Loewen Hermeneutic Pedagogy

Hermeneutic Pedagogy: teaching and learning as dialogue and interpretation
1. Introduction - hermeneutics and critical pedagogy

Learning involves an essential incompleteness of knowledge, a noncoincidence
between teacher and student, a hermeneutical circularity that remains open. (Gallagher
1!"#$%.
&nowledge and ignorance are friends. 'he interpretation of what we have known
reali(es the promise of learning that knowledge carries within it. )e are all interpreters of
everyday life. *o world is forever closed to us, and none appears to us fully embodied.
+ermeneutics is the art and theory of interpretation, and thus its language is that of the
landscape of learning. 'hat arcadian egos must travel such terrain in search of their
destinies, and that death too inhabits every ,rcadia, only reinforces the dual limits that
mortality has conferred upon us from the beginning. -ne the one hand, we are made
unmade, and must finish ourselves. -n the other hand, we can never accomplish this final
form, whatever we may imagine lies ahead for us. 'eaching and learning are
simultaneously acts of interpretation and willing action which affirms not only our
present e.istence but also our future, however unknown. *o one is truly master of these
processes, but all must partake in them as if they are at least competent enough to begin
again. 'he tyche of mastery is the wisdom that sees living on as a work in progress, and
the knowledge that such work cannot come to an end and yet also must nevertheless end.
'he practical wisdom that is generated from the combination of the techne of skills and
knowledge and the e.perience of the une.pected and different enables the tyche of
mastery to attain phronesis, its true character. /ustom provides the original template of
human diversity and society, while the practice of theory e.tends, overturns, and modifies
what has been the case., what is customarily so. 0rimary sociali(ation provides the action
of hexis, or what is taken for granted as the case, tradition, an norms. Praxis challenges
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the status 1uo by opening the previously singular and insular world into its manifold and
strange recesses. 'he world as it is confronts us and its alien 1uality makes further
customary action impossible. 2et it is only a combination of the two of these, what has
been the case and what is strange, that can create the hermeneutic environment of
phronesis, the practical wisdom of living on. /ustoms are reinterpreted, theory ad3usted
to suit reality, the social reality of tradition is reshaped, and the episteme of the serious
business of constructing knowledge takes on new its historical task. 'he wisdom of
e.periential practice and reflective self-consciousness is phronetic in its character. It
neither brooks the somnolence of our present state nor does it presume upon the authority
of the sciences. It accepts neither value nor fact alone. rather, it presents to us the idea of
validity, a temporary ethical stature that confers authority only on the case to case. )hile
custom presents a ready-made reality for our consumption and oblation, and theory
presents to us the revolution of consciousness that overturns that world, practical wisdom
shines upon the light of worldliness, the way in which the world worlds itself, and it is
this kind of e.perience that marks the most realistic of human perceptions, for we know
that what we think is sub3ect to change, and what we do is no final will.
,ll of this points directly to an ontological characteri(ation of self-understanding.
'his 4self4 is, however, not merely something that is ranged over against either other
selves or the world, but it inhabits and coe.ists with these others and with their worlds, as
well as )orld itself. )orld is at once the home of beings as it is the envelope of 5eing.
)ithin this envelopment, we hardly notice that we too are part of the fabric of history and
world. 'he world as it is also contains the world as it must be, but this 4must4, the shalt of
the worlding of world, is also no final will, and its historical foundation is revealed to us
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when we alter our surroundings, even in the slightest degree. )hether we learn to use a
new tool, or a broken tool anew, or for an une.pected purpose, means that we must
replace our prior e.pectations of both our skill set and the tools around us - both part of
the 4stock of knowledge at hand4 that is a further envelopment into which we are
sometimes too sealed - and thus what comes to be the new is always a herald of history
itself. +istory is such that it changes over time. It does not matter that sometimes, or
perhaps betimes, the pace is almost unnoticeable. 'he pace of history is akin in this way
to the presence of the world" 6)orld is something sensed 4alongside4 the entities that
appear in the world, yet understanding must be through world. It is fundamental to all
understanding7 world and understanding are inseparable parts of the ontological
constitution of Dasein's e.isting.6 (0almer 18"199 italics the te.t4s%. 5oth time and
being in their capital states are like social facts, yet they are more universal than the
cultural a prioris that populate the list of primary sociali(ation form any specific or
singular society. 'hey do not lay down the normative content by which each culture is
content to live. :ather, they are the ether that fills the vessel of our common humanity,
and like this invisible and at times even mythical atmosphere, such characters of the
human condition can become soporifics. If we are not to wander the earth as
somnambulistic masses, we must always turn our attentiveness, our concernfulness of
being, towards both history and world, for what they are we are as well.
In a uni1ue manual, the inter-war artist 0aul &lee makes much of the then
fashionable claim that civil society in its mass acculturation has both dimmed and denied
the alertness that human being needs to attend to become both historically conscious and
worldly at once. +e draws these social facts as vectors, their force brought thus into high
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relief, and he suggests that 6'he contrast between man4s ideological capacity to move at
random through material and metaphysical spaces and his physical limitations, is the
origin of all human tragedy.6 (&lee 1;9";9 <1!;=%. 2et at the same time it is through
culture, and cultural development alone, that human beings become the 4prosthetic gods4
that >reud would famously label us 3ust five years later"6 It is this contrast between power
and prostration that implies the duality of human e.istence. +alf-winged--half-
imprisoned, this is man?6 (ibid%. 'he ecce homo of our general condition is always well
taken, as it provides the beginning of all beginnings. )e must start always with what we
are, which also includes all we have ever been. 'hus time and world merge, as it is the
presence of the present world as it is in our lives as they are, and the history of all that has
led up to the making of what we are 3ust now that collide, and perhaps collude, in the
subtlety of metonymic beings. It is reflection that opens up these secrets, so that they
cannot continue to be passed sotto voce, avoiding the light of the world and the lighted
space of the envelope of 5eing" 6'hought is the mediary between earth and world.6 2et
action must be the result of thought, lest it lend only a further and deeper credence of the
fact that we cannot, as conscious mortals, connect the end with the beginning" 6'he
broader the magnitude of his reach, the more painful man4s tragic limitation. 'o be
impelled toward motion and not be the motor? ,ction bears this out.6 (ibid%. 'his
4sketching4 of an e.istential pedagogy remarks upon our culture as a mere subsistence,
suggests &lee. It is an e.tension, certainly, and we are given to the farthest flights of
earthbound fancy, which today is not even bound to the earth. 5ut the difference between
earth and world lies precisely here" we do not always have an earth, as we can either
destroy it, or seek to leave it altogether. 5ut we must always be within )orld, for we are
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beings not only in the world, but of )orld, and its is the history of the worlding of world
that makes us historical beings as well as e.istential ones.
It is easy to forfeit this gift, to eschew this task. 'he fallen-ness of human being
should not be immediately read as only a theological drift. :ather, and more importantly
in an age where the prevalence of mass culture - and indeed, the educational institution as
such is both a scion of and a valet for such a culture - is also like an envelope for us. )e
are surrounded by it in a manner that makes it look much like world. It is so much a part
of the world as it is that it may be mistaken for it, and in fact this i s perhaps its chief
goal. Inasmuch as :icoeur reminds us that the 4evil of evil4 involves a process of
4fraudulency in the work of totali(ation4, mass culture, more so than the church or yet
even the state which provide him with his e.amples, is the more perfected foil for the
vehicle of verfallen. )e lose ourselves not in the other nor ethically for the other, as in
Levinas, nor do we lose ourselves in self-introspection that some religious disciplines
demand of us on the way back to an original state of union, but rather in the swirl of what
is only of the moment, fashion, image, other-directedness and commodity. 'hus the
theological link between a self-interpretation which must take account of this tendency
for dasein to immolate itself on the pillar of casual desire and the e.egesis of a state of
being which is allegori(ed after the advent of agrarianism as a 4fall4 from grace, an
absence of community and a turning away from the problem of e.istence, the problem of
a fragile and mortal consciousness that can yet think itself anew in the face of death,
become more clear" 6*evertheless, the notion of @asein is constituted as a possible,
perhaps Aisyphean counter-instance against this fall from oneself7 and the reflective
unfolding or elucidating interpretation of our hermeneutical situation is the means
;
through which we can become aware of ourselves...6 (Grondin 1;";9%. It is +eidegger
who has shown that the danger of 4ruination4 occurs through the avoidance of the
encounter between a self which is already in the world and as worldly as has been its own
history and participation in )orld and the self-understanding becoming ontological in
the face of its own demise. If we separate self and world we are doomed to remaining
fallen, as we have e.cerpted ourselves - falsely, and with a suspension of disbelief in the
social forces arranged so that we imagine our landings to always be of the softest nature,
as if we are coming home to an eden after merely a brief hiatus - from the envelope of
5eing which holds our dasein in its utmost possibility of mitsein. )orld, rather, is an
already always fact of this e.istence, not to be encountered as one might an other, or an
ob3ect within the world. 2et world remains occluded to the lens which attempts to
4analy(e4 it without so much as a drop of human blood. )e cannot 4enter4 into something
from which we have not ever been apart, states +eidegger" 6,nd did he not perceive, at
the heart of every state-of-mind, the blatant fact of the impossibility of getting out of a
condition which no one has ever entered, inasmuch as birth itself < = has never, properly
speaking, been the e.perience of entering into the world but that of already having been
born and finding oneself already thereB6 (:icoeur 1!"9!#%. 'his is also why it is only
allegorical to speak of a fall of origin, or a cosmogonical collapse, whereas it is
reasonable to characteri(e the lapsing of alert and concernful being in the world as a kind
of torpor laden centrifugality, pulling one into the center of mere things. 'his 4verfallen4 is
6..but the facticity on the basis of which @asein becomes a burden for itself...6 and not
something that suggests 6...any fall from some higher place, in the gnostic manner...6
(ibid%. Indeed, our e.perience of early growth and maturation is 1uite the opposite of the
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myths. )e become something more from something less, as in the ac1uisition of
language, motor skills, social norms and desires and what have you. -ur beginnings are
lower than our aspirations and accomplishments, and if, in the end, we cannot return to
the beginning, we can depart the blessed life as *iet(sche states we must, and, as he
mentions, we find 3ust such a departure in another mythic narrative, that of -dysseus and
/alypso.
'he process by which we attain the higher forms of humanity is that of learning
and thence understanding. 'he prior pre3udice of the world as it has been is overturned by
hermeneutic e.perience. 'hat old assumptions are replaced by current sets is no a fatal
problem, but constitutes rather and ongoing and necessary challenge. It is well thought of
as a kind of 4tension4 between what I have been and what I must become. 'his 4must-ness4
of living on - not merely in the face of death, which is mostly abstract in its possible
subito until we approach such a shrouded hori(on in a more knowing fashion if we attain
old age - is held within the e.perience which is ironically felt most stringently when it
must take account of its own absence. 'hat is, our e.periences are never 1uite enough to
live on with, we cannot be complacent based only on what we have come to know as our
own. 'he hermeneutics of learning in al conte.ts betrays this tension. 'he gift if prior
e.perience wears thin, much as well-worn clothing must be cast off as eventual dross, no
matter the warmth and status it may have given us when we first received it. +ence,
60rimarily, what is produced in educational e.perience, in the tension between the
familiar and the unfamiliar, or between student and teacher, is understanding which is
self-understanding. 'o say the same thing another way, learning involves the production
of one4s own possibilities.6 (Gallagher 1!"1$9%. 'here is no real mystery to this
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process. -ne simply, and regularly, encounters situations both human and apparently
cosmic, where we do not know what is going on, or how to act, or what to think of reality
in terms of whether it has remained reasonable or has taken off into the fanciful. -ne
would suggest that this is normative for human beings of all kinds, though the more
insular the cultural conte.t the less e.perience one might correspondingly be able to rely
on to get by. ,nd it is through language and literacy that learning takes place. *ot all of
these languages are 4natural4 or spoken, orthographically rendered or sporting
le.icographies and dictionaries, but at base, one could also suggest that all learning
involves a new literacy, a new level of the ability to the read )orld. Auch a world, both as
a universal e.istential envelope and the purely humanistic world of social reality, the
world 4as-it-is4, re1uires skill in many different languages, and for all we know, this might
even include the tongues of the dead. 2et because literacy of the world is our common
task and gift, history is a willing ally. /oming to know it, however, is sometimes not
enough, but neither here is history coy or aloof, it is we, rather who are not taking task
seriously enough while pronouncing the gift of history to be already our own"
:ather than resigning ourselves to either its parado. or mystery, we are trying to
be more faithful to the normal experience of language, to its phenomenological
appearance in our minds. In so doing we also aim to be more respectful of the sense that
we are never alone when using language, that we are necessarily bound up with others at
all linguistic moments, and that there are ethical and political forces which go to the heart
of language use. (5leich 1CC"8;, italics the te.t4s%.
'he limitations on literacy are such that it is easy to imagine that language itself,
or history, for that matter, reaches not into our consciousness and that we must step
outside of ourselves in all ways to take what is necessary for our collective survival. 'his
is only half correct. 2es, we reach outside of ourselves in coming to terms with the new
and une.pected, whether the news comes from the past or the present. Auch e.periences
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cuts into the heart of what we thought was true, and reorders our e.pectations, both of
ourselves and of others. 5ut it is not correct to say that history is nothing but e.ternal to
our lives, since it has already passed into a past. *ot at all. )e rather carry it around with
us, not only as memory but as the fully waking alertness of being in the world. )e could
not, in other words, function as human beings without a direct cogni(ance of what we
have been, and what we have already learned about ourselves and )orld. 'hat there is an
art to this endeavor perhaps goes without saying, but learning per se is not necessarily an
aesthetic act" ,s @ewey (19$"9$#% suggest, 6It is by way of communication that art
becomes the incomparable organ of instruction, but the way is so remote from what is
usually associated with the idea of education...6 that we often seem to feel more
comfortable pretending that literacy is merely a technical matter. /ompetency should be
our only goal, with the 4one best way4 as our holy path. 2et immediately we are
confronted with the human fact that to be able to do something well includes all of the
non-technical parameters of social and intellectual life. Ideas have a genealogy, writing
has an aesthetic, speaking has an elo1uence which not mere shill, and desire is both
adorable but also risky, and indeed, such risk makes what is attractive to us all the more
desirable. )e cannot then speak of 4competency4 as if it were a measurable end of a
known 1uality or category. Instead, interaction within social reality reminds us that the
otherness of both massive world and individuated human diversity that learning is more a
conversation than a tool" 6If language is thought of as 4dialogue4, for e.ample, then
competence would have to include a category like 4ability to interact with another person4,
while performance would have to include much more than linguistic data.6 (5leich
1CC"8$%. :eductions of all kinds are often a kind of knee-3erk reaction to the an.iety

regarding any task. /an I rationali(e this problem into its component partsB we may ask
of ourselves. )hat is the simplest solution to what I am facingB /an I avoid the regress of
the second guess and the shadow of self-doubtB 'he premature burial of the issue of
understanding as self-understanding is the root of not only misunderstanding but also of
the fetish of techni1ue as a way of grace.
Dnderstanding is thus the very essence of one4s reason of being. )hether or not
we are placed on earth in a manner beyond human imagination, whether we are more
than the insignificant significance of the local sentience of the cosmos, our collective
enterprise involves us in the most immediate manner within the envelope that is being4s
self-understanding. -nce again, akin to and kindred with )orld and its subtle
omnipresence, the absence of an omniscience which would be both the foil and
counterweight to )orld imbues human life with its most essential tension. +e.is helps us
to imagine that we do have this kind of utter and immanent knowledge of our world. )e
are assured, by learning our primary sociali(ation well, that we are in control. 2et we
come to know through growth and diverse e.perience that this is not necessarily the case,
and indeed, it must necessarily not be the case given the diversity of human culture and
individuality. 0ra.is elevates the stakes of self-control and attempts to provide us with a
new arsenal of systems and techni1ues, theories and rubrics by which we can gain control
over both others to self and the world at large. Like he.is, pra.is too when seen only in
this way is an illusion, and one that fosters powerful delusions, 3ust as does the thrall of
custom. 0ra.is is better defined within the character of its first encounter with what has
been the case, as revolutionary thinking and learning. *o study of the arts of the human is
bereft of it, but at the same time, pra.is institutionali(ed e.erts a territoriality that
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becomes threatening to itself. If knowledge is seamless, then discourse manifestly is not.
)e are thrust into a conte.t where at first we felt the liberation of perspective and
reflection, only to come to know rather abruptly the limits of discursive canons and the
black bo. of un1uestioned principles, both in the sciences and the humanities. Fust
because we are now e1uipped with the techni1ues of 4good thinking4, those very tools by
which the customary and the traditional have come to be 1uestioned and thence
overthrown,
...does not mean that scholars in the humanities and social sciences do not have
the task of using their powers to develop a consciousness of their own situation, the
situation in which they stand over against the tradition that they are trying to understand.
Guite the contrary? In every genuine effort at research one needs to work out a
consciousness of one4s hermeneutical situation. -nly in this way can one shed light on the
basis of one4s interests in it and on what supports one4s standpoint of 1uestioning. ,nd of
course one still must confess to the endlessness of this task. (Gadamer !EE1"$8%.
0ra.is as only an effort to support the current situation of its own hegemony is not
authentic pra.is at all. 'he theories of knowledge that cast doubt not merely upon the
accuracy and precision of instrumental knowing but as well, and far more importantly,
1uestion radically the entire enterprise of science and philosophy in the conte.t of their
own genealogies, the history of their respective geneses and their intimacies with one
another, as well, and of the utmost, their place in the politics of our own times, it is these
kinds of theoretical efforts that deserve most our praise and support. 'he study of
knowledge as both a human enterprise as well as an historical and ethical task is
immediately and already an hermeneutic task. 'hrough this, custom re-renters the arena.
In this encounter, practical theory must come to grips with the world as it is, as it is this
world that not only occludes the common e.istential envelope of )orld - through the
advent and promulgation of both cultural diversity and global culture - but it is also the
world from which all scholarship ultimately originates, and by which it must be tested. if
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such an encounter is sincere and authentic to the human interest, and not a town and
gown affair where there is a competitive pri(e or an accounting of calculatedly scarce
resources, then we find ourselves on the road to phronesis. 'his practical wisdom of
e.perience and reflection combined is the ideal that a critical hermeneutics of education
seeks. It is not an end in itself, however, but another more educated and mature means to
move on with the 4endlessness of the task4.
'hat pra.is often stops well short of coming to terms with he.is as the vast
ma3ority of human thinking in both the tradition and in the world at large is one thing.
5ut that it seeks to insulate itself against the world only further fosters the cloak of
cultured invisibility that shields us from our e.istential condition, and masks )orld as a
philosophical artifice aberrant from and abhorrent to instrumental rationality. 'he teacher
or professor is thus cast as an agent for a fashionable rationale of why the world works in
this way and not others, or worse, why it must work only in this way, as it may be the
best way. 'hat transmissive pedagogy has an authoritarian character, no matter how
frosted with 4student-centered4 activities or resisted officially by student course
evaluations - one of the chief divide and con1uer tools of a suspicious and always
threatened management - disallows both the inventiveness of critical theory and the
spontaneity of reflective thought. +istorical consciousness is something that is not even
disavowed. :ather it is not sought at all. *o authentic criti1ue is mounted, and it is mere
criticism that we listen to both from our own students and from the public at large"
6'hose pupils re3oice who perceive in the teacher that against which they instinctively
feel the entire painful process of education is waged. 'his indeed comprises a criti1ue of
the educational process itself, which in our culture to this day has generally failed.6
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(,dorno 1C"1C;%. Dltimately, the pressure to perform in a measurable manner
outspeaks even the efforts to maintain competitive grade point averages, for once
graduated, students find 3obs not based on any lasting relationship with what their
transcripts supposedly represent. 'hey know how to do something, and this something is
a unit of instrumental rationality and has as its vehicle of desire the polished techni1ue of
motor-skilled manipulator. *ot that there is fault here at any individual level. )e can only
blame ourselves for en3oying the patent but often fraudulent lu.uries of our mass society
too much, for becoming numbly comfortable with all that is apparently given to us with
so little effort. 'he perennial ritual of the sacrifice forgotten, spring turns to summer and
for a time, all is warmed by the light of this brave new world.
5ourdieu and 0asseron famously accuse us of abetting a non-culture to this regard
when it comes to sub3ecting the institution of education to a serious criti1ue. 'he ends in
mind that are supposed to emanate from such a study are presumably the ends of a
general human freedom. 2et the purpose of all human learning up until very recently has
been merely to survive and reproduce. *ot in any @arwinian sense, but rather so that the
variety of cultural templates might be transmitted to successive generations over perhaps
millions of years. -ver the previous 1uarter millennium, however, a new goal has arisen
that has transformed the human self-imagination. 'his is the goal of an abstract freedom
that has in its own envelope human happiness. before, even with the Greeks, happiness
may be thought of as freedom from care or suffering. 'oday, perhaps, we may better think
of it as having something to do with enlightenment. In fact, happiness might well be the
very opposite of what it once as. >reedom from concern with oneself and with others is a
kind of blissful ignorance. In spite of the Aocratic in3unction that reminds us that the
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4une.amined life is not worth living4 for a human being, we do not get the sense that such
a self-e.amination is necessarily endless in its scope. if the cosmos itself is bounded, then
human nature too must have its limits. If there are forces e.ternal to those of our own
making, fates which predetermine our actions and motives, then we cannot aspire to a
truly free state of consciousness with a view that such an ideal can in fact be achieved.
,ll of this is straightforward, but recently we have begin to imagine a cosmos without
limits, an e.tension of consciousness neither divine nor human, an anonymous stage for
the newly liberated concept of human freedom to be played out in as vast a scale as we
can manage. 'his is 1ualitatively different from what our ancestors imagined was the
case. 'his liberating 1uality also has its risks, as when children leave the family hearth for
the first time. -ne cannot do so in blithe ignorance of all that pra.is will suddenly invite
one to partake in. the hearth of he.is does not prepare us in any way for freedom, either
abstract or material and logistical. 'hese latter freedoms, which our society is so well-
designed to confer upon those who ironically are the least free from social norms - the
most conforming of our children attain the highest honors in capitalist education, for
e.ample - distract us from the goals of the enlightenment, and through this lens, the
ideals we imagine at least a few of the ancient thinkers also to have been espousing. 'he
pro3ect of freedom is now a general task of the entire species, as, and also for the first
time, all of our lives are threatened with e.tinction at a moment4s notice through the
concurrent advent of modern technology" 6'o refuse such a pro3ect is to consign oneself
to blind or complicitous adherence to the given as it gives itself, whether this theoretical
surrender be masked under the flaunted rigour of empirical procedures or legitimated by
invocation of the ideal of 4ethical neutrality4, a mere non-aggression pact with the
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established order.6 (5ourdieu and 0asseron 1!"!1C <1#E=%. Acience itself, the
paragon of in1uiry and hallmark of modernity, can also be practiced within empirical
frameworks and logical methods without a shred of criti1ue ever entering its scope. 'his
is not the best science has to offer, we might say, because ideally 4arguments from
authority are worthless4, as Aagan famously intoned. 2et a critical pedagogy must look at
all aspects of the world as they are, including the conte.ts from which its would-be allies
emanate. 'he effect of pra.is learned only as techni1ue is that it becomes an enabler for
rational normativity and the politics of the market.
*ot only science but also theory - the other great scion of pra.is - can have this
truncated effect on a critical self-understanding. 'he seeming disconnectedness of
intellectual ardor when it comes to confronting the action of human life in the world is as
distracting as mere logistical freedom. It is notorious, in spite of the theses on >euerbach
and many other such 4calls to arms4 that philosophy can as easily as science regress into
the comfort of its own apparent home. 'he ungeheuer of having to come to grips with
both the otherness of what is not myself and the alien 1uality of nature is negated through
the sensibility that says that nature can be known as technical detail and used only as
commodity producing resource and that the other to self - apart from also being known
as a scientific ob3ect - can be seen instrumentally as a means to my own ends. 'heoretical
dialogue that only speaks of itself lacks the key critical ingredient of any authentic
e.change of ideas, the understanding of dialectic. It is the dialectic, and not necessarily
that of +egel, Har., or any other specific thinker, that reminds us that real dialogue
always involves an ultimate risk. )hat is placed on the table are not only the norms of
he.is, the traditions of culture, but also the corresponding rules of pra.is and of
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instrumental rationality. 'he 4bo.4 that we are being disingenuously e.horted to 4think
outside of4 is much larger than managerial attitudes imagine, or desire to imagine. Instead,
we can while away our intellects in the salons of what we already know to be the case,
whilst all the while also imagining that we as the intellectual elite already know 4what is
to be done4, and indeed, are also, as we speak, doing it" 6,t least part of the reason the
argument can go on for so long is that conservative academic interests are usually
enhanced by such debates, while the participants feel no need to arrive at some practical
result or program. 'he lack of concrete purpose diminishes the value of the debates by
keeping them 4academic4.6 (5leich 1CC"119-$%. It would seem that the last place that
could afford the hermeneutics of suspicion would be the educational institution in all of
its forms and levels, as it is the structure that has been ordained with the task of
reproduction of what has been the case, in economics, politics, and sociality.
'his 4suspicion4, that all is not what it seems to be, raises its nascent 1uestioning in
adolescence. 'he 4whyB4 1uestions of the child are much more empirical in their character,
and may be taken 1uite literally as 1ueries about the nature of things as we humans know
such to be in our own time. 'he key difference that animates the more provocative
1uestions of later childhood is their incipient criticism of the apparent way of the world.
*o longer are we content to hear an e.planation from a voice of authority. If the response
is not to our liking we do not merely react, but 1uestion further, and we change the tenor
and direction of our 1uestions to get at the root of the matter, rather than the obstreperous
child who merely repeats himself in the hopes of wearing down his parent. 'he 1uestions
of adolescence and beyond are the unschooled demands of an interrogation into the world
as it has been presented to us, with the aspiration of not only attaining knowledge of the
18
world as it is, and specifically the social world, but also of changing it so that it benefits
us more directly. In this way, one might allegori(e +eraclitus is the 4father4 of all
teenagers, Aocrates the practiced wit of the 4annoying kid4 in class, and Har. the radical
who leaves his parental home in search of a wider destiny. 2et for our own time no more
so than did *iet(sche alter both the tack and the interests of understanding and historical
consciousness" 6'he 4will to power4 changes completely the idea of interpretation7 it is no
longer the manifest meaning of a statement of a te.t, but the te.t4s and its interpreter4s
function in the preservation of life. 'he e.tension of power - that is the real meaning of
our all-too-human insights and cognitions.6 (Gadamer 1C$";C%. Left only thee, we are
too easily reminded of the adolescent striving for some self-determination in her life, and
we are left without the deeper notion of an e.tension of self-understanding. 2et 6'his
radical position forces us to attend to the dichotomy of the belief in the integrity of te.ts
and the intelligibility of their meaning, and the opposed effort to unmask the pretensions
hidden behind so-called ob3ectivity.6 (ibid%. 'he sudden reali(ation that what has been the
meaning of something, anything, has been placed before us so that other meanings can
maintain their latent functions - convenience politically or familialy or institutionally, for
e.ample - strikes us as a truth beyond the whitewash. )e may become fatalistic or
cynical at such news, depending its conte.t and what we had hoped to gain from
discovering what 4lay behind4 the pretense. Ideally, however, we over time develop a
practiced e.perience that knows how and who to 1uestion. 'his phronetic disposition,
skeptical but not cynical, realistic without being pessimistic, discontent without being
nihilistic, is not so much the mark of estranged youth as it is the beginning of effective
1#
historical consciousness and the reflective mind necessary for the e.amined life to take
place over its fullest course.
*iet(sche himself begins this course of reflection long before he discusses the
will to power. Apeaking of the new consciousness of both e.ternal history of cultures and
the history of one4s own predilections and biases, as well as the pedigree of institutional
and moral authority in the world, states at the outset that we must have this kind of
breadth - the never-mastered tyche that transcends all of the stocks of knowledge at hand
available in the study of history and society as only a functioning state, or yet a working
model - in order to live humanely" 6)e need it, that is to say, for the sake of life and
action, let alone for the purpose of e.tenuating the self-seeking life and the base of
cowardly action. )e want to serve history only to the e.tent that history serves life...6
(*iet(sche 1C9"; <1C#$=%. &nowledge of only the present details of how we live in the
immediate world is not immanent self-knowing. 'his kind of pra.is mimics all too
closely the norms and forms of sociality as they are laid out in he.is, the content of which
- though not at all necessarily the order - is meant to overturn. Aagan famously reminds
us that although the philosophical Greeks were able to 1uestion the cosmic order, they did
little to 1uestion the structures of their own society, often in the most bald manner
reinforcing their worst 1ualities. Auch a pra.is, is, as we have already seen, half-baked. It
is on the way to dialogue but lacks the dialectic and the authentic and risky encounter
with the other as alien interlocutor. It serves history as a kind of servility, 6...for it is
possible to value the study of history to such a degree that life becomes stunted and
degenerate - a phenomenon that we are now forced to acknowledge, painful though this
may be, in the face of certain striking symptoms of our age.6 (ibid%. 'he fetish of
1C
ob3ectivity can remind one of nothing other than the parental response to an uncountable
number of youthful 1ueries - 4because that is the way it is4. 2et we come to know that as
we grow older, the world changes around us. ,dults are capable of more decisions than
are adolescence, and we are burdened with more responsibilities as the corollary to this
new freedom. 'he idea of freely making one4s life in the world of others is a too easy
egress - a :andian thought e.periment, perhaps - as against both the interlocution and the
simple resistance that all ethical beings must offer to one another in the face of attempts
at pure willful domination. It is the learning of these limits that is perhaps yet more
4painful4 than even the knowledge of their ill effects within culture and society.
2et we generally cannot learn of such limits and implications thereof within either
the spaces of he.is of pra.is. )e must rather learn it in the space of the world as it is,
where our consciousness thereof is not divorced from either its worldly envelope - the
social reality of the entirety of our history and history in general - or the larger and pan-
cultural )orld of human e.istence and condition. 'he e.periential learning that generates
phronesis is the process by which such a consciousness may be pursued and acted upon7
6Iducation as the practice of freedom - as opposed to education as the practice of
domination - denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the
world7 it also denies that the world e.ists as a reality apart from men.6 (>riere 1#E"8%.
5ecause we must act within the world, and because we know that we cannot act within
any world without that self-same world being changed, as well as reacting upon ourselves
and changing us as part of its process of worlding, the education of practical e.perience
which is not limited by to techni1ue always a transformative learning. It is this ongoing
transformation that reminds us of the sincerity of being when it is forced to think itself
1
anew" 6,uthentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without men,
but men in their relations with the world. In these relations consciousness and world are
simultaneous" consciousness neither precedes the world nor follows it.6 (ibid%. 'he
envelope of singular )orld is embodied in each individual human being in the world of
forms. 2et these social facts - institutions, morals, rules, and rates of various kinds -
reflect only the attempt to frame a world as it passes along. Like an identity or a role, our
understanding of )orld is aided by the frameworks we construct to hold it in place for a
time. Hutable history is too li1uid a composition for the rule of natural law, pure reason,
or 4best practices4 policy and management. 'herefore time itself must be made to slow
until any perceptible change can be controlled ahead of itself. 'his notion that we can
prepare is based on prior e.perience, though we are also all too aware that we cannot
predict with any ultimate precision what ne.t will occur, either to ourselves or to the
world around us. @iversity and perspective are the keys to the most authentic engagement
with the world as it is, because we know that what is implicit in this phrase is its pro
tempore 1uality. 'he world is as it is for now. 'his is its 4natural4 state, if you will, though
it be not a state of nature apart from humanity, as >riere reminds us. +ence phronetic
education arms itself not only with the dialectic of authentic pra.is, but also the self-
doubt of autohagiography" 6It will therefore always argue a still defective education if the
moral character can assert itself only through the sacrifice of what is natural7 and a
political constitution will still be very imperfect if it is able to produce unity only by
suppressing variety.6 (Achiller 18;"9! <1#;=%. 'he idol of 4nomolatry4, as 'aylor has put
it, demands not merely conformity of citi(ens and students, teachers and professor alike,
but that such obeisance should be directed solely to the Atate - formerly the /hurch - as a
!E
work of totali(ation. )e know that such a work emanating from these sources is
fraudulent, and thus the 4evil of evil4 in the face of authentic sources of universal 5eing,
)orld and Apirit, wherever these may be located in the modern mind, and therefore 6'he
Atate should respect not merely the ob3ective and generic, but also the sub3ective and
specific character of its individuals, and in e.tending the invisible realm of morals, it
must not depopulate the realm of phenomena.6 (ibid%. ,t the same time, any collection of
nation-states which e.ist to preserve all that divides humanity from itself cannot
ultimately be trusted with such a task as authentic education. 4Atate /urricula4 is indeed an
appropriate phrase with which to designate a kind of banking education that indoctrinates
persons on their way to becoming the good citi(en. Like centrali(ed social institutions
before it, the modern state attempt to gather in its centrifuge a monopoly of ideas, even
ways of being in the world. 'he more fascistic these attempts, the less likely they are to
be successful over the ling term. *o state has been around for a long enough time to
prove itself in any tested sense. ,rguably the oldest of modern nations, the 5ritain that
begins in 18CC has itself lasted only during the corresponding epoch of capital. It is
highly likely that when economic forces shift, the current way of doing politics will
collapse. 'his is indeed what all recent revolutionary thinkers have adapted as a
presuppositions. +owever likely this may be, however, one cannot take it as a given. It is
possible the state will outlast its siblings of market and rational utility, bureaucracy and
civil religion. >uture oriented pra.is has this deficit" )hile it has a vision of what the
world 4should4 rather be it can often trip up at its historical feet. )hat is underfoot at
present is precisely the world as it is, and not some visionary value. :ational action
directed at finite goals is one of the best tools available to the human lot. ,bsolute values,
!1
however rational, risk overstepping the needs of the day, as one wishes for the philosophy
without the sustenance of the full stomach. Instead, we need to engage the present as the
birthstone of the future" 6)e always live at the time we live and not at some other time,
and only by e.tracting at each present time the full meaning of each present e.perience
are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future. 'his is the only preparation which
in the long run amounts to anything.6 (@ewey 19C"$%.
If such a process is most fully characteri(ed by the hermeneutical circle of he.is,
pra.is and phronesis, let us briefly outline the salient motifs of each of these respectively,
with a view to introducing the materials of the three substantive sections which follow
below. 'here are at least seven characteristics associated with each of these phases of the
hermeneutical circle within any pedagogic conte.t. +e.is, as what is customary, is
associated with cultural belief in all of its forms. ,s a form of knowledge, he.is is learned
simply by growing up in this or that society. ,% +e.is,
1. originates in sociali(ation
!. is diverse cross-culturally and yet claims truth
9. provides a comfort (one of 4the known4
$. demarcates social in-groups
;. can become ideology through institutions
8. is unreflective and semi-conscious
#. often includes a transcendental realm
0oint ,; is generally the most dangerous thing about he.is, and of course this is
not a process by which he.is alone can come to grief. *ations of al kinds notoriously
play on their citi(ens4 beliefs in order to make war, set internal policies, 3ustify current
economic or ta. systems and the like. )hat is customary, 3ustified by 4what has been the
case4 or the traditional response of 4this is how we do things4, or how are ancestors 4have
always done4 things is easy to understand once one has become part of the culture in
1uestion. 'he amalgam of origins and effects that inhabit he.is correspond to what
!!
Acheler identified as the 4natural attitude4. @oing what comes 4naturally 4 for humans is of
course not a part of nature, as we have been divorced from such a symbiosis for some
millions of years evolutionarily speaking, but what Acheler and later Achut( meant by
such a nomenclature was simply that the 4second nature4 of sociali(ation - really, a first
nature for human beings - allows us to function in a set of historical conte.ts within
which we have been acculturated. /orrespondingly, point ,! reminds us that once
outside of these specific conte.ts we are often lost, as when we travel and cannot
recogni(e the norms elsewhere, even in an increasingly globali(ed world culture. Iven
within 4our own4 culture we know that there are plenty of particualr circumstances where
we do not know what is e.actly going on. Generally, however, we can learn these other
conte.ts through involving ourselv$s with people and activities that are befitting to them.
'hat we are most in love with points ,9 and ,$ above speaks not merely to our bigotries
as effects of thorough sociali(ation mi.ed with ideology - witness the miniscule marriage
rates between people of different social classes, for instance - but also to the overall
success rate of the process of he.is as a social fact. 'hat we do not reflect on this kind of
knowledge, that of belief and custom, only allows it to become more akin to the envelope
of e.istential being. /ulture mas1uerades itself as a kind of totali(ation which is
necessary and thus not evil. Aurvival and reproduction were, until recently, the entire
pro3ect of humanity. Ironically, it is these twin goals of our species and more generally of
all life that now threaten themselves, because we have cast their net too narrowly, still
believing that if the species is to survive, it must only survive in the form that we know
the best. 'he ultimate 3ustification of he.is comes form the addition of an historical
appendage that takes its cue mainly from the great systems of religion of the agrarian or
!9
archaic civili(ations, the idea of a transcendental realm that not only has a human interest,
but provides the goal and destination of human life after it passes from the realm of
culture proper. ,lthough 3ust as cultural and historical in its genesis as is the rest of what
we grow into as children, this realm is set apart by belief due to its world-creating
capabilities. 'he source of culture is, in these systems, ultimately a non-human source.
Host convenient for social reproduction, it allows the teachers and authorities of he.is to
say to their replacements that such and such is not merely disallowed, but in fact is
impossible. 'he metaphysical suasion of an edict coming from a non-human realm not
only takes the responsibility off other human beings, who may be 1uestioned by still
others, but states an order of nature that is cosmic and not local, and therefore unchanging
as against the vicissitudes of human history.
,ll of this is well-known. +e.is has been so successful up until recently because
it in fact had a monopoly on the heart and minds of its minions. -nly with the resurgence
of reflective philosophy and science that had begun with the Greeks of the ,le.andrian
and Hiletian schools some two and a half millenia ago, do we find a competing sets of
response to the whys and wherefores of the human condition. 0ra.is, then ,is the suite of
characteristics that surround the form of knowledge we might call 4fact4. 5% >act,
1. rests on scientific or historical authority
!. is universali(ing in its truth claims
9. is apparently generali(able across cultures
$. must be studied as techni1ues
;. less powerful than the 4social facts4 of belief
8. reproduces elite groups
#. is the source of 4cultural capital4
'hat we know 4the facts4 are also cultural constructions neither takes away from
their prestige, nor lends them the same status as beliefs. :ather, facts too have their
conte.ts, 4galleries of meaning4 as Latour suggests, and outside these spaces they are
!$
mostly irrelevant. )e do not have to speak of discursivities such as 1uantum mechanics
to get the point here. 'he mere, and also empirical, fact that the knowledge of science and
history, philosophy and the arts must be formally studied is enough to understand the
difference. *o culture has within basic sociali(ation the groundwork for 4the fact4. *o
doubt much of our beliefs are based on e.periential facts of human mortality - watch for
cars before we cross the road, we tell our children, etc. - but these from a scientific and
historical perspective are merely effects, and not the facts themselves. In such a case we
would need to know about *ewtonian mechanics and what underlies it, the internal
combustion engine and its physics, the idea of friction and the social studies of drivers
and their specifically personali(ed vehicles and vehicular habits and tendencies. ,ll of
this and much more - akin to Aagan4s e.ample of a conscious digestive system, where if
we had to go through the comple. chemical steps in our minds in order to eat we would
most certainly starve to death - would be needed to provide a serious and discursive
understanding of 4the facts4 involved in crossing the street safely. +e.is dispense with all
of this, and understandably so. 5ut pra.is is made up of such materials from the very
beginning. 0ra.is as techni1ue is the result of knowing such facts. *ote that it is not in
the nature of the fact to provide its own dialectic, otherwise characteristics 5! and 59
would be much more difficult to reproduce, and 58 and 5# would immediately be called
into 1uestion. 'hat the facts of 4nature4 or of human history are less important than the
social facts of belief is not simply based on their fre1uency in our mundane lives. 5y far
the most of us are not philosophers or scientists, and what Achut( has referred to as the
4scientific attitude4, to 3u.tapose it with the 4natural4 one above, is reserved for an elite few.
'hat the fact rests its relative prestige upon social conte.ts which are often unavailable to
!;
many of us is the first sign that the realm of pra.is can also be harnessed to ideology, as
well as finding a safe haven amidst other social conte.ts which subsists in 4mere4 belief.
'he form of capital which is associated with the knowledge of discourses of all kinds is
both a lu.ury within the larger society, and wa.es lu.uriantly only within the conte.ts
that it has made its own. 0opular culture, as a distraction from the serious business of the
reflective life, is far more omnipresent, and washes through he.is as if it were not only
another part of primary sociali(ation, but increasingly, the largest part.
'he third form of knowledge that seeks to be archiphonemic to these first two, its
Aaussurean dialectic providing an aufheben - a bracketing and an uplifting while
preserving aspects of each - can be called historicity. +egel4s effect appears here without
his form of the dialectic. Instead, phronesis is gained when we sub3ect he.is to the harsh
light of a critical pra.is, while at the same time not allowing the criti1ue to be any more
than a means for further knowledge, a vehicle for further reflection. 0hronesis, or the
practical wisdom of e.perience and reflection, is more of a process than a place. It does
not rest in our consciousness in the same way as either belief or fact. /% +istoricity,
1. is anti-transcendentalist and 4relativist4
!. provides a reflective space
9. is on the way to an ethics and to authenticity
$. is one source of 4mature being4
;. regains humanity in the 4world as it is4
8. holds the parado. of living history
#. is both sub3ective and ob3ective
5ecause we are imbedded in a history which is both not of our own making - the
4tradition4 against which we must assert our reflective beings - and one through which our
very living on gets rewritten, the parado. of living history provides the milieu. in which
ethics regains its status as actuality. 5oth he.is and pra.is demand utter action, either
obedient or critical respectively. 0hronesis, rather, demands that we stop and think about
!8
what we are to do. )e neither bow to tradition or to criti1ue for their respective sakes.
Ithics is always ad hoc, and in this it differs from its forma progenitor, morality. )hat is
good for one situation may not be for the ne.t,. It is the same for persons, where the
geese and ganders of the mottled flock of humanity often have little enough to do with
one another in their specific travails and personal challenges. Gadamer4s definition of
4maturity4 contains this sense of reflection as part of reflective historical consciousness. It
is 4effective4 in the manner that it confronts the tradition, all the while knowing that
history is much more about what has been the case than who we are as individuals within
it. ,kin to the scientific candle, the mysterious swirl of history and society is cast sharply
in its silhouettes only when we assert our uni1ue combination of e.perience and
knowledge in the way of their shadowed presence. ) cannot do so through either he.is
or pra.is alone. ,s we have seen, the entire work of he.is is to reproduce what has been
the case. >or the great length of human tenure on earth this was enough. >or our own
time, and perhaps for the previous half millenia, he.is has faced the stiffest competition
from a pra.is bent on reshaping the world to its own needs. 2et this too is a world that
can become 4traditional4 in the sense that the architecture of modern consciousness is
partly built upon instrumental rationality, 'aylorism, and the marginal utility of
reproducing the massive margins of capital.
'hat there is in our world a constant conflict of interpretations, not only amongst
different belief systems, but within each system as it confronts the new pra.is,
underscores the immanent necessity of attaining the process of phronesis through
dialogue and dialectic. >or the he.is of beliefs are, in turn, a% often discriminatory against
difference and can become a source of degradation and stigmata. b% local cultural
!#
assumptions which may not hold over time and can create pockets of ignorance and
isolated insulation, and c% are the source of values, and as such cannot by themselves
occupy the ob3ective space of valuation. It is not the work of he.is to dismantle itself.
Guite the contrary, what is customary is the social glue that binds human beings to their
fellows and maintains some semblance of social order and function. /ontrary to many
revolutionaries, he.is is not entirely bankrupt, as societies left to their own devices
provide functional space for most persons most of the time. 'he shamanic and other ritual
roles for transgendered persons in 0lains *orth ,merican pre-contact societies are merely
one of a thousand ethnographic e.amples of this division of symbolic labor. *o, it is in
the main through aggressive culture contact and conflict that the systems of the social
fabric are unwound, the more rapidly, the more dangerously. 2et we do occupy the period
of sudden and sometimes total cultural conflict and annihilation. 'his only further adds to
the weight of our ethical responsibility to step back from our tacit support of these
rationali(ed themes and motives - the effects of an uncritical pra.is of utility - and sub3ect
them to both an holistic pra.is and the e.perienced wisdom of phronesis. >or pra.is
based only on 4the facts4 or as ideographic, a% is presumed to be true regardless of value
and hence often either lacks value or is treated as not valuable, and thus can seem
anonymous to human concerns. b% rest on a universal language (or an esoteric
interpretation% that factors out most people, and c% cannot be known as certain7 science
and history are often in conflict with one another as the latter produces the former and
also can change it. 'he ma3or problem with any pra.is - because it must first be learned
as if it were a techni1ue and thus often gives the impression that this is only what it is - is
access. Its resources are still those of elites, either intellectual or scientific. Its politics
!C
then, takes the latter place of the religious ideas that )eber famously said emanated from
disaffected and displaced intellectual elites in archaic societies. Har. is very much a
modernist religious figure to this regard, and Ingels a baptist of both critical and erotic
1uality. 'he detail of the mathematical language of the sciences and its offspring such as
a statistics can be easily manipulated in the face of laypersons who know nothing of its
internal workings nor genealogy. 5eyond 4lies and damned lies4, such machinations
replace the insulation of he.is by constructing a new comforts (one where we are
reassured by e.pertise that all is well and that reality is in the hands of the people who it
best, and thus also make the claim that they know what is best for the remainder of us.
*ot really any different from the claims of traditional elders in every human tribe of lore
and history, the e.perts of mass society have accredited themselves on the original model
of the priesthood, their auto-mythology that of a rationality that seeks only itself.
