Paul Fairfield
The consequences of hermeneutics for education are profound and far-reaching. While the philosophy of education was never a major preoccupation of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s, his writings on Bildung and dialogue, in particular, contain implications for what happens, or might happen, in classrooms, which are the topic of this chapter. After discussing these two themes in what follows, I offer a few reflections on some obstacles to education as hermeneutics conceives of it which are plainly visible in the university of today. Let us begin with dialogue. This most central theme in philosophical hermeneutics was appropriately described in Truth and Method as an art of informal conversation on the model of Platonic dialogue, in which Socrates comports himself not as one in possession of the truth but as the professor of his own ignorance and student of whatever interlocutor he encountered. True wisdom, he insisted, is the possession of the gods; human beings may pursue and indeed love wisdom, but we are only ever on the way to acquiring it, and acquiring it in association with other rational beings. One does not pursue knowledge alone, but only ever on a common basis, and rather often without formal methods. Language is best regarded, phenomenologically speaking, as the practice of dialogue in which reciprocity, freedom, and equality between speakers is the only morality, and power, while never altogether eliminable from human affairs, requires constant vigilance from participants. The point of a dialogue is the search for what is true, what is good, and what things mean, and none in the conversation possesses special expertise in these matters.
There are two paradigmatic dialogical acts, which are speaking and listening. Participation involves a constant back and forth between what another has to say—be it a person, text, or what have you—and the creative response of the individual. Fundamentally, the act of speaking is a responding to what another has said, and a response that crucially anticipates its possible truth value. The other has addressed me, and it behooves me to take their claim to truth or meaning seriously, which means to regard it in its strongest light rather than to be searching continually for evidence of incoherence or errors in reasoning. The accent on receptivity and the anticipation of truth does not entail an uncritical posture, but that where this preliminary expectation is not present there is no genuine listening and learning. Gadamer described not only an expressive but an importantly receptive dimension of dialogue which has special importance for the learning process. We do not control the direction a dialogue takes but allow ourselves to be taken up in a process that has a life of its own. In his words, “We say that we ‘conduct’ a conversation, but the more genuine a conversation is, the less its conduct lies within the will of either partner. Thus a genuine conversation is never the one that we wanted to conduct. Rather, it is generally more correct to say that we fall into conversation, or even that we become involved in it. The way one word follows another, with the conversation taking its own twists and reaching its own conclusion, may well be conducted in some way, but the partners conversing are less the leaders of it than the led. No one knows in advance what will ‘come out’ of a conversation. Understanding or its failure is like an event that happens to us. Thus we say that something was a good conversation or that it was ill fated. All this shows that a conversation has a spirit of its own, and that the language in which it is conducted bears its own truth within it—i.e., that it allows something to ‘emerge’ which henceforth exits” (Gadamer, 1989, 383).
While educators of many theoretical orientations have long claimed to be followers of the Socratic method, the general theme of dialogical education has received perhaps its most thorough analysis in Nicholas Burbules’ Dialogue in Teaching, a study that follows Gadamer rather less than Paulo Freire and the movement of critical pedagogy that he inspired.1 Burbules places dialogue in the center of his conception of education, and as an ideal it is undoubtedly an attractive one. Where it is genuine, rather than an empty catchphrase or a veneer for a certain kind of politicization, dialogue is governed by a spirit of egalitarian reciprocity in which all are responsible for what they say and no one, be it teacher or student, is above the fray. The idea of dialogical education is at once hermeneutical, epistemological, and ethical-political, as Burbules pointed out, although it is undoubtedly Gadamer who provided the most adequate philosophical articulation of dialogue itself. The play structure of language, the primacy of the question, and the non-methodological “dialectic without end” are themes of enduring importance, the implications of which extend beyond what Gadamer himself identified (Nicholson 2002). Hermeneutically, the dialogical ideal recognizes the educational value of uncertainty and of processes of fallibilist interpretation and judgment that largely define us as rational beings. Quite apart from the secure possession of information, a mark of educational success is the cultivation of habits of mind that may or may not translate into outcomes of some determinate and measurable kind. The language of “learning outcomes,” “accountability,” and so on, distorts the educative process by imposing on it a categorial framework that draws upon positivist science and utilitarian economics, and which is thoroughly beholden to tangible practicalities and ostensible certainties. Epistemologically, the dialogical view expresses a conception of knowledge, reason, and truth as praxial categories for which there are no foundations but the ongoing conversation of humankind. To know is to participate in social practices of inquiry and interpretation that culminate in understanding, not in objective certainties. It is defined by the pursuit and the love of wisdom in the Greek sense and not by its altogether secure possession.
