Towards reclaiming the work,

vocation and metaphysics of teaching

Adam Smith

BA Modern Liberal Arts

University of Winchester 2014-17

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Black grows the southern sky, betokening rain

And humming hive-bees homeward hurry bye:
They feel the change; so let us shun the grain,
And take the broad road while our feet are dry.
Ay, there some dropples moistened on my face,
And pattered on my hat--tis coming nigh!
Let's look about, and find a sheltering place.
The little things around, like you and I,
Are hurrying through the grass to shun the shower.
Here stoops an ash-tree--hark! the wind gets high,
But never mind; this ivy, for an hour,
Rain as it may, will keep us dryly here:
That little wren knows well his sheltering bower,
Nor leaves his dry house though we come so near.

Sudden Shower by John Clare

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Introduction

Rowan Williams, writing in the wake of Gillian Roses death in 1995, in Between

Politics and Metaphysics, poses the question which is at the heart of this dissertation:

can we find a way of talking about metaphysics that doesnt immediately descend

into the quagmires of fantasy? (Williams, 1995, p.3). The argument, to which this

dissertation somewhat responds, which is made by postmodern philosophers and

educators is that this pursuit of metaphysics is a fools errand that seeks to bind the

world into one broad, overcoming, grand narrative. John Gray, the arch-

postmodernist, describes in Enlightenments Wake, how he views 3,000 years of the

Western tradition as bourgeois philosophy, devoted to the search for foundations

for the practices of particular communities (Gray, 2007, p.216). It is his argument

that the Western tradition of first principles has reached an end marked by the

fragment, dissolution and deconstruction of postmodern thinking. This dissertation

is no defence of enlightenment reason but it is in vigorous opposition to the

postmodern idea that reason ought to be overcome by the vacuum.

The introduction will seek to outline the frames of argument and terms in this

dissertation. Chapter 1, Education in Ruins, is a review of postmodern education in

light of Paolo Freires critiques of modern education. Chapter 2, Eros, Attention,

Acceptance, looks at the writing of Gillian Rose and the role of philosophy and

authority in the classroom. Chapter 3, The Aporetic Tradition, seeks to reclaim the
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works of the tradition from the claws of modern and postmodern determinism.

Chapter 4, Work and Vocation, lays out a reinvigorated, spiritual idea of vocation

and the logic and work of education.

The postmodern creationist

The earnest and intransigent postmodernist is akin to the young earth creationist

who argues that the job of the palaeontologist is, at best pointless and misguided,

and, at worst, a dangerous hoax. Their virulent belief in the non-existence of

dinosaurs does not stop dinosaur bones turning up in the ground; it does not halt the

crowds that queue up outside the Natural History Museum; it certainly does not

convince anyone who has walked along the beach at Seaford Head and found fossils in

the rocks. Natural science is working in the real world with shovels and tweezers and

excavators. It is my contention that education does the same. There is a metaphysical

world out there to be explored, its foundations lie in the history of philosophy but the

remains in our own time are not skeleton waiting to be uncovered, they are still alive

and having their effects felt through good teaching. This dissertation will argue that

the role of teacher must be like the botanist in the greenhouse, planting and

cultivating seeds, allowing accidents to occur, working with rather than against the

difficulty of a not-entirely knowable nature. Postmodernists have built a grand

narrative to topple all others. They claim the beginning, middle and end of history

but they cannot stop the plants from growing and they cannot stop teachers and

students from having real, educative experiences. This dissertation, I hope, will go

some way to recover education from not only the legitimately damaging claims laid
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at the feet of enlightenment reason but also the apocalyptic solutions proffered by

postmodernists.

Gillian Rose, whose work I will draw on heavily throughout, offers a good starting

point in Hegel Contra Sociology: Hegels philosophy (and metaphysics generally, it

could be said) has no social import if the absolute cannot be thought (Rose, 1995,

p.204). If metaphysics is to be of any relevance to this conversation around

education, then it must actually relate to the world in which students and teachers

work. It cannot be an exercise in disinherited abstracts or critical thought for its own

sake. To think in a detached abstract is a dangerous denial of the difficult questions

which arise when we have to confront the dichotomies of universal and particular,

master and slave, stasis and movement which metaphysics raises. If we can cut the

cord between ourselves and our philosophical education without any loss of our self

in the process, then we can disown the difficulty of trying to work with universals at

all. It is easy to think of a universal; I am thinking of one right now. It is much

harder to translate that abstract thought into a lesson plan with any real import in

the classroom. Rowan Williams writes of exactly the difficulty which the postmodern

teacher aims to avoid but which the metaphysical teacher cant help but work with:

violating this [postmodern] axiom raises the spectre of claims to presence, to

privilege or to totalising vision; and we (who?) know that these are the claims that we

must resist on pain of losing what language is, and thus losing the only thing we can

now find to say of our human essence (Williams, 1995, p.3).

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Paradox in Language

In answer to this, and by way of an introduction to one of the main themes of this

dissertation, it is worth spending some time thinking about the relationship between

our language and metaphysics. Williams, in A Ray of Darkness, a sermon he gave

around the mid-1990s, describes how the simple, dialectical nature of language fails

to adequately capture the nature of truth and universals (in his case, God). Even in

colloquial, banal speech, Williams writes, we are aware of the fact that our

pigeonholes for things, people, emotions and perceptions are often lagging well

behind the fluidity of the real world (Williams, 2014, p.118). A paradox ought to

break our language, if there was a simple and dialectical nature to truth it ought to be

able to be expressed through the simple and dialectical mode of expression that is

language. The fact that Henry Vaughn can write:

There is in God (some say),

A deep but dazzling darkness.

And for that to resonate with me and hold some truth of the human experience must

demonstrate some of the failing of the dialectic to account for the world in its

totality. Whether its in theoretical physics or in poetry, we need to express some

sense of this strange fact that your language doesnt keep up with the multiplicity,

and interrelatedness and elusiveness of truth (Williams, 2014, p.118-9). Language

can only work in a dialectical subject-object relation but our lived experience of truth,

and God, and metaphysics, causes it to double-back on itself and express things in
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ways which are both paradoxical and true. This will be a theme throughout this

dissertation.