Iven so, he.is and pra.is are the essential ingredients for a critical and reflective
perspective which is finally embodied in its most full e.tent in the historicity of
phronesis. 'his a% acknowledges cultural value as its ob3ect without accepting it as its
measure. b% theoretically can become 4democratic4 but often creates aesthetic or
intellectual elites, and cE cannot be sourced from any single aspect of discourse but
envelopes all social conflicts as both empirical eventuality and as statements of ethics.
)ith phronesis, we listen to what has been the case and 1uestion it. )e do not accept its
cultural 3udgement as the sole mode of evaluation, nor do we accept its traditional value
hierarchies as the ones which either must be adhered to uncritically nor the ones which
must be defended at all costs. ,ll of us, from whatever society, are placed in the position
of saboteurs, and the 4hermeneutics of suspicion4 always begins with a shadow of a doubt.
!
)e must maintain that there can be no distinctions amongst our fellow humans to this
regard, lest these new forms of criti1ue and reflection become the esoteric properties of
new intellectual or aesthetic elites that carry on much in the same way as did there
predecessors. 'hus pedagogy is of the utmost import to phronesis, even though teaching
and learning are part of the very core of the process which leads to practical wisdom. ,s
with persons, so with the sciences. no single epistemic group has a privileged space. 'he
1ueen of the sciences must step down into the hive. ,kin to the e.istential envelope of
)orld, the historicity of phronetic knowledge - that we are living history as well as living
within history - surrounds us with its massive subtlety.
'hese three forms of knowing are intimately related to )eber4s three forms of
authority. 4'raditional authority4 emanates from small scale social institutions and is the
source of both morals and mores. ,ge-graded and inherited, this non-rational or even
4pre-rational4 mode of thinking casts aspersion on 4the new4 in all of its alien advent. +e.is
is what is created by traditional authority. as against this, the much more recent 4rational-
legal4 authority contests to the very core the value of all traditions, and historically, has
been triumphant in its symbolic con1uests in almost every case. *ot that tradition simply
disappears, as it is well known that all revolutions regress into something not entirely
different from what they aimed to replace, but nevertheless the new ideas are now here to
stay, however they may be diluted. :ational-Legal authority has the history of pra.is as
both its hallmark and call to arms. 'he two of them have an ironic relationship, to be
sure, as pra.is must immediately lose its critical edge once the new order is established.
/alls for 4permanent revolution4 aside, pra.is hones its new tools of criti1ue in defense of
4the new4 and against pockets of resistance from traditional 1uarters, as much of the
9E
rhetoric regarding the continued presence of science education in *orth ,merica is
geared towards. 5oth these forms of authority are ultimately and complacently
unreflective. 5oth are challenged by what )eber famously referred to as 4/harismatic4
authority. 'hough 1uite effective in traditional conte.ts, charisma - not to mention its
degraded and false cousin, political charm - seems rather blithely ineffective in modern
rationali(ed spaces of power. Indeed, attempts at charisma outside the world of sports and
entertainment seemed destined to be ignored simply because we have been, along with
the world, 4disenchanted4, and are no longer willing to believe in the voice that claims
truth and assignation at once. truth claims are fine by themselves f couched in the
languages of the sciences, but these also can almost entirely be ignored, for as we have
seen, scientific facts most often have little relevance for our everyday lives and their
pedigree and connections re1uire patient study to be understood in necessary and fullest
detail. /harismatic authority is not merely revolutionary but radically democratic - as
long as one is twice-born - pursues authenticity and emanates a 1uasi-mystical 1uality,
and is non-moral and pronounces a new ethics. ,ll religions have begun more or less like
this, and most have not survived the stern twin tests of history and world. 'hose that do,
)eber reminds us, are 1uickly 4routini(ed4 and take on many of the 1ualities of the
institutions that had originally sought to entirely replace. Ao while phronesis is kindred
with charisma, its authority can only be authoritative, never stating baldly that the
knowledge of practical wisdom is not only brand new - it often rests rather on a patient
and conscientious study of the history of discourses even into ancient times - but that it
ahs all the answers in a trice. 'he charisma of phronesis lies in the revolution all thinking
grasps in being thought. if not, phronesis 1uickly retreats into pra.is alone, for while the
91
routini(ation of charisma is an ubi1uitous process in societies both modern and archaic, it
is only within the former that the radical personae of charismatic leadership is
commoditi(ed and marginali(ed by the sheer inertia of rationali(ed institutions. 'his
inertia is defined by strategic and conscious political market and is manifested in
popularity and the consumption of fashion. Husic, television, film, clothing, even
definitions of health and love fall into the same category in our own age. 'he pra.is of
advertising, though such a phrase sounds vaguely heretical, consists of the 4art4 of
manipulating the process of consumption in the light of self-determination and self-
betterment. 'he tools of this kind of 4mature being4 are also theoretically democratic, the
healthier breakfast or the cleaner fuel. )hat passes for self-consciousness today has been
artfully changed into the skein of false consciousness. Learning and teaching can either
aid this process of reproduction and e.pansion, or they can 1uestion it. It is not a case of
this or that person either being 4with us or against us4. )e are all always against one
another and with one another, pending circumstance. 'he manner of most closely
reassuring that we continue to think is by engaging at all times a continuing and lucid
criti1ue of 4the world as it appears to be4.
Iducational processes by which the three forms of knowledge interact may be
charted in the following manner, where there is at first a replacement of what has been
sociali(ed as necessary by what claims to be 4serious4, and thence what turns out to be the
case over time, as practical wisdom that e.periences itself -as we ultimately e.perience
our humanity - as its own finitude"
Hodes of 5eing +e.is (custom% 0ra.is (applied theory% 0hronesis (practical wisdom%
/hronological -
Aources" sociali(ation institution 4e.perience4
9!
5ias" social control paradigm biography
,spiration" reproduction accumulation 4mature being4
'emporality" apparent stasis 4progressive4 finitude
and long term and short term
'he chief weakness of e.perience alone is its singularity. 'he corresponding
weakness of theory alone is its disconnect with the lives lived in social reality. 'he chief
weakness of custom alone is that it takes what is social to be too real. 2et the three of
them taken critically together can avoid these pitfalls. In keeping with the format of the
main sections of this book, we can provide an interactive classroom activity to
demonstrate the pedagogic usefulness of such a model, as well as it being an e.ercise
with which to dissect and e.plore further the implications of such relations therein. ,sk
participants in the course to find e.amples of the three forms of knowledge as well as the
personal location of each of these three as loci in their own learning processes. 'hat is,
each of us have aspects of our lives which remain in one or the other of these three
spaces, retaining the character of their respective forms of knowledge. , simple e.ample
is perhaps found in a person4s religious beliefs, which have been sociali(ed as sacred
against many comers, that may remain as he.is in one4s life. -r perhaps the untrammeled
belief in the success of the applied sciences, such as engineering or medecine, might state
its case from the position of pra.is alone. 'hen, a% trace the accomplished or pro3ected
process with each e.ample. b% ask how do you value the content of the loci and whyB and
c% construct more detailed categories of belief, fact, and historicity within your groups
and compare with other groups4 findings. -ne e.ample that most of us e.perience as we
age is the shift in perception of the ideal and form of love and eros. )e might begin with
the ,lcibiadean sense that their is a ingle soul-mate 4out there4 awaiting us, and our
destiny is to find them (he.is%. 'hrough e.perience we find that love is ambiguous in all
99
of its forms (pra.is%, and finally we come to know love as it is, as differential and diffuse
(phronesis%.
It remains to conclude this opening chapter by stating some of the pedagogic
reasons that lie at the heart of the proposed hermeneutic circle of learning and thinking.
-ne might do no better than to reiterate what I generally ask of my students within each
course I teach. *iet(sche once said that the true teacher takes nothing seriously unless it
is in reference to his students - even himself. 0erhaps this is true of the ideal teacher.
0erhaps also, however, it is not necessary to completely embody this ideal to be a good
teacher, even an e.cellent pedagogue - one who studies the art and theory of teaching. ,ll
of us are aspects of the embodiment of a great teacher, and that teacher is the community
that can take place when we are thrown into this or that classroom together, often as
strangers, and often for a brief period of time. 'his teacher, the sum of all of our parts,
creates a learning process which is, as the old adage has it, more than such a sum. 'his is
the teacher that I wish help to construct and learn from with the further help of each of
you each day we meet.
,fter eighteen years as a university professor in one guise or other, I have begun
to reali(e that what is called higher education in *orth ,merica has not and is not living
up to its billing as the uni1ue center of thought and space of ideas for our many cultures.
'here is a lengthy list of famous criti1ues of both these ideals and the spaces in which
they are supposed to inhabit. In fact, this list begins as soon as the modern mass
education system begins, as soon as the modern university system begins, that is, in the
latter half of the nineteenth century. 'his is not the place for a recantation of such
criti1ues, but suffice to say that as soon as the noble ideas of learning, passions of
9$
knowledge, and arts and sciences of humanity and nature came together in an institutional
setting, some have reflected that perhaps this was not the best place of rest for them.
-thers have even suggested that it is a fitting final resting place, that in fact such
knowledge, passions, and ideas are indeed at rest in the graves of academe.
+ow could such a criti1ue withstand the sheer inertia of a system which now
numbers, for e.ample, in the Dnited Atates alone, some 99EE colleges and universities,
public and private, with hundreds of thousands of successful graduates to speak for itB
>or critics like Gatto it is, in the main, because higher education repeats and reproduces
to a large e.tent the ways of learning that elementary and secondary institutions
prevaricate on their captive audiences. +e also suggests that many members of these
audiences, although still a minority, are convinced that their education is important
enough to continue in a similar system - but this time, by paying their own way - and
enough still of these latter are further convinced to progress to an even higher echelon
and complete divers and sundry graduate degrees. 'o what end, one may askB :obert
Lynd asked such a 1uestion in 19, but directed it not merely to knowledge producing
institutions but to an entire society. 'he most immediate reply came two years later when
liberal democracies were engulfed in a do or die struggle with dangerous forms of
fascism. )ell, this is one response, and of course knowledge in defense of the free access
to knowledge and history is one of educationJs most important tasks. 2et a true global
crisis in this sense is a rare task, upon which we are fortunately seldom called upon to act.
'hat we are currently engaged in an ongoing crisis regarding environment and
geopolitical competition reminds us that the need for reflection and criti1ue, of conscious
action and interpretation is never distant. 'here are yet more imminent responses to the
9;
1uestion, Kknowledge for whatBJ, and it is to some of these which I would like the
learning community of which I spoke above to turn.
0erhaps much of what is taught in university classrooms, no matter the sub3ect
discipline, could be more truly called information, rather than knowledge. 'he former is
in many ways passive, descriptive, - Kmatter of factJ, if you will - and is taught in a
transmissive environment. 'he student comes to class, sits down in rows, takes notes for
an hour from overheads or other presentation technologies, and then must study and
regurgitate such information on Kob3ectiveJ e.ams in order to receive a grade and credit
for the class. K5anking educationJ, as 0aulo >riere calls it, and advisedly? ,fter many
years of this or something like it, the unfortunate effect on the learner is to create a
student who is more than content to come to class, sit back and listen, perhaps take notes,
and study for e.ams.
i
LAurely it is up to the professor to be responsible for my learning?M,
this student suggests, and believes it. 0erhaps not. 'here have been a number of famous
studies on e.am learning which suggest that such information is forgotten soon after the
test for it has concluded, and there is only one professional discipline that I can think of
where such a process could be beneficial. 'his is law, simply because the attorney must
have every detail of a case at her fingertips for a short time and then completely forget
about it and move on to the ne.t case as it comes. *ow, in the natural sciences,
transmissive pedagogy can be forgiven given that these disciplines re1uire often much
substantive learning of techni1ue and technicality before moving on with the e.amination
of the cosmos. 2et even here, the greatest of our scientists have been thinkers first, and
technicians a long way second.
98
It is not so much transmission of information in the classroom that is the problem
in itself. It is rather the kind of learning space, and most importantly, the kind of learner
that such helps to create. ,nd by no means can we discretely pro3ect disdain on an
education system which is surrounded by a passive consumer society that reproduces
itself by schooling each generation to be, more than anything else, passive producers and
consumers who do not reflect on the human condition, and are often forced to struggle
within an economic system which also reproduces both great privilege and poverty. 'he
original public school classroom was often a place of great disorder, but its ideals were of
a militaristic regimen. 'he advent of large scale consumption of media, most eminently
through the television, has ended a need for physical coercion in most educational
settings. /lassrooms which mimic the passivity of watching television, and drugs such as
ritalin to smooth out the margins of the classroom, have proven an effective combination
of deterrents against active learning and thinking. Learning becomes a form of
entertainment, e.periences are vicarious and gratificatory in the short term, thence
forgotten. In fact, learning begins to mirror the hedonistic, and yet perhaps ironically
neurotic, larger social pursuit of instant gratification.
/ommenting on such shallow events, @ewey describes some of their effects"
'raditional education offers a plethora of e.amples of e.periences of
the kind 3ust mentioned. < = +ow many students, for e.ample, were rendered
callous to ideas, and how many lost the impetus to learn because of the way in
which learning was e.perienced by them. +ow many ac1uired special skills by
means of automatic drill so that their power of 3udgement and capacity to act
intelligently in new situations was limitedB +ow many came to associate the
learning process with ennui and boredomB +ow many found what they did learn
was so foreign to the situations of life outside the school as to give them no
power of control over the latterB (19C"!8-#%.
9#
'hat is indeed the plan, though it be no conscious conspiracy. 'he less power of
learned 3udgement, the less of what Gadamer calls Khistorical consciousnessJ, the less
thought in general within the larger society the better, the more convenient, the less
troubling for all those who benefit from contemporary social and economic organi(ation.
I say, Kall thoseJ, but we can probably fit such angels on the head of a pin relative to the
population as a whole. :obert HertonJs famous 1uestion, Kwho benefitsBJ is one which
each of us within the modern classroom could well stand to pause for, instead of rushing
headlong into a fren(ied race to make sure that you or I become one of the privileged few
at the e.pense of our colleagues in the other rows.
5ourdieu suggests, however, the university presents to us, at the same time it aids
the reproduction of society, a relatively autonomous, officially organi(ed space where one
is actually free to think and share. 'his is the only such space that society offers us. It is
well known that revolutions in consciousness often fail due to lack of organi(ation of the
interested, curious, and imaginative. +ere then is an institutional space offering itself to
us for that very purpose. )e are ethically culpable when we do not sei(e such an
opportunity to think and create given that by far the remainder of our fellow humans
around the world will never get the chance. , community of learning, a shared pedagogy
of dialogue and discussion can open up the space of thinking once again. Hy ideal
classroom is one in which we learn from one another, use as many of the resources and
life e.perience each of you brings to the course, study and work cooperatively, and
evaluate as non-competitively as possible. *or is this to turn the classroom into a political
space. 'hinking itself is revolutionary. ,s Gadamer suggests, e.perience can only be new
when it asserts itself against the known as something new, or in a new way.
9C
If then education serves to undermine democracy, to protect us from it, then
democracy in its turn must defend against this continuous sorting out of potential lives in
a manner which must also preclude the complete destruction of democracy. Suffice here
to say that it is by a strategically though not fully conscious socialization of a series of
graduated misrecognitions of a complex of interconnected and mutually necessary
'cultural arbitraries', that children become not who they are - although this may
sometimes occur in not a 'specially gifted child', but one in which another series of
cultural arbitraries has 'backfired', as it were, and has produced rather than reproduced.
But what the 'system' needs to tender its own future; to make itself into itself again and
again. As such, at least we have one concept of the future, but one which the past is the
future once more, in an eternal recurrence of the same. Hence competition to get out of
the way of a democracy which has engendered its reproduction through competition is a
nigh on perfect manner of ensuring not only that the system gets reproduced intact, with
all and in tact, but more importantly that that system is the generator and catalyst for all
the other societal parts. Now what of the balancing weight to this self-serving and self-
servicing understanding? Democracy then must be the promise of a better life by self-
participation in the only game in town, that of democracy's alter agent, education. But as
education, as we have seen, is but a promise of competition and struggle for ever
decreasing reward and is intensely anti-democratic in process and practice, whatever it be
in rhetorical ideals (another major part of the argument of misrepresentation of
arbitrariness, and the naturalization of ideological tropes), there seems to be an alternate
appeal on the one hand to democracy to give us the chance at a 'better life' by allowing us
9
the potential to better ourselves in the educative struggle, and on the other hand back to
education itself to save us from the threat of commonness.
What is fatal about this irony is not so much that such a cultural arbitrary exists
but that it seems like it is natural, necessary, and the only game in town. This is neither
democratic nor educational. Yet it is both in an unholy amalgam to which we can suggest
that all our best efforts at genealogizing and decentering should be put to work. How this
might be done is by paying more intimate attention to all the things we think we want and
think we get out of both of these somewhat devious and deviating concepts. What we get
at least on the surface, to rephrase a little what is already fully implicated in the above, is
a chance to compete first - a chance to win at the expense of others, and a chance to fail
as the fodder for others' success. Instead, I would like to share with you a classroom
which is a world, and the world as a classroom. 'his course and our learning within
reasonable bounds of the sub3ects at hand will be perhaps less didactic, structured,
formal, competitive, and boring than many you may previously have e.perienced. 2ou
may be chagrined, surprised, annoyed, lost and frustrated by this at various times
throughout the term. I am committed to your learning and maturity of thought, and I am
merely asking you to do the same for yourself and for the community at large, which is
us. )e are all ensconced in the education system for a reason. I am asking each of you,
for a brief period of time - and hopefully thence for a lifetime - to eschew the material
and logistical motives which may have brought you here.. 'hat is, I wish to begin to
construct with you as a cooperative community of learners a sense of wonder at the
cosmos, a sense of compassion for the human condition, a curiosity for the knowable and
an imagination for the unknown, and most of all, a passion for knowledge.
$E
!. +e.is - what students bring to overcome
Hake yourself only once ac1uainted with the pedagogical literature of this
present7 in him there is nothing more to corrupt, who with this study is not horrified
concerning the highest of all poverty of the spirit and concerning a truly clumsy circle
dance. +ere our philosophy must begin not with wonder, but with horror" )homever it is
not able to bring to horror is asked to leave his hands from pedagogical things. (*iet(sche
!EE$"$! <1C#!=%.
2.1 The Resource of Custom in the Classroom
Critiques of Hexis as a Pedagogic Outcome -
)hile what is customary contains the contents of necessary pre3udice, and while
it cannot be avoided that any social being have his or her respective vault of condensed
knowledge about the local social world, nevertheless he.is can also be used as a resource
in teaching and learning. 'he horror generated by a glancing criti1ue of pedagogical
discourse has its roots in the disdain we might pro3ect against our common bigotries7
those things that 4everyone knows are true4 but in fact have little validity beyond the
local group" 6)hat is supposed to be known in common by everyone who shares our
system of relevances is the way of life considered to be the natural, the good, the right
one by the members of the 4in-group46 (Achut( 18#"19 <1;9=%. It is somewhat
disconcerting that even in our contemporary period cultural groups often behave as if
they were nothing more than scattered villages along a lengthy river system, where the
3ungle hides all signs of neighbors who are also strangers, and encounters amongst tribes
are often violent and laced with fear and ignorance of the most base kind. 'his is merely
an effect, however, of he.is ideologi(ed into a nationEstate apparatus that 4keeps the old
game alive4, to borrow a phrase from Gwynne @yer. /ompetition for resources and the
power and control of populations that comes with them is one of the ma3or motives for
geographical entities and thus the idea of borders and boundary maintenance on the
$1
grandest of scales. Iducation systems within each of these entities aid and abet such
purposes. Indeed, if developed countries maintain global control, they might even suggest
to that self-same that they do so because they have the right way of thinking, the best way
of doing things, the most mature societies known to humankind. If 4they4 wish to be like
4us4, as so many others seems to do in their official roles as emerging states themselves,
then it must be the case that we are the most worthy of emulation on all fronts. 2et we
know that, 3ust like our situation at home, governments seldom represent the widest of
interests with regard to the citi(enry. 'his is all the more the case in emerging economies
within the 4developing4 world. 4@eveloping4 into whatB, we may well ask. ,t the same
time, we are also aware that the intense forces of globali(ation are in fact creating a kind
of world-space - once again, if metonymi(ed into an ontology (a common humanity
based on the ideology of want, say% then a fraudulent totali(ation and hence 4evil4 - where
shared values and goals are supposed to inhabit every member of the species. 'his
certainly runs counter to our entire history, but it does hold out the soteriological promise
that if we all turn into the same thing, then conflict and competition will end. 'ime will
tell, no doubt, but the main contenders at present 3oust with one another not on e.istential
lines, but based only on the most brutish sensibility that 4we are better than them4 - indeed
thus more worthy of life - simply because we happened to have been born in one
geography and not another. /an the complacency of an accident become the most blithe
and pathetic e.cuse for geopoliticsB It seems that it can, but the reason for this is not that
birth itself has become an ideological event, but that he.is is so easily convertible into a
politics. -ne, because what is customary is in fact held in common by a vast ma3ority of
persons in this or that space, and two, any politics which attempts to preserve its
$!
fashionable hold on power must cater to what most people think they know about the
world. 2es, opinions can be created and 4spun4, sometimes out of control, but it is a
savvier politics that knows how to massage what is already there, than one that attempts
to create anew in the face of cultural inertia" 6Aharing a community of space implies that
a certain sector of the outer world is e1ually within the reach of each partner, and
contains ob3ects of common interest and relevance.6 (ibid"18%. 'his sharing is not at all
limited to one4s sub3ectivity when relating to the ob3ect realm. )e embody he.is in the
very way we conduct ourselves in the world of others who are not alien to us, and in the
interface of a world of constructed and natural things that we have grown accustomed to"
6>or each partner the other4s body, his gestures, his gait and facial e.pressions, are
immediately observable, not merely as things or events of the outer world but in their
physiognomical significance, that is, as symptoms of the other4s thoughts.6 (ibid"18%.
+ere Achut( may ultimately be making reference to ,ristotle4s famous remark about the
eyes being the windows of the soul4, but the point that we manifest our customary being
to one another as a matter of course is the fundamental ground of 4lay ontology4. It is
indeed an ontography, because we can map it and write on it or about it. Huch of the
human sciences is the official chart of human ontology in its cultural manifestation. 5ut
this map is one of pra.is ,not he.is. It is not he.is made into the state narrative of what
constitutes the good polis, it is not polis policed. rather it is metastasi(ing of custom into
theories thereof. )hy do people do the things they doB is the common 1uestion of all
human science. the response of traditional authority is, as we have seen above, good
enough within the confines of each in-group, but it fails to utter any higher validity. )e
do not, in fact even know why things work the way in which they do, let alone anything
$9
about deeper human motives or aspirations. Aurvival and reproduction aside, human
beings are evolutionarily and culturally endowed with the ability to imagine the future
and cast themselves out into the world as scattered but cogent agents of alien change on a
virginal landscape of the non-human. +e.is stands in the way of pra.is, but it is also its
ob3ect. 'he goal is to understand ourselves better and more fully than before. +e.is is
itself a system of self-understanding which has worked 4on its won4, as it were, up until
1uite recently. /onflict certainly was e.tant for no doubt much of human e.istence, but
never on such a scale that threatened the species or even its diversity of cultures. 'he
reproduction of this or that culture seems to us to be a modest goal today. yet we are not
in so very different a position, given that we are fashioning, for better or worse, a global
culture, and given that most of us wish it to continue in some form that improves the
general human 1uality of life and intellect. 'he reproduction of what can be humanity is
today the first 1uestion, and necessarily following from this, its maturation, simply
because we cannot survive as we are now.
'o learn to do this we must inevitably take our cue from how we used to learn, or
how we have always learned. 'hat is, how did he.is survive and reproduce itself, and
what can we gain from the knowledge of what he.is is and does that can help turn our
pra.is into a viable he.is that crosses cultural and national bordersB 6Learning here
means ac1uisition of already is incorporated in books and in the heads of elders. It is
taught as a finished product with little regard either way in which it was originally built
up or to changes that will surely occur in the future.6 (@ewey 19C"1%. 'he
cosmogonical cycles and narratives that populate the imagination of traditional
mythologies and modern science alike are testament that we do pay some notice to 4how
$$
it all got started4, but generally @ewey is correct. In teaching the world as it has been, or
custom and behavior which has been the case and is e.pected to continue, we treat it as a
black bo., not to be opened pending the risk of 0andora hovering above our youthful
heads" 6It is to a large e.tent the cultural product of societies that assumed the future
would be much like the past, and yet it is used as an educational tool in a society where
change is the rule, not the e.ception.6 (ibid%. 0erhaps it is precisely because of the
accelerated pace of change in the past few centuries that there has grown a more pressing
need to keep things the way they were, as every 4is4 is so 1uickly a 4was4. -ne hears this
casually when parents intone almost ritualistically every so often that children grow up
very 1uickly, and 4where does the time go4, as if child raising were like the act that gave it
its origin, the love and passion that stops time still within erotic mitsein. ,s rhetorical as
these commonplaces may be - the middle class mannerism of decoying any suspicion that
one actually dislikes the thought of having had children, turning the 4having had to4 of the
normative into a simple e.tension of 3oy the lasts uninterrupted for decades at a time -
such moments are testament to the feeling that one must needs attend to the reproduction
of oneself through another, vastly different and for a long while dependent. Auch filial
bonds for the most part remains the sub-te.t of all cultural reproduction, the living on of a
society writ small. ,nd not only was this a concrete feature of kinship relations"
6,longside material production and reproduction, the transmission of forms of social life
was traditionally the most pressing of all cultural practices. >rom the everyday
phenomena of manners and childrearing to the more e.alted domains of religion, politics,
and philosophy, social life was inherently pedagogical.6 (+orowit( !EE1"19-$%. 'his
cycle never ended, for as soon as one stopped being the student one already was the
$;
teacher. 'he child into parent, the non-responsible into the obligatory, the guarded into
the guardian. -ne moved from the inheritor into the one who be1ueathed in a smooth and
often concise fashion, given traditional rites of passage associated with puberty. 'his
telescoping of the time of life was necessary in societies where population loads were
small and life e.pectancies were often below thirty years of age. 'here was, ironically, no
time for the change of human history to occur. -ne simply lived to pass on what one
suddenly had become, without much notice of anything else" 6'he universality of
pedagogy tells us much about the dialectics of fate and faith, since 3ust as each new
generation was the vessel of the older one4s survival in its passing, the new vessel was
inherently untrustworthy and needed to be bent to its responsibilities.6 (ibid"1$%. It was
less a matter of faith proper, perhaps, than with the skill in showing the manner of how
one had to live on in this or that circumstance. >or while any particualr small group might
die out, the end of the world was never at hand, despite the feeling that may have
pervaded different civili(ations during shifts in modes of production or through epic large
scale conflicts and the trading of geographic empires. 'his 0auline an.iety, from which
emanates our contemporary concept of the apocalypse, is older than /hristianity. 2et
perhaps it has never been so realistic as we now can feel it. 'he end of the world is
immediately immanent to us as it was to no other culture. *ot even the seventh seal of the
millenia could compete with the sensibility that we not only face our collective fate - and
with the faith that may well have animated earlier guises of the social contract, indeed,
such a faith as we harbor still is more dangerous to us than is a safeguard, as it imagines
that we will pass on 4after all4, and that no evil we commit will be a final and fatal one -
but that we 4own4 our own apocalypse7 that is, we are the one4s that flick the switch.
$8
*o more reason need be given for the preeminence of the perspective of the other
that has also become part of our collective fate. /ertainly cultural conflict is also a path to
the abyss, but it is also, and more importantly, a manner in which we are shown that we
do not indeed have all the answers, as traditional societies once did for their own local
situations. >or such perspective we also need not travel very far, even though the further
afield we do venture, the more strange our beliefs might well feel to us" 62et the world of
my daily life is by no means my private world but is from the outset an intersub3ective
one, shared with my fellow-men, e.perienced and interpreted by -thers7 in brief, it is a
world common to all of us.6 (Achut( 18#"91! <1;;=%. ,s common as it may be, the
mere fact that otherness e.ists and its very conception is also held in common makes the
social world not merely mutable, but even fragile. we know we have already changed
throughout our own biographical e.perience, why should others not have done so as well.
)e indeed have e.perienced such change in others, even such may be the well-
calculated phases of social life that should come and go in rather specific order and
fashion. ,t the same time, 6'he uni1ue biographical situation in which I find myself
within the world at any moment of my e.istence is only a very small e.tent of my own
making. I find myself always within an historically given world which, as a world of
nature as well as a sociocultural world, had e.isted before my birth and which will
continue to e.ist after my death.6 (ibid%. ,t this point in history, only the former is
necessarily true, as one kind of death today has the capability of consuming all life. 'he
earth will e.ist after any human death but no longer the world as it is, nor the envelope of
e.istential )orld. *evertheless, one does go ahead with one4s life with an amalgam of
$#
faith and fate which may be primordial to our species consciousness. )e believe in the
morrow, and therein lies the marrow of all faith.
'he intersub3ective character of he.is means that for the most part, teachers of all
stripes can assume that their tribal lore will not merely amount to something in the world
of today, but that their charges will take it on as if it were their own in the same manner
as did the previous generations, the teachers of the teachers etc. 'hat language is still the
primal medium of human communication, separating us form all other forms of known
consciousness, only throws into high relief what we can observe amongst our fellows7
that each social encounter is a pedagogical e.perience, even if by far the most of them
confirm our suspicions that the social world is as real as nature and has incomparably
more 1uotidean force for us than what even the cosmos can proffer. 'hese e.periences
are not negative in the hermeneutic sense of 4negation of previous pre3udice4. :ather in
their confirmation - pending our interpretation of them of course - they both solidify the
prior presence of what we have assume to be the case, the lessons of generali(ed he.is,
but as well they further the course of pedagogy all of us began as young children. 'he
trite casuistry 4learning never ends4 is most trivially true in the day to day, where we
imagine that we have learned nothing at all. yet we could not keep up the social
performances e.pected of us without all kinds of help from the other players treading the
well-worn boards of the social stage. 'his is specifically felt through the use of linguistic
communication, where the universal te.ts of humanity is acted out. Language puts us
socially 4in our place4, as it were. )e are heavily reliant upon 6...the belief that each
person4s language use strategies are sub3ectively registered through a process which
might be called social insertion. Aelf-awareness appears in each of us at the moment of
$C
language ac1uisition because both self-awareness and language re1uire and 4mean4 in a
sense, our implication of other people4s lives and their implication in ours.6 (5leich
1CC"!1E italics the te.t4s%. *ot that we write our own scripts from scratch. 'he tired
adage that here is 4nothing new under the sun4 is particularly appropriate for he.is
oriented language and interaction, 3uts as it is potentially overdone for philosophical
discourse. )e are also reliant upon others to co-write the libretto of everyday life, and we
in turn are usually willing to become the co-author4s of others4 communication tactics.
'his only becomes e.cessive when we transgress certain interpersonal boundaries in the
attempt to e.ert more control over the actual lives of others, but it should be remembered
that we are always treading on these margins in any case, given the intersub3ective 1uality
of all human interaction. )e do not fully author our own e.istence - very much less so
than the ideology of individualism proclaims, given the inertia of history and the oft
unconfronted tradition - and yet we get to 4make up4 for this in a way by helping others
author theirs" 6Fust as all language has already been used, one4s own language is also
4common property4. In most instances, of every day conversation we do not note or think
about its uni1ueness or allude to the fact that it is 4ours4 and not someone else4s.6
(ibid"!1#%. 'his voluntaristic sharing of tongues does not e.tend, however, to the
sensibility that other persons - or other minds - are somehow connected to our own in a
manner akin to the collective conscience of mechanical solidarity. )e draw the line rather
naively, perhaps, using the physical analogy of ob3ects in space to help demarcate what is
our own and what is not" 6)e are, on the other hand, firmly aware of the difference
between ourselves and our interlocutors, the difference between us and other couples,
groups, or communities who are speaking among themselves.6 (ibid%. 0laying up these
$
divisions to much could be fatal for the species, of course, but for now one can suggest
that such differentiation is not only e.pedient given the notion of agency, free will, and
even the concept of elf or selves, but also necessary given the problem of confronting the
tradition anew as a motive force in history on the way to attaining historical
consciousness. Iffective historical consciousness needs the perspective of the other, and
indeed, as we have already seen, the otherness of what has not been the case, in things,
world or persons, provides the radicality of the first step away from what we have known
before. >urthermore, this otherness must also be allowed to become abstracted from the
immediate dialogical or hermeneutic conte.t. )e need not only the sense that there is a
self and other, but also that there is, akin to Head4s 4generali(ed other4, another kind of
being that stands around us, writ larger tan social interaction alone, and yet is still more
easily accessible than the 1uite abstract notion of 4the tradition4. 'his is the idea of the
third eye of semi-autonomous ob3ectivity that we search for in the third person" 6'his will
pose a problem, for we must not allow a theory of refle.ivity to rob us of the definite
advantage of being able to consider the person as a third person, and not only as an I and
a you. 'he difficulty will be instead understanding how a third person is designated in
discourse as someone who designates himself as a first person.6 (:icoeur 1!"9;%. 'his
is not so much of a challenge as it first may appear, if we simply consider the fact that we
too have been 4typecast4 in some way in order for others to use us as an abstract 1uantity
or presence. Iven the fact that we often, and correctly, take offense at such a typification
can lend us leverage to understanding the 1uasi-e.istential shifting of discursive or
historical roles undergone by living selves. 'he ob3ectification necessary for one to
append a discursive label to a living entity is based on that used by ta.onomists of nature.
;E
'he trick with any human situation is of course not to make an assumption about what the
living will or can do, or what they might actually think of things, before one goes much
more deeply into the matter of conte.t and person. ,ll of us think of ourselves as
individuals, at least in fully organic societies, and yet we are also well aware that
individuals as part of their individuality have opinions and beliefs that are at the same
time shared by many others, trivially or with profundity respectively, and that this alone
allows us to become a 4we4, as in 4we others4. 'his acknowledged community, tacit in
social interactions amongst persons in the everyday world, is the first step in designating
ourselves as part of an abstraction like community or society. 4)e ourselves4 at first
appears parado.ical, but what it is referring to is the immanent facticity that humans
cannot be what hey are unless they are with 4each other4. 'he otherness of human history
makes us what we are ourselves. 'hus self and other, aside from being a primordial
pedagogical relationship, are 1uite literally two sides of the same social coin. 'hat we
might disdain this necessary social fact is one thing, but it is fact nonetheless. 'his
intimacy between first and second person, together always potentially used as the real
currency of the ob3ectified third person, is further illustrated by the way in which we are
able to fill in for each other on the social stage at a moment4s notice. )e are all each
other4s understudies - aside from being one another4s undertakers, by which we undertake
the roles of the other until death do us part - and as such we actually make our own
scripted roles much more fle.ible, as well as being seen as cooperative people acting in
the common cause of human communication" 6...pre-e.isting language habits enable one
to consciously perceive someone else4s us of language in ways appropriate to the ne
situation. It is possible for any student, or other observer, because they necessarily have
;1
such language-use strategies, to make new, meaningful, and helpful comments on anyone
else4s language.6 (5leich 1CC"!8!%. Indeed, this constant editing, e.tending, or
e.trapolating is also part of the process of making the 4you4 into both an 4I4 and a 4we4. )e
might attempt to bring the language of the other closer to our own, though always with
the risk of translation losses, but we might also e1ually well abstract the other until he or
she appears only as part of the generali(ed face of the social consciousness, or yet further,
as part of history. this side of the process of constructing a third person perspective can be
seen most transparently in through the idea of history as a landscape populated only with
larger than life figures, who have attained their abstract status as discursive labels by
accomplishments during their first person lives that supposedly soar above the common
lot. 'here is an immediate danger to this kind of typification of course, if we allow the
figures and fields of discourse to also keep their human status, for" 6'he activities of
great men inevitably hold for us a certain mysterious prestige, a certain secret element
whose key we are forever trying to discover among the details of their lives. )e make use
of incident and anecdote both as documentary and as fictional material, and out of them
we build up heroic portraits and truthful fables alike.6 (>ocillon 19$"191%. *ot only can
we no longer discern facts from fictions, we incautiously blend history and biography.
'he up-side to this impatient amalgam is that we are reminded that facts and fictions do
not differ as much as we might think, especially when they are ensconced only in a
history beyond mortal memory. 'he down-side rests its peace when we find ourselves
repeating a history that was never our own in the first place.
2et even in the most romantic renditions of 4what has been the case4 there are few
heroes and villains. Host of us by far remain what we had always been, the onlookers,
;!
bystanders, and dramatic e.tras whose effect on the passing of time is that we stand as
mute witnesses to it. In a heavily rationali(ed and stratified society like our own, what is
taught as heroic takes the form of either class villainy or class charity. 'he education
systems promote and reproduce these typifications, 3ust as they e.onerate humanity from
the dross of its own history by constructing the 4great person4 out of a merely human life.
'he person with intellectual or artistic talent becomes the scion of a new commodity as a
vehicle for marketable talent. 'he leaders of the 4free world4, public or private, almost
always emanate from the same source" 60rofessional men of any specialty, university
graduates or not, are men who have been 4determined from above4 by a culture of
domination which has constituted them as dual beings. (If they had come form the lower
classes this miseducation would be the same, if not worse%.6 (>riere 1#E"1;8%. 'he
duplicity of an education that at once tells us that we are free to 4become who we are4
while at the same time valuing only a very narrow range of human interest and talent
takes its toll at both psychological and social levels. I remind my first year students each
term that all of them have likely already made serious sacrifices regarding their possible
futures in order to conform to a variety of e.pectations, those of families and the state,
but mostly, those of the fashions of market and employment. ,ll of us desire to live
comfortably, but such definitions of the word 4comfort4 might range much more widely if
stigmata were not immediately attached to the outliers of the current spectrum of
occupations or vocation. 'he idea of one4s child becoming a small-time actor, painter,
musician, or servicing the margins of society in what itself is likely to be a marginal
position, the aides that work with persons with various cognitive and physical challenges
for instance, seldom appeal to the rising classes, those already within a class which is
;9
attempting to hold fast to its stratigraphic position, and, needless to say, never come
within the radar of the elites. 'he term 4undervalued4 comes to mind here, but the fact is
that the value of these persons, their charges, and their activities, is impalpable, and is
more often seen akin to charity or voluntarism - also 4undervalued4 but perhaps this has
the silver lining of recalling that philanthropic action is not revolutionary but yet even its
opposite - or less diplomatically, fit only for those with neither ambition nor honor.
Iducation research can participate in this state of affairs if the dominance of the
science or the control of the conte.t to be studied sets the stage of the sorting of various
kinds of successes and failures that are pre-defined by either a class system or a system of
symbolic violences that derogate local e.perience and knowledge. Auch researchers do
not 6...come to their sub3ects with the purpose of contributing to their lives and situations.
In their roles as observers, and perhaps as manipulative observers, they superimpose an
intimidating authority situation on the social scene of the people being studied.6 (5leich
1CC"C1%. 'his sudden authority interrupts the happenstance of culture and interaction i
am ore serious way than the 4observer effect4 suggests. /ertainly, persons change their
behavior when confronted with more or less strange others, but these others where the
badge and mask of a system that is well-known to be not only more prestigious than the
local scene can muster, but is also suspected of being much more 3udgemental" 6)orking
in the standard idiom of ob3ectivity, that is, isolating one parameter while ignoring any
others, the meaning and role of the research scene is overlooked - really, understood to be
inert - by the researchers, and the knowledge claimed is given out as pertaining only to
the sub3ects under study, rather than to the sub3ects-in-the-interpersonal-research-
situation.6 (ibid%. 'he dual consciousness of the trained technician or martinet is
;$
duplicated in educational research that strives for a separation between culture and
science, living-on and the history of discourse. 'here is e1ual duplicity here, perhaps, as
those under study no longer feel the need to be themselves, as it were, as they have now
been cast as understudies for the role of research sub3ect alone. 'heir new language is
that of the education system and its public minions, their actions graded and measured,
akin to our students, by rubric not of their own making, and their once resourceful use of
he.is is suddenly unmade in the same way as is the bed of an interrupted pair of lovers.
)hat e.periential use of language there may have been is culled in a specific manner"
6Language thereby falls into the service of e.pediting communication along routes where
ob3ectification - the uniform accessibility of everything to everyone - branches out and
disregards all limits. In this way language comes under the dictatorship of the public
realm which decides in advance what is intelligible and what is unintelligible.6
(+eidegger 1##"1#%. Language in the service of 'hinking, of 5eing, rather retains its
elemental status of as something uni1uely human. 'his status is not merely uni1ue, and
confers its uni1ueness upon us as a gift, but it also emanates in our beings as the un1uiet
of the )orld envelope, the always murmuring moment of a consciousness that is only
historical an can only be so. 'hinking aloud this moment brings us to within hailing
distance of our own mortality. )e might suggest that children do not need to know such
things, but indeed, they already feel the presence of an absence of this kind because they
are specifically less insulated by the completed sociali(ation of the adult, the caves of
society that shelter our mortality against the ongoing weather of nature and cosmos. 'he
great anti-e.istential purpose of modern education appears to be the e.tinguishing of a
thinking that takes us back into the heart of 5eing" 6)hen thinking comes to an end by
;;
slipping out of its element it replaces this loss by procuring a validity for itself as techne,
as an instrument of education and therefore a classroom matter and later acultural
concern.6 (ibid%. 'hat human consciousness which is in its essence a thinking and an
historical consciousness cannot truly be annulled only by this or that specific skill of
training only fuels the desperation of any politics that uses large scale systems of such
training and skill bestowing as a form of status elevation. 42ou can be a better person only
through our education4, it says to each and every one of us. 'he purpose of education is to
make oneself a better human being. 0hilosophy would not in principle dispute this, but
would wish to 1uestion the definitions of the key terms in use, 4education4, 4better4, and
4person4, for e.ample. If historical consciousness in the nineteenth century meant 6...the
noble and slowly perfected art of holding ourselves at a critical distance in dealing with
witnesses to past life.6 (Gadamer 1#8";%, then today it must also mean the ability to
refuse to be tempted by an imagination that says that we can do the same for the voices of
the present. we are, in our very 5eing-'hinking, the creature whose consciousness both
develops and breathes in the present while at the same time knowing that the present is
not all it appears to be. 'he present, in other words, has a past. )e are no longer animals
of mere instinct, where what is occurring to us now is all in all, and all of our
physiognomical e1uipment has been evolutionarily geared to respond to the now and its
attendant features in order to survive and reproduce. 'he historicity of present life
reminds us that we both live on in the moment but have also lived on previously.
0re3udice is the remanance of this relationship. I.perience is its residue.
'here is a kind of parado. that is involved in any thinking consciousness that
cannot merely 4be itself4 without recalling to itself what it had also been" 6...*iet(sche
;8
formulated the contradiction between this historical distancing and the immediate will to
shape things that always cleaves to the present.6 (ibid%. 2et 3ust because we can only be
ourselves by at once also being what we have been does not mean we are forever
imprisoned in the torpor of times gone by. ,lthough personal nostalgia might impinge
upon our ability to live as we age, the fact that there is still much living to do - even at the
end of our lives relative to what may be coming after the life we know has come to an
end - means that we harness e.perience and live on within it. )e do not relive our lives
so much as we rewrite our histories whilst living on. )e are perhaps more conscious of
the fact that as we age we seem to speak more of the past than the present, but the fact
that we are still speaking and breathing in the present is never entirely lost on us. 'he
living breathing presence of beings in the world are a constant companion to authentic
thoughts of all kinds. 'hinking remains 4in its element4, as +eidegger puts it, simply
because of the persistence of living on while one is still amongst the living. )e need only
take this self-same perspective that must be applied to our own biographical narratives
and understand human history proper by way of it. +alf-thought historical consciousness
- the distanciation of the drive of the living present - can only produce the discursive
version of nostalgia, an anti1uarianism" 6,nti1uarian history itself degenerates from the
moment it is no longer animated and inspired by the fresh life of the present. Its piety
withers away, the habit of scholarliness continues without it and rotates in egoistic self-
satisfaction around its own a.is.6 (*iet(sche 1C9"#; <1C#$=%. ,ll techne that redeems
itself through smugness has this 1uality. It does not need the living present for it already
knows 4what to do4. 'hese skills and techni1ues, information and rules e.ist most fully in
their attempt to 1uell the lo1uacity of the witnesses, not to history, but to our own lives as
;#
they are lived in the here and now. ,ll criti1ue then has the added task of distinguishing
between the technical narratives of instrumental rationality that mas1uerade as authentic
pra.is and the severe traditionalism of desperate he.is. 'he combination of pra.is as
techni1ue and tradition only harnessed to preservation of what 4has been the case4 without
regard to the world as it is, is a powerful, world-historical force in our own age.
ii
It
represents neither thinking, living nor even beings, however, 6>or it knows only how to
preserve life, not how to engender it7 it always undervalues that which is becoming
because it has no instinct for divining it...6 (ibid, italics the te.t4s%. 'his is why the
knowledge of history is not enough not to repeat it, as the full meaning of Aantayana4s
dictum suggests. >or this kind of 4knowing4 remains within the ordered collection of
nostalgia, as we might practice philately only to understand the history of colonialism or
the nation-state4s official auto-narrative and without placing its same lessons into our own
lives as citi(ens and beneficiaries of neo-colonialism and geographic territory. 'he
knowing of he.is is mimicked by the pra.is of techni1ue as it seeks to replace only the
content of what has been knowledge, and not its form. *ostalgia for he.is in the face of
uncritical pra.is allows the latter to 4fill in4, to become a surrogate for previous pre3udice
but also as a stop-gap against thinking. Its mode is the same as that of he.is, a reciting of
what has been, and therefore what still must, through 4recitation4, be the case.
