Policy Futures in Education

ISSN 1478-2103

Volume 8 Issues 3 & 4 2010

 

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CONTENTS [click on author's name for abstract and full text]

 

SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE
Diasporic Philosophy and Counter-Education
Guest editor: ILAN GUR-ZE’EV

Ilan Gur-Ze’ev
. Introduction, pages 258‑270 doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.258 VIEW FULL TEXT
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev. The Nomadic Existence of the Eternal Improviser and Diasporic Co-poiesis in the Era of Mega-speed, pages 271‑287
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev. Diasporic Philosophy, Homelessness, and Counter-Education in Context: the Israeli-Palestinian example, pages 288‑297
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev. Adorno and Horkheimer: Diasporic philosophy, Negative Theology and counter-education, pages 298‑314
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev. Beyond Peace Education: toward co-poiesis and enduring improvisation, pages 315‑339
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev. Diasporic Philosophy, Counter-Education and Improvisation, pages 340‑345
Daniel Boyarin in conversation with Ilan Gur-Ze’ev. Judaism, Post-colonialism and Diasporic Education in the Era of Globalization, pages 346‑357
Cornel West in conversation with Ilan Gur-Ze’ev. Diaspora, Philosophy and Counter-Education in the Face of Post-colonial Reality, pages 358‑380
Ilan Gur-Ze’ev in conversation with Jonathan Boyarin. The Possibility of a New Critical Language from the Sources of Jewish Negative Theology, pages 381‑397
Zygmunt Bauman. Education in the World of Diasporas, pages 398‑407
Rosi Braidotti. Nomadism: against methodological nationalism, pages 408‑418
Tzvetan Todorov. The Coexistence of Cultures, pages 419‑426
Ignacio L. Götz. Vignettes of Ambiguity, pages 427‑439
Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan. Language, Identity, and Exile, pages 440‑445
Michael Peters. Wittgenstein as Exile: a philosophical topography, pages 446‑456
Ilan Pappe. Diaspora as Catastrophe, Diaspora as a Mission and the Post-colonial Philosophy of Edward Said, pages 457‑466
Arie Kizel. Homelessness, Restlessness and Diasporic Poetry, pages 467‑477
Yotam Hotam. Ecology and Pedagogy: on the educational implications of postwar environmental philosophy, pages 478‑487

The Nomadic Existence of the Eternal Improviser and Diasporic Co-poiesis in the Era of Mega-Speed

ILAN GURZE’EV Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Israel

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.271

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The history of transcendence and nomadism in face of the call for ‘home-returning’ is marked figuratively by four milestones: (1) the ‘era’ of immanence and dwelling in total harmony as a manifestation of self-sustained holiness; (2) the ‘era’ of relating to holiness by mediation of God, especially in the monotheistic religions; (3) the ‘era’ of killing-God-each-moment-anew as a path for regaining contact with holiness in Enlightenment’s progress and the deification of humanity; and (4) the ‘era’ of the exile of the killer of God and the forgetfulness of the holy imperative of the progressive deification of humanity and the sacred work of killing-God-each-moment-anew. These four milestones are paralleled by growing changes and speeding of (de)constructions as part of the de-positioning of the human as dweller of this world or, alternatively, as a genuine Diasporic nomad. The current change in the history of human’s search for itself, its meaning and its telos is realized in an historical moment of change: from rapid changes into an arena of mega-speed, an era in which the sacred work of killing-God-each-moment-anew is replaced by the exile of the killer of God and the forgetfulness of the humanist’s telos within the immanence of the present dull anti-metaphysical moment within which the relations between space and time are transformed; both the quest for redemption/home-returning and the call for revolutionary progress and human’s self-edification are forgotten, ridiculed, deconstructed and swallowed into the postmodern-neo-liberal system. Linear time and the quest for transcendence are overwhelmed by punctual time, end of historical consciousness, quasi-nomadism and the possibility to solve all human responsibility and shortcomings by plugging in to the pleasure machine. In face of this reality Diasporic philosophy and its improvised co-poiesis become relevant for the possibility of counter-education.