Ethically-politically, dialogical education gives expression to aspirations of a more egalitarian kind than what is implicit in the traditional separation of roles between educator and student. While the language of oppression and emancipation is less pronounced in Burbules’ account than in Freire and many others on the far left, he does remark that the “narrow categories of ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ do not fit many instances of dialogue well; they dichotomize the roles of teacher and student, and they connote the pursuit of particular learning outcomes, as opposed to a broader (and more mutual) process of edification.”2 Political themes of equality and respect find expression in this account along with a Deweyan emphasis on democracy and its inseparability from education as inquiry. Long before Freire, of course, John Dewey had well noted the connection between authoritarianism and the traditional education that he sought to replace with an explicitly democratic model, one that regards educators and students alike as inquirers rather than experts and ignoramuses.3 An important mark of educational success, on Dewey’s view, is that one is a politically engaged citizen capable of forming judgments in an intelligent and pragmatic fashion. A more hermeneutical (and not at all un-Deweyan) way of saying this is that education properly initiates students into the dialogue that is our culture or tradition. It is concerned far less with the content of students’ beliefs than with their ability to form their own and to participate as equals in the conversation of humankind.
It is not uncommon for students or anyone else to be afflicted with blinding prejudices of one kind or another, and the work of education surely involves leading students to see how their apparent certainties are in fact interpretations and judgments that might have been otherwise. The best way this is accomplished is still to expose students to others’ ideas since, as Gadamer well knew, it is in dialogical exchanges that one’s prejudices are called into play and can become an object of awareness. Conversation requires that we risk our point of view and often our parochialism in encountering unfamiliar texts and ideas. This is how our prejudices, be they true or false, are brought to light and potentially seen through rather than by any expertocratic bestowing of enlightenment on the part of the educator. If we regard culture itself on the model of a conversation that began long ago and that can be expected to continue into an indefinite future, a dialogue that constitutes our historical facticity and affords a fundamental orientation to consciousness, then education can be conceived as the process by which the younger generation learns to participate in dialogical processes that precede us rather than any mere acquisition of information or credentials. An education in philosophy clearly involves more than gaining factual knowledge about the intellectual systems of the past and present, and includes educating the student’s own habits of mind. A graduate in this field must be capable of fashioning arguments and judgments, expressing these in written work and classroom discussion, interpreting texts, and must in a larger sense have a demonstrated ability to participate in the conversation of Western thought. An education in any other field of the humanities is not essentially different and involves gaining not an outsider’s knowledge of history, literature, or what have you, but the knowledge of the historian, literary critic, and so on. A student of the natural sciences as well is learning the methods of science rather than the content of its discoveries alone; again, it is the researcher’s knowledge that is the indicator of educational success. Becoming literate in this sense means developing the capacities of intellectual agency, and where agency signifies not only that one knows how the conversation has unfolded to this point but how to carry it further.
So long as the learning process aims at the gradual attainment of intellectual maturity, indications of its success will be found not in test scores or other quasi-objective indicators alone but in the cultivation of habits and capacities of mind of the kind that are called forth in dialogue. These are largely intangible and qualitative matters of the kind that educational policymakers are often not at ease with or regard as an impractical accessory, yet it is these that enable the young to participate in the intellectual life of the society. Becoming competent interlocutors requires practice at all stages of the learning process. One learns to judge, as Aristotle remarked, by judging, and one learns to participate in dialogue by participating, not only by being informed of whatever consensus or discoveries at which others have arrived. It is an important prerequisite of such participation that one knows the history of the conversation to which one will offer a contribution, but it is a prerequisite nonetheless and not an end in itself. The art of conversation requires much of its participants, from inventiveness to listening and a hospitality to others’ views. It requires a renunciation of false self-certainty and an orientation toward process over outcomes. This last issue is a virtual impossibility for teachers at the primary and secondary levels, who are required both to teach a standardized and information-driven curriculum and to prepare students to write standardized tests, and in a great variety of ways to ensure certain measurable outcomes. The highest achievements in education—a certain restlessness of mind, a passion for understanding for its own sake, curiosity, originality, critical capacity, and similar habits of mind—are not quantifiable outcomes, and no standardized examination can test for their presence. The impatience for process and intangibles, or for any educational values that defy reduction to the utilitarian calculus, is profoundly antithetical to dialogue, the conditions and spirit of which are incommensurable with the scientistic and technological bent of many contemporary approaches.
