How Could There Be an Education in Transcendence?

• In Event: Transcendence and Education

Abstract

Imagine we have encountered intelligent beings on another planet. As we and they start to learn each other’s languages, these aliens note that on their world, they use their equivalent of the word “philosophy”—which they have learned from us means “love of wisdom”—and their synonym for “education”—defined as “leading out”—interchangeably. For example, sometimes they will say, “Spock is neglecting his education” and other times, “Spock hasn’t been putting much into his philosophy.” At which point, it is not hard to imagine, our linguists might protest that the aliens have not in fact fully understood what “education” and “philosophy” mean for us.
Why would this be the case? Why is our real world actually opposed to this science-fiction one? In the course of exploring these questions, I shall claim that there is no place in the world of education for the transcendence of wisdom. This last phrase of course calls for explication; I hope to provide one that draws on Martin Heidegger’s (Heidegger 1968) and Alain Badiou’s (Badiou 2001 and 2002) understandings of life’s “eventful calling.” If we accept the way this argument revises our understanding of education and philosophy, three significant implications follow. The first is that, contra Dewey (1916), educational practice cannot be theoretically based on philosophy: “philosophy of education,” in this sense, is a contradiction in terms. Secondly, philosophy cannot be genuinely pursued as a specialized discipline that is part of a program in education: this is sophistry. And the third implication is that we should realize love of wisdom, like romantic love, is a kind of grace. It is given to us to celebrate, but we cannot engineer it.
My argument will begin with a look at how we conventionally understand “education”. I observe that we associate the term with a specialized, technical practice, analyzable into similar component practices, that aims to help people acquire knowledge. I shall then explain how this conception represents an instance of what the social critic Georg Lukács calls “reification” (Lukács 1971): the commodification of life that alienates us from our own experience.
What is the nature of uncommodified life? It is a unity defined by its mortal limits. Because it is fated to disappear, it raises the question of its meaning. The answer on which this question speculates, one which constitutes a central object of desire, is what we may call “wisdom.” In this sense, life is proto-philosophical. In contrast, education, like other reified practices, distracts us from our interest in wisdom.
The philosopher is someone for whom this interest has been converted into a devotional calling. This occurs when a question of wisdom discloses the Present that answers it indirectly. Using Heidegger and Badiou’s work, I shall explain how this question is answered and why the indirect nature of such an answer constitutes a form of transcendence.

Author

• Rene V. Arcilla, New York University