Williams speaks of God as an education in the elusive nature of an absolute truth.

Inevitably, in talking of matters of metaphysics and truths and the work of a former

Archbishop of Canterbury, this dissertation will bring in questions of God.

Appropriately the way I feel comfortable writing, reading and thinking about God is

not deterministic but aporetic. Therefore, when I write of God it is not in a strictly

religious sense but a way of talking about a universal, spiritual question. The spiritual

experience of encountering God is an experience in which language and self is

challenged and in which the nature of the relationship between individual and

universal is shown, to some extent, to be broken. This can only be expressed in

language in the form of a paradox: having some revelatory encounter with this divine

truth leaves one nearer than before to some sort of truthfulness; and [] plunged

into confusion (Williams, 2014, p.120). It would not be fair to say that I will use

God and truth interchangeably here, but I think that the two are deeply intertwined.

Some writers (myself included) feel more comfortable thinking in terms of God,

some prefer to think of truth. Williams writes, here is God then: in the event which

attacks and upsets my self-image, and so confuses the whole of my speech and

imagery (Williams, 2014, p.120).

Working within this difficult, elusive truth is one way in which I will attempt, in this

dissertation, to reclaim the vocation of teaching from the totalising truths of both
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modernity and postmodernity. Williams describes how we speak in paradoxes

because we have to speak in a way that keeps the question alive (Williams, 2014, p.119).

This question need not be merely our own, personal, spiritual questions; it ought to

be the wider, educative questions about life and telos. It ought also to be those

questions of power, mastery and pain which the Western canon is accused of papering

over. This dissertation will also seek to expunge some of the totalising narratives

around texts ancient, modern and contemporary. Both modern and postmodern

readings of texts have a tendency to be dialectic, simplifying and totalising. They aim

at pitting ideas against each other in order to reduce down the project of philosophy

to one of refining and closing down. Rose describes in Judaism and Modernity a

reading of texts so they may be comprehended and not dogmatically contrasted

(Rose, 1993, p.55). This approach will be at the heart of this dissertation.

Aporia

One of the major themes throughout will be Roses view that there is an essential

pantlessness at the centre of things which she describes as aporia. This ought to be

explored a little here in the introduction so the use of the term in this dissertation

has a framework established. Rose describes, in Hegel Contra Sociology, the importance

of being able to think the absolute and talk speculatively about the nature of reality. It

is in doing this that one comes to a realisation that this is not simple dialectical task;

it is one which requires an understanding of the world rooted in difficulty with a

conception of reality that allows some space for unknowing. Rose writes, actuality is

not something posited (put there) and not nature, not-posited or out-side the act (not
 8

put there). Actuality can be known because it is experienced both as a dichotomy and

as beyond the dichotomy (Rose, 1995, p.204). Experiencing something as beyond

the dichotomy goes against any simple understanding of the world. Williams

describes Roses belief that, thinking the tensions of truthfulness in action and

about action must resist an insupportable and menacing pull towards false

reconciliations (Williams, 1995, p.13).

The postmodern thinkers view metaphysics as a dichotomy, a closed system in which

ideas oppose one another in an effort to totalise the world. They seek to step out of

this system by arguing that both sides in the opposition are relative. In doing so they

have abandoned the mechanics of knowledge and, judging this mechanism to be

inherently dangerous, they have smashed the machines before leaving the factory

floor. Roses actuality reclaims this dichotomy but also identifies the imperfections at

work in the mechanism. The machines of deterministic thought try to assimilate the

universal and the particular but the difficulty of doing this, the impossibility of doing

this, is productive in a way which escapes the dichotomy. The lack of identity

between actuality and specific act gives rise to experience, to a re-cognition which sees

what the act did not immediately see. To see the determination of the act is to see

beyond the dichotomy of act and non-act (Rose, 1995, pp.204-5).

To indulge myself with another analogy, the place of aporia in education reminds me

of the story of the hot dog factory forced to move from the building in downtown

New York where it had been making hot dogs for centuries. They packed up their
 9

machinery and settled into a brand-new, purpose-built, multi-million dollar facility

outside the city. They re-started the machines and put in the same meat, the same

seasonings, used the exact same casings and yet they found that the flavour was

different, less rounded, not as recognisable. It was not just the meat and the machine

which were making the hot dog, there was a third term. It might be described as the

milieu but it was something which couldnt be captured from the old wooden beams

and red brick of their downtown factory. Either way this counts against any idea that

the process, either in the new factory or the old one, was a process of pure dialectics.

There is evidence of the sparks created when there is a realisation that overcoming

only produces the infinite regression of more overcoming. It is something like the

experience of negativity, the existential drama (Rose, 1995, p.x) which Rose describes

as the heart of a renewal of critical thought in the intellectual difficulty of our time

(Rose, 1995, p.x). The postmodern teacher, with their belief in the simple (but to

them discredited) nature of truth, is stood in the new hot dog factory and wondering

why the sausage doesnt taste the same.

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1 Education in Ruins

Investment Banking Education

In this chapter I will outline the fundamental flaws in the supposedly liberated

education offered by postmodern ideology and philosophy. Using Paolo Freires

critiques of modern education I will show how postmodern education is not a step

forward into a new and distinct philosophical world but one which retains all the

problems of modern education whilst deluding itself that a new bout of grand

narratives is the neat solution to 3,000 years of aporia.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paolo Freire is not talking about postmodern education

but modern education. That is an education founded, supposedly, on the principles of

the Enlightenment and often on the classical texts of the Western canon. It is my

belief, however, that much of the criticisms Freire makes of this education are still

relevant today when aimed toward the forms of postmodern, post-humanist

education which have become prevalent in the Western education system. Of

particular resonance to a postmodern mind-set is when Freire argues that words in

the classroom, learned by rote or separated from any real context, are being spoken

for their sonority and removed from any real educative process. The outstanding

characteristic of this narrative education, then, is the sonority of words, not their

transforming power (Freire, 1972, p.45). As I will outline, it is not my belief that
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postmodern education has represented any move above or beyond the narrative,

banking concept of education put forward by Freire.