 

Diasporic Philosophy, Homelessness, and Counter-Education in Context: the Israeli-Palestinian example

ILAN GUR-ZE’EV Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Israel

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.288

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Under current historical conditions, as Israelis, Jews are structurally almost prevented from facing the possibility of living in light of the Messianic impetus, as the world’s universal moral, intellectual, and creative vanguard. This special Jewish mission was made possible by the Jews’ unique homelessness – a Diasporic existence as a realized ideal of a community that is not a collective. Diasporic life is ultimately a kind of life in which the yahid (individual, not found in liberal terminology) is afforded, as an ecstatic way of moral life, an existence that allows a universalistic moral responsibility and intellectual commitment to overcome any dogma and content with the world of ‘facts’ and to reject the promises of mere power, glory, and pleasure. All this has changed in face of the successes of Zionist education and its political realizations. Unreserved siding against injustice inevitably endangers the very existence of Israel, not solely its current policies. As a genuine dialectical realization of Diasporic philosophy, counter-education in Israel cannot become instrumentalized, cannot become a collective self-imposed mass immigration. It is not solely a moral-political concrete dilemma facing us nowadays; it is fundamentally a philosophical and existential antinomy. Ultimately, it begins and ends in and by the individual, who is willing to overcome his or her self and to open the gates to the nomadic existence of a brave lover of Life and creativity. The new exodus is from Israel and the Zionist nation-building project as a present-day ‘Egypt’ as a home. It is an exodus from a distorted concept of Diasporic life, from the concept of ‘Egypt’ in the form of all versions of ‘homecoming’ and a monotheistic way, to rebuild or go back to the Garden of Eden. In the face of the new anti-Semitism as the meta-narrative of the new progressive thinking there is a special role to the present challenge of the unification of an ongoing moral struggle for the realization of the essence of Judaism, and transcending it into a universal alternative human existence.

 

Adorno and Horkheimer: Diasporic philosophy, Negative Theology, and counter-education

ILAN GUR-ZE’EV Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Israel

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.298

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The later Horkheimer presents mature Critical Theory as a Jewish Negative Theology. This change carries major educational implications hegemonic critical pedagogy has not yet dared to address until now and much less in the present era of the new anti-Semitism as the meta-narrative of the progressive circles. In Horkheimer’s work the change from a Marxian Critical Theory to a Diasporic philosophy is paralleled by an articulation of Critical Theory as a new, Jewish, Negative Theology. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics follows the same path, attempting to present ‘counter-education’ as a worthy addressing of the present absence of the quest for transcendence and meaning, and as a Diasporic form of awaiting as a self-education for the human stance of readiness to be called upon. The refusal to dwell in peace in the present order of things, the negation of the ‘facts’ of the actuality, are but a manifestation of the rejection of metaphysical violence and of all kinds of ‘homes’, dogmas, and self-satisfaction in a world of pain, injustice, ugliness, and betrayed love. Since Adorno and Horkheimer refused a positive Utopia, their mature thought could not promise a better world as a justification for resistance to normalizing education and the quest for pleasure, ‘success’, and hegemony. Homelessness and the moral importance of suffering are here grounded ontologically and become a religious way of life. In this the Frankfurt School thinkers followed Benjamin’s lead: it is a kind of religiosity which is Messianic without a Messiah. As a counter-education it holds out no promise of salvation or of redemption. But it might offer a Messianic moment, which will overcome the violence of the governing ‘now-time’ and open the gate to an alternative way of life. Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s later work offers a framework for counter-educational praxis whose religiosity is fertilized by the alarming resistance to educational optimism in light of an alternative, Diasporic co-poiesis and enduring responsible improvisation.

