An appetite for transcendence: A response to Doris Santoro’s and Samuel
Rocha’s review of The Beautiful Risk of Education
Gert Biesta
Brunel University London
I am grateful for the generous reading Doris Santoro and Samuel Rocha offer of
my book The Beautiful Risk of Education. Giving their review article the title ‘The
Beautiful Risk of Teaching’ sounds right to me, because when I use the word
‘education’ I nowadays seldom have an amorphous process in mind, but most of
the time am thinking of a set up where there is a teacher teaching something to
someone. This simple formula – a teacher teaching something to someone –
actually opens up a whole universe of complexity and beauty, and the main
ambition of my book has been to provide some insights into this universe.
As is the case with most of my work, the book is not just a theoretical exercise
but also responds to particular developments in educational policy, research and
practice. At the most fundamental level I take issue with current attempts to
make education entirely predictable and risk free. While the book is not a
celebration of ‘all things risky,' it is an attempt to show where risk is actually
meaningful and important. It is an attempt to show that when we drive all risk
out of education, we eliminate what ultimately is most important in education,
which is that education should contribute to making the subject-ness of another
human being possible. This is not just a matter of the ‘project’ of education. I also
respond to the ways in which current tendencies to make education predictable
and risk free are denying teachers the very possibility to be teachers – which is
precisely what Santoro’s empirical work makes visible (for example Santoro
2013) and what is discussed so well in the review.
I explore the question of the being of the teacher particularly in chapter 1, on
creativity, and chapter 3, on teaching, and I discuss implications for teacher
education in chapter 7, on virtuosity. While it is true that I make a point of saying
that we should see teaching as bringing something radically new to the
educational situation, this is not to suggest that any instance of where something
new is brought to a situation or when something radically new enters someone’s
life, would count as teaching. By this I do not mean to say that such events do not
exist or cannot be significant, but I find it important to keep teaching firmly
located in the domain of the human, because what is ultimately at stake for me in
education is the question what it means to be human (the opening question of
my book Beyond Learning; Biesta, 2006) or, as I would put it now put, what it
means to exist in a human way (see Biesta 2015).
Philosophically I try to pursue this issue from a radical first-person perspective.
Unlike third-person perspective theory, which always tries to tell people what
the world is like or what they should do in it, I only try to highlight what we may
encounter in our lives and what we may encounter in educational situations.1 It
is up to each of us individually to ‘take up’ what we encounter, that is, to engage
Here I take inspiration from Levinas, when he writes: “My task does not consist in
constructing ethics; I only try to find its meaning.” (Levinas 1985, p.90)
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ourselves with it, or to walk away from it, and to remain responsible for
whatever road we took. This also informs my stance towards many theoretical
and philosophical positions which, when articulated as ‘-isms,’ run the risk of
overriding or obliterating the existential challenge, that is, the challenge to exist
and to exist humanely. In chapter 2 I discuss this problem in relation to
pragmatism which, as an ‘-ism,’ runs the risk of becoming another totalising
‘project.’ I would probably have similar concerns with regard to post-humanism
and many of the other ‘-isms’ that keep popping up in educational theory and
philosophy.
Why, then, do I insist that teaching has to do with bringing something radically
new to a situation? And why do I find the language of transcendence meaningful
for this? First of all because most contemporary theories of learning that seem to
be framing educational discourse and practice (particularly constructivist
theories) see learning entirely in immanent terms, that is as a process where a
‘learner,’ in interaction with its environment, expands its own understanding.
Such ‘ego-logical’ (Levinas) accounts of our being-in-the-world may carry some
meaning – they may be useful in some situations – but when they are used as a
template for understanding and enacting education, they make the possibility
that something arrives from ‘elsewhere’ impossible. In precisely this sense they
imply the end of (the possibility of) teaching and the end of (the possibility of)
the teacher.
This is first of all a problem for education because, to put it simply and (too)
quickly, this is not what is happening in education. The school is (still) not a
place where students are just creating their own understanding and expanding
their own meaning. It is a place where new things enter the minds and bodies of
students, and teachers play an important role in this. So to assume that learning
is entirely immanent – and it is remarkable how this assumption is being
repeated again and again at all levels of the educational system – actually blocks
access to what is going on in education, which is at least utterly unhelpful for
teachers (but probably also for students). This lies behind my ambition to give
teaching back to education (Biesta 2012) – which sometimes is misunderstood
as an argument for giving education back to teachers, which is an altogether
different issue.