If we would teach our students to think critically or to liberate them from whatever bondage we believe holds the minds of the young captive, we must train them as active participants in the intellectual life of their culture. Whatever emancipation means in the context of education, it does not mean instilling the political stance of an educator in the minds of their students. If concepts of emancipation and dialogue are to hold any meaning in an educational setting, they can only signify the capacity of students to participate in dialogical practices on their own terms rather than deteriorate into platitudes or a veil for forms of politicization of which political correctness is not the only example. Educators are neither experts nor crusaders but interlocutors, and as such they are wise to practice a degree of restraint in expressing their opinions in the classroom. In order that dialogical education not become a veneer for something that it manifestly is not, we might well recall Deweyan themes of experimentation, fallibility, and intellectual humility in order to correct the dogmatic excesses of Freire and the critical pedagogy movement.
A related theme that warrants attention here is Gadamer’s conception of Bildung. He would speak of this in Truth and Method as a term connoting at once culture, education, formation, and sophistication, an all-around cultivation of the self of a kind that is often thought to produce an edifying effect on human relations. In becoming educated, one takes up one’s culture in such a way as to make it one’s own, much as in joining a profession one is not merely conforming to established ways of doing things but adding one’s originality to the received ways. For Gadamer, in learning about one’s tradition or culture (and other cultures no less), one learns not only in the limited sense that it speaks and one listens but that one also answers or enters into a dialogue with the past. I must appropriate my culture, make it my own and see myself in it, indeed become myself in it, and in a process in which I also transform elements of the culture itself. For Gadamer, the true mark of Bildung is precisely an openness to what is alien: “The general characteristic of Bildung [is] keeping oneself open to what is other—to other, more universal points of view.” The cultivated mind is not only well informed in a particular discipline but has more the character of a sense than mere information—a sense that is at once universal and common, including a sense of what is important and good, a sense of history, an aesthetic sense, and some others. Common sense, for instance, is far more than any mere matter of possessing information but consists in a sense of what is shared by the members of a historical community, a sense of how to do things including how to form various kinds of judgments. As well, “someone who has an aesthetic sense knows how to distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly, high and low quality, and whoever has a historical sense knows what is possible for an age and what is not, and has a sense of the otherness of the past in relation to the present” (Gadamer, 1989, 17).
Bildung is one of the principal concepts of Roman humanist thought and was described by Johann Gottfried Herder as a gradual process of “rising up to humanity through culture” (Gadamer, 1989, 10). It is a rising up from nature to culture and from immaturity to maturity, and it happens chiefly through broadening our horizons through exposure to ideas. Gadamer would strongly emphasize the theme of hospitality or receptivity to ideas, whatever their source. Every student likely believes they are receptive to ideas; if they were not, they would not be students or so we tend to say. But what is it to be receptive to ideas? It does not mean that we accept whatever ideas we hear uncritically, but nor does it mean the opposite: that we are habitually suspicious or that we invariably know better than others. For Gadamer, the heart and soul of education is to approach a text with the anticipation that what it has to say is true. How often students or the rest of us actually do this may be questioned, but his point is that where this anticipation is absent, so is Bildung.
The word Bildung as Gadamer would speak of it refers to both the process of becoming formed in a certain way and also the result of that process. The process itself is not a technical one but instead is a kind of inner development that is characterized by a break from what is given in our natures. In Gadamer’s words, “Man is characterized by the break with the immediate and the natural that the intellectual, rational side of his nature demands of him.” Culture and humanity itself are values to which the human being aspires and must not be regarded as givens of our existence. G. W. F. Hegel had described Bildung as a rising up to the universal and maintained that it is a life task of every human being to rise above the circumstances in which we find ourselves and to pursue an idea of one kind or another, for example, in the work that we do. In working upon an object, one is forming and transforming not only the thing but the self, or as Gadamer expressed it, “in acquiring a ‘capacity,’ a skill, man gains the sense of himself.” This is the nature and meaning of work, and for Hegel “getting beyond his naturalness” is a task in which we are all constantly engaged, usually without conscious awareness (Gadamer, 1989, 12–14).