 

Beyond Peace Education: toward co-poiesis and enduring improvisation

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.315

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Is it possible that the essence of peace is negated in peace education? And is it possible that even against its own will peace education calls for the negation of its negation? In peace education no serious attempts have been made to elaborate its most central concepts. ‘Pacifism’, ‘violence’, ‘counter-violence’ and ‘emancipation’, ‘culture of peace’, among others, have still not been probed. Peace education, actually, is a serious threat to human edification. Peace for the eternal Jew, for the enduring improviser, is a condition of the one who found his way: an endless path of a nomad that has Love but no other ‘home’, dogma or quest for ‘home-returning’ into thingness, the continuum or the Same. He will never find and never search for ‘peace’ as an end of Diasporic existence and terminality of the suffering of the nomad. He will be at peace with his mission of avoiding history within history, of overcoming the temptation to be part of the collective ‘I’/consensus/pleasure machine/truth, and often he will be tired, ridiculed, punished or executed. But he will be also rewarded, each moment anew, for being at peace with his refusal of ‘peace’: he will be a freer and a richer improviser that his co-poiesis with the world, the Other, and he himself gives birth to Love. As such, the eternal improviser is mature enough to meet the alterity of other free nomads and Diasporic humans, as well as the gifts of other free-minded spirits. They too, as Nietzsche tell us, feel at home on the mountain, in the forest, and within their loneliness. But for the eternal improviser there is more and there is less than the rewards of the eternal Nietzschean nomad. This is so since the Nietzschean nomad is rewarded with presents and finally finds harmony in himself and the right path to the freedom of reason. The eternal improviser, however, is a more consistent Nietzschean than the Nietzschean nomad and is never appeased, domesticated or rewarded by any ‘home’. Homelessness, eternal Diaspora and improvisation worthy of the name cannot offer any ‘reward’ or rest in the (right) paved way, be it ‘external’ or ‘internal’, transcendent or immanent. Here counter-education reintroduces peace as a realization of Love and worthy togetherness with the cosmos, with the Other, with worthy suffering and with one’s self.

 

Diasporic Philosophy, Counter-Education and Improvisation

ILAN GUR-ZE’EV Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Israel

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.340

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Counter-education that addresses seriously the challenge of loss, exile, and the deceiving ‘home-returning’ projects accepts that no positive Utopia awaits us as ‘truth’, ‘genuine life’, ‘worthy struggle’, ‘pleasure’ or worthy self-annihilation. Loss is not to be recovered or compensated; not for the individual nor for any kind of ‘we’. And yet, Love of Life is the home of the Diasporic in the Socratic sense of Eros as an attracting absence of the beautiful. Counter-education should invite the Diasporic to the hospitality of Love of Life. Such hospitality calls for overcoming conventional morality and the other imperatives of the ethnocentric ‘we’, its self-evidence, its normality, the counter-violence of the oppressed and its normalized patriotic citizenship. The determination for Diasporic life and the possibilities opened by Diasporic counter-education is always ironic. It is never at home. The heart of improvisation is this movement within co-poiesis as a togetherness offered by Love of Life. It gives birth to the totally new. To the wholly unexpected that the Diasporic human faces its hospitality as alterity and togetherness symbolized by the Orcha; a form of non-instrumental nomadic playfulness that manifests erotic responsibility to Life at its best. Improvisation manifests the dialectics of response-ability and respond-ability. It is not ‘constructive’ nor is it merely ‘negative’. It is far from a manifestation of ‘resistance’ to oppression or suffering and loss. In the context of Diasporic counter-education it plays a special role as part of Love of Life and co-poiesis that challenges the matrix of whose manifestations traditional critical pedagogy is part and parcel.

 

Judaism, Post-colonialism and Diasporic Education in the Era of Globalization

DANIEL BOYARIN in conversation with ILAN GUR-ZE’EV

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.346

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Diaspora is a cultural situation in which a group of people have a dual cultural alliance, dual cultural allegiance – to a cultural or cultures in the place where they are and to a culture or cultures in another place to which they are related by etiological memory, other strategies to read the past like shared values, shared religion, and so on. So Diaspora is a very precise term to describe a particular kind of culture in synchronic time. It does not necessarily have to be based on a particular history. The sense of dual cultural allegiance and dual cultural alliance – before a person, yes, there was a language and history and praxis in the place where he or she is and also an alliance with others somewhere else. That particular dual cultural situation is what can be understood as Diaspora. It produces double consciousness, it is the first of the fruits: the ability to be critical. Critical not necessarily in a formal manner like the Frankfurt School but some sense of distance or some sense of reflection that comes between a human and his or her identity.

