Illuminating the Simultaneously Interior and Interpersonal Dynamic of Soulful Learning

• In Event: The Erotic Reconstitution of Democratic Life: From Socrates to Today

Abstract

The depiction of teaching as the cultivation of soulful personhood highlights both personhood and the process of education as inextricably social. The fourth panelist will shine a light on this both deeply personal and deeply social process through a self-study of their own erotically soulful educative becoming.

Plato’s Seventh Letter describes the peripetal “turning of the soul” of the Republic as a necessarily long dialogical process through which the deeply hidden wick of the student’s soul is finally set afire, in ways that are then well-nigh impossible to quench. The accomplishment of learning, Plato suggests, is deeply individual and personal—a free movement of desire within one’s own soul—yet the interior act of learning emerges through and depends on extended encounter with others.

The speaker will employ insights from Edmund Husserl (1960, 1989) and Edith Stein’s (1964) understandings of “empathy” and Jean-Luc Marion’s (2002) notion of “gift” to illuminate the compelling yet somewhat elusive Platonic account of learning as a both interior and interpersonal process. Highlighting the hidden connection between phenomenology and philosophical pragmatism, Stein specifically cites Josiah Royce’s essay “Consciousness, Self-Conciousness, and Nature” (1895) to substantiate the at the same time social and psychological workings of empathy: “This whole popular and philosophical opposition between a [person’s] self-consciousness, as if it were something primitive and lonely, and [one’s] social consciousness, as if that were something acquired, apart from one’s self-consciousness, through intercourse with [one’s] fellows, is false to human nature. A [person] becomes self-conscious only in the most intimate connection with the growth of one’s social consciousness.”

Through depicting the trajectory of learning followed through their doctoral studies in phenomenological terms, the speaker will offer what hopefully listeners will find to be both a conceptually rich and phenomenologically alive illustration of learning as becoming oneself through the help of others. And they will conclude with observations on how eros can be a gift that perpetually keeps on giving—how, in the words of Robert L. Inchausti, “real teachers take their very lives up into speech, so that others may do the same” (1994).

References

Husserl, E. (1960). Cartesian meditations: An introduction to phenomenology. (D. Cairns, Trans.). Martinus Nijoff. (Original work published 1931).
Husserl, E. (1989). Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy. Second book: Studies in the phenomenology of constitution. (R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer, Trans.). Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Inchausti, R.L. (1994). Spitwad Sutras: Classroom teaching as sublime vocation. (Stamford, CT: Bergin & Garvey).
Marion, J. L. (2002). Being given: Toward a phenomenology of givenness. (J. L. Kosky, Trans). Stanford University Press.
Royce, J. (1895). Consciousness, self-consciousness, and nature. Philosophical Review 4 (1895): 577-602.
Stein, E. (1964). On the problem of empathy. (W. Stein, Trans.). Springer Science and Media. (Original work published 1916).

Author

• Rebecca Sullivan, Montrose School