2et it is not mere techni1ue that provides the easy space of replacement. @ialogue
and the sharing of the differences appended to biographical e.perience can also be
1uelled lest it sow the seeds of perspective 6...likely it is the usual authority of the
classroom which discourages collaboration and encourages compliant 4recitation4, rather
than the failure of any given techni1ue used within that structure that accounts for young
;C
students4 frustration in learning to read.6 (5leich 1CC"11%. It is not enough that the odd
coagulation of youth from specific neighborhoods in cites simply brings together families
and persons who had no idea that these others e.isted. )hat one is to become in this
guise of the 4total institution4 has been decided beforehand. *o matter that the role
speciali(ation in comple. society appears to be a kind of ultimate freedom - one can do
4anything one wants4 and thus 4become who you are4, which is a propaganda item told to
children and adults alike - what we take away from mass educational systems is that
although we do different things we are very much in the end all the same thing. 'his is
reflected in the most casual language of ac1uaintance, when one of the first 1ueries put to
us by any stranger is 4what we do4, and rarely 4who we are4, as the latter has a peculiar
intonation to it, and suggests implications that might only heighten the disaffection we
always potentially feel when we encounter another in a highly stratified society. In order
to avoid too much face to face ressentiment, we con3ure an insulating barrier of 4work4 or
43ob4. -dds are, we imagine, that we would not want the tasks of others, or as we ascend
the social hierarchy, it becomes more and more likely that are 3ob is more prestigious and
also pays more. )e ourselves as well, and more disconcertingly, might well not know
how to answer the e.istential 1uestions concerning our human and personal identity. )ho
e.actly are we, after allB If we dare ask this of the other, we open ourselves to the same in
return. Learning in any authenticating sense must go far beyond the accreditation of
techne and the e.punging of he.is. It must not confer anything on us. Its ordainment is
purely secondary to its self-understanding, and indeed, even at the most mute level,
learning and teaching does have this character" 6Indeed, if learning is not simply the
passive acceptance of information, but involves interpretation and hermeneutical
;
reflection, then authoritative structures are constantly challenged within educational
e.perience. 'he very authority of structure (preconception, tradition% stands or falls
through this challenge.6 (Gallagher 1!"#%. 2et at the same time the for-having of prior
pre3udice might contain that which opens itself up into the world and risks the being of its
transient vessel" 60roductive preconceptions, ones that facilitate understanding, will
survive the challenge of interpretation.6 (ibid%. In the battle for the youthful mind, he.is
attempts to stand up against pra.is, giving its hallmark call to arms as both e.perience
and tradition. 2et he.is is neither properly discourse nor the tradition. It itself has already
been infiltrated by the pra.is of everyday life, the action that calls itself to alertness
whenever the une.pected of any kind appears before us. >ar less than the subito of
irruptive events or phantasms, the improbable and the idea of risk inform our 1uotidean
rounds. Iven if something untoward does occur, the 4charismatic4 character of the
une.pected is 1uickly routini(ed. 'his is also a dual situation, akin to the shared space of
fore-conceptions that impinge upon or open themselves to the new and to learning in
general, because we also know that even the new can only be recogni(ed at first, and in
part, due to its only partial strangeness. )e cannot really maintain that what has been the
case entirely e.ists of its own devices, without some concernful presence of what we are
today, and without some memoriali(ation of the recollective aspect of our present
consciousness" 6It would be wrong to think of conte.ts as e.isting prior to utterances or
as being causally linked to them. rather, utterances, their interpretations or
understandings, and the conte.ts are intrinsically linked7 nothing is entirely prior to the
rest. 'hus, understanding and conte.ts are in many ways developed in parallel, as aspects
of the same communicative process.6 (Linell 1;"1#C%. *o learning would in fact be
8E
possible without the fact of necessary pre3udice built out of the forehaving of e.perience
and the larger priority of )orld and its e.istential envelope. +e.is represents only the
standard e1uipment of living on in the social world, and not the more sophisticated
e1uipage of being in the world. Fust as communication in the learning of what is
customary continues uninterrupted a lengthy narrative of cross-generational language, the
world that has been recreated by such a narrative - including its forms, norms, taboos,
rituals of all kinds, etc. - accrues a more and more meaningful sensibility. Its very
worlding is enabled by the manner in which we come into its orbit. 'he ambit of its
facticity is neither laid bare before our eyes" 6)e do not come face to face with brute
fact7 in our hermeneutical pro3ections, we encounter a meaningful world which is not
independent of the language we use to e.press it. 'o deliberate, to argue, to 3udge, to
appraise, and so on - these are all ways that we enter into dialogue with the world. Auch
dialogue is made possible by language and itself constitutes the learning process.6
(Gallagher 1!"118%. )e are already dimly aware that social reality becomes ever more
a fragile construction when he.is runs headlong into pra.is. ,ll successful social
institutions 4get them when they4re young4, and schooling as well as post-secondary
education is no e.ception. 'hose that fill the numerous seats of large lecture halls in
undergraduate programs are undergoing all of the lingering doubts of late adolescence.
+as custom really all there has ever been to worldB ,re there not other worlds than the
one I have knownB ,s we have seen, the cynical aspect of pra.is of course plays a strong
role here, in that the inculcation of he.is allows pra.is to simply e.tend the form of
custom into applied theory, without ever engaging in real criti1ue, 1uestions that would
81
dismantle the forms of life, rather than merely replacing one content with another that has
more social prestige.
'his seemingly seamless shift from local knowledge to formal discourse is,
however, hardly without its travails. )hile systems of education attempt to dovetail
subtly to one another through techni1ues such as e.am learning, transmissive pedagogic
styles, and grading and evaluation, the highly structured call and response 4dialogues4 that
constitute much directed group-work, 6,t the same time, we note that not all aspects of
dialogue contributions can be checked and controlled7 to many meta-comments and
remedial side-se1uences threaten to disrupt smooth communication of topical substances.
Horeover, there are, presumably in all cultures, rules of eti1uette and politeness which
serve to mitigate or even inhibit attempts at themati(ing andNor repairing some kinds of
possible misunderstandings.6 (Linell 1;"1C9%. Indeed, much of the practice of he.is is
set up beforehand to provide 3ust such limits. It may at first glance appear ironic that what
is not understood should be 3ust as valued with regard to boundary maintenance and
social order as clarity of comprehension. )e might imagine that we must know the norms
of social life through and through. 2et it is well known that norms are masked. 'hey
function in their utmost performance only when we agree to suspend our disbelief in
them, and hence full comprehension is detrimental to their abilities. )e, through our tacit
misunderstanding of their real purpose or even form, render to them the oblation they
need to continue" 6Dtterances are produced not only 4with respect to4 the other but also 4in
respect for4 the other.6 (ibid%. It is this general respect that is given to he.is -
un1uestioning and routine, complacent and co-opted - that allows it to function in the
face of social change, and more importantly, insulates it against pra.es of all kinds,
8!
technical and critical. *ot that he.is is invulnerable because its position has the inertia of
spoken and intersub3ective tradition. 0recisely because it is not discourse, not even
policy, its customariness may be eroded or even shattered in an instant of either
selfishness on the part of any community member, or with the incision of the critical
blade of an unredeemed 1uestion. ,s we noted above, adolescence provides plenty of
both kinds of events, but it is when this raw rebellion of the weary waiting for one4s own
authoritative space draws nearer the surface of language and interaction that he.is is most
endangered, for it is then that we seek other kinds of historical phenomena to enlist in the
nascent cause of revolution. Ao the task for he.is becomes adorned with the most
elaborate of hoa.es, that of keeping up a pretense with and about others when all who
participate in it already know that that is e.actly what each one of us is up to.
2et there is a more serious matter still enclosed within the 1uelling of doubts that
al of us, as mature adults, have about the fragility of social life. 'he same historicity that
effects society effects the self. ,nd 3ust because the one provides the other with a set of
scripted roles with which to stage manage our way through life4s phases does not mean it
can control every outcome in the face of difference and 4the new4. +e.is indeed bumps up
against a different kind of task, one which it is not by itself e1uipped to negotiate" 6In our
e.perience of life generally, we face this task at its most e.treme whenever we have to let
something be said to us. )e might well say that learning how to do this properly is a
never-ending task laid upon each of us in our own lives.6 (Gadamer 1##"1$1%. 'he
reason that listening to 4what has not been the case4 is such an arduous event is simply that
the new asserts itself against the old in a new way, that is, one with which we have little
or no e.perience. )hat we have been as persons is offered change, which may appear to
89
be threatening. )e have such regard for what we have become through other similar
events and processes of both pretense and authenticity that we understandably are
ourselves wary of the ne.t difference. )e are as weary of change, in fact, as the younger
guise of what we once were was weary of the lack thereof" 65ut even if we ignore this
moral inhibition caused by our self regard, we can certainly claim that we encounter
different levels of difficulty in the task of understanding, and that it is especially difficult
where we must reawaken the petrified language of writing so that it speaks anew.6 (ibid%.
Insofar as he.is is written down at all, it provides only the most banal space of
affirmation on the one hand, which re1uires no real interpretation at all. In fact, the
policies and manuals of uncritical pra.is are based upon such documents as there are in
the worlds of custom. -n the other hand, he.is is hypostasi(ed through mythic narratives
of all kinds, and these do re1uire of us some kind of adept, even if such an interpretive
skill is limited by the structures of the myths themselves - 4deep4 or otherwise - and even
if we might sneer at the 1uaint or yet archaic character of certain kinds of myths when we
thin of the historical and cultural distance between the time of their origins and our own
age. 2et here as elsewhere - myth, manual, memorial, or manifesto - we must enlist the
hermeneutic frame of circularity in the midst of managing our awarenesses" 6'o that
e.tent, it is clear that understanding represents a particualr task whenever we are
confronted by te.ts or anything that has been committed to writing - the task is to let the
te.t speak to us once again.6 (ibid%.
0erhaps fittingly, he.is is most at odds with everyday e.perience when it is
thrown into the high relief of its own cosmogony. >or when we reali(e that things have a
beginning, we also must needs understand that what has been the case has not always
8$
been the case. 'here is a 4before4 to every present which is unlike itself. -nce again, we
begin ourselves to recogni(e that we too have a past during adolescence, when the pace
of biographical change accelerates, and when we are faced with more and more comple.
responsibilities as well as options in our lives. 'he factical state of being in the world is
not radically altered by a panoply of choice, but we do find it more of a challenge to keep
up the appearances that social life by itself offers us everything we need in the face of our
own mortality, which comes 3ust onto the hori(on during the earliest of adulthoods. If we
opt to misrecogni(e this ultimate arbiter that calls us to begin the work of life then this
deliberate misunderstanding is hung on the peg of personali(ation, of imagining that what
e.istence calls us to do in fact is a task set before us only by some other to self that is
identifiable as another human being. 5ut this is not the case. rather, it is the character of
human e.istence that envelopes us as the most effective part of )orld, as it is the world4s
own history which is suddenly at stake through the actions of each of us as singular
e.pressions of 5eing" 6>or it is indeed into e.istence that @asein is thrown. 'he avowal
of passivity, of the nonmastery of affection, tied to being-called, is directed toward a
meditation on nothingness, that is, on the radical nonchoice affecting being-in-the-world,
considered in its facticity.6 (:icoeur 1!"9$%. If the discovery of origins represents the
risk of history - by definition, mutable, and only muted by the ritual of custom - then the
incipient vision of an e.istential hori(on represents the end of autobiography. It is 3ust
here that he.is appears to us at its most blithe and aloof, for it can carry on without our
presence and after our passing. It is 3ust then that we must begin the serious search for
something else.
8;
!a"ing Hexis into Praxis
In order to press local knowledge into the service of institutional discourse, pra.is
is represented as simply a new tool or skill to be added to the stock of knowledge at hand
regarding everyday life. 'o be sure, pra.is also understands itself to be a more realistic
and relevant set of such skills than those the natural attitude has to offer, and therefore it
has am ore serious social status. 'he prestige of what it can offer those who accredit
themselves in its name out ranks the mere possession of various elements of tradition or
custom. +ence much of the input to post-secondary educational systems is already keyed
in the direction of desiring a kind of knowledge that is a lesson in an advanced 4how to4"
6Hany college students, especially those hoping to be doctors or lawyers, for e.ample,
are already apprentice members of the academy and advocates of its interests. 'hey help
create a false sense of harmony in the university not because they work as partners of the
academy, but for it.6 (5leich 1CC"1;# italics the te.t4s%. 'he university is here preaching
to the converted. It need not sell pra.is as an interloper to a defended he.is, nor as an
interlocutor with the tradition, much less as a revolutionary form of reflective thought.
+ere, as with almost all professional and applied science programs, the speciali(ed
techni1ues of successful material discourses is enough to convince all aspirants to accept
uncritically its claims and implications" 6'heir own aspiration to enter professions even
more e.clusive than the academy forms them into a fifth column that helps prevent any
change in how classrooms use and distribute social authority.6 (ibid%. 0articularly it is the
competitive format of educational settings that dovetails well not only wit the larger
capital, but with the specific entrance and e.it re1uirements of highly paid professions.
Given that one is always evaluated, the technical know-how and information that must be
88
recollected in order to pass through such a system becomes to detailed and vast, that there
is simply no time nor energy left over for reflection. 'hat medecine, engineering, law and
genetics all have histories is lost in the contemporary setting. 'he professor and teacher,
caught in these conte.ts, might be held up as sacrificial martyrs to the continuation and
enlargement of any technical discourse, especially if the graduates of such programs not
only come from more privileged social backgrounds than their mentors, but also will
move on to hold more prestigious posts, and thus e.ercise more power in that same
society which gave them their original edge. 'he professor, long thought of as a kind of
dangerous but respected figure, like the sorcerer of ages past, has lost both these
characteristics in contemporary life. Instead, the teacher is held out for a certain kind of
disdain, but given that a professor4s 3ob is less stressful than other professions, the former
cannot make a serious plaintiff. It is enough, then for pra.is to use the professoriate as its
instruments, paying them well for amount of hours worked, and insulating them from
much of the usual labor strife that occurs in other less privileged conte.ts. 5ut respect as
a particular social role is hard to come by, even more so for teachers" 62ou might ask why
archaic taboo and ambivalence were transferred onto the teacher while other intellectual
professions were spared. 'o e.plain why something is not the case always entails great
epistemological difficulties. I would like to offer only a common-sense remark. Lawyers
and doctors, e1ually intellectual vocations, are not sub3ect to this taboo. +owever, today
they are independent professions. 'hey are sub3ect to the mechanism of competition...6
(,dorno 1C"1CE%. 'hose status groups who are not insulated by e.ternal suasion and
must compete in the open market not only for clientele but for prestige and salary are
generally thought of as more viable human beings. 'hey are forced to face the world as it
8#
is, we imagine, and those whose intellectual life does not seem to touch the everyday
concerns of the great masses of fellow humans are regarded with a suspicious sneer.
,t the same time, teaches and professors are the handmaidens of not only the
institution and its discourses, but of pra.is more generally. 'his means that they
themselves must encourage the already learned forms of he.is as templates for the new
and generali(ed techni1ues of applied theory. 'he teacher is a way-station to the e.pertise
of the true master who dwell without the educational system. 'his latter has mastered not
only the technical knowledge of instrumental pra.is - the stuff that is consumed by most
students in the conte.t of the university - but also the institution itself, because she no
longer needs it to be viable in the wider society. *ow the professional calls her own
shots, and is her own authority. Fust as the information presented in her former classroom
had no history, her own learning itself loses its history upon convocation and the finding
of durable employment" 6'he analogy is that the teacher is thought of as a representative
of yet higher authorities (but this time understood to be 4e.perts4% whose role it is to
render authoritative pronouncements on matters of individual handling of knowledge...6
(5leich 1CC"18E%. 'he student desires to be counted not amongst his teachers - for this
would represent a half-baked state of ignominy and purgatory - but to move far beyond,
using the mentor as a stepping stone. 'hat the politics of the professoriate is often
overshadowed by the politics of tits former students should come as no surprise here, as
the latter now indeed occupy a 4higher4 space and may be thought of as even more e.pert
than their former masters, and almost always more wealthy and better connected.
iii
5ut there is yet another reason why pra.is sabotages the authority of its temporary
vehicles . 'he teacher is responsible for a new kind of evaluation, one that is not based on
8C
what the student already knows, and does not conform to how previous guises of
authority have 3udged the young person. +ere, ,dorno speaks of how the teacher is
regarded as a kind of calculator of specific misanthropy, leveling his students with either
the 4authoritarian personality4 - theatrical or real, it matters not - or the distanced weapon
of evaluation itself. 'he casual pretense of ob3ectivity, still carried on in the arts and
honed to a fine art in the sciences, with regard to grading and measurement of student
aptitudes is the ma3or manner of enforcing the misanthropic slouch" 6'he teacher is so to
say not fair, not a good sport. Auch unfairness - and every teacher, even the university
teacher, sense this - somewhat taints the advantage of the teacher4s knowledge over that
of his pupils, an advantage the teacher asserts without having the right7 because indeed
this advantage is indivisible from his function...6 (,dorno 1C"1C!%. 'he teacher retains
his misanthropy due to the combination of not being a representative of he.is and in fact
being its enemy, while at the same time having to mimic the style of authority by which
he.is established itself as the young person4s entire world. 'eachers are thus resented on
two fronts simultaneously" they attac" the content of the student's forehaving hile
appearing to be but a continuation of that content's sources. ,dorno suggests that there is
for the teacher really no way out of this odd corner, for 6...he continually bestows upon
that advantage an authority he can disregard only with great difficulty. #nfairness lies as
it were in the ontology of the teacher.6 (ibid, italics the te.t4s%. 'ransmissive, coercive and
hierarchical forms of authority give the young person a sense that the world is not only
controllable but also to be kept in control. Aocial norms demand this of every cultural
neophyte. It is the mode of being in the world, to take up ,dorno again, that is controlled
by the social world and e.erts in turn its control over it. 'hat we are co-conspirators in
8
the grand plot of society is nothing new. 'hat institutions garner prestige and power
through our voluntaristic imprisonment within them is also old hat. )hat the pedagogical
usefulness of he.is suggests, is rather that we desire to have the world of our childhoods
and the world of coming adulthood as the same world, that he.is and pra.is be more than
friends, but be cut from the same cloth, and harbor the same loyalties both to world and
fate. 'hat this is not in fact the case is what creates the enormous need for the pretense of
control and detente. 'his would be no more than a rationali(ed farce if it did not have
such wide ranging e.istential implications for each of us" 6-ur modern understanding
falls prey to the illusion that our control is complete, that we are independent and self-
empowered sub3ects who order the ob3ective world. 'his illusory understanding is what
closes off the possibilities of human self-understanding.6 (Gallagher 1!"1##%. )ithin
primary sociali(ation, what appears to 4make sense 4to us takes on the form of a rubric for
all rational operations. Iven though we come to be well aware that bureaucratic
maneuvers often are senseless as they appear to lack both human agency and
responsibility, the (ero sum black and white game of policy and rulebook reinforce the
ob3ectified rationales of both everyday morality - mores, folkways and taboos - and those
of schoolroom measure. 'his in turn allows us to denigrate not only reflective reasoning
but also human difference and innovation" 6)ith the assistance of logic and ratio - so
often invoked - people come to believe that whatever is not positive is negative and thus
that it seeks to degrade reason - and therefore deserves to be branded as depravity.6
(+eidegger 1##"!!8%. +e.is is harnessed not only as the template for technical pra.is,
but as the vessel to be filled with fashionable non-culture and market. 'his non-
philosophical rationality of an instrumentali(ed he.is provides the softest landing for any
#E
sudden drop of either commodity or politics. 6)e are so filled with 4logic4 that anything
that disturbs the habitual somnolence of prevailing opinion is automatically registered as
a despicable contradiction.6 (ibid%. 2et we have already seen that it is the fundamental
character of new e.perience to disturb all prior pre3udice, whether its source is in the
habits of he.is or the shill of advertising, the ideology of the day or mere bureaucratic
convenience. Indeed, contradiction is the correct term to use in such cases, as not only
does the new assert itself radically against what has been the case, but also that it speaks
in a different language than that of prior e.perience. Its very 4diction4 and intonation are a
large part of what makes such events new to us. )e cannot understand them at first
glance because they manifestly do not conform to our e.pectations, 3aded or fashionable
as the case may be. 'his new language of the phenomenological encounter with the
worlding of the world, whether it assumes the shape of the 4eck4 of ekstasis or the mystery
of eschatological immanence, disturbs our very being as we have known it. It could take
the form of an other to self, a natural force or animal, or yet a cosmic event, registered
through our scientific instruments. It might arrest us as does the uncanny or it might call
up a long forgotten memory in a new way. ,ny of these and others like them could well
be despised by any of us intent on only living on as we have lived.
2et it is the element of loss of control, both over ourselves and over the world
around us, that is perhaps the most disconcerting thing about the new. Iducational
systems of all kinds, because they must introduce their charges to new content, do so in
orders of environments which are not themselves new. 'his in turn undermines the
authenticity of the content itself, because its newness begins to seem like a matter of
course. It really does appear that pra.is is 3ust an e.tension of he.is, with the suasion that
#1
what is customary is not theoretical at all, and also thus is not 4applied4 in a any real sense,
because it is simply 4the way things are4, as if all of us live in a kind of naturali(ed social
caste system. 'his is no more evident than in the structure of most classrooms at any
systemic level" 6Inforced 1uiet and ac1uiescence prevent pupils from disclosing their
real natures. 'hey enforce artificial uniformity. 'hey put seeming before being. 'he place
a premium upon the outward appearance of attention, decorum, and obedience.6 (@ewey
19C"8!%. 'he 4true nature4 of pra.is is of course belied by its representation as a mere
addition to custom. It might even be thought of as the folk culture of the classroom. -ne
plays the role of student before that of son or daughter, for instance, 3ust as the teachers
are no longer parents themselves. 'he fact that pra.is has a recent pedigree which is well
known even unto its origins is forgotten. 'he fact that pra.is has its source in theoretical
constructs and models that must be learned as techni1ue as well as philosophy is lost.
0erhaps more so than he.is is turned into pra.is, it is the very opposite. 2et this is saying
too much. >or pra.is takes on the guise of he.is in order to insinuate itself into the
consciousness of an already partially sociali(ed youth. 'he 4partial knowledge4 of all
social locations is also partial in a second sense in that it has loyalties to that location and
to no other. It is 4partial4 to itself, in other words, and to those who share it. 0ra.is
imagines itself to be impartial, 3ust as science and history run across cultures and their
feats of mechanical and concrete manifestation 4work4 as well there as they do here, near
us and yet as well far from their forebears. &indred with this divide, students of all kinds
keep beneath the surface of control and order the partiality they render to themselves and
to their prior e.periences. 'hey remain loyal, to a point, to the world as it has been" 6,nd
everyone who ac1uainted with schools in which this system prevailed well knows that
#!
thoughts, imaginations, desires, and sly activities ran their own unchecked course behind
this facade. 'hey were disclosed to the teacher only when some untoward act led to their
detection.6 (ibid%. 'his is precisely the same manner in which the new obtrudes upon the
silent consciousness of he.is. Its diction speaks the untoward and une.pected, its voice
breaks in on a chorus of murmurers, and its message is that of the @elphic oracle, a
pu((ling kerygma that must be interpreted and given meaning in the face of what has
been meant by all things before it.
'he silence of an educational setting is of course not voiceless, but yet it also does
not speak out of line. 0ra.is pulls the wool over the eyes of he.is by replacing its too
content contents, and by co-opting its forms for its own uses. 5ut by doing so it allows
he.is a staying power, an alliance of sorts, much in the manner that neo-colonialism
enforces a kind of protection racket on 4developing4 countries. 4Atay silent and somnolent
and we will be your friend4, we might say sotto voce to the smaller or 4dumber4 kids in the
world classroom. 'he bullying of the playground or field - Iton, or what have you - is
merely the rehearsal for the geopolitics of the adult world. -ur citi(enship itself is silent
3ust as our student bodies were. 'his kind of autonomic state furnishes social institutions
with the franchise of apparently willing consumers but also willing wills themselves. 'he
4triumph4 of such a will can only be the massification of a rationali(ed pra.is which
pretends to be moral and to speak as one. 'his version of fascism can be seen in any
educational conte.t that ignores what makes us human in the first place7 the curiosity of
1uestion and the innovation and imagination, for " 6+uman e.istence cannot be silent, nor
can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which men transform the
world. 'o e.ist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it.6 (>riere 1#E"#8 italics the
#9
te.t4s%. +ere, the nomos of human language is not merely an iterative grunt in the face of
all that stands in front of culture, but a transformation" 6-nce named, the world in its turn
reappears to the namers as a problem and re1uires of them a new naming. Hen are not
built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection.4 (ibid, italics the te.t4s%. Indeed,
the designative function of language is felt most keenly in the social sphere, and, like
nature 4itself4, our understanding of the world deemed to be outside of culture and society
uses a language that reflects the distance that we set up between these ontological
landscapes. 'hough cultural evolution has for millions of years increased the gap between
our animal origins and our current consciousness, not all societies perform this gap in the
same manner. 'he he.is of mechanical societies is shot through with the sensibility that
human beings are ensconced within the same envelope as are animals and other forces,
hence the transformation myths and creatures of all kinds that inhabit their cultural
imagination and thus also are seen to inhabit the environment within which these social
groups live. *ature and culture are much more fluid categories in these kinds of
ontologies. 'he contemporary version of the transformer being is perhaps the
psychoanalytic double of ourselves in the other. )e pro3ect ourselves on the other, as
*iet(sche reminds us, and thence imagine them to be as we think them, but more than
this, our society works precisely because we can hold typical e.pectations of other
persons who, in their stolid and predictable performance of these e.pectations, only
renders are sly pro3ection more credibility - if only to ourselves. 5ut this is not all" 6Hy
constructing of -ther as a partial self, as the performer of typical roles and functions, has
a corollary in the process of self-typification which takes place when I enter into
interaction with him. I am not involved in such a relationship with my total personality
#$
but merely with certain layers of it. In defining the -ther4s behavior I am typifying my
own...6 (Achut( 18#"1 <1;9=%. >ace to face intersub3ectivity is where the rubber of
he.is hits the road of a kind of pra.is. In theory, what has been the case should work once
again, but like any e.periment, we cannot be absolutely sure of our fellow human beings4
reactions to our role performances. )ill they help us complete the act or will they
introduce new elements into the drama as it unfoldsB he.is has its own pra.is, in other
words, because what is assumed to be the case must confront the actuality of becoming
the case each time it is enacted. 'his 4application of theory4 then also lends itself to the
newness of institutional pra.is and techni1ue, because, 3ust as we are already used to the
sense that custom merely names what is the case and thus skill and techne appear to be
e.tensions of this naming process, we are also already aware that new situations might
call for new naming procedures and terminologies. )e can accept this far more easily
than the idea that pra.is itself seeks to overthrow he.is and replace it with itself under the
guise of he.is anew. 'his is why professional schools4 enrollments are burgeoning across
the globe. It is here that pra.is is most crafty in assuming its dramatic role as the natural
e.tension of he.is. Its acolytes are implicitly geared to understand pra.is as a mere
instrument for a part of the customary world they had not yet e.perienced, and whatever
the content of the course or program, even in the arts 6...almost all of the students assume
traditional individualist values, namely, that they are in the literacy classroom to improve
their individual skill, and that the un1uestioned path to that end is to secure, in a one-to-
one relationship with the teacher, either authori(ed approval or official instruction in a
problem-solving way, to achieve the real ultimate end - a high grade.6 (5leich 1CC"9!#%.
'he formal evaluation of performance in the classroom mimics the informal but powerful
#;
affirmation of earlier kinds of social authority, parents or the like, that children must
needed to have performed for. 'he two sources of the uncritical affirmation of what has
been the case dovetail especially well in families where high grades are e.pected and
rewarded early on. 'here is a relatively seamless transition between schools and
universities in these cases, and the prevalence of families who pay their children4s tuition
but might well withdraw such support if the child does not maintain a certain average are
a case in point. ,ll of this, so oft cited as part of both the individual and the common
good, has such a cachet of respect surrounding that it is difficult to disdain. -f course we
want our children to perform in this way, and even if we are suspicious of the educational
system or of society at large, as many persons are who otherwise seem to be
wholehearted supporters of the status 1uo, we know that if our children do not succeed
they will be unhappy, for happiness in our culture is based s1uarely on the ability to
participate in it - as with any society - and the currency of participation is the hard
currency of the market.
Ao one cannot simply e.hort pra.is to show itself in its fullest form and destroy
the entirety of he.is overnight. )hat we can begin with, however, is the abandonment of
all uncritical or non-critical forms of ac1uiescence to any social system or institution,
including the fi.ture of the social scene, the other to self as partial self. 'his typified
interaction is, by definition, a myth, for we cannot be merely part of ourselves. )e rather,
in fact suppress part of ourselves to perform the parts necessary to get by in the day to
day. )e are all our own oppressors, pretending to destroy the unwanted parts of who we
are in a serial and diverse basis. 2et 6Aince the oppressors cannot totally achieve this
destruction, they must mythici$e the world.6 (>riere 1#E"19; italics the te.t4s%. 'his is
#8
particularly apparent in any public social interaction, but this is only the small print of a
much larger tendency that it appears each cultural period or society has e.erted over both
the world and its own members. 'his mythic 1uality then rewrites its own history to the
politics of the day. 5eyond this, we must also consider that the fashion for being a 4team
player4 finds itself hitched up to a morality reminds one of the most insidious groupthink "
6,nd 1uite also apart from those wholly thoughtless people who when they write history
do so in the naive belief that all the popular views of precisely their own age are the right
and 3ust views and that to write in accord with the views of their age is the same thing as
being 3ust7 a belief in which every religion dwells...6 (*iet(sche 1C9"E <1C#$=%. It is the
aspiration to a morality that links mythology and politics. 'he retelling of mythic
narrative has always had a pedagogical function. /ustom is proven universal as such
hypostasi(ed he.is. 'hat what has been the case should not have a history is the
manifestation of the present become myth. 'his is not the same thing as the problem of
historicism, where we cannot 1uit our own age at will or pretend that we see more clearly
because of the trappings of the now. *o, 4the long telescopes of the historical neuters4, as
*iet(sche slyly refers to them, are tools for the political abuse of history and pedagogy
alike. *o time period utterly changes what has been the case, as revolutionary thinking
desires, but neither does it conserve all in a total archive. 'his fact of human history
represents a pu((le for consciousness, one that can only be confronted as one does the
changing but sometimes apparently solid tradition" 6'he truth lies somewhere between
the absolutes of transformation and reproduction. 'he truth lies not in the resolution of
the aporia, but in recogni(ing the fundamental ambiguity of interpretation.6 (Gallagher
1!"9$$%. Auch ambivalence that we may have regarding our place in both society and
##
history strikes us as unreasonable given the effort that must be made by each of us simply
to find a niche and survive from day to day. 'hat whatever control we e.ercise over the
here and now is immediately called into 1uestion by the need for ongoing interpretation
and the imprecision of our fellow human beings - the daily commute, for instance, is a
perfect e.ample of the attempt to control situations which may suddenly turn to the
une.pected and even dangerous - and this in turn suggests to us the desperation of all
attempts at control. *evertheless, the complete lack of predictability that a chaotic state
of affairs would produce is nowhere to be found. Iven in combat there are odds. 'hat the
mundane sphere holds little sudden risk is as well known as the fact that the most vanilla
of lives will deteriorate into mortal danger given enough time. Guality of life, therefore,
retains its reasonable stance. 'he tools of pra.is which model themselves into the forms
of he.is may thus be seen not only as the attempt to control human life in its most general
sense, but also attempts to control the history of human institutions and ideas. If the
4correct4 ideas that inhabit he.is are 4once and for all4, then surely too are the lenses we use
to analyse both nature and ourselves. +istory is seen more clearly by the present, and
nature in more detail.
,t the same time, the language of he.is is too murky for any aspiring pra.is of
utility. 'he forms of custom may be replenished with advanced skills and techni1ue, but
the voices of he.is must be replaced" 6Dses of language that give attitudes, opinions,
feelings, generali(ations, guesses, and doubts - commonplace, socially interactive
behavior - are understood to interfere with the basic need for 4clear information4. (5leich
1CC"19%. If this replacement can be accomplished, then anything 74new4 takes the form of
mere further information, which can be learned on a 4need to know7 basis, and simply
#C
added to the stock of techni1ue at hand already e.tant in each student4s mind or program
portfolio. 'he seamless sense of knowledge, modern or ancient, is preserved only as an
archive preserves the complete set of parts needed to understand each in turn. 'he gestalt
of the wholeness of human knowledge and its phenomenological relationships is lost.
Ivery tone is known, but no melody can issue forth. +ow does one distinguish what is a
part of this or that without some idea of the total aspect of knowingB 'hat custom is
taught against this tendency in organic societies eagerly lends itself to the sense that
technical pra.is can be taught without regard for either its own pedigree or genealogy or
human history more generally. Fust as we do not 1uestion the purpose of having this kind
of society versus some other kind, or why this kind arose, we also do not 1uestion the
purpose or creation of information and techni1ue, we only nod sagely at its 4necessity4 for
the 4working of things4, and not even with the caveat of 4the working of things as they are
today.4, unless it be in the direction of imagining more and more fail-safe technological or
policy 4solutions4 to current disorders or inconveniences. 'hat knowledge includes self-
knowledge means that it itself cannot participate in the round dance of ideology" 6'his
concept of knowledge as dialectic reasserts the hermeneutical circle which had been
denied by the parado.. )e can learn about the unknown only by recogni(ing it as
something that fits into or challenges what is already known.6 (Gallagher 1!"1; italics
the te.t4s%. 'he 4hermeneutical dimension4 of human knowledge is bracketed by any
regime of truth that seeks only clarity at the e.pense not so much of detail, though this
too can suffer, but of breadth. 'he peripheral vision of the human lens is much less clear
in its e.position of our condition than is the stereoscopic focus of centered sight. 'his in
principle is not a problem, but it does suggest that it very much matters where we focus
#
our ga(e. 'he trees are fascinating, but what they make up is ultimately what we as
human beings have to confront. -ne can easily get round a tree, not so much a forest.
)e have seen that it is the idea of the 4fact4 as being found only in an
informational and technical conte.t, the grounded Gradgrind of instrumental pra.is, that
contributes more than any other modern idea to the sensibility that if we only knew all the
facts of this or that situation, we could resolve it without further difficulty. @evelopment
programs, certain forms of counseling, medical and clinical work, engineering and
economics all generally share this hubris. ,nd 3ust as we e.tinguished the shades of a
retreating history and mutable memory regarding custom, we provide ourselves with the
template to do the same for ideas and facts. 5ut factuality is not the same as facticity. 'he
former is kindred to a controlled social e.periment, the latter, the ambiguity of the
everyday" 6)e must remember, fist of all, that the concept of the fact, which corresponds
to the concept of pure perception and pure assertion, was e.posed by +eidegger as an
ontological pre3udice affecting the concept of value as well. 'hus +eidegger showed the
distinction between the 3udgement of fact and the 3udgement of value to be problematic,
as if there could be no determination of facts at all.6 (Gadamer 1#8"1!1%. It is well
known that the 4validity4 statement contains both fact and value. 'he empiricity or
referentiality of what is 4valid4 is given a spin by the values or politics of the day. facts are
spun into the service of values, and thus can never communicate their content to us with
the complete clarity of ideali(ed truths. 'his condition is itself perhaps the primordial
fact, the first principle, that we cannot have a knowledge without both valuing it and
evaluating it in some way. 'his is the lesson of the tree of knowledge, where human
perception immediately sees the 4use and abuse4 of what is, the world and other persons.
CE
)e are only able to do so because what makes us finite is the same thing that makes us
self-conscious. *o longer do we live as purely part of the e.istential envelope of )orld,
as the mythical Iden of graceful ignorance imagined our collectCive origins, but rather as
part of the worlding of the world, ever changing and ever partial in its self-understanding.
Irasing the history of humanity by only contrasting its supposed origins in a primal
nature with its supposed totali(ing knowledge of contemporary nature represents the
inhumanity of humankind. +eidegger himself suggests that this 6... is the sub3ectivity of
man in totality. It completes sub3ectivity4s unconditioned self-assertion, which refuses to
yield. *or can it be even ade1uately e.perienced by a thinking that mediates in a one-
sided fashion. I.pelled from the truth of being, man everywhere circles round himself as
the animal rationale.6 (+eidegger 1##"!!1 <1$#=%. Instrumental rationality is not even
bereaved at its parting from the whole of reason. It mourns only its serial failure to
ad3udicate with the fullest of factuality the events of humanity. Its memory is one of the
embittered but perseverant ressentimentaliste who is determined that things will go his
way the ne.t time. 5ecause the stumbling blocks of human aspiration are always the
shards of discarded pro3ects that had been at play before the current desire took hold,
history itself must be erased. 'he 4end of history4 heralds the beginning of true
enlightenment and rationality. 'he end of being means that being in the world can be
controlled and predicted. +ence technical pra.is is accepted by he.is as a 4natural4 and
3ust e.tension of a path which has been cleared of the detritus of previous human failures"
6Iducation to ob3ectivity and science, moreover, is a goal that can be accepted by society,
and this implies that education to purpose-free research into truth is really not as odd as
all that. It has nothing to do with the idoli(ation of knowledge and ability. It is an
C1
indispensable element of the process of human 4sociali(ation4 in which the practitioner,
and even the 4administrator4, participate 3ust as much as the researcher.6 (Gadamer
1C"8 <1##=%. Haking he.is into pra.is means that the values of uncritical sociality
will be used to guide the efforts of uncritical skill and techni1ue. 'he furthering of
current aims is thus all we need to know about, and the belief that we are doing the best
possible 3ob given the circumstances is all we need to know.
!.! ,nalysis of 4what has been the case4
%hat &ather to do ith the Presence of Hexis
'he assumptions concerning the ultimate purpose of education carry with them an
inherent utility. 'he education system serves he.is and instrumental pra.is alike.
'raditional authority in the form of custom, and rational-legal7 authority in the form of
policy are apparently made in each other4s image. 'he good citi(en is one who not only
behaves politically - avoiding the hori(ontal violence of intranecine confrontations but
not even imagining the vertical violence of revolution - but knows 3ust enough about his
society and culture that he can take e.ception to anything too unfamiliar, while at the
same time accepting all that has been the case within his narrow e.perience" 6'he
uniform canon is that the young man has to start with a knowledge of culture, not even
with a knowledge of life and even less with life and e.perience itself.6 (*iet(sche
1C9"11C <1C#$=%. 'his is why history can be taught as 4one damn thing after another4,
science as a mass of detail and writing as a mere skill for 4clarity of communication4.
Aocial science can be enthralled to policy initiatives and descriptive commentaries on
e.isting institutions, 0hilosophy is another matter, more risky and immediately at a
distance from the concerns of the day to day. -ne4s own life, memoriali(ed and placed in
C!
an autobiographical narrative in various ways, begins to take on much more meaning than
discourse in the form win which it is presented in the schools and universities. It may
re1uire some delicacy in its archiving, the e.pedience of forgetting certain uncomfortable
things about oneself, for instance, or the assiduity needed to avoid unpleasant company or
conte.ts, but interpretation and reflection may in large part be forsaken. -ne4s life begins
to be able to stand alone and aloof from the concerns of the world and we learn how to
put ourselves first and foremost in the most trivial of ways" 65ut hermeneutics, which ism
ore profound than biography, must determine the centers of fate by ridding history of its
con3unctive temporal tissue, which has no action on our fates. >or a knowledge of
intimacy, locali(ation in the spaces of intimacy is more urgent than the determination of
dates.6 (5achelard 18" <1;C=%. -ne of the chief effects of pra.is mimicking he.is is
that the personal connection with history and science is immediately lost. )e recall only
how things 4work4, and not how human beings needed them to work in this way and in no
other. It is far easier to 1uestion the stars than it is social structure. 'he edgy newness of
holistic pra.is is dulled by its transmission as an e.tension of the customary, as a tool and
a techni1ue for subsistence but not for e.istence. 'he 4subsustenance4 we gain from
prostheses of this kind is but a new lease on life, and not the free-hold human
consciousness at once desires and perhaps fears. )e can avoid the 4shattering of previous
pre3udice4 by ensconcing ourselves within the insulation of techni1ue. 'hat this mirrors
the hearth of all culture as against the throes and shades of the nature we were
primordially attached to is of the least concern. -f course the very definition of humanity
is that it is transformed in this specific way, uni1uely, so far as we know, and consciously.
Indeed it is because of this ability to calculate and adapt without relying on many
C9
intervening generations of alleles that allows us to eschew mere cultural insulation and
the smug knowledge of self-aggrandi(ement. the encounter with the unfamiliar and the
confrontation with tradition are 1uintessentially the conte.ts where humanity 3udges itself
most completely, and this evaluation takes the form of an interpretive dialectic" 6'he
focus of critical 1uestioning must come fro the hermeneutic situation itself" the language
conte.t of tradition, the learner4s fore-conceptions, and the literacy which biases every
1uestion. In 1uestioning the ob3ect is brought into a state of indeterminacy.6 (Gallagher
1!"!9#%.
iv
Generally, we are taught to narrow the space of 1uestioning to the point that
we can 4pin something down4. 'he controlled e.periment is the epitome of such a line of
reasoning, but even the phenomenological reduction may be said to carry within it the
colors of this kind of focus. 'his is one kind of investigation, and necessary though it is,
it belies the reality of the world as it is. 'o begin an analysis with the purpose of making
things less clear at first seems to be counter-productive. It very much is critically against
production and reproduction of all instrumental 1uantities, so the term 4counter-
productive4 does have some positive weight. 2et the dismantling of assumptions, the
disconcerting of presumed attitudes and the upsetting of norms is merely a way-station
along the path to a fuller understanding of any social reality. 'he interrogation of the
world is an hermeneutic tack, but the winds of the world must also be adhered to. )e
must feel free to alter course in the face of prevailing weather of all kinds, but not by way
of the martyrdom of the intellect. )e do not abandon the e.ploration to seek some safe
part well known to those who have traversed and charted waters before us. we rather
insinuate our way through the resistance the politics of rational society and its rules lean
up against us. +ermeneutic pedagogy thus is heavily reliant upon the human imagination
C$
in the most general sense" 6'he peculiar 1uality of the imaginative is best understood
when placed in opposition to the narrowing effect of habituation. 'ime is the test that
discriminates the imaginative from the imaginary. 'he latter passes because it is arbitrary.
'he imaginative endures because, while at first strange with respect to us, it is enduringly
familiar with respect to the nature of things.6 (@ewey 19$"!8%.
v
Indurance must not be
thought of as the ability to stand in the face of human history, the bron(e of calligraphic
doctrines as testamental politics. It is rather the reli1uary of leitmotifs that light the space
of 5eing and )orld, the very space in which we find ourselves as reflective
consciousness.