 

Diaspora, Philosophy and Counter-Education in the face of Post-colonial Reality

CORNEL WEST in conversation with ILAN GUR-ZE’EV

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.358

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Human life begins in the middle, in the midst, and sometimes in the darkness. Or even in the woods. In the woods – you’re in the middle and if you are always in the middle there is no home, or refuge or cave – a sure space that you have access to. It means then that the best we can do is to somehow try to strengthen our armor on the Socratic level – which is we must have courage to engage in critical reflection on being in the middle, knowing that there is always a remainder for Adorno the stuff that theories can’t catch. It is the blind spots, the wasted material. Blind spots and wasted material that the dialectics cannot catch, which is the saying that there is a humility in being in the middle and to think you gain access to pure spaces of intellectual arrogance, which is blinding all the time and misleading. So, if you have a humility, which is not so much to come to skepticism, it is simply to say you would resist, you would transgress, you would continually try to transcend, you will fail, you will fall on your face, you would be inadequate, you won’t have the conceptual clarity and transparency associated with pure spaces – you are a bluesman. There is no way out.

 

The Possibility of a New Critical Language from the Sources of Jewish Negative Theology

ILAN GUR-ZE’EV in conversation with JONATHAN BOYARIN

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.381

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A new critical language is possible yet its becoming is not guaranteed. Its roots and sources should be diverse, universal and Diasporic. Jewish negative theology is ultimately Diasporic and could become one of its edifying sources. Diaspora is not only an intellectual state, not necessarily collective but communal. One of the things that makes the notion most vital is the possibility and the cultural technology of generational continuity in the absence of a majority. It is true that there is always a danger of sentimentalism. A great deal of post-Enlightenment terror, both in the sense of individual terror, and eventually organized violence, has to do with the inability of an isolated organism that is aware of its own mortality to achieve some kind of equanimity with the fact of its own mortality. One of the key driving forces of the symbolic aspects of almost all human cultures until now has been to strengthen a real, not just a sentimental force, in structuring identificatory practices such that the organism does not, in the first instance, understand existence as starting with its birth and ending with its death, but almost in the first instance understands existence as being a continuity and a cycle, inflected by its own mortality. This mortality and the endurance of Life in face of the prospects of worthy life is the gate for a new understanding of transcendence, critique and emancipation. Today the most vital power of enriching the critical language is the new anti-Semitism. The prospects of an alternative revitalization of the critical language and the possibility of a language that challenges the exile of holiness and transcends critique is here addressed in light of the Jewish tradition.

 

Education in the World of Diasporas

ZYGMUNT BAUMAN University of Leeds, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.398

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Today’s culture consists of offerings, not norms. Liquid-modern culture, unlike the culture of the nation-building era, has no ‘people’ to ‘cultivate’. The solid-modern policy of dealing with difference, the policy of assimilation to the dominant culture and stripping the strangers of their strangehood, is no longer feasible. For the young, the main attraction of the virtual world derives from the absence of contradictions and cross-purposes that haunt the off-line life. Unlike its off-line alternative, the online world renders the infinite multiplication of contacts conceivable – both plausible and feasible. It does it through the weakening of bonds – in a stark opposition to its off-line counterpart, known to find its bearings in the continuous effort to strengthen the bonds by severely limiting the number of contacts while deepening each one of them. It is the quantity of connections rather than their quality that makes the difference between chances of success or failure. A crisis, however, may linger just after the next corner. So it is too early to decide how the ingrained world-views and attitudes of the present-day young will eventually fit the world to come.

