A Hermeneutics of Religious Education 9781441114426, 9781474217705, 9781441119094

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A Hermeneutics of Religious Education

Also Available from Bloomsbury Is Religious Education Possible?, by Michael Hand Teaching Virtue, edited by Marius Felderhof Does Religious Education Work?, by James C. Conroy, David Lundie, Robert A. Davis, Vivienne Baumfield, L. Philip Barnes, Tony Gallagher, Kevin Lowden, Nicole Bourque and Karen Wenell Reimagining Liberal Education, by Hanan Alexander Ethical English, by Mark A. Pike

A Hermeneutics of Religious Education By David Aldridge

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2017 © David Aldridge, 2015 David Aldridge has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-1442-6 PB: 978-1-3500-3000-8 ePDF: 978-1-4411-1909-4 ePub: 978-1-4411-3656-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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Contents Acknowledgements

Introduction 1 Hermeneutic circles and philosophical works 2 What is ‘questionable’ in religious education? 3 Outline of the argument Part 1 1

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vii 1 1 5 13

Hermeneutics, Education and Religion

Religious Education – Museum or Temple? 1.1 The happening of truth 1.2 Education as artwork 1.3 A digression into museum studies 1.4 Reading the religious education curriculum as museum collection 1.5 ‘Constructing’ a curriculum 1.6 An ‘enframed’ curriculum? 1.7 Why Heidegger?

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What is a ‘Philosophical Hermeneutics’? 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Phenomenology – unlikely ally? 2.3 Ontology – false friend? 2.4 Critical realism and phenomenology 2.5 What is a philosophical hermeneutics? 2.6 Hermeneutics in religious education – the story so far

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Dialogue, Tradition and Truth 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Heidegger, language and the Kehre 3.3 Dialogue and the fusion of horizons 3.4 Dialogic/textual priority 3.5 Wright’s criticism – Gadamer the conservative 3.6 Erricker’s appropriation – Gadamer the ‘relativist’ 3.7 Conclusion – criticality, conservatism and truth

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21 27 32 35 43 45 48

54 55 59 66 69 72

78 79 81 87 89 100 104

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Contents

Hermeneutics and Education 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Deficient dialogues 4.3 The pedagogical triangle, authority and the hermeneutic situation 4.4 The new educational triangle and the complex of hermeneutic circles 4.5 Application and belonging – or, so what?

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Hermeneutics and Religion 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Text and truth 5.3 The happening of truth in dialogue 5.4 A divine destiny for hermeneutics? 5.5 Concluding remarks

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Part 2 6

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106 106 115 119 125

130 131 138 141 146

Hermeneutics and Religious Education

Aims and Subject Matter of Religious Education 6.1 Introduction 6.2 John White and the justification of religious education 6.3 Andrew Wright’s reply 6.4 An education without aims? 6.5 A curriculum of disciplines 6.6 Curriculum as conversation 6.7 The ‘Possibility of Truth’ 6.8 Conclusion

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Critical Religious Education – A Hermeneutic Intervention 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Intentionality in religious education 7.3 Truth as disclosure 7.4 Impudent practice 7.5 The text as teacher 7.6 Belonging

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Afterword References Index

149 150 152 157 163 166 169 179

180 180 185 188 191 193 195 200 213

Acknowledgements Love and thanks to Claire, Rudy, Jonah and Scarlett. This book is as much a product of your patient and self-sacrificial support as it is of my own efforts. Also to the fellow enquirers and friends in universities and schools with whom the ideas in this volume have been tested and developed over the years, particularly colleagues and students at Oxford Brookes University, King’s College London and the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. Finally to Andy Wright, with whom the journey began.

Introduction 1 Hermeneutic circles and philosophical works It is to Schleiermacher (1997, 1998) that we owe the first detailed development of a ‘hermeneutic circle’ (Dilthey 2010: 148). Attempting a universal theory of the ‘art’ of understanding, Schleiermacher offers an illustrative model of textual interpretation in which there is a movement between the ‘parts’ and the ‘whole’. This dialectic is well known. Assuming a certain textual unity, any portion of a text will be understandable to the extent that it coheres with a broader conception of the meaning of the whole; in turn, the only evidence we have for the meaning of the whole text is the individual parts, since we range across the text and never have a total intuition of the whole. We are not restricted here to scriptural interpretation: there are other parts and wholes (or possibly broader conceptions of ‘texts’) intended in Schleiermacher’s discussion – the individual work itself can be a ‘part’, in that it is a single piece of evidence for the ‘whole’ text constituted by all of our evidence of the life history and intentions of a particular author, the preoccupations of a particular cultural audience, or even the whole meaning of a language. The movement is ‘circular’ in that our current conception of (for example) the author’s whole body of work, or broad theological approach, must guide our interpretation of the part, but is itself revisable in light of what is yielded up to us by the part. Similarly, we do not approach any portion of the text without some (provisional) understanding of the meaning of the whole text, but that understanding itself must develop and change if we find a portion of the text to be inconsistent with it. At all times, for Schleiermacher, the guiding principle is to understand a text on its own terms, seeking to account for its meaning only with reference to the intentions and life history of its author or the linguistic tools he would have had available to him. We revise our provisional conception in light of what is revealed in our ongoing study as we move towards a moment of empathy with the author – aiming to understand the text ‘at first as well as and then even better than its author’ (Schleiermacher 1997: 112). This influential formulation was undoubtedly a major contribution to the theory of textual interpretation, but Hans-Georg Gadamer attributes to his

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teacher, Martin Heidegger, the more fundamental step or ‘decisive turning point’ (2004: 293) in the attempt to give a philosophical description of what he calls the ‘event’ of understanding (208). He argues that Heidegger’s circle ‘breaks right through the circle drawn by romantic hermeneutics’ (296). A new dimension is added in that, whereas Schleiermacher’s circle ‘runs backward and forward along the text’ (293), Heidegger’s contribution is to emphasize the unavoidable and enabling role the interpreter’s ‘fore-conception’ plays in the event of understanding. This circle thus encompasses the reader and the text, rather than the parts of the text and the whole. Understanding results not from the dissolution of our own prior prejudices in favour of the author’s intention in writing the work, but from the play or tension between the text and the reader’s prior conceptions, or between the text’s strangeness to the reader and its familiarity. ‘ The true locus of hermeneutics is this in-between’ (295) and understanding involves ‘sharing in a common meaning’ (292). Thus it is not Gadamer’s concern that we ever attain an ‘objective’ interpretation of a text; the ‘in-between’ nature of the event of understanding means that it resists characterization as a subjective or an objective process. No method or procedure for correct understanding can be offered, as the interpreter ‘cannot separate in advance the productive prejudices that enable understanding from the prejudices that hinder it and lead to misunderstandings. ... Rather, this separation must take place in the process of understanding itself ’ (296). Even our ‘method’ can itself become questionable through an encounter with the text. Gadamer’s hermeneutics should not be identified with a postmodern ‘reader response’ theory. Meaning is not subjectively determined, as the goal of an attempt to reach an understanding is ‘agreement concerning the subject matter’ (292). Gadamer identifies understanding with a process of ‘coming to an understanding’ with the text. This does not indicate, on the other hand, an uncritical acceptance of the other’s view: ‘If a prejudice becomes questionable in view of what another person or a text says to us, this does not mean that it is simply set aside and the text or the other person accepted as valid in its place. ... In fact our own prejudice is properly brought into play by being put at risk’ (298–9). Texts can be understood truthfully, for Gadamer, but not exhaustively or definitively. Rather than coming to empathize with the author’s intention, or even achieving that empathy and knowing something else in addition, Gadamer contends that we ‘understand in a different way, if we understand at all’ (296). Thus the hermeneutic circle is never closed, and there is always the possibility of new or further understanding.

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Here Gadamer is largely developing Heidegger’s treatment of hermeneutics in his magnum opus Being and Time (1962). However, Heidegger in his later work develops a related example of ‘circular’ reasoning that deals with the structure of a philosophical work or argument (see also Caputo 1986). He acknowledges that his attempt to question The Origin of the Work of Art will necessarily move in a circle: ‘What art is can be gathered from a comparative examination of actual artworks. But how are we to be certain that we are indeed basing such an examination on artworks if we do not know beforehand what art is?’ (2011a: 90). Whereas ‘ordinary understanding’ would condemn this circle because it ‘violates logic’, Heidegger argues that ‘this is neither a makeshift nor a defect. To enter upon this path is the strength of thought, to continue on it is the feast of thought’ (90). The path we take through the essay that follows is a meandering one indeed: after an introductory focus on the work of art, Heidegger questions the work in its ‘thingly’ nature: this leads him into a consideration of the interpretation of ‘things’ in the history of Western thought, which in turn leads to a distinction between ‘equipmental’ being and ‘mere’ being. He then asks ‘what path leads to the equipmental being of equipment’ and claims to discover ‘unwittingly’, even ‘in passing’, that it is through a work of art that the truth of equipmental being is revealed (102). The conventional concern of Western aesthetics with a work as a being among beings can now be seen as a ‘detour’ – ‘But it brings us directly to a road that may lead to a determination of the thingly feature in the work’ (104). Works of art are now discussed as instantiations of a broader category of the happening of truth, which as such can disclose to us something of the nature of truth and the Being of beings; it is these last two ideas which become (despite the title) the eventual main concern of the essay (and indeed our concern in the chapter that immediately follows this). Note Heidegger’s continual reference here to paths, roads, detours, movement, passing, and being led. His translator points out that this essay was at one point gathered into a collection which Heidegger named Holzwege, or ‘woodpaths’ (Krell 2011). Such paths proverbially lead nowhere, or at least, in Krell’s analysis, where they lead is unpredictable and out of our control. Rather than specifying our destination in advance, we must follow the paths and find out where they lead. We must necessarily ‘plunge into unknown territory’ (xl) – there is no other way of getting through the forest. Another interpreter points out that a successful journey on such a path is in fact one that takes you ‘back to your hut’ (De La Durantaye 2007). The subject matter of Heidegger’s essay cannot be specified in advance – at least, not definitively, but only tentatively, and in a way which ultimately proves unsatisfactory. Note how, rather than naming

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or structuring the essay with a more ‘satisfactory’ initial definition, Heidegger guides his reader along the paths that lead to his insights into truth and Being, even the ones along which he must double back and retrace his steps – this is, in itself, the ‘craft’ of thinking (Heidegger 2011a: 90). This imagery of itinerary resonates with the theologian Nicholas Lash’s introduction to his work on religious experience, where he draws on ‘what it is fashionable to call hermeneutics’ (1988: 6–7) and asks, ‘But what is it that begins at page one?’ (2) Considering the role of the table of contents and the different ways that readers browse texts, he offers the route map as a metaphor for ‘the patterning of a story or an argument’ (3). The map improves upon an ‘a la carte menu’ metaphor in that it acknowledges that the readers of a text (for the most part unknown to its author) will come from a range of different starting points, comprising all sorts of different ‘perspectives’ and ‘points of view’. A map can be useful to them in that, rather than assuming they wish to get from A to B, it can be used to plot any sort of route through the territory. But even this metaphor does not do justice to the way an argument ‘begins’ or how it is ‘pursued’. The instruments required for the navigation of physical maps ‘remain quite impersonal in character’ – they do not vary from person to person (2). But recall how for Gadamer above even the interpretive method which we apply to understanding a text depends on the reader’s ‘fore-conception’: a writer cannot assume or require that their reader will apply the same principles or accept the same initial definitions. Lash writes, ‘Each reader of this text will bring to it their own account of how these familiar notions work and of the relationships that obtain between them. … As a result, the chances are that any attempt on my part to offer initial summary definitions of the notions of human experience and the knowledge of God would probably strike you as abstract, obvious, arbitrary, trivial, perverse or unintelligible.’ He adds: ‘What I hope to achieve, at the end of this exercise, is some “definition”, some particular description, of how these notions work and what they signify. And I clearly cannot begin at the point at which I hope, eventually, to arrive’ (4). Lash reminds us that an argument assumes a conversation. A text can be understood to ‘present’ an argument, then, to the extent that it participates in a conversational structure: the voice of the text addresses an imagined reader, solicits her to read further, and urges her assent to particular propositions. In any significant conversation, Gadamer urges, we allow ourselves ‘to be conducted by the subject matter’ (2004: 360). In an early work on Plato’s dialectic he points out how much easier it is to achieve a certain sort of superficial agreement with our interlocutor if we do not, in fact, have any great concern for the subject

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matter that is at issue between us (1991: 35–44). Even if we are to reach a serious disagreement on substantive issues, there needs to be a certain convergence between us on the way the subject matter is being interrogated, what exactly is at stake in what we are arguing about. This is the crucial significance of Gadamer’s well-known ‘fusion of horizons’ that will be discussed in more detail in the following chapters. If we are not open to the necessity of our initial view of the subject matter being transformed in the event of understanding, we stand to achieve nothing from engaging in dialogue, regardless of whether we initially seem to agree or disagree with our interlocutor. A hermeneutically informed argument, then, will allow its subject matter to ‘emerge’, however contrary this might seem to the traditional, analytic conventions of much Anglo-American philosophy of education – where it is normally held, ‘You’ve got to get something on your plate before you can start messing it around!’ (Austin 1962: 142). These observations are pertinent to the structure of any argumentative text, and particularly one such as this, that acknowledges Heidegger’s ‘hermeneutic turn’ as its central theoretical orientation. But what particular relevance do they have for a book that purports also to deal with ‘religious education’?