'hat we are constantly buffeted by winds of change rather belies our authenticity
with regard to history and world. )e might imagine that we are forced to accept whatever
changes come our way, and so there is really no option but to learn to adapt. yet this kind
of learning is kindred only with the same attitude that is proffered by a rationali(ed pra.is
when it appears to e.tend the custom of sociali(ation. Instead of fortifying the self
against e.ternal change, and then adapting to circumstances as best we can - not letting
things affect us too deeply is often seen as a success - e.perience that lends itself towards
phronesis must in fact forget its e.ternal source and be taken on as a shift in interiority"
6Learning re1uires a self-transcendence which displaces sub3ectivity. In this regard, it is
not so much the self which, under its own power, displaces itself, but the sub3ect matter,
the unfamiliar, which initiates the challenge to the fore-structure of understanding, and
thus to familiar conte.t and tradition.6 (Gallagher 1!"1C!%. 'he fore-having of prior
e.perience is also not a pure sub3ectivity, for it rests within an amalgam of the traditions
of he.is, however routini(ed, and the principles of pra.is, however rationali(ed. 'he fact
C;
that both of these ingredients lend themselves to a recipe of mere habit - not so much an
unwritten e.periential archive but a ritual - suggests that the way in which both he.is and
now pra.is are taught e.cludes their own self-understanding upon which we might model
our own" 6>rom the perspective of pedagogy, an ignorance of historical effects, or worse,
a belief that tradition is controlled by historical ob3ectification, could lead to a closing off
of learning and the domination of dogmatic interpretations.6 (ibid";%. , we noted above,
the reproductive processes of mechanical societies were in an empirically correct with
their own history. 'hese kinds of social organi(ations really did not change much over
time, perhaps tens of millenia in some cases. Iven agrarian and archaic civili(ations
could afford to eschew their own actual7 histories as the pace of empirical change in these
societies too was generally pedantic. *ot so for our own historical situation. 'he only
constant for us is change. 2et we also know that we cannot afford to look at history as
one long series of progressive triumphs. >urthermore, history cannot be used as a
yardstick for the pessimist, who with malicious irony desires only to cite our failure to
learn from our past mistakes. Instead, we must confront ourselves anew as if we were
also our ancestors, ad not 3ust contemporaries of one another. )hat has been the case at
the level of ideas - the narratives of the tradition and its e.pectations of us - continue as
tropes for the living" 65y themati(ing the tradition we do not automatically or fully
escape its influence, but we do transform our relation to it, and in a sense we transform
the tradition itself.6 (ibid"1;;%.
vi
+istory can be thought of as an other to self without the
sense that we must by way of social eti1uette be concerned about its 4feelings4 or how it
might react to us. *o, we can address both the history of discourse and thence the
biographical history of ourselves with utter candor and e.pect results within the same
C8
tenor. )e can be 4accused4 by our own histories 3ust as we might be confronted by another
whom we have affronted in some way. 2et even if 6...the self-designation of the agent of
action appeared to be inseparable from the ascription by another, who designates me in
the accusative as the author of my actions.6 (:icoeur 1!"9!%, in fact history is not at
all our own set of actions. :ather we have more often been acted upon by its inertial
force, in the sense that we are much more made of the unreflective character of he.is and
made over by the same elemental character of institutional pra.is. ,gency can come to
have a meaning only through the confrontation with tradition, or the resistance to the
other to self in the e.teriority of social life. ,gency is neither inherently malificent nor
benevolent. Its effects usually contain both atmospheres. )e would become mere
ideologues if we believed tat our actions were always for the 3ust, or that there was a
category of agency that worked only for the common good which included ourselves, or
worse, that agency itself, in order to be itself, could only contain the lighted space of
5eing as a new )orld. 'he position of he.is in the classroom for instance, might well be
taken as both a good in itself - everyone agrees on the norms and forms social life has
taken on during our short tenure as children and students - and on top of this, an
instrumental good in that the institution agrees to take on the forms of he.is in order to
instill pra.is as content. Aince the language of he.is is being used as the vehicle for
uncritical pra.is, it might also be imagined that nay agency language might have could
only work for the greater good as long as it conformed to what all of us4 might e.pect
from what we have already learned as the good in itself. 2et all language is language in
use. 'here are no purely 4dead tongues4, though the dead themselves may have a tongue of
their own, ironically still-born in the world of the still-living" 65y understanding language
C#
in this thoroughly social sense, it no longer makes sense to approach it as if it were an
abstract and infinitely variable code7 it is considered instead as a feature of identifiable
human interests.6 (5leich 1CC"1C!%. Like the controlled social science e.periment, the
attempt to think and use language as if it were a tool of communication which the
ultimate goal of clarity is to deny both the history and the sociality of language. It is to
deny, in other words, that language is the e.pression of the ontology of humanity, not
merely that it is also constantly changing and that we do not speak as if words had a
precise meaning to them. 'o understand learning through language as an accumulation of
information carried on the backs or within the holds of words as deni(ens of
terminologies is to reduce the human dialogue to the efforts of a mechanical muse. It has
its homologs in all other reductions of the same character, the body as a medical ob3ect,
the mind as an elector-chemical assemblage, behavior as a 0avlovian effect. In doing so,
we misunderstand our relationship to the world as it is, let alone our relationship to the
wider humane self-interest that recogni(es itself in the other who as well participates in
my history and my living-on within the e.istential envelope of 5eings. ,nd yet we
cannot completely misunderstand ourselves in this way" 6*o matter how faultily we
e.plain our 5eing in terms of mere ob3ective presence, no matter how badly we
misinterpret our self-understanding, even if we degenerate into purely magical accounts
of the 5eing of @asein, we nonetheless always and already understand ourselves.6
(/aputo 1C#"8#%. 'his is so because along with the elemental understanding of the self
as an agentive being thrown directly into the on-running of the world, there is also a
necessary ongoing interpretation of that self, which is never the same and yet must come
home to itself after each turn of the torus of e.perience and reflection" 6)hat has gone
CC
astray in a bad reading of the 5eing of @asein is not self-understanding - for that is
constitutive of our e.istence - but self-interpretation, which has failed ade1uately to tap
into the prior understanding of @asein.6 (ibid%. 5ecause of the 4already and always4
character of @asein, a staple phrase in hermeneutic phenomenology, we can deny that we
have come to know ourselves, but what we are actually e.periencing is the lack of
dialogue between what we undergo in our biographies and the facticality of our
e.istential lot as human beings. he.is and instrumental pra.is confide in one another with
the purpose of displacing self-understanding by sabotaging the ongoing task of self-
interpretation. >or if we lack the time and ability to perform the latter - a crucial element
of concernful-being, or yet the ethics of le souci de soi - then we become the target of our
own misrepresentation of ourselves vis-a-vis history proper as well as setting ourselves at
a distance - because we imagine we hear an e.ternal call - with respect to humane 5eing"
6'his is why the caller is not anyone, since the call comes from the very uncanniness of
the condition of thrownness and fallenness.6 (:icoeur 1!"9$%. 'he absurdity of the
human condition aside for the moment, consciousness itself must contemplate itself as a
stranger to itself. 'hese ipsissimous guises are no passing serial selves, but a
simultaneous situation that is reflected in a variety of myths and philosophies, from the
trinity to polytheism more generally, to the rather anti-hermeneutic problem of sub3ect
and ob3ect. If the e.istential situation of @asein calls to us in its very own-ness, then in
turn we must call ourselves to the action of living on and to the full presence of death.
'hat we have numerous rehearsals for this final passing on is manifest in the way we
learn things. 'he old knowledge, the world as it has been, must die along with our
previous selves. 'hese are never final fatalities, as we have seen, the shades of what we
C
were live on within us and still have visitation rights, but through these e.periences we
become more literate in the largest sense of the word. 'his in turn gives us the ability to
attain serial phronesis in the face of the inertia of he.is and the ever globali(ing near-
omnipresence of instrumental pra.is. )e call to ourselves as we are in the world, and this
in its own turn holds the e.pectation that, and issues the e.hortation to, others who can do
the same" 6Isn4t the courage to name things as they really are in our lives what we mean
by literacyB6 (5leich 1CC"9!%. >rom one voice that emanates from a comple. of
selfhood created by he.is and incipient pra.is, to a discourses which have been
constructed to provide the openings human beings need to think, learning and literacy
follow the hermeneutic circle. )e do not remain aloof to either our own sub3ective
concerns or to the ob3ections to ur e.istence that the ob3ects of the world raise up before
us. )e must retain the e.perience we know only as a mid-wife to the birth of the new.
'he perspective of a third eye is not the ob3ect, and its archiphonemic character rests in a
synthesis of what stereoscopic vision we already possess, e.perience and knowledge. It is
never purely value-free and neutral in its disposition. Indeed, it underscores the sense that
pra.is, as it attempts to mimic he.is for its own device, gives itself away" 6If the
attainment of such a neutral or disconnected standpoint is ruled out by hermeneutics, then
the fact that reproduction theory is able to discover, in some way, 4misrecognitions4 and
ideological determinants verifies the hermeneutical claim that traditions do not constitute
absolute constraints but enable, in sciences like sociology, the discovery of something
new, the reinterpretation of society, and the transformation of our understanding.6
(Gallagher 1!"!88%. 'hat there is an art to this auto-archaeology is beyond dispute, for
instrumentality of all kinds bends itself only to techne. Aome kind of aesthetic
E
understanding is involved in the self-understanding of being-in-the-world. )ithout the
ability to e.perience the interior of e.istence we misrecogni(e ourselves as merely
animals which adapt to circumstance but do so lacking the self-consciousness and
conscientiousness that make us human. )ith neither reflection nor ethics involved,
animal being might well strikes us as less comple., to be sure, but also that much more
convenient. 'he puma is a natural hunter, and she does not ever lose these traits whatever
the e.ternal circumstances. 'o be like the other creatures with whom we niggardly share
this earthly home is perhaps to feel that we still belong with them, and further, that this is
still our home, even though we have drastically and often critically reshaped it to suit our
own self-image. )e are drawn by the creature left within us because we still are able to
feel somewhat like the animals, pain, pleasure, the sustenance of nourishment, the
imposition of hunger. 2et we have also become the consciousness which knows itself and
which does not wait for biology to make it into something other than what it must now
suddenly be" 6In a word, there is no other way to make the sensuous man rational than by
first making him aesthetic. 5ut, you may ob3ect, ought this mediation to be absolutely
indispensableB -ught not truth and duty, simply for themselves alone and through
themselves, to be able to find an entrance into the sensuous manB6 (Achiller 18;"1EC
<1#;=%. 'he truth of knowledge and the duty of custom do in fact find such an entrance,
but they cannot by themselves step over the e.istential threshold which is our uni1ue
form of beingness as a part of the )orld of 5eing. )e must reali(e, to take either what is
known by us or what is e.pected of us into ourselves authentically, a new form of our
own consciousness that partakes in the envelope of a singular )orld. ,ll other forms of
knowledge divide not merely the intellect but humanity itself.
vii

1
Ao learning cannot be done too completely - we must not learn e.actly what the
teacher tells us is the truth - and following social rules must not be done to a tee - we
must not ape automata in our sense of civic duty - else we become mere reproductions of
something that never had for itself an original, apparitions of a being who never in fact
had life. 'his is the case for any kind of authentic pedagogical outcome, and the arts
merely throw such a relationship into the highest relief. )e recall even in the most
whiggish histories of discourse only those who made some kind of innovation, no matter
how small" 6'eaching, in other words, is at odd with following even as it is re1uisite for
any artistic achievement whatsoever. 'he capacity to follow cannot be taught - it can only
be ignited by a teaching that does not teach too well.6 (+orowit( !EE1"$C%. )e often hear
the adage in education conte.ts that each class is different, each a structurally biased
sample of the larger whole of society, each a sub-culture into which the teacher as
ethnographer must step. 4Leading4 such a group of fellow humans all of a sudden takes on
an ominous note. Guite apart from the 1uestion of where they may be 4led4, what business
is it of ours to alter their life-courses and to take them out of themselvesB 'here is a
strong buyer beware involved with any conte.t of education. >irst, parents must read the
small print for their children, but in the universities, once again, with sudden presence
and force, the young person become the 4buyer4 is now on his own. Iducating then needs
the presence of an ethnographic aspect in order to see what the 4natives4 want or need to
think about. 'his kind of analytic and description is also part of the hermeneutic circle of
pedagogic processes, as it opens up the space of the new for the teacher and student alike.
)e learn from one another, and each participant is a resource in the classroom, and
perhaps also outside of it, especially if e.periential or community service learning is
!
involved in the course. @aring not to 4teach too well4 re1uires that we as professionals let
the class teach itself some things. )e are not that different from the true ethnographer,
who is present in an alien conte.t to learn, certainly, but also cannot escape the fact hat he
has already altered what is to be learned" 65oth the researcher4s 3oining of the new
community and the writing about it, is already a change in that community relative to
both the researcher4s community and the one being studied. 'he value of ethnographic
work to begin with is that it accepts social change as being endemic to the research
process.6 (5leich 1CC"9!1%. >irst as a record of the permanence of change itself affecting
all cultures - not so different from the era of 4salvage ethnography4 of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries - but then more importantly as a testament to the diverse but
collective human endeavor, teaching and learning as an hermeneutic ethnography is the
key to using he.is in the classroom more authentically. +e.is becomes a resource and an
interlocutor7 leverage for new discourses to assert themselves against, the first lay step in
4confronting the tradition4, and the plaintiff in the cases in which a too rational pra.is
would insinuate itself.
'he first reali(ation of this kind of relationship - the first hermeneutics of he.is in
the modern educational scene - arguably occurs in *iet(sche4s early work on rhetoric and
truth, composed when he himself was still a professor at 5asel. ,s :icoeur suggests, the
downfall of rhetoric from its classical apogee was in the main fostered by the sense that it
provided only lu.uriant dress for plain language, present in the mellifluous tongues of
those who would deceive us or bend us to their political purpose. *ot so, states *iet(sche
adamantly. 'he arts of rhetoric 6...do not constitute ornaments added onto a discourse that
is by right literal and non-figurative but instead are inherent in the most basic linguistic
9
functioning. In this sense, there is no non-rhetorical 4naturalness4 of language. Language
is figurative through and through.6 (:icoeur 1!"1! <1E=%. ,s such, institutions and
discourse alike have their own peculiar forms of rhetoric built into the language used to
communicate their worlds. Huch of the techni1ue of the sciences both natural and
cultural involves the learning of this new 4validity4 language - terms, principles,
vocabulary of other kinds, etc. - and then being able to apply it appropriately. 5ut merely
stating that all of this pedagogic action is linguistic and thus also rhetorical would not be
enough to discern the stakes involved. *eedless to say, *iet(sche goes much farther than
this over the course of his working life, his 4re-evaluation of all values4 perhaps left
incomplete. 2et if we today wish to 1uestion the authority of a pra.is which has co-opted
the forms of he.is for the purposes of instrumental rationality, we must continue apace to
be what *iet(sche referred to as 4bush-beaters4, ferreting out of the underbrush the roots
of our contemporary discursive tropes. )e need to continue to engage in his 4genealogy4"
6In this case, if the aim is to design a set of critical and pedagogical canons that would
address the particualr situation, one would re1uire something more than universal
principles which state that all educational e.perience is linguistic and hegemonic. :ather,
one needs to know specifically how particular hegemonic relations condition a particular
school language.6 (Gallagher 1!"!#$%.
viii
'he subterranean charting of the pedigrees of
not only ideas in the world of discourse and philosophy - the holistic pra.is which is both
critical and dialogic - but also the spelunking of the grounds of he.is - the sometimes
permafrost of what is taken to be 4necessary error4 - is one effect of understanding
hermeneutically the role he.is has come to play in the modern pedagogical situation.
I.tending this tactic to its widest ambit, we refresh our sensibility that we as human
$
beings are part of a much deeper temporal and spatial universe, where history is active
and the living presence of what is beyond our consciousness may suddenly irrupt into the
worlds we had foreseen as our own. >or 6..each new contact with the cosmos renews our
inner being, and that every new cosmos is open to us when we have freed ourselves from
the ties of a former sensitivity.6 (5achelard 18"!8 <1;C=%.
'valuations and Class (ctivities
'he presence of he.is in the classroom is, as we have seen, a Fanus. It even
presents itself duplicitously, beyond the mere contradiction brought on by its fragile place
as both the ground and the interloper. -ver the course of eighteen years, I have found a
number of themes in students use of, and reactions to authoritative use as well as criti1ue
of, what is customary. 'he world as it has been is the home of all sensitivities, and its
cosmos usually a 1uite narrow one. Dniversity education in particualr is charged with
broadening these hori(ons while at the same time preparing young persons for market
career. 'hese dual task are also Fanus-like, and also are presented with some play-acting o
the part of the professoriate, and certainly within the mission oriented rhetoric of official
institutional documents. In each of these brief sections ,to be found at the end of the three
substantive chapters in this book, we will discuss the ma3or themes emanating from
thousands of course evaluations, and summari(e a few e.amples of interactive pedagogic
activities that I have used with specific regard to the understanding of he.is, pra.is, and
phronesis respectively.
i.
'he presence of what is customary appears with force when students feel that the
material or the style of the class contradicts their previous e.perience. 5ut we must be
cautious here, because student comments to this regard can be positive if they feel willing
;
to abandon their previous pre3udice, or were already in the process of dismantling it
themselves, or they could be negative if custom in some way needed defending. 'he
following was typical to this regard" 6I en3oyed the class but at some times I did feel a bit
lost with the content and the lectures. I liked having the second half of the class where we
discussed our opinions. I feel like I learned something from the class that I will be able to
take with me to other classes.6 (!nd year%. 'he back and forth in commentaries
surrounding the tension that he.is presents is repeated throughout evaluations that
address this theme. ,t first the barrier to learning is the classroom content and pedagogy
used. Aometimes this proves to be a long-term blockade that prevents any learning at all,
but it is not perceived as such ,t length what is customary itself is often perceived as a
block to understanding by the student" 6I was worried the first day of class when I wasn4t
understanding right away, but I4m glad I stuck around to think about and understand the
content.6 (!nd year%. 'hat he.is can be recogni(ed as an initiator or as a vehicle of further
learning is also present in this theme" 6It was a bit intense. 'he professor uses very
intelligent language, which is sometimes hard to follow. -verall the course was different
than any other class I have taken, and the students seemed to form a group very 1uickly.
It was very communal.6 (!nd year%, or 6+aving group discussions and interactive material
was very helpful and help put conte.ts into everyday situations and apply it to history.4
(1st year%. 'he sense that learning could occur in conte.ts similar to or even based upon
the learning conte.ts of pre-school or home was comforting to many students. 'his is a
delicate moment, because as we discussed above, the form of he.is is co-opted by pra.is
as if the latter were a mere e.tension of the former. 'hat this is not the case need to be
e.posed, and yet one can do this effectively in the classroom within those customary
8
forms, as long as one also provides content and perhaps action which somehow alter, or
suggest a paralla. to the accepted outcomes of customary form. In the first year, students
were always surprised by what they themselves could learn through what they brought to
the course" 6'here were a lot of very interesting topics viewed differently from how they
are normally viewed. Aeeing a different view on things was very interesting.6 (1st year%.
-f course, there can be too much of a good thing here, as the following typical response
notes" 6'he class structure itself I found to be very conducive to learning in the conte.t of
this particualr course. I en3oyed the small informal class style. 'he te.ts themselves were
very informative and interesting and led to good opportunities for discourse, however, I
think one less te.t to read would have allowed for more in depth dialogue and
understanding.6 ($th year%. 5y the final official year of undergraduate programs, students
are using the terms of an hermeneutic pedagogy readily in their comments, but we have
no real data on whether or not this language use has been merely reiterated or has become
part of a person4s thought process.
'he sense that the presence of he.is provides a 3umping off point, or a kind of
leverage for pushing on to some new form of knowledge is also a common theme" 6I
looked forward to this class every day and will miss the intellectual stimulation and the
challenge of my ideals.6 (1st year%, or 6'he challenge aspect of it all. 'here may have
been lots of work outside of class compared to others but it really challenged you on how
you thought of things. Oery intellectually stimulating.6 (1st year%. +e.is was not always
seen as something that must be overcome, however, as either the students in 1uestion had
previously worked to alter their prior pre3udice or the very content of some forms of
pra.is - for instance, the sense that the human sciences might well mimic in their analyses
#
certain aspects of the 4natural attitude4 - allowed for the comforting notion that the world
as it had been was not completely lost, and thus, neither was the student" 6It has enlarged
my view of people, communities and their culture. 5ut in another respect, it has cemented
some of my views of society and beliefs which may be out of the norm7 we had a lot of
fle.ibility in the class discussion.6 (9rd year%. It also aided the students4 comfort levels if
the content of pra.is was perceived to be too general to effect specific beliefs or
pre3udices individual students might hold. Ao, along with a pedagogical style that
mimicked early or non-school peer group settings, the he.is of the particular was
insulated by the pra.is of the general" 6I liked our discussion setting. It seemed very
comfortable and informal. +e was very vague about the material and did not apply it to
any particualr belief system.6 (!nd year%. -ne tactic we can use with some success is the
alternation of principle and individual, in that a challenge to a belief system is often not
perceived as the same thing as a challenge to a specific real person who is taking this or
that class. @epending on the class chemistry - often a week to week summary of how the
participants feel about the level of intimacy and disclosure in the course is very useful,
and may be completed within a ten minute slot at the end of each weekly round of contact
hours - one can gradually insinuate the sensibility that students too are involved in the
wider society and share the content of he.is with their fellow humans. Oery often it is this
content and the behaviors arising from it that come under the critical lens of both the
humanities and social sciences, but as we have seen, sometimes they are reaffirmed. 'he
use of customary form is also a reasonable pedagogic tactic if it is kept to the status of a
vehicle and not a substantive ideal, an ethical principle but not a moral rule" 6+is
C
techni1ue of group discussions at the end of every class was awesome and definitely
made me more comfortable with this class than any other.6 (!nd year%.
>inally, there was a ma3or theme relating to the deficits students felt had been
imposed upon them by their primary sociali(ation. In other words, he.is was seen not
only as a comfort but also as something increasingly incomplete given the wider world of
ideas that pra.is was beginning to e.pose. 'his was typically e.pressed in students4
apprehensions concerning the pedagogic tactics involved in the construction of an
intimate community of learners" 6)hat would help me understand is more notes, I like
discussion but it is a little intimidating.6 (!nd year%. I1ually, such trepidations are
overcome, though sometimes students felt forced to do so, and this was an emotionally
ambivalent e.perience. ,s such it mirror one important aspect of the newness of
hermeneutic events" 6'his course challenged me in all aspects. I had to e.pand my
beliefs, be willing to be more open-minded, and I even had to gain confidence in myself.
'his class helped me overcome my fear of public speaking.6 (!nd year%. 'he well known
3oke about our hierarchy of social an.ieties is called to mind - where we would rather be
in the coffin than giving the eulogy - and indeed intimate seminar situations must
overcome this very common hurdle of not merely he.is - 4do what you are told and no
1uestions4 - but all the more so, the transmissive techni1ues of schooling, for all stark
transmission re1uires obedient submission. 'o speak at all is an action shot through with
self-doubt and mistrust of others. 'his may be an ideal for he politics of mass societies,
but it is one of the clearest barriers to learning of any kind. 'he ambivalence of self-
discovery was also e1ualed by students4 sense of how they felt about the world after
taking this or that course" 6'he course opened up my view of society and showed me how

humans actually are. ,lthough the discoveries were not always pleasant, they were
definitely worthwhile.6 (1st year%. 'he shock of the new is very often characteri(ed by
forms of negation, and Gadamer famously refers to the hermeneutic e.perience as
4negative4, in that it annuls previous pre3udice in a sudden manner. 'his may later be
interpreted as positive or negative, but the event itself and one4s undergoing of it cannot
help but carry within it a basic discomfort. 'o this, students typically responded by
making a distinction between the ob3ective systems of belief with which he.is has been
constructed, and their own specific ethical feelings or druthers, that somehow might still
be e.empted from critical and holistic pra.is" 6I was challenged to think beyond my
beliefs, which was good. +owever, I felt as though we were not challenged to engage the
course according to our conscience.6 (1st year%.
-f the many interactive classroom activities performed over the years that have
relevance to he.is and its presence, two in particualr stand out as providing the
opportunity for participant to reflect on their prior pre3udice and 1uestion the authority of
its source, while at the same time not allowing an uncritical pra.is to be a simple
replacement" a% 'he 4Atigmati(ing /ircle4" 5etween 8 and 9E students. ,sk the class to sit
in a fairly tight circle. Iach must stand within the circle in turn, starting with the
professor. 'ell the students to 4take their best shot4, that is, stigmati(e the person in the
middle along customary lines. +ave students write down the insults and epithets for
pattern analysis later on, but as they are given, ask the class to 1uestion their validity, and
allow the person in the middle to defend themselves after all the stigmata has been
registered. ,lways debrief after each stigmati(ing event. -ne will need to wait until
perhaps the tenth week of a smaller class to be sure that the chemistry an intimacy is
1EE
appropriate for the activity. 'his has been a very enlightening piece of pedagogic action
and fits well into a broad range of course offerings. It tends to e.pose the bigotries and
pettiness by which the he.is of society orders itself and thus keeps all of us in line.
Atudents universally begin to acknowledge that the stereotypes we place on others are far
more than convenient typifications that allow us to e.pect certain predictable conte.ts in
the day to day. It also allows students to e.press their feelings toward the professor and
his or her presentation of self as the official authoritative role-player in a class. 'his too
can be 1uite enlightening and aid in better teaching methods and e.periences. b% 4,lien
,rtifacts4" Less tense but of e1ual merit regarding the analysis of he.is is the use of
unfamiliar ob3ects. 5ring in your collection of odd items - real artifacts from other
cultures or archaeological conte.ts, things found, fragments of larger ob3ects that have
fallen into disuse, stuff from your grandparents4 attics and so on - and distribute them into
student groups. have students generate statement about them regarding their material,
their form, their speculated use, their culture of origin and their age. ,rrange these
statement in three types - 4fact4 (the entire class must agree on the validity of this%, 4belief4
(3ust the small group members themselves must be in agreement%, and 4opinion4 (one
student alone can hold this statement to be valid about the ob3ect%. I1ually good is to ask
the students themselves to bring in ob3ects they think other participants will not
recogni(e. 'his e.ercise gives students the sense that reality is very much socially
constructed from the ground up, and that a person4s beliefs need not have any empirical
or historical referent to be held as true and real. 'he power of he.is is thus revealed, and
as the ,merican sociologist ).I. 'homas famously asserted, 4If people believe something
to be real, it is real in its conse1uences4. 'he new fore-knowledge of the e.perience of
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constructing reality from a space of speculation and even ignorance also gives
participants a palpable sense that what knowledge there is in the world is socially
distributed, a point Achut( made long ago. 'hat is, different social locations have
different perceptions of the world, and indeed, live in very different worlds because of
this. 'his reali(ation also aids in understanding he.is to be diverse and fragile, and not at
all the Hosaic document it intends itself to be taken as. he.is can then be used as a
resource through being the source of e.emplars for the analytics of critical pra.is, but
also as being the source of the very ideas that pra.is has sometimes elevated to the level
of discourse.
+e.is alone is not an indefatigable barrier to phronesis. It is a formidable
opponent, but it also has within the seeds of all future enlightenment. )e must never
accuse students or others of holding so closely to their pre3udice tat they cannot look afar
as long as the educational conte.ts within which we attempt to broaden their perspectives
are so narrowly confined to an instrumentality themselves, which in its own devices
differs not from the reproductive efforts of what is called customary. 'he forms of he.is
co-opted by pra.is are, however, enemies of phronesis and must always remain so. +ence
turning the pedagogic trick of hermeneutics in these situations re1uires that the very
structure of custom be disarticulated from both individual feeling and e.perience and the
construction of the world of ob3ects and discourse within which each of us must live.
3. Praxis - what attempts the overcoming of previous prejudice
'hose who unwearyingly repeat the modern call to battle and sacrifice 4@ivision
of Labour? >all in?4 must for once be told in round and plain terms" if you want to push
1E!
science forward as 1uickly as possible you will succeed in destroying it as 1uickly as
possible... (*iet(sche 1C9" <1C#$=%.
9.1 'yche :educed to Hasterful 'echne
)ome )ources of *nstrumentality
If pra.is presents itself as the e.tension of he.is and not its replacement, then we
must investigate first how the former can still use its non-traditional sources, modern,
rational and institutional, and yet appear to be cut from the same cloth as the natural
attitude. 'here are a number of key motifs involved in such a discussion, but they all
intercourse with the student at a rhetorical level, a level built into the language of the
institution first and foremost, and thus not easy to discern in terms of its ulteriority. 'hat
language itself, and thus humanity, can be dishonest about its motives general or
individual is part of the character of all human communication. 'he 4lying animal4, so
often part of the usual suspects regarding the refrains sung in criticism of the human
conversation, is somewhat misplaced. >or it is in the nature of language to hold back
meaning at the same time meaning is pouring forth from it. Ivery syntagmatic series of
signs must withhold its deferring and differing for the moment where one decides that
this, and only this, for the time being, will be what this and only this means. 'he vertical
feature of sentential structure is the paradigmatic frame that uplifts the sign, word, term
into a field of stasis. , combination of +egel4s aufheben, Aaussure4s arbitrary, +usserl4s
reduction and +eidegger4s ekstasis, this archiphonemic space preserves and brackets
simultaneously. It is this peculiar and fascinating ability of human language that allows us
to get across any meaning at all, but it is the same ability that allows us to conceal
meaning. >or :icoeur, it is *iet(sche who is the first to notice the profound implications
of such a parado.ical structure" 6It is a parado. in a double sense" first, in that from the
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opening lines, life, apparently taken in a referential and non-figurative sense, is taken to
be the source of the fables by which it sustains itself. *e.t, it is parado.ical in that
*iet(sche4s own discourse on truth as a lie ought to be drawn into the abyss of the
parado. of the liar.6 (:icoeur 1!"1!%. *iet(sche of course takes this as a given in that
the eternal return and the will to power are also not to betaken as having 4vertical4
meaning in the sense proposed 3ust now. )hatever +eidegger4s interior motive ay have
been for positing a transcendental back door to ekstasis, it is clear enough that in
*iet(sche, the supposed 4last metaphysician4, there is no such upward egress. 'his alone
reminds us of the syntagmatic chain of differing signifiers, deferring their meaning down
the line to be lost in the optics of a narrowed hori(on.
)hen we s1uint along this line, the most we can make out is that there is a
headlong rush of meanings that flow back and forth upon such sytagmata. 'his too is
crucial for both memory and anticipation, and many an untruth relies on both7 we must
regularly forget something in order for someone to rewrite history, or for us, as *iet(sche
also famously noted, to allow pride to erase our own biographical memories of untoward
moments, as well as recall something someone told us in an act of fraudulent authority.
)ithin the sphere of pra.is, the actors, trappings and props of the classroom and its
e.ercises provide the necessary authoritative atmosphere to induce students to believe,
whatever the case may be, in the new discourse which seek to dislodge the previously
unmoved beliefs of he.is" 6)hen students enter a classroom, or open a book, or when
they are shown how to perform some task in the field, they are confronted by authority.
Iven in the apparent isolation of self-reflection, we do not confront ourselves without the
intervention of authority in the form of those socially determined categories by which we
1E$
conceive of ourselves.6 (Gallagher 1!"8%. )hat distinguishes the new authority of
pra.is is that it no longer is to learned seemingly hapha(ardly, but as a cumulative system
of generally technical literacies. 'he previous authority of what is customary mostly acts
behind the scenes, and intervenes rather automatically, without our needing to recite it in
our heads. 0ra.is thus has an additional task to accomplish. +ow to not merely act as a
new kind of he.is, but to act upon the learner ads if it actually was he.isB 'he bluff and
bluster of the ordered classroom and curricula which assumes nothing on the face of it,
and thinks blithely that all will simply 4fall in4 and go about their assorted business, allows
instrumental pra.is some breathing room. )hatever its occurrence, 6Hany times
manifest, but most of the time latent, authority is embedded in every educational
e.perience.6 (ibid%. 'he first authoritative event that must be made manifest is, however,
the voice and presence of the teacher or professor. 'he 4invisible curricula4 of this moment
is purely about social control, with an aside to ingratiation and perhaps the role transition
from one who, like her students, has 3ust entered a new theatrical scene and must be
prepared to perform in a new way. 'he newness of such an act is not hermeneutic, but
demagogic, for it must take the first step in substituting itself for the role models of he.is"
6'he social task of teachers is to 4convince4 students to be less loyal to their own already
established set of communities and, presumably, increase their loyalty to the teachers4
communities.6 (5leich 1CC"91C%. Atudents do not become members of these posited new
social conte.ts unless they themselves become part of the front-line education system,
that is, unless they are planning to become as we are. Dntil the recent period, and
especially with the two enormous university e.pansions starting in the 1C#Es and again in
the 1;Es, one could very much assume that this was to be the case for any young person
1E;
who darkened the doors of the medieval colleges. 'hat the cotemporary university system
looks more and more like its younger sibling the school system - also manifestly and
even more than the university is of a recent origin - and that this identity is akin to a
massive production facility which also sorts and warehouses its products, 4higher4
education can certainly claim its moniker at least in regard to its costs and its output. 2et
the one universal thing that all new communities of pra.is will share, and the one thing
that separates them in practice from all original communities of sociali(ation, is that they
will themselves assume that their new members have already been 4schooled4 in such a
manner as to be ready to shift their loyalties, in the same way that workers as adult must
now shift their allegiance from peer groups to laboring groups, from play as an end in
itself to recreation as a manes to rebuild oneself in order to return to work. 0ra.is itself as
well may be legitimately said to belong to this 4higher4 plane of subsistence in that it
overlays the customary assumptions of the old communities. )hether or not pra.is is
presented in its fullest degree, as authentic criti1ue and effective historical consciousness,
or merely as an instrument and techni1ue, its replacement of he.is hinges upon the sense
that loyalty and trust be mutable. >or instance, if 6...the constructs used by the social
scientist are, so to speak, constructs of the second degree, namely constructs of the
constructs used by the actors on the social scene, whose behavior the scientist observes
and tries to e.plain in accordance with the procedural rules of his science.6 (Achut(
18#"8 <1;9=%, then this become in fact the template for all forms of both investigative
and technical applied theory. ,ll pra.es, even critical ones, are models of models,
interpretation of interpretations, though not, of course, criti1ues of criti1ues, because
he.is must remain fundamentally uncritical and un-self-conscious. 'he 4etic4 level of the
1E8
social sciences is predicated upon a sense that one can bracket phenomenologically the
common-sense constructs of the mundane sphere, a sort of social 4hyletic4 consciousness
that is held apart from one4s now and newly ob3ective lenses. 'hat social scientists can
accomplish such a feat is perhaps otiose, but it is also well-known that the 4data4 that
emanate from such work often remains as if it as well were but an e.tension of custom,
thereby ironically mimicking the official and ideologically driven cartel of pra.es the
university and its models represent to the young person. 'his 4butterfly collecting4 version
of social science, famously criti1ued by Leach, Farvie and others, gives outsiders the
impression that what scientists do is simply describe the world as it is, which is almost
completely composed of the world as it has been, and thereby such knowledge that pra.is
might hold forth about and attempt to resociali(e our children with is not really a threat at
all. ,t best, as ,ndreski noted, it is 4fit for the museum4 of humanity. 2et all of these
critics and many others, from *iet(sche forward to 5ourdieu and 0asseron, have also
noted with some dismay that the resociali(ation pro3ect of the university and its
accompanying institutions is not by any means an autonomous function of pra.is alone"
6'he compartmentali(ed psychology that holds to an intrinsic separation between
completeness of perceptual e.perience is, then, itself a reflection of dominant social
institutions that have deeply affected both production and consumption or use. )here the
worker produces in different industrial conditions from those which prevail today, his
own impulsions tend in the direction of creation of articles of use that satisfy his urge for
e.perience as he works.6 (@ewey 19$"!8!%. 'he manner in which we work is also the
manner in which we learn, and thus also learn to work. 'his in itself is a trivial truth, but
its implications are profound. ,fter all, both the modern mass schooling system and the
1E#
modern +umboldtian university and its analogues themselves are products of the self-
same industrial or 5ourgeois relations of production. *o longer would the trivium and
1uadrivium be fit apparatuses for installing the new skills and knowledge to run the vast
world of commerce and globali(ed labor processes. 'he speciali(ation in the division of
labor, so long a road in the realm of human he.is, rapidly accelerates into that of pra.is
by the industrial age. )hat originated as an incipient but still 1uite radical set of roles in
early agrarianism - scribes, ta. officials, priests and architects, to name a few - became
the e.pected lot of all who subscribed to the contemporary ideals of individualist oriented
work and leisure, production and reproduction. +e.is was first metastasi(ed and then
mirrored. 'he sources of these ideas were long forgotten, their necessity assumed, and
any imagination left for thinking otherwise could be occupied with the facts and figures
of the new regime. ,nd so with behavior, so too with theories of behavior" 6-nce a
theory is stipulated, its conditional premise is forgotten, so that the 4logical4 or necessary
conse1uences of the theory may be pursued. In the te.tbooks, the knowledge is then
presented in this elf-enclosed way, so that the conditional premise of the knowledge is
taken out of the pedagogical process as out of the 4normal science4 process.6 (5leich
1CC"8!%.
.
'he 0andoran 1uality of this 4black-bo.4, to reiterate Latour4s conception of the
4galleries4 of scientific labor and product, disallows any hope of historical consciousness
because what has passed before - the world of science as it was if you will - is already
and always bracketed out. I* all but the largest of departments, history of science classes
do not e.ist, or are consigned to history 4proper4, where anti1uarians and others interested
in the nostalgia of knowledge can offer and take them. 'he genealogy of *iet(sche, the
archaeology of >oucault, the phenomenology of 5achelard must remain in the
1EC
departments of philosophy lest they get in the way of the progress of technical ability, the
e.tension of human prosthesis into the cosmos, and the control of the human psyche as a
reductio ad absurdum. ,t best, the sciences both natural and cultural look at their own
histories with a whiggish smugness, calculating the cumulative gains in our
understanding which is premised in its turn in our misunderstanding of history and its
inertial influences" 6'hus the illusion of being understood and the illusion of
understanding can reinforce each other by serving as each others4 alibi because they have
their foundations in the institution.6 (5ourdieu and 0asseron 1!"11! <1#E=%. 'he
censoring of history from any pedagogical space is the second step in the process by
which pra.is clandestinely replaces he.is. yet, as we have seen, this can only be
accomplished if what had been the case was presented as a kind of resistance to 4nature4,
as if children would regress beyond the point of humanity unless schooling substituted
itself for more intimate social settings. +e.is no doubt has its own illusions - those
pertaining to its truth claims in spite of being a form of local knowledge the most
grandiose and addicting - but it is in the very character of pra.is to e.pose such fictions.
'hat it instead tends to rest upon their form is of the utmost concern to any type of alert
pedagogic consciousness" 6,ll the conditioning received in their previous training and all
the social conditioning of the relation of pedagogic communication cause students to be
ob3ectively condemned to enter the game of fictitious communication, even if this entails
adherence to the academic world-view which casts them into unworthiness.6 (ibid%.
Indeed, young people are already and also used to being cast as the understudy. >irst, the
scripts of mundane social relations must be taken to heart. 'hat they are so brings out the
second and ore profound meaning of the persons who 4studies under4 another. )e need to
1E
stand beneath the other to understand her, but this process is ideally reciprocal. 'hat the
older generations disdain those younger and that this is a cyclical affair with no apparent
end as long as the new defies the old in an alien way and does not take it as its own
consciousness, provides pra.is with the fertile double ground it needs to inculcate its new
presence in the minds of youth. 'he reversal that is effected under the guise of reciprocity
is that the student accepts the knowledge and authority of the teacher. ,t best, the balance
or redistribution of social knowledge is never 1uite attained - in this it mimics once again
the bigotry of those who have gotten their hands into he.is first - but delayed, as in the
case where graduate students replace their professorial mentors over the length of the
academic slow burn. It is also the case that even amongst nominal colleagues or peers,
tenure in the system in the widest sense allows for a kind of condemnation of those
4behind4. @uring such a process, 6'his unspoken rule about accepting one4s opponents4
premises makes it possible for one thinker, holding more social authority, to dominate the
particular in1uiry.6 (5leich 1CC"9;%.
.i
*ot that these social conte.ts are by any means
considered abnormative by academics or students, though the latter have to 4get used4 to
them. It is well known that first and second year students often have a difficult time
making the transition from the arena of fau. pra.is of the he.is dominated schools to the
broader but more anonymous university system where pra.is is the new he.is.
:ationali(ed organi(ations have the advantage of being able to take from disparate
regions and cultures an input of persons whose goals are already assumed to be the same"
6'o be sure, the more standardi(ed the prevailing action pattern is, the more anonymous it
is, the grater is the sub3ective chance of conformity and, therewith, of the success of
intersub3ective behavior.6 (Achut( 18#"99 <1;9=%. ,t the same time, and conferring the
11E
second and decisive advantage upon the system of instrumental pra.es is the fact that
rationali(ed systems occlude their own assumptions within the substantive content of the
new truth and taste regime. 'his in turn disallows the self-e.posure of stating to students
at the outset that their he.is is of no value in the here and now of technical education"
6...this is the parado. of rationality on the common-sense level - the more standardi(ed
the pattern is, the less the underlying elements become analy(able for common-sense
thought in terms of rational insight.6 (ibid%. 'his too mimics primary sociali(ation in that
he.is must not accede the point - so transparent later in life, that it is only the local
version of a diverse and highly relative set of cultural presumptions which others simply
do not share. 'he genius of instrumental pra.is is that it has both constructed and been
carried on the global tidal wave of rationali(ation so that it either seems that everyone
indeed shares this understanding, or desires to do so, and thus every student thus must get
on with it and dive into its turbulent and unmerciful waters" 6In other words, in the
university, one learns to either appropriate academic authority or adapt to it in a
completely private and individual ay.6 (5leich 1CC"$ italics the te.t4s%. 'he ideology of
the individual, a surrogate of which is the sensibility of the private learner - studious and
chaste, obedient and solitary - does much to sabotage the historical consciousness of the
4conversation of humankind4. 'he educational system has built into it the measurement of
individuals, in that the vast ma3ority of evolution takes place within the solo ambit of the
singular student. 4@o your own work4 is the motto of both e.am and essay, and, apart from
the eti1uette and respect demanded by rules of citation and plagiarism, there is no actual
scholarly need for singularity. rather, science and philosophy progress much further and
faster with collaboration. >or the most part, 6...the social situation in which students work
111
- the regular gathering, the steady physical formation of a collective body - is deliberately
bypassed in favor of a more private, authority-heavy dyadic relationship in which the
student is encouraged more to adapt to the teacher4s perspective than to proceed with
authentic negotiation...6 (5leich 1CC"1;%. 'hat dialogue cannot be immediately
e.pected from students in the realm of discourse is a pedagogic fact. Iven so, this fore-
knowledge of the absence of pra.is within e.perience of the neophyte is over-e.tended
with the assumption that the student has little or nothing to contribute to the actual
learning of pra.is. ,s we noted above, young people are indeed the most apt pupils in the
sense that they have reached a life stage where 1uestioning the authority of he.is is
something most are 1uite eager to do. 'o find out that thee are officially sanctioned
spaces of discourse - the entire history of philosophy is built on this premise, for instance
- which systematically are charged with 1uestioning the world as it has been and thus
altering the world as it is strikes most of these students as a revelation. 'his is perhaps
more immediately available to the more advanced students" 6It is precisely among the
most gifted of the students < = that I observe the strongest resistance to what those e.ams
have 1ualified them for and what they are actually e.pected to take up afterwards.6
(,dorno 1C"1##%. 2et it remains the birthright of all those given the opportunity to
study discourse to resist the sensibility that they are doing so only in order to pass an
e.am or to please another kind of authority which has its original model in custom and
norm. Ideally, all young persons should have this opportunity, because at least in the
humanistic tradition - whether or not it is hooked up to a religious suasion that adheres to
the older metaphysics of assignation or 'ruth - by virtue of being born human rather than
in some other form of much more limited and animalian consciousness, the e.amined life
11!
itself is what is at hand and what is therefore necessary. 'o prevent the falling arc of
being a thrown pro3ect upon the plane of being concern us prematurely, all of us must
continually engage ourselves in the world, and confront the tradition as part of the way in
which the worlding of that world pro3ects upon us.
'o shun such a task can be considered both an intellectual and even cognitive
disability. 'hose in charge of firing the imagination of the rational and reflective
consciousness are particularly at risk if they themselves do not take up the arts of an
hermeneutic pedagogy" 60erhaps teachers are like those veterans who are unconsciously
imagined as a kind of cripple, as people who no function within their actual live, within
the real reproductive process of society, but only in an obscure fashion and by the means
grace has given them they do their part so that the whole and their own lives somehow
keep going.6 (ibid"1C9%.
.ii
'his numbly comfortable e.istence mimics the human
condition and even attempts to dominate it in terms of seeking a monopoly on the
e.perience of the 1uotidean while at the same time the abnormative or yet the
uncanniness of hermeneutic e.perience is down-played or disdained. In a heavily
rationali(ed mass society there are few of us who relish the une.pected - we generally
give such events a negative connotation more literally than Gadamer4s sense of negation
would permit simply because it puts us off our routine tracks and causes us to do more
work - and prefer the predictable. ,t least, we reason, if we must submit to its
dehumani(ing and impersonal 1uantity of the massive public life we can do so reassured
that it does not hold any untoward surprises for us. Aince the effort we must e.pend to get
ourselves 4back on track4 after an interruption or yet more so, an authentically irruptive
presence of the absence of being in our lives, tends to push us in the direction of the
119
routine - in a nutshell, we labor so that we can get back to laboring - all the more reason
to shun the une.pected, because its overwhelming function is to remind us of our pathetic
situations. 'he newness of e.perience is thus oft taken not as a talisman of our continued,
though suppressed or oppressed humanity, but rather as a moment of ironic insult or
satire emanating from who-knows-where. 0redictability and the e.pectations that run
within it are the handmaidens of instrumental rationality, where the shortest route must
also be the best Ene, and the faster we 4get things done4 means the more esteem we can
attract from those who 3udge us. In the case of education systems, young persons are fed
through a process where the outputs become vehicles for what is e.pected of them, but
also, vehicles that e.pect only certain tried and true outcomes from the world itself. In
our contemporary mass society, this may even be seen as a necessity for youth and not
merely as a state-sponsored e.pediency related to social control. 'his was not always the
case" 6'he ever-so-fre1uent e.ploitation of these years by the state, which as soon as
possible enlists useful officials and wants to secure their unconditioned obedience
through e.cessively e.hausting e.aminations, had remained in the furthest distance
throughout our educations" and how little of anything in the utilitarian sense, anything
with a view to 1uick advancement and a fast career had determined us...6 (*iet(sche
!EE9"99 <1C#!=%. 'his partially imaginary educational conte.t was certainly also destined
for social elites, for even the apprenticeship of laboring classes or castes had the
instrumental sense about tit that one had to learn a trade or play a menial role or perish.
2et *iet(sche presents to us the liberal ideal of the humanistic arts education as well as
the necessary inductive conte.t in which the best research science functions for the
general advancement of the species. Ivery space of learning has its evaluative
11$
component. -ne either brings home the hunter4s trophy or one does not. 2et the 1uestion
of what one is learning for is lost in modern mass education systems, or better, the
profundity of being able to continuously ask such a 1uestion and those related to it is
chased out by the bottom line of instrumentality. -ne learns to get a 3ob and live in this
way, rather than one learns to live as a human being who can only learn because nothing
is given to him as a part of his own origins. )e are manifestly not instinctual creatures,
and we must rely only on the wit of accumulated and e.periential intelligence to get by.
'hat we have rationali(ed this 4natural4 process of human cognition to the greatest e.tent
yet seen in culture history perhaps should not surprise us. Iven so, it remains the work of
instrumental evaluation upon which hinges the contemporary 1uestion of 4knowledge for
whatB4. 'he test is the manner in which the education system not only promotes pra.is in
the limited form that suits the purposes of rational institutions and rational-legal
authorities, but it is also the method by which the education system is seen by its
deni(ens and more importantly, by outsiders, as maintaining its institutional relevance"
*othing is better designed than the e.amination to inspire universal recognition
of the legitimacy of academic verdicts and of the social hierarchies they legitimate, since
it leads the self-eliminated to count themselves among those who fail, while enabling
those elected from the small number of eligible candidates to see in their election the
proof of a merit or 4gift4 which would have caused them to be preferred to all comers in
any circumstances. (5ourdieu and 0asseron 1!"18! <1#E=%.