Freire describes the banking concept of education as one in which knowledge is a gift

bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they

consider to know nothing (Freire, 1972, p.46). The teacher deposits knowledge into

the students in the safe knowledge that they are in a position of mastery, a mastery

bestowed upon them by the virtues of a liberal education in many cases. The students

are in a position of subjugation; they are expected to hand over any and all freedom in

their own education they may have to the teacher. In return they receive a neat parcel

of knowledge which they can regurgitate at will and use to subjugate others. In the

classroom of the banking concept, the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge

with his own professional authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of

the students (Freire, 1972, p.47). For Freire, this method of education amplifies and

exacerbates the patterns of action and thought which create the oppressive society as a

whole. In this way, it is instructive to see in educations problems the wider issues of

societies in microcosm. In such a way postmodernisms claim to have been able to

move past these structures of thought in society is mirrored in their belief that they

can do so in education.

Usher and Edwards, writing in Postmodernism and Education, give an account of the

postmodern condition in education whereby, there is an increasing recognition that

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all knowledge-claims are partial, local and specific rather than universal and

ahistorical (Usher & Edwards, 1994, p.10). Besides the obvious irony that this

statement is, itself, universal and ahistorical, there is also something deeper lurking

in the lack of self-awareness which lets that irony exist. In Freires banking concept of

education the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing (Freire,

1972, p.46). The student in postmodernism is still assumed to know nothing but the

teacher has taken up a position of (apparent) lack-of-position which teaches the

student that nothing can be known that isnt local and partial.

This postmodern banking concept of education is even more dangerous than Freires

because it has untethered itself from a fundamental humanism which, though

misguided in Freires time, was at least present. Freire describes how the

humanism of the banking approach masks the effort to turn men into automatons -

the very negations of their ontological vocation to be more fully human (Freire,

1972, p.48). Postmodernity, however, has deliberately given up any claim to anything

as universal as humanism and, instead, describes a world where people have to make

their way without fixed reference and traditional anchoring points (Usher &

Edwards, 1994, p.10). In this way, the postmodern banking concept now is analogous

to the banking sector of today. In the mid-20th century it was clear that banks were

primarily concerned with managing and moving around real money, tethered to

actual gold in their vaults. Even if the banks could be accused of mismanaging the

money or acting nefariously with it, they could still trace their deposits back to a
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universal value, an economic humanism. Now, however, banks have been cut loose

from the actual values of gold and silver and have used this new-found freedom to

build enormous fictions of credit and risk with no connection to anything actual.

This is both a new-found freedom but also something deeply damaging to the

fundamental values of economics which still exist.

The fundamental failing of postmodern educators has been akin to the fundamental

failings of the economic system in 2008. The impact of an accelerated non-reality

colliding abruptly with the actual reality from which it was un-tethered. Just as the

mortgage defaults began to ripple around the economy in 2007, we are now seeing a

rise in populism and fascism across the globe. It is not fair to entirely lay that at the

feet of the postmodern academic but the apathy which is seen across university

campuses is certainly some of their doing. The economic decadence and unreality of

late Capitalism led to a financial crisis which reverberated around the world.

Meanwhile the postmodern decadence in education has had more insipid results

which, as Freire says of the banking concept, closely mirror the makings of the wider

oppressive society. The subject in postmodernity becomes an ill-defined value in a

world where sensibilities are attuned to the pleasure of constant and new

experiencing (Usher & Edwards, 1994, p.11).

In the banking concept of education, man is spectator not re-creator (Freire, 1994,

p.49) and this is broadly something that is still true of the postmodern man. In
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postmodernity the cultivation of desire threatens and to some extent replaces

modernitys cultivation of reason (Usher & Edwards, 1994, p.11). Spectator may not

be the correct term for the new primacy of experience over considered, constructive

thought, but the point which Freire is making about the intellectual paucity of the

student still stands. The sonority of words has become the meaning of words because

any other meaning that might be associated with them can be traced back to some

idea of universal ideas or metanarratives. What both the banking concept of

education and the investment banking concept of education have in common is a

fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of knowledge. They both work on the

assumption that truth is simple and unified, the former because that is the nature of

the knowledge they seek to impart and the latter choosing to do away with that truth

altogether. Freire writes that teachers fail to perceive that the deposits themselves

contain contradictions about reality (Freire, 1972, p.48). Truth, as Rowan Williams

makes clear, is anything but simple, just as language fails to keep up with truth so do

both these concepts of education. They fail to acknowledge the multiplicity, and

interrelatedness and elusiveness of truth (Williams, 2014, p.118-9).

On the surface the plurality and freedom of a decentred postmodern truth seems to

be an answer to this but what Williams is writing about is not decentred at all. It is

multiplict not multiple. There is still an integral unity to the world just as there is

still some kind of value attached to the digital currency which gets shifted from bank-

to-bank. 10 in a mortgage-backed security is, in essence, connected and related to

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the same 10 note that you can take and exchange for coffee in Pret a Manger.

Postmodernists seek a questioning of the legitimacy of mastery and [a] decentring

of knowledge (Usher & Edwards, 1994, p.10), but, as has been discussed, to do so is

to deny the difficulty of education. Decentring is just a sleight-of-hand trick which

skirts around questions of truth and power in the classroom, in doing so it creates

students (and then teachers) who are ill-prepared to do anything but live life as the

decadent, unquestioning postmodern man.

Freires problem-posing education is not the answer to the difficulty of education

but it provides an interesting counter-weight to the claims of postmodern educators.

Freire is able to give us an example of a liberating education which is rooted rather

than floating. Freires pedagogy is put forward as a constant unveiling of reality

(Freire, 1972, p.54) spurred on by the emergence of consciousness and critical

intervention in reality (Freire, 1972, p.54). This is in definite contrast to the

abstraction which is peddled by those teachers of the banking concept and the idea, in

postmodern education, that reality does not need to be revealed because local truths,

already known to students, are that reality. Freire puts a great deal of emphasis on the

student as an individual in the world and the student being liberated through genuine

interaction with the world. Liberation is praxis: the action and reflection of men

upon their world in order to transform it (Freire, 1972, p.52). Surely it cannot be

enough for the student to exist in the world and to perform their praxis and reflect,

they would not be alienated, they may even be quite genuinely liberated but it does
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not seem as though you could call that a genuine education. What role does the

teacher have other than, as Rousseau suggests, to leave well alone?