2 What is ‘questionable’ in religious education? Mark Chater, long-standing advocate of religious education (RE) in the UK, one-time advisor to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and currently chair of Culham-St Gabriel’s trust, the largest charitable body devoted to supporting research and development of high quality RE in schools, argued in a well-circulated address that ‘RE has been hit by a crisis so profound that  … the continued existence of our subject, in the recognisable form in which it has evolved since 1944, is under threat’ (Chater 2010). He argues that if the subject is to survive (and by this he means to maintain a particular proportion of compulsory curriculum time in mainstream schools and remain an option for students at GCSE and beyond) then (among other things) a review of legislation, of content, of pedagogy and even a name change may be necessary. The hermeneutic circle at play here needs little elaboration. Needless to say, RE has a ‘history’ – it has not been understood in the same way from one decade to the next. If so much is now ‘up for grabs’, then what is it in RE that must be preserved through these radical changes? What are the essential features of RE that could justify its continued compulsory curriculum status and that would remain ‘recognizable’ despite such wide-reaching transformation? We

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must know what RE is, it seems, before we can justify that it should continue to exist and move to transform it accordingly; but in transforming it, we affirm the subject’s historicity: it is not one thing for all time. At first glance, the term ‘religious education’ in the UK designates a fairly closely delineated entity – what Michael Hand has called a child’s ‘weekly dose of formal instruction on religious matters’ (2006: 1). Since 1944 we have had a historically compulsory (although not ‘National Curriculum’) subject with an apparently self-explanatory subject matter: religion, religions, or religious beliefs. Yet the nomenclature, content and compulsory status of RE have traditionally been contested to an extent unparalleled in any other curriculum area. I spent ten years as a teacher of RE in secondary schools. Some of my more perceptive (and wittier) students were wont to observe that any school subject that needs to include the word ‘education’ in its name is protesting too much. In response I would offer the familiar story: the name change from Religious Instruction to Religious Education in 1988 signified a move from an approach to the subject as nurture into a particular faith community to a multi-faith approach that assumed or required no particular faith perspective in students1; I would add that this cultural shift from a ‘confessional’ to a ‘non-confessional’ RE, enshrined in the words of the 1988 Education Reform Act, had long been admired by colleagues in many European settings who were in a later state of transition to non-confessional RE (see Jackson 2012; Hella 2008; Hella and Wright 2009). Students’ parents were often unconvinced by this. Perhaps they felt that the preservation of the adjectival form ‘religious’, combined with a clause in that same 1988 Act which allows parents to withdraw their students from this activity on confessional grounds (DfE 1994 paras 44–49), denotes exactly the kind of experience from which parents who encourage their children to avoid other activities of a ‘religious’ kind might want to withdraw them. Added to this, it was always possible that my particular, idealized description of what had changed in RE bore little resemblance to the reality of what was going on under the name ‘religious education’ in most mainstream classrooms – a largely uncharted empirical territory (although for a recent attempt to do so, see Conroy et al. 2013). The nomenclature of RE is potentially more than confusing: it may be discriminatory. A case is now commonly made, on the grounds of educational inclusion and equity, for incorporating secular subject matter, humanism, atheist perspectives (etc.) into the RE programme of study (see, for example, Watson 2008). These kinds of arguments have made inroads into non-statutory guidance for the subject – the National Framework suggests the inclusion of

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‘a secular world view, where appropriate’, in descriptions of the breadth of study for each key stage (QCA 2004: 25, 27, 29) – even if at the level of examination specification secular views have been excluded for some very interesting reasons (see Mansell 2008). To respond to these arguments by claiming that there is no place for secular beliefs in a curriculum area which has religion or religions as its distinctive subject matter seems to me, in light of the discussion that has preceded, to be question-begging in the extreme (see, for example, Felderhof 2012). Chater’s call to consider a name change for the subject opens up the possibility not only that there is other subject matter which deserves similar status to religious content, but also that, as I have argued elsewhere (Aldridge 2011), religion or religions are not the subject matter (in Gadamer’s sense of die Sache, or what is at stake) of RE at all. This possibility has been repressed, I have argued, out of fear of an encroachment by other subjects on RE’s discrete curriculum time, even to the detriment of many of the stronger transformational justifications of the subject that are offered by the same scholars (e.g. Teece 2010). I will elaborate this further in the second part of the book. One will give a different answer to the question, ‘What is religious education?’, depending on whether one is offering an ideological contribution to the debate about the proper compulsory curriculum, an empirical description of classroom practice, a prescription about what constitutes ‘good pedagogy’ in the subject, or a survey of the relevant legislation or guidance documents. In each of these different situations, moreover, it begins to look like a very different question. Chater’s address attempts to put this question, in its attendant variety and complexity, to the RE community. His rallying cry is a commendable attempt to problematize nearly all of the sacred cows of the RE traditionalist, but note how one question is not asked here: the possibility that RE should be allowed to disappear as a discrete curriculum presence is not countenanced, even to be refuted. Indeed, one might ask, why would Chater, an ‘insider’, pose this question? He speaks for a community of individuals whose very livelihood, in many cases, could depend on the preservation of such an activity. Gadamer wrote that ‘the path of all knowledge leads through the question’ (2004: 357). But the questions we choose to ask say a great deal about us, and go a long way towards prescribing and limiting the range of possible answers that become available to us. Questions are not ‘free floating’ entities or self-contained ‘stars in the sky’ (369). They are not, as Heidegger argues, ‘happenstance thoughts’ (Heidegger 1999: 4). The permanent ‘problems’ debated by philosophers are for Gadamer abstract questions that have ‘fallen out of the motivated context of questioning’ (369). One might easily pick these up from ‘hearsay and book

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learning’ and deck them out ‘with a gesture of profundity’ (Heidegger 1999: 4). Each live question, on the other hand, has its own evolving history, one which is inevitably entwined with the particular situation of anyone who is interested in asking it. As the philosopher of education Chris Higgins puts it, ‘To pose the question in any particular manner is to show yourself already knee-deep in the controversy’ (2010: 463). Higgins elaborates that ‘if one circumscribes too closely at the outset what there is to disagree about, one risks excluding from the conversation precisely those voices which promise to expand a debate narrowed by its unexamined assumptions’ (451). Once we have established certain givens, or fixed particular stars in place, constellations come to be formed around them. It might be tempting, when dealing with RE, to tackle the familiar, apparently ‘transcendent’ (see Aldridge 2013) or self-contained questions, such as whether a compulsory RE can be justified, what should be its proper content, and how it should be taught. To do so, however, would be to neglect or ignore the essential role of prejudice in giving these questions their specific form. Such questions can hardly be separated from each other, let alone the particular historical or motivational situation of whoever is interested in asking them. The more we attempt to separate out such questions, or divorce them from these motivated contexts, the less the subject matter we have before us appears to be ‘questionable’ in any profound sense, and the less open we are to productive transformation through dialogue. As Heidegger elaborates, ‘Questions grow out of a confrontation with “subject matter”. And subject matter is there only where eyes are’ (1999: 4). Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle acknowledges that all conversations and arguments (unlike the introduction to a book on RE – however lengthy) are always already underway. The interests, prejudices and presuppositions that have brought us into dialogue go a long way towards prescribing the direction this dialogue will take: they give shape to the subject matter. We come into dialogue precisely because we already have an interest in whatever it is that the other has to say to us, and a certain anticipation of what she will say. There are those, of course, with whom we never come into dialogue. It is quite possible to have so much ‘on your plate’ that whatever is on someone else’s can begin to look unappetizing, uninteresting or even irrelevant. This situation, I want to argue, expresses the profound crisis faced by the contemporary RE debate in the UK, a crisis that thoroughly eclipses Chater’s concern over the threat to curriculum time (see also Woodhead 2012). In fact, this broader crisis concerns the background against which the likelihood of reduced curriculum time might (or might not) itself show up as problematic.

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It is a crisis of the (in some cases spectacular) failure of interested parties to ‘sit at the same table’ and enter into dialogue. By this I do not mean two sides of a debate (such as, for example, those who support compulsory RE and those who would see it removed from school provision), but those whose disciplinary or other commitments appear to situate them in different debates, such as (for example) the philosophers of curriculum and the pedagogical theorists. On the other hand, certain marriages of convenience (such as the alliance between those who wish to see RE continue as a potentially transformative and critical curriculum subject and the highly influential church lobbies, who may have their own reasons for promoting RE in schools) must necessarily assume that they are concerned with the same questions, whereas their different motivational starting points require that they are possibly defending quite different entities. This is not, then, a simple case of a well-defined ‘contested issue’ or unresolved problem. It is a thoroughly hermeneutic crisis, a crisis of shared understanding which calls for interpretation. I should support this claim with a brief example, although it will be expanded in detail particularly throughout the second half of the book. The philosopher Michael Hand (2006) asks the question, ‘Is religious education possible?’ This would seem a good candidate for a properly basic question, since if RE is indeed impossible, it certainly has no place on a compulsory school curriculum. However, Hand acknowledges that this is not a question that most religious educators would think to ask about their own practice (1). It is not a ‘new’ question: Hand acknowledges a history of attempts to grapple with it through the pages of one particular journal (beginning with Marples 1978). The question hinges on claims that are made from some quarters for religion’s ‘epistemological autonomy’. Hand accepts a taxonomy of distinct ‘forms of knowledge’ whose understanding depends on already holding certain propositions of that form to be true or false. He furthermore accepts that if religion was one of these distinct forms of knowledge, RE (at least of the non-confessional kind) would not be possible, since to understand religion would require having already accepted certain religious propositions to be true. The majority of Hand’s monograph, therefore, is an attempt at an original contribution to the philosophy of religion, in which he argues that religion is not an autonomous form of knowledge, but that religious beliefs – if indeed there are any beliefs of this sort, rather than binding perceptions or expressions of feeling – refer to transcendent agents or autonomous personal beings, and therefore to understand them requires assent only to some propositions about agents and beings, rather than specifically religious propositions.

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It would be fair to say that, in their proposals for the future of RE as a curriculum subject, Hand and Andrew Wright, the well-known advocate of a ‘critical religious education’, display a better than usual agreement. Hand is almost alone among vocal philosophers of the analytic tradition who agree not only that the discussion of religious beliefs is important in certain educational contexts, but also that it is sufficiently significant to be afforded the kind of curriculum time that is currently allocated in England and Wales (compare, for example, White 2004: 163). In addition, the kind of approach to RE that is commended by Hand (critical judgement of the truth claims offered by faith communities, most significantly on the question of whether or not God exists) bears a strong resemblance to that advocated by Wright, which has attracted criticism from a proportion of the RE community for its emphasis on criticality and truth (Strhan 2010) or alternatively for being too ‘philosophical’ (see Jackson’s charge of ‘heavy rationalism’, 2004: 84). However, Hand’s monograph comes in for some energetic criticism from Wright, who likens the work to a ‘quixotic tilting at windmills’ (2010: 112–13). Wright responds that the question of the legitimacy of a dialogue cannot be resolved in advance of engagement in that dialogue. Rather than prescribe a priori, as the logical positivists sought to do, the ways in which a subject matter can be allowed to show up, a knowledgeseeking practice should allow itself to be guided by the ways in which the subject matter comes to reveal itself. The point to be made for the time being is not that Hand and Wright disagree over the answer to the question (they do not) but that Hand’s question is not one which – for Wright – arises from the situation in which he finds himself, and it addresses him with no force whatsoever. Both writers do, however, address related concerns; Hand in his use of Wittgenstein’s claim that agreement in definitions requires some agreement in judgements, and Wright in his adoption of the ‘epistemic relativity’ of Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism. Both show themselves to be grappling with concerns that Heidegger addresses through the related ontological observations that beings are disclosed against a certain background or region, and that all understanding is necessarily enabled by a fore-conception. These claims of Heidegger’s will be discussed in detail in Chapters 1 and 2, and Wright will then be addressed in more detail throughout and particularly in Chapter 7. It is hoped that Heidegger’s insights, developed into Gadamer’s ‘universal’ problem of hermeneutics, might provide a sufficiently expansive backdrop against which this particular disagreement, among others, might be dissolved. This then gives an indication of what is intended to be the contribution of the whole book to the contemporary RE debate. The influential teacher

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of theological hermeneutics, Anthony Thiselton, discusses the benefits that the study of hermeneutics has afforded his students. He argues that ‘hermeneutics seeks to establish bridges between opposing viewpoints. This does not necessitate giving ground to the other view, but sympathetically to understand the diverse motivations and journeys that have led in the first place to each respective view or argument.’ In addition, hermeneutics can provide an integrating dimension to one’s view, in that ‘different areas and methods of approach’ come together in hermeneutics as ‘coherent, “joined up,” interrelated factors’ (Thiselton 2009: 5–6). I hope in what precedes to have made the case for not offering an initial definition of ‘religious education’. I wish to avoid getting too much ‘on my plate’ that is of a specific, local, nature. I intend, in the opening stages of the book, to tackle ‘hermeneutics’, ‘education’ and ‘religion’ in much broader terms and explore how they are mutually enlightening. That the discussion of RE as a discrete curriculum subject soon opens out into a broader set of questions about the relation of religion and education more generally can be seen, for example, in the work of Trevor Cooling, who has also recently engaged in public debate with Hand (Hand 2012; Cooling 2012a). Hand’s defence of RE has been restricted to the legitimacy of a discrete curriculum area among others with its own distinctive aims and practices, and furthermore has strenuously distinguished a ‘non-confessional’ approach from ‘the attempt to impart both understanding and belief, to instil or nurture religious faith’ (2006: 1). This latter, ‘confessional’ approach cannot be justified in Hand’s view. Cooling (2010), in a report for Theos on the relation of religion and education, refuses to accept either of these assumptions. Note how the nomenclature of the report, ‘Doing God in Education’, while also being a reference to a pronouncement of Alastair Campbell on the political significance of religion, avoids a specific focus on the future of a particular curriculum subject. The report offers two significant proposals: firstly, that the treatment of religious content and questions of value, meaning and identity should not be confined to a particular curriculum area but can and should become a focus of attention in any curriculum subject, and secondly that all schools, even ‘secular’ community schools, are at least implicitly faith schools in that their chosen mode of teaching will enshrine a set of confessional values, be these religious or otherwise. I will have more to say about Cooling – who has elsewhere (2012b, 2013) argued for a ‘hermeneutic pedagogy’ – in the final chapter of this book. It is worth noting that a number of other thinkers who approach education from a more obviously ‘continental’ perspective, and who have not had religious

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education as their immediate concern, have remarked (with differing subsequent development) that our interpretation of the educational situation is impoverished until we have worked through the ‘religious’ dimension of our pedagogical thought (Biesta 2011; Saeverot 2010). It is for this reason that, although RE is the specific concern of this book, I hope that new contributions can be made both to the fields of hermeneutics (in developing the specifically educational nature of hermeneutics, as well as the educational implications) and education (in developing a discussion of education’s specifically ‘religious’ character). The first part of the book has therefore been arranged to entice readers who are interested at least in any two of the broad fields of religion, education and hermeneutics, and the argument and examples have been developed accordingly. In Chapters 2 and 3 I develop what is meant by a specifically ‘philosophical’ conception of hermeneutics, and in Chapters 4 and 5 I consider its contribution to the fields of education and religion respectively. The book does begin and end, however, with the question of what is to become of RE in England and Wales. The second part of the book therefore considers RE specifically in a more local or prescriptive context. Whereas the first part deals with philosophical hermeneutics as a global or universal theoretical approach, the second is a ‘hermeneutic’ in that it offers an interpretation of a specific situation or phenomenon. Such an interpretation will (as I argue in what follows) be inseparable from an ethical orientation towards the subject matter as it emerges. Thus, although this book is not primarily a work of ‘RE pedagogy’ or a justification of a particular form of RE, my colours will be nailed to the mast along the way, almost in passing. Additionally, although I have stated my intention to ‘go broad’ in the opening chapters, Chapter 1 will offer – along with an introduction to Heidegger – a situated, almost idiosyncratic interpretation of the place of religion in English and Welsh education. This will be my attempt to grapple with Lash’s problem of where a writer begins, after acknowledging the hermeneutic situation. My introduction must be an ouverture, an enticement to the reader to engage in a particular dialogue which she may not have considered relevant. I must thus present an answer to the question, ‘Why Heidegger?’, both in the sense of responding to certain negative connotations that this name will carry for some potential readers, and also to justify the sustained technical engagement with philosophical hermeneutics that forms the rest of the first part of the work. The poetic distinction I offer, therefore, between ‘museum’ and ‘temple’, is deliberately evocative or suggestive of a valuable, but neglected, way of approaching RE. Although the detailed technical development must necessarily follow afterwards, the choice offered in ‘museum or temple’ contains the whole

Introduction

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movement of the book (thus also does this ouverture ‘open up’ or lay bare the text as a whole). If the reader chooses to accompany me, we will find ourselves by Chapter 6 back at the hut, as it were, having collected a great deal of warming firewood along the timber tracks. Such is the unapologetic circularity of my argument.