 

Nomadism: against methodological nationalism

ROSI BRAIDOTTI Arts Faculty, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.408

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This article is inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical nomadology and stresses the idea of subjectivity. It stresses the non-unitary, complex and inter-relational structure of the process of subject-formation and explores some of the implications of this structure for ethical relations, politics and for pedagogical practice. As for ethical relations, the emphasis falls on the ethics of affirmation and the extent to which they inform the practice of nomadic, transversal subjectivities. Great value is given to anti-nationalism, anti-racism and resistance to fixed and essentialized cultural or national identities. The article then explores the methodological implications of nomadic subjectivity: the rejection of the classical equation between rational consciousness and universal values; extensive trans-disciplinarity and the practice of non-linearity. The main argument is that, by defending an open-ended and relational vision of the subject, philosophical nomadic thought contributes to cosmopolitan community building against narrow nationalistic practices and it sustains multiple ecologies of belonging.

 

The Coexistence of Cultures

TZVETAN TODOROV

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.419

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Traditional links are being erased. When one lacks positive elements in order to build one’s collective identity the temptation is strong to hook on to negative elements – I am not like these immigrants who are physically different from me, who speak another language, and who have strange customs. My identity lies in rejecting them. Thus, the apocalyptic vision of a homogeneous humanity is faced with a no-less-threatening vision – that of a planet inhabited by tribes at war with each other. While the benefits of the legalization of groups, in accordance with the communal or with the multicultural model, are problematic, its perverse effects are easy to foresee. Nationalism, or other forms of particularism, can serve towards fulfilling some generous goals, on a punctual scale, but it is dangerous in its principle. Universalism can be punctually misled and used to fulfill unacceptable goals; however, its principle remains liberating. It is for this reason that it has also been able to serve in order to eliminate its own perversions, such as in the ancient colonies’ struggle for independence or in women’s fight for equal rights. The author’s conclusion is that, on a political level, the preference granted to collective belonging over individual freedom is poorly justified.

 

Vignettes of Ambiguity

IGNACIO L. GÖTZ New College, Hofstra University, New York, USA

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.427

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This article is an exploration of ambiguity as it appears in various guises in philosophical, social, political, and educational situations. Among these situations is the experience of exile. The exploration is conducted by means of literary anecdotes and real-life instances, hence the use of vignettes. The suggestion is made that ambiguity can be conquered only in the concrete, through a life stamped by justice and solidarity with other fellow human beings.

 

Language, Identity, and Exile

DAPHNA ERDINAST-VULCAN University of Haifa, Israel

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.440

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The exilic mode of being, a living on boundary-lines, produces a constant relativization of one’s home, one’s culture, one’s language, and one’s self, through the acknowledgement of otherness. It is a homesickness without nostalgia, without the desire to return to the same, to be identical to oneself. The encounter with the other which produces a ‘transvaluation’ of one’s own culture is also the ultimately ethical experience of reading oneself in quotation marks. Yeshurun’s work – fragmented, broken – is exilic in its bifurcation, or multifurcation of consciousness, the superimposition of the language of ‘there’ over the language of ‘here’. His descriptions of Tel-Aviv, the white, modern, energetic emblem of the thrust to ‘make it new’ are oddly and imperfectly plastered over by images of dilapidated buildings, uprooted trees and rusty, dripping faucets. It is as though the poverty of a diasporic, displaced existence has crept in and coloured over the façade of the new which, torn from within, is already showing its fault-lines and cracks. Avot Yeshurun’s longing for home does not yield to the consolations of kitsch or the retrospective colourings of an idealized ‘before’, and the anguish of guilt is its motor force. Yeshurun’s hybrid poetry with its bricolage of linguistic fragments and shards finds its materials in the debris of a dead culture. Enacting the return of the culturally repressed, the ghostly return of the sacrificed mame-loshn with all the pain, the love, and perhaps the inevitability of the repression, it does not seek to go back, to offer a remedy, or mend the rift (more bottomless than the eponymous Syrian-African geological one) with the exilic home-language. Rather more modest and infinitely more difficult, it is the labour of mourning that it undertakes.