'he docimological system inherent at almost all levels of the educational process
is not 3ust the most economical manner of sorting through the unwashed dross of younger
humanity that are paraded through it each year. Its official sanction and prestige, its gate
keeping 1ualities and the sanctity of both its presentation and even the spaces in which it
takes place - to enter the e.am room is to enter both the military and the church at once,
akin to a private club where proof of one4s identity must be shown, and yet at the same
11;
time one is made the same as the rest of one4s fellow competitors7 it is both a rite of
passage and a race - offers to the successful candidate the status of the winner. 'he grade,
whatever it may be, is purely secondary to this other feeling, which is something
sub3ective that the e.am process makes ob3ective, as well as making it the ob3ective. 'o
ob3ect to this process is to cast oneself immediately outside of it, and by immediate
e.tension, outside of the entire social system that supports it and is supported by it" 6'his
e.tension belongs among the beloved economic dogmas of the present. ,s much
knowledge and education as possible - conse1uently as much production and demand as
possible - conse1uently as much happiness as possible" thus or thereabouts runs the
formula. here we have utility as the goal and purpose of education, still more e.actly
ac1uisition, the highest possible winning of great amounts of money.6 (*iet(sche !EE9"98
<1C#!=%. It is well known that an education system that has its birthright in capital should
mimic the character of the wider capital in its microcosm. -ne competes for grades or for
the favor of the teacher, then for grades alone, then for entrances into the higher echelons
or programs of the university, and then for 3obs, promotions or tenures, merit or bonuses,
vacation times, etc. be labelled within such a system is almost a life or death event.
Atructural advantages are unlikely to be s1uandered, 3ust as structural disadvantages are
unlikely to be overcome. 5ourdieu and 0asseron4s 4golden child4 notoriously serves the
purposes of the system because her presence 4proves4 that the system is unbiased. If one
or two marginals can attain the sanctity of official recognition then surely anyone else can
do so, it is simply a matter of effort. 'he children of +oratio ,lger are most welcome in
the academy, their paper routes collecting diplomas and spreading the news of their
victories 4against all of the odds4.
.iii
'he e.amination sets ahead of time what will be
118
thought, and thereby destroys the essential character of thin"ing, which is inherently
revolutionary. >or hermeneutics, the recreation of culture in spite of itself is a
manifestation of the overturning of prior pre3udice by the 4new4 of authentic human
e.perience. 'he e.am resuscitates what is given, what is assumed and what has been the
case, for its is precisely its function to make sure that what has been learned can be
reproduced rather than challenged yet again. Instead of this, 6...we are all as human
beings faced with the challenge of teaching and learning for ourselves. )hat is
demanded is precisely the active application of our own thirst for knowledge, and of our
powers of discrimination...6 (Gadamer 1C8";1 <1##=%. 'he pedagogic utility of the
e.am could still maintain itself through a new informality about its structure and its
gravity regarding ultimate evaluation. 2es, one must learn the tradition to confront it,
must needs take into one4s very being the world as it has been because it is indeed already
and always part of our history and has thus created us. )e must come to know it to know
ourselves. )e need to be asked the 1uestion of prior knowing - have we committed
ourselves to the history of being in the worldB In a critical pra.is, the e.am still has its
place, but it is reduced to the status of an aide-memoire, a space of iterability and further
challenge, and not a call and response auto-diktat that winnows the structurally
advantaged wheat from the chaff of the social margins, that reiterates the world as it has
been in the widest possible sense, that reminds those unlucky enough to born, without
their permission, into the gutter of culture that they belong there and only there.
)e have seen that it is by the disingenuous mimesis of custom that instrumental
pra.is foists itself on the unsuspecting students of contemporary higher education. ,nd
yet it is not entirely dishonest in doing so, because in this version of applied theory the
11#
substance really dos seek only to be an e.tension of the tools one uses to get through the
mundane sphere, to manipulate it and manage it, and to earn a living within it and from it.
'his kind of honesty may be cynical, but it can claim some reality for itself. Iven so, it
participates in the world only by making that world into an instrument for itself, thereby
de-authenticating it and making it as well insincere in its common humanity" 6In reality,
our pra.is does not consist in our adapting to pregiven functions or in the thinking of
suitable means for achieving pregiven purposes. 'hat is technology. :ather, our pra.is
must consist in prudent choices as we pursue common goals, choices we arrive at
together and in practical reflection making concrete decisions about what is to be done in
our present situation. 'hat is social reason.6 (Gadamer !EE1"C9-$%. Aimilar to the
)eberian idea of keeping the decision-making process regarding social policy in the
hands of the community, rather than letting it be taken over by those deemed to have
special e.pertise in such matters - the irony of perhaps the greatest e.pert on society
warning us about not letting the social e.perts have such suasion is still of interest -
hermeneutic pra.is takes into consideration the educated rationale of models and theories,
but does not aspire to mimic them. In this, it is attempting to be a role model for a critical
pra.is, pushing it away from the easy calculations involved in the disingenuous mimicry
of he.is. /ritical and reflective, authentic pra.is must weigh evidences, contradictions,
conflicting interpretations, and the needs of an increasingly diverse cultural melange.
'his evidence is not necessarily to be found in only the ob3ective factuality of scientific
models. It also cannot be discovered alone through the lens of custom and what had
worked, however well or faultily, historically. Aince 6...the search for evidence is always
directed by fore-conceptions < = ,n appeal to evidence does not get us out of the
11C
hermeneutical circle, but simply puts us into it in a different way.6 (Gallagher 1!"!91%.
It is also certainly the case that hermeneutics cannot give itself away to that which has
traditionally resisted knowledge and pra.is. +ermeneutics is also not a customary part of
any he.is. )e cannot simply reinstate the rule of tradition and custom, norm and habit
within the space lately taken over by instrumental reason. , close but open watch must be
kept over the kinds of ideas that are not only brought into the classroom or the education
system more broadly by the students and teachers who inhabit these places, but also a yet
more alert stance needs be taken within the sheltering milieu. of the discourses which, on
the face of it, appear to liberate us from our parochial bigotries" 6'he aim of sociali(ing
the classroom and integrating it with the academy, then, re1uires adapting ourselves, for
the foreseeable future, to living and working in peaceful (but unrelenting% opposition to
community ignorance, social inertia, ideological superstition.6 (5leich 1CC"9!#%. It is
precisely the sincere absence of reflection that characteri(es all normative and customary
forms and actions of primary sociali(ation that makes on the one hand mimesis of it seem
benign, and allows pra.is to slide into its own version of unreflectivity, on the other. )e
do not generally feel like charlatans when we act out the prescribed roles to which our
social duties call us. 'hat we play these roles without much thought or ado, pending
circumstance, is not by itself a fatal in3ustice to either he.is or to our fractured
singularities. It is simply what people do, and, perhaps what they must do at least for part
of their waking hours. 5ut we should never confuse this 4must-ness4 of the socius with the
authenticity of all that takes us out of ourselves - the other, the neighbor, the aesthetic
encounter, the strange and pu((ling double consciousness inside ourselves, the uncanny
presence of the absence of being - lest we forget the essence of our humanity7 to be
11
thinking, learning observing and evaluating mobile consciousnesses, to be the local lights
of the consciousness of the cosmos.
+he (ppeal of *nstrumentality as an *deal -
'he sources of interpretation and their guides are seldom the same. 'his is most
easily shown by a comparison of the books students read and the actual persons who are
there teachers. It sometimes occurs that the actual authors of the te.ts in 1uestion are
present. 'hat they are mostly dead and gone is not fatal to our current understanding of
them nor of ourselves, nor is it always wise to have an authorial authority fully present,
especially if the te.tuality that once was his lends itself to the demagogic. 'he author is
3ust another reader, after the te.t or book takes on the life that is rightfully its own. In the
same way as an art work speaks to all who encounter it with the open hermeneutic of
both e.perience and curiosity, the te.t encompasses the voices and reason of each of its
readers, and the art of interpretation is thus manifold and mutable. yet at the same time,
and indeed because of this li1uid understanding we have of our cultural productions and
criti1ues, the guide and ob3ective of reasoned working-out is also a necessity for teaching
and learning. 'he fore-having of reasoned consciousness is not y itself ea sure guarantor
of insight or profundity. ,t the same time, the authority of any instrument, the yet surer
guide of a measured pace and static target, limit the fullest presence of a pedagogic
e.perience that in its most authentic form is kindred to that aesthetic and ethical. Is the
traditionally lucid and e.pansive notion of 4the te.t4 enough to both display the arts of
interpretation, to call them into the being of learning, while at the same time displacing a
too rigid guide or structure of authorial or authority relationsB 6If te.tual interpretation is
cast as the educational model, that is, if learning is viewed as a process of reading to
1!E
understand or ac1uire knowledge, then it seems self-evident that the study of the process
of te.tual interpretation is also the study of learning.6 (Gallagher 1!"9$, cf. 99E ff for a
more detailed account of this homology%. Aurely this is on the face of it too narrow a
confine for general human e.perience, even with the 4world as te.t4 metaphor that has
recently been hastened from its arcane grave in the cemetery of late agrarian notions.
>oucault famously analy(es the 4prose of the world4, the autographed hand of divine
intent within which the world was held as a sapphire 3ewel in the manifold speckled dark
velvet of the cosmic creation. yet this reveals the entire problem of the te.tual
hermeneutic, the conception of the autograph. Iven the author as reader does not entirely
prevent the 7earned from imagining that there must be some kind of surer guide at hand.
'his two-handedness, which is at once uneven though ambide.trous, combines the oral
and the written in a double-barreled display of authority. 5ut to what endB 6>re1uently
the professor reads while he speaks. In general he wants to have as many listeners as
possible, in need he contents himself with a few, almost never with one. -ne speaking
mouth and very many ears with half as many writing hands - this is the e.ternal academic
apparatus, that is the educational machine of the university in action.6 (*iet(sche
!EE9"1E8 <1C#!=%. 'his authoritative scene is priestly, sermonic, hegemonic, and vastly
outnumbering of other modes of pedagogy still. 'he addition of visuals, also at the front
of the room, gives the author a third hand, as well as providing him with a cheat sheet in
case of lapses of memory. 2et it appears at first glance to be archaic, as there may be
fewer and fewer true orators in educational settings. )hile transmissive pedagogy is
perhaps at its best in an operatic version of vaudeville meets televangelism, it too is a
performance that is not easy to pull off"
1!1
'he most typically charismatic feast, such as verbal acrobatics, hermetic
allusion, disconcerting references or peremptory obscurity, as well as the technical tricks
which serve as their support or substitute, such as the concealment of sources, the
insertion of studied 3okes or the avoidance of compromising formulations, owe their
symbolic efficacy to the conte.t of authority the institution sets up for tem. (5ourdieu and
0asseron 1!"1!; <1#E=%.
'his is a script that I myself know well. )hen I first started teaching I had four
hour vectors and upper level large seminars to contend with. I wrote down every word of
every lecture, with marginal aside including humor, and memori(ed the entire show. I
even recorded myself so I could listen to the narrative, with its accompanying
personifications and theatrical moments. 'hat I grew up playing in the school theaters
was no doubt part of this sense of showmanship, which still is present in large lecture
halls to this day, though without the pedantic memory work and scripted 3okes. 2et its
appeal is in the main a sub3ective one, though younger students may be entertained by the
dramatic 1uality and the vulgar asides, and e.perienced students may feel themselves in
awe of the 4master4. 5ut these kinds of effects are merely that, the dross of facade, and not
the truth of the material or the authenticity of the teacher. 'hat I was also at this time
beginning my hermeneutic studies, attracted me to the sense that language was the hot
blood of performance. 'here is irony here as well, of course, and not only that but real
limitations" 6'he common element in these renditions is the figure of language as ludic
activity, resulting in terms such as 4the game of language4, the 4free play of language4 or
4the play of difference4, as if language were only a constraining force that is beyond
human regulation.6 (5leich 1CC"1#%. -f course, 5leich overstates the case. Language is
what provides the medium for the liberated human consciousness and it is precisely that
which within language marks it as remarkable and remarking upon us that allows our
humanity to come to know itself. Aomewhere between the indictment that ludic signifiers
1!!
are but rascals and cannot be tamed to meaning of any kind, and the analytic fantasy of
ob3ective referentiality lays the truth of human communication. 2et we would not guess
at this truth by following either the hermeticist or the analyst. )ith te.ts or literature of
any discourse or genre the problem that presents itself is the same, and some kind of
choice must be made" 6Iither teachers of literature have brought off an unprecedented
confidence trick or else there is knowledge and skill involved in reading literature" skill
which can be imparted.6 (/uller 1#C";!%. -nce one decides that there is authority - but
not simply because there must be authority - then the crucial step is taken for clearing the
lighted space of being in learning. 5ut what authorityB 'he appeal of the instrument is
also two-fold here. >irst it allows the pretense of ob3ectivity, as we have seen with
e.aminations. Aecondly, it gives us the sense that anyone within the community of
learners can reach out and grasp this ob3ect and turn it to her own purposes. 'he second
appeal in some way sabotages the first, because what the instrument is in actuality is
something to be used, and thus used within the human ambit. Iven so, it is the first that
provides the best possibility that the teacher4s authority will not be e.posed as his own, as
a part of an institutional rhetoric, or yet as the incipient presence of utility in general,
calling down upon us the 4icy nights of polar darkness4 as we are winnowed and herded
from the school to the 3ob.
'his first ruse of the instrument also provides the rubric by which students can
come to be evaluated without really ever knowing more than the effects of
instrumentality. In other words, they do not come to own the tool in the same way as does
the authority of the professor" 6It is, to say the least, surprising that those who do not
hesitate to grade their students on the competence of their reading and on their progress
1!9
in learning, the art of reading, should be prepared to deny the e.istence of literary
competence and should make no effort to describe e.plicitly the skills they are supposed
to teach.6 (ibid%. In this, pra.is is in reality the same as he.is. It is a discourse that stands
apart from individuals while at the same time e.erting enormous influence upon them. It
is not made up of mere opinions, and yet it e.pects to be able to transmit its presence
through the same vehicles as does opinion, the orality of the intersub3ective social scene,
the fragment of te.t, the student essay, etc. It takes a stand against the politics of the day
and indeed, one the aspects of its ruse of ob3ectivity is that it can mask itself in the
studied opinion of the philosopher hat no one really has to take seriously anyway.
.iv
*iet(sche4s blithe comment about philosophers having 4only their opinions4 should not
distract us here, for within it lies the kernel of truth regarding the social construction and
distribution of all human knowledge. Ao the first aspect of the appeal of ideal
instrumentality is that it can stand apart from the one and thus influence the many.
If such an encounter with the discourses of pra.is is to have a lasting hold on the
scions of he.is, however, these latter as students must also imagine that they can harness
instrumentality and its apparently naked sword for their own devices, whether it be to cut
through the Gordian knots of political propaganda, media commodification, family
influence or e.pectations, or even the travails of mental illness. >or even uncritical
pra.is, in its e.tension of the stock of knowledge at hand be1ueathed by custom and
e.perienced as the 4world as it has been4 does not leave completely untouched the
assumptions of the past. Iven in its technical e.tension, the prosthesis of pra.is
e.tenuates the arguments of belief, e.trapolates from them, and perhaps places them in a
new relation to a more worldly perspective, 3ust as if we were to read an anthropological
1!$
study of kinship or se.ual practices of some 4e.otic4 and alien people and thus get a sense
that what we do is only one way of doing things. *o criti1ue is implied here, and the
cultural relativism of descriptive ethnography can ultimately be shrugged off, for after all,
we live at home and not with these others. 'he second aspect of the ruse of instrumental
pra.is is that it fits so well into the form and design of all of the conversations regarding
human affairs that we have previously entered. Generally, even as children, we blunder
into confrontation rather than calculating it. 'his is the same for adults. /onversation is
designed to communicate to a point of shared understanding inasmuch as it may
communicate its opposite. 'he vehicle itself is not at all necessarily calculated.
/onversations and dialogues are not in principle either therapies or interrogations, though
these latter are subspecies of the human dialogue" 6...a conversation is something one gets
caught up in, in which one gets involved. In a conversation one does not know
beforehand what will come out of it, and one usually does not break it off unless forced to
do so, because there is always something more you want to say. 'hat is the measure of a
real conversation.6 (Gadamer !EE1";%. 'hough the concept of 4intersub3ectivity4 can be
criti1ued along the lines of authenticity of dialogue on the one hand - we sincerely desire
to know the other as a further fold in the manifold of 5eing, but not thereby as part of the
self - and on the other, the sheer radicality of the alien otherness of persons - in that we
cannot simply assume any specific thing about them nor should we attempt to make them
into those who simply 4live in my world along with me4 - at the same time as there is not a
4doubled sub3ectivity4 as Gadamer rightly puts it, there is however a Headian slant that
5leich reminds us is constructive in thinking about how pra.is has its way through the
apparently sincere dialogue of teaching and learning" 6...to thin" of mental development
1!;
in terms of intersub3ectivity promises a more comprehensive understanding of how mind,
language, society and culture evolve together from the beginning.M (5leich 1CC"#!%. 'he
systems of discourse suggest to us that though knowledge may be seamless, the seams
that each system defends while encroaching on its siblings suggests that differences
amongst them must be taken seriously if only to divide intellectual labor into viable
portions. 'he KtogethernessJ of pra.is is an ideal, similar to that found in the obstinately
arching umbrellas of the now either taken for granted mental e.ercises of Acience or the
shunned wisdom of philosophical sages. Iducation might well LPrelate to the totality of
our various powers, without being a specific ob3ect for any one of them <and= that is its
aesthetic character.M (Achiller 18;" <1#8;= italics the te.tJs%, but the polymath of
today, if she e.ists, is surely a scion of the inability to organi(e oneJs though into a
cohesive network that is recogni(able by the educational institution. Apeaking of
'aminiau., :icouer suggests that an analysis of all encompassing philosophical systems
also cannot overcome the sheer weight of the Kdo.a of pra.isJ, if that be acceptable. In
other words, oneJs professional sociali(ation does not get one off the hook of he.is.
+aving an opinion, however educated it may be, cannot yet be serious unless it
relin1uishes the comfort of personality. 'his is why pra.is alone both stands aloof to
custom but also must accept the impersonality of its own distanced disinterest, and thus
analysts cannot LPgo so far as to make pra.is the unitary principlePM (:icoeur
1!"919 <1E=% even if one can affirm that pra.is has a critical edge superior to other
forms which are more obviously aesthetic in character such as poiesis. 0erhaps the
greatest irony of the presence of pra.is in modern society is that it eschews the
metaphysics of unity. ,lthough itJs general narrative must be one of disinterest, whatever
1!8
human passions and melodramas it may document as part of its scientific ob3ect, pra.is
both critical and instrumental makes its claims in very much a Kdown to earthJ manner in
that the Kwhat is to be doneJ of a Lenin is not so different from a technical manual as it
may at first appear. 5oth are about fixing things as they are at present, so that the future is
better Q more efficient for the instrumentalist, more democratic, perhaps, for the culture
critics. 'his dual hair-trigger of pra.is is possible only because it redefines what it is to be
human in the first place, and does so by once again a duality of at once broaching the
unknown while shifting its abode, and proclaiming that there can be a future where all is
at least knowable. +ence L'he real relevance of the universe of understanding is more
subtle and indirect. It lies in the way it has altered the terms of the debate, and reshaped
the possibilities both of belief and unbelief, opened up new loci of mystery, as well as
offering new ways of denying transcendence.M ('aylor !EE#"81%. 'hat mystery remains is
not because of any inherently occlusive 1uality. Hystery is not romantic in this way, like
desire or death may still be for us. Hystery is, rather, something to be solved, and the
elemental assumption is that it can be solved. In the same way that we would like to
assume that interpersonal and intercultural difference can be resolved, the mysteries of
human misunderstanding are pu((les for the hermeneutic detective. If in this realm of
KwhodunitJ it is also a Kcapital crime to theori(e before the factsJ as +olmes famously
chides, then we can immediately look to the sciences of pra.is to provide the evidence
needed Q not to theori(e after the facts? Q but to simply e.plain the apparently comple.
problem by e.posing its simpler components. 'he cognitive sciences have perhaps taken
this reductivist mode of transforming human e.perience the farthest. Iach conte.t of
learning then would pursue a local knowledge, but only as a representative portion of
1!#
both the methods and the ob3ect of the wider discourse. 0ra.is would not retreat but
would assume a guise appropriate to the occasion. 'heory which could not be applied
would have to withdraw, and in this we can see the gradual movement from the
authenticity of critical pra.is which still relies on philosophy, and an instrumental
application with the goal of e.plaining rather than e.plicating. 2et even here the would-
be aesthetic 1uality of in1uiry is maintained" L'he meta-interpretation employed in a
local hermeneutics would, in this sense, be an art akin to the Aocratic art, an art, because,
for lack of a better method, the practitioner is forced to ask 1uestions and learn as she
goes. It is not a matter of applying predetermined procedural rulesPM (Gallagher
1!"998%.
.v
2et even if we do not presume upon an outcome, our presence locally has an
effect. 'he investigator, the reader, the teacher, the authoritative guide or source needs the
locals Q students or whomever Q to at least agree to pursue what they imagine to be a
similar goal. I.perience in this classical sense cannot be taught. 'he author of the
research design, the interpreter and the teacher re1uire a following, and we may very
often construct one out the parochial 1ualities of this or that customary social scene or
readership by charming and appealing to the upwardly-mobile desires of those who have,
until this moment, remained on the outside looking in. 'hese are the neophytes who seek
to become acolytes, the uncultured, or at the very least, uneducated masses of
Khe.istenceJ that custom has created but that would be more in the face of /ulture and
@iscourse" L'his seduction addresses itself to their egoistic emotions, to their weaknesses
and vanities. 0recisely the spirit of the times whispers to them, K>ollow me?M (*iet(sche
!EE9"# <1C#!=%. )ithin he.is we were but enthralled to anthropologically defined
culture" L'here you were servants, helpers, tools, outshined by higher naturesP.M (ibid%.
1!C
'his K'hereJ of course refers to all that the world had been before the students met with
the institutions and their masters that promised the liberation of the KhigherJ culture
through what is to this day referred to as KhigherJ education. )e have already seen that
within the space of an uncritical and instrumental pra.is, we remain as servants but we
too now have an accreditation that bestows on us a status privilege unlike anything within
the ambit of custom. 'he servitude of the student remains in effect simply because the
authority of pra.is borrows its latent presence from the template of he.is, as we have also
seen. 'he rhetoric of the seduction of this new form of authority is often different from
those associated with primary sociali(ation, but the result is basically the same. /onsider
the by-play, flirting, and scripted banter of the university classroom, especially in seminar
situations, where students and the professor engage with one another as if there could be
no power differences and that all were involved in an egalitarian learning community"
L5ut behind all this friendly and complicated 3oking, I heard a very serious point being
made, namely, that if grades are given in a course at all, then they will remain important
to <the student= no matter what I say or what else I do to change the classroomJs authority
structure.M (5leich 1CC"!$;%. 'he fact of graded evaluation in the realm of pra.is could
be seen as epiphenomenal to the social order of he.is, that now must be maintained more
formally and professionally, once again as if the relations were amongst social e1uals Q
not elders and their children, for instance Q and that all measurement is disinterested and
impartial, having its source in the modern metaphysics which is vehemently anti-
transcendental Q that is, the parent is not omniscient but the science that has displaced the
parent is also incomplete Q but at the same time oddly in league with its own weaknesses
in that pra.is KknowsJ it can complete itself given time. 'o put it differently, pra.is
1!
befriends the incompleteness Q in the form of incompetence - of its students by e.posing
tits own calculated incompleteness which is in fact part of the strength of its scientific
processes and models. In doing so, it reserves the right to be modest at the e.pense of any
claims to truth that he.is might have made, and furthermore, shows them to be parochial
and local, not "noledge at all, in fact, but mere belief. 'he unbelief of pra.is is also a
strength, and one that is brought back to life through its e.tended methodological
skepticism and penchant for e.periment and replication. 'hat previous scientific models
must go the way of archaic technologies is simply the way in which the world of pra.is
worlds itself. Its new e.istential envelope is one of the current state of affairs, a facticity
built only on factuality and not inclusive of any phenomenology of the sub3ect. 'his new
metaphysics resolves to ironically transcend he.is because LPit takes us beyond by
incorporating a fascination with the negation of life, with death and suffering.M ('aylor
!EE#"9#$%, as these too are the facts of living on and cannot be recompensed by an
ultimate restoration of the spirit" LIt doesnJt acknowledge some supreme good beyond
life, and in that sense sees itself as utterly antithetical to religion. 'he KtranscendenceJ is,
once again in an important sense parado.ically immanent.M (ibid%. If pra.is is the most
commonly encountered scion of the new anti-transcendentalist metaphysics, then it can
best be swallowed with a heavy coating of the comfortable notion that it too wishes to
e.tend life beyond itself, but has some both more modest and more realistic means of
doing so. Hore real precisely in its ethics of modesty, it is able at one stroke to
acknowledge the reality of human finitude while at the same time e.horting all of us to
choose the high road to either prosthetic or e.istential redemption. >urthermore, pra.is
hooked up to its parent metaphysics reminds us of the reality of those others with whom
19E
we increasingly live with. )e must find some new manner of communicating with KthemJ
and thus with ourselves, and this new way cannot be better demonstrated than through the
techni1ue of a universali(ing pra.is and scientific understanding that appears to cut
across cultures" L/learly the universal conversation of mankind, taken as a metanarrative,
has failed to live up to its claims. 'he real case is rather that there are many conversations
going on, a plurality of paralogical conversations at a multiplicity of interpretive sites.M
(Gallagher 1!"9;1%. Hore than this, these sites of interpretation are mostly dedicated to
1uite different goals, and thus e.perience differing outcomes. 'his is not something that
only occurs across cultures, vaguely delineated by national borders or more indigenously,
by geographic regions. 'his conflict of interpretations is the case within both official and
unofficial cultures, and amongst individuals. 'he official narratives, of which tropes such
as the :hodian Ahore, the Great /hain of 5eing and the aforesaid conversation of
humankind emanate, are not so much archaic or dogmatic meta-narratives as convenient
labels for the ob3ects of many conflicting stories. 2et further, within individuals
themselves, as we age and change, or as we confront a new e.perience, there e.ists this
self-same conflict. )ithin the hermeneutical circle of coming to dwell in the being-
understanding, one must overcome oneJs prior pre3udice as the vehicle of the past set of
role-selves as well as conserving that portion of these histories which aids the
recogni(ance of the new e.perience" LAelf-understanding involves self-transcendence as
well as self-appropriation. 'he student moves beyond the narrow confines of his opinions
by 1uestioning and opening up the sub3ect matter.M ibid"18#%. )e have seen that even
uncritical pra.is can respond to local knowledge because in its apparent e.tension of all
custom, it recogni(es that no custom had within it what pra.is has in store for it. *eedless
191
to say, authentic pra.is defies custom at a fundamental level, and is, akin to the scientific
attitude versus the natural attitude, very often in opposition to it. Ao the key for any
learner involved in what he admires as the liberating newness of knowledge and the
world at large is to place oneself in the mi. of worlds" L'his movement is simultaneously
a 1uestioning, opening up, and transcendence of himself. ,gain, the same interpretational
dynamic involved in play is involved in all learning.M (ibid%.
.vi

If the ends of instrumental pra.is include the appeals of egotism, status,
accreditation and market value, amongst others, it remains to suggest for now that such a
pra.is also gains by it having the ability to close off a conversation and appear to have all
the answers. 'his is because the topics of such dialogues as they are are always technical
in nature and so it is indeed possible to have e.plained what needs to be e.plained
through the techne of skill and e.perienced practice alone. 'his success, mirrored in the
much admired progression of feats in engineering and medicine beginning in the
nineteenth century and astoundingly accelerated in the century 3ust passed, culminates in
the ability to attract adherents through the resociali(ation of students in applied science
and professional fields. 'hese student numbers, in terms of program enrollment, are
burgeoning across the board in almost all larger universities, and it is precisely because of
the combination of ready market and the promise of being able to pay off student loans,
etc., that are on the face of it most attractive. 5ut much more than this, I think, is the
ability of technical pra.is to assuage our e.istential doubts about not only ourselves but
our place in the world. It can do so by answering the 1uestions at hand in a final manner.
'he arts remake the art of 1uestioning, but applied theory responds to the adhocracy of
material needs. 'he discourse which stands contraposition to custom is the knowledge of
19!
the world as it is combined with the imagination that seeks new worlds. Its language is
not that of the ready response, nor that of tradition. It does not attempt to find the truth of
things in any final manner, though it seeks truth. )hat it discovers is the dialogue of
which we are" L'here is no absolute guarantee that it would be true, no guarantee of
ob3ective proof. 5ut this is what we have before us in the everyday situation of
communication, where we do have to defend our raisons, our good reasons Q not in the
sense that we want to foist ourselves on the other, but only in the sense that we should
make clear what we believe to be rightPM (Gadamer !EE9" ;# <!EEE=%. In this kind of
dialogue, the beliefs of custom are challenged by those who have different beliefs,
different rights, and in this there is an incipient dialectic, even without the presence of
critical pra.is. 'he confrontation between human beings is made of the same stuff as is
the confrontation with tradition, but takes its place in a microcosm of local discourses
that do not necessarily attend to what meta-narratives propose regarding the world
situation. )hatever works is what is needed, but while persons generally can agree on
what appears to work in technical circumstances, the ability to decide on the reasons why
we should choose this or that option are more obscure, and sub3ect to argument. 'he Kin
order toJ motives are often parado.ically more clear than the KbecauseJ motives even
though they point to a future which by definition cannot be so clear as our previous
e.perience. 5ut to ask why we need this to work rather than that is a further 1uestion that
is not one of immediate need. It is this kind of 1uestion and those that follow from it that
re1uire of us the true dialectic of interpretation and criti1ue, something that neither he.is
nor instrumental pra.is can provide us.
199
3.2 uestioning the !hill of !"ill#
+he &esults and Critique of (ctual *nstrumentality
2et we need first to argue that such a 1uestion should indeed be asked, in other
words, why ask why at allB 'he instruments of practical reason and the rationality of
utility could be made ultimately democratic, as in a technocracy. 'he need to ask of these
operations their source and pedigree might appear to be specious, or at least distracting to
the true needs of the day and those who live in it. It is at first a philosophical criti1ue that
challenges the space of rationality alone, but this discourse has its own roots in the
everyday feelings and e.periences of human beings in general, and does not emanate
solely from the observations of those specifically trained to argue and with detailed
knowledge of the history of discourse. Gadamer famously suggests that philosophy
cannot be meritorious over even the short term if it cannot be communicated as widely as
possible. 2et philosophy in the widest sense is part of the general human persuasion and
heritage, and does not belong in any particular place or find a home in any one personJs
mind" L)hat we call mind or intelligence or reason is a truly universal capacity to
understand things, and is in no way limited to the arithmetical arts, measuring procedures,
and the tasks of calculation that are so indispensible to technical rationality.M (Gadamer
1C"11 <1C9=%. 'he pra.is of human intelligence, or that which is generated by its
force of reflective thought and studied action, is as universal and omnipresent as the
totality of he.is. Indeed, nothing within custom could have come about without its
influence, even if the great bulk of belief appears to be a bulwark against further thinking
and discrimination of definition. 'hose who defend only what the world has been find
technical rationality convenient, but the fruits of this narrow position do not represent the
19$
reality of either the world or the human condition" KIf reason were no more than that,
nothing would be able to save us from suffocating mandarins who would give us
omnipotent bureaucracy and stagnating progress in technology and civili(ation.M (ibid%.
Aince we are not yet automata of fully rationali(ed organi(ations Q we recogni(e that to
be so is a dehumani(ing tendency, lampooned in satire and popular culture alike, we yet
shy away from the -rwellian conse1uences of such systems and their deni(ens Q we must
also respond to the problem of why such a rationality has not been able to ma.imi(e its
own potential. 'he idea that human are specifically and Kby natureJ irrational and thus
gum up perfectly good systems is part of the 3aded cynicism that feels more at home with
machines than with humans and as an e.planation of our general awkwardness in the face
of mere techni1ue it has no merit, either historical or ethical. ,nd to suggest that
instrumental pra.is has simply triumphed in the face of the beliefs inherent in he.is is
also unrealistic given both the emergence of new non-rational belief systems and the
persistence of those ancient. 'aylor is rightly skeptical of this kind of response,
characteri(ed in the following manner"
)hat emerges comes about through this loss. 'he upbeat story cherishes the
dominance of an empirical-scientific approach to knowledge claims, of
individualism, negative freedom, instrumental rationality. 5ut these come to the
fore because they are what we humans KnormallyJ value, once we are no longer
impeded or blinded by false or superstitious beliefs and the stultifying modes of
life which accompany them. -nce myth and error are dissipated, these are the only
games in town. ('aylor !EE#";#1%
:ather it is clear that what modernity is, and even if we can in fact claim to be
living authentically with such a set of assumptions as are listed in the inset above, is as
well an historical construction, as 'aylor reiterates others such as *iet(sche and 5erger
further down the same page. Hany of us, at least in the KdevelopedJ world do live day to
day as if we are prima facie individuals with only material needs, who do not engage in
19;
magical thinking, and who cherish no myths. 5ut as we have already seen, this is how all
ages must have lived after organicity evolved. It may well be true that the collective
conscience of mechanical societies did in fact provide for its members a sure and
undisputed template of cultural beliefs which could be shared by all in a manner that
mimicked nature. ,s soon as diversity of labor and role, hierarchy of status and
differentiality of access to resources took hold, however, this kind of conscience was lost,
to be replaced by alternating modes of consciousness that did not necessarily understand
the world in at all the same manner. 2et the symbolic sphere not only remained, but
underwent an efflorescence of great magnitude and variety. Hythic narratives became
more and more reflections of the worldly state of affairs, and thus became more and more
relevant to the everyday life of persons. Aociety Kworshipping itselfJ had made that orison
much more transparent. 'he current result of this variety of e.perience, religious,
mythical, practical and social, was that the mythic narratives of agrarian organicity were
confronted and overthrown. 'hey were replaced, however, and not simply discarded.
'heir forms remain. 2es, modern knowledge and its accoutrement of technical pra.es
refers to an ob3ectified nature and the phenomenon of human culture in general, and yes,
the content of modern reason is newly detailed and empirically sounded. 5ut making a
distinction between myth and science at any other level than that of content and referent
is dubious, and reminds one of none other than the reductivist tendencies shown by
modern knowledge but having their birthright in the metaphysics of archaic social
organi(ations, especially those from the *ear Iast, which attempted to absolve all forms
into the creative force of the -ne" L'he distinction can be maintained only if there are for
the body several ways of being a body and for the consciousness several ways of being
198
consciousness. < = 'aking such an assumption as the point of departure means reducing
everything that separates us from the true world Q error, disease, and the like Q to a mere
appearance.M (Achut( 18#"!#$ <1;E=%. 'he language of science is as much a symbolic
affair as is the language of myth. 'he search for origins in cosmogonical accounts is the
same for both realms. 'he human desire for e.plaining the KwhyJ of consciousness - a
1uestion that underscores almost all meaning-making activity in all cultures and one that
is the hallmark of humanity Q also drives the construction of both belief and fact. >acts as
well, as @urkheim famously noted, must have their believers. 'hey do no remain in some
other place apart from our need of them, and neither did any god. 'he both of them
maintain not only their relevance but their very e.istence through a language which is no
mere medium, but which is of the elemental character of a reflective and in1uisitive
intelligence" L'hus language is at once the house of 5eing and the home of human
beings. -nly because language is the home of the essence of man can historical mankind
and human beings not be at home in their language, so that for them language becomes a
mere container for their sundry preoccupations.M (+eidegger 1##" !9 <1$#=%. 'he
sense that language is a set of signs which refer or act as vessels of meaning is
epiphenomenal to the historicity of meaningfulness that yet eludes certainty by eliding
our self-doubt into the shadows of memory. 'hat human consciousness is eminently
historical or autobiographical is something that is as much a part of our mundane
e.perience as is any referentiality or symbolic apparatus of he.is, as well as any concrete
imposition of rationali(ed pra.is" L'o the e.tent that language which has thus been
brought into fully into its essence as historical, 5eing is entrusted to recollection.M (ibid%.
'his species of memoria is aporetic insofar as it remains within in its own remnants. 'he
19#
strange pu((le of having e.perienced what has occurred and yet being able to reflect on
its substance and meaning only through the passing of that self-same occurrence strikes
us KdumbJ. )e may be muted by both the sense that we should have then and there
understood what occurred, and by our inability to return to that moment now that we have
in fact understood it. 'his regret is the tenor of all lost loves, amongst many other human
predicaments. 'hat our being in the world worlds along with others and with the world as
it is, is itself a KpreoccupationJ that cannot be reconciled within the envelope of )orld-
5eing that does have the force to unite e.perience and thought in the same moment. 'his
is what LPleads Gadamer to view the functioning of the Khistorically operative
consciousnessJ not as a sub3ective but as an ontological process.M (0almer 18";%. *one
of this is reflected in a pra.is which ignores the symbolic as something itself from the
past, as only an historical entity in the sense of the artifact, and indeed, as even then,
throughout human history, in fact as an artefact, a phony.
'he opening up of the sub3ect by the being of history is part of the problem faced
by pra.es of all kinds. 'here are two distinct responses. Instrumental pra.is opens the
problem of e.istential worth and meaning by e.posing the parochial 1uality of the
techni1ues of he.is. 'his kind of pra.is e.tends the scope of what has been known as
correct without changing its meaning. It is made more meaningful only in the sense that it
is able to accomplish more things in the world. Its growth is always a 1uantity, never a
1uality. Atudents can identify with their vocations not in any assignative way but through
the ac1uisition of measurable and cumulative skill sets. 'hat their upcoming work lives
will do much to construct their dominant life-identities is transparent. ,uthentic and
critical pra.is destroys the former identities, often in a radical manner, and does not hold
19C
out the promise Q nor is it built upon the premise Q that some new and superior identity
will take hold, one which can better withstand the Kways of the worldJ, a world now
known more fully and thus more under control. In fact, LIt is still an open 1uestion for
students how they will create their social identities, and it would be 1uite a success for us
simply to disclose the degree of openness of that 1uestion for each individual.M (5leich
1CC"91%. 'his kind of success is unnecessary for instrumental reason, which needs give
the student only the Khow toJ knowledge of the problem at hand, which cannot be an
e.istential problem because it lacks the ontological imperative. 'hat what one learns in
school does work in the world contains a large measure of the affirmation we would need
in thinking that what we have learned is worth something. 'his new worth is immediately
attached to our self-worth, not unlike the doubling over of status conferred upon us as
vehicles for commodities, as when we appear behind the wheel of a lu.ury automobile or
what have you. Dncritical and rationali(ed pra.is accomplishes the shift in student
identity purely at the level of ability7 this is its shill of skill, its best suit, hand-woven by
the newly skilled hands of its adepts. 5y this means, and by not 1uestioning either its own
place in society or the studentsJ new place in the coming society, the applied theory of
techni1ue succeeds in masking its victory" LIn abolishing the happy unconsciousness of
familial or primitive educations, actions of hidden persuasions which, better than any
other form of education, impose misrecognition of their ob3ective truth (since they tend
towards the point of not even appearing as education% < = the persistence of an educational
system proves that it resolves by its very e.istence the 1uestions raised by its e.istence.M
(5ourdieu and 0asseron 1!"8! <1#E=%. 'he durability of instrumental pra.is lies in its
Ke.tracurricularJ presence. )hat one learns in schooling but especially in the system of
19
universities allows one entrance to the spaces where the technical skills take on a wider
value. *ot merely remuneration and status, but the respect and admiration of those others
who are also the audience for innovations in the technical spheres. *o mere professoriate,
these entrepreneurs or managers need the abilities of the day to constantly improve. 'he
market is only one reason for this. 'he more salient imperative comes from the very
necessity for technical pra.is to continue to sell itself to us as the only relevant Kgame in
townJ. Ao much is this the case even in the early years of education, that LPmost
students really believe that they must conceal or deny the true terms of their citi(enship in
the class and in the society, that school is no place to interrogate their KbackgroundJ or
their history.M (5leich 1CC"9!%. 'he result of the inculcation of attentiveness to skill is
that we lose the ability to speak about both what is Kmost conse1uential ion our livesJ, as
5leich suggest, but also and following necessarily from this fate, to communicate the
conse1uences of this contemporary species of unbelief, an absence of faith which has
nothing whatsoever to do with the turning away from revealed or organi(ed religion. 'he
most pernicious form of unbelief is not agnosticism, but the disinterest in human history
and e.istence as they continue to be lived in all their diversity and problematics.
'echnical rationality claims to con1uer the abscesses of mere belief which had
supposedly rotted the reasoned consciousness of culture. In doing so, it closes the
conversation of humanity and proclaims the end of history.
*evertheless, even in the most scripted of rational environments, even in the most
controlled of social e.periments, even in the most routine of workplaces, the problem of
the symptomatic agues of ongoingness continue to provide us with opportunities to
e.perience more than what we already think we know. 'hat we attempt to avoid this
1$E
encounter with a possible undreamed of or the confrontation with an actual not taken
account of suggests that even with all of its ponderous and stentorian presence in our
lives, technical pra.is needs our ongoing support" LDnless a given e.perience leads out in
to a field previously unfamiliar, no problems arise, while problems are a stimulus to
thinking. 'hat the conditions found in present e.perience should be used as sources of
problems is a characteristic which differentiates education based on e.perience from
traditional education.6 (@ewey 19C"#%. I.periential pedagogy finds a home within the
hermeneutical circle of learning. 2et even technical education must enter such a circle in
a sense, for the skills and know-how necessary to perform a task also lie without the
breadth of previous e.perience. 'he difference is, as we have noted, not one of something
new in principle, because such techne can be considered 4new4 in that we had not the
information or skills beforehand, but something that through its very newness overturns
part of our self-understanding. *o mere skill can accomplish this overturning, though the
hermeneutics of the technical event does in fact overtake at a shallow level our previous
abilities by e.tending them or showing how they are limited in some way. 4'radition4 in
@ewey4s sense is the site of a command over the transmission of skills. It does not refer to
the actuality of forms of education that were inherent in previous modes of production -
the location or sources of other kinds of 4traditions4, including that philosophical or
religious - because the kind of education present in these previous periods was in fact
overwhelmingly e.periential, from the skills of the artisans to those of the fields to those
domestic. :ather, 4 what may be thought of as 4traditional4 is 1uite recent, if we e.clude
the formality of transmissive religious education regarding the te.ts and their e.egetical
properties, which, though at first rote, tended toward the hermeneutical in all of their
1$1
advanced forms. 'he tradition which today can be challenged by e.periential education is
primarily about information and technical pra.is. 0ra.is has been successful in taking the
place of he.is, and thus must ironically now bear the epithet of 4tradition4. 'he way in
which pra.is is gotten across in the classroom provides the bulk of what constitutes
teaching in the academy, which may come across as only the efforts of the autodiktat"
6...the adherence to forms of academic teaching, which we still defend for carefully
considered reasons, confronts the teaching professor of today with overwhelming
problems - and naturally the student has to pay for this, for he is not able to find the
proper access to his teacher.6 (Gadamer 1!";9%. ,s if the teacher was not merely a
vehicle for knowledge or discourse in the )eberian sense but was also overlain with
presenting herself as both the disembodied voice of reason and authority as well as
occupying a physical space that confers the apparent e.tra-humanity of the source of
wisdom upon her, the teacher is as insulated from the e.perience of teaching as is the
information presented from the world" 6'herefore, the student encounters the truly
didactic, namely the role model, almost e.clusively as standing behind a rostrum. In most
academic disciplines, the augmentation of teachers by using assistants cannot be
considered a solution for this shortage.6 (ibid%. 'his presentation of the self of the teacher
has profound implications for the students sense of the use of language and its
relationship to the thinking that is supposedly to be produced by the confluence of
authority and neophyte. Atudents observe the communication process as a one-way
funnel, and many have grown so comfortable with this action that they protest when it is
altered, especially if the alteration re1uires of them some real action and thought. 'his is
in fact a theme in course evaluation, as we will see below, concerning the element of
1$!
pra.is. 'he language of the plaintiff for the loss of the home of being is transparently
about convenience and comfort in the face of a too direct challenge of both he.is and
uncritical pra.is" 6...students are taught to treat their language as a tool, as if it were not
already ineradicably bound up with their individual histories as social beings, as if it can
be cut and shaped into an all-purpose conduit of 4thought4.6 (5leich 1CC"1$%. In order to
divorce the e.perience of others, all of those predecessors who have constructed the
discourse of both the tradition and the world as it has been, we invoke the tongues of the
dead only in a dead language, itself divorced from its own history. -ne encounters an
almost universal boredom, even amongst 4educated4 persons4, if one happens to relate a
simple genealogy of a term. 'here is an e.traordinary disinterest in history of all kinds,
from politics, where it is especially damaging to our current situation, to ethnicity and
gender, and most of all, language and te.t. 'hat the language of technical pra.is should
be only a tool, an intercessor, is the key to its ability to stand aloof from the world and its
diverse e.periences. 'his runs counter to the way in which interpretation moves in the
world, and the manner in which we are supposedly able to find a home in the being of
language" 6,s the reader passes through the various perspectives offered by the te.t, and
relates the different views and patterns to one another, he sets the work in motion, and
also sets himself in motion, too.4 (Iser 1#C"1E8%. >inding a home in language in both the
phenomenological and e.istential senses, means understanding language as one
understands one4s own blood. Language circulates, reaching every part of the corpus of
te.tuality and world. If is life-giving and preserving, and it nourishes the whole
simultaneously as it does each part. 'he work of human life is first written in blood, ink
only afterwards, because we live before we reflect on life. It is this reflection that is short-
1$9
circuited by technical pra.is, and the te.ts with which it documents its own aloofness to
the lifeworld are those with which one can have only the minimal of interactions, the
didactic te.tbook or informational manual. 'hese kinds of te.ts also encourage an
individual isolation, and with the knowledge that everyone is reading 4the same book4, we
do not need to come together and think about it as a learning community" 6'he virtual
interaction between a reader and a te.t is claimed to be both a universal feature of reading
and a description of private e.perience. 'he responsibility of one reader to another, to
groups of readers to previous and subse1uent groups, as well as of writers to one another
and to readers, do not enter this relation as active terms6 (5leich 1CC"1%. 'his
4virtuality4 comes across to us in a number of different and suggestive senses. 'he act of
self-understanding with or through the other as te.tuality is not 1uite present, only almost
or 4virtually4 there. It also presents a surreal version of the reality of the world as te.t, a
4virtual4 world where things are only models of other things and not the 4reality4 that
shapes us from without the classroom. ,s well, as is suggested in the citation, such an
interaction between the person as assumed sub3ect and the te.t as presumed ob3ect is also
4virtual4 when 3u.taposed with the face to face interaction amongst persons as sub3ects.