3 Outline of the argument Readers of any research work in education will expect a ‘methodology’ section, and may immediately be frustrated by what is attempted here, particularly since (as I hope to have justified above) I have avoided first ‘defining my terms’ then setting out from some assumed starting point the main movements of my argument, which might be considered an acceptable alternative in an explicitly philosophical endeavour. This is not to say, however, that I have been neglectful of methodological considerations, but rather that I am attempting to do justice to the stance on methodology that unfolds through a focused engagement with Heidegger’s and then Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer argues in Truth and Method that method cannot exhaust truth, or that in any endeavour where we are genuinely concerned with a truthful engagement with the subject matter, we must be constantly open to the possibility that the method we have been employing until now will be found wanting. This stance is elaborated at length in the first part of the book, so anyone who wishes to consider philosophical hermeneutics a ‘methodology’ or ‘theoretical perspective’ can, if they wish, see the first part of the book as a detailed elaboration of my ‘methodology’. However, in the spirit of what will subsequently be elaborated, Chapter 1 of the book is offered as an alternative to a methodology. Heeding Heidegger’s suggestion that it does not make sense to separate methodological considerations from the substantive issue under consideration, or that the craft of thinking entails hearkening to the subject matter, I commence my elaboration of Heidegger at the same time as offering an interpretation of the predicament facing RE educators in England and Wales. Beginning with a reading of The Origin of the Work of Art, I allude to debates within the discipline of museum studies to offer a new interpretation of the state of the ‘curriculum’ in RE, and to introduce the transformative, or ontological, approach to the educational endeavour that unfolds in the rest of the text. In so doing I hope that the later Heidegger’s deliberately poetic approach to philosophy can be vindicated and to an extent exemplified. In particular, I hope to nip in the bud at this point

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any concern that what I am proposing is any sort of (in the sense of subjective, postmodern, or arbitrary) ‘aesthetic’ approach to learning in RE; by contrast, Heidegger’s poetic strategy facilitates a deeply serious critique of education in a technological epoch. This chapter will also nod to the genre convention of offering a ‘historical overview’ of RE in England and Wales, although not without marked self-consciousness. What follows is comparatively more straightforward: the next two chapters attempt to elaborate pertinent aspects of the specifically descriptive or ‘philosophical’ hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer. Chapter 2 must begin with a sort of disambiguation: the terms phenomenology and ontology will be known to those who have engaged with the pedagogical literature of RE, but are likely to be picked up respectively as a false enemy and a false friend without some accompanying awareness of their characteristic development in philosophical hermeneutics. ‘Hermeneutics’, additionally, is likely to be overhastily appropriated by anyone with a background in biblical studies, so Heidegger’s specifically phenomenological interpretation of the tradition must be elaborated. In summary, hermeneutics is not limited to technical issues of textual interpretation, but is the characteristic condition of human existence; from Gadamer we learn that the attempt to give an account of the event of understanding is thus the truly universal philosophical problem. The chapter concludes by indicating the limited engagement so far in the literature of RE in England and Wales with a hermeneutics thus construed. This chapter also introduces the ‘critical religious education’ project of Professor Andrew Wright. Wright stands out in the literature for his sustained engagement with Gadamer, along with his appropriation of the ‘critical realist’ philosophy of Roy Bhaskar; Critical RE constitutes an explicit dialogic presence throughout this work and (ultimately) serves as a counterpoint to the argument developed (see Chapter 7). Chapter 3 is intended to respond to two important criticisms that have been levelled against philosophical hermeneutics, namely that it constitutes on the one hand a conservative position that stresses submission to the authority of the other or text at the expense of critical judgement, or on the other hand that it constitutes a radically subjectivist stance. This requires firstly an examination of how two such contrasting charges could be levelled against the same position, which will require a consideration of the Kehre or ‘turning’ in Heidegger’s thought and Gadamer’s subsequent development of a dialogic ontology. I will then respond to these criticisms by considering their manifestation in the literature of RE, the first (explicitly) in Wright’s adoption of Habermas’s critique of Gadamer and the second (implicitly) in Clive Erricker’s advocacy of a relativist hermeneutics.

Introduction

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I contend that neither thinker has adequately construed the dialogic implications of the event of understanding; in particular the character of understanding as an event in tradition has been neglected by both thinkers but is vital to any consideration of the role of ‘authority’ in philosophical hermeneutics. In Chapter 4 we are able to consider the relationship between philosophical hermeneutics and education, firstly by observing the ‘educational’ elements of the ontology that has been presented, in that it is precisely the possibility of learning from the other that distinguishes the hermeneutic dialogue from a number of deficient or degenerate alternatives. I then discuss how philosophical hermeneutics has not yet been applied in a way that does justice to the complexity of the familiar educational situation. I develop a novel account of the intentionality of the classroom dialogue that makes explicit a constellation of connected hermeneutic circles, and distinguishes between the object of study (or text) and the emergent subject matter. Finally, I am able to make my own contribution to the discussion of Michael Grimmitt’s distinction between ‘learning about’ and ‘learning from’ that has been so influential in RE policy and practice in England and Wales, but has also provoked much criticism. I argue firstly that the distinction preserves a universally relevant educational insight into the historic hermeneutical distinction between ‘interpretation’ and ‘application’, and secondly that the key to resolving the tension is the Gadamerian relationship of ‘belonging’ to the subject matter. However, the chapter will identify a second, more important, educational tension – namely that between a transformative dialogue and the effects of the ‘curriculum’ or ‘scheme’, which can be brought into play at a number of different levels. Chapter 5 considers the relationship between hermeneutics and religion. I cannot convey the full extent to which theology, religious studies and philosophy of religion have been radically transformed by an encounter with the specifically philosophical or descriptive hermeneutics outlined above. Instead, I discuss the paradigmatic or originary role that scriptural interpretation has played in the development of Western hermeneutics, and consider how philosophical hermeneutics can be understood as a universal extrapolation of the theological insight that the interpreter relates to a living text or tradition that presents a claim to life-transforming truth; secondly, I consider religious or inter-religious dialogue as a specific hermeneutic context; finally, I explore the intersection of radical theological hermeneutics and philosophy of religion, in particular in the ‘weak thought’ of Gianni Vattimo. In keeping with previous reservations about doing ‘definitional’ work, this final section will present the means whereby the familiar concepts of RE – the term ‘religion’ itself, God, the secular and

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the transcendent – can be problematized. I will then be able to make the most controversial claim of this work, that philosophical hermeneutics has what could be called, following Heidegger, a ‘divine destiny’. It is not necessary that readers buy into this radical theology, particularly following such a necessarily abbreviated discussion. What is important, however, as I move towards the argument of the second division of the book, is that any ‘minimal philosophical consensus’ that might provide the grounds for a shared conception of RE would need to be sufficiently expansive to accommodate this account of the divine. The ground is now laid for the argument that constitutes the second part of the book. This is a ‘local’ application of philosophical hermeneutics that interprets the specific context of RE in England and Wales and offers an original contribution to debates about its aims, proper content, and appropriate pedagogy. In Chapter 6 I engage with the debate about the justification of RE as a discrete curriculum area, particularly addressing the correspondence between John White and Andrew Wright in the pages of the British Journal of Religious Education. I will locate this debate within the wider philosophical discussion of aims-based and subject-based approaches to curriculum, and ultimately commend a version of ‘curriculum as conversation’ that applies the dialogic insights of part one of the book to the question of how curriculum should be ordered into domains. I consider in detail and partially commend Wright and Hand’s ‘possibility of truth’ justification of RE, although considered in the light of philosophical hermeneutics this will transform in such a way that it cannot (and need not) provide a transcendent justification of RE as a discrete curriculum domain. In Chapter 7 I offer a local elaboration of hermeneutics in the context of RE that stands in place of a discussion of a correct ‘methodology’ for teaching RE. I return to Critical RE firstly with an elaboration of Wright’s development of the ‘intentionality’ of RE, which I argue must undergo an even more radical transformation if it is not to become, in itself, a further reduction of the subject matter. I then develop the nature of the disclosure of truth in RE, and argue that this need not be thought of in terms of an evaluation or critical judgement, but also that ‘meaning’ cannot be separated from ‘truth’ in the event of understanding, so that truth is always at stake in RE. I caution against a tendency to address truth in explicit terms that might be described, to use a phrase applied by Paul Standish to educational situations, as ‘impudent practice’. I then explore what it means in RE to approach the text in such a way that the text is a teacher, and draw together my response to some concerns that class teachers might have about intellectual challenge and authentic treatment of religious content in a discussion of the moment of ‘belonging’ that is entailed in understanding.

Introduction

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In a final chapter, or afterword, I return to the question raised in Chapter 1, about whether our philosophy for RE per se can be separated from our philosophy of the curriculum more broadly. I contend that it cannot, and from this can be summarized the overarching argument or contribution of this work: the application of philosophical hermeneutics to a consideration of RE brings about a transformational event in thought. Philosophical hermeneutics can elaborate the transformational value of the dialogue that is RE, but in so doing weakens any attempt to defend a discrete curriculum area as the location for that dialogue. The redemptive potential of RE, to use a theological analogy, is realized in its ‘self-emptying’ (Vattimo would say ‘weakening’) into the wider educational endeavour. No once and for all or ‘eternal’ justification for RE can be offered that is not in tension with the transformational potential of the dialogue elaborated in this work, however much religious educators might want to offer one. I conclude with some thoughts about the extent to which RE, the current state of schooling, and the preparation of teachers are ready for such an event.

Note 1 As early as 1989, of course, this characterization of the 1988 Act as ‘nonconfessional’ was already being problematized. Cox and Cairns, for example, acknowledge that the Act enshrines the feeling that teachers can no longer assume that they have a mandate to teach that Christianity is true, and that, ‘at the very least the Act invites teachers to discuss openly … what explicit guidance should be offered to young people about moral and religious ideas and practices in a country which refuses to nominate any one moral code or any one religious philosophy as that to which it is prepared to be committed’ (1989: 66). At the same time, however, they note that in the requirement for a predominance of Christian content, and in the continued coupling of RE to broadly Christian worship, one could detect a deliberate shaping of shared moral and spiritual ideals in response to a perceived social anomie; they contend that this ‘might have been appropriate in 1944, but may have been outdated even then’ (69).

Part One

Hermeneutics, Education and Religion

1

Religious Education – Museum or Temple?

1.1 The happening of truth We begin our consideration of hermeneutics, religion and education, then, in medias res, somewhere in the heart of Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’; here stands a building, the Greek temple, selected for discussion by the philosopher as an example of a non-representational work of art (2011a: 106). We are a little way, as yet, from confronting education head-on, although we stand before an edifice, and might recall how often our discussions of education centre around our concern to edify or build character in our students, or how intimately the language of pedagogy has grown entwined, ivy-like, around the metaphor of construction – of knowledges, of social worlds, of meaning (see, in RE alone, Erricker 2000, 2010 on ‘construction’; or Jackson 1997: 130–4 for ‘edification’). Later in this chapter we will find ourselves faced with another significant and explicitly educational building – the ‘museum’ – although the juxtaposition presented will take us perhaps a little further than Heidegger intends in his own brief treatment of museums and galleries in the same essay. We might seem, perhaps, a little nearer to the other concern that preoccupies us – religion – in that the building we are standing before is ostensibly ‘religious’; certainly, Heidegger writes that ‘the god is present in the temple’ (106). What we are facing, however, as we brace ourselves in that rock-cleft valley against the violent storm that rages above, that ‘firm towering’ presence contrasted against the rock’s ‘obscurity’, should not be reduced to a ‘place of worship’ or even a ‘sacred space’, which could feature among the phenomena of the study of religion. For all his talk of holiness, consecration and praise, the specific curriculum content of RE, such as might be listed or prescribed on an agreed syllabus, is far from Heidegger’s concern here. What, then, has brought us here? And what exactly are we looking at? As elaborated in the preceding chapter, Heidegger discovered that it was through a particular work of art that the truth of ‘equipmental being’ is revealed. He

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therefore finds himself presenting the temple work to us as an example of the ‘happening of truth’ (106), and in this we draw closer – albeit indirectly – to what has been a preoccupation of religious and (arguably) educational thought. If we stand before Heidegger’s temple as a contemporary tourist, ‘the world of the work that stands there has perished’ (Heidegger 2011a: 106). We must imagine that we face the temple in the company of the ‘historical people’ or ‘nation’ to whom it belongs (or who belong to it). For this people, the templework ‘opens up a world’ (107). It is no accident that Heidegger selects the temple, an architectural form rooted in place in the natural rock, as opposed to some other non-representational artwork. The ‘topological’ metaphor introduced in the previous chapter pervades this discussion and is integral to an understanding of the happening of truth: the temple ‘fits together’ and ‘gathers around itself ’ certain ‘paths and relations’ where ‘birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being’ (106). Hubert Dreyfus’ (2006) extrapolation of this passage, drawing on the work of Clifford Geertz and Thomas Kuhn, provides a lucid starting point for interpretation. For Dreyfus, Heidegger’s temple work represents a cultural paradigm, which ‘collects the scattered practices of a group, unifies them into coherent possibilities for action, and holds them up to the people who can then act and relate to each other in terms of that exemplar’ (354). The ‘setting up’ or ‘opening up’ of the world by the temple can be understood in terms of the possibilities it holds out to the culture that produces it: it exemplifies the distinctions, for example, which make ethical conduct or deliberation possible in that culture (Dreyfus introduces the medieval cathedral, which contrasts with the Greek Temple by ‘holding up’ to the Christians saints and sinners, rewards and temptations, rather than heroes and slaves and marvellous things). While the temple is undoubtedly produced by a community, it also founds that community, in that it produces a shared understanding rather than simply representing or symbolizing. The temple therefore represents the happening (Ereignis), rather than the simple expression of truth. Its truth must be understood in terms of an event that invites the participation of the community to which it belongs (and which belongs to it). Here we begin to get a sense of Heidegger’s rich concern with a primordial understanding of truth, which is ‘inextricably intertwined’ (Dicenso 1990: 30) with his perhaps better-known concern with the ‘question of the meaning of Being’ (Heidegger 1962: 1). In his early work, Heidegger identifies the most basic question of philosophy to be: ‘What does being signify? Whence can something like being in general

