Abstract
Bildung can be determined as the experimental form of world disclosure as applied to the individual and learning as the explorational form of world disclosure as applied to the individual. This new understanding of the concepts of Bildung and learning enables a fundamental critique of those theoretical approaches in Bildung and learning that remain rooted in the representational paradigm and must thus repress the essentially paradoxical character of theoretically described processes of world disclosure. Using various examples, this section covers the associated over inflation of language, the forgetting of technology and the aporetic relation between theory and empiricism.
You don’t have to be a scientist todo experiments on your own heart
—Jeffrey Lewis
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Notes
- 1.
That learning is also a paradoxical event, and also that the orientation from a preceding distinction cannot cement or bridge the breach between the old and the new, also has a good side: only so, is it, for example, understandable why children, as Marja van den Heuvel-Panhuizen has shown, using the example of a bad mathematics lesson, can also learn correctly when something is incorrectly taught. (Van den Heuvel-Panhuizen 2003).
- 2.
Just as in the experience of impossibility, understanding that the experiment within the “limits of the given possibilities” was prepared for by the explorative thought system in that one learnt more and more about the praxis of the experiment. Steinle (2000) has shown how manifold the possibilities of experimental experience are in an especially clear and understandable account—and how insufficient the present and still dominant understanding of the experiment is.
- 3.
In both senses of the word: then, as was shown above (in Sect. 3.13 ), those who have no idea can also not get an idea; intuition needs to be acquired.
- 4.
Even suicide, which is erroneously seen as a failure in the world, is actually the possibility, never to be excluded, with which every failure can be brought to fail—as a permanent option of self destruction on offer: from the perspective of a theory of Bildung, accounted in terms of form theory, suicide is the final arrangement with a world in which one participated in, in which no possibility of co-mmunication is anymore envisaged, and, as a consequence of this, the attempt at doing it justice is given up. This is certainly the existential meaning of the point that every process of Bildung is overrun by its own beginnings.
- 5.
Also equally fundamental in this, cf. Waldenfels, who locates the starting point of technological inventions in situations, which are admittedly compelling, but must nevertheless be thought of as irreducibly open: “Becoming human [Menschwerdung] begins in a situation that extorts inventions from us, placing some of them to hand, but never forcing them. Even hunger and death, in which the field of possibilities melts down, allows for various responses. Technology equally has its place of origin here. A differential view of technology and invention, holding these contingent origins in focus, is developed from a resistance against a mechanisation which, like its anti-mechanistic rival, takes its measure from a one sided and narrow form of technology, and applies this measure.” (Waldenfels 2004, p. 185).
- 6.
“The economic plays an elementary and unavoidable role. The selection inhabiting all attentiveness, this simultaneous turning to and away from, renders attentiveness a scarce commodity” (Waldenfels 2006, p. 107). On this cf. also Sect. 1.5 .
- 7.
One would need to correspondingly modify and generalise the relation between eye and hand in the natural scientific experiment depicted above for the “thought experiment”: as thinking in which one can forget the body and as thinking in which one must deal with the body.
- 8.
That which for Kant self-evidently counted as the tasks of a pedagogy aimed at responsibility is now something with which to remind those who feel called by the attempt to bring discipline together with obedience, and thus play against responsibility—and which also gains attention because of the media conforming schemas of provocation requiring no reflection.
- 9.
To those who believe this belong the “constructivists” and the “realists”, whose dispute won such great attention for some time: on this cf. Hacking 1999.
- 10.
Wimmer thus, in a certain way, sets deconstruction against the formation of theories of science and thought against theory and science: “Deconstruction, unlike theories of science, takes on another relationship to praxis, in which theory or knowledge does not have the task of ensuring its success, but rather of enabling the event. Thus Derrida does not speak of theory or of science but of thought.” (Wimmer 2006, p. 371) The difference between Wimmer’s discussion of the meaning of paradox in relation to theory and praxis, deconstruction and science and the arguments being followed here is small: if one understands theory as prescriptive and science as aimed at a closed theoretical context it is even extremely small. The difference consists more in a shift: in the attempt to understand the praxis of science itself as deconstructive, and to determine the task of theory therein, instead of prescribing the praxis its solutions, holding present thought’s (as one that is always practical) unsolved problems.
- 11.
For the necessity of this distinction as the condition of possibility of translation cf. Derrida 1972, p. 20.
- 12.
One can twist and turn it as one will, one can hide it or programmatically claim the opposite: the “mere” has here its structural place.
- 13.
In fact, it is a doubled relation between technology and the visual: continually renewed visual technologies enable continually renewed perspectives and thus create the impression of independence. This impression can, however, only result because the visual is already correspondingly technologised—it is so accustomed to the central perspective—a representational technology, an invention of the Renaissance—that it can forget its technicity. On this cf. Giesecke 1998 and Krämer 1998, and, on the respective codification of space cf. Panofsky 1927.
- 14.
Haraway thus speaks of insight also as “materialised refiguration” (Haraway 1997a, p. 64).
- 15.
That scientists also have a responsibility does not mean that they can take responsibility for the results of their research. As a scientist one does not, after all, think out one’s results beforehand.
- 16.
Cf. e.g. Latour 1993, pp. 1–12. That Latour oscillates between the realisation that we do nothing else than talk about these hybrids the whole time and deal with them on a daily basis, and the claim that we cannot even think them because of the division between fact and fabrication, is also due to him, instead of differentiating between exploration and experiment, attempting to recursively universalise the experimental back into the past: one can understand his thesis that we were never modern in exactly the same way—as the claim that the vocabulary of the explorative is not appropriate and never was.
- 17.
On the eye as “guardian and source of the truth” in pedagogy and its relation to the figure of the conqueror cf. Wimmer 1988, p. 275 f. Wimmer uses the example of the Pietists to explore the relationship between the visual and the modus of insight: “The visual must be desubjectivised and disembodied if it wishes to decipher the truth of children and separate naturalness from its perversion. Observation is performed without intervention, distanced, silent, without gesture, nothing is a secret for it. The pure gaze has the privilege of recording the invisible since it is equipped with the whole logic which distributes the visible within a given conceptual configuration. The observing gaze does not help to realise this, but rather only to recognise” (ibid.).
- 18.
Also see Koller’s arguments as to why he holds Popper’s concept of falsification for less enlightening of the Bildung’s theoretical question as to the origin of the new: “For Popper’s Falsificationism delivers nothing other than a formulation of a philosophy of science which […] was described as occasion for a process of Bildung: the failure of a previously valid or ‘successful’ world and self understanding in the confrontation with new experiences or problems.” (Koller 2007, p. 53 f., my emphasis).
- 19.
It is for this reason that Latour’s efforts around a new sociology (cf. esp. Latour 2005) are so important: what concerns him is the necessity of establishing a systematic place for natural science in political discourse—not in order to attack its claim to validity, and also not in order to come to an agreement beyond alleged cultural differences.
- 20.
It also brings—as perhaps will now become clear—theoretical-practical advantages with it when one considers the relationship between theory and practice in its dependence upon the respective system of thought and not, for example, as a representational problem. In other words: the relationship between theory and praxis is not a derivative problem of the problem of representation—rather, both problems are bound together in the interconnection and in the complentarity of both systems of thought (or, if one so will, in connection with their “incommensurability”); Michael Lynch is correct when he writes with an eye to the attention afforded the problem of representation: “Representation is overrated” (1994, esp. p. 148)—for the problem of representation is also not one that can be approached independently from the composite of one of the two systems of thought.
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Ahrens, S. (2014). The Subversion of Bildung . In: Experiment and Exploration: Forms of World-Disclosure. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8709-3_4
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