Phronetic Education to IntegrityCapability, Courage, and Passion for Thinking

Living our lives means situating ourselves in the Wirkungsgeschichte of that which has been thought, then expressed in the different ways taken up by human activities, all within the history of the world. It is not only a question of reading historical texts but trying to understand the totality of human experience. Since times immemorial, from Plato and Aristoteles, Augustine and Aquinas, Hegel and Kant, Dilthey and von Humboldt, Heidegger and Gadamer, Derrida and Ricoeur, our thinking is accompanied by the array of voices that help us to position ourselves in-between. In the in-between, the human and the divine, earth and sky, we experience the poetics of in-betweenness and not the division that would fain separate us from each other. It is the poetics of the flows. Thus, our reading of life is a never-fulfilled praxis that situates us, always, in-between suspicion and sympathy, critique and conviction (cf. Wierciński 2003). Hermeneutics allows us to see the resulting tension, not as something to be determined, resolved, and overcome. Indeed, maintaining this tension and carrying it with courage and passion for life seems to be our existential mission and the main task for the hermeneutics of education. Reducing education to being the key to the job market and a stimulus for personal growth and development, which keeps societies in an upward motion, does not do any justice to the role it can play in a world that is becoming increasingly complex. Understanding education as an event (Ereignis), as something that is happening to us in life even beyond our conscious wanting and doing, is, thus, elevated to being the greatest existential and educational project around. The event-like character of education emphasizes that what is happening in this trans-formative process, does not only happen as the result of pedagogical action but through being together as essentially incommunicable individuals,1 and yet dedicated and committed to sharing our lives.