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be understood? How is the understanding of being at all possible?’ (1982: 15). Western metaphysics, as Heidegger sketches out in Being and Time (BT), has long misconceived this question, or forgotten its original meaning. So the Being of beings1 has come to be thought of as some sort of property that objects have – much like any other, ‘except that it is the most general property’ (Dreyfus 1991a: 10). Alternatively, ‘Being’ could be thought of as an entity among entities (even if it might be the most supreme entity). Thus the question, ‘How is it that beings are’ would be answered with reference to another being, some ‘causally self-sufficient source’ that grounds them (ibid.: 12). This is the two-fold path of traditional Western metaphysics for which Heidegger has famously appropriated Kant’s term ‘ontotheology’ (Thomson 2005: 7–23). Such formulations of the question, for Heidegger, presuppose the ‘givenness’ of beings (as is expressed in the German es gibt, literally ‘it gives’ for ‘there is’) and neglect a more fundamental version of the question which might be expressed, ‘How is it that beings are able to show up as such, or as they are?’ Heidegger’s enquiry is into the prior understanding or conditions that must precede the possibility of asking the other questions. So it is with his concept of the truth as aletheia, ‘un-hiddenness’ or ‘unforgetting’.2 This unforgetting suggests an understanding of truth as something which is ‘already there’, but which has become hidden or alienated, which is recognized, recovered or remembered rather than discovered. This is a more basic or original understanding of truth than the prevailing metaphysical understanding of ‘truth as correspondence’; it is truth understood as what must be the case for us, and for things, and for our relationship with those things, in order for a proposition even to have the possibility of corresponding to a ‘real’ state of affairs. Vattimo summarizes that ‘the validity of every method is conditioned by being originally placed inside an horizon of truth, understood as the light which makes beings visible’ (2008: 150). Heidegger writes that ‘it is one thing to give a report in which we tell about entities, but another to grasp entities in their Being. For the latter task we lack not only most of the words but, above all, the “grammar”’ (1962: 63). Throughout his writing career, therefore, he strives to wield language in such a way that he will avoid slipping back into the well-ploughed furrows of his philosophical forebears. Such a task constitutes nothing less than the ‘overcoming of metaphysics’ (Heidegger 2003), and Heidegger is not uniformly optimistic about the possibility of its success. What he arrives at (and although it might be argued that the imagery is more pronounced in his later writing, it is right there in the Dasein, or ‘being there’ of BT) is a rich relational, and – as I have already mentioned – more explicitly topological vocabulary. Beings (and indeed Being

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itself) become ‘given’ or ‘given up’ – Heidegger also uses the concept of ecstasis, or ‘standing out’ (Heidegger 1962, 2011b; Raffoul 2012) – and Being might be understood as the ‘region’ within which things show up as they are and do so by their relation to other things within that region (see Heidegger 1966: 65). What we do not find in this vocabulary is any particular concern for minds, or knowledge, or ‘constructions’. We do find, however, temple works, or artworks, and we also find places where we might ‘dwell’, but Heidegger argues that these must be understood to differ in an important way from ‘buildings’, a point I will return to later. Thus in ‘The Origin’, the image of the temple comes to overlap at certain points with the further image of the ‘clearing’. The word used, Lichtung, conjures in German most immediately the meaning of a forest glade, but also carries in Licht the obvious visual image of ‘light’ as well as a thinning out and lifting up, so that the clearing becomes a space in which entities show themselves as they are. Beings both ‘stand within’ and ‘stand without’ this clearing or ‘open place’. ‘The clearing centre itself encircles all that is’, and ‘only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are’ (Heidegger 2011a: 114). The clearing is, then, for Heidegger, the presupposition of any notion of the truth of our conceptions of the world – it is the space in which truth can happen, the precondition of our engagement with entities and even our discovery of ourselves. In the essay, aletheia (‘truth’) is defined as unconcealment, and yet a certain relationship with concealment is constantly necessary: ‘Truth is un-truth, insofar as there belongs to it the reservoir of the not-yet-revealed, the un-covered, in the sense of concealment’ (119). Of the Lichtung, Heidegger writes: Thanks to this clearing, beings are unconcealed in certain changing degrees. And yet a being can be concealed, as well, only within the sphere of what is cleared. Each being we encounter and which encounters us keeps to this curious opposition of presencing, in that it always witholds itself at the same time in a concealment. The clearing in which beings stand is in itself at the same time concealment. (114)

Dreyfus’ example is a useful way of beginning to think of this highly suggestive passage in more concrete terms: for the cathedral to offer to the medieval Christian the possibility of a life conceived in terms of sainthood or sin, other possibilities which were alive in the temple work (such as that of living as a hero, as opposed to a slave) must be concealed.

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This ‘curious opposition of presencing’ is related to the ‘strife’ at play in the artwork between ‘earth’ and ‘world’ (111). We have already begun to explore ‘world’, what Dreyfus calls ‘the way the artwork solicits the culture to make the artwork explicit, coherent, and encompassing’ (Dreyfus 2006: 356). The work also has a ground – ‘Earth is that whence the arising brings back and shelters everything that arises as such’ (Heidegger 2011a: 107). This deeply suggestive imagery will be explored in an educational context later in the chapter, but it might be useful at this stage to clarify what is not meant by this strife, or to warn against overhasty definitions of earth and world. First, Heidegger notes that where it is in the nature of world to ‘open up’, earth is ‘essentially self-secluding’ (110), but we should be on guard against a simple association of earth and world with concealment and unconcealment respectively. In his earlier discussion of the ‘thingly’ nature of the artwork, Heidegger argued for the inadequacy of the ‘matter-form structure’ to account for ‘mere being’ as opposed to specifically ‘equipmental’ being (96). He is thus at pains here not to equate earth with matter: it is ‘not to be associated with the idea of a mass of matter deposited somewhere’ (107). Yet the earth is associated with the material aspect of the temple work: ‘This resting of the work draws up out of the rock the obscurity of that rock’s bulky yet spontaneous support’ (106–7). The earth’s materiality is best understood in terms of its resistance to the world: it ‘shatters any attempt to penetrate it’ (110) – as Dreyfus elaborates, the artwork resists any ‘totalization’ or attempt to give a complete or reductive account of the ‘world’ that it opens up. Yet the world also depends on the earth; it ‘cannot soar out of the earth’s sight if, as the governing breadth and path of all destiny, it is to ground itself on something decisive’ (112). Earth, in turn, ‘shrinks from every disclosure’, yet it is as a result of being ‘set forth’ by the work, in ‘the open region of a world’, that it appears for what it is: ‘It shows itself only when it remains undisclosed and unexplained’ (110). The ‘earth’ is that which serves to reveal, even as its own essential obscurity is disclosed, precisely that which the ‘world’ conceals; hence the avoidance of a simple correspondence between earth and concealment. Hence also Heidegger’s assertion that this strife should not be interpreted as ‘discord’. ‘In essential strife … the opponents raise each other into the assertion of their essential natures’ (111). At times the image of the clearing at the heart of the dense forest in which entities are disclosed seems to map to Heidegger’s ‘world’, and at other times the clearing calls to mind the whole of the temple work; our interpretation of the meaning of ‘earth’ must therefore shift accordingly. The entities or individual ‘things’ that appear within the clearing, in the ‘play of brightness and shadow’

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(Malpas 2006: 249), cannot themselves be equated with the ‘earth’. Rather, when ‘Lichtung’ and ‘world’ appear to us to be most closely associated, then the ‘forest’ itself seems closest to the ‘earth’. When, as it sometimes does, ‘Lichtung’ overlaps in its entirety with the ‘temple work’, then ‘earth’ is perhaps best associated with the dark shadows that throw those bright things in the clearing into relief. This shimmering relationship between different distinctions in Heidegger has been remarked upon by scholars. Malpas refers to the tendency of terms in Heidegger to shift their meaning in relation to each other as their ‘iridescence’, and warns against offering clear cut oppositions or parallels (Malpas 2006: 12). The richness of the language of Heidegger’s later writing enables different facets of his thought to shine at different times and in different contexts. This is compared by Malpas to the ‘backwards or forwards’ relatedness of the hermeneutic circle discussed previously, and is also – for Malpas – ‘tied to the nature of the topological’ (37), in that it reflects the shifting, relational character of place, and the nature of the disclosure of things within the forest clearing. The idea of iridescence will also help us to grapple with the different ways in which this essay of Heidegger’s has been employed in educational contexts, when we come to this later in the chapter. At this point I should attempt an initial response to concerns that what follows, drawing as it does on what is ostensibly a theory of art, will present an overly ‘aesthetic’ account of education. Note the circular movement of Heidegger’s essay, discussed in the preceding chapter. Following his discussion of the temple work, Heidegger writes, Another way in which truth occurs is the act that founds a political state.3 Still another way in which truth comes to shine forth is the nearness of that which is not simply a being, but the being that is most in being. Still another way in which the truth becomes is the thinker’s questioning, which, as the thinking of being, names being in its question-worthiness. (2011a: 120)

In opening out the happening of truth to a political, theological, or revelatory context – even the context of thought itself – Heidegger seems to have moved through his discussion of art, so that the artwork becomes an exploratory paradigm for a more general account of the happening of truth. The first part of my response, then, would be to argue that it is the happening of truth that is the real concern of the essay, rather than simply a theory or philosophy of art. The strife between earth and world then becomes a universal aspect of our interpretive engagement with Being. But the circular movement is not as simple as this. Julian Young argues that what Heidegger is doing here is expanding the concept of art ‘to embrace

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“world-defining” events of all sorts’ (Young 2001: 16–19). Thus towards the very end of the essay comes the claim that the essence of art is poetry. ‘The essence of poetry, in turn, is the founding of truth’ (Heidegger 2011a: 129). It is Heidegger’s contention that the ‘aesthetic focus’ is precisely what is wrong with existing theories of art, since it involves a forgetting of the question of truth (133–5). Heidegger attributes this forgetting to an Enlightenment division of labour in which logic dealt with judgement and thought, ethics with character and behaviour, and aesthetics with sensations and feeling. Art, relegated to the realm of sensation and feeling, could be appreciated for its capacity to produce certain sensual or emotional states, but lost its ‘truth-disclosing’ potential to show its audience how to live (Young 2001: 8–12). An encounter with truth requires a poetic engagement, a poeisis (making) in which things are brought forth into being (Standish 2002). Heidegger’s ‘poetry’ can thus be understood as a deeply serious attempt to avoid certain dangers involved in an aestheticization of our interpretation of Being. These dangers will be considered in more detail as we move now into an exploration of the happening of truth in explicitly educational contexts.

1.2 Education as artwork Although he does not focus on the temple work, Pádraig Hogan draws on Heidegger’s essay, along with the work of James Joyce, to found his argument for an ‘epiphanic’ education. Hogan highlights two senses of identity that he argues have tended to underpin attempts to ground a philosophy of education. The first of these he attributes to the long dominance of Christendom over Western educational institutions, where the chief task of education ‘was seen as evangelical’. Within this view, ‘The identity of each person was already ordained’ and education was construed as the attempt to shape ‘the identity of a fallen creature to the image and likeness of godliness’ (Hogan 2005: 84). This approach can also be detected in metaphysical systems that influenced Christian thought. For example, in Plato’s republic ‘the issue of human identity is pre-figured in all essentials by the form (ιδεα) of the Good. The question of identity, in other words, is definitively answered’ (85). Such an approach, in which education can be viewed as the ‘transmission’ of a uniform set of ‘essentials’ to which students are expected to conform uncritically, comes under strong criticism after the Enlightenment: it is difficult to see how the charge of indoctrination can be avoided. The alternative approach, found in ‘postmodern standpoints’ such as that of Richard Rorty, Hogan attributes largely to the influence of Nietzsche (86). Rorty

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rejects the notion of objective truth, and thus, for him, any positing of a ‘common essence’ for mankind constitutes a ‘pursuit of illusions’ (87). Personhood, for Rorty, becomes ‘a matter of decision rather than knowledge’ (Rorty 2009: 38), something which is chosen rather than discovered. Rorty’s concept of education as ‘edification’ then becomes a matter of pursuing new possibilities for self-description or redescription, precisely so that we can avoid the danger of ‘“degenerating” once again into a situation where “objective knowledge” asserts its supremacy’ (Hogan 2005: 88). Hogan writes, Rorty’s recommending of ‘conversation’ and ‘edification’ identify a kind of discourse which turns its back on anything like a joint search for truth and seeks its fulfilment instead in that which is aesthetically new or different. In this it closely resembles Lyotard’s promotion of aesthetic experience – and particularly the avant garde – to a place of supremacy over any ethical considerations. (Hogan 1995: 149)

Hogan’s criticism of such an ‘aesthetic’ approach to identity is that, in the necessary absence of any criteria to govern such reflection on self-hood, the emergence of self becomes an arbitrary and trivialized affair. As an illustration of his own, ‘epiphanic’ interpretation, Hogan offers Heidegger’s discussion of Van Gogh’s painting of the peasant shoes in ‘The Origin’. He argues that this depiction of a pair of mundane objects ‘sets forth a previously familiar world in a way charged with a meaning previously undetected’ and renders it ‘newly intelligible’ (2005: 91–2). He links this to Joyce’s understanding of epiphany as ‘the sudden “revelation of the whatness of a thing”’ (Ellman 1983: 83). Hogan’s epiphanies can be understood as transformational interruptions of a routine or unreflective kind of learning, where ‘one’s own most potentials are uncovered and appropriated. In short, they are unforced disclosures and affirmations of identity’ (2005: 92) The ‘epiphanic art’ is offered as a corrective to educators who view teaching and learning as habitual in nature, or instrumentally aimed at impressive grades rather than an opportunity for moments of transformative self-discovery. The chosen term, ‘disclosure’, resonates with Heidegger’s aletheia and is crucial to understanding how Hogan’s epiphanies are an alternative to the two approaches to identity he rejects. There is undoubtedly an active (one hesitates to say ‘subjective’, for reasons that will be elaborated in the following chapter) component to the educational epiphany, viewed as part of students’ ongoing process of ‘becoming’ who they are. Epiphany implies a transformation in the learner’s self-understanding, and thus her being, which necessitates a creative