The concept of Bildung fell into some disrepute in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries owing to its association in many minds with elitism. As Graeme Nicholson has pointed out, “Bildung took on a bourgeois coloring during the nineteenth century that would make it repugnant to authors like Nietzsche and Heidegger. As with the English word ‘gentleman,’ it was the tone of snobbery that came to prevail, for ein gebildeter Herr was a German term that in the nineteenth century accomplished the same effect—marking a social distinction” (Nicholson 2010). Clearly, this is not what the term meant in the humanist tradition or in the writings of early modern German thinkers like Hegel and Herder. For Gadamer, Bildung is a life task that belongs to everyone, and it occurs both inside and outside educational institutions. It has no socioeconomic connotation but is more the nature of a process and project that aims at the transformation of the self, and not in any single direction. People can be well educated and otherwise have rather little in common. What unites them is not membership in any socioeconomic or cultural elite but the kind of senses noted earlier. This includes the sense of what is questionable in the realm of ideas as well as the art of asking the right questions. No method teaches this art, of course. When it is learned at all it is learned through habituation and practice rather than by means of any pedagogical technique.
As Nicholas Davey has noted, Gadamer’s conception of Bildung includes a few additional hypotheses which he appropriated particularly from Hegel and Herder. To speak of Bildung as a process of self-formation fits with a non-essentialist view of human beings. It is an idea closely associated with culture and involves the development of inherent capacities which directly reflect the culture in which we are situated. Bildung issues in a kind of poise in the face of the unexpected. This is a way of being that is an end rather than a means, and amounts to a “mature reflective sensibility” that is nourished by exposure to what is different. Since it is a reflective disposition, it requires some distancing from the immediate while also enhancing the capacity for action. In his words, “Bildung involves the practice of nurturing a disposition of poise which allows the mind a particular free mobility, moving back and forth between perceiving the whole in the part, and the part in the whole” (Davey 2010, 46, 47). Bildung also includes the notion of tact, another concept that Gadamer recovered from the humanist tradition. The tactful person has a sense of what to say or not say and has a kind of sensitivity that allows them to know what to do in certain, particularly social, situations. Here again is a kind of know-how that no method teaches. Gadamer compared this to a craftsman’s knowledge; beyond any possession of information, the skilled craftsman has a feeling for whatever material with which they habitually work. We can develop a similar sense with respect to ideas: by “living with ideas” over a period of time, the student can develop a facility with concepts, a sense of what a new idea is good for, whether it is worth pursuing, plausible, or how it might be applied.
In the real world of education, there are conditions that render hermeneutical and a great many other ideals more than a little difficult to attain. Educational institutions have long been the playground of idealists and meddlers, and if we do not wish to follow suit in imposing values on the learning process that effectively undermine it, then we must be mindful both of the conditions that make learning possible and of others that produce a kind of distortion. Among the latter conditions is a strategic mindset that is excessively focused on grades at the expense of the intangibles of learning. The higher purpose of education is no “learning outcome” that can be quantified in the tidy manner often preferred by administrators, as if dialogue, Bildung, or what is called “critical thinking” were commodities over which the institution claims special expertise, if not a monopoly, and which educators hand over to their students by means of pedagogical “best practices” and “evidence-based” techniques. Much of the current vocabulary of educational theory and psychology, which is often difficult to distinguish from the economic, has an inveterate tendency to produce a quality of educational experience that closely compares to that of a rat in a maze, as Ivan Illich perceptively described in Deschooling Society (Illich 2000). Students who have spent their childhood and adolescence running through mazes arrive at the university with an expectation that the university can only be a new kind of maze, one that is indispensable for entering the maze that is the workforce, and indeed that social reality in general consists of mazes. When this mindset constitutes the very being of the student, education hermeneutically conceived faces formidable obstacles. The intangibles and unquantifiables of education have always been its most essential aspect, but the opposite appears the case when what Jean-François Lyotard called “performativity” reigns—a trend decades in the making and which does not appear fated to end any time soon (Lyotard 1984). Its consequences include an exclusive preoccupation with outcomes over processes, the tangible over the intangible, the quantitative over the qualitative, and a quality of thinking that is rational in only a utilitarian sense, unimaginative, and utterly beholden to convention.
A further consequence of the strategic orientation is a reluctance to read books which one so frequently observes today. It is likely an exaggeration when an educational conservative like Allan Bloom writes, “Today’s select students know so much less, are so much more cut off from the tradition, are so much slacker intellectually, that they make their predecessors look like prodigies of culture,” but for reasons that are not easily identified a sizable portion of university students now require a good deal of convincing that reading books is a worthwhile use of their time, that lines of thought cannot be boiled down to so many informational bits projected onto a screen or a few pages in a textbook (Bloom 1987, 51). When students come to believe that what a text has to say can be so reduced, that a book is a long-winded sound bite or an antiquated precursor of a website, in short when the love of reading is absent, the student cannot be initiated in full into their culture. No educational technology, in which many now place unlimited faith, substitutes for reading texts in the old-fashioned way, which is to say unhurriedly and from cover to cover. Educational technology demands not only to be used, like all technology, but used in highly specific ways, and the more habituated one becomes to this, the less visible this fact becomes. It habituates one to an experience that is truncated, instrumental, and an object of institutional management, to regarding work as the performance of small- to medium-sized tasks spelled out in advance, to regarding thinking itself as conformity to rules, and to regarding the rest of human experience as something of an irrelevance or an anachronism. Learning experiences that are mediated by Moodle, PowerPoint, and the next generation of technology that is sure to follow and quickly, do not differ in fundamentals from conversation that is had over e-mail or other “social media,” or any other practice of intersubjectivity that is mediated by a screen. Disconnection in one form or another is inevitable here, and the next generation of technology will do nothing to change this. The best that may be hoped for educational technology is that it provides for the efficient transfer of information to large numbers of students—not its interpretation, critique, absorption, or even retention, but simple transmission. The problem is no mere matter of efficiency but what happens when ideas become information, dialogical participation becomes a posting on a discussion board, free inquiry becomes amusement, and educators and students alike become part of the machinery of what Illich termed manipulative institutions. Education, as the same thinker argued, is largely self-education, and there is no technology of this any more than there is a technology of listening or discerning what matters. It is when the technology is put aside and the rules are silent that the real work of education can begin. In a talk Gadamer delivered at the University of Heidelberg in 1986 titled “The Idea of the University—Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow,” he spoke of a “threefold alienation” that he believed had emerged in the contemporary university: between professors and students, due primarily to the size of the institution; between the disciplines themselves; and between students and the love of ideas which is the heart and soul of a university education. “Living with ideas” is the central purpose and ethos of the university, Gadamer maintained, and it is undermined by each of these factors (Gadamer 1992). It is an assessment with which it is difficult to disagree. Living with ideas and partaking of the spirit of research, or what Dewey termed “inquiry,” is a matter in which many a student today does not see the point. The point is to gain a credential that is necessary for entering the workforce and little else besides, while the bachelor’s degree is the counterpart of the high school diploma of yesteryear. It is, as Illich accurately stated, an initiation rite into the middle class.4 Here is anti-idealism with a vengeance; learning is not an end but a means toward utilitarian and economic ends. The scale of the institution itself almost guarantees this, as educators continue to express displeasure at the high enrolments which are deemed necessary on budgetary grounds and which make values of dialogue, Bildung, or any genuine engagement with ideas a virtual impossibility.
Education theorists since Plato have taken the view that the learning process serves a higher purpose than practical necessity, and, while formulations of this view differ, hermeneutics gives us a way of conceiving education’s purpose that is ambitious, demanding, and in many ways at odds with the times. The charge of idealism is quickly leveled at any who posit a higher purpose to education than utility, but it is no naivety to insist that a university education, and not only in the humanities, ought to partake of the spirit of research and so not only train students for entry into a profession but broaden horizons and initiate minds into the conversation that is their culture. The warnings of Allan Bloom are exaggerated; the American mind (let us say the mind) is neither closed nor closing, but nor is it accurate to assert the opposite. The business of education is to open the mind, broaden horizons, and indeed to form the self in some crucial respects, and whether current trends and institutional realities make such ends more realizable or less may be debated. What seems clear is that no advances in educational technology will remedy the ills that either Bloom or Gadamer described. What may is a way of thinking about the educative process that awards a central position to dialogue, Bildung, and the search for understanding which is our ontological condition.