Premium
Out of Love for Some‐Thing: An Ontological Exploration of the Roots of Teaching with Arendt, Badiou and Scheler
Author(s) -
VLIEGHE JORIS,
ZAMOJSKI PIOTR
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of philosophy of education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.501
H-Index - 41
eISSN - 1467-9752
pISSN - 0309-8249
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9752.12375
Subject(s) - the thing , falling in love , object (grammar) , sociology , event (particle physics) , epistemology , order (exchange) , subject (documents) , phenomenon , philosophy , aesthetics , psychology , psychoanalysis , computer science , linguistics , physics , finance , quantum mechanics , telecommunications , library science , economics
In this article we develop the idea that there exists a unique educational love and that it moreover can be identified as essential to education. First, developing Arendt's claim that education is about the existing generation introducing newcomers to the world, we argue that the object‐side of educational love is not the student, but first and foremost the thing that is studied in the classroom. Educational love is love for the world, not for a person. It expresses itself in the act of affirming that a particular thing is interesting: a part of the world that is worth the effort of being studied together with the new generation. Second, we follow Badiou's account of love as the labour of fidelity to the event, in order to render teaching in terms of staying faithful to one's falling in love with a particular subject matter. Teaching is therefore a continuous attempt at making this event of falling in love present in the classroom. Thus, love for the thing materialises itself in an effort to make the thing endure and to show to the next generation that it is worth of care and attention. Finally, indicating the erotic and agapeic dimension of educational love we turn to Scheler and his position on love and hate as two distinct ways of relating with the world, which respectively come down to an opening and a narrowing‐down mode of world‐disclosure.