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engagement with her own life history. Yet note also that along with developing into what you are not yet, ‘becoming’ also implies a sense of recognizing what you already are: thus the unfolding of a student’s identity is constrained by the past – the emergence of identity entails an affirmation of possibilities already present in the being of the learner. The disclosure of identity is a process of continual self-interpretation that cannot be rendered into pedagogical models either of transmission or of encouraging unrestrained choice or self-invention. This disclosure is a happening of truth of the same order as that we find in Van Gogh’s painting. Heidegger writes that ‘the artwork lets us know what shoes are in truth’ (2011a: 102). There is an element of recognition in what we learn about the shoes. If we have never encountered the proverbial peasant woman for whom the shoes serve as equipment, there is no possibility of us assenting to the truth of the revelation, at least as far as it concerns her world. R. E. Palmer writes, ‘When we see a great work of art and enter the world, we do not leave home so much as “come home”. We say at once: truly it is so! The artist has said what is’ (Palmer 1969: 168). Paul Smeyers (2002) draws on ‘ The Origin’ to ground a vision of education as a work of art. This is no mere aestheticization of education – certainly not in the sense of producing the kind of arbitrariness we might find in Hogan’s critique of Rorty’s aesthetics. Rather, this is an attempt to introduce what Dreyfus has termed the seriousness of Heidegger’s endeavour (Dreyfus 2006: 346), in that it offers a response to the ‘terror of performativity’ that ‘rules’ ‘in all kinds of areas’ and certainly – in Smeyers’ view – in education (2002: 82). Smeyers employs the strife between earth and world to illustrate his claim that ‘the materiality of education can be understood from a Heideggerian position in this way – that, at the same time, it rules out the obsession with measurement and ranking without implying that education could do without a materiality whatsoever’ (82). Smeyers defines earth as ‘the existing reality of the work of art (the paint, the stone, the words)’ and world as ‘the being of existing reality of the work of art, the setting of higher relationships which gives meaning to the artwork’ (85) The realm of the world is ‘transcendent and intangible’ and protected within the ‘enduring foundation’ of the earth, and it is in the dialectical relationship between the two ‘that truth emerges, that truth happens’ (86). This is a ‘poetic’ conception of truth in that art bestows ‘the truth as a new unique thing, by presenting it as a gift which transcends “that which is” in the real world’ (87). Resonating with Hogan’s discussion of epiphanies, works of art ‘open up new horizons by drawing in advance the paths for authentic existence’.

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Smeyers’ interpretation of the history of education accords in important ways with Hogan’s; here the Enlightenment view is seen as still essentially transmission-based, and postmodernity is identified with a nihilism of educational values. For Kant and the ‘German tradition’, the child does not know what is good, whereas the adult does: the adult thus ‘seeks to awaken the child’s potentialities to become a rational human being’ (88). Smeyers identifies the post-Enlightenment schism between the aims of education, which are considered to be the domain of philosophy, and the means, which can be considered psychologically, then scientifically, or (most recently) technologically. Crucially, ‘there comes a point where modernity begins to parody itself, pursuing answers without any sense of the original questions’ (91), and the question of the ends of education falls out of currency. This is the instrumentalist context of ‘education nowadays’, where ‘performativity obscures differences, requiring everything to be commensurable with everything else, so that things can be ranked on the same scale and everyone can be “accountable” against the same standards. This in turn entails the disvaluing, and perhaps the eradication, of what cannot be ranked’ (91). The question of ‘to what end’ is eclipsed by the question of what is efficient, or effective, or ‘what works’. Education in any subject cannot get off the ground unless we have some sort of ‘material substratum’: for Smeyers this is ‘the capitals of the European countries, the formulas of this or that chemical element, mathematical algorithms, what happened in 1979, and so on and so forth’ (92). Smeyers’ vision would have us consider education as an event, in which a world is opened up for students, with this materiality, the whole ‘stuff ’ of education as far as might concern a technical or performative approach, constituting the earth. It is crucial to acknowledge that world is opened up but is not shown or represented in this event (amidst a great deal that is represented), and cannot be equated with this material substratum; rather the everyday is ‘invested with a new significance’ (Hogan 2005: 91). Both Smeyers and Hogan acknowledge that Oakeshott’s ‘induction’ model comes close to recognizing what has here been attributed to Heidegger, except that ‘his apparent reluctance to grant the learner any decisive standing as a moral agent, his disinclination to allow “inclination” itself to join forces with the “intimations of excellence”; these betray a very one-sided … conception of teaching and learning in schools’ (Hogan 2005: 94–5; Oakeshott 1989). The world is not completed in the artwork, but inaugurated in it. Thus any truth that is set to work in education will require the active participation of the pupils themselves – the equivalent of the stand taken towards the temple work by those who ‘preserve’ it. The possibilities that shine forth for students

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are – as Hogan argues – inseparable from the unfolding of the unique identity of each individual. Thus we see the significance in an educational context of the earth’s shattering of ‘all attempts to penetrate it by calculative thought’. Smeyers continues that ‘the possibilities of the content that is offered are never fully realized, can never be fully realized’ (2002: 96). Whatever teacher or student makes of the material, whatever is brought to light in the intense focus of the classroom or in the more gentle illumination of subsequent reflection, inevitably leaves much else in shadow. What is in the material, therefore, ‘moves’ with the play of light and the shifting of relative positions on the landscape, and remains ‘a matter for constant evaluation’ (96). As we have moved back and forth from Hogan to Smeyers, a Heideggerian iridescence has been in play. In Hogan, it is the individual pupils themselves, even the earthiest, ‘dull and conventional’ specimens written off by Rorty (2009: 352), who are cracked open in the epiphany, allowing new possibilities and ways of being to shine forth. In Smeyers we see the material ‘content’ of education as the ground from which a shifting subject matter emerges. But it is the activities as much as the curriculum – the practices as much as the content of education, if you will – that constitute the ‘earth’. Indeed it is the ‘event’ of education itself that Smeyers wishes to liken to the artwork. This is an event, of course, in which the teacher (the artist) is implicated no less than the student. The event of education is never completed, and the teacher must constantly cope with and adjust to the indeterminate responses of her students to the content and activities presented. This coping, Smeyers reminds us, always entails an ethical responsibility, as the teacher must recognize her own role in the transformation of her students, and the setting out of possibilities for the unfolding of identity; it is the teacher who designs, or at least consciously or unconsciously appropriates, curriculum content or experiences, and calls forth a response from her students. This iridescence of the application of the strife between earth and world in the educational context points to a rich topology of the educational experience, a shimmering constellation of teacher, student, curriculum and subject matter that will be explored in more detail in Chapter 4. Suffice it to say at this point that what will be called for is a ‘phenomenology’ of the educational event. How this approach differs from a reductive explanation on the level of epistemology, or psychology, for example – or any sort of empirically grounded discipline – will be explained in the following chapter. Any attempt to shine a light into the darkness of the educational experience will necessarily cast new shadows. The obscurity can never be eradicated by a more efficient or accurate theorization of educational processes and their outcomes (cf. Fairfield 2011a: 1–2). Descriptions

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of education in terms of curriculum, knowledge or certain kinds of educational activities all constitute reductions to what can be measured and controlled, a flattening that stifles the evocative component and ignores the singularity that is ‘the very “thing” that makes education educational’ (Biesta 2012: 7). Thus Smeyers argues that only a poetic conception of education as the happening of truth can resist the ethical emptying out that accompanies the instrumentalization of the technological age and constitutes the ‘terror of performativity’ (Ball 2001; Lyotard 1984). Why this should merit the term ‘terror’ can now be more clearly understood: it would not mean a vertical flattening of attainment, or a ‘lowest common denominator’ kind of levelling (we miss the point of what has gone before if we think of this issue in terms of ‘attainment’ at all), but a flattening which cuts horizontally across this, a levelling out of difference, and a failure to recognize each individual student as a human being, where ‘to be human means, first of all, to go a way for oneself … to realize one’s humanhood’ (Smeyers 2002: 98).

1.3 A digression into museum studies In ‘The Origin’, ‘collections and exhibitions’ house ‘art works of the most diverse periods and peoples’ (2011a: 90). Housed in such collections, Heidegger argues, they cease to become works and become objectified – they hang ‘on the wall like a rifle or a hat’. In this way they can be made available for public appreciation, can become familiar and commonplace, and can be studied by ‘a science’, with official agencies taking responsibility for their care, maintenance and exposition (105). Crucially, however, they have come to ‘stand outside all relations’ (106). As in the case of the ruins of the temple at Paestum, when worshippers no longer move among its precincts, the world has ‘withdrawn’ from a museum object; it becomes worldless, like a stone, and can no longer be the location of the truth’s setting itself to work. All of the great and ancient poetic works begin, we know, with invocations of the Muses. Let us recall then (so as not to stray too far from the path on which we began) that the earliest museums were, of course, temples. Or rather, so a superficial etymology would tell us. Perhaps that would be just a little too convenient in a work devoted to the intersection of religion and education. What is in no doubt is that the Greek origin of the word ‘mouseion’ unavoidably directs us to those complex classical divinities, the Muses, goddesses of ‘song, music, poetry, dancing, the drama and all fine arts’ (according to Liddell and

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Scott’s Oxford Greek Lexicon). It is difficult to identify a time when the mouseion had a clear ritual or sacral function. In Plato we find the term mousa being used metonymically to indicate the arts or poetry, and the much vaunted Hellenistic Museum at Alexandria, though dedicated to and apparently protected by the Muses, was on the face of it a university or gathering of scholars rather than a place of worship. The most ancient surviving uses of the term, in fact, attest to the pedagogical role of the mouseion. Aeschines in the Timarchus alerts us to the fact that it was not uncommon to find a mouseion in a school in the fourth century BCE (although the question of what activities would have been housed there is shrouded in mystery), and the historian of Greek philosophy W. K. C. Guthrie offers the following choice of explanations for why Plato’s Academy was also known as the mouseion: given that a society that was to own land needed to be registered as a cult association dedicated to the service of a divinity, Plato chose the Muses, perhaps in connection with these ‘chapels of the Muses’ that were found in schools in his day, or perhaps because he was on record as saying that philosophy was the highest ‘music’ (Phaedo 61a). This second explanation reminds us that the distinction between areas of enquiry was not as rigid in Plato’s context as we might now consider it to be, and that even the natural sciences were as likely to be considered to fall under the sphere of the Muses as the fine arts, or rather that all might be considered subsets of poetry. We should perhaps not make this commonly accepted truth do too much work – especially in light of Plato’s own well-known hierarchy of knowledge and antipathy towards poetry – but Guthrie is sufficiently confident in it to accord to the Muses the broader label of ‘patrons of education’ (Guthrie 1975: 20). Although the classical or Hellenistic museum, as the home of an educational institution, would likely have housed artworks and certainly scholarly texts, the association of a museum with its collection is a significantly later development. We perhaps trace the beginnings of the modern museum to the ‘cabinets of curiosities’ housing objects of fascination collected by private individuals in the Renaissance period, then bequeathed over time to academic or public bodies (Crane 2000). The anthropologist and museum curator Anthony Alan Shelton draws our attention to the historicity of a museum collection and its defining rationale or ‘paradigmatic position’ (Shelton 2000: 155). In the shift, and often multiple shifts of ownership from private collection to public institution, a group of objects (or multiple groups from different sources), which were  perhaps originally gathered together primarily for their exoticism or rarity value, acquire a distinctive narrative identity; in order to understand the objects as a collection, or to grasp the identity of the museum that houses them, it is necessary to

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gather them together around a single coherent principle. Shelton points out that this narrative need not follow a ‘single logical compulsion’, and that the rationalization of a collection ‘may occur only after its formation, and then be projected back’ to its origin, along with the writing of a defining catalogue for the collection (155). Such rationalizations began, Shelton argues, largely in the mid- to later part of the eighteenth century, when the ‘curiosity’ of objects began to be replaced with an evidential meaning within such grand narratives as evolutionism and empire. Shelton sketches the development of museums into centres of historical and anthropological research by the late nineteenth century. This required a considerable reorganization of their collections along explicitly educational lines. He quotes Woolnough’s claim that museums ‘are no longer old curiosity shops, they are now educational colleges’ (Woolnough 1908: 199). He also cites A. C. Haddon’s claim that modern museums are to their predecessors what textbooks are to dictionaries, conveying information through their arrangement rather than simply displaying objects (Shelton 2000: 167). One influential organizing principle was the typological arrangement championed by Augustus Pitt Rivers and preserved today in the layout of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Pitt Rivers was committed to an evolutionary or chronological account of the development of cultures – one which undoubtedly displayed an ‘implicit Western European bias’ (Chapman 1991: 136). This structure could be demonstrated through a sequence of ‘ideal categories’, in which ‘typical specimens’ from different cultural and geographical origins could be gathered together according to their formal or functional similarities (Chapman 1991). In this approach to ethnology he ‘popularised a practice that had become central to the work of the natural sciences’ (Gosden and Larson 2007: 108). An educational intention drives the development of a museum’s collection. A private collection, acquired perhaps through the wide-ranging and eclectic antiquarian interest of a single individual, or comprising the diverse exotic objects collected by an early anthropologist on his travels throughout the Empire, gains significance and ordered meaning within the ideological framework of an academic discipline. This unifying narrative provides the motivation and direction for the museum’s later curators to seek out new acquisitions for the collection, and for future benefactors to identify a suitable home to which to donate or bequeath their own further acquisitions. The example of Pitt Rivers reminds us that the ideological framework of an academic discipline can transform (often with some significant reflexivity, i.e. as a result of the work carried out by researchers on the objects housed in just the kinds of collections

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we are discussing). This means that the museum collection eludes total or final rationalization, and constantly demands re-interpretation both as the collection grows and as the culture of the visitors that move through it transforms. The persistence of the ‘curiosity’ in museum collections attests to this: objects are retained in the collection which do not neatly fit the prevailing rationalization at a given moment: ‘An object that was a curiosity yesterday and is a historical object today does not necessarily face a secure future. There is nothing to guarantee the persistence of the historical object’s identity, except the museum, and habit’ (Crane 2000: 80). The tension between the collection and its rationalization is at the heart of the contemporary discipline of museology or museum studies. The designer of the contemporary gallery or museum programme experiences a degree of autonomy as he or she is free from constraints other than the desire to provide an interesting and rewarding experience for potential visitors to the museum. Any duty is to the integrity of the collection itself; new acquisitions can be sought to supplement the educational value of existing collections, but rarely can new collections be created ex nihilo for purely educational purposes. A certain strife can be experienced between the museum’s collections and the contemporary tastes of potential audiences, or the categories and classifying practices of evolving academic disciplines: these tensions can sometimes be experienced as ethical in nature, such as in the case of the questionable means of acquisition of certain objects in history, or the cultural bias of collectors (Vallance 2004: 349). Consequently it is a feature of museum programmes and displays that they have become increasingly self-conscious, so that the collection itself, the museum’s benefactors and founders and their lives and activities, and even the building that has come to house the collection, become objects of interest within the museum experience (ibid.: 345).