But in the background of this, there is a bigger ‘theme’ I seek to address in the
book as well, which is the question whether in our time and place – and the ‘our’
here refers first of all to the contemporary or modern Western world – we still
have an ‘appetite’ for transcendence, or whether all the negative experiences we
– and again I refer to the same ‘we’ – have had with instances of transcendence
that appeared in the form of power, control and terror, have led to the
conclusion that transcendence itself is the problem, and that the only way to
regain freedom and human dignity is by overcoming and eradicating
transcendence, and putting oneself back in the centre (even in the form of a
hyper-reflective decentred centre).2
I am aware that this is a very condensed way to discuss a complex issue but
nonetheless hope that the reader gets the gist of what I am trying to say. The reason why
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In the introduction to the book I refer briefly to the distinction between an
infantile and a grown up way of being in and with the world, where the infantile
way wishes the world to be as we want it to be, and the grown up way
acknowledges that ‘the world’ – natural and social – has an existence and
integrity of its own.3 Coming to terms with the transcendence of the world, and
with the ‘fact of transcendence’ more generally, does not mean to be totally
subjected to it. If the latter is the question of power, the former is the question of
authority, which, as Charles Bingham reminds us and as I also discuss in chapter
6 on Hannah Arendt and democracy, is relational (Bingham 2009) as it is a
process in which we ‘authorise’ (Meirieu 2007) what is other and different to be
a legitimate ‘force,’ ‘voice’ and ‘author’ in our lives.
The reason why I engage with theological literature in the book is precisely
because I think that many discussions about power, authority and transcendence
– in education and elsewhere – still do so with reference to particular
understandings of religion and theology. The modern rejection of power – with
has been conceived as a liberation from power – was to a large extent the
rejection of the power of the church, based on a theology which saw God itself as
the ultimate force and cause. This, as I show in chapter 1, is the God who
functions as a big bang, the one who sets the universe into motion and seeks to
remain in control of it. This is a God who takes no risks, who has an infantile
desire for control, and, interestingly enough, doesn’t tolerate transcendence.
Unfortunately it is the story that has tainted many discussions about religion,
both by those who have invested in it and by hose who oppose and reject it. But
as I show in chapter 1, it’s not the only story that is told about creation and God’s
role in it. There is an altogether different story in the same bible book, of a God
who approaches creation from the intention to make the grown up existence of
human beings possible and who knows that accepting the otherness (or
transcendence) of those human beings implies taking a risk, giving up the desire
for control, without, of course, ceasing to care about them and without ceasing to
be concerned about them.
To think that religion can only be about an omnipotent God-wizzard is perhaps a
little short-sighted then, although we should never forget that this shortsightedness is continuing to lead to death and destruction. But to reject
transcendence – religious or otherwise – just because of the fixation on this one
story-line is perhaps a little immature. It is a bit like the phase teenagers
apparently go through in rejecting the power of ‘authority figures,’ before they
I try to confine these reflections to the modern Western world is because I think that
those who have been at the receiving end Western modernisation and liberation may
have different perceptions and judgements.
3 The words ‘infantile’ and ‘grown up’ may suggest that children are infantile and adults
grown up in the ways in which they exist in and with the world. This is not what I think
is empirically correct. There are children who are able to exist in and with the world in a
grown up way and there are (many) adults who do not manage. The distinction,
therefore, is an existential one and might better be described as the distinction between
an ego-logical and non-ego-logical way of existing (see also Biesta in press).
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come to realise that these authority figures are actually not as omnipotent as
they imagined them to be and have actually all the time been interested in
promoting their subject-ness in the same way in which, as I show in chapter 5,
the teaching of Rancière’s ignorant schoolmaster was always orientated towards
the emancipation of his students. My engagement with theological literature is in
this sense also an invitation to engage in a more grown-up way with the fact of
transcendence, wherever it may come from.
References
Biesta, G.J.J. (2006). Beyond learning. Democratic education for a human future.
Boulder, Co.: Paradigm Publishers.
Biesta, G.J.J. (2012). Giving teaching back to education. Responding to the
disappearance of the teacher. Phenomenology and Practice 6(2), 35-49.
Biesta, G.J.J. (i2015). Hva er en pedagogisk oppgave? Om det å gjøre voksen
eksistens mulig. [What is the educational task? To make a grown-up existence in
the world possible.] In P.O. Brunstad, S.M. Reindal & H. Sæverot (red.), Eksistens
og pedagogikk. En samtale om pedagogikkens oppgave. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Biesta, G.J.J. (in press). The rediscovery of teaching: On robot vacuum cleaners,
non-egological education, and the limits of the hermeneutical world-view.
Educational Philosophy and Theory.
Bingham. C. (2009). Authority is relational. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and infinity. Conversations with Philippe Nemo.
Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.
Meirieu, P. (2007). Pédagogie: Le devoir de résister. Issy-les-Moulineaux: ESF
éditeur.
Santoro, D. A. (2013). “I Was Becoming Increasingly Uneasy about the Profession
and What Was Being Asked of Me”: Preserving Integrity in Teaching. Curriculum
Inquiry, 43(5), 563-587.
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