One of the most challenging claims made by Freire in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is

that for the role of the teacher. Freire writes, in order to function, authority must

be on the side of freedom, not against it (Freire, 1972, p.53). This is a challenge

issued to any teacher hoping to find a third way between the freedom of postmodern

education and the absolute authority of the banking concept teacher and one that will

be explored in the following chapter.

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2 Eros, Attention, Acceptance

Dr Land and Dr Grove Philosophical Education

Gillian Rose, in Paradiso, describes what it is to be a philosopher and how it is that

the philosophical professional ought to be able to work within the power structures of

their profession without making absolute claims to knowledge or authority. The

model for the teacher of any reclamation of metaphysics from the modern or

postmodern ought to be based on Roses definition of the philosopher:

To be a philosopher you need only three things. First, infinite intellectual

eros: endless curiosity about everything. Second the ability to pay attention: to

be rapt by what is in front of you without seizing it yourself, the care of

concentration - in the way you might look closely, without touching, at the

green lacewing fly, overwintering silently on the kitchen wall. Third,

acceptance of pathlessness (aporia): that there may be no solutions to

questions, only the clarification of their statement. Eros, attention,

acceptance.

(Rose, 1999, p.42)

How is it that eros, attention and acceptance can be bought into a classroom setting

which is the seat of mastery for the teacher and subjugation for the student? Rose,

was writing Paradiso whilst receiving treatment for terminal cancer and she uses the
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oft-made analogy between medicine and philosophy in order to explore an aporetic,

philosophical worldview in contrast to a deterministic one. Postmodernism, argues

Rose, is despairing rationalism without reason (Rose, 1999, p.42). A philosophical

education ought to tend toward allowing the honest despair which Rose describes in

Loves Work, in the classroom whilst also encouraging students to work toward

centring their own self-knowledge and confidence.

Rose presents Dr Land and Dr Grove as two incredibly highly trained medical

professionals, each expert in their field but representing two different expressions of

authority within the doctor/patient relationship. The traditional expression of

authority comes in the form of Dr Land who is straightforward with Rose, she

reviews the situation of her cancer and tells Rose: this means your cancer is active;

this means you will become ill; this means you will need more treatment. How long

do you intend to continue working? (Rose, 1999, p.44). In this way Dr Land seems

to view Roses condition in a simple dichotomy, Rose stands to lose her battle with

the disease and there are no medical solutions to this. When Rose sees Dr Grove she is

immediately put into a different position than with Dr Land. Grove asks who you

are and how you are (Rose, 1999, p.44) and invites her to give a holistic, narrative

account of her illness. The doctor would have had just the same access to the notes

and charts as Dr Land did and yet they cede some of their traditional position of

authority and expertise to Rose in order that she might explain how her cancer is seen

from her own point of view. They give Rose a degree of autonomy and freedom

within the power structure of the consulting room. Rose has not earned this through
 19

being tested on knowledge of her condition but by dint of being the patient. Dr

Grove, in contrast with Dr Land tells Rose: you are well; you are not dominated by

this disease; we will keep you in this equilibrium. Is there anything you want to do

that you cannot do? (Rose, 1999, p.44). For Rose the difference between Dr Land

and Dr Grove is the difference between a sentence of death and one of life.

Here philosophy provides the analogy for medicine. Dr Grove is able to say, I

dont know: I dont know what is causing this or that symptom. I dont

know what will happen next. I dont know when you will die. Dr Grove does

not permit you to transfer your authority to him, and, so, paradoxically, you

trust him more, because that trust is uncoerced and freely bestowed.

(Rose, 1999, p.44-5)

Dr Grove does not completely diminish their authority but they do not take the

position of total authority that Dr Land does. They are able to admit that there is an

aporia in Roses being and, in that gap between knowledge and the unknowable, they

give Rose a freedom and self-determination which Land cannot. Dr Groves way is

one of presenting knowledge without arrogating authority but also without

relinquishing it (Rose, 1999, p.45). The banking concept teacher (modern or

postmodern) refuses to allow difficulty, multiplicity and paradox to stand in the

classroom and have its own truth within the students experience. They possess not

only the authority of the teacher but also the authority of the tradition which stems

from a deterministic interpretation of the texts of the Western canon. It invents a

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certainty to fill the gap between the self and the world. The aporetic teacher allows

that gap to stand by presenting the world as one in which the student has some, but

not total, authority over their own self-determination.

Rose calls this educational process autopoeisis: the continuous inventing of the self,

where that self acquires infinite plasticity of boundary, [this] is the gift of the

doctor-philosopher who is skilled in bestowing the truth or reason and the authority

of his discipline onto this patient (Rose, 1999, p.45). Rose, in Loves Work, makes

the claim that the tradition was actually kinder than it was allowed to be by the

deterministic readings of it which lead to the metaphysical emptiness of

postmodernism. In Mourning Becomes the Law, Rose articulates an aporetic way of

viewing the tragedy of Enlightenment reason in the 20th and 21st centuries. Ethics

and metaphysics are torn halves of an integral freedom to which they have never

added up (Rose, 1996, p.9). In this world, a world where the difficulty in the

tradition is accepted and not fixed there can be a fundamentally different type of

education to the easy, but false, solutions of doing away with it which Rose terms

euporia.

Launcelot and Guinevere The Sadness of the King

If the teacher is going to be rooted in the philosophical tradition, then it is worth

spending some time looking at what this means for the logic of education. Gillian

Rose writes, elsewhere in Loves Work, that philosophy is born out of the condition

of sadness (Rose, 2011, p.124). This sadness emerges from the tragic relationship
 21

between the universal law and individual freedom. It is as much a question of

metaphysics as it is of politics and it is as much an expression of Williams God-

paradox as it is a legalistic question. Rose uses the allegory of Launcelot and

Guinevere to demonstrate this human tragedy at its most acute.