5ut tis third implication may be premature, as we as readers are also ob3ects in the world
and other persons can be treated by us as ob3ects. -n top of this, the te.tuality is, like an
aesthetic ob3ect, made into a 1uasi-sub3ect by the act of reading and interpretation. 'his
re1uires a specific motive that must drive the interaction with any te.t, but in taking up
this motive, we are also shown the usual manner of ob3ectifying the te.t " 6In 1uoting or
citing another author, for e.ample, < = interpretation is served not if the 1uoting is done in
order to reconstruct the other author4s answer to his original 1uestion, but only if his work
1$$
has motivated a 1uestion for us and we are attempting to apply that work in
understanding, to draw it into a genuine process of interpretation.6 (Gallagher 1!"1$%.
'he authority of the te.t, or even the somewhat second-hand authority of the teacher,
cannot be taken at face value. 'his means much the same as Aagan4s famous e.hortation
regarding the sciences and their method, in that 4arguments from authority are worthless4.
yet there is more to this than meets the empirical eye. Huch of science is contained in
4black bo.es4, which Latour has also famously discussed. In this sense, the authority of
normal science relies on the parado.ical fact that it remains un1uestioned and that its
interpretation solidifies into rather specific forms. , few years ago, when Atephen
+awking cast doubt on much of his own work during a keynote at a large physics
conference, his audience, consisting of the top minds in the field, were 1uite stunned.
'hey doubted the authority of +awking, because it had suddenly taken a turn against 4its
own4 authority. +awking was now seen as speaking against his former self, and this
former self had more authoritative and authorial weight than the presence of the actual
person speaking in a more informal setting. 0ublications trump oralities, discourse trumps
dialogue. 2et because the present version of the living +awking still had enough
historical linkage to his previous work, assumed to emanate from more or less the 4same4
person, after all, his audience eventually admitted that strange as it seemed, they had to at
least listen to +awking and take his doubts, and self-doubts, into consideration to further
the scientific enterprise. )ithin the arts, there is yet more caution. 'he 4nature of things4 is
not readily available as a broker regarding truth. +uman nature is shot through and
through with the sub3ective, and although the universe may be full of mystery, it does not
calculate a lie. 40rogress4 in thinking and learning can be had only at the e.pense of losing
1$;
the ground upon which on thought one stood firm, and this is the case both in and out of
school" 6Indeed, he is lucky who do not find that in order to make progress, in order to go
ahead intellectually, he does not have to unlearn much of what he learned in school.
'hese 1uestions cannot be disposed of by saying that the sub3ects were not actually
learned, for they were learned at least sufficiently to enable a pupil to pass e.amination in
them.6 (@ewey 19C"$#-C%. *either the arts nor the sciences can afford to overthrow their
entire set of truth regimes in one stroke. )e never, in the hermeneutical circle, start from
nought in any case. 'his is why the 4confrontation with tradition4 takes on both an
immanent and an ongoing importance. 'he presence of tradition frames the 1uestions to
be asked, but the Cinterrogation of what has been the case in pra.is does not blink att he
approach of these frames. Auch hori(ons of knowledge and social control as may be in
place in any specific generation4s research are seen rather as testing points, and not
necessary limits. )hy have we not 1uestioned this beforeB might well be a principle
1uery for all embarking on the interpretive dialectic. In being critical of pra.is, we also
must be critical of ourselves, for it is in part our own intellectual and interpretative lapses
that have allowed the inertia of an uncritical tradition to carry on or even grow.
/ertainly the evaluatory tools of technical pra.is provide a kind of pseudo-frame
against which both students and scholars struggle. 'he pedantic ritual of formal e.ams
may end for teachers and professors, but evaluation does not retire until we ourselves do.
Iven then, if one has contributed a corpus of knowledge to the history of discourse, that
same history will forever be our 3udge, though we can take the easy conscience of the fact
that te.ts, as we have seen, must take on a life of their own and thus defend themselves
with and without their readerships. It is clear that the construction of pra.is, even in its
1$8
most didactic and utilitarian guises, is a cultural process that floats in the li1uid of
language in use, and as such, will regularly overflow current evaluations thereof" 6If you
are eager to present language as a social process, you will not need any immediate
reassurance through improved test scores. < = )hat those who have used groups in
language classes al report is that the most palpable change from other classes is that of
student and teacher attitudes.6 (5leich 1CC"1#$-; italics the te.t4s%. *ot 4teaching to the
test4 is a common education faculty bu((-phrase that does tell part of the story. -n the
other hand, to what does one teachB If grading is still re1uired, one evaluates formally.
Iven if grading is absent, as it is in at least half a do(en ,merican liberal arts colleges,
one still must evaluate, in more detail, and more intimately. *o doubt this is better for
prospective employers, who can view written reports coming from real people who have
interacted with one another in intimate pedagogic settings rather than the banal transcript
with its academic codes and utter lack of responsible detail, but nevertheless, the student
and teacher are performing self-diagnostics time and again. -ne might well 1uestion the
5leich4s sentiment in the first following sentence, while perhaps nodding in sober
agreement with the sentiment in the second" 6*o one really believes that growth and
development of people will suddenly become invisible if it is not tested and graded. 'he
real fear is that students and teachers will abandon their sense of responsibility toward
one another unless fear itself is used as a deterrent.6 (ibid"1C9%.
.vii
>ear used arbitrarily,
rather than in some evolutionary situation where we look to survive - we may be
confronted by nature, for instance, or accosted by a marginal member of society -
inevitably hardens the human being beyond learning. ,ll those who underwent abuse as
children report this is the case. Institutional abuse of the old-school variety is increasingly
1$#
on the wane world-wide, but this does not mean that it has not been replaced by other
kinds of formal or informal controls. 'he sense that through the evaluation of a technical
pra.is we become more fit is surely the left-over of an imperialist age where the scions of
the top Iuropean and ,merican universities were bred to e.ert and maintain the
authoritarian voice of global empire" 6'his educational ideal of hardness, in which many
may believe without reflecting about it, is utterly wrong. 'he idea that virility consist in
the ma.imum degree of endurance long ago became a screen-image for masochism, that
as psychology has demonstrated, aligns itself all too easily with sadism.6 (,dorno
1C"1C <18=%. ,t each level of the contemporary educational system endurance
remains the key feature, no more so than in attaining the arts 0h.@., where the rite of
passage initiation rituals are often so painful as to cause a large attrition rate. 'hese rites
have little to do with academic issues, and are often bereft of intellect, in that they mirror
older associations with religious cults and other elect groups who wish to ma.imi(e not
their service to the wider society, but rather their separation from it.
+ermeneutic pedagogy as it concerns itself with pra.is, the second phase of the
circle of self-understanding and the entrance onto the interpretative torus of the applied
theory and practical knowledge suggests a very different route. 'he dialogue present in
this phase rests in the ability of the teacher to provide the history of ideas, to show to
students how knowledge comes to be in the first place, something he.is cannot do. 'he
dialectic present provides a criti1ue of custom and an auto-criti1ue of discourse. 5oth of
these must be accomplished within a learning community" 6'he plan, in other words, is a
co-operative enterprise, not a dictation. 'he teacher4s suggestion is not a mold for a cast-
iron result but is a starting point to be developed into a plan through contributions from
1$C
the e.perience of all engaged in the learning process.6 (@ewey 19C"#!%. It is much
easier, and thus also much more common, for even a critical pra.is to limit its criti1ue to
the customary forms and norms of unreflective social life. 'his kind of criti1ue is also
very popular with youth, for it gives cantor to their already present suspicions regarding
the 4fairness4 of the way in which they have been forced to live, both in school and in the
home. In this sense, the half-criti1ue of pra.is is an e.tension of adolescence. It presents
the safest means of challenging the system and the world as it has been. Iven though
such a criti1ue is absolutely necessary, alone it can 1uickly degenerate into mere
criticism, as if we were surveying the clothing or child raising habits of other people. It
also garners to itself the false security of the ironist, as when we can scathingly pro3ect
our disdain on our fellow humans, but remind ourselves that we are, after all, more clever
than they. 'he teacher must be alert to the forms of student-centered classroom styles in
these situations, because certain arenas are all the more 1uick to reproduce or even
generate the adolescent criticism of half-criti1ue" 6, small group functions in part as a
4safe haven4, a place where one4s doubts about authority can find a sympathetic response
to begin with7 perhaps an even more permanent set of views can be cultivated and
nurtured with less compliance to the teacher than if one had those views by oneself.6
(5leich 1CC"!C9%. 'he 1ualities of insulation found when students 4get together4 and
4study4 - a term associated with a variety of other activities, including those both intimate
and gustatory - can be both salutary to the fullest e.tent of an hermeneutic pra.is or
detrimental to them. It is best if those in the groups do not have much prior knowledge of
one another, and also if the small groups are made up of structurally diverse persons,
students of different genders and ethnicities, if possible, from contrasting generations and
1$
social classes and the like. If so, this diversity will almost always run counter to the
tendency of persons to become cli1uish in their analysis of the topics of the course. Amall
group dynamics are well known to develop cult-like 1ualities early on in their careers. If
this occurs, it is all the more likely that there work will bear a reproductive and even an
incantatory design. Instead, 6...as a hermeneutical task, understanding includes a
reflective dimension from the very beginning. Dnderstanding is not a mere reproduction
of knowledge, that is, it is not a mere act of repeating the same thing. rather,
understanding is aare of the fact that it is indeed an act of repeating.6 (Gadamer
1#8"$; italics the te.t4s%. Ao the students, working in whatever kind of community
internal to the course, and of e1ual importance, encountering the world outside of the
classroom but concurrent to the e.perience of the content of pra.is, must be reminded
that their learning consist of the alertness they bring to what they would say if they only
repeated what they already knew, whether or not this prior pre3udice comes from he.is -
perhaps inevitably most often the case or some version of technical or half-critical pra.is.
Oery often one observes that the degrees of pra.is are placed in a hierarchy by this or that
student, pending their own biases. Aome students are very comfortable with critici(ing
only others, others take self-criticism to heart and abuse their own conscience with it. It is
likely that these latter have had some kid of authoritarian or oppressive upbringing, as did
Fohn Atuart Hill, for instance. -ne must work diligently as an intellectual and ethical
mentor in the realm of authentic pra.is to bring both kinds of students 4out of themselves4.
-n the one hand, the ironist or other-directed critic of the insulated student must be
placed in a new relationship regarding his peers and his others, one that takes account of
empathetic understanding and broadens the student4s e.perience of human life in general.
1;E
-n the other hand, the insular student who practices a kind of self-loathing must be
brought into the light of a self-understanding that sees that each of us has doubts about
the meaning or significance of our e.istence and what we do in life. 'his is an auto-
empathy, suggesting that we can afford to be gentle with ourselves in a social world full
of the sharp corners of unreflective self-criticism. Iach of these individuated forms of
authenticity in pra.is set up a dialectic between what one has taken for a final authority -
in the case of the ironist, himself, in the case of the doubter, the world of others - and the
world as it is, as well as the discourse of theoretical pra.is" 60rimarily, what is produced
in educational e.perience, in the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar, or
between student and teacher, is understanding which is self-understanding. 'o say the
same thing another way, learning involves the production of one4s own possibilities.6
(Gallagher 1!"1$9, cf. also +erbert :ead 1uoted in Achiller 18;"1C in that this
dialectic takes one the 4harmony4 of contradisposed worlds%. 'he two main limits that are
confronted by possibility within self-understanding are the irony of the critic, who uses
pra.is to bolster his arguments that people are basically stupid and the best one can do is
see through this and maintain one4s distance, and the compulsive doubts of the self-critic,
who uses pra.is to analy(e all that is wrong with her and her alone. It is unfortunate that
the academy itself is populated with many professors who are cut from these two cloths,
but it should not surprise us, for whatever childhood may have been like for them, the
professoriate is trained to become an intellectual and cultural elite and thus can easily
adopt the posture of the ironist, while at the same time the training itself is so very
authoritarian and critical that its minion are also likely to adopt an internal form of
damaging self-criticism that ironically lends itself to the disdain of others as well.
1;1
'he enlightenment that authentic pra.is can give to both of these ma3or forms of
student attitudes is the same one that was iterated in the actual Inlightenment" 6...we all
stand on the ground of the modern Inlightenment, whose fundamental tenet was so
powerfully formulated by &ant" 4+ave the courage to use your own understanding.4. 'his
statement was directly aimed at the authority of the church and the prevailing political
powers...6 (Gadamer 18"11C%. 'his sense of self must at first be divorced from its
previous shell of authority, which is perhaps more likely to come from mass media today
than its main institutional sources of the eighteenth century, although state propaganda
directed through corporate media still plays a defining role in our early identity
construction. 'he 4self, in other words, must not remain static. It cannot retain the self-
centered manner of e.pression that denies selfhood to others to self, nor can it rest
comfortably imagining that it has understood this or that part of itself in any ultimate
manner. 'he self-understanding of the student must not become the safe deposit vault of a
half-critical pra.is. Indeed, this is more dangerous than even the student who only cares
about techni1ue, for the technician himself takes himself out of the play of the social
world, and ends up in the company of his technology alone. 0erhaps the danger in this
route is that persons dehumani(e themselves and lack the auto-empathy needed to
differentiate themselves from pieces of technology in the ob3ect realm" 6Dnfortunately,
those who espouse the cause of liberation are themselves surrounded and influenced by
the climate which generates the banking concept, and often do not perceive its true
significance or its dehumani(ing power.6 (>riere 1#E"88%. 'he two kinds of limits that
student carry with them into the classroom of pra.is can thus be transformed into two
kinds of practical limits7 one, the ironist who gravitates to techni1ue and technology for
1;!
its own sake because he cannot trust other human beings to be more than there assured
stupidities suggest, and two, the self-critic who buries herself in the te.t as if it were a
thing in itself. 5oth kinds turn away from the world as it is, for they assume that their
e.perience in the world as it has been cannot change because the world does not change.
'he transmissive model of technical or instrumental pra.is is well suited for both the
input of the ironist and self-critic as well as their outputs, the technician and the theorist.
Learning in both these cases represents the triumph of pra.is as the feigned e.tension of
he.is, as the non-critical stock of information at hand that allows one to keep one4s
distance from oneself and others" 6'he lifeless letter takes the place of the living
understanding, and a practised memory is a surer guise than genius and feeling.6 (Achiller
18;"$E <1#;=%.
2et an entire world of change is manifest within authentic pra.is, which carries
itself outside of the classroom into the world and transforms it. It remains for us to
e.plore how the practical wisdom of reflective e.perience and theoretical knowledge
combines to perform more than the world transformed, but the transfiguration of self as a
1uasi-ob3ect in the being of the world4s 1uasi-sub3ectivity.
'valuations and Class (ctivities:
5ut first let us e.amine the common themes of how students react to the presence
and transformation of both instrumental and critical pra.is in the classroom, and then
suggest another couple of class activities to e.pose the relationship between authentic
pra.is as critical applied theory and the other sources of mere techni1ue which surmise to
keep their distance from both thought and action.
1;9
/omments regarding pra.is may be divided into three kinds" a% the tension over
e.pectations students had concerning freedom and structure of the class, that is, the sense
of being on their own was contrasted with the desire for a more centered authority7 b% the
distinction that could be made between the knowledge of pra.is, whether it was seen as
technical or philosophical, and students4 actual ability to think, the thought of which often
appeared to them to be in some conflict with official knowledge7 and c% the problem of
trying to figure out 3ust e.actly what was going on in the course, what we can call here
the 4malaise of melange4, for it is the action of both pedagogic events and e.perience of
the in-class conte.ts and the encounter between te.t and readers and assignments and
writers that sometimes seem so confusing as to sabotage their combined efforts. )e will
see, however, that the confusion in the main results from the conflicting e.pectations
students bring to the class. -n the one hand they desire liberation, but they desire it
within the confines of the world as it has been. 'hey seek a prosthetic pra.is which, by its
sheer e.tension of who and what they believe themselves to be, will transform them into
a new being. Dltimately, this is the problem with any pedagogy, however reflective, that
limits itself to critical pra.is and eschews making the synthetic turn to phronesis.
'he following comments were typical with regard to the tension between freedom
and structure" 6, little more guidelines on presentations and papers would be helpful. I
found the e.pectations were not clearly laid out which made the assignments difficult. It
is nice to have freedom on assignments, but if the e.pectations were more clear it would
make it easier.6 (!nd year student%. )ithout lampooning the obvious contradictions here,
this kind of comment speaks directly to the problem of thresholds. )hat amount of
responsibility should students be asked to take when it comes to working without strict
1;$
instructionsB )hat resources might they have of which they themselves are unawareB Is
freedom something that is only 4nice4 to have, a lu.ury, or is it rather a necessity for
authentic learningB ,nother version of this plaintiff takes this form" 6I am used to more
structured classes and this was interesting. It is kind of strange going into a final without
having some type of e.am earlier in the semester. I really en3oyed our first day in the
sculpture garden and other class discussions.6 (!nd year student%. 'e use of diplomatic
code words here - 4interesting4, 4strange4, 4some type4 - does not mask the general sense of
unease in the sentiments. 'he idea that students should have more control over how they
are feeling about this or that course event lurks in the background. , different result
follows" 6Group activities gave us a method to directly apply what we were taught in
class to be firmly cemented within our minds.6 (1st year student%. +ere, freedom is
associated with the gaining of more control over the material. 'he irony here is that the
liberating leverage of the activity is ameliorated not only by the sense that there were
groups that participated in it together - one is not on one4s own and thus one has to be
attentive to the needs of others, often seen as a limit on at least personal freedom - and
that the ultimate purpose of these somewhat disconcerting pedagogic events was to apply
or demonstrate e1ually odd concepts in the world, thereby making the student feel more
at home with what at first appeared to be all too new. ,s well, it was typical of students to
ask for the burden of proof to be placed on the transmissive materials themselves, as if
transmission could take place and then freedom of thinking or reflection would
immediately and necessarily follow. 'his is likely a naive e.pectation" 6-ne thing that
cold have been done differently is if the notes were structured a little better. often they
seemed rather separate and were hard to follow. >or e.ample, some of the tables or charts
1;;
we were given were difficult to understand and I wasn4t sure what they were referring or
the relation of the material being discussed.6 (1st year student%. 'his same student
immediately concludes, however, by stating that 6I really en3oyed the fact that we were
able to move into groups and participate in discussions rather than 3ust being lectured to.6
It is likely that students see the active part of the class as both a 4safe haven4, as 5leich
suggests, but also as a kind of space where they could debrief each other about the new
ideas in the course as well as about their concerns over the clarity of the transmissive
materials. Atudents would seem to be using the more 4free4 pedagogic e.periences to loop
around to at least their own form of structured learning. 'hat is, all e.periential action
may be thought of having the effect of drawing the learner back into the more
comfortable folds of a self-understanding which is already present, but can be e.tended
by new knowledge, e.tended, but not overturned. ,nother similar comment" 6'he
professor is very capable and able, however, lectures were a little hard to follow and the
notes didn4t really have a clear cut structure. I en3oyed the group discussion - made me
feel comfortable and at home.6 (1st year student%. 'he problem of freedom appears also
in relation to evaluation" 6Hy only complaint is how we were graded was never made
entirely clear but I think this was due to the freedom of content of the assignments we
were given which I appreciated.6 (!nd year student%. 'his tension, perhaps more than any
of the other associated with the presence of both the airs of freedom and the structures of
control in the classroom through the teacher4s presence and the e.tension of surveillance
of that authority through readings and assignments which must be completed outside of
the physical space of the actual classroom, calls to mind 5leich4s and other4s
commentaries about grading in general.
1;8
'he second theme within student evaluations concerning the general drift of
forms of pra.is in their learning concerned the perceived difference between the official
knowledge of the course - what students felt they should be learning - and their own
thoughts about it - as we have seen, often reduced by pedagogic authorities to the status
of mere 4opinions. 'hese kinds of comments almost always showed the 3u.taposition of
something the students felt to be important that they might imagine the professor would
agree with, and something they also felt important but might well have imagined that the
professor could not care less about" 6I thought the assignments were useful because they
encouraged reflection, but were not highly structured or re1uiring too much time to
complete. Hy only complaint was that the reading load was a little bit much for a three
credit <twelve week= class.6 ($th year student%, or 6'he class was much more thought
provoking than other classes I have taken. te.ts were good, but it would have helped to
have some secondary te.ts to help interpret the primary te.ts. three hours without a break
is a little long in my opinion, but I en3oyed the class.6 ($th year student%. )ere these
students concerned that their own interpretations might not measure up in some manner
to possible published, and thus more official insightsB In other words, did students feel a
trepidatious about tackling primary sources - in their length and their literacy - without
the usual help from synthetic works or commentariesB Indeed, such te.ts are often used
alone, without their own sources, and thus could not be said to act as aids to the canonical
discourse. ,s well, there was a sense that students wanted to aspire to a higher
understanding or literacy through the unstructured classroom but with the presence of
highly structured te.ts or assignments" 6'he free form structure of the class was useful in
achieving this goal and I think it is e.tremely valuable as it is a very non-traditional
1;#
teaching method, though at times his e.planations of concepts were very theoretical and
thus hard to understand.6 (9rd year student%. 'here was, on top of this an e.pectation
amongst students that the 4names4 they had previously heard of would always constitute
the sources of official discourse, and that they themselves should not stray to far from
what they had been told were the 4correct4 interpretations" 6'his course has e.posed new
areas of thought for me along the lines of 4fact4. I greatly appreciate learning about the
philosophies of Har. and )eber.6 (1st year student%. 2et literacy issues continued to be
defined against the practices of he.is that student, especially in the early years of
undergraduate study, had become accustomed to, rather than to the cumulative discursive
theories of pra.is" 62es, my skills and competencies have increased and improved
through taking this course. I now have a better understanding of the sociological point of
view and am able to relate these concepts to things I have learned in my own life.6 (1st
year student%. 0ra.is was also often seen as set in stone, something that could only be
applied, and not inherently open to further reflection" 6It has not changed my opinion of
the field of study, however, it has helped me to understand western culture better. It has ,
more often than not reinforced my own views because of the illogical and opinion based
4proofs4 of certain scientific studies. 'hey are all still theories for the most part and take as
much belief as being religious.6 (1st year student%. 'his kind of sentiment clearly
e.presses the bias towards the physical sciences, and the sub3ectivity of the human
sciences remains an open 1uestion. hence the idea that one might take seriously the
criti1ues embedded within the work of social philosophy is itself 1uestionable. 'he
world, and discourse, thus can work in only one way. 'he problem of perspectives raises
itself in may comments within this rubric" 6'his class was different from other classes in
1;C
the sense that there is not one sub3ect being learned. 'here are many different aspects of
life that are mentioned and discussed. 2et I think I understand the main idea...6 (!nd year
student%. 'he whirl of warp and weft within the te.tuality of thought is often so confusing
for students that they retreat toward an 4essence4 of some kind, even if they also often
reali(e they are making this centered formula up for themselves. 'his inertia is not merely
the product of he.is in all its locally diverse forms. especially when the target of student
criticism or misunderstanding is the arts, one observes the unmistakable presence of
technical pra.is as both the correct manner of thinking but also as an end in itself. yet
even here this can be turned to reflective use" 62es, one thing that is learned is the
purpose and need for science in all aspects. +ow you come to understand things and
1uestioning your basic beliefs is essential to be genuine.6 (!nd year student%, or, 6'his
course did not change my view of my place in the world, but rather added to meaning that
I had already established prior to taking this class.6 ($th year student%. if the limits of a
combination of local custom and instrumental knowledge or information seem at first
daunting, they are not impregnable to critical pra.is honed within the ambit of students4
personal e.periences. 0articularly effective is the drawing out of e.perience that the
students have not yet been able to e.plain or give fulfilling meaning to, as we will see
when we come to both commentaries and activities related directly to phronesis, in the
final chapter.
Lastly are comments that are related to the problem of the sheer amount of
information even in a basic and mostly transmissive setting, with pra.is being defined in
part by its deluge of official thinking and narrative, and thus only partly authenticating
itself by an auto-criti1ue" 'he malaise suffered by students regarding the melange of
1;
philosophical works and ideas is a kind of cognitive 4shell-shock. 'his rather non-
academic effect must be accounted for if pra.is is going be fully present in the classroom
and also without it" 6I would have liked more notes printed out. I often felt I didn4t have
ade1uate time to copy down notes, listen to the professor, and make my own
observations.6 (1st year student%. 'he following was also typical" 6'ry to use language a
first year student is likely to know, most of the time I had no idea what was going on.6
(1st year student%. ,nother , perhaps more constructive version of this is echoed here" 6I
was referencing the dictionary in this class more so than in any other class due to the high
vocabulary of the professor. I have therefore learned new concepts and vocabulary.6 (9rd
year student%. 'he problem of general student literacy has been remarked upon perhaps
overmuch, by analysts as well as students" 6'his is one of those classes that initially
makes me cringe with the vocabulary and weight of the sub3ect, but in the end I am
grateful for it really helps push me to e.pand my mind and ideas that I entertain.6 (1st
year student%. )hat is of concern here is that pra.is itself does not get lost in its own
language, whether this language be a technical one - the common complaints about
disciplinary 43argons4, which even colleagues from other realms of intellectual work are
liable to trot out in times of linguistic distress - or more importantly an authentic
aesthetic, ethical, or philosophical one. 'he at first popular idea that the students
themselves could translate this work into their own language by teaching themselves and
others must be e.ercised with tremendous caution, as this rather damning comment
suggests7 6'he professor only taught for the first two months. >or the last four weeks of
class there were group presentations. I do not feel that I should have paid five hundred
dollars for a class of which the professor taught only one-third. I felt that the last months
18E
were a waste....6 (!nd year student%. )hile I must have actually taught two-thirds of the
course, the point about relying on students to manage the literacy and communicate it
effectively is no doubt still made. ,t the same time, the balance between thinking aloud
with some seriousness and the e.pectations student might bring regarding their own
abilities - which once again show traces of both the ironist and the self-critic amongst
their peers - remains a delicate one, and one which, more than any other aspect of the
presence of pra.is in the classroom, inflames student rhetoric" 6I felt lost for much of the
course because the language of the lectures was over my head. 'he professor needs to
understandably take an academic approach, but not at the e.pense of the student4s
comprehension.6 (!nd year student%. *ot all students e.cerpted themselves from the
responsibility ideally associated with dialogical learning" 6,s suggested before, the
fluency of myself and others was tested, but I soon adapted to the particular style of
presenting ideas.6 (1st year student%. -nce again, the apparent informality of the
classroom belied the seriousness of the sub3ect matter" 6Oery comfortable 4homey4
atmosphere. 'he professor was laid back and didn4t treat us like kids. +owever, I
struggled through the actual course content because he assumed at times that we, or at
least I, knew far more than I actually did.6 (1st year student%. In this way, rather than
have the form and norm of he.is intrude upon the space of learning, one might use it as
an illusion, so that critical pra.is can appear unmolested by previous distractions or
limitations. ,s well, if the teacher takes seriously the informality and participates in it as
a member of the class, rather than using it as a mere screen for the velvet glove of
authority, there are pedagogic advantages to be had" 6Oery fluent communication of ideas.
+e shared some of his own personal e.periences with the class so was very competent in
181
sharing with us what he wanted to hear. I was made to feel at home during this course due
to its small si(e and freedom of personal e.pression. I was able to get to know everyone
on a personal basis and thus share answers.6 (!nd year student%. )e can note the lingering
suggestion that the student still desires to know what the teacher 4wants4, and also 4uses4
their peers to gain insight into what the 4answers4 might be.
'wo in class activities that I have found over the years to be 1uite conducive to
not only the e.position of the official version of propagandi(ed pra.is attempting to
mas1uerade as he.is, but also to contrast technical and critical pra.is, come from the
diverse parents of philately and criminology. ,% the political narrative of the nation state
as represented in images of postage stamps" Atamps are easily found, and one does not
need to be a collector in order to harvest large amounts of them from all countries simply
by going on line and buying or bidding at auction on bulk lots of common place philatelic
items. Iither bring in pre-arranged sets to the class, e.emplifying a specific point you
wish to make regarding the official rewriting of history, the manner in which figures are
portrayed, who is on a stamp and who is not, what topics - for instance, public service
announcements for everything from dental and mental health to new traffic signs and
everything in between - constitute iterative themes or tropes in the language of political
culture and what topics never show up, for instance, homelessness. ,sk what links
apparently disparate historical and contemporary figures, scenes, mythic narratives and
non-human images together. )hat or who constitutes the 4good citi(en4, and the like.
/ompare and contrast stamps from different periods - colonialism to neo-colonialism, for
instance - and different countries, especially those 4developed4 and 4developing4. Atudents
will rapidly get a sense that there beliefs regarding their own culture histories have been
18!
polished and manufactured over the generations to cast a specific, and rather narrow light
across the diversity of human history. ,s well, the technical achievements of mass
societies are highlighted once again as if the tools of pra.is were only designed for the
technological progress of the human species, even if many of these innovations remain
unshared by most of humanity to this day. 5% the 4sentencing circle4" *ot unlike the
stigmati(ing circle outlined above, the sentencing circle brings together students4 personal
and e.periential takes on the 3ustice system and the legal discourses. have students sit in a
circle and 3oin them. ,sk each student to recount a time when they broke the law, or felt
they engaged in an otherwise unethical act which might be beyond the reach of formal
legal procedures. I am always astonished at what young persons 4get up to4 over the years,
including 1uite serious crimes such as assault, theft of e.pensive commodities, serious
vandalism or arson, illicit drug use and abuse, and se.ual misconducts. )hat is more
astonishing are the la. sentences that are pronounced upon them by their peers, often
including the forgiving phrase 4time served4. 'his then is the second part of the e.ercise.
ask the group to pass sentence on the 4offenders4 and to e.plain their sentencing
procedures. 'he acts of 3urisprudence and hermeneutic feats are impressive to behold.
'his second activity allows students to e.plore the interface between forms of pra.is, the
legalistic and technical applications of 3ustice on the ground, which in theory might well
represent our ideals, but which enacted sometimes fails to do so. >urthermore, it allows
students to negotiate with each other over matters of some import, and thus generate an
ethical conversation where one must not only confront the tradition of normative
e.pectations that society has conferred upon all of us, but also the personal emotions of
actual or possible victims. 'he fact that the perpetrators and the victims are never in the
189
same class conte.t aids this discussion and gives it a theoretical bent, and this in turn
allows students to understand the process of theory building itself within the discourses.
)e will see that like the activities associated with the e.position of he.is, those
associated with the interrogation of and by pra.is may also be e.tended by the third and
final phase of the hermeneutical circle of teaching and learning, that of the synthesis of
e.perience and knowledge, action and reflection, to be found in practical wisdom.
$. 0hronesis - e.perience and knowledge as practical wisdom
>or true education disdains polluting itself with the needing and desiring
individual" it knows how wisely to give the slip to those, who would like to secure it as a
manes for egoistic aims7 and if even one person fancies himself to hold it fast, in order
now perhaps to make a living out of it and to satisfy the necessities of life through its
e.ploitation, then it runs away suddenly with inaudible steps and with a mien of derision.
(*iet(sche !EE9"C! <1C#!=%.
$.1 %pening the &ermeneutic Circle through !uspicion
+he ,ull Humanity of Phronesis
18$
'he terms in any dialectical relation are not par of an arithmetic formula. 'hesis
and ,nti-thesis do not add up to a synthetic position. 'he third term e.ists in an
archiphonemic relation to the plane of the other two. It stands uplifted from them, and
constitutes a gestalt, whose substance is more than the sum of the parts of the content of
the other two. 'hus practical wisdom is not a simple combination of customary habit and
technical know how, nor even the fullness of the e.perience of the natural attitude
leavened or e.tended by the theoretical prosthesis of discourse and technology. 0hronesis
is, rather, the ability to reflect theoretically upon one4s e.periences. to have e.perience in
the lighted space of being, a being which is now put into touch with the e.istential
envelope of )orld through language and thought that are not mere functions of the
hyletic life. 'he synthesis of the dialectic transforms its two previous figures, and then
taking them together, transfigures their sum in its own turn. +e.is is transformed not by
its running up against the instrumental rationality of techne. In doing so, it is only altered,
e.tended as we have seen above, and made more sure of itself. It carries on, in other
words, with the bloated blitheness of anyone who has had his most cherished and local
opinions confirmed by official sources. +e.is comes to 5eing only through its
combination with the reflective and critical knowledge of authentic pra.is -this is theory4s
truest 4application4 - and when it is uplifted into its new being, that of the practical ability
of an understanding which is also self-understanding. +e.is now no longer is naive about
its origins and its inertia, 3ust as pra.is cannot rest in technicalities and abstract models.
In its turn, pra.is too is transformed. *ot by disdaining he.is and seeking to supplant it,
and neither by merely e.tending it without being fundamentally genealogical and critical
about it. 0ra.is is transformed rather by deepening its understanding of where its own
18;
origins, the cultural and historical roots of both custom and e.perience. /ritical and
theoretical thinking, the scientific and philosophical attitudes combined, are yet practiced
by human beings who also must e.ist in their various cultures as the day to day citi(ens
of living on. If pra.is reflects and 1uestions this mode of being in the world then it too
begins to uplift itself into the realm of phronesis. >inally, practical wisdom also does not
rest smugly atop the hori(ontal of internecine conflict, custom and theory, belief and
knowledge forever distracted, staring across the ontological fence erected by otherwise
distant neighbors. 0hronesis must regularly delve into the other plane, traversing such a
boundary as if it were only a metaphor. In doing so, it replenishes its own self-
understanding. )isdom does not descend from the cloud of 5eing, it rushes up from the
grounds of beings, and it is to these grounds that teaching and learning must unite in
reaching.
'his entire process is characteri(ed by a kind of hopeful suspicion. -ur doubts are
those of discontent, but they do not already have the tragic tinge of pessimism, let alone
nihilism, that the darker shadows of doubt impel forward. )e are suspicious of the nature
of culture, the world as it has been, and the world around us in its social ongoingness.
*iet(sche homes in on the utilitarian desires of modern education, but of course this is
but one draw, even for us. ,ccreditation also produces the status of a pro3ected egotism,
as well as the fulfillment of an intro3ected egoism, the souci de soi that can as well
distance ourselves from the practical wisdom offered by the encounter with other beings.
It remains the primary manner in which we turn away from the worlding of the world,
and the motive force we apply to nature to make it give itself to us, penetrating and
delving, demanding that it yield" 6If we understand 4nature4 as that which culture has
188
always taken itself to have left behind but with which it still must settle accounts, then
even *iet(sche4s radical interpretation entails that tragedy is a means for reweaving the
future of culture out of its historical past.6 (+orowit( !EE1"1E%. 'he ability of the wider
nature to connect its present and past through the advent of a continuous future-creating
has always made a deep impression upon human beings. *ature connects the beginning
and the end in a way that humans cannot yet do. and indeed, if we gain such a power we
will cease to be human, not that such a future in principle is to be deplored. *ature, like
the :aven, eats from the dead and yet goes on living, in fact, it eats of itself in order to
live. *ecrophagous cannibalism has no real meaning outside of our cultural confines, and
the horror we may visit upon ourselves in the darkest orgies of self-destruction does not
touch the indifference that the natural world e.udes within what for it constitutes the
most mundane of day to day ecological processes. Ao nature would seem to have a kind
of ultimate wisdom, the kind that human beings might well seek, and due to our finitude
and limited consciousness, fall into the abyss that awaits all ultimacies, the pit of
meaningless death. 'his is likely part of the reason why ,ristotle observes two kinds of
wisdom in the world, the phronesis of nature and that of humanity. +uman phronesis is
linked to the crucial event of human foresight, something granted to us by 0rometheus"
6'hus, for e.ample, ,ristotle claimed that certain animals also clearly possess phronesis.
+e was thinking primarily about bees and ants, about animals which gather food for the
winter and so, from a human point of view, reveal foresight, something which must
include an awareness of time.6 (Gadamer 18"$# <1C8=%. -f course this is but an
analogy, as evolutionary instinct can often give the appearance of anticipatory
intelligence. , true awareness of time includes its own history, the ever shifting
18#
e.perience of a life which does not run on the rails of predetermined behavior and
reaction. It also must include the abstract knowledge of one4s own finitude, and thus an
awareness of the historicity of time, in that we cannot have foreknowledge of our own
precise demises, but must have the ability to imagine the biographical, and increasingly
today, the collective, end of life so that we can, perhaps ironically, live on. Ao far as we
know, only humanity betrays this much more fragile state of affairs, and thus ,ristotle
conserved his more profound definition of practical wisdom for the sphere of human
ethics" 6+e considered phronesis not only as the clever, skilful discovery of means for
meeting specific tasks, not only as an awareness of what is practical, of how to reali(e
incidental goals, but also as the same for setting the goals themselves and taking
responsibility for them. 'he concept of phronesis thereby ac1uires, and this is what is
important, a substantive determination.6 (ibid"$#-C%.
.viii
,s well, 3ust as does nature ever
renew itself through a seeming play of forces whose constellation is vast and comple.,
the organicity of forethought plays upon its past e.perience 3ust as it must take into
account the present conte.t, and yet imagine outcomes, even attempting to calculate them
and predict their plausibilities. nature of course does none of this internal work, but we
are no longer nature. )e must contrive all of the steps that automatically take place in the
cosmic manifold. In doing so, we restore our sub3ectivity to its proper accounting" 6...play
involves putting into effect one4s freedom, which strips the real world of its reality and
4releases sub3ectivity4.6 (Gallagher 1!"1$#%. 2et play in the hermeneutic sense much
more closely resembles the action of nature, and the sub3ects of the play are not the
players themselves, the goal is not human freedom, but the non-goal of renewal. In this
sense, the modern understanding of a non-teleological evolution in nature is affirmed"
18C
60lay is an impersonal movement in which sub3ectivity loses itself.6 (ibid"$#-C%. *ot that
the playing humanity is somehow not serious, or that it attains the indifference of the
process of nature. Guite the contrary. 0lay - imagination, dialogue, even criti1ue -
contains a 4sacred seriousness4 that cannot be had by any other means. It is necessary to
create self-understanding in the face of both he.is and pra.is, and thus is a ma3or
character in the synthetic action through which these two worlds of human activity are
reconciled and uplifted" 6'he self is nothing other than this playful process of
transcendence and appropriation taking place through the possibilities opened up for it in
art, in action, in all educational e.perience.6 (Gallagher 1!";!%. If this is the case,
practical wisdom comes into its own only when the play of beings opens upon the space
of 5eing. &nowing in the special sense of coming to know, the mode-of-being-knowing
which is forthcoming and not resting in forehaving, plays itself out in the dialogue of
being-together which is to say, with beings other to the sensibilities of previous pre3udice,
which might be characteri(ed as within-being or with-beings, depending upon whether or
not we are only ourselves, or attempting to relate to others but within the cast of norms or
techni1ues. In this way, then, the play of beings becomes authentic by risking itself in its
own 4unresting4. 'his restlessness, once again, in the dialectic, 4hopeful yet discontent4,
must play in order to approach that which is its very own-most" 65eing is the nearest. yet
the near remains farthest from man. Han at first clings always and only to beings. 5ut
when thinking represents being as beings it no doubt relates itself to 5eing. In truth,
however, it always thinks only of beings as such...6 (+eidegger 1##"!1E-1 <1$#=%. 'his
kind of truth proposes itself from the world as it has been, inasmuch as it can rest upon
the propositions, tried and true, of our e.pectations regarding both he.is and pra.is.
18
*either of these alone can surprise us in any profound manner, although we may be
momentarily taken aback by the statistical or detailed discoveries of a descriptive science,
as when a new species is found or the presence of a lost city uncovered. 2et the truth of
these events escapes the discourse of truths. , new being is a being created, and its
evenement proposes that there is another aspect to 5eing and its )orld that we knew not.
Iach scientific discovery is an event in the plot of self-discovery, 3ust as each new
understanding of the sub3ected ob3ectives of the social world is a moment of self-
clarification of our location in that world. )ho we are, in the deepest sense, is premised
upon what the world holds in store for us. -ur very identities are presaged upon the
identifications of new worlds, ones that have not yet been lived by previous guises of
humanity and do not fall into the dominion of what we already have known to be the
truth of things" 65ecause this dominion is as much a feeling and a value as it is an
ordinary piece of propositional 4truth4, one cannot be wrong to claim its transiency and
impalpability. 5ut one can find no better use for the inward sense of dominion that is both
the starting point for the reconstruction of one4s social being, and the starting point for the
pursuit of knowledge.6 (5leich 1CC"$%.
,ll of this points in the direction not of ploy - for this seeks to use the known in a
manner which sabotages the other4s self-understanding rather than aiding its maturing -
but of play - which seeks rather the opening up of the self to the other in the risk of
movement away from what it has been as a self. /ommon to the ethical notions of the
4neighbor4 and virtue, practical wisdom as the sudden abode of 5eing in the language of
learning appears but cannot root itself. Iven learning from one4s e.periences means also
and inevitably to apply them elsewhere in the form of understanding a new e.perience. In
1#E
the encounter with the newness of what has the potential to become 4hermeneutic4 in the
sense of both its demand that we interpret it and in doing so its demand to overturn our
prior pre3udices, we are in a similar position as the child who learns in innocence, and
hence the notion of playing has this added overtone of the absence of knowledge which is
always to come" 6In the Greek e.pression paideia, there is an echo of the light-
heartedness and innocence of children4s play. Its authentic 4ob3ect4, if we can apply this
word at all, is the beautiful. 5ut that 3ust refers to everything that commends itself
without being of use for anything, so that nobody asks what is its purpose.6 (Gadamer
1C"%. It is not that education has no purpose. Its telos seeks itself, that is, 3ust like play,
love, or nature, the ever renewing properties of learning allow it to become a perennial
part of the human condition and take its place alongside these other forms of beauty. Ao
learning and therefore teaching must have this hermeneutic character, and it is through
the playful creativity and endlessly seeking curiosity that human learning take their
particualr form, and thus also that human intelligence takes on its characteristic manner
of searching, whether it be for its own origins or for a benevolent future.
-nly when the instrumental pra.is of institutional education co-opts learning is it
goal altered away from itself. Iven before this common event lies the eventuality of all
custom which seeks only to reproduce itself. :eproduction of the same is not renewal. ,s
the root of the term implies, renewal seeks the new, whereas replacement seeks to restore
what is already in place, or that place which had been disturbed in some way. 'he circle
of hermeneutic pedagogy is not a tautology, there is no 4viciousness4 about it, though even
where such a pe3orative applies, the edge of the vicious cuts us only if we attempt to
grasp its meaning. 'his is when we find out we have been chasing our own tails. 5ut it
1#1
does not consume itself as does the serpent who bites its own tail, for a tautology merely
serves to affirm that two or more of our conceptions are so closely related as to be
indistinguishable for the purposes of argument, and thus it too has a purpose which lies
beyond itself. Aomething truly 4vicious4 does not reach outside of itself in such a manner.
It cannot feed anything but itself. 'he hermeneutic circle of learning plays away from its
sources in the direction of 5eing, 3ust as it rolls along on its torus with the impetus of
e.perience behind it and the promise of the undiscovered before it" 6'o the e.tent that
play is the dialectical interchange of transcendence and appropriation, it reflects the
circularity found in all learning. If this circularity collapses, if the lack of coincidence
which characteri(es sub3ectivity is suddenly transformed into coincidence, then
sub3ectivity congeals into substance, play ceases, 4seriousness4 or 4bad faith4 sets in, and
learning comes to an end.6 (Gallagher 1!"##%. -ur learning selves do not flail around
in the world at random, there is always a method of sorts in play, because playing in the
world - as a calculated subspecific to being in the world - entails some foreknowledge of
the rules of play, or at least, the process of moving from ignorance to knowledge,
whatever the conte.t. 'he unspoken and even unthought sense that 4I will learn something
new4, or 4I will understand something about myself or the world anew4 always backdrops
all attempts at learning once the pure play of children is colored with the added proposal
of a gradual maturing. Gallagher adds that even within the sensibility of formal learning,
the attitude of play is necessary to the discovery that what we have taken for granted has
more to it than meets the normative eye, and that this attitude vanishes at the point of
thinking that one has 4got it4, or that there is nothing more to 4get4 about something" 60lay
is finished as soon as the learner thinks that he already understands. 'his 4serious4 posture,
1#!
which takes everything as familiar and recogni(es no other possibilities, this 4Heno-type4
ignorance or bad faith, signifies the foreclosure of learning.6 (ibid"1$$%. , 4hermenoics4
then, would be the position of a self-interpreter who not only pro3ects his own
understanding into the world and makes that world conform to it - in other words, the
student or scientist who engages in self-fulfilling prophecy, a potential problem, as )eber
warned, with any type of deductive stance - but also would characteri(e the interlocutor
who assumes that there is nothing new in the world even if he is unaware of all that is
contained in the world. If he does not know it, someone else does, and thus the necessity
for play and curiosity is shipwrecked on the stolid transmission of reproductive learning.
