Title: Philosophy of Education as a Process-philosophy: Eros and Communication
Abstract: This paper is dedicated to the victims of those continuing tragic events that started on September 11. Human communication is a crucial factor ensuring the survival of our species. Any message carried through by means of a violent act leading to destruction and self-destruction represents a fundamental breakdown in meaningful communicative activities. As pertaining to the philosophy of education, the problematics of language and communication relates to the understanding of human subjectivity (Garrison 1999a) in terms of human behaviors, actions and thoughts. The paper, by placing the notion of communication in the framework of complex dynamical systems, posits communication as a continuous and open-ended process. The concepts of poiesis, or making, and autopoiesis, as—literally—self-making, or making of the “self”, are critical for describing the dynamics of such a process understood as creative—versus destructive—and potentially leading to the production of new meanings, habits and values.
The paper draws from John Dewey’s philosophy of education devoted to the transformations of our old “habitual attitudes” (Dewey 1922, p. 26) and creation of new, intelligent habits or, as Dewey called them, “organizations” (Dewey 1922, p. 22). The paper also introduces some views on language and communication derived from the works of the French poststructuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Reading Deleuze through the lens of Dewey’s process philosophy strengthens the possibility that “poststructuralism—its genealogy, transmission, development and application—has ongoing significance for educational theory” (Peters 1998, p. 18) as well as for actual classroom practice. If, as a result of such a “coupling” (see further below) of two thought-processes, Dewey’s philosophy itself undergoes some transformation, it only confirms the fact, as Jim Garrison (1995) has indicated, that Dewey would welcome, in accord with his own philosophical project, the reconstruction of his own ideas so as “to better respond to the vicissitudes of new times and contexts” (Garrison 1995, p. 1).
The notion of communication as shared, that is as a process leading to the emergence of commonly shared meanings, questions the accepted view of the Self as autonomous entity, in the tradition of liberal education, and presents human subjectivity as a function of an ongoing complex process of multiple interactions. Epistemology overlaps with ethics, and the educational practice in a classroom becomes a self-organizing process of self-discovery in terms of assigning novel meanings to students’ own experiences
Publication Year: 2003
Publication Date: 2003-07-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 9
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot