Thinking about Thinking: What Kind of Conversation is Philosophy?

4. Education: Responsive Tradition

58 f o u r Education: Responsive Tradition Education is the basic activity through which civilizations assure their continuation. It presupposes educators and pupils who are able to communicate with one another. Belonging to historical communities similar enough to permit mutual understanding, they transmit a speci fic culture from generation to generation. The process of transmission has been called paradosis, traditio, tradition, giving or passing on to others what first has been received. Educators are good if they are good at handing on what they, as educated in their context, have received in order to help others in taking root. Because, as Herakleitos saw, nothing remains the same, transmission and tradition have their own rules of identity and change: time and again, a culturally determined heritage becomes new while remaining a version of the same. Educators initiate their pupils into the culture that has become their own, but, since their pupils’ lives occupy another time, the latter’s appropriation of the tradition changes it into a different one. Teaching philosophy is only one example of transmission, but an elementary analysis of it, especially if its historical dimension is not Education: Responsive Tradition 59 obscured, can show a temporal structure that, mutatis mutandis, recurs in all or most other examples. the passing of the past To be a teacher is to be involved in the transition of a past, through the present of teaching and learning, into a future in which the past continues its life, thanks to its renewal. This transition is accomplished during a present in which the past is taught. To present the past, one must be attentive to the student’s needs. The teacher passes on what she formerly has learned about the culture in which she has been educated , but to do this well, that culture must have become an integral part of her own manners of life, taste, moods, and thought. At the same time, the teacher is aware that her own needs and her personal or professional mode of appropriation do not necessarily coincide with those of her students. First, each student is, like the teacher, a unique individual, and second, the particular culture in which the teacher feels at home is already engaged in changing into a—at least somewhat—different culture, in which the next generation will be at home. One of the factors that causes a continual transformation of the heritage that, through tradition and teaching, has come to us lies in the different uniqueness that singularizes every teacher and every student. This difference shows already in the way in which the transmission is received and accepted, for the reception of a tradition is not the simple filling of a void or its imprint on an entirely empty and passive soul but rather an attentive and actively responsive appropriation . That such a response follows the suggestion(s) implied in the quality of the offered gift and the mode of its passing on does not diminish the receiver’s responsivity and the singularity of his style and depth or breadth. Learning is itself an engagement whose modes range from obedience (which is a concentrated—and thus already self-determining—passivity) through a distanced interest to energetic appropriation. If the teacher’s own past has not been driven by any active integration, she does not have much to offer. Then most of 60 Education: Responsive Tradition her work can be taken over by a book or a computer (which “knows” much more than she). Similarly, a student without passion for learning will not surpass the level of a correct but boring transmitter, and his version of received insights will be moribund. In other words, the available culture must be kept alive by the concerned tradition of its life through communication between already involved participants, one of which—the teacher—symbolizes and re-presents the past, whereas the other—the learner—will re-present it in the near future. Both are links in the extension of the past into a future that saves but also changes the past through the alchemy of teaching and learning that fills the present. A fruitful intermingling of teaching and learning presupposes that those who are involved share one temporality, although, as belonging to different generations, they live in different times and cultures. Tradition is the name of a shared temporality—a temporality that permits an unbreakable combination of repetition and renewal, loyalty and dissidence, or maintenance...