1.4 Reading the religious education curriculum as museum collection The title of this chapter promises a choice. Through Hogan and Smeyers I have explored the possibility of seeing the educational experience (although not specifically yet the religious educational experience) as a ‘temple’. What would it mean to see it as a museum? It requires little stretch of the imagination to see a curriculum as a collection of objects, although a reader will not by now be surprised that I will argue that

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we run ahead of ourselves if we attempt at this stage to offer too close a definition of the nature, range and extent of these objects. Let us also not broach in any detail for now the notoriously difficult issue of offering a formal or persistent idea of a ‘curriculum’ for RE. The self-conscious conceit of the museum sketched out above will, it is hoped, serve to distinguish the brief history of RE in England and Wales that follows from so many others that have preceded it. The essential organizing principle will be the story of a collection of objects at any time always already ‘bequeathed’ and calling for rationalization by its inheritors, all the while transforming (more or less self-consciously or reflexively) within a broader context of social and educational change. Along the way, and in accordance with a dominant ‘rationalization’, new objects are acquired to revitalize the educational impact of the collection, or they are donated by well-meaning benefactors, while others are left to stand idly by in the dust and darkness of storerooms, vaults and archives. In assuming such a thing as a ‘dominant’ rationalization at any particular time, this historical treatment is of course admittedly idealized, but no more so than many of its competitors (albeit more honestly); the strength of the account is that if the narrative principle compels, it continues to do so however much the complexity and detail multiplies along with our increasing understanding of relevant social, historical and policy contexts. Certainly, the reality that at any time there are in fact competing rationalizations of RE in a range of diverse contexts can be anticipated and will be dealt with in the second part of the book. The RE theorist must often attempt to be all things – historian, sociologist of curriculum, philosopher, theologian, psychologist of learning. A possible weakness of this book is that I have only attempted one thing, a hermeneutic interpretation, and furthermore within a very specific conception of a ‘philosophical’ hermeneutics. Readers will therefore be rightly sceptical of my claims here to offer a ‘history’ of any sort. This chapter offers, then, a ‘genealogy’ of a Nietzschean kind. As opposed to a linear development, in which ‘words had kept their meaning, … desires still pointed in a single direction, and … ideas retained their logic’, the museum narrative, for all its apparent unity, draws attention to ‘the fact that the world of speech and desires has known invasions, struggles, plundering, disguises, ploys’ (Foucault 1977: 139). The continuity implied in the ongoing ‘bequeathing’ and rationalization of the curriculum collection exposes a discontinuity throughout time in the interpretation of even the most central terms of the RE curriculum debate. It also encourages us to avoid thinking of emergence (in this case, the emergence of RE as we know it) as ‘the final term of an historical development’ (ibid.: 148).

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Before we begin to focus on the objects of study that have been bequeathed to us, let us recall that, in keeping with our original observation about museums and Muses, the milieu occupied by RE lessons is, in its earliest instantiation, a devotional space. We do not need to go back very far into the history of education in the UK to discover the intimate relationship between the church and the school; in fact, in architectural terms, we often find elementary schools to be the close neighbours, both geographically and aesthetically, of the denominational institutions that funded them (Seaborne 1971: 131–236). The eighteenth century sees the beginning of a gradual transition from a situation of almost entirely religious and charitable funding of schooling to that of predominantly state funding. This is accompanied by a movement of education away from the confessional aims of the church – where education itself is seen to be inseparable from the attempt to shape ‘the identity of a fallen creature to the image and likeness of godliness’ (Hogan 2005: 84) – towards the economic and social aims of the state (Wardle 1975: 20–39). For some commentators this has only ever been a partial transition, and in any case it was not in the earliest stages uncommon to view the confessional mission of the church as compatible with, and in fact serving, the broader moral and social motivations of educational reform (Hand 2003: 153–4). Thus, significantly, even as the 1870 Act ensured elementary education for all, it also cemented religious instruction as the oldest compulsory component of the school curriculum (Lundie 2012: 23). Michael Hand (2004) argues, interpreting the 1944 Education Reform Act, that in a period where traditional religious devotion could less and less be considered the social ‘norm’ (Parsons 1994: 169), an explicit decision was made to inculcate children into Christian doctrine and practice in support of community cohesion and moral development. Hand cites even major church leaders as promulgating the view that – in a time of threat from competing political ideologies – a social commitment to democracy ought to be strengthened, and that this could be achieved through a deliberate attempt to reinforce a commitment to shared Christian values (Hand 2003: 153; see also White 2004). The Act prescribes both protected curriculum time for religious ‘instruction’ and daily collective worship for all students (subject to parental exclusion). Hand’s reading of the Act encourages a revision of any idea that the foregrounding of religion in the Act might indicate a prevalence of religious devotion in educational life in the years after the war. Interpreted in the context of declining church attendance, the religious components of the Act constitute an attempt to enlist school-based RE to shore up the foundations of civic life and hold out to students the possibility of flourishing within a unified democratic society (see also Copley 2008: 26

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and Erricker 2001: 31). The educational self-consciousness of this move already suggests the possibility that, for many students, religious objects of study were no longer accepted unquestioningly as the trappings of a shared devotional form of life; thus the components of a religious instruction curriculum already begin to be deposited in a historically acquired ‘collection’ that calls for interpretation in light of a coherent educational rationale. We could view the earliest ‘local agreed syllabuses’ following the 1944 Act as the first local ‘catalogues’ of the various collections, offering an educational rationale for the historically accumulated content of the classroom experience of religious instruction. In his landmark evaluation in the 1960s, Ronald Goldman attests to the thinness of this educational rationale. A survey of the local syllabuses available reveals that stories from the Bible constituted the earliest objects of pedagogical interest (Goldman 1964: 5–7). Goldman points out the inadequacy of attempts, for example, to motivate the youngest children by gathering together thematically linked Bible stories (for example, those about ‘babies’). He criticizes the West Riding syllabus for its assumptions about how obvious the meanings of the stories of ‘The Call of Samuel’ or ‘Jacob’s vision at Bethel’ were to seven-year-olds, and cites a younger child’s insistence that the ‘Pilate’ under which Jesus suffered must have been, if not a tree, then at least ‘a very Pontius man’ (1). What the accumulation and range of misconceptions gathered in Goldman’s work demonstrates is that already the ‘curators’ of the religious instruction collection did not need to travel to distant locales to find curriculum artefacts that were curious or exotic to a majority of students. The assumption that children would readily understand the contents of what was taken to be their own cultural and religious heritage was proving unfounded; it could not be assumed that children were ‘at home’ with content that was taken to be familiar by class teachers. In Goldman’s critique, it is the suitability of the selected stories for the various stages of a child’s cognitive or social development, rather than the Biblical objects of study themselves, that requires a new rationale. He offers instead a ‘psychological framework’, informed by a Piagetian concept of readiness to approach particular theological content, and guided by a consideration of relevance to a child’s social and emotional needs at each particular stage of his or her development. The work of Goldman’s contemporary Harold Loukes (1961) further illustrates the growing realization by educators of the need to conceive a rationale for the objects gathered together in ‘religious instruction’ that did not assume a shared cultural heritage. Loukes found that although teenagers and older children appeared fascinated by religious questions when approached in broader

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terms, they would condemn the study of scripture as childish and irrelevant or alternatively something that was only done by ‘grown-ups’ within a particular social sphere; their understanding of theological questions was, in the view of Loukes and his co-researchers, surprisingly limited. Rather than arousing a curiosity in the little known and unfamiliar objects of Christian doctrine, this gap between teenagers’ horizons of understanding and the Christian theological narrative had a demotivating effect. Loukes’ solution was to introduce what has come to be known as ‘implicit RE’: in the earliest years of secondary schooling, students were to explore questions about meaning, authority and morality that were relevant to the realities and concerns of their own lives, with complex scriptural content and doctrinal questions being introduced explicitly much later on; thus the objects gathered together in the RE curriculum began to be categorized around ‘life themes’ rather than Biblical narratives. Some commentators suggest that implicit RE, while acknowledging the growth of atheism, agnosticism and religious apathy in the teenage classroom, remains a ‘confessional’ educational rationale, in that its aim, even if implicit only in the early stages, ultimately remains nurture into the Christian worldview (Hand 2003: 154; Wright 2007a: 192). Certainly, elements of Loukes’ account support this: he writes that ‘a religious formula must become experimental, and must be seen to work, before [a student] leaves; for in this field, he will find men working with other formulae, which, in their way, still work too, but may work for evil’ (1961: 8). He also claims that Christianity is ‘larger’ than any other world view (96). However, I would argue that Loukes’ pedagogical strategy demonstrates a clear desire for students to engage critically with religious questions, and that he states explicitly that it is not his intention to claim or defend the ‘truth’ of Christianity. That said, one detects in his work a commitment to something close to a theological anthropology (Rahner 1973, 1974), where the Christian revelation, since it originates from the creator of the human race, can be understood to constitute the complete answer to universal human concerns. Thus Loukes’ selection of life themes, even if it does not explicitly assume the truth of the Christian revelation, has been guided implicitly by Christian principles. Questions are identified earlier on in the programme of study, that is, to which the Christian answers explored later are expected to prove particularly satisfying. Confessional rationalizations of the objects of the RE curriculum came under increasing strain in the period between the two Education Reform Acts of the twentieth century, as a radically changing post-war immigrant population brought a bewildering variety of new objects of study into the RI classroom

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(Cox and Cairns 1989: 18). Although the 1988 Education Reform Act constitutes the major ‘paradigm shift’ in policy terms from a confessional to a nonconfessional conception of RE, this is largely a response to changes in practice ‘on the ground’: a number of advisory councils responsible for local agreed syllabuses in areas with significant immigrant populations began to realize that their collections could no longer have educational value for the full range of students in their schools unless they undertook a wide-ranging programme of new curricular acquisitions (Schools Council 1971: 61–6). A popular rationale for these pioneering syllabus conferences, and one which was to prove highly influential to this day, came to be known as the ‘phenomenological approach’. Imported from the newly emerging higher education field of religious studies, the so-called phenomenological approach was influenced originally by Ninian Smart’s six dimensions of religion. Although world religions differed greatly, each could be considered an organic whole composed of elements of the same six common and distinct features – ritual, myth, doctrinal, ethical, social and experiential (Smart 1971: 31). ‘World Religions’ syllabuses could be (and increasingly came to be) arranged under these thematic categories, which cut across the content of the different faiths. An emphasis on the ‘experiential’ dimension led Smart to reject the classification of Marxism or Humanism as religions (but no less worthy of study for all that) because they did not make claims about the ‘invisible’ world. Religious experience of the ‘invisible’ was thus an essential component of the school study of religions. Crucially, ‘pure’ experience preceded interpretation within a particular doctrine or language and was for Smart ‘non-propositional’ (1971). This opened the door to the claim (seized upon by many class teachers, syllabuses and guidance documents, although not clearly a commitment of Smart’s) that underneath various cultural and linguistic trappings, ‘pure’ religious experience is common across all religions (Hay 1990). As applied in many agreed syllabus documents – and despite Smart’s protestation that there can be a non-typological phenomenology (1973: 21)  – the organizing rationale of the ‘dimensions’ bears strong similarities to Pitt Rivers’ ‘typological’ arrangement of his museum collection, and has come in for similar criticism. Robert Jackson, drawing on Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s deconstruction of the Western concept of ‘religion’, offers a convincing account of how the phenomenological approach came to ‘entrap’ the objects of RE within ‘schematic formulations of key beliefs and concepts’ which did little justice to insiders’ experiences of their own faith (Jackson 2004: 69; Smith 1978). Without wanting to push the connection too far, Smith’s account locates the

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creation of the Eastern ‘religions’ in the Western imaginary (‘Boudhism’ in 1801, ‘Hindooism’ in 1829, ‘Taouism’ in 1839, ‘Zoroasterianism’ in 1854 etc.) within the same orientalizing and colonizing academic narratives that motivated the rationalizations of museum collections in the same period (Jackson 2004: 59). ‘Phenomenological’ RE has also been criticized for its implicit liberal theological assumption that the various ‘world religions’ constitute culturally bound but equally valid encounters with a universal spiritual reality (Barnes 2001). Despite the defence of phenomenology in some quarters (O’Grady 2005, 2009) and its continued widespread influence on agreed syllabuses and classrooms, academic debate over RE has well and truly entered a ‘postcolonial’ phase. For example, after drawing on Jackson’s critique of phenomenology (Erricker 2000: 18–21) Clive Erricker’s ‘Children and Worldviews Project’ turns over the responsibility for rationalizing the RE curriculum to the children themselves (Erricker 2000; Erricker and Erricker 2000). Doing away with the colonizing ‘grand narratives’ of previous incarnations of the subject, Erricker turns to the ‘small narratives’ that are the personal subjective constructions of individuals; this is a move that is similar in epistemological commitment, in fact, to the consciously postcolonial design of the displays of objects in the Museum of Sydney, where taxonomies have been done away with in favour of pastiche, collage and irony, so that the visitors are required to construct their own narratives (Marcus 2000). Erricker’s commitment to a radical epistemological constructivism extends even to allowing children to bring and add their own treasured objects to the museum collection, welcoming the fact that this weakens convenient curricular distinctions between the traditionally separate areas of RE, citizenship, moral education, and personal, social, health and economic education (PSHE) (Erricker 2000, 2001; Erricker and Erricker 2000). While the implicitly postmodern emphasis of Erricker’s work on RE will later on in this work be shown to be hermeneutically wanting (see Chapter 3), it stands out from the work of other commentators for this thoroughgoing commitment to acknowledging the historicity of the subject. It is de rigeur within the genre of new rationalizations of the RE curriculum to include at least one chapter of historical overview detailing how the subject has transformed over time and come to be what it is today, for good or ill. Yet this awareness of the historicity of our understanding of the subject has, in most cases, been limited. Despite the recognition of a number of transitions between significant ‘epochs’ in the conception of the subject matter of RE, from Christianity as revealed in the Bible, to some kind of universal experience of religion, or the subjective ‘spiritual experience’ of individuals, and the

