Resonant Education

The articles in this symposium make two important contributions: they introduce and explain the powerful but opaque philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy; and they show how his philosophy illuminates central issues in education. Their accounts also diverge in interesting ways, raising provocative questions for the philosophy of education. The contributors describe how being with captures Nancy's core ontological claim. The basic level of human being is in relation to others. As David Hansen articulates, we exist only “in common,” through activities with others.1 This does not mean that we are subsumed into a group, however. We are simultaneously singular-plural. “Being with” captures individual distinctiveness as well as connectedness, without reducing one to the other. The contributors argue that for Nancy the paradigmatic human activity is not individual cognition about the world, but is instead listening. As Eduardo Duarte Bono says, we must replace “the [Cartesian] philosophical subject” with “the listening subject,” and we must replace the predominant visual metaphor with a musical one.2 Instead of standing apart from the world and observing it, we “resonate” with something in the world and are taken out of ourselves by it. As Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon and Megan Laverty say, “the listener's search for meaning … is a search guided by felt resonance rather than intellectual cognizing, at least initially.”3 The traditional philosophical focus on internal self-reflection, according to Nancy, impedes genuine listening and distorts our relations with others and the world. Nancy does not eliminate the subject, but he focuses on resonant subjectivity. Our basic mode of experiencing the world involves resonating with aspects of it. Duarte Bono explores this musical metaphor, describing how listening to music involves a “letting go” of oneself and an openness to experience. Together with Haroutunian-Gordon and Laverty, Duarte Bono shows how music evokes meaning, how it can be transformative even though it does not contain analytic messages. Hansen describes this as a “pre-cognitive” responsiveness to the world. Touch is another important metaphor for Nancy. Unlike vision, touch involves contact with others and a distinctive immediacy. It is a second-person experience, in contact with something next to me. This contrasts with the third-person experience of analytic abstraction associated with vision and the Cartesian subject. René Arcilla explains how this emphasis on resonance and touch demands a different attitude toward experience — an “opening” or an “expansion of being.” According to Arcilla, Nancy calls for “bearing witness and lyrically summoning other witnesses.” We should not strive for “conclusive epiphany,” but for “perpetual intimation.”4 This is a process-based philosophy, emphasizing becoming. Haroutunian-Gordon and Laverty describe how meaning emerges gradually in listening, through resonance that connects to prior experience but remains open to the world. This process does not end with a final judgment. Hansen shows that, for Nancy, human life involves an unending series of “co-appearances.” There are no stable individuals or stable groups that are ontologically prior. We exist only as we are with others, across a series of spontaneous, contingent, unique events. Arcilla uses the metaphor of “dance” to capture this — we are all involved in this dance, with ongoing responsiveness to and interconnections with others. Each time we encounter and resonate with others it changes us, and it changes them. This means that individuals travel unique pathways. Haroutunian-Gordon and Laverty describe how an individual potentially becomes a new person in each experience, across the series of events that make up a life. Hansen summarizes Nancy's account of an individual “as a being who embodies a lived, dynamic history of responses to experience, and who is influenced by others who are responding in their distinctive ways.” Individuals are distinctive and deserve respect not because they possess a moral core, but because of their unique pathway across experience and their ability to take distinctive stances and engage others. Listening and “being with” thus have an ethical dimension. Individuals have dignity, based in their unique histories and their capacity to engage with and draw out resonance in others. We owe others true “listening,” which Haroutunian-Gordon and Laverty characterize as being open to more challenging meanings, as opposed to simply “hearing” others by employing familiar categories. We owe others openness and respect. Hansen describes this moral obligation in the context of teaching, arguing that teachers must attend to the distinctiveness of individual students and unique moments. Instead of imposing abstract categories, or dealing in exchange value and instrumental rationality, we must be open to and engage with others — acknowledging their unique history of engagement in “the dance” and their capacity to evoke resonance in us. Arcilla connects Nancy's ontology to politics, describing the kind of “we” implied by our “being with.” The Cartesian subject presupposes autonomous individuals who pursue self-determination, fundamentally separate from others. In contrast, Nancy argues that people are always already with others. This presupposes some kind of collective. But Arcilla argues that two kinds of collectives on offer at this historical moment do not suffice. On one hand, we have universalizing visions that presuppose we are all the same, typically taking the norms of one ethnic or economic group as allegedly universal. On the other hand, we have essentializing identity politics that claims some ethnic or economic characteristic binds together supposedly homogeneous groups. Both of these erase the uniqueness of individuals and close off spontaneous, unexpected experience. Nancy wants a sense of community that is not based on fixed, shared characteristics. Instead, he imagines a community based in our mutual participation in the ongoing dance of engagement with others. As the contributors make clear, Nancy argues that we should remain open to unexpected opportunities for resonance with others. An emphasis on cognition and analysis can impede this. Contemporary education is unfortunately built for Cartesian subjects, emphasizing propositional knowledge and skills. Education should instead focus on openness to and engagement with others and the world. It should maintain spaces designed for open engagement and create dispositions to engage others and enter the dance in an open way. Arcilla argues that this means education should involve questions more than answers, leading us to “wondering together at being.” Duarte Bono argues for education that leads individuals to accept uncertainty and remain open to the world instead of imposing categories on it. He uses the