Existential Yoga: The Educational Event of Thought Bending Back Upon Itself

• In Event: Roundtable Session 29
  In Roundtable Session: War, Vulnerability, Suffering, and Being: Human Existence and Education

Abstract

This paper explores the productive and generative outcomes of existential angst and struggle to put forward the ways in which the qualitative leap is an educational event. To this end, I will explore the last section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the first part of Notes from the Underground to look at the ways in which Nietzsche and Dostoevsky understand to dual quality of suffering to be productive. I will then move forward to extend the existentialist notions of suffering into education, where I will propose that in allowing ourselves to move along the affective dimension of the qualitative leap, we can develop an attitude that makes possible a kind of thought that bends back upon itself.

Author

• Zofia Zaliwska, University of Toronto - OISE