Chapter 2 The Culture of Philosophical Experience

CULTURE In the first chapter we have explored ways in which speculative experience is suppressed within various perspectives within the philosophy of education and educational theory. When the speculative experience is comprehended as the broken relation of education and philosophy, not only is the one-sided nature of these perspectives exposed, but also their broken relation is realised philosophically, that is, as an experience of aporia in and for itself. Within this investigation in Chapter 1, we saw the different ways in which this experience is misrecognised, but we also, in brief, described the ways in which philosophy in Hegel, Kierkegaard and Rose re-cognises this misrecognition. This recognition cannot be interpreted as an overcoming of the oppositions that are the substance of its experience. Recognition is tied to misrecognition, and is the relation of philosophy to existing social relations, not its overcoming of them. 1 To be engaged in and by the speculative is to learn to live with, yet in important ways also apart from, the social relations that currently predetermine both our experience and the thought of our experience. It is to an examination of these relations and pre-determinations that this chapter turns its attention. These social and political relations are already present, then, in the forms that philosophy of education and educational theorising take. As we saw above, when, for example, moral philosophy posits objectivity or validity as having priority over the dialectic, or negation, or mediation, then it posits itself as a consciousness of the object, but not, also, as a consciousness of itself as object. This is an oft-made critique of such work from within both the emancipatory tradition, which sees it as paying no heed to the universality of modern commodification, as well as for more post-foundationalist outlooks, which see its logos implicated in and by a Western epistemological and rational imperialism. Equally, however, when these critical or deconstructive outlooks give priority to non-objectivity, be it as praxis or pluralism, this, in turn, refuses political experience a grounding in itself and threatens to make it otiose as thinking that lacks objective educational import. Social relations, specifically universal private property relations, are carried within both of these groups of perspectives and their critiques of each other. This is experienced by us in the repetition of such critiques where each accuses the other of varying degrees of universality or particularity. Our experience of their opposition, and the …