The ancient king Arthur is the tragic character at the heart of this allegory. His

tragedy stems from his position as both the embodiment of sovereign law and his

own ethical, individual existence. Launcelot is a knight from France who hears of

Arthurs vision of Camelot and seeks to join the Round Table of Arthurs new

kingdom. After doing so he falls in love with Guinevere, Arthurs wife and the queen

of his kingdom. For Arthur, there is an impossible choice to be made: whether to

overlook the betrayal or to prosecute the crime (Rose, 2011, p.124). The fact is,

however, the choice is not the issue; whichever choice is made the outcome for

Arthur is a tragic one (even the choice suggested by someone to Rose in Paradiso that

Arthur could sacrifice himself for his daughter). Whether action is taken in the

spirit of the law, or whether its requirements are ignored, the law will rebound

against his human weakness so as to disqualify itself (Rose, 2011, p.124). The King

must experience the dichotomy between the solid and immutable law and the

complex and broken self: betrayed or avenged, sadness is the condition of the King

(Rose, 2011, p.123). From this broken interrelatedness springs the sadness and

difficulty of philosophy.
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It is, of course, not just the allegorical King Arthur who stands on this fault line.

Education is right in the very heart of this brokenness; it is the space in which the

individual most acutely encounters concepts of universal difficulty such as mastery

and spirit. The classroom sits on the very dividing line between authority, law and

the universal and introspection, individuality and self-knowledge. The power

structures within both the classroom and the tradition cannot be denied or

overlooked, they are an integral part of the education which occurs within them. In

Toward a Decentred Paideia, William Spanos puts forward one of the key arguments

which has shaped postmodern education. He posits a reaction against (and attempted

solution to) power structures in education which would see subjugated knowledges

released from the oppression of the universal. In the institutions of education, there

exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this [local] discourse

and this knowledge (Spanos, 1993, p.195). For Spanos the legal universal structures

are oppressing and subjugating a truth found in local and individual knowledges; this

truth requires an upheaval to be released from the shackles of collectivity and be

allowed to stand on its own. Spanos writes, the intellectuals role is no longer to

place himself somewhat ahead and to the side in order to express the stifled truth of

the collectivity; rather it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him

into its object (Spanos, 1993, p.195). It is not made clear in what actual way a local

truth differs from an apparently distant truth found in the books of the tradition.

Truth, local or otherwise, by the very nature of being (or having) truth makes claims

to a universal and is therefore implicated in a power struggle. A quest to decentre

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truth away from a discussion of universals and toward discussion of subjective and

particular experience does nothing to decentre the metaphysical nature of a truth.

Rose, in Hegel Contra Sociology, writes that rather than seeking to somehow find a

truth which can be liberated from a universal; thinking the absolute is the basis for

the critique of different kinds of property relations and for the critique of different

kinds of law (Rose, 1995, p.204). In the classroom, the teacher is not (as Spanos

believes) merely re-creating oppressive power structures, they are also re-creating the

relation of the individual to these power structures and, in doing so, they can think

and critique them. Spanos represents Roses euporia, the always missing, yet

prodigiously imaginable easy way (Rose, 2011, p.125). How can the philosophical

teacher aim to avoid this euporia which enlightenment and postmodern reason have

both applied to the tradition?

 24

3 Aporia in the Tradition

Difficulty in the Classroom and the Tradition

To go into the classroom with an awareness of difficulty and aporia is to go with the

grain of the tradition. It is in seeking deterministic and dialogical solutions that the

teacher and student work against the grain of the works and ideas which they seek to

overcome. In working with the tradition it is possible to reclaim it from the euporia

of modern and postmodern thought and it is also possible to give a positive

understanding to the work of the teacher in the classroom. Rose, in Mourning

Becomes the Law, describes how the works of the tradition can be read either as fixed,

closed conceptual structures, colonising being with the garrison of thought; or

according to the difficulty which the conceptuality represents by leaving gaps and

silences in the mode of representation (Rose, 1996, p.8). The determinism of

modernity is matched by a negative determinism in refusing to engage with the works

of the canon in postmodernism. To choose to ignore or disregard the texts must be

based on an awareness of their meaning and is, therefore, not a blind action, it is one

informed by dogmatic views about the nature of truth and universals just as much as

the modern view was.

Rose writes in Loves Work of rejecting the New Age (or possibly ancient) desire to

remove the mind from its hell, the hell of metaphysics. The tradition is far kinder

in its understanding that to live, to love, is to be failed, to forgive, to have failed, to

 25

be forgiven, for ever and ever. (Rose, 2011, p.105). Roses reading of the tradition is

not as somewhere of easy answers. Postmoderns might pick up books from the canon

and claim to be doing them justice when they treat them as self-help titles from

which gobbets of life advice might be extracted. Roses aporetic view of the tradition

is one which has a kindness, understanding and forgiveness to it but not one which

will circumvent the difficulty of philosophy. Rose urges us to keep your mind in

hell, and despair not (Rose, 2011, p.105).

The metaphysics which stems from the tradition is the perplexity, the aporia, at

how to find a path from the law of the concept to the peculiarity of each instance

(Rose, 2011, p.124). That path is not a simple, dialectical movement from point A to

point B. Aporia can be described as pathlessness and it could be argued that the

inherent sadness and tragedy of philosophy, of which Rose writes, is the inability of

man to successfully traverse this path, from the law of the concept, to peculiarity in a

way which is satisfying or easy. This presents an ethical question; why should we want

to continue down a path of despair? The diaporia is the ethical response to the

difficulty of attempting to traverse the metaphysical path, it is being at a loss yet

exploring various routes, different ways towards the good enough justice, which

recognises the intrinsic and the contingent limitations in its exercise (Rose, 2011,

p.124). Here is the sense in which education moves from being a discussion of

abstracts to occurring in the marketplace of life. The difficulty of education shows

itself not in abstract thought which, trapped as it is by language, must be inherently

simple and dialectical. Instead it occurs in the ethical activity of an aporetic

 26

education, an education where it is possible to speak of a concept like good enough

justice without it being a mealy-mouthed compromise. This education takes in the

actual lived experience of the teacher and student in the ill-fitting dichotomy between

individual and universal. Rose describes this contingent, human existence as:

earthly, human sadness is the divine comedy - the ineluctable discrepancy between

our worthy intentions and ever-surprising outcome of our actions (Rose, 2011,

pp.124-5).

