Hope and education beyond critique. Towards pedagogy with a lower case ‘p’

ABSTRACT

For Rorty, any attempt to articulate a theory of truth as such is of no interest. This implies that although it may be meaningful to differentiate the truths from the falsehoods, it is pointless to say what the property of goodness is in the things we believe are good to do. Rorty points out that our no longer understanding Philosophy – with the capital ‘P’–as the framing of normative notions would make room for a post-philosophical culture where the philosophers’ activity would be closer to the practices of cultural critique with the self-imposed limitation of devoting themselves exclusively to advancing descriptions of how things relate to each other. This article aims to explore what would happen if this provocation were brought to the field of Pedagogy. Taking on this Rortyan theme, keeping hope on the potentially liberating and transformative power of education implies a hopeful attitude by which individuals involved in education processes express their love for the world as a commitment to a better future, as well as their belief in its possibilities.

KEYWORDS:

• Richard Rorty
• concept of education
• post-critical pedagogy
• hope

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See, https://eera-ecer.de/ecer-2019-hamburg/.

2. There is going on a lively epistemological discussion in Spain about the argumentative circularity that legitimizes contemporary educational research and how this is affecting our views on education as whole (Gil and Reyero 2014; Gaviria 2015, 2015; Thoilliez 2017; Boarini 2018).

3. Published by Punctum Books, it is possible to freely download the e-book version of the Manifesto (as well as buying a paperbound edition). See, https://punctumbooks.com/titles/manifesto-for-a-post-critical-pedagogy/.

4. Which by now has had two later developments (Hodgson, Vlieghe, and Zamojski 2018; Vlieghe and Zamojski 2019).

5. An aspect that is also addressed by Stefano Oliverio’s contribution to this symposium, although pointing to the existing differences between the Manifesto’s vocabularies and Rorty’s rather than to what makes possible a conversation between them (Oliverio 2019).

6. I myself have expressed my doubts (Thoilliez 2019a).

7. ‘“Phenomenal” can no longer be given a sense, once Kantian “intuitions” drop out. For the suggestion that our concepts shape neutral material no longer makes sense once there is nothing to serve as this material. The physical stimuli themselves are not a useful substitute, for the contrast between the “posits” which the inventive mind construct us to predict and control stimuli, and the stimuli themselves, can be no more than a contrast between the effable world its ineffable cause’ (Rorty 1982, 4).

8. Rorty’s views of science have recently been very well discussed by Nalliely Hernández (2017). Regarding literature Rorty says: ‘I shall mean areas of culture which, quite self-consciously, forego agreement on an encompassing critical vocabulary, and thus forego argumentation’ (Rorty 1982, 142). As Del Castillo (2015, 17–18) reminds us, Rorty saw the community of academic philosophers divided in two groups. One group was made of people who were busy formulating problems and meeting established criteria that determine what a contribution to research really is. The other group was made of people who try to widen their imagination and read books in order to modify their perception and that of their society. Proper philosophers (those acting within a post-philosophical culture), would mediate between the two and use their knowledge for cultural change.

9. For a deeper understanding of the Rorty-Foucault debate, see Malecki (2011). His main argument is that Rorty’s interpretation of Foucault should always be understood in the context of his approach toward the ‘American Cultural Left.’ I would like to thank Kai Wortmann for pointing me to this particular reading, and I would encourage readers to look at Wortmann’s own redescription of Rorty’s ‘cultural politics’ within this symposium (Wortman 2019).

10. ‘Our social hope is that human beings will build a world, valuate, sustain, nourish and defend the nutritive needs of human life, because and only because, such activity reveals its significance in the lineaments, texture and quality of its obviousness. In more simple but powerful terms, things become sacred because we use them, touch them, name them and covet them. The social hope is that we more share than covet. As Dewey sees it or better as Dewey “has” it, the task of philosophy is to map the terrain in which the irreducible problematic character of our situation shows itself, and shows itself happily vulnerable to the fortuitous intrusion of “creative intelligence”’. (McDermott 1985, 5).

11. See Rorty (1998b, 1999). I very much appreciate Kai Wortmann’s observations in this particular point.

12. See, Sleeper (1986).

13. Meanings in the sense of ‘embodied meanings’, i.e. meanings ascribed to things we experience. Dewey offers an explanation on this matter in an essay from 1907, ‘The Intellectualist Criterion for Truth’ (MW 4: 50–75; originally published in the journal Mind and later included in his collection 1910 The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy), where the idea of embodied meaning, the meaning that things have, what things are, addresses a criterion for truth different from classical theories on truth as correspondence or adaptation. As Dewey says, ‘No subject can be mere existence any more than it can be mere meaning. It is always existent or embodied meaning. As such it claims individuality or the character of a single subsistent whole. But this indispensable claim is inconsistent with its ragged-edged character, its indefinite external reference, which is indispensable to it as subject that it may require and receive further meaning from predication’ (Dewey 1907, 52). A bit further on he adds: ‘All things that we experience have some meaning, but that meaning is always so partially embodied in things that we cannot rest in them. They point beyond themselves; they indicate meanings which they do not fulfil; they suggest values which they fail to embody, and when we go to other things for the fruition of what is denied, we either find the same situation of division over again, or we find even more positive disappointment and frustration – we find contrary meanings set up. Now all thinking grows out of this discrepancy between existence and the meaning which it partially embodies and partially refuses, which it suggests but declines to express’ (Ibid. 53).

14. As I have been trying to do in previous works (Standish and Thoilliez 2018; Thoilliez 2019b).

15. Being Kai Wortmann’s paper included in this symposium a very good exemplary of what this creation of new possibilities may look like (Wortman 2019).