The leap of learning

Abstract

This article seeks to elaborate the step of epistemological affirmation that exists within every movement of learning. My epistemological method is rooted in philosophical hermeneutics in contrast to empirical or rationalist traditions. I argue that any movement of learning is based upon an entry into a hermeneutical circle: one is thrown into, or leaps into, an interpretation which in some sense has to be temporarily affirmed or adopted in order to be either absorbed and integrated, or overcome and rejected. I illustrate this process through a retrieval of the concept of submission in pedagogy, particularly with reference to submission in Eastern traditions, as well as pre-modern Christian thought. These other traditions are introduced to contrast with the modern liberal Western perspective in which the role of submission has been almost entirely lost.

Keywords::

• submission
• hermeneutics
• Ricoeur
• Tai Chi
• pedagogy
• epistemology

Notes

^1. Although Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur are most associated with philosophical hermeneutics, Nietzsche specialists might seek to explain the hermeneutical approach set out here in terms of a Nietzschean philosophy of affirmation. Although I suspect such a connection may be fruitful, it lies beyond my present concerns.

^2. This modern sense of hermeneutics develops largely in the wake of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. As Simms has pointed out, Hans Georg Gadamer's book Truth and Method ‘represents the first attempt to develop a fully fledged “hermeneutics” in the modern sense’ (2003, 39). But Ricoeur's more sustained treatment of hermeneutics is arguably at least as influential today.

^3. MacIntyre and Ricoeur elaborated the religious significance of atheism by examining the theological significance of the ‘great’ atheists: Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche (1969). This kind of atheism is some way from the resurgent atheism espoused by certain secularists and humanists skeptical of apparent ‘post-secular’ contemporary contexts.

^4. Heidegger's account of ‘involved’ relations with things is most consistently elaborated within Being and Time (1996).

^5. For St Anselm, who is most associated with the Christian dictum faith seeking understanding (fides quaerens intellectum), faith is understood more as an act of orientation or volition. In line with the thesis of a primary affirmation, Anselm understands this formula to indicate: ‘an active love of God seeking a deeper knowledge of God’ (2001).

^6. Ricoeur adopts the notion of the wager, made most famous by Blaise Pascal, to explore the nature of engaged hermeneutics: the wager is

that I shall have a better understanding of man, and of the bond between the being of man and the being of all beings if I follow the indication of symbolic thought. That wager then becomes the task of verifying my wager and saturating it, so to speak, with intelligibility. In return, the task transforms my wager: in betting on the significance of the symbolic world, I bet at the same time that my wager will be restored to me in power of reflection, in coherent discourse (1967, 355).

^7. Ricoeur calls this a ‘long-route’ to being via interpretive structures, in contrast to Heidegger's more direct route to fundamental ontology (see Kearney 2004, 22).

^8. By contrast to the following account of my own experience, here are words that might otherwise characterize the depth of relation in more substantial terms:

Meeting one's Guru or Master is a Mystery. It is a date with destiny. Those who are lucky enough to stumble upon this seismic encounter may never be the same again. In that meeting one experiences, suddenly or gradually, an ecstatic release into the limitless singularity and depth of one's True Self (Bampton 2009).

^9. Among the best known examples of this formulation of self-understanding is to be found in Luke 9:24 ‘whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.’

^10. The infamous image of Francis Bacon advocating the ‘torture of nature’ may not be historically accurate (Pesic 1999), but the general notion that we have expected nature to yield knowledge is not an unfair characterization of modern scientific and technological practice.