If we insert only a Heno-like character in the circle of interpretation, we lead ourselves
only either back to ourselves as we have already been or to the tradition which awaits us
un1uestioned and unchallenged. )e have already seen how neither of these options has
any merit with regard to pedagogy" 6Learning does not take place on the basis of a
rhetorical or pedagogical 1uestion posed by the teacher unless that 1uestion seriously and
playfully opens up both the student and the sub3ect matter to an indeterminacy.6
(ibid"189%.
*ot everyone agrees with the ultimate place phronesis has within the circle of
hermeneutic learning, as we will see shortly. It has within it a 4safety4 or 4governor4 that,
because it also looks back to the history of e.perience, does not entirely let loose its
bonds with the tradition as it has been. It would seem that this is inevitable, and that
sources such as /aputo are stretching a point when they suggest that practical wisdom is
too conservative. Indeed, anything from the ancient world might well seem to us
uncritical given their society, but here we are speaking of philosophical conceptions
1#9
which are not only portable in the manner the notion of the sacred is portable, but must
themselves participate in the play of human reason and intelligence. 'hey themselves are
historical and thus mutable, and mean something different to us than they likely meant to
our forebears, no matter how recogni(able they may seem for us" 6>or /aputo phronesis
is o match for the wisdom one needs to allow the play to play itself out - that is, the
wisdom needed for hermeneutical emancipation.6 (Gallagher 1!"9E;%.
.i.
'he
*iet(schean concept of the play of @ionysiac radicality still contains the foreknowledge
of a dual finitude7 one, that we are dying as we live, and two, that human life can be
transported but not transcended, the beginning does not reach the end, but only abruptly
trails off.
..
It may be that all previous pedagogy that is e.tant within mortal memory has
the undertones of evaluation against a previous norm, which is set up as what the case
must look like, but as 5leich cautions, even if we eliminated such norms there would still
remain the habitus of learning within the environment of he.is and rationali(ed techni1ue
- that which contains the purposes of reproduction and usury of which *iet(sche spoke -
for 6In part, grading is now a social substitute for an ideal of pedagogy that itself
unconsciously rules out collective work.6 (5leich 1CC"!;$%. ,t the same time, what is
normative but not yet part of an institutional structure may still have a role to play in the
construction of the phronetic process of self-understanding. 'his is so, because as we
have already stated, interpretations of living on are based first on the day to day
presumptions that are attendant upon certain aspects of he.is, specially those that do not
aspire to, or find themselves placed in, larger rational organi(ations or systems of
technical discourse" 6...'he proper model for a local hermeneutics is to be found in the
concept of phronesis rather than the concept of techne. < = if there are legitimate universal
1#$
canons < = they must be dependent on or derived from local ones, not vice-versa.
(Gallagher 1!"999 and cf. also 9$C where this position is restated in the form of
dialogue%. 'his local situatedness of beings is the one in which we find ourselves along
the arc of our thrownness. 'his tra3ectory does not necessarily afford us a surveyor4s
view, but it takes only the torsion of the hermeneutical torus to allow us the paralla. we
need to view things awry. 'he hermeneutics of suspicion emanates from such a
viewpoint. 'he immediate problem of all incipient criti1ue on its way to wisdom is the
same problem we encounter in having a new e.perience. 'he newness of the ne.t world
is that it has not yet been taken into the home of our language, though it may be e.tant in
the 5eing of human language. 'he nomenclature of e.perience is something that must be
constructed after the facticity of being-here. 'he there-being of facticality is what issues
forth, a world which is no populated by something other than what it held before, but this
otherness is now part of ourselves, and we have come to be familiar with it. Ao 6...if man
is find his way once again into the nearness of 5eing he must first learn to e.ist in the
nameless. In the same way, he must recogni(e the seductions of the public realm as well
as the impotence of the private.6 (+eidegger 1##"1 <1$#=%. Generally, the naming
procedure of learning he.is short-circuits the approach to the e.istential envelope of
)orld by telling itself everything is 4okay4. 'he comfort (one of the normative can
continue undisturbed. It may be interrupted, but no real irruptive force can be brooked.
)ith pra.is, the approach to 5eing is sabotaged simply by the sense that everything that
is can be made known through its function and its place in an empirical catalogue. 'his
functionality is not the same thing as the implicit understanding that is to be had by the
actual use of a cultural ob3ect, like a tool. /aputo e.pressly states that though we may
1#;
know what something is for, within the force of its being an ob3ect in the realm of
ob3ects, a thing in the world, lies the inertia of its partial beingness, that manner in which
it becomes 4involved4 in the world. 'he most forceful interpretation of the ob3ect is held
within the actuality of its non-function, as when +eidegger4s famous hammer breaks, and
one suddenly knows what it is 4for4, because the unthought of 4not being able to4 must now
be reflected upon. 'he presence of being, then, shows itself in its very absence, and thus
even a mundane event such as the breaking of a tool has within it an uncanniness that
must be confronted. )e generally take such things in our stride - we may buy another
tool or attempt to mend the one whose vitality is no longer at hand, or we may move on
to another task and return to the one incomplete at some future date better e1uipped - but
even here we must acknowledge that the world as it has been can abruptly change its
tenor, even in small ways, and thus the forehaving of the world has an apparent 1uality to
it. It is the e.position of this realm of appearances in the world that calls us back to
ourselves" 65ut over and beyond the world of everyday concerns, @asein is stretched out
to that for the sake of which there is a world, to @asein itself. < = @asein is pro3ected upon
< = its own deepest possibility to be the being which it alone is or can be... @asein
4understands4 what it is about, that is, it predelineates for itself an anticipatory sketch of its
world, casts itself forth into a sphere or hori(on of e.istence within which it must make
its way about.6 (/aputo 1C#"8%. Fust because we have learned to move about in such a
world does not mean that that self-same world does not change, and thus we must change
with it. 'he breaking of a tool is perhaps the most poignant of mundane events, because it
4shows up4 our knowledge to be incomplete, and indeed, the finitude of human
consciousness makes incompleteness both the character and the task of our personal and
1#8
collective e.istence. 'his kind of life cannot be entirely prepared for7 we cannot know
what we need to know and also e.pect that what we know will be needed. ,lthough we
may shy away from the knowledge of our partial knowing, the factuality of our
perspectival facticity, we must confront the being which is at hand in the world because
the worlding of the lifeworld continues with or without our acknowledgement.
,uthenticity in learning then must include the sense that we do not learn entirely at our
own pace and we indeed should not always attempt to control the environment in which
we learn. 2et because we are also pointed towards the ethic of concernful being by the
vector of our shared thrownness, we are always mindful - perhaps even over-wrought - of
the fragility of what we have come to know and how it too may break upon us" 6'he ego
is first and foremost a being of care or an.iety of which the first concern must be that of
its authentic being-in-the-world. 'his rehabilitation of the ego as a being of care, as a
practical pro3ect, is not foreign to the renaissance of practical philosophy which came out
of the heart of the phenomenological movement...6 (Grondin 1;"$$%. 'he breaking into
the e.pected or predicted routine of mundane e.istence cannot actually be formulated
with any certitude. 'he human interest in prediction is perhaps primordial, but it is our
culture that has obsessed over the methods of predictive prosthesis, from meteorology to
statistics to probability theory, in the always odd duet of care and an.iety. 'he an.ious
being is one 4of the world as it has been4 whilst knowing the character of all human
worlds is one that is immanently historical. 'he concernful being has also an 4of-ness4
about it, but it is more fully involved 4in the world4 in the phenomenological sense, in that
it does not e.cerpt itself to pass its time in the over-concern of worry. 'he adoption of the
concernful being takes itself into its own care, because it too knows that it has had ethical
1##
lapses where its lack of care absented 5eing from its proper relationship with beings. 2et
it does not strike itself low with regret. It seeks rather to use such lapses or even absences
as pedagogic events" 6*othing is to be gained, then from remorse, from repentance, for
who can say 4I am good4B +eidegger does not even want to hear conscience referred to as
admonishment, warning, in the name of the curious argument that conscience would
thereby once again become the prisoner of the 4they4.6 (:icoeur 1!"9;E <1E=%. 'his
suggests that our ethical being cannot be beholden to the e.ternality of either custom or
theoretical application. 5oth are 4deductive4 in the sense that there has been a 3udgement
made ahead of time, and thus conscience is pushed to become something other than it is
ahead of its time. )hatever lapse of good or bad conscience has occurred, for both of
these serve e1ually well the ends of education, the honest coming to terms of with the
absence of ethical being indicates its very presence, its return from being otherwise.
'his circle of withholding one4s will to act in the ethical conte.t of learning is also
hermeneutic, in that it re1uires of us to risk that which has been held back. In confronting
the absence of conscience we are generate a character study which places us both in
negative and positive light, in the most casual sense, we are 4learning from our mistakes4.
'here is also a perhaps all too convenient rhetoric about such a circle, especially if it is
e.posed in the formal settings of classroom or teacher-student relations. Like a first date
whereby one4s true confessions generate a sympathy that may turn to erotism the second
time around, the ability of bad conscience to produce a more base advantage cannot be
overlooked" 6Host likely a teacher who says 62es, I am un3ust7 I am 3ust as human as you
are7 some thing please me, and some things 4don4t,4 is more convincing than one who
strictly upholds the ideology of 3ustice but then inevitably commits unavowed in3ustice.6
1#C
(,dorno 1C"1C#%. )hether or not, as ,dorno suggests, the psycho-analytic genre of
archaeological self-reflection is a necessity for pedagogues may be disputed, but it
nevertheless remains clear that the teacher cannot at all afford to play a morali(ing game
with either students or sub3ect matter. -pening oneself up to the pedagogic process at
hand does at least mean not to place on a pedestal the concepts or the beings involved in
the history of discourse and consciousness. 4+istorical effective conscience4 could thus be
rendered as the ethical taking to task one4s moral premises in the light of their genealogy.
0edagogy centering itself on phronesis does not rest assured that there would be secrets in
any case, that mystery is the necessary heart of all things. :ather, the aspects of the
human condition which are shrouded always become shrouded, and in principle they are
value neutral in their attraction or disdain of the light of 5eing. Auch ontological facticity
is still a matter of historicity, that is, the veils of interpretation drop off or are replaced
according to what is at hand in the culture of the day. 'his means the hermeneutic circle
of pedagogy employs not only previous interpretation as and 1uestions them along the
lines of that which students bring to the classroom as a resource, but in doing so has
accepted the risk that both what we understand about ourselves and how the discourse has
understood itself are sub3ect to criti1ue and must thereby change themselves. 5ut this is
not all, for the attainment of phronesis, however momentary it too must be, can only
reside in the home of a language which is of the human essence" 6It means that ontology
must, as phenomenology of being, become a 4hermeneutic4 of e.istence. < = It lays open
what was hidden7 it constitutes not an interpretation of an interpretation (which te.tual
e.plication is% but the primary act of interpretation which first brings a thing from
concealment.6 (0almer 18"1!%. 2et in doing so, the autonomy of the ob3ect which is
1#
now suddenly at hand - the concept, idea, te.t, or person - cannot be enthralled to a model
which sub3ects it to a self-ob3ection. 'hat is, this 4thing4 which we are and to which we
bring ourselves to be must ob3ect to itself in a critical manner, without sub3ecting itself to
a criticism which makes it part of something else. Auch sub3ection is the ob3ect of the
critic who is also a missionary, be it for ideology or instrumental pra.is, the ritual of
custom or the fealty which 4should4 be felt to filial ties. 'his kind of slippage, where we
might feel that prodigality is the only measure of not only our learning but also too our
conscience in principal, is in fact an ethical error" 6...the very willingness to connive with
power and to submit outwardly to what is stronger, under the guise of a norm, is the
attitude of the tormentors that should not arise again. It is for this reason that the
advocacy of bonds is so fatal. 0eople who adopt them more or less voluntarily are placed
under a kind of permanent compulsion to obey orders.6 (,dorno 1C"1;%. )e are
already well aware of the e.periences that the letting go of historical e.perience brings
upon us in the present. It is lived e.perience itself which stands as a reasoned bulwark
against the tyranny of models or instrumentalities. ,dherence itself is alone enough to
close off both dialogue and dialectic, whether it be to an argument or a position - one4s
favorite 4concept4, even phronesis as a status, let alone an ideology or a belief system.
-nce the double ensconcement of being in a model and the conception of self that finds a
subterranean lair in a cognitive recess that deliberately shuns the interpretive light is
effected, the rhetoric of reproduction can be as shallow as it would be if we were to have
seen through it at the first" 6'hose who adhered to the established system needed merely
a few fine-sounding words to 3ustify e.isting practices. 'he real work was done by habits
which were so fi.ed as to be institutional.6 (@ewey 19C"!%. +ence the e.perientiality of
1CE
any educational always mitigates against the acceptance prima facie of any state of
previous practices, for the practicalities that they have measured themselves too and for
are also changed by new e.perience. of course, we cannot guarantee ourselves that our
e.periences will be new, and this is why the understanding of hermeneutic pedagogy
takes place within the self-understanding of concernful being. /aring about something is
by definition future looking, even if the care is conserving to the point of ritual. 'he
ritual, as it has been, and thus the world as it has been, must be kept in this or that way at
all costs. Auch concern, however reactionary, thinks ahead of itself. Ao caring is at its
basis not mere prediction, control, calculation or repetition, though all of these highly
rationali(ed tools can either emanate therefrom or adhere to the basic ethic of
concernfulness not unlike the manner in which students or other persons have 3ust been
seen as adhering to a system of rules and practices. /aring is, before all of these other
things, the ma3or form of e.istential self-understanding which notices its own being as
having to be in the world, and further, forehaving this beingness as part of a world which
is not all at once our own in the same way as we might imagine ourselves to be" 6Hust
we not agree that to be careful, to care for something, is always the central character of
care7 but whoever is 4caring for4 is careful in doing so, and that means he is concerned
with himself7 in the same sense in which +usserl says (with &ant% that to be conscious of
something is, for essential reasons, to be self-conscious.6 (Gadamer 1C$"81 italics the
te.t4s%. 'his e.istential ethic is but one side of the currency of the lifeworld. )e must care
for others to care for ourselves, even if capital has redefined the self as often only
selfishness, or at least, self-centeredness. 'hat everything can be made a commodity does
not e.empt the self. )e fetishi(e about our own doings, our coming s and goings, our
1C1
visage and image, and our presentation of self. 'he process of self-ob3ectification in
which we are partial volunteers takes place within the ethic of care, but one which has
been narrowed by the error which confuses egoism and egotism. Ispecially in *orth
,merica, we are pressed each day to be responsible for ourselves, to love ourselves, and
only then may we be in fact responsible for others or be loved by them. 'he facticity of
this situatedness of being - the singularity which desires mitsein but does not immediately
know how to attain it - lends itself, specifically if it be re3ected by others in its learning
process, to the indifference to others characteristic of the worst human crimes" 6'he
coldness of the societal monad, the isolated competitor, was the precondition, as
indifferently to the fate of others, for the fact that only very few people reacted. 'he
torturers saw this, and they put it to the test ever anew.6 (,dorno 1C"!E1 <18=%. Ao it
is obvious that concernful being must have a human breadth, and not be solely concerned
for the self in its various guises, or, by e.tension, only for the selves which are to be used
as means for one4s own ends. Indeed, this kind of e.tending of the narrow ethic of self-
care is kindred in its chicanery to that of instrumental pra.is masking itself as a mere
e.tension of he.is. neither at the level of the individual learner nor within the systems of
education and discourse can such a movement lead to phronesis. -ne is not only in the
world, and one is not only with one4s contemporaries, but one must strike up a 1uite
specific attitude of interest in both. 'his position takes upon itself the responsibility of the
very facticity of otherness in opening up the self to dialogue and dialectic" 65ecause
dialogue is an encounter among men who name the world, it must not be a situation
where some men name on behalf of others. It is an act of creation7 it must not serve as a
crafty instrument for the domination of one man by another.6 (>riere 1#E"##%. 'his is
1C!
part of the story here, though it be epiphenomenal to a more basic ethic that holds the
world and its others as both sub3ect to one4s care, and the ob3ect of one4s caring"
6@ialogue cannot e.ist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and for
men.6 (ibid%. 'he individual of the modern social world is turned away from the other
because he cannot risk himself. ,s well, the otherness of alterity turns him away, because
he cannot find recogni(able the mode of being in the other4s world that for him could act
as an instrument to serve his own ends. 'his is why persons from differing social classes
almost never marry. *ot only do they not encounter one another, the dominant group4s
domination cannot possibly be served by taking into its folds the very margins it has
created. @ialogue rather assumes that we are at least partially conscious that our
interlocution with others changes us and points us in a new direction. -ften this direction
is also partially occupied by the other to self, and thus the encounter becomes more
intimate as time goes on. 5ut that such encounters cannot be as two ships passing in the
daylight, in sight of each other and e.tending themselves only in the most typified of
greetings, we must confront the otherness of being otherwise to how we are for ourselves
through the dialectic of dialogue, the edge of the world as we have known it. It is this,
more than intimacy, which gives forth the wisdom of practice. )e must recogni(e
ourselves as part of the process of learning about the self only through the other, rather
than the opposite case, where we take the other as part of ourselves and feign a
learnedness about her because we think we know ourselves only too well7 6'o put this
point in pedagogical terms, had I stuck to the traditional self-concept of the teacher, that
of the 4banking educator4, I would have conceived of my essays as having been written in
a variety of different modes, and I would have disregarded the fact that my being in class,
1C9
as a class member was influencing my development.6 (5leich 1CC"!#E italics the te.t4s%.
'aking the other 4into account4 is perhaps a phrase which betrays itself by its very
polysemy. )hose account is being enriched hereB )hy must we 4take in4 as if hoarding
the profit of our encounters with others, or using them as a form of ego-gratificationB -n
top of this, there is the arrogance which appears in related phrases such as 4the human
factor4, which also must be taken 4into account4 as something that will be seen to detract
from the otherwise proper and rational functioning of either machines or organi(ations,
economies or political systems, as if these very constructions were made by humans only
to supersede the humanity of their creators? 5etween arrogance and selfishness then there
is little room indeed for otherness or the authenticity of self-risk, unless risk means
staking one4s wealth or status upon tables that have the chance to increase the same. 'he
problem of identification with one4s e.ternal trappings, including ones status relationships
with others - without my wife, I am nothing, for instance, or my 3ob or portfolio, etc. -
severely limits our ability to move in the direction of practical wisdom, for such, if it
e.ists at all, is held only by other or within the sources of material wealth and social
status that I have arranged around myself as a kind of insulation from the e.istential risk
of the )orldly envelope. ,s with ourselves, the teacher, who is in fact a class or course
participant, a member of a temporary community dedicated to learning, must overcome
her insularity in the same manner as she e.pects of her students. 'he teacher envisages
the future being of the student, but must also come to terms with the being of the present,
in herself and win others" 6'hink of them as they ought to be when you have to influence
them, but think of them as they are when you are tempted to act on their behalf.6 (Achiller
18;";$ <1#;=%. 'he suasion of hermeneutic pedagogy is one that remains open to being
1C$
swayed. 'he otherness it seeks to encounter is not alien at all costs, but must needs reside
in the self as the always already partiality to both knowledge and self-understanding. In
other words, such a dialogue aspires to know the self anew in the same way that it looks
to know the newness of the other.
Iven though there are at least two faces involved in the encounter with the other,
this kind of pedagogy cannot afford any serious duplicity. It is 1uite reasonable to embark
upon theatrical pro3ects that lessen the social distance which pervades the nascent
classroom setting in any kind of course, but to do so is also to commit to a self-
e.position that allows students to see the trick being turned in its turning. 'hey may at
first re3ect the sensibility that on the one hand, they are suddenly responsible in an
encompassing manner for their own learning, and on the other, for the learning of others
in the new community of learners. It is this second aspect of the concernful hermeneutics
of education that will be the more difficult to accomplish, simply and precisely for the
reasons to which those like @ewey and ,dorno have alluded. )e live s1uarely in a social
milieu which sees the self as the reality of an ideal which is also looked to as the highest
form of living. )e may act as if we care for others, but this is mere grease that keeps the
wheels of social order turning without e.cessive and noisome constraint. 'o alter this
re1uires of us a general shift in the sensibility that the self is only responsible to its own
actions, let alone for them" 6Hy changing reference to 4acting4 from the stage to the class
is perhaps my individuali(ed version of seeing students and teachers (actors% as members
of the same class.6 (5leich 1CC"!# italics the te.t4s%. 'his similitude stems neither from
the forehaving of he.is nor from the foreknowledge of pra.is. It can take place as the
lighted stage of beings only because this new community finds itself anew in itself and in
1C;
its shared circumstance of learning about being in the world through the aspiration to
phronesis. It learns, in other words, through the learning of being-towards-itself, though
here, unlike in the conte.ts of the socius, the 4itself4 is the community and the being-with
is the shard undertaking of concernfulness towards practical wisdom and the shared
overcoming of the previous limits bestowed upon members by both he.is and pra.is. >or
every student, and each teacher is also and still a student of both others and of discourse
and the lebenseldt in general, what has closed upon us is the cognatic comfort of the
presence of what we think we are. 2et we also must return to ourselves from being
otherwise even though such a 4return4 constitutes no prodigal homecoming" 6Learning
entails opening up the fore-structure of her understanding and pro3ecting the possibilities
of meaning that will ultimately situate the ob3ect of learning in a more familiar conte.t.
'his transcendence means going beyond the once familiar conte.t7 it means risking that
familiar ground in order to allow the unfamiliar to find its place.6 (Gallagher 1!"19C-
%. 'here is a new feel for the significance of reality, for it at first made fragile and
e.posed, charted and fathomed as if it were a discovery incipient of a more detailed auto-
cartography, and then it is made, perhaps parado.ically, more solid and believable
because of the group of students, 3oined by the teacher, who undergo this 1uest together.
'he recording of this shift in reality and the mobile perceptions of multiple realities of
learning, thinking, writing, and speaking to one another in the conte.t of critical pra.is
involves all of us and each of us in turn as interlocutors. )e are very much
communicating to ourselves as well as to others, for the new self which must come to
understand the new e.perience is gestating, and we generally do not know other students
or teachers even on smaller campuses or in larger course enrollments. In a mature or
1C8
e.tended course that participates in hermeneutic pedagogy, however, 6...the audience is
always real and relatively well known to each student, and the purpose of writing is, first,
to record in some orderly fashion memories and e.periences of language use that seemed
to have remained important, and second, to make these e.periences meaningful to
specific, real people.6 (5leich 1CC"11%. >urther to the new reality of pedagogic
situatedness, there is the doubling over of the old reality being shown to have been not
what it had appeared to be. 'he hinge of this opening up of the unforeseen vista of
learning and yet the closing of the previous pre3udice of now limited forestructure of
understanding is the facticity of e.perience of both radical otherness in the apparently
mundane arena of the classroom, or when reading a te.t, listening to a dialogical
presentation or what have you. 0ra.is alone, even in its most authentically critical form
and breadth, cannot provide the sharpness of the edge of an ontological hori(on that has
this edge not because we see with eagle vision, not because its blade is our own to use as
we will, but because it is we ourselves who are cut into and thereby opened up by its
presence. 'he critical edge of pra.is is still a tool to be applied with the surgical
philosophy of sounding out 4hollow idols4, the famous 4philosophy with a hammer4"
6Instead, the hermeneutical notion of application, related to the concept of phronesis,
re1uires a situated, less than ob3ective response. In this view there is never anything like a
pure problem unrelated to the more ambiguous or 4mysterious4 < = dimensions of human
e.istence.6 (Gallagher 1!"1C8%.
'he world as it has been has remained so in part because its version of 4mystery4 is
a calculation based on the inertia of custom and the false pretenses of instrumentally
applied theory. 0ractical wisdom is generated within the movement that understands
1C#
being in the life-world to be the forehaving of the living in the social world, and thus also
the ground of relevance for all prosthetic techne that shares such a world with us, almost
as if it were another form of being entirely. Insofar as others must come to terms with our
presence and we with theirs, even the technologies of rationality may find a home within
the language of )orld as vehicles for not only opening up the cosmic mystery, but of
e1ual importance and necessity, the disclosure of how we have imagined ourselves and
others as sharing the same mysterious cosmogony.
$.! :emaining at Large - the )orld ,uthenticates the Aelf
Practical Consequences of Practical %isdom
*ot that the infinite is either the beginning of e.perience or thought, though it
provides the hori(ons of both. 0hronesis is not a strictly philosophical stance. It does not
rest content with self-reflection and neither does it contrive an architecture of discourse
that designs itself to prohibit entrance from without, and therefore denies the
intelligibility of what philosophy hopes to make clear. 0ractical wisdom is also not the
repetitive or even ritual wisdom that comes from mere practice, as if we could see a thing
or a problem in its entirety simply by returning to it in the same way time and again.
:ather, the archiphonemic amalgam of e.perience, practice and reflection is the manner
in which the self comes to be at home in the world and in language. 'his becoming
represents the process through which consciousness comes into its own as a specifically
human faculty. 'his faculty does not arise through the products of discourse alone, and it
would not be the case that its self-understanding could remark upon itself from the
distance and disinterest which is the hallmark of science and theoretical philosophy"
1CC
It is not a new problem that persons having received a theoretical training are
often disappointed when they have to face practical life. 'his transition always entails a
new learning and often a renunciation of the abstract, e.otic, and unpragmatic knowledge
which one had absorbed. 'his problem appears to me to be necessarily connected to the
fundamental problem of desiring to know and needing to know, which is the very essence
of human nature, and implies a dislodging from the path of natural life. (Gadamer
1!";8%.
'here is at least at first a parado. held within the ambit of curiosity as a human
trait. 'he 4desire4 for knowledge, and thus to have a new e.perience is not always
identical with its 4necessity4. 'his tension gives rise to the notorious and sometimes
irresponsible refrain 4need to know4, referring to the basis upon which the ongoing test of
the validity of knowledge should rest. )e hear this as a plaintiff amongst the children of
each new generation7 6 )hy do I need to know thisB4, and to this 1uerulous 1uery there is
an ambiguous response. )e cannot be sure what our children will need to know because
we do not know ourselves our own future, let alone theirs. 0hronesis can tell us what we
have come to know and why, and that we have now such knowledge because we have
found it to be necessary, or, at the very least, have understood it to be relevant to a
problem or a misunderstanding that had previously gone unrecogni(ed. 5ut none of this
can directly answer the 1uestion of the 4need4 to know. )e can only say to the child, and
thus to ourselves, that we have found through e.perience that it is often the case that new
knowledge 4comes in handy4 in some way, and that the very uncertainty of the manner in
which it may or may not be convenient or more than convenient to know something lends
credit to the ability and desire to know about the world in general.
*ow no one can know everything, nor can one know everything one will need to
know. -n top of this, we may desire to know much more than we will be able to
accomplish in this realm. *evertheless, our very life depends on what we can know,
which means honing the phronetic skill of discerning more or less 4ahead of time4 what
1C
will be necessary in this or that case, and this is where theoretical understanding enters
the circle of self-understanding, for it is within the ambit of theory that predicative
knowledge can find the temporary leverage it needs to fulfill its obligations to being and
world. 'his new world needs our knowledge within it as much as we need the knowledge
of the world. It is not the case that here e.ists a world where, like an infinite account, one
can draw out knowledge at will and in an ad hoc manner, as things come up"
In modern universities, people learn the same way as at school. >uture teachers,
doctors, and lawyers are e.amined on the basis of their memory and formal intellectual
proficiency. 'he university gives them preparatory schooling in theory. 'heir real
education begins only when they begin to practice. 'o me, our educational system seems
somewhat backward, in that students4 theoretical preparation e.cludes them for far tool
long from participating in the various practical activities of the professions and careers to
which they aspire. It4s an old problem - how can we diminish the gulf between theoretical
academic education and real practical education in such a way that people who want to
be, say, teachers, don4t simply have to put aside what they4ve learned at university when
they start their teacher training in order to use the favorite books of whoever is organi(ing
the course, who naturally prefers the books he or she studied as a studentB (Gadamer
1C"1!E%.
'he 4professions4 are really no different from any other kind of vocation in this
way. 'hink of the sciences, where there e.ists laboratory training, and indeed, it often
seems that the modern scientists who is not a writer or who does not engage in pure
research is often ironically bereft of all historical and even theoretical knowledge. 2et in
actual fact there is little difference, because no discipline can afford to dwell on its own
pedigree, on the genealogy of ideas for too long, unless its very reason of being id to do
3ust that, or, in the case of philosophy, such a dwelling in the house of thought is
absolutely necessary in order to think anew in the present. )e might ideali(e that all
studies of all aspects of human consciousness and therefore theoretical discourse should
have this ability to dwell, to be at home in their own house of language, but the present
social organi(ation of our society will not permit this. 'hus phronesis must confront the
advent of a new kind of society, one in which there e.ists mass education and all of its
1E
attendant alienations - the gap between thinking and acting, theory and practice, is an
umbrella for many other cleavages - and therefore one in which there are many
4intellectually4 trained citi(ens who still must get on with the day4s work. 'his is entirely
new. *o previous society, even if it had constructed and adopted the factuality of science
over against the customary of belief, had to face it in this way. , society of only thinkers
might well founder of its own doubts. *o doubt we need much more doubting than what
is to be had at the moment, but we also need to be able to put aside the history of an idea
long enough to try something new. 0hronesis is in fact able to lend a hand to this
Aisyphean task. It is through the hermeneutically inclined confrontation with the tradition
that phronesis gains some insight into the problem of action in the world as it is. )e need,
in other words, to be able to know 4what to do4 given this or that current situation, and this
is where the desire and need for knowledge of which Gadamer spoke come together most
forcefully.
Auch an identity has a lengthy history. In an historically accurate way, the history
of the problem of knowing is also very much the history of hermeneutics itself, because
human knowledge, in its sub3ectivity, has always re1uired an interpretation in order to
take action of any kind" 6'he cryptic messages from the oracle at @elphi did not interpret
a pree.istent te.t7 they were 4interpretations4 of a situation... 'hey brought something to
e.pression...but what they brought was at the same time an e.planation of something -
something formerly une.plained...they e.plained it, sometimes in words that concealed
as much as they revealed.6 (0almer 18"!E%. 'he still famous kerygmatic phrase 4build
wooden walls4 that the ,thenians pu((led over at the eleventh hour sounds of this
ambiguity which is in fact the nature of all language. 'hat is, because of its polysemy, we
11
must make a decision about meaning, and this decision is always an interpretive one.
'here are certainly degrees of depth in our interpretations, degrees of relevance given a
specific framework or the inertia of both custom and discourse, as we have seen. 5ut
meaningfulness, itself a necessity for human life, is had only by risking what has
previously been known about a situation, for indeed history dictates that the human
situations cannot but change over time, however imperceptible these changes might be.
,s well, our very understanding of language has also altered from the period in
which hermeneutics as the means of meaning has entered into the human vernacular. )e
are much more today concerned with the iterative and playful 1ualities of words than the
fulfilling of the )ord, for e.ample. 'his was hardly always the case" 6,ccording to the
Greek understanding of language, the linguistic element does not appear to en3oy any
respectable autonomy of its own. It is but a means of e.pressing something, a thought
process that lies 4behind4 the graphic or phonetic e.pression itself.6 (Grondin 1;"!8%.
+ence there is an immediate sense that motive, intent, meaningfulness and even will are
obscured, made occult, by their presence in a human tongue. 'his reflects the classical
period4s imagination that the Gods, who had direct access to the Logos and indeed had
created it, re1uired no interpretation in order to communicate effectively. 'hey did so, via
+ermes or his homologues, with perfect clarity. 'heir intents mirrored their acts and their
4words4. Hortal humanity, on the other hand, had no such ability, as was made painfully
aware not only by the 5abelian narrative but by the everyday conse1uences of
misunderstanding, still felt by every human being alive to this day. Ao 6'he unitary task
of hermeneutics in anti1uity seems to have consisted in going back from what was said to
what was meant, to the vouloir dire beneath language. 'his understanding of
1!
hermeneutics tacitly assumes that language is invested with a meaning that precedes or
goes beyond the uttered word itself.6 (ibid%. 5ecause human beings have the capability to
reflect on their actions and their words, we have at the same time an utter necessity to
search for meaning since we cannot be sure that what we have done, felt, or thought, has
any resemblance to any kind of shared reality, social, historical scientific, or even
mythical. Given that we can reflect upon the possible truth of things, we can, by
definition, bend away from the supposed truth in acts of deliberate dishonesty. of course,
how believable these acts might become rests with an audience composed of members
who, like ourselves, have the same human capabilities. ,ll belief systems shed their
historical origins, whatever they may be, through such processes as these. Indeed, those
that withstand the arguments of both history and cultural diversity are strengthened by
their eschewing of their own actual pasts. Hythic history is far more powerful than
history alone. It is so because it brings out the moral dimension of human e.istence, even
though it hypostasi(es it and makes it thus larger than life, ironically distanciating its
kerygmatic 1uality from lived time and the actual e.pression of meaning in the day to
day. 'his may result in either tragedy or comedy, but for pedagogic purposes, it
underscores the vital and continuing need for interpretation and for the presence of
practical wisdom in both accruing meaning to any e.pression and if action is called forth
by the resulting meaning, the wisdom to decide upon its course" 6'he meaning of the
oracle in this sort of tragedy lies in the fact that the hero provides an e.emplary
illustration of the ambiguities of fate that hag over every one of us. ,s human beings, we
are essentially caught up in the attempt to interpret the meaning of this ambiguity.6
(Gadamer 1##"#1%. 'his most profound insight of interpretation is in fact no substantive
19
or specific 4insight4 at all, other than a reiteration of the need for finding meaning in
human affairs. 2et without it, the bestowal of meaning, however temporary and however
alert to the potential fascism of all static will or intent, interpretation easily slides into a
guise for the e.pression not of meaningfulness, but authority of various kinds" 6Atudents
do not, in some general way, think this literally and consciously, but rather see its citation
- in the passive voice - as the professor bringing to bear his own knowledge, his own
reading of the criticism, his own way of resaying the 4meaning4 of the story.6 (5leich
1CC"!E8-#, cf. 99E for the e.tension of this sensibility into gender relations%. 'he danger
for practical wisdom is that while it can assume the laurel of being at the far end of a
pedagogic process that has created it out of the lesser elements of custom and theory, it
cannot be taken into the folds of myth as wisdom somehow 4timeless4 or even sage.
0hronesis knows only the human manifold, it is invested in the moment of meaning and
decision, and it must shun the vestments of any longitudinal authority. It is a kind of
knowing that both is dependent upon e.perience and pendant upon it. I.perience is
always 4to be had4, it is part of the art of becoming, and as such it is pending. It awaits not
our approval but only our presence. +ence the realistic appraisal the human condition as
fundamentally an uncertain one, and hence the necessity for wisdom to be practical, not
theoretical nor mythical" 6Phronesis... is not the mechanical application of preestablished
universal rules to particualr circumstances. Phronesis is not a skill or craft which
founders when the situation is paralogical. It is neither a method nor a kind of techne. It is
precisely the interpretational virtue that one can fall back on within a hermeneutical
situation which is uncertain6 (Gallagher 1!"9$!%. 'he wisdom of mere practice, as we
have noted, is not enough to guarantee a relevant or even a meaningful outcome in the
1$
ongoingness of the lifeworld. 'he means to an already established end are also already
established, but we regularly face circumstances of which we cannot know the ends.
Indeed, this is the most authentic of human e.periences, and the technical apparatus of
theoretical modeling involved in uncritical pra.is, or yet even the skilled rhetoric and
philosophical accoutrement of culture criti1ues, have as their ends something that can be
predicted with more or less aplomb. 'he verdure of history notwithstanding, techni1ue,
theory and criti1ue stand in a similar relationship to one another and to the world" they
seek something that they know they can find. 'he dialectic of critical dialogue is of
course an opening onto a new plane of being and thinking, but it too can be used merely
as a sledgehammer without regard to the value that this or that part of human history may
still be graced with. 'he sense that history itself can be overcome is one of the most
dangerous vices of generational thought, but the reason why we may attempt a clean
sweep of what we have been is still 1uite understandable" 6)e may re3ect knowledge of
the past as the end of education nd thereby only emphasi(e its importance as a means.
)hen we do that we have a problem that is new in the story of education. +ow shall the
young become ac1uainted with the past in such a way that the ac1uaintance is a potent
agent in appreciation of the living presentB6(@ewey 19C"!9, italics the te.t4s%. 'he
present does not belong entirely to the past, 3ust as children are both made of the stuff that
made their parents but also of things 1uite different from the e.perience of those latter.
-ne cannot e.perience the same world if one is so much younger than another, leaving
aside the 1uestion of the diverse sociali(ations of culture, class and gender. I.periential
pedagogy has also this advantage - that the student4s background is likely to be called into
1uestion by the encounter with these new worlds of otherness. -ne only imagines, at
1;
first, that one knows how to live, and this not necessarily well but at as least striving for
the normative. In seeing how others must live, or desire to live, is a way of seeing not
only the options that human life and history present and represent, but it is also seeing
that others who are like oneself but also oddly distant and alien, have had to make
decisions regarding coming to terms with the ongoingness of the 4living present4, and that
their past as well was something that once seemed to be a solid blockade of growth and
maturity, but in fact became what it always becomes, a negotiable resource within which
there are une.plored modes of being. >inally, the otherness of the present presents itself
to us as an engaged ethical situation, where on must also decide more or less immanently
how one is going to act, and leave the whys and wherefores to the side. In doing so, we
are often left wondering 3ust what we can do, what are the possibilities of being for us,
and for others" 6/onscience, as attestation-in3unction, signifies that these 4ownmost
possibilities4 of @asein are primordially structured by the optative mood of living well,
which mood governs in a secondary fashion the imperative of respect and links up with
the conviction belonging to moral 3udgement in situation.6 (:icoeur 1!"9;! <1E=%.
)hat is possible for me as a desiring being in the world of the new and within the stream
of conscious e.perience is not always the same as what others feel is plausible given the
conte.tual constraints and the practicality of shared knowledge. )hat I can do may not
be what I may do, nor further, what I should do. 'he 4may4 emanates from the sense of the
being of the other, and the should is invoked by either tradition or, in a more casual
manner given its aspiration to amorality, a technical procedure which may or may not
involve human beings. Iven here, however, instrumental pra.is runs afoul of the ideally
ever alert phronesis of the hermeneutic situatedness of concernful being" 6It is not an
18
innocent use of a science-reporting convention to describe an instruction with the passive
voice7 it is a means of concealing or attempting to conceal, through language, the fact that
specific real people have made choices.6 (5leich 1CC"%. )e can better understand how
the occult sense of meaning within e.pression links up with the absenting of ourselves
from our own sub3ectivity, as well as with the 4optative4 mood that governs or at least
influences decision-making in substantive conte.ts. )e can immediately go two ways
here. -ne, we can use language to obscure the intent of the decision in the way that
language used to be thought of in general, or two, we can make plain through language
that our interpretation of what choice we wish to make is precisely the same as how we
will act. >urther to this, we can either disregard others or take them into account, but at
least with the second option we are being honest with both ourselves and others. If we
have calculated the removal of otherness from a situation beforehand, we might well
choose to adopt the occult language of mystery while pretending that such is plain-
spoken and could ever hold only the one meaning we give to it. 'o eschew this stance is
to open up the ethical situatedness of being in the world by placing oneself in the hands
of others4 meanings. 'o learn to do this is to create community, certainly, but also is to
place the care of the self into the world as a mode of being-caring, and not so much
compulsively cautious or 4careful4 in the admonitory sense. 'his is the point at which
phronesis has the practical conse1uence of a shared ethics, a recogni(ance that what one
can do one does with or to others, and that this is always a choice that rests above the bad
faith of the socius. Apeaking of Gurian, ,rendt notes that 6'he only thing he did... was to
bring them purposely into society, into contact with his other friends in order to undo, as
far as it was in his power, the insult of humiliation which society invariably adds to the
1#
in3ury of misfortune.6 (,rendt 18C"!81%. 'here is thus an ethical reality to which
practical wisdom is the mid-wife. I.periential pedagogy might well include the ability to
bring students together in an informal an open-ended 4therapy4, where they are confronted
with the fact that hey are not only not alone in the world, but that their self-
understandings are held in common to a great degree, with others 4like4 themselves.
0hronesis is the mode of being that presents itself to the limits that have acted as frames
upon it. )hat is enclosed within the limits of custom and theory is not something that can
be e.perienced by remaining inside their hori(ons. -ne rather steps out into the sudden
openness of beings risked. ,fter the initial trepidation, one begins to understand that here
too, as in he.is and pra.is, there are delineations and even categories, though they seem
much more broad, and contain at first diverse phenomenon and 3udgements" 6'o lead
back these latter to the former - to achieve instead of moral practices, morality, instead of
thing-known, knowledge, instead of happy e.perience, happiness, is the business of
physical and moral education, to make 5eauty from beautiful ob3ects is the task of
aesthetic education.6 (Achiller 18;"C9 <1#;=%, and one can continue to populate such a
list if one is restrained in thinking in a too principled fashion that these categories,
cultural and historical as they are, might have an utter suasion over us and thence be set
up as authoritative within the space of phronesis, thereby defeating the entire purpose of
the practicality of e.periential and reflective wisdom.
'he idea of category implies that of measurement, whether such boundaries be
placed in a ratio or an ordinal manner, and thus also there is an implication of hierarchy.
+ere Gadamer speaks of there being an intrinsic measure that 4things themselves possess4
in relation to phronesis, rather than the wisdom of e.perience and reflection being the
1C
practice of measuring tings4. (cf. Gadamer 1C"#ff%. 2et further, since phronesis not
only is a reflection upon human life, and thus also has its origin within the same, it not
only accrues a sense of 3ust measure to itself, it also performs within the sphere of
rationality. 'his kind of reason is of course, not instrumental, but it remains pragmatic, as
it measures itself against the outcome of both the ability to have an e.perience in human
fashion and affairs and the results of reflection and action upon such e.perience" 6'he
rationality that guides practice ,ristotle calls phronesis <practical wisdom=. Phronesis is
something that proves itself only in the concrete situation and stands always already
within a living network of common convictions, habits, and values - that is to say, within
an ethos. 'his is where the hermeneutical problem... comes in.6 (ibid"#%. Ao phronesis is
still a part of the he.is within which it originates, but it comes to be a part thereof through
the circle of understanding that takes place within self-understanding in relation to a
world in which the self too has its place and roots. 'he ethos or history of any culture
wraps itself around the e.istential folds of 5eing in an ordered manner. 5ut we are not
cogent of this order, 4the structures of the lifeworld4, simply be being a member of a
specific set of customs. *or are we made entirely savvy to its design and character, let
alone its pervasive influence upon us by taking up the critical pra.is of discourse. ,s
well, we cannot glean its entirety by hoping to observe the influence of ethos through the
actions of others, their utterances and their deeds" 6In other words, only the actor knows
4when his action starts and where it ends4, that is, why it will have been performed. It is
the span of his pro3ects which determines the unit of his action. +is partner has neither
knowledge of the pro3ecting preceding the actor4s action nor the conte.t of a higher unit
in which it stands. +e knows only the fragment of the actor4s action that has become
1
manifest to him...6 (Achut( 18#"!$ <1;9=%. )e might say to ourselves, in wondering
why this human being has behaved or spoken in that way, 6I may well have done the
same given her position.4, or 4)ould I have acted in this way if this other thing had
occurred to meB4. 'hese musings are the bare beginning of self-reflection, and they have
their basis in the observation of others, which can be but partial and very much open to
interpretation. In their opening, they must be made the sub3ect of an hermeneutic in1uiry,
and one that is also pedagogic in its scope. >or we must teach ourselves not only to
interpret the other and her presence in a shared social world, but also be willing to be
taught directly by her actions. )e must let this other become the interpreter of everyday
life, as well as perhaps the discourses of pra.is, before we can ourselves attain the
reflective stance of a phronesis which in turn is able to act upon its reflection in a
concernful, and not merely a knowledgeable, manner. In turn, the other comes to
understand herself more clearly because she has helped me to know the 4higher unit4 of
her acts, and thus shed some light on the shared meanings that give flesh to that in the
lifeworld which presents itself as the manifold within which beings such as ourselves are
ensconced. )e have, in the end, taught each other to practice a kind of wisdom that can
only come from the reasoned and dialogic encounter with the other to self" 6'eachers
often claim to understand something better after having taught it. In light of this, one
might say that the teacher4s understanding of the sub3ect matter functions as a fore-
conception relative to the pedagogical presentation.6 (Gallagher 1!"#;%. 2et as all
forms of dialogic encounter must become nomothetic, in order for any kind of
understanding to be gotten across - dialogue, after all is 1uite literally to 4throw words
across to one another4 - one must be sure not to hang more than the local hermeneutics of
!EE
students4 or student groups4 understanding onto the categorial or procedural peg.
I.perientiality is always placed in a category by interpretation. -ne might even suggest
that the erlebnis that encounters itself in auslegung needs to be also conserved in the
aufhebung of practical wisdom. If this cannot be accomplished in the classroom or in
assignments, the evaluation of the end result takes on a dominance that overshadows any
possible process that ideally would move the class in disparate directions and generate
multiple and local perspectives that could later be compared with the structures and
discourses" 6...the students were at a loss to understand that the momentum of grading
psychology reduces the opportunities of even a new pedagogy. 'he grade as a naming
procedure fi.es more than its own referent.6 (5leich 1CC"1# italics the te.t4s%.
0hronesis itself cannot be held to too closely, cannot be seen as an attainment for which
there is a material or status reward that mimics the traditional classroom and its apparatus
of hierarchical authority. ,t the same time, it is also clear that for most teaches and
professors, there is a sense that they are the first resource for both pra.is and even for
phronesis, especially in pedagogic settings - though not in other related psychological
conte.ts, where the teacher either willingly, or by being ca3oled or even charmed by the
student, takes on the role of a more generali(ed mentor or counselor - and of foremost
importance for intuitionally rationali(ed students, as the ultimate evaluative authority.
