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15 CHAPTER TWO Existential Learning Although existentialism may no longer be in the news, as in Willy Ronis’s famous photograph, the word “existential” regularly is.1 We read about brooding, “existential” thrillers, or stark, “existential” forms, or the dissonant crescendos of an “existential” nightmare. It is easy to make sport of such Arts and Leisure prose, but clearly the term is common currency. “Existential learning,” though, sounds dubious.2 The previous cases refer to some kind of extreme, anguishing experience; exam dreams aside, is not normal, unnewsworthy learning a much less melodramatic affair? So what could this learning be? As a first step toward redescribing modernism as a pedagogical culture, this chapter will try to work out a theoretical answer to this question. One touchstone at hand is the notion of freedom. Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, of course, is devoted to elaborating what it means to be a free being. And Michael Oakeshott, for one, has reminded us that liberal learning, the quest for self-understanding in liberal education, proceeds from a fundamental acknowledgment of our essential freedom. His classic essay “A Place of Learning,” one of the most well-argued apologies for liberal education, presents us with an elegant and precise explication of his rationale for this learning.3 Could existential learning, then, be simply liberal learning garnished with an explanation of its ontological conditions? To explore this possibility more seriously, I want to start by focusing on the idea of freedom in Oakeshott. Although insightful, this idea, I worry, provides in the end somewhat uncertain support for liberal learning. It fails to take into account the Sartrean problem of bad faith. I shall suggest how it might be buttressed, therefore, with a sense of existence, where the realization that we exist, more unsettling than obvious, calls for a learning elaborated further in a particular direction. “Existential learning” would be the name for how we take responsibility for the fact that to exist at all is to be in question and that the learning that responds to this condition is not something we undertake to achieve an end—an instrumental practice—but the way we are ourselves. It 16 Mediumism would indicate a natural necessity that demands to be better recognized by our educational institutions, one that modernist culture can address. FREEDOM Liberal education: an education in the liberal arts, an education appropriate for the free person; such goes the standard gloss of the term. By free person, furthermore, we usually mean someone who regularly exercises independence and self-reliance, someone who is capable of autonomy. And today in the democratic world, we are all presumed to be so capable, regardless of our given social stations. Liberal education, accordingly, comprises an education that promotes practical freedom, one that teaches us how to claim constructively and enduringly our autonomy and why that is rationally good. Evidently, this education shares many of the precepts of political liberalism, as Meira Levinson has recently argued.4 More generally, its prominence appears to be a product of the larger ethic of self-assertion that separates our modern age from the medieval past.5 Thepracticeofliberaleducation,then,positsinlearnersagermoffreedom.Yet it also makes freedom something that must be for the most part achieved. We each needthiseducationbecause,inspiteofourpotential,wearebornlargelydependent on and subordinate to others such as our parents. As we release ourselves from others ’foreigndirection—directionthatwelearntoseeasconfining—we develop our autonomy. When on the contrary we see that some such guidance accords with our own considered thinking, we learn to recognize what is reasonable. Sorting all this out is bound to take considerable time and effort. We have to admit, therefore, that this commonsense conception of liberal education is to some degree misleading. This education is less appropriate for the free person than for someone who wants to become free, or at least freer. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that the model liberal learner is a significantly unfree person. As he becomes increasingly aware of his constraints, of his situation of mixed dependence and independence, he may come to regard autonomy as a desirable goal that he could realize. And we could help teach him how. Now it may be that this infelicity indicates merely a need to préciser our conception. After all, nothing I have said impugns the appeal of this education: who would not want to become freer? But I also think it broaches a question at the very root of our educational practices. Might there not exist a...

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