The Divine Comedy of Metaphysics

Nigel Tubbs, writing in Philosophy and Modern Liberal Arts, brings this idea of the

divine comedy to a modern metaphysics, one that is fit for purpose for the twenty-

first century. Tubbs writes, the logic and character of ancient first principles are no

longer fit for purpose in the Western world. Theirs is the logic of harmony (Tubbs,

2015, p.3). This harmonious, unified view of education has led to the rejection of the

canon of Western philosophy in classrooms as a reflection of the leisured, male,

Western world against the kinds of local knowledges put forward by Spanos and

others. Tubbs, however, seeks, rather than to discard of the liberal arts tradition, to

see how an aporetic reading of the tradition could be conveyed into a new

metaphysics. What liberal arts now requires is a new logic of first principles forged

in the image of the West working within the imperialism, sexism, racism and

colonialism of its leisured, propertied and masterful experience (Tubbs, 2015, p.3).

This new metaphysics is a middle term between the tranquillity of the spheres in the
 27

ancient world and the fracture, deconstruction and relativism that come with the

supposed discarding of universals.

Tubbs describes how, the modern logic of necessity, of modern metaphysics, looks

somewhat barbarian in contrast, bringing struggle, contingency, relation,

opposition, vulnerability and even anger to the logic of tranquillity and to the

tranquillity of logic (Tubbs, 2015, p.128). No longer is the barbarian struggle

excluded from education, it is bought into the classroom. This logic has its own

educational necessity (and its own form of harmony) in difficulty (Tubbs, 2015, p.3).

Rather than being a place for the idle man of leisure, the modern liberal arts becomes

a ground for work, struggle and difficulty. For the student to think the absolute as

Rose urges and use that to re-think the property and legal relations posited by the

ancient and Enlightenment ideas of reason. It is not, however, truly a new

metaphysics in more than the sense that it is being written about kindly now. It could

certainly not be said that the uncomfortable logic of relation has not accompanied

the ancient logic on its way through Western educational and philosophical history

(Tubbs, 2015, pp.128-9). It has indeed but it has always been subjugated by the desire

for deterministic and harmonious solutions. Now, Tubbs seeks to give the voice of

difficulty a place in the classroom.

In this way, the new metaphysics does not claim an entirely separate conceptual space

for itself as postmodernism does. That is to say that error, barbarism and the other

are not new concepts in education or philosophy but their re-conceptualisation in a

 28

more speculative vein is what is new. For Tubbs, the ancient logic of necessity is

itself barbarian, for it suppresses the way its own truth exports the error of infinite

regression to the other (Tubbs, 2015, p.129). Although the liberal arts education of

the past has always been characterised as liberal in the broader sense of freedom, it is

always accompanied by the illiberal. It is the slave who has always accompanied the

master; and it is the struggle with relation that has always accompanied the identity

of truth-in-itself (Tubbs, 2015, p.129). The question which is now posed for the

teacher who wishes to step outside of the postmodern paradigm is how to relate their

educational process to the difficulty of the relation between liberal and illiberal or

subjectivity and truth or life and death. Tubbs describes this as a modern divine

comedy in which opposing parts of the dialectic find the truth of their relation to

each other dissolved and preserved in and as education (Tubbs, 2015, p.130).

Comedy educates us in what is preserved within the collision of opposites as

learning (Tubbs, 2015, p.130). This idea of a collision of opposites as learning is not

any idea of pure dialectics where ideas overcome one another. As Williams says this

becomes another strategy for avoiding strategy, violence, time and error (Williams,

1995, p.14). To do this sort of dialectics is to re-enact a form of mastery whereby one

idea seeks to subjugate another. The modern comedy of metaphysics is speculative,

difficult and educative rather than deterministic and simplifying. A comedy of

divine metaphysical errors that defines truth as ineffable and/or impossible and a

metaphysics of modern comedy wherein error mediates itself, dissolves itself and

learns of its own first principle in and as this learning (Tubbs, 2015, p.131).
 29

Tubbs rejects the ancient virtue of the balanced and stoical master in favour of an

image of the aporetic individual, negotiating the difficulty and possibility of the

modern divine comedy. Now it is an individual who is re-invigorated by the

educational logic of the struggles which define the aporetic relation between modern

subjectivity and the death of substance (Tubbs, 2015, p.132). This modern comedy

requires a re-conceptualisation of error in the mind of the teacher and the student in

order for it to be seen as invigorating or exciting, and not just another route down

which to explore sadness or despair. There must be a movement of the term of error

from one inherently linked with bad learning to one where it becomes a part of the

logic of education. Williams remarks on how every moment of recognition is also a

new moment of salutary error to the extent that it is the taking of a position

(Williams, 1995, p.10). The teacher, even in the physical stance of standing in front

of a room full of students, takes a position. They are unable to be a conduit for aporia

and error in the same way as a student might and this requires a deeper understanding

of the role of the teacher within the modern divine comedy of education as outlined

by Tubbs. To what extent can the vocation to teach be retrieved and reinvigorated by

an aporetic understanding of education and vocation?

 30

4 The Work and Vocation of Teaching

The Difficult Work of Education

Rowan Williams describes in Between Politics and Metaphysics, his belief that, the

truth lies in the system, which is not the theory that the mind can possess at one

moment, but the entirety of the path, the project, of critical dissolution of the

positional and partial definition (Williams, 1995, p.10). Williams truth is religious

but it is also aporetic and, standing in both camps, it provides some of the re-

invigoration of which Tubbs speaks and also a platform from which to assess the

work, difficulty and vocation of teaching. As I have discussed previously I do not

want to conflate religious and educational ideas by accident but nor do I want to

ignore my own personal thoughts of vocation and spirituality which bleed into

discussions around education. Williams religious, spiritual and speculative truth is

deeply related to a logic of education which will here provide the basis on which to

discuss the work of the teacher.

