Being Taught by, Being-With, Living With: From "Mathematic Learning" Back to "Pragmatic Paideía"

• In Event: Roundtable Session 26
  In Roundtable Session: Education and the Limits of Learning: How Much Learning Does Education Need?

Abstract

In my presentation, I will engage with the question of what education without learning could mean by taking cue from the distinction between learning from and being taught by (Biesta, 2013).

First, I intend to mobilize this distinction within a possible re-interpretation—in an educational perspective—of Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy and Kant’s (Preface to) the Critique of Pure Reason. This could help us to consider the phenomenon of ‘learnification’ in a broader horizon, as the contemporary heir of a much longer development, consisting in the replacement of experience (which entails a being affected by the ‘world’) with knowledge as something occurring in and even constructed by the head of the subject(s).

Second, I will suggest capturing this shift through the notion of “mathematic learning.” As Heidegger (1935/36) reminds us, the word ‘mathematic’ comes from the Greek tà mathémata, which are the things insofar as they are learnable. Different from tà mathémata are tà prágmata, which are the things insofar as they are that with which we have to do and deal. By elaborating on some of Heidegger’s tenets, I will, on the one hand, refer the emergence of the ‘mathematic learning’ to what Heidegger (1945) considered as a major lapse in the history of education, namely the stranglehold of reason over education; on the other hand, I will endeavour to show how Heidegger invites us to abandon ‘mathematic learning’ and to recover ‘pragmatic paideía,’ in which affectedness and passibility (Roth, 2011) play a major role. I will illustrate the meaning of such ‘pragmatic paideía’ by drawing upon Heidegger’s (1940) specific translation of Plato’s definition of paideía and by applying it to Heidegger’s (1954) example of the carpenter apprentice, which—I will argue—should not be construed in terms of learning, Heidegger’s word choices notwithstanding.

Finally, against this backdrop I will attempt to provide an idiosyncratic interpretation of a famous passage of Plato’s Seventh Letter, in which the opposition between mathémata and prágma occurs. I would like to suggest that in it the traces of a discourse emerge, in which paideía is a matter of being-together and living-together. This discourse could be relatable to the idea of ‘adoption,’ as is presented in this symposium. [481 words, references included]

References
Biesta, G.J.J. (2013). Receiving the Gift of Teaching: From ‘Learning From’ to ‘Being Taught By.’ Studies in Philosophy and Education, 32(5), pp. 449-462.
Heidegger, M. (1935/36). Die Frage nach dem Ding. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1987.
Heidegger, M. (1940). Platons Lehre der Wahrheit. In Wegmarken (pp. 203-238). Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996.
Heidegger, M. (1945). The Art of Teaching. Edited and translated by Valerie Allen and Ares D. Axiotis. In Michael A. Peters (ed.). Heidegger, Education, and Modernity (pp. 27-45). Lanham-Boulder-New York-Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002.
Heidegger, M. (1954). Was heisst Denken?. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1997.
Roth, W.-M. (2011). Passibility. At the Limits of the Constructivist Metaphor. Dordrecht-Heidelberg-London, New York: Springer.

Author

• Stefano Oliverio, University of Naples Federico II