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corresponding evolution of the various collections of curriculum objects that might illuminate these pedagogical objectives, commentators (other than in the earlier work of Clive Erricker) have tended to cling to the view that RE as a field of study has some sort of defensible contemporary essence that might support a particular rationalization. The work of Andrew Wright (2004, 2007a) illustrates particularly clearly the charge I am implying. Wright’s historical account delves back impressively far: originating in the educational views of ancient Israel, through Plato, to the RE of the early church and beyond, Wright locates the contemporary crisis in RE in a movement in society towards what he labels a ‘comprehensive liberalism’, which is ultimately grounded (for Wright) in an impoverished view of tolerance (Wright 2007a). Wright’s work seeks to return the critical edge to RE, to encourage a dialogue between students that is grounded in a respect derived from the mutual pursuit of truth and truthful living. In this, he is not far from the general thrust of this book. In support of this, however, Wright must firstly attempt to reverse what he sees as the trend towards ‘nominalism’ in work like Robert Jackson’s, and argue that religions do in fact have discrete ‘prototypical identities’ (155). He then identifies religions as the primary bearers of claims about transcendent truth (131–57), and argues that – since the nature of transcendent or ultimate truth is a vital and contested question in contemporary society – the study of religions is justified in having a discrete and significant place on the compulsory curriculum. Despite offering a controversial take on the purpose of RE, Wright accepts the RE collection that has been handed down to him relatively unproblematically. At one point he resists moves to increase the importance, for example, of Marxism and Humanism on the curriculum, on the grounds that neither of these perspectives makes claims (as do religions) about transcendent truth (2004a: 212). The general movement of his ‘critical religious education’, if one explores his pedagogical examples, is that it can largely be ‘parachuted in’ as a heuristic planning tool to assist teachers wherever they find themselves on the existing curriculum of the department or local agreed syllabus (2007a: 233–60). The circularity of this rationalization – of deriving a persistent question of concern (the nature of ultimate or transcendent reality) from a contingent collection of objects that has been ‘bequeathed’ to the contemporary classroom – is not explicitly recognized, but does seem to have troubled Wright. In an attempt to ground his argument, he employs the contents of the nonstatutory national framework to supply a ‘mandate’ for critical RE (104–7). It is hard to see how anything meaningfully like a mandate could be derived from a document which (to apply my museum analogy one final time) constitutes a

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‘catalogue’ of the RE collection as it stood in 2004 from the point of view of a particular gathering of RE academics, teachers and faith leaders (QCA 2004). Some scholars have argued (cf Tillson 2011) that Wright’s argument for the educational value of a particular orientation towards truth and truthfulness is compelling, but leads us towards a new conception of the subject oriented around the pursuit of the ‘good life’ and encompassing the study of ethics and – where appropriate  – religions. Wright’s response – that religions should be privileged because only they raise questions about ‘transcendent truth’ – here seems to rely more on historical authority than educational rationale. I discuss this further in Chapters 6 and 7.

1.5 ‘Constructing’ a curriculum Although the strife at the heart of the RE curriculum has not been recognized, it has, interestingly, been named. There has been much debate about the meaning and value of the two RE attainment targets, Learning about and Learning from religion, which made their way into the guidance documents and from there to a number of agreed syllabuses via the SCAA model syllabuses of the 1990s (SCAA 1994). I have made my own contribution to this discussion and will develop this in more detail in what follows (Aldridge 2011). For now, I will suggest a parallel (however undoubtedly iridescent) between Attainment Target (AT) 1, ‘learning about’, and the ‘earth’ or ‘material’ of RE, and AT2, ‘learning from’, and the ‘world’. Michael Grimmitt’s original offering of the distinction (and even in Grimmitt, I have argued, there was not a clear claim that the distinction named two easily separable aspects of RE) could then be read as a reminder to educators that claims for the educational value of the subject must rest not in its necessary ‘materiality’ but in its potential to open up a world for the student; few have made stronger claims than Grimmitt, outside of an explicitly confessional approach, for the central importance of RE in a child’s ongoing development as a human being (Grimmitt 1987). Over the twenty-five years since the publication of Grimmitt’s influential work, Religious Education and Human Development, there has been much talk, but little progress, over the interpretation of this distinction. The AT1/ AT2 distinction has been accused of causing confusion (Teece 2010), replaced with a single alternative target (Erricker 2010), or interpreted as naming ontologically inseparable aspects of the same event (Hella and Wright 2009), but the implications of characterizing it as a productive strife have not been

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developed.4 Arguably, the closest anyone has come to this is Grimmitt himself, in his recognition of the ‘dialectical or creative tension’ at the heart of the process of curriculum construction; in fact, for all its earliness, Grimmitt’s 1987 work achieves a powerful and elaborate analysis of the complex of influences and interweaving relationships of RE curriculum construction. He offers a masterpiece of the kind of ‘total view’ of RE called for by Goldman (1965: 192– 219), a developmental account of learning that could inform the construction of agreed syllabuses from the bottom up, replete with complex diagrams, numerous worked examples of curriculum construction (over 120, the back cover proudly proclaims), and tables of appropriate content for appropriate age groups. Yet, let us make no mistake, it is precisely a totalizing view that Grimmitt intends. His work on RE is situated within a desire to elaborate a ‘total curriculum’ (1987: 264) in which each subject has its own distinctly delineated contribution to make to human development (and upon which that subject relies for its justification on the curriculum); for this reason the study of ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ religion must maintain a discrete identity throughout a child’s educational experience, and must resist incorporation into ‘Personal, Social and Moral Education (PSME)’ courses or other such initiatives (261–4). Although, to represent Grimmitt accurately, he prefers in this work to speak of ‘curriculum decision-making’, the often-used metaphor of ‘constructing a curriculum’ is not out of place here. Grimmitt is at pains to point out a holistic model of the human development aims of RE. A student’s development must not be conceived solely in terms of the acquisition of knowledge, but also in terms of particular dispositions, attitudes and forms of social and self-understanding: what Grimmitt calls ‘abilities in applied religion’ (218–24). A system of ‘pupil profiling’ should be employed in place of the ‘objective’ CSE assessment model to more adequately track a child’s progress. Despite Grimmitt’s emphasis on human development as the core of the RE curriculum, and the complex balance of values and ideologies that must be negotiated in curriculum decision-making, the curriculum still stands, once constructed, as a monolithic edifice: although the pupil must transform in order to learn, this happens within the boundaries of a curriculum that does not transform, at least in relation to that individual student. Grimmitt’s model of curriculum design inevitably recognizes, along with Goldman and Loukes, that different ‘life themes’ might be appropriate at different broad age ranges, and that there should be a progression in engagement with particular religious content (it is Grimmitt who first imports Bruner’s ‘spiral’ into RE); thus the curriculum develops from one school year to the next. Outside of these broader considerations, however, any response to the individual

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development of a pupil must happen within the predetermined confines of a prescribed curriculum. There are different ways, of course, in which learning might be ‘constructed’ by either teachers or students. The philosopher of education Ian Munday (2012) has pointed out how even our most progressive and ‘active’ pedagogical models draw on the language of construction. In his discussion of what he sees as a predominant ‘phenomenology of having’ in education, he draws attention to the image of ‘scaffolding’ so essential to Vygotsky’s influential work. Scaffolding supports the emerging edifice, but it also contains, confines, restricts and channels the contours of that building. In his later work, Grimmitt makes use of the literature of ‘social constructivism’ to set out an alternative to ‘transmission’ forms of learning which purports to acknowledge the different responses individual students will have to the content (2000). But Grimmitt is not the only thinker who, as I will argue later, does not fully understand the significance of his own recognition that pupils ‘will interpret and understand the same religious ideas in an even greater variety of ways’ (2000b: 223). It should by now be clear that the name of this chapter does not refer to a choice between two different kinds of building or construction; ‘museum’ and ‘temple’ might rather offer alternative models – curriculum as construction versus curriculum as artwork. In fact, the either/or of the title may be additionally misleading in that, in Heideggerian fashion, we may be able to ‘recover’ in the museum its origins in the temple. So within the field of museum studies we have  observed a return to the educational origins of the mouseion: the work of the curator or museum educator is to situate or conduct an educational experience within a material collection that is largely given in advance (Marcus 2000; Costello 2003). ‘Museum or temple’ is thus offered as a choice between viewing RE as a fully or finally rationalized collection of curriculum content or as an event which entails the poetic happening of truth, a bringing forth (poiesis) on the part of both teacher and student. We now return to Heidegger to explore the importance of this distinction.

1.6 An ‘enframed’ curriculum? In a lecture given over a decade after the first delivery of ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ – significantly, after the events of the Second World War – Heidegger draws on many of the themes established in the earlier lecture, but with a new focus on technology as the danger facing the human condition. It is not Heidegger’s

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contention that technology itself is a danger (technology, of course, has been with us as long as there have been human beings, and has been put to both lethal and life-sustaining use), but that modern physics – whose rise Heidegger tracks in inverse proportion to the forgetting of the question of the meaning of Being (Thomson 2005: 7–43) – has given rise to a particular way in which Being is revealed, which can be considered to be the essence of technology, although it is not itself technological. Within this mode of revealing, which Heidegger calls ‘enframing’, entities show up as devoid of meaning, as resources ever standing by to be put to use with maximal efficiency. ‘Everything that man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct.’ Heidegger argues that this mode of revealing has even come to encompass man himself, so that ‘he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as a standing reserve’ (Heidegger 1977a: 27). Yet the ethical implication here – of human beings themselves being treated as so many resources (we sometimes say ‘human resources’) to be used up or optimally deployed – is not, in itself, the greatest danger that concerns Heidegger. What provides the real terror here is that enframing ‘banishes man into that kind of revealing which is an ordering. Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing’ (27). Recall the strife between earth and world discussed earlier. Although the world in which we find ourselves is not something which is chosen (Heidegger speaks of a ‘destining’, a way of understanding that goes before us), it is something which in the artwork is revealed as questionable, even as it sets forth the possibilities for self-understanding; thus recall that the earth reveals, even as its own essential obscurity is disclosed, precisely that the ‘world’ conceals. The danger is that enframing shows the nature of entities as standing reserve (Bestand) as a final or ultimate truth, and thus effectively removes truth as a concern – its poetic happening is no longer possible. It is as if the natural play of light and shadow has been replaced by a sterile laboratory light that illuminates all things equally, shows them to have equivalent value only as resources, and casts no shadows. The disclosure that is enframing conceals even the possibility of other disclosure. Educational thinkers have recognized the implications of this ‘ontologically reductive’ mode of thinking (Thomson 2005: 44, see also Fitzimons 2002). Michael Peters draws attention to the characterization of education as a ‘soft technology’, where people are treated as ‘human capital’ and are expected to become ‘flexible, multi-skilled knowledge-workers for the twentieth century’ (Peters 2002: 9). Knowledge itself becomes detached from value and becomes nothing more than a currency to be traded and multiplied. Technological models of learning – building, constructing, scaffolding – come to be valued for their own sake, without a consideration of the ends the resulting edifice will

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serve. Even human development models of education are emptied of meaningful content, so that ‘development’ itself is the aim, without a consideration of the worth of what is produced, and we become obsessed with ‘maximizing potential’. Where values do come into play, it is as private experience, objects which can be chosen, discarded and replaced, which have no call on us or authority over us (Dreyfus 2006: 348–9; Young 2001: 8–12), peripheral to the educational business of developing skills or banking knowledge that can be put to use later. Heidegger calls attention to a more ‘primordial’ way of being human to which building or constructing ‘belongs’, which is the state of ‘dwelling’. The space in which we dwell is related to the ‘clearing’ of Heidegger’s earlier thought. With reference to the new image of the ‘fourfold’ of earth, sky, divinities and mortals, Heidegger draws attention to the values that inhere in the background of our being which exert their subtle call on us and are ‘preserved’ in dwelling; we exist in a realm of things that count, of paths and possibilities already held out to us that we affirm in our everyday human activity. He points out a close etymological connection, in old German, between building and dwelling, that is falling ‘into oblivion’ as it recedes behind ‘the activities of cultivation and construction’ (2001a: 146). Heidegger points out that ‘thinking itself belongs to dwelling in the same sense as building’ (158) but that ‘not every building is a dwelling’ (143). This encourages us to consider whether the ‘edifices’ constructed in educational events are spaces where students can dwell, rather than technological constructions they simply inhabit. The challenge to the teacher here is to recall Hogan’s close connection between being and becoming: educational ‘building’, if it is to resist this oblivion, should be a ‘distinctive letting-dwell’ (156). It is ‘building as dwelling’ that ‘unfolds into the building that cultivates growing things’ (146). Vitally, ‘Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build’ (157). The kind of learning that is made possible in dwelling is illustrated by Heidegger in another lecture of the same period along the analogy of the cabinetmaker: he does not ‘merely gather knowledge about the customary forms of the things he is to build’ (1976: 14); he must respond above all to the different kinds of wood and to the shapes slumbering within wood. … In fact, this relatedness to wood is what maintains the whole craft. Without this relatedness, the craft will never be anything but empty busywork, any occupation with it will be determined exclusively by business concerns. (14–15)

Heidegger intends this analogy to apply to all intellectual pursuits no less than the cabinet maker. Thinking itself is a ‘craft’. The teacher’s role in developing thinking is to ‘let learn’ (15), to resist the drive to conceive of the educational

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event in calculative terms and create space for the student to respond to the content of learning, to make out the shapes that are slumbering within it. But the lure of enframing for the educator is great; it may even be that contemporary educational systems are a (the?) primary means of its perpetuation. Might not our educational thinking be irredeemably shot through with the metaphor of epistemological construction and the language of managerialism and soft technology? Is there any hope of calling the process of schooling to be more ‘educational’, committed as it is to a programme of incremental development towards predefined goals; a programme conducted within ordered and closely  regulated systems that do not admit of the happening of truth and cannot themselves be called into question? Heidegger is ambiguous about the possibility of redemption, except that he does reproduce Hölderlin’s claim that ‘where the danger is, grows the saving power also’ (Heidegger 1977a: 28). The saving power is also connected to the work of art, although Heidegger struggles to define the contours of such a redemptive act; perhaps some new form of artwork might be found that could disclose the very essence of technology, and in so doing expose its own status as a form of disclosure (Costello 2003; Dreyfus 2006).5 It is in search of such a saving power that Smeyers calls teachers to recognize the event of education as an artwork, even as they embrace the recognition that any education cannot do without the materiality of curriculum.