Freires conception of the teacher in his problem posing education is of someone

who is able to express and revel in a constant unveiling of reality (Freire, 1972,

p.54). Freire believes that the world is not a static object of study in which the teacher

is responsible for imparting fixed knowledge to the student. Instead he argues that

students (and teachers) must comprehend the world not as a static reality, but as a

reality in process, in transformation (Freire, 1972, p.56). Here he posits the position
 31

of the classroom as a transformative space in which students can establish an

authentic form of thought and action (Freire, 1972, p.56). Williams, using Hegels

concept of the natural consciousness as a default mode of thought, also recognises

the need for a logic of education to have some more authentic form of thought and

action. Rather than viewing the world in a deterministic way it is in a continued re-

engagement with [determinate] experiences that we move constantly and afresh into

the properly speculative mode in which we unmake the natural consciousness

(Williams, 1995, p.10). This is counter to some readings of Hegel which suggest that

he seeks to do away with natural consciousness in favour of the speculative mode.

Rose and Williams both describe the more aporetic reading that it is in recognising

the errors of the natural mode that a speculative mode and the resultant critiques can

arise. That is, at heart, a logic for the educator, it gives a reason for the classroom and

the teacher to exist because this is not, of course, a natural process, it is unnatural.

Williams describes how we ought to entertain the particular in its strangeness, and

out of that will, properly, come the speculative recognition of the unsustainable

character of the natural (Williams, 1995, p.10). When, in a Ray of Darkness he

describes the paradox of truth, is this not exactly what he is arguing that paradox is

able to do in the strict dialectic of language? He argues, we speak in paradoxes

because we have to speak in a way that keeps the question alive (Williams, 2014, p.119).

The teacher in the classroom, finding themselves in the broken middle between

authority and freedom is able to articulate the fundamental errors of natural

consciousness just as paradox is able to in language. Tubbs talks of being re-

 32

invigorated by the comic challenge of truth but Williams goes further because within

the difficulty of truth, for him, there is not only an educational logic but also a

spiritual and religious one. It is only when you can see in the whole of somebodys

life and language that they have been interrupted, disorientated, reorganised, left

behind by their experience, that you may be inclined to think that, whatever else

theyre doing, theyre not evading anything (Williams, 2014, p.119). Not only is the

student not evading anything but they are not seeking to overcome something, they

are, in actual fact, allowing themselves to be overcome. Whether or not the student is

overcome by interaction with educational or religious truth is more likely an

individual and personal question. In my time of study there are examples I can think

of where I have felt myself being interrupted, disorientated, reorganised and left

behind by what Ive been learning but that cannot be universalised and it is not a goal

on which to build a pedagogical logic of education to work from.

What is for certain is that the new metaphysics actively shuns the deterministic

desire to overcome one side of the dialectic. Tubbs writes, the logic of overcoming,

[], resists the logic of education that can be retrieved from the infinite regression of

mastery overcoming mastery (Tubbs, 2015, p.146). Tubbs goes as far as to identify

this logic of overcoming with the dialectic of enlightenment: where enlightenment

claims to overcome ignorance but where, instead, the answer to the question only

becomes another question needing to be answered (Tubbs, 2015, p.146). What

Williams is describing is not an overcoming of knowledge through enlightenment

but almost a coming to peace with the paradoxically true nature of the world. This
 33

might not be the best description, certainly it is not a coming to peace in the sense of

tranquillity, rather it is arriving at some kind of starting point from which the

teacher and student can begin. Someone who passively allows the awe of the world

wash over them, speculative or not, would not be doing the work of aporia, they

would be back in the mode of leisure where work is not required. There is work in

education, there is most definitely work in vocation. An education in the speculative

mode is, for Williams, a process in which they are put in question at their deepest

level (Williams, 1995, p.120), it cannot be passive.

The question posed by this dissertation is not simply addressing the work of

education, it specifically mentions teaching as vocation.

Reclaiming Vocation

Vocation is often described in simple terms as a calling to a profession, it is most

often associated with a religious dialogue because that call must originate from

somewhere. I cannot talk of vocation without talking of religion, I began this degree

with an idea of my own vocation founded in a deeply held religious belief that I had a

calling from God to be in education and possibly to enter the priesthood. It is a

vocation which has shifted backward and forward as I have attempted to know thyself

and come to some kind of clarity around what the root of my calling is. I say all of

this to outline my own stake in talking of work, vocation and teaching and to clarify

the inevitably religious element of talking of vocation.

 34

Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism argues that, by nature,

man does not wish to earn more and more money, but simply to live as he is

accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose (Weber,

1989, p.60). Vocation fits in the gap between the greed Weber attributes to the

capitalist pursuit of wealth and the desire to only work as much as is absolutely

necessary. Vocation certainly relates to work but it has a very different relationship to

work than the one of necessity or greed of which Weber writes. It springs from a

necessity of the soul. Webers famous claim of specialists without spirit, sensualists

without heart comes from his belief that vocation had spread from being a

particular, individual, spiritual idea to one which was being universalised by the spirit

of capitalism. It is this universal vocation to which all must be called and all must

answer that call in order to please God, work must be performed as if it were an

absolute end in itself, a calling (Weber, 1989, p.62). The personal piety and faith of

vocation is replaced by the universal Protestant guilt of the calling of work as an end-

in-itself, or at least toward the end of creating Gods kingdom on earth. The result of

a Reformation founded on Puritan ideals is that now every Christian had to be a

monk all his life (Weber, 1989, p.121). It ought to be possible to find a way to

reclaim the idea of vocation from this puritanical tyranny which gives vocation the

space to do the work and difficulty of education without entirely rejecting its place in

both the religious and secular realms of thought.

 35

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian and member of the Resistance during

World War Two. In his Ethics he describes vocation in a way which does not entirely

do away with Webers universality but which is something of a return to a truly

spiritual idea. The call reaches us as Gentile or Jew, slave or free, man or woman,

married or unmarried. Right where they happen to be, human beings ought to hear

the call and allow themselves to be claimed by it (Bonhoeffer, 2005, p.290).

Bonhoeffer characterises the call of vocation as an expression of grace which happens

when the temporal existence of man comes into connection with the eternal spirit of

God. He speaks, just as Dante does in the Paradiso, of God in this position of paradox

coming into contact with human understanding: it is not human beings who seek

out grace in its place, for God lives in unapproachable light. Instead, grace seeks out

and finds human beings in their place (Bonhoeffer, 2005, p.289). Bonhoeffer argues

that vocation presents an image of a whole human responding to reality, a human

which embodies both the responsive self and a relation to the universal. He also

makes clear that vocation entails more than earthbound acts toward an end like

monetary greed or personal hedonism. Vocation ought to have some relation to the

whole of reality as well as the whole individual. He gives the example of the doctor:

In dealing with a concrete case I serve not only my patient, but also the body

of scientific knowledge, and thus science and knowledge of truth in general.