 

Wittgenstein as Exile: a philosophical topography

MICHAEL A. PETERS University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.446

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Exilic thought is a kind of uprooted thought developed away from ‘home’ under conditions of displacement and uncertainty, often in a different mother tongue, language tradition and culture. Exilic thought is sometimes the self-imposed discipline of the ‘stranger’ who develops his or her identity as an ‘alien’ or immigrant against the conventions of a host culture and from the perspective of an outsider. The motif OF? the exile-stranger in a foreign land finding his or her way about for the first time is fable-ized in ancient accounts of ‘first contacts’ and early cultural exchanges. ‘Exile’ often marks a complex ambivalence to one’s own home culture and, therefore, also to questions of one’s own national, cultural and personal identity. Exile is one of the central and most powerful motifs of the intellectual in the twentieth century: it describes a profound existential condition of cultural estrangement, and sometimes alienation, that defines identity in terms of migration, movement, departure, homelessness. It prefigures a notion of thought that is ‘nomadic’, formed in a different context, and laced with observations that at once make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Exile was a condition that Wittgenstein thought necessary to a form of life as philosopher. This idea took on a particular hue when Wittgenstein ‘returned’ to philosophy (at least in a formal sense) to focus upon cultural questions. It is as though Wittgenstein’s focus on cultural questions – on questions that stand at the heart of human culture – rather than questions of strict logic, required a simulation of the anthropologist’s ‘observer-participant’ attitude and sense of detachment in order to analyze ‘language-games’ and develop ‘perspicuous representations’.

 

Diaspora as Catastrophe, Diaspora as a Mission and the Post-colonial Philosophy of Edward Said

ILAN PAPPE Department of History, University of Exeter, United Kingdom

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.457

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Edward Said the refugee could not easily allow himself to join in the celebration of demythologizing nationalism. His Palestinianism had to coexist, uncomfortably, with his universalism. Time made this necessary coexistence an asset, not a liability, and this in fact was his political legacy for the future: Jews and Palestinians would have to reconcile to a similar existence as does the national intellectual in exile. Like Said himself, future society in Palestine would have to live on the border between two and more cultures (including national ones), a society that would represent alternative narratives to reality – instead of or next to the master national narratives – as part of a process of restitution. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari defined these as ‘deterrritorialized’ societies built on the collapse of master narratives. Said would probably have lived more comfortably with a less postmodernist approach to deterritorialization, such as the one offered by Henry Giroux in his pedagogic attempt to reconcile modernist and postmodernist critique as part of what he termed the pedagogy of ‘Border Crossing’: one could chart in post-conflictual Palestine a society in which identity is fragile, dynamic and moves easily between origins, spheres and languages.

 

Homelessness, Restlessness and Diasporic Poetry

ARIE KIZEL University of Haifa, Israel

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.467

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Can poetry be Diasporic? Can poetry free itself from the shackles of conformism? Can it be independent and divergent, and not seek a home? Is it capable of mustering its inner strengths and living without being enlisted by a collective that accords it power? This article argues that poetry is essentially dialectic. It has little vitality without the presence of the Other, without interaction with him. However, it also contains independent, personal elements and reaches its peak through the individual’s anti-conformist activity and expression. Poetry, like language, enables us to view ourselves from outside, thereby fulfilling an important role, similar to language itself, and it is created by the individual’s alienation even from himself. Poetry may provide one of the most creative potential tools of Diasporic philosophy, love and creativity being its cornerstones, but it can also be a destructive factor seeking to imprison the creative soul within a home with the solid walls of a rigid community.

 

Ecology and Pedagogy: on the educational implications of postwar environmental philosophy

YOTAM HOTAM Faculty of Education, University of Haifa, Israel

doi:10.2304/pfie.2010.8.3.478

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Environmentalism, an ethical imperative to preserve and protect nature, has become in the last decade a central ethical, political and pedagogic theme. Against this background, this article focuses on the postwar philosophy of the German-Jewish scholar Hans Jonas (1903‑93). It points to Jonas’s radical theory of pedagogic responsibility, and to the manner in which this theory advocated conciliation between ecocentric and anthropocentric ecological approaches. The article further shows how this theory was informed by Jonas’s theological reflections on a God who is concurrently transcendent and immanent – a God who is both ‘exiled’ from the world and ‘at home’ within the world. Jonas’s specific approach demonstrates the manner in which theology informs eco-pedagogy; ecological education is thus demonstrated as secular-theological phenomena.

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