'his kind of 4attentiveness4, related to concernful being but more militari(ed, so to speak,
needs to be directed towards itself as a member of a learning community" 640roblem-
posing4 education, responding to the essence of consciousness - intentionality - re3ects
communi1uRs and embodies communication" being conscious of, not only as intent on
ob3ects but as turned in upon itself in a Fasperian 4split4 - consciousness as consciousness
!E1
of consciousness.6 (>riere 1#E"88-#, italics the te.t4s7 cf. also 5leich p. cit. 1;C%. >rom
the outset, the 4problem4 of pedagogy is that the participants in the course no nothing of
what they are about to e.perience, if indeed hermeneutic learning is what is at stake and
what is on the table, as it were. )e pose our own presence to others as the problem of
otherness. )e pose to ourselves the confrontation with tradition when we are e.pected to
come to know a set of discourses. )e pose the problem of self-understanding when we
take on the perspective of the alter, whether this be the other person, history, or cross-
cultural diversity. It may also find a home, as a posed problematic, in the genres of
academic writing or in the technical language of the sciences, the arcane meanderings
theoretical commentaries, and the astute insights or interpretations of philosophical
criti1ues. If we are to bring ourselves into the opening of being-able-participants,
becoming partially and for the time being historically conscious nein a new way, we must
do so as a community. 'here is no enlightenment to be had that throws open the self and
puts its prior preconceptions at risk without the radical other to self, whether this be
found in our still common humanity, in nature, or in the history of consciousness"
40articipation4 is a strange word. Its dialectic consists of the fact that
participation is not taking parts, but in a way taking the whole. Iverybody who
participates in something does not take something away, so that others cannot have it.
'he opposite is true" by sharing, by our participating in the things in which we are
participating, we enrich them7 they do not become smaller, but larger. 'he whole life of
tradition consists e.actly in this enrichment, so that life is our culture and our past" the
whole inner store of our lives is always e.tending by participating. (Gadamer 1C$"8$%.
'he general hermeneutic insight of phronesis is contained in the sensibility that it
itself generates shared meanings anew, and this not only by the commonality that we find
in the other to self. 'he world is so similar for them, we discover, and yet we are still our
own selves, we both participate in being human, and this beingness is authentically
e.tended by the encounter with history and consciousness. 'his time, the e.tension of
!E!
what we have been transforms us, and does not act either as a technical prosthetic, as in
the case of instrumental pra.is, or as an assuaging of he.is, as in uncritical transmission
of some of the content of pra.is which rests within a narrow tradition. 'he pursuit of the
4truth of things4 need not take on any grandiose metaphysical mannerisms. 2et there are
fundamental human truths that have great gravity because they are embedded so deeply
in the sediments of a history whose temporal processes erode and e.pose the pedigrees of
these conception. Ao much the better. -ur critical genealogies must understand each
ground as an archaeological task. 'he artifacts that are rendered forth by such an analytic
are the gifts to humanity from the collective conversation of its own history" 6It is a
valuable insight about language use to know that one is more 4truthful4 when authority is
4shared4 in conversation.6 (5leich 1CC"!$!%.
..i
-f course, 3ust because we mention the
notion 4truth4, does not necessitate that the ways and means of communication in such a
serious conversation - dialogue which includes its own dialectic - need not always be
discursive or eminently philosophical in style. 'hinking as a revolutionary act and as a
revelationary thought finds a home in any language whose profundity oversteps its
terminology" 6'he liberation of language from grammar into a more original essential
framework is reserved for thought and poetic creation < = 'he +istory of being is never
past but stands ever before, it sustains and defines every condition et situation humaine.6
< = Aaid plainly, thinking is the thinking of 5eing. (+eidegger 1##"1$, 18 <1$#=%.
Auch language as this is not at home in either he.is or pra.is. In the one,
communication takes the form of inculcation and reproduction, with a view to preserving
what the world has been in its social reality, and often as against the perceived storm of
the world4s own chaos, or the chaos apparent in that of other cultural worlds. 'hat much
!E9
of this latter is rooted in our global situation which has placed us, as dwellers of the
center, in the role of distanciated and disinterested absentee landlords only fouls the
problem yet further. In the other, techni1ue takes the throne of what is to be
communicated, and thus is both the means and its own end in one language of
instrumentality and rationality. In this sense, he.is is always colonial, pra.is neo-colonial.
It is only phronesis, guided by the e.perience of what custom has made us in the light of
what a critical application of theory and philosophy has to say to us as it confronts us
with its own culture and history, that overcomes the enforced parochiality of he.is and
the calculated insularity of techne with a view to knowing the world as a new truth, and
knowing the self as a new form of human being.
'valuations and class activities
'he great mass of student reactions to hermeneutic pedagogies in their varying
degrees of intensity may be catalogued in a three-fold manner" a% comments which
addressed the ongoing problem associated with the 4literacy of wisdom4 as it became
apparent to students that the knowledge involved in pursuing self-reflection was not at all
a technical one, and yet still involved a great deal of linguistic sophistication. b%
comments regarding the e.perientiality of learning which acted as a new form of what
became customary in the archiphonemic triangle of phronesis. /ommunity service
learning was used in many of the courses over the years, for instance, and even though
this is a fashionable mode of education, it reminds us of nothing other than the basis of
authentic and humane learning, as long as it is kept from either originating in or
degenerating into uncritical voluntarism, and c% comments about the transformative
!E$
powers of practical wisdom, which we can refer to here as being within the hortatory 4the
thing is to change it4 category.
'he problem of ascending into the different and challenging literacy of wisdom
which is so often accrued to philosophical renditions of phronesis and related concepts
involves a great deal of focused work upon te.ts by both teachers and students alike.
Invariably, the weakness of working within advanced literacy is that it must come to grips
with institutional limitations" 6'he only negative aspect about the course was +eidegger4s
book. if we didn4t have to read that book then there would have been more time to study
the other books. @ue to how it was written I didn4t understand the +eidegger book well at
all6 (graduate student%. 'he 43oke4, if you will, about the problem of temporality vis-a-vis
+eidegger, was apparently on us. yet one does not begin with the te.t itself, but always
with the ways of attaining or entering into a dialogue with the te.t" 6'he thing about Greg
is that he leaves the connections up to us. +e lays them out and allows us to think
critically and relate the concepts to ur own lives.6 (!nd year student%. In doing so, the
practice of wisdom becomes more and more practical over time" 6'his course, so far, has
definitely changed my view on a number of things, including what I have done in the
past, am doing now, and what I hope to do in the future. 0erhaps the most important thing
I have learned so far through this course is how much more fre1uently I should 1uestion
4thing46. (!nd year student%. -ne must, however, beware any attempt by students to foist
such a practice on the mere presence of the teacher, as if the authority of the professor or
intellectual should become a kind of charisma, which attracts students and at the same
time distracts them" 6'he professor was very professional in every regard without
sacrificing his humanity towards the material or to the students.6 (9rd year student%. 'his
!E;
student seems to have gotten it right, but this is hardly always the case, and one must look
to oneself as the opening interlocutor of the would-be learning community for a course
correction" 6I did not en3oy this class or how it was taught. I felt that he material was not
interesting, and the professor did not make it any more interesting, 3ust more confusing.6
(9rd year student from the same class as the previous comment%.
I.periential learning occurs in every classroom, even though its voguishly
vaunted capabilities are seen to be at their best outside of it. I do not necessarily agree
with this sentiment, especially if the course enrolments are small enough to run seminar
formats. 'he intimacies of this new community must be gradually sculpted, not unlike
those of long term friendships, but by weeks si. to eight or so, disclosures may be had
that are often as astonishing as they are pedagogically sound concerning topics that
students feel are most pressing in their lives. 'hese should always be related to discursive
material at hand, to make sure the elements of the hermeneutical circle of teaching and
learning are present and 4in place4. It was interesting, that over the many years, younger
student adopt the attitude of intimacy more readily than do those who are more
e.perienced. 'his might be put down to the internali(ation of the more rationali(ed sets
of pra.is and institutional norms that pervade most classroom settings" 6Aome of the
topics we were asked to share about gave me some discomfort, as it sometimes felt more
like a psycho-therapy session than it id a course on the sociology of religion. 0ersonal
e.amples are great is small classes, however, sometimes the sharing might have been too
intimate.6 ($th year student%, or 6'he faculty member was able to relate fairly abstract
concepts to more concrete e.amples. 'here was a fairly personal atmosphere in the class
where we all got to know each other and felt comfortable speaking. -n the other side,
!E8
sometimes the 1uestions seemed to create discomfort among us - too personalB6 ($th year
student%. /ontrast these hesitations with younger students who might be more e.pected to
shy away from risking themselves overmuch" 6'his course made me more aware of not
3ust my view and opinions but a lot of other people, and showed me different views to be
more aware of everything around me, including myself and my surroundings.6 (1st year
student%. *ot only perspective, but even a sense of personal liberty was at hand for
students who were at the point in their careers where they had left behind the strictures of
the public schools but had not yet replaced them with those of the university system" 6I
loved our outside class discussions - the group sharing - I appreciate the freedom you
gave us to be responsible for our own learning. 'hank you for e.panding my
opportunities for using my knowledge and ability through the understanding of freedom.6
(1st year student%. +ere, the discourse is rendered correctly as 4knowledge4, and the
e.perience as 4ability4. 4>reedom4 is associated with the combination of the two them in
practical wisdom. 'here were also pedagogic e.periences that changed students4
conceptions of what they had imagined was the case about pra.is as well as the more
common shift in understanding he.is" 6+e portrayed a new way of educating that
challenged myself directly and indirectly and caused me to grow in ways I did not e.pect
and seek knowledge and find interest in an area I formerly dubbed as boring.6 (1st year
student%. >or many students, the 4reality4 of what they had known in the world as it has
been was altered in significant ways, but they often found it ore difficult to ad3ust their
logistical e.pectations than even their worldviews" 6I really appreciate how 4real4 you are.
I found it hard at the beginning to take 4proper4 notes as I have not taken a course such as
this before. 5ut as the course went on I began to appreciate listening more so rather than
!E#
struggling to write notes down.6 (!nd year student%. ,s well, the e.perience of
e.periential learning was in itself often enough to allow students to reach their own
personal phronetic vision that appeared to be portable. 'hat is , the manner in which
learning took place had the potential to travel to other areas of life, and thus not ironically
become associated only with the classroom or with taking courses" 6+is sections
discussing 4the other4 were very beneficial. +e did a great 3ob of engaging students and
making us feel at home. +is sections reflected the sub3ect well. +e forced the students to
think. 'he other professors should be willing to create discussions like Loewen because
students are in general sociali(ed to remain silent and only listen. I.periential learning
was the best part of this course.6 (!nd year student%.
..ii

>inally, the Har.ian call to arms regarding action in the world as it has been was
rendered as a form of phronesis. Ahorn of its 0auline an.iety, 4the thing is to change it4
included both the world and oneself in it, and did not suggest tat either there was a
metaphysical obligation on us to do so, or that an apocalypse emanating from without the
human realm would befall us if we neglected this call" 6I can honestly say that I am able
to view the world through a more critical lens as a result of this class. 'he world dos not
have to be the way it seems. )e can change and create change. I found the class
inspiring. 'his class forced me to make connections.6 (!nd year student%. +he idea of
history begins hen one is shon that ideas themselves have a history" 6I think the course
makes you look at yourself a lot more than you would on a normal day, and makes you
reflect on the lives of others and how you may effect them.6 (!nd year student%, or 62es,
this course is more than about interdisciplinary studies. It is about understanding oneself
before all else. It has indeed altered my views of the world and brought about 1uestions
!EC
of free will and morality which I am going to apply to everyday life. 0ersonal discussions
of these ideas has had a great effect on me.6 (9rd year student, italics within%. Hany
students linked the sense of history and change with that of the difference between
received morality and a new ethics which confronted the world as it had been wrought by
morality" 6'his class was much more involved in one4s conscience than in one4s
intellectual ability. It was challenging to really dig into the conscience and discuss more
personal ideas, but it was a nice change from the memori(ation involved in other
classes.6 (!nd year student%. -nce again, the younger students appeared to more
4naturally4 adapt and adopt these e.periences into their thinking lives than those more
e.perienced, who, were at the very least taken aback by the idea that learning could be at
once personal and worldly. )e have seen how pra.is strains to separate the two spheres
in every possible way" 6'his course ahs e.panded my mind in many more ways and
helped me to think outside of the bo. and outside hat society has taught us to believe. 'he
course has not pushed anything upon me but taught me the different ways to approach the
world and how to perceive it.6 (1st year student%. 5oth he.is and pra.is often look the
same in their limitations once phronesis is achieved" 6'his course has shown me that he
very concept of a university class is strange and that we should 1uestion every aspect of
our lives to end the perpetual 4idiocracy4 our society now faces.6 (1st year student%. 'he
idea of change originates in the idea of conscience, but the latter must be awakened to the
plight of the world as it is, for the world as it has been understood contains within it its
own insulation, 3ust as both he.is and pra.is hold themselves aloof from authentic human
understandings by remaining at a safe distance from the fuller humanity of phronesis. 'he
following was typical to this regard" 6Hy conscience was bothered by a lot of the
!E
documentaries, comments, and sometimes the professor4s responses in this class.6 (1st
year student%. )hen one is disconcerted, one desire to ad3ust the situation that has
troubled one4s e1uanimity. -ne must regain a place in a world that has now been
suddenly changed, and thus us one is must also change. *o pretense, no facade consisting
of the same meaning can survive such alterations, even though we may rest uneasily in
the limbo of denial for a time. 0hronesis has the character of both an interlocutor but also
carries within it the edge of the interrogator. )e are not left 4alone4 by its presence, and
the wisdom it seeks may well castigate us for our petty delays.
)ithin the ambit of practical wisdom there are two final class activities I would
like to suggest can be used to generate the sense of unease or dis-ease that is necessary
for a transformative learning e.perience to take place. 5oth of these have been of great
interest to students over the years, and are portable in many different disciplinary and
class si(e settings. 'hey both re1uire a class chemistry that only occurs after some weeks
of being together, but the very feeling of being at home in the world through being in a
learning community also must be challenged and reassembled if students are going to
understand the fullest accounting of practical wisdom and its role in the hermeneutical
circle. 'his new intimacy and atmosphere is at once needed and needed to be absent, for
the ungeheuer of phronesis is also a crucial part of its character. 'o this end, one might
attempt a discussion of a% students4 e.perience of something that occurred in their lives
that they have not been able to rationally e.plain or e.plain away, in other words, we
might call this the presence of the absence of being, or the 4uncanny4, and b% discussions
relating to personal issues that student4s see reflected in the discourse but that this same
knowledge is somehow distanciated from their 4true4 feelings, hence the idea of the
!1E
4therapeutic4 circle. )ith the 4uncanny4 one can ask each class participant to relate a
narrative that has the 4campfire4 1uality of the ghost story to it. Aome of these may indeed
come across as 4campy4, but that it is a minor risk well worth taking. Iach class that has
participated in this activity have been astonished at the similarity of stories, but one must
be careful to remind students that they themselves must have personally e.perienced
these events or phenomena, whatever they may be, and not to repeat local folklore or
something from imaginative fiction they had also e.perienced, but in a different manner.
Dncanniness has the power to force us outside of ourselves for the duration of its 4being
absent4 It disconcerts being in the world because it presents to it not so much a new world
but a form of non-being, a way of making the concept of nothingness into a name, the
proper noun of *othing. 'his parousia of presence displaces our sense of placement
within the known or knowable world. 'he mystery is shrouds us with is of course
partially constructed by our imaginations, but that is no matter pedagogically. )e should
also impress upon the participants that the goal is not rationally e.plain such events, but
to understand why they have made us feel the way they have, and what that means for our
understanding of the world, which, in its mundane ongoingness, can yet contain such odd
e.periences while tending to marginali(e them. 'he class should be encouraged to ask
why this is so and pursue such a line of 1uestions in as personal and communal manner as
possible. )ith 4b4, the 4therapeutic4 circle4, more caution should be e.ercised. 'he students
must understand that most professors have no training or formal licensing to engage in
any long term counseling techni1ues. 'herapy is used metaphorically here, although most
students find such a pedagogic activity to be 1uite liberating. ,s in the previous 4circles4
discussed above, students should form a ring and speak about an e.perience which in the
!11
past had given them problems, but now they had gotten over these issues. 'hey should
e.plain to the class how they overcame the events e.perienced, and relate it to the current
discussion of the discourse at hand, whether it be about structural variables, free will, the
mind, ethics, the conscience, sub3ectivity, the other, an.iety or a host of other key topics.
'hen, when yet more classroom chemistry is in place, return to such a device and ask
students about problems they are personally encountering at the very moment the class is
running, and get other students to aid in their understanding and perhaps suggest modes
of egress or resolution of them. It is ama(ing to me what wisdom young people already
have, but have misrecogni(ed as idiosyncratic. Like the uncanny, personal problem in the
ongoing presence of being in the world are often shared, as students hail from very
similar structural backgrounds, and the world around them increasingly effects everyone
in it in similar ways. 'his insight alone is worth price of admission to such a risky circle.
'. Conclusion# (hat (isdom )oes (isdom *s
'he professor is a very interesting and wonderful human being. +andsome and
even se.y, he had my attention throughout the course even though I didn4t learn anything.
+e has great interpersonal skills and is very talented intellectually, but he can4t teach
worth a damn. +e really needs to find another 3ob, but with all his talent I can4t imagine
that he would have a hard time doing so. (9rd year student%.
-ne of the most obvious results of practical wisdom is its ability to engage with
relativity and perspectivism without losing its understanding that the world remains
human and must become humane. -ne person4s saint is another4s fool, phronesis also tells
us, even though at the same time it strives to makes sense of why this is so, and must
needs be so. 'he reality of being able to see 4the same4 person in radically different ways
in a function both of language and of our aspirations and an.ieties. )e commonly pro3ect
our foibles on others, and we may envy them for having overcome that from which we
!1!
still suffer. )e also view ourselves in 1uite different ways depending on our successes
and failures, and whether or not we have learned from our previous errors. 5ut asking
ourselves what we do or who we are is not enough in the light of practical wisdom, for
1uestions e.posed to us and traditions confronted by us through phronesis are those of a
larger understanding of an e.istentiality and the )orld envelope. Apeaking of the 4essence
of humanity in this regard, +eidegger states that" 6)e are accustomed to posing this
1uestion with e1ual impropriety whether we ask what man is or who he is. >or in the
%ho- or the %hat- we are already on the lookout for something like a person or an
ob3ect. 5ut the personal no less than the ob3ective misses and misconstrues the essential
unfolding of ek-sistence in the history of 5eing.6 (+eidegger 1##"!E# <1$#=%. )e
cannot rely on the perspective of the person, as it is not only but one viewpoint and a
mere miniscule sample of a social location. yet we also cannot pretend to an ob3ectivity
that sheds itself of persons. 'he being of humanity rests neither in the singular human
being alone nor in the ob3ect realm with its attendant distance to and differentiation from
human beings as 1uasi-ob3ects. >or what is unfolded is the opening of beings into the
history of )orld, and humans access this or become aware of it through departing from
the personality of he.is and the ob3ectivity of pra.is. 0hronesis brings to bear what
Gadamer has referred to as 4the resources of social reason4 as well as ethos, as we have
noted above (cf. Gadamer !EE1"18-# and !EE9"!1ff%. 'he limitations practical wisdom
unfolds in its amalgamation and synthetic analytic of he.is and pra.is within the
hermeneutical circle of e.periential pedagogy allows students and any other interested
person the ability to look into themselves while at the same time also look beyond
themselves. 'his is not the parado. it first seems to be. >or e.ploring the interiority of
!19
being human means to go beneath what had passed for our efforts at humanity. 0erhaps
we had previously been more ethical than we are today, as certain traumatic events may
have turned us inward in parochial and defensive ways. I.ploring the hori(ons of the
lifeworld means discovering things about being human that we simply never were in the
first place. 5oth of these movements of a newly alert and concernful being are on the way
to phronesis as well as embodying themselves in a species of reflective critical-moral
discourse. -nce again, 6'he difference between technical knowledge and moral
knowledge, blurred in modern epistemology, is clarified by Gadamer. 0erhaps the most
important difference is that phronesis (moral knowledge% involves a self-knowledge that
is not re1uired by technical know-how. Horeover, whereas technical knowledge is
knowledge about means and in a sense is itself a means, phronesis <embodies both means
and ends=...6 (Gallagher 1!"1;9, cf. also 1;8ff%. Fust as the situatedness of the reality
of 45eing4 as it encounters the world4s beings as part of its ownmost possibilities but also
as its very much limited e.emplars has within it both sub3ect and ob3ect, practical
wisdom cannot separate the way in which understanding takes place from understanding
4itself4. 'he process and product, to speak more basely, are the same thing in phronesis.
'his insight is crucial to an hermeneutic pedagogy, because what is generally called
education tends to separate beings form one another and from their common e.istential
envelope of humanity. *ot only this, as Gallagher suggested, modern discourse and
systems of knowing tend to separate the personal and the political, the sub3ective and the
ob3ective, and indeed, their are heralds and acolytes of both suasions, the sub3ectivity of
the artist and the ob3ectivity of the scientist are both see as ideal representations of 5eing
in human beings. 0hronesis tells us that neither can be the case" 6, human being must
!1$
learn very much in order to lie, in order to fight his fight for e.istence" but everything that
he learns and does in this respect as an individual still has nothing to with education.6
(*iet(sche !EE9"C1 <1C#!=%.
..iii
'he 4real problem regarding man4, to glance again at
*iet(sche4s genealogies of morals is the idea that our sub3ectivity is held to the promise
of both its relationship to 5eing and its relationship to other beings. 'hat these others
must also be human presents a task re1uiring the greatest effort on our parts, for we must
at once recogni(e that we are but parts, and yet at the same time what we do and who we
are effects most intimately these others to whom I appear to have no living connection.
-ne might well promise to 4behave4, as does a castigated child, but a hierarchical social
organi(ation reserves the right for some of us to never have to become responsible in any
important way to our fellow humans. )e might praise ourselves for being a 4good citi(en4,
but what does this really mean, if the will of the state both guides us and serves as our
model for a willing ac1uiescence to policies and rationalities that blind the 1uestion of
being-with into silence" 6, disturbing note, however, colors this praise" this responsible
animal is also a predictable, and, hence, a calculable animal.6 (:icoeur 1!"9$; <1E=%.
)e can indeed learn to lie without paying heed to the ethical function of untruth, in that it
lights the space of truth in its dark demarcations. Dntruth sets the hori(on for what can be
within the truth, and not so much is it the truth of things which is of the utmost, but rather
the human truths of how we run our world.
Iven with the benefits of phronesis our finitude is still present and perhaps even
more e.posed to us, our actions and the knowledge which may initiate them remain
limited" 6I am not allowed to vary fictitiously in my phantasying those elements of the
situation which are beyond my control7 that all chances and risks have to be weighed in
!1;
accordance with my present knowledge of possible occurrences of this kind in the real
world.6 (Achut( 18#"#9 <1;1=%. In spite of the presumed radicality of the deconstructive
stance, the weighing of potential action and conse1uence generally does take place within
a rational consciousness, as the sensibility of .ec"rationales Handeln suggests. )e
must and in fact do choose amongst finite pro3ects simply because the hori(on which
delimits our present consciousness of all pro3ects, including the arc of the thrown pro3ect
of @asein, reminds us of the immanence of action in the world. 'his is why rational
action directed at a set of finite pro3ects is one of the chief outcomes of practical wisdom
in the world. It is the application of thinking, not of theory alone, and not within the habit
of ritual. 0hronesis does not separate thought and action in the manner of either he.is -
which brackets thinking as only originary learning of the tasks or behaviors at hand so
that they eventually becomes habits and can remain unthought - or pra.is - where thought
is taken in whole cloth and literally 4applied4 as if it were a model for life. 'he pedagogy
of phronesis must bear both of these more limiting alternatives in mind" 6,ny attempt to
teach abnormal, agonistic discourse would be to normali(e it and to turn it into an
established discipline, 3ust as any attempt to teach phronesis would be to turn it into a set
of rules of a particualr techne. -ne ac1uires phronesis, one picks up abnormal discourse,
only by participating in a conversation that is beyond the e.plicit control of the
participants.. -ne cannot pedagogi(e the abnormal...6 (Gallagher 1!"919%. 2et this is
still not to say that e.periential education and hermeneutic pedagogy are at a loss to step
into the hori(on of practical wisdom. -ne must be placed within such a milieu, and we
have seen that there are specific ways of working with students that do so. 'he
conversations that occurred within both the 4uncanny4 and the 4therapeutic4 do take on the
!18
e.istentiality of which Gallagher speaks. It is perhaps even better to characteri(e the
pedagogy of phronesis as a way in which teaching and learning subvert both institutional
norms and the normative imperative of disciplinary language. Iach classroom might be
best though of as a course in literacy, in consciousness, in thinking, and not so narrowly
defined as units in a discursive program. 'his way of approaching the pedagogic allows
for the phronetic conversation to develop, and does not seek to necessarily control it from
without. *eedless to say, the 4uncontrolled4 character of dialectical dialogue is not chaotic
in its process and its results are not random in their outcome. 'he reason to engage one
another, the reason for the encounter with the other is immanently present, and the
reason this can be e.perienced is that one has attuned oneself to a kind of open pedagogy
that facilitates the presence of phronesis. >or the teacher, 6...responsibility is not a burden
and has nothing whatsoever to do with moral imperatives. :ather, it flows naturally out
of an innate pleasure in making manifest, in clarifying the obscure, in illuminating the
darkness < = I.istence is 4clarified4 by reason...6 (,rendt 18C"#;%.
)e must still ask why this is so. )hat is it that drives human consciousness to at
first know and confront its own limits, and yet at the same time push to overcome them in
both technical and authentically ethical waysB 0rosthesis assumes a ground, a pinion, a
hinge or crampon. Ithics cannot presume any of these, but rather reminds us not only of
its own ambiguous presence as a mode of being in the world, but also that it takes shape
not so much in the ob3ect realm but in the world of forms and characters. Iven in casual
parlance, we have the language to speak of one4s 4character4 as either 4weak4 or 4strong4
depending on the social conte.t. Hature being is alert to its own finitude but is also
concernful about. -ne truly would like to 4die at the right time4, as *iet(sche e.horts. 'he
!1#
premature burial of the victims of all kinds of travesties that the human catalogue has to
offer us cannot be overlooked, from neocolonialism to intersub3ective crime to
individuated neglect. 5ut the ethical content of hopeful discontent remains in spite of the
trial and error nature of human doings" 6'he will to life, the love of life, confronts the
wisdom of self-consciousness, which is aware of its own death. &nowledge of the
necessity of transience and death confronts itself in the eternal recurrence of the same 3ust
as much as the will to eternity does. -ne cannot solve this conflict through the wisdom of
self-consciousness...6 (Gadamer !EE9"19; <!EEE=%. 'his is so because the alertness and
concernfulness of phronesis is only enough to allow us to live on7 it does not transcend
human life but remains perhaps the most intimate and authentic aspect thereof. Iven so, it
is also clear that he 1uality of human life, while remaining profoundly human in the
organic coils of its mortal character, is made vastly more understanding of itself, more
humane, by the presence and the represencing of phronesis, both in the classroom and in
daily life. 'his is indeed more necessary than poetic e.istential reflections or musings,
though they be the grace of the repast of human sustenance, for 6If language is not soon
enfranchised by recognition of its social shape, if the classroom is not soon understood as
the scene of regular, conse1uential, even urgent human action, then all the knowledge we
have traditionally valued is in danger of falling into the hands of gunsmiths, bureaucrats,
and those who still believe that slavery and freedom can e.ist in the same society.6
(5leich 1CC"99E%. 'his has always been the case, at least since the era of modern
educational systems began about a century and a half ago. 'he problem of human
freedom is redefined by the addition of the discourses of science, which portend their
own version of freedom both through cosmic knowledge and supra-human prosthesis and
!1C
thus a reality of a transcendent consciousness, as well as by the addition of highly
rationali(ed discourses of bureaucratic organi(ations and political systems of the nation-
state. /iti(enship, whatever its other securities and deficits, is not a substitute for human
freedom. -vercoming the mortal limits of humanity makes the 1uestion moot. 5oth
rational and scientific discourses, and we have seen that they are not precisely the same
thing with regard to their e.istentiality and their relationship to ethics - the one contains
the dual aspiration of overcoming and knowing, the other for the most part dehumani(es -
do not respond to the most important 1uestions of human presence, of being-with the
other and being present to others in the world. >or what occurs after our departure from
this life is also moot, and what continues to occur after our departure on this earth is now
suddenly for us forever moot" 6+ere it is enough to ask whether freedom is to be thought
of and ad3udged on the basis of relatively momentary incidents or whether its meaning is
found in the continuity of developing e.perience.6 (@ewey 19C"$9%.
0hronesis is the key pedagogic element within such an e.periential ongoingness.
In its conversation of beings, our humanity is both the stake and the goal. )e place
ourselves at risk in the immanence of the other to self, the alien 1uality of otherness in
general pervades our attempts at communication, and the placid comforts of habitual self-
recognitions slip away. )e cannot give ourselves over entirely to any other. Indeed, we
must remind ourselves to take up this partial and alert stance to ourselves as well, lest our
own mundane but reflective egoism take on the larger than life proportions of egotism.
2et we must also not distrust the other by placing her at a safe distance" 6@ialogue is a
dialectical relation worked out between trust and suspicion.6 (Gallagher 1!"9$#%. 'here
is risk because we are not safe, but there is assuredness because we remain at first what
!1
we have always already been. )e seek to transform ourselves through teaching and
learning, but we know that what we our seeking to transform is ourselves, and not some
immediately alien 1uality or mode of being. +e.is desires of us in the main to stay the
course, to remain what we have been with the greater purpose of reproducing a culture in
the way those who live within it and live for it can recogni(e. It is one of the great
biographical tragedies that effects almost all of us to some degree that in growing old our
relevance to a an ever-changing world slips through our hands. )e are, in a socially real
way, no longer relevant to such a world, which renews itself even though it carries the
apparent burdensome 1ualities of the old along with it. 2et phronesis can address even
this, for it reminds us that those who are older have e.perienced change, and know its
effects" 6'he value of e.perience is not only in the ideals it reveals, but in its power to
disclose many ideals, a power more germinal and more significant than any revealed
ideal, since it includes them in its stride, shatters and remakes them. -ne may even
reverse the statement and say that the value of ideals lies in the e.periences to which they
lead.6 (@ewey 19$"9!!%. +ermeneutic pedagogy is only the mediator between ideals -
be they discursive or ethical - and e.perience - which is always containing of both. 0ra.is
desires of us to e.tend what we have been without necessarily overcoming it. It presents
to us an addition, not a transformation. ,nd yet the world does not e.tend itself through
its history of change, and thus the techne of pra.is is made to look like an attempt to
control the human fatedness of ambiguous finitude, and the criti1ue of authentic pra.is
made to look like an e.cuse for the sake of change itself, without necessarily
understanding the open-endedness of each living tradition that has participated in the
human conversation" 6,ny language in which we live is infinite in this sense, and it is
!!E
completely mistaken to infer that reason is fragmented because there are various
languages. Fust the opposite is the case. 0recisely through our finitude, the particularity of
our being, which is evident even in the variety of languages, the infinite dialogue is
opened in the direction of the truth that we are.6 (Gadamer 1#8"18%.
0erhaps it is the understanding that wisdom must practice itself in the world that
sets phronesis apart from its constituents. 'he pragmatic 1uality by itself is also to be
found in both custom - after all, what we have known about the way we live has 4worked4
in this or that over the generations, we may say to ourselves - as well as in pra.is - for the
sole purpose of instrumental reason is to effect the most e.pedient action, to create a
world where one4s humanity may be secured by practice alone. 0hronesis sees through
the practicality of repetition and e.tension by seeing them as rationali(ations for the
world as it has been. In its subtle but forceful presence, the wisdom of reflective practice
asks us to stand outside of the dominion of discourse, the caveat of custom, and move
ourselves into the brightest human light of self-understanding anew.
!!1
!!!
i
+otes"
,s Har. suggests - in his 4/riti1ue of +egelJs @octrine of the AtateJ - commenting on their actual function" L'he
e.amination is nothing but the bureaucratic baptism of knowledge, the official recognition of the transubstantiation of
profane knowledge into sacred knowledgeM, which then is often forgotten.
ii
'hat we live in the same kind of society that committed genocide is an uncomfortable fact of 3ust such a living present
that techni1ue and instrumental rationality would live to deny. In telling ourselves we could not commit such acts we make
all of us into 4holocaust deniers4. ,dorno reminds us that such an event and others like it are not 4outside4 of the flow of
history nor are they merely perverse tangents of our social structures" 6Hillions of innocent people - to 1uote or haggle over
the numbers is already inhumane - were systematically murdered. 'hat cannot be dismissed by any living person as a
superficial phenomenon, as an aberration of the course of history to be disregarded when compared to the great dynamic of
progress, of enlightenment, of the supposed growth of humanitarianism. 'he fact that it happened is itself the e.pression of
an e.tremely powerful societal tendency.6 (,dorno 1C"1! <18=%.
iii
*eedless to say, it is much easier being an arts professor to this regard, for while one might have to put up with some
professional students who think one is but a 3umped up high school teacher of no real worldly relevance - who does
philosophy, anywayB - the vast ma3ority of upper level students render great esteem upon those they imagine to be founts of
the particualr brand of wisdom they should like to emulate. 'he danger for both the arts and more technical programs alike
is that the professor suddenly become some kind of moral force and thus adds counseling to his already swollen credentials"
6...where this handling takes on an ethical force - a 4good4 student is not merely competent, but is morally certified by virtue
of the competence < = , teacher offers a kind of 4absolution74 for error and provides 4guidance4 on how to proceed ne.t.6
(5leich 1CC"18E%.
iv
,nd this hermeneutic conte.t also includes an analysis of the forms of authority that both document and docket each
attempt at critical dialogue within any discourse, whether the ob3ect of it be the scientific attitude, the sociological
imagination, or the 4common-sense4 view of things" 6'he full meaning of the lesson, embedded in language itself, includes
both a microcosm of power relations (those between the teacher as authority and student as dominated% and a reflection of
the macrocosm of power relations in the larger society.6 (Gallagher 1!"!;9 italics the te.t4s%.
v
5leich adds that it is through language that the imagination can resist both habit and policy, even if the latter be unfamiliar
to us in its content and rule" 6...language use is related to every social instinct in human beings, and to disregard this fact
would be to transform language - the name and the thing - into something else.6 (5leich 1CC"91;%. 'hus the hermeneutic
language of interpretation and reflection, its criti1ue and impulse to overturn an assumption, cannot become another mere
nomenclature of the fictive world of norms as necessities.
vi
'hese tropes are often revealed through language in use, where our utterances reaffirm their embeddedness in social
relations, and that these are the self-same forms of relations that had to be negotiated by each generation" 6In fact, to take
the word seriously as a human, social speech act shows the strong kinship of literacy and orality7 what is re1uired for that
kinship to emerge is the adoption of values which do not give priority to either the individual or the community. Iach
simultaneously constitutes the other.6 (5leich 1CC"C$%.
vii
'o this sensibility Achiller continues" 6'hough need may drive Han into society, and :eason implant social principles in
him, 5eauty alone can confer on him a social character. 'aste alone brings harmony into society, because it establishes
harmony in the individual.6 (Achiller 18;"19C <1#;= italics the te.t4s%.
viii
'his must be done at the level of individual speakers as well as at an interdiscursive level of te.tuality and institutional
policy. Indeed, the aspects of classes we might recall most easily might be the epigrammatical statements of teachers and
students alike. 'hese hold the clues to a larger rhetoric or tension between rhetorics, they may well be the kerygmatic
kernels of meaningfulness that has been shunted aside in the ever-surging 1uest for clarity and unanimity. It is this blithe
movement toward an absolute goal of rationality and techni1ue that casts also aside a human ethics" 60erhaps specific verbal
formulations by individuals might also have proved memorable. 'he missing element in such a procedure would be the
record on the ethical role played by each person.6 (5leich 1CC"91$ italics the te.t4s%.
i.
Iach of the evaluation transcripts has been anonymi(ed, and referenced only with the year the course was listed under in
the various university calendars. *o attempt was made to ascertain already muted data such as gender and ma3or, out of
respect for the institutions4 evaluation processes. 'he reader, however, is seeing what I myself have seen in terms of written
1ualitative student feedback, with some minor grammatical ad3ustments. I culled, however, only typical statements to
illustrate themes of response related to the three ma3or tropes of the hermeneutical circle in pedagogic conte.ts. I also have
taken out almost all of the laudatory comments, as there presence is always ambiguous and might well be seen as self-
aggrandi(ing.
.
,long with Aagan before him, 5leich goes on to characteri(e the roots of )estern culture as having this same problem, in
that we are able to look to our origins in the manner of all of those acolytes who follow a specific religious belief,
disbelieving all critical stances towards their system, and forgetting 1uite conveniently both the origins of the belief
themselves in history as well as ironically playing down the metaphorical lattices that might make the meanings adhered to
such beliefs and attendant practices relevant to us today" 6Greek thought goes unchallenged in today4s intellectual life as a
repository of values and intellectual schemata. Dsually it is a 1uestion of either ,ristotle or 0lato, but virtually no one
conceptuali(es the great period of ,thens as a masculine-dominated, se.ist, slave-holding society whose conceptions of
knowledge may actually be serving those degenerate values.6 (5leich 1CC"8!%.

.i
5leich fleshed this point out earlier in his te.t when enumerating the occasions when what passes for scholarly endeavors
is collected and reviewed as if it were not part of the collective e.ercise of the conversation of humanity, ironically one of
the first principles of 4humanist thought, which he says 6...is understood to be privately generated, and the conditions of its
production are highly individuali(ed. Acholars work out of the classroom, in libraries or other private places.6 (5leich
1CC"18 italics the te.t4s%.
.ii
'hus measurement and evaluation techni1ues also harm the intelligence of the teacher or teaching professor, as these are
most often cited as the chief instrument of not only maintaining social order in a classroom which is by nurture filled with
the keenness of revolt and refutation and the e.perience of the very mi.ed messages of youth, but of also accreditation.
ironically, the good grade is to be taken as a mark of the intellectual grade of its holder" 6It is grading that allows the
academy to keep an authoritarian policy toward the classroom, a policy that inhibits imaginative social imitative for the
class as a whole as well as risk-taking by individual students. ,lthough students often complain about grading, they have no
choice, finally, but to view it as something benign...6 (5leich 1CC"1;#, cf. 1;ff for an e.tended discussion of the problem
of formality and permanence of grades as a 4recording4 of intellectual merit%.
.iii
,long these lines, >riere reminds us that media communication also serves the interests of a hierarchy predisposed to
acknowledge little beyond the 4facts4 of the matter. 2et editorials sometimes betray the effect of a perspectivism, so much so
that the word 4editoriali(ing4 is more or less a pe3orative given that 6...people will react to newspapers or news broadcasts not
as passive ob3ects of the 4communi1uRs4 directed at them, but rather as consciousness seeking to be free.4 (>riere 1#E"118%.
'his is a well worn theme in analyses of contemporary society, both of its normative idolatry and of its massive scale of
media influence, but more importantly, the fact that such a media must already have a willing audience, one that could only
have been created by the he.is-mimicry of a system of false pra.is" 6/ertainly human culture is greatly endangered by the
passivity that is produced when the channels of cultural information are all too instantly available. 'his is especially true of
the mass media.6 (Gadamer 1C8";1 <1##=%.
.iv
In times of crisis, this can be a great advantage, as in the case that Gadamer relates speaking about his lectures during the
'hird :eich" 6I was still allowed to hold seminars, even on Fewish authors, undisturbed. *obody denounced this. )hyB
God, yes of course. 5ecause the *a(is didn4t give a damn what we did. < = 'hese intellectuals, they thought, what did it
matter what they had in their headsB6 (Gadamer !EE1"1!#%.
.v
,nd again" L)ithin the meta-interpretation the local interpretations would not be evaluated in terms of any predetermined
prescriptives or rules.M(ibid"99C%. Gallagher reminds us of this ethic as it is clearly on the way to the practical wisdom of
phronesis, but perhaps prematurely in that it assumes a background model based on the tradition as it stands (cf. 99ff%.
.vi
'his KludicityJ does not refer to the endless play of signifiers as a limit on language, as we have mentioned, but more as
the games which Gadamer and others have referred to as what one becomes involved in. 5leich likens it to intercollegiate
sports, although admits that this form of mutuality re1uires no great insights nor does it aspire to the profound (cf.
1CC"9!$%. ,s far as opening upJ is concerned, we need only think of the many important aesthetic moments in learning
about the degrees of being-as-the-world. 'he conductor Air Aimon :attle famously notes that when he first heard Hahler at
a young age, he felt his insides had been ripped out of him, which he then notes was Ke.actly the correct feelingJ.
.vii
5leich further relates his own personal e.perience with attempting to offer ungraded courses, which were re3ected by his
institution" 6If it clearly demonstrates that student do better in an ungraded course, leading to other re1uests by other faculty
members, it would mean the gradual erosion of the grading system. I do not see any other e.planation for refusing my
re1uest. < = I ask any reader who doubts than an unreasonable fear is behind the resistance to eliminate grading - even for
one semester in writing courses - to try re1uesting the same thing in your own university and then to tell me what you find
out.6 (5leich 1CC"1C%. 'his resistance may be not so irrational and shadowy as 5leich implies, but more cynical. If so,
then we would be better off taking Har.ian edge to the institutional version of pra.is than one >reudian. -n the other hand,
the mere fact that in this very end-note I had to add to my word processor4s dictionary the word 4ungraded4 may give some
weight to 5leich4s suggestions.
.viii
Gadamer continues by sketching out what in our modern sensibility owes its allegiance to this original conceptuali(ation.
he sees it as a 4motive force4 of science in particular, 6...which we describe in terms of 4practical reason4. Aince the eighteenth
century this is the term we have used to describe what the Greeks meant by the words pra"ti"e and phronesis, namely an
awareness appropriate to a particular situation, like that in which diagnosis, treatment, dialogue and the participation of the
patient all come together.6 (Gadamer 18"19C <1C8=%.
.i.
2et Gallagher ultimately decides that practical wisdom is in fact what is necessary to confront the finitude of human
consciousness" 6Phronesis is not, as /aputo would have it, inade1uate to the conversation or relegated to normal discourse
alone. It is the only virtue available to deal with the ambiguity, the play involved in the incommensurability of discourses. It
is the only virtue that will not deny the ambiguity.6 (Gallagher 1!"911%
..
It is precisely this abruptness that constitutes the *iet(schean edge of interpretation. 'his is not a recollection of the 4all is
vanity4 or 4all flesh is as grass4 call to arms of the 0auline an.iety, but rather a fundamental acknowledgement of the needful
and yearning aspiration of humanity - to make meaningful the cosmos is also to return to it. In doing so, we radically risk
our previous sense of self, and in this we are not at all conserving, for we do not know the ends of this play" 6...an
4authoritative4 teacher can share substantial parts of his or her sub3ectivity, thereby disclosing my common participation with
the students in the universal processes of growth and change.6 (5leich 1CC"!;;%.
..i
Auch a task is an ongoing and a daunting one, however, as students and professors alike are wary of both the risk of
authentic dialogue - the former may not believe they have anything to offer or that the professor is after all here to teach
them, not the other way around, and the latter may either feel that they are condescending or they have no will to
condescend, for what else could it beB - and as such it may sometimes be 6...virtually impossible to dislodge the ethic of the
primacy of the individual even in those efforts which recogni(e that mutuality is as primary as individuality, and which
understand that leadership does not have to be authoritarian.6 (5leich 1CC"!;9%.
..ii
,nother e.ample was atypical in its length and detailed understanding of the process of e.periential learning, and is
worth 1uoting in its entirety because its substantive e.amples do not in fact appear to be very radical at all" 6@ewey4s idea of
4active learning4 is epitomi(ed within this sociology class. Hy professor for the class has set himself apart from the crowd of
e.tremely linear instructors. )ithin this particular e.ample there is an e.cellent case where this freedom is illustrated" upon
the assignment of group presentations we had the freedom to choose a topic that pertained to the course. 'he ma3ority of the
class was not familiar with this instructing techni1ue and was very surprised because it is so different than what or how we
had been taught in years of education. +ere he is giving us complete control over something enabling us the freedom to
e.perience open-minded possibilities rather than choosing from a list of prepared topics. Hy group members and I were
both grateful and surprised by this, which in turn led to confusion. -ne of the females in the group was stressing out
because she had no idea 4what the professor e.pected4. 'hat was the whole point he was trying to get across to everyone.
Iver since kindergarten we have been told what to do and told what to and what not to e.pect7 this professor was taking a
different approach with his students, and succeed in doing so. he gave us back some of the freedom we had lost over the
years. +e didn4t bo. us in like other instructors have over my academic e.perience. :ather he too away the bo., enabling
personal growth over the past couple of months in this course. >or that I am truly grateful.6 (9rd year student%.
..iii
,nd indeed the 4struggle for e.istence4 is played out in a larger than human life scale. 'he greatest danger to the stage of
5eing as it lights upon the world without stopping to alight is that real human lives become the stakes in the great game of
becoming, and as long as 4becoming4 has no concern for the other it may grow to any proportion it desires" 6It was the
barbarism all education strives against. -ne speaks of the threat of a relapse into barbarism. 5ut it is not a threat -
,uschwit( was this relapse, and barbarism continues as long as the fundamental conditions that favored that relapse
continue largely unchanged. 'hat is the whole horror. 'he societal pressure still bears down, although the danger remains
invisible nowadays.6 (,dorno 1C"11 <18=%.
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Hermeneutic Pedagogy: teaching and learning as dialogue and interpretation

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Hermeneutic Pedagogy: teaching and learning as dialogue and interpretation

Hermeneutic Pedagogy: teaching and learning as dialogue and interpretation

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