Although in practice I render this service in my concrete situation for

example at a patients bedside I nevertheless remain aware of my

responsibility toward the whole, and only thus fulfil my vocation

 36

(Bonhoeffer, 2005, pp.290-1)

The key difference in Weber and Bonhoeffer, which allows vocation to retain a place

in the language of education for the twenty-first century, is Bonhoeffers aporetic

interpretation of vocation as something which is both experienced but also not fully

knowable. Although vocation leads into earthly obligations, [it] is never

synonymous with these, but instead always transcends them as a reality standing

before and behind them (Bonhoeffer, 2005, p.290). Williams, in A Ray of Darkness,

describes the presence of Gods grace in life as the event which attacks and upsets my

self-image (Williams, 2014, p.120). Dante, in the Paradiso, describes himself, Like

a geometer who sets himself / To square the circle, and is unable to think / Of the

formula he needs to solve the problem (Dante, 2008, p.499). Even in the secular

there is a sense of this aporia in the relation between the individual and the universal.

Freire describes how his education seeks to show the world not as a static reality, but

as a reality in process (Freire, 1972, p.56). Rose, in Judaism and Modernity, describes

the speculative form which moves beyond the basic opposition of dialectic as

knowledge of what is opposed in its very oneness, more precisely the knowledge that

the opposites are in truth one (Rose, 1993, p.60).

Toward an End

All of this is to say that although vocation can be reclaimed through a spiritual,

rather than secular, image it is not then trapped within the confines of Christian

theology or religious writing. Vocation has a place within the speculative aporia
 37

described by Rose just as much as it does within the God-given grace described by

Bonhoeffer. A self-education which is able to contain an aporetic understanding of

the speculative can tend toward finding the spiritual calling of which Bonhoeffer

writes. Whether the source of calling is know thyself through God or know thyself

through education (or whether those might be one-and-the-same), vocation is some

kind of expression of the universal spirit in the individual. Vocation is

responsibility, and responsibility is the whole response of the whole person to reality

as a whole (Bonhoeffer, 2005, p.291), the whole person is, as has been discussed

through this dissertation, not merely the single individual, it is the meeting of the

individual and the universal and the relation between the two.

To return to some secular context for vocation might be to look at Rose, in Hegel

Contra Sociology where she seeks to outline The End of Philosophy. To seek the end of

philosophy has parallels with seeking the ends of education, and particularly the ends

of the philosophical teachers vocation as expressed in the classroom. For Rose the

End lies not in abstraction but in the transformative ability of action. She describes

how our transformative or productive activity has a special claim as a mode of

acknowledging actuality which transcended the dichotomies between theoretical and

practical reason (Rose, 1995, p.204). Actuality (which is where the social import of

philosophy lies) can be known because it is experienced both as a dichotomy and as

beyond the dichotomy (Rose, 1995, p.204). Freires liberating education, which is

based on reflection and re-cognition of the world by the student, might also be said to

access the realm beyond the dichotomy. It does not merely relate to the world and the
 38

other but it also relates to the relation. Freire describes how authentic reflection

considers neither abstract man nor the world without men, but men in their

relations with the world (Freire, 1972, p.54). This goes some way to matching what

Bonhoeffer describes as the whole human existing in the whole of reality and the

relation of this to the spiritual idea of vocation. Knowledge emerges only through

invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful

enquiry men pursue in the world, with the world and with each other (Freire, 1972,

p.46). This is how, for Freire at least; the relationship between teacher and student

can have that vocational relationship to the wider universal. The work of education is

not confined to just the teacher making deposits of knowledge into the student. The

work of education manifests itself in, what Freire describes as, the process of

becoming (Freire, 1972, pp.56-7).

Williams argues that at the centre of Roses philosophy is the idea that the

philosopher and the educator, has to refuse divinity, or rather the pretence of

divinity, not by refusing to make judgements but by knowing the risky and violent

nature of the judgements s/he cannot but make, staking a position which naturally

involves claiming something over against an other (Williams, 1995, p.13). As I leave

this degree and head into a career of teaching I find that idea of staking a position

both reassuring and frightening. It does, however, give me a great deal more hope

and speak much more strongly to my vocation, than ideas of false liberation from the

difficulty and error of education. I wanted to end this dissertation with two quotes
 39

from Canto XXXIII of Dantes Paradiso that I feel have something to say about the

truth of paradox which has run through this work.

I saw gathered there in the depths of it

Bound up by love into a single volume,

All the leave scattered through the universe;

Substance and accidents and their relations,

But yet fused together in such a manner

That what I am talking of is a simple light.

The universal form of this knot

Is what I think I saw, because when I say that

I feel that my gladness becomes more ample.

(Dante, 2008, p.498)

And finally

At this point high imagination failed

But already my desire and my will

Were being turned like a wheel, all at one speed

 40

By the love which moves the sun and other stars.

(Dante, 2008,p.499)
 41

References

Bonhoeffer, D. (2005). Ethics. Minneapolis: Fortress Press

Dante, A. (2008). The Divine Comedy. Oxford: Oxford World Classics (trans. Sissions, C.H.)

Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin

Rose, G. (1995). Hegel Contra Sociology. London: Athlone

Rose, G. (2011). Loves Work. New York: New York Review Books

Rose, G. (1996). Mourning Becomes the Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Rose, G. (1999). Paradiso. London: Menard Press

Rose, G. (1993). Judaism and Modernity. Oxford: Blackwell

Spanos, W. (1993). The End of Education. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press

Tubbs, N. (2015). Philosophy and Modern Liberal Arts Education: Freedom is to Learn.

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Usher, R. and Edwards, R. (1994). Postmodernism and Education. London: Routledge

Weber, M. (1989). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London, Unwin Hyman

Williams, R. (1995). Between Politics and Metaphysics: Reflections in the Wake of Gillian Rose in

Modern Theology, 11 (1), pp.3-22.

Williams, R. (2014). Open to Judgement. London: Darton, Longman and Todd

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