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The Educational Thing

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Abstract

In this essay, I argue that education should be conceived of as a thing in itself. To lift this view, I present aspects of Graham Harman’s philosophy, a speculative realism that can be seen as a radical break with social constructivism and similar approaches. Next, I attempt to outline a rough sketch of an educational “thing”, drawing on concepts such as protection, love, swarm, tension and shadow. Finally, I briefly discuss some implications of this vision for philosophy of education. In particular, I think that my discussion point to philosophy of education as the basic discipline in an educational science.

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Notes

  1. See Harman (2009, p. 334) for a discussion of this term. The other references in this paper are to Harman (2005), except where otherwise explicitly stated.

  2. Harman is a very friendly reader to the late Heidegger lecture The Thing from 1949 (an essay generally overlooked, see for example Safranski’s biography on Heidegger (Safranski 1998). In this lecture “a thing” is considered to be a mirror-play of Gods and mortals and between sky and earth: a fourfold (a concept which Harman uses himself). When the mirrorplay is fully at work, the “thing things” in a kind of glowing ring.

  3. This is completely in line with the view expressed by Hannah Arendt in her essay The Crisis in Education (1961).

  4. Socratic virtue in the context of the concept of “ideality”, a concept I know from Danish poet, priest and life-philosopher Jacob Knudsen (1858–1917) (Knudsen 1907).

  5. See Rømer (2010) for an elaboration of this “object” of education. I think it can be developed on the basis of the heideggerian fourfold, se note no. 2.

  6. The idea that thought and reality somehow comes from the same place is also found in the philosophy of Spinoza and of pre-socratic Parmenides.

References

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  • Harman, G. (2005). Guerrilla metaphysics: Phenomenology and the carpentry of things. Illinois: Open Court.

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  • Harman, G. (2009). On the horror of phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl. Collapse, 4, 333–364.

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  • Knudsen, J. (1907). Livsfilosofi. Copenhagen: Gyldendal.

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  • Safranski, R. (1998). Heidegger—between Good and Evil. Cambridge: Havard University Press.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Education, University of Aarhus, Niels Juels Gade 84, building 2110, office 241, Aarhus, Denmark

    Thomas Aastrup Rømer

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  1. Thomas Aastrup Rømer
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Correspondence to Thomas Aastrup Rømer.

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Rømer, T.A. The Educational Thing. Stud Philos Educ 30, 499–506 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-011-9250-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-011-9250-y

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