metaphor of being taken away by music to capture the experience Nancy has in mind. Hansen provides an extended account of teaching along these lines, describing how teachers can be attuned to and facilitate emergent, resonant engagements with themselves, students, and the subject matter. This kind of education helps students get outside of their experiences, and their categories. It helps them discover who they are through openness to and encounters with the other. According to Nancy, education should help people adopt this new stance toward others and the world. Arcilla argues that successful education catalyzes this transformation through three moments. First, students must recognize that autonomy and accumulation (whether of identity, knowledge, or possessions) are not adequate goals for a life. One way to facilitate this recognition is by confronting mortality and asking questions about life purpose. Second, students must come to see that there is something sacred and open happening out in the world and that this ongoing dance or engagement with others is accessible to them. Third, students must surrender themselves to the ongoing interplay with others, which will go on beyond any individual. Nancy clearly argues that cognition and analysis can impede the openness required for us to “be with.” But are cognition and openness necessarily opposed? The contributors answer this question differently. When discussing music, Duarte Bono emphasizes the non-cognitive and losing oneself in resonance. But in their discussion of music, after recognizing the importance of openness and the dangers of analysis, Haroutunian-Gordon and Laverty argue for a cognitive moment as well. For those hoping to use Nancy to articulate a philosophy of education, it will be crucial to take a position on this issue. Education involves subject matter, and students are expected to learn about and analyze that subject matter. Can we retain these traditional cognitive aspects of education while integrating Nancy's powerful account? Hansen argues that we can. Drawing on a holistic account of teaching — in which the aesthetic, the moral, and the intellectual cannot be separated — he argues that Nancy's emphasis on openness can enrich an education that includes more traditional reflection and cognition. With Nancy, Duarte Bono, and other contributors, Hansen embraces “being with in teaching, understood as attunement and immediate pre-cognitive responsiveness.” At the same time, he argues that reflection is crucial and that reflection need not domesticate or undermine “being with” and openness. “Attunement and responsiveness, and [an] embodied orientation can be refined, deepened, and cultivated, precisely through bringing that which is ethically and aesthetically pre-cognitive but felt into awareness where it can become the stuff of reflection.” Educators might be able to combine openness and reflection, if we can develop an account of “reflection” that would work with Nancy's philosophy. In a seminar with the contributors, devoted to the discussion and development of these articles, Duck-Joo Kwak of Seoul National University suggested that we could reimagine our pedagogical relation with subject matter as what she called “living with” that academic content. She argued that educators' and students' whole beings could be engaged in reflection on academic content, in a second-person experience, creating a space where we ourselves are changing as we engage with others and the subject matter, as we “touch” it. This would make academic engagement part of the dance that Arcilla describes, with an emerging pathway for individuals as they engage with others and explore resonant possibilities offered by the subject matter and others' stances. This vision of education imagined by Hansen and Kwak treats reflection and subject matter as inextricable from aesthetics, ethics, and ongoing joint activities. Chris Higgins argues that, for Nancy to be consistent, he and his followers cannot write philosophy in a traditional expository way. Instead of stringing together propositional claims, they must invite others into the ongoing dance of openness and resonance. Nancy attempts this, treating his writing itself as an instance of “being with.” The form of Nancy's writing provides, in a quote from Nancy that Higgins analyzes, “an address that comes to us from everywhere simultaneously, multiplied, repeated, insistent, and variable, gesturing only toward ‘us’ and toward our curious ‘being-with-one-another.’”5 Higgins calls it “a form of philosophical writing … that embraces voice, address, polysemy, the lyrical.”6 Both Arcilla and Duarte Bono practice non traditional forms of philosophical writing as well. Arcilla's article is an imagined conversation with Jean-Luc Nancy himself. His writing is already involved in the ongoing dance with others, since he presents his own engagement with Nancy in the form of a conversation that he invites readers into. As he says at one point: “My thinking truly responds to yours only when I treat the latter as something just half understood that is still in the middle of occurring to me.” Duarte Bono provides what he calls an even more “experimental” type of representation, evoking the “pre-intentional and ineffable” experience of listening to music. He adopts “a non-analytic form of philosophical address, one that is poetic by inclination,” involving “circular writing and associative thinking.” He explicitly does not intend a coherent, linear argument, but instead provides evocations and invitations to further engagement. Higgins is skeptical about all this. “The relational ontologist must learn to stop speaking about what exists and start speaking collectively from it, or rather from us, or perhaps as we.” This will often lead to confusion. Creating “imaginative resonance” is what artists do. Should philosophy then just become art? Higgins points out a tension between Nancy's desire for philosophy and his desire for immersion in immediate experience. He argues that there is a place for philosophy distinct from art and immediate experience. This dispute over the appropriate form of philosophical writing returns to the question raised earlier about whether Nancy's openness and cognitive reflection can coexist. Perhaps we can subsume reflective abstraction into the dance that Nancy envisions, in a synthesis that overcomes the opposed dangers of isolated subjectivity and immersive plurality. The essays in this engaging symposium open up the possibility with their resonant arguments. STANTON WORTHAM is the Charles Donovan, S.J., Dean of the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College; email [email protected]. A linguistic anthropologist and educational ethnographer with particular expertise in how identities develop in human interactions, Wortham has conducted research spanning education, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and sociology.