1.7 Why Heidegger? There is much in the general discussion that has preceded that might be of specific interest to religious educators; many of them might align their curriculum area with something like the kind of ‘saving power’ Smeyers calls for. It is not uncommon for the beleaguered RE teacher to acknowledge in her compulsory but often unexamined subject a dwindling space in the curriculum where the explicit consideration of personal and communal meaning and truth can be foregrounded when elsewhere technologization, accountability and calculative methods of external assessment exclude them (Cooling 2012b: 93–5). Here is a subject which has become attuned to bringing the broader picture into question, given a certain historical association of the subject with questions about the relation of the parts (our own lives) to the whole (the totality of existence) or with exploring the wider narratives or ‘worldviews’ within which individual decisions might be made; so that whereas every subject, poetically conceived,

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challenges me to take a stand on who I am, RE might take this question as its central concern (cf, among others, Hella and Wright 2009). Of course, the jury is still out as to the extent to which such questions are in fact the main concern of classroom RE in most cases. But it might be observed that the pedagogical literature of RE, particularly in the recognition of the problematic AT1/AT2 distinction, has at least implicitly recognized more than in other subject areas the ‘strife’ at play in the classroom. My selection of the temple motif has been intended to draw out this understanding of education as a transformative event, one which cannot do without grounding in a materiality (which will include a curriculum with a historically ‘given’ rationale and a specified progression of content) but which will happen in spite of it, and in the ‘happening of truth’ will challenge that rationale. My development of the museum motif is a deliberate attempt to find a specific starting point for RE outside of the usual range of likely beginnings such as the definition of a religion, the academic disciplinary identity of religious studies, the educational importance of tolerating other cultures etc. I hope to have shown that the materiality of RE has preceded any explicit engagement with particular pedagogical theories or academic disciplines; we find ourselves already underway in a curriculum area which has a particular history that cannot easily be identified with any particular discipline in the academy, and which has no universally accepted aim (although we can be more certain than in other subject areas that any aim that might have been claimed at its inception is no longer justifiable). There is a particular situation facing RE in England and Wales which takes us further than the more general observations developed so far. RE does not find itself simply a curriculum subject among others which must vie for the affection of students, with all their differing talents and motivations (Smeyers 2002: 97), but a curriculum subject whose very existence is challenged a priori by many students, parents and academics who no longer feel that ‘religion’ or the questions addressed by religions have sufficient cultural relevance to merit inclusion in the curriculum; such claims are accompanied either by a demand to remove the subject from the curriculum or, on the grounds of inclusivity, to widen its content to an extent that (for many defenders of the subject) weakens its disciplinary identity or academic integrity. This is the situation that has called forth particular competing rationalizations of the subject where other curriculum areas might have made do with an authoritative or traditional ‘canon’. Some readers might connect this situation of the potential exclusion of questions of meaning and value from the curriculum with the broader phenomenon of enframing discussed above, although I will not develop that connection further

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in this work (see rather Fitzimons 2002). The point is that these rationalizations cause us to lost sight of the event-like character of education: the drive to offer an overarching theory or justification for the subject will conceal the singularity of the educational event, in which transformation can occur as the happening of truth for an individual student. Such events will necessarily interrupt or break through any particular theorization of the process. In a reversal of Heidegger’s use of Hölderlin, it might be that in attempting to resist the phenomenon of enframing, religious educators can open themselves up to a further danger. In securing a distinctive place for RE in a human development curriculum, or in identifying a particular stratum or element of reality which is the distinctive focus of the subject in a total curriculum, RE itself becomes implicated in a final totalization, an ordering of all of the parts so that the whole educational endeavour can come clearly into view. The attempt to ‘save’ RE might itself lead to a loss of its own saving power. I am aware that my intention to answer the question, ‘Why Heidegger?’ has so far only been attempted by offering his work as a distinctive starting point for a discussion of religion and the curriculum. Heidegger speaks of a particular kind of educational danger that religious educators, although they might imagine themselves to be attuned to precisely such dangers, may have neglected. I have not, however, offered a response to the numerous possible reasons why one would not begin with Heidegger. There are those who would point out that Heidegger’s own relationship with religion was antagonistic, and certainly difficult to fathom. I will attempt to address this as the work develops; for now I  will simply say that the deep complexity of Heidegger’s engagement mirrors more closely than one would first imagine the ambiguities of the situation to which I am attempting to speak. Certainly, Heidegger’s antagonism has not prevented his thought from being taken up enthusiastically into theology (cf Thiselton 1993). More important than this, though, is the ‘moral problem’ of Heidegger. Heidegger is one of those contested figures (Nietzsche being another) where engagement seems to require an initial apology or caveat. I shall certainly not offer any moral defence of Heidegger’s life. That he joined the Nazi party, when so many of his fellow academics (including Gadamer) were capable of seeing the evils that it heralded, was inexcusable. Whether or not he was personally antiSemitic, it seems fairly certain that he exploited the party’s anti-Semitic policies to further his own academic career (Thomson 2005: 82–3). Heidegger resigned his notorious appointment as rector of the University of Freiburg in 1934 and it has been convincingly argued that he learnt from his disastrous engagement with politics, to the benefit of his philosophy (ibid.: 114–29). However, although

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his later philosophy cannot be read without making some connection to the technological horrors of the Shoah that would have been coming to light even as it was being published, Heidegger offered only the most minimal explicit recognition of the fact of the Holocaust (ibid.: 83). In his subsequent career, even up to his death, where there was a growing demand for some recognition of guilt and a renouncing of his involvement with Nazism, a repugnant academic pride seems to have prevented him from acknowledging this as anything other than a political mistake. A well-known distinction between thought and action is sometimes brought into play whenever we evaluate a difficult philosopher. Heidegger’s philosophy does not admit of such a distinction. It has been convincingly demonstrated that the language of Heidegger’s early thought is shot through with the Volkische imagery of the Nazis; it might very well even be lurking in the ‘strife’ of ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (Malpas 2006: 19–27). Heidegger’s own conception of education needs to be extricated from the Nazi educational project which did so much to sully the name of Bildung in the history of educational philosophy (Thomson 2005). I agree with those commentators who seek to detect a development for the better in Heidegger’s political thought, but not with those who would separate the thought from the person: this kind of distinction is problematized, for example, in the infamous address given by Heidegger at Freiburg on taking up the rectorate in 1933 (Heidegger 1985). The address constitutes a development of his thinking on the endeavour of higher education that cannot be ignored or erased, but is also a public act of political propaganda. No separation of thought and action, then, is possible here. What makes us so uneasy about Heidegger is not simply his engagement with Nazism, although this could certainly make us wary of mining his work for philosophical insight. What concerns us is that he was in many ways so insightful. In his development of the technological hermeneutic he was particularly prescient; how then was he, who should have been so able to see, unable to recognize early on an evil that proved so historically decisive? It is this central mystery that warns against forestalling our engagement with a thinker simply because the thought might lead into dangerous places; the danger must be discerned in the event, as we enter into dialogue and seek to understand. This book does not have the resolution of that mystery as its first concern, but it will argue that a certain reflexivity is an essential component of our attempts to understand another’s thought. Paul Standish, in addressing the ‘contemporary liberal scorn’ that might be directed to ‘Heidegger’s notorious political interventions’, reminds us that ‘our contemporary, globalized, neoliberal world

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manifests problems in ways of being and thinking that are, to some extent, the targets of both Heidegger and the Kyoto school writ large’ (Standish 2012a: 8). Heidegger was prescient about the dangers of the technological hermeneutic even as he implicated himself in its most significant historical instantiation: might education today be faced with a happening of such ethical import that at some point in the future we too will have to give an account of the stand we took in relation to it? The fate of RE would surely be bound up in such a happening. It is with this fear in the background that I argue that Heidegger – because of, rather than in spite of, the dangers that might reside in his thought – demands a reading in the contemporary educational climate.

Notes 1 I follow here the practice of the Macquarrie/ Robinson translation of Being and Time (1962) in capitalizing Being where it refers to the expression of ‘Being’ as opposed to existent beings themselves, although no such distinction is made in Heidegger’s German original, and this practice is not uniform across all of the translations I have cited. 2 While the Greek etymology of aletheia inevitably recalls the waters of Lethe, of oblivion or forgetfulness, Heidegger tends to concentrate in his discussion of the word on the play of concealment and unconcealment also implied. However, Heidegger does discuss a relationship of remembering and forgetting in Being and Time (1962: 63). Arguably, it is Gadamer who links remembering and forgetting more explicitly with understanding; see, for example (2004: 14). I have attempted a discussion of the relation between aletheia and memory in Aldridge (2014). 3 The political implications of linking the happening of truth to ‘strife’, and then to the founding of a political state, in a lecture originally delivered in Freiburg in 1935, are not lost on this author, and will be discussed briefly later in this chapter. 4 Wright’s acknowledgement of the creative tension between students’ own accounts of the nature of ultimate reality and those of their peers (Hella and Wright 2009), while hermeneutically significant and an object of interest later in this book, is not the same as the strife being identified here. The AT1/AT2 distinction can be read rather with a suitably Heideggerian ambiguity. Where Wright finds in it the tension between – essentially – ‘your account’ and ‘my account’, one can also detect in Grimmitt a contribution to the time-worn debate between the knowledgecentred and child-centred curriculum; the ‘strife’ developed in this chapter calls our attention to the fact that as long as the student is acknowledged as a participant in the educational event, what is ‘in’ the content and curriculum of education calls for poetic interpretation.

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5 Julie Marcus, to return to our earlier digression into museum studies, hints that museums might offer their own disclosure of enframing. Striving for an ‘erotics of the museum’, she writes that ‘the taxonomies and keys to the order of nature and human nature offer not only a truth but the totalising possibility of closure’ (Marcus 2000: 240). Drawing explicitly on Heidegger, she argues that a museum display – in which objects are literally arranged under glass in frames – offers a ‘simultaneous disclosing into light and casting into darkness’ (239), as a homogenizing tendency is revealed alongside any order it purports to display.

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What is a ‘Philosophical Hermeneutics’?

2.1 Introduction An alternative title for this book might have been, ‘a phenomenology of religious education’. I rejected it largely because I did not want to put off or confuse potential readers: this is an unpopular term in the current literature of RE. As was mentioned in the last chapter, the ‘phenomenological approach’ has become in the academic discussion of RE something like the Cartesian ‘ego’ in the Western philosophical tradition, by which I mean that (with some exceptions, e.g. Lovat 2001; O’Grady 2005, 2009) subsequent writers have felt the need to define themselves against it (see especially Barnes 2000, 2001; Erricker 2000; Jackson 1997; Wright 2007a). This is unfortunate, since without exception this discussion has had little to do with what is in this chapter meant by phenomenology. Philip Barnes’ thorough treatment of the diverse phenomenological approaches within the study of religion acknowledges a ‘hermeneutic phenomenology’ that has its distinctive origins in Heidegger, but rightly minimizes its historical influence on the academic or guidance literature of RE (2001: 449). Heidegger’s phenomenology will be discussed in this chapter because of its important contribution to understanding what is distinctive in the ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ of his student Gadamer. Although readers with a background in religious studies or theology might be relatively receptive to something called hermeneutics (and certainly the literature of RE makes much use of the term), I hope in this book to open out the discussion of hermeneutics further than has normally been intended here, even where there has been an explicit engagement with Gadamer (e.g. Jackson 2004; Miller 2013; Wright 1997, 1998, 2007a). As we go, we will also need to extricate ourselves from some alternative and potentially misleading ways in which the term ‘ontology’ is being used in the current discussion. The chapter concludes by briefly elaborating the limited extent to which a distinctively

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philosophical hermeneutics has influenced the literature of RE in England and Wales to date.

2.2 Phenomenology – unlikely ally? We have considered in the previous chapter Heidegger’s stated intention ‘to work out the question of the meaning of Being’ (1962: 1). This is a question a reader will undoubtedly want sharpened up, and the appropriate means of doing so for Heidegger is to embark on a project of phenomenology. There is a circularity here which may frustrate readers unfamiliar with Heidegger’s approach, since to approach a fundamental ontology calls for a phenomenological method, yet it is only through embarking on phenomenology that the need for a fundamental ontology can begin to be understood. Following the methodological decision elaborated in the introduction to this book, we will ‘begin by doing’ and leave the definitional work for later. We turn now to Heidegger’s earlier work in BT. Perhaps the set of terms most readily associated with Heidegger is the distinction between the ‘ready-to-hand’ and the ‘present-at-hand’ (1962: 102–3). To return to Heidegger’s favoured examples from crafting and woodcraft, we are encouraged to think of ourselves ‘at work’ in a workshop. What are the ‘things’ we encounter here – the hammer, the plane, the needle? If we are already thinking philosophically, we might be inclined to say that these are material objects or substances, or – if we have encountered enough of a certain kind of philosophy and wish to bracket out certain assumptions about reality – ‘sense data’ or even ‘intentional content’ (this would bring us close to the ‘phenomena’ or direct appearances of Husserlian phenomenology). Heidegger asks us to consider the manner of our engagement with these things. Absorbed in a task, perhaps to make a further object like a table, I find myself needing to drive in a nail. I reach for a hammer of appropriate heft, find it in its proper place, and carry on with my work in an uninterrupted state of activity. In this case, Heidegger observes, the thingly nature of the object is bound up in the task itself. My efforts are directed towards some goal, a project I am involved in, and the things closest to me are taken up together in this absorbed activity; they are not the direct focus of my attention but are situated within a network of wider significance. These things are encountered as ready-to-hand, and do not come into ‘presence’ or ‘occur’ as entities or objects at all; they are subordinated to ‘the manifold assignments of the “in-order-to” ’ (1962: 98).

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Now consider the possibility that my work is interrupted because I do not find the hammer in its proper place, or the tools have been put away incorrectly, and the hammer I have selected is insufficiently weighty for the task. I have a problem, and the hammer shows up for me in a new way (even in its absence). It can be ‘grasped thematically’ and considered theoretically, with specific properties that can be abstracted, such as its weight, and its occurring in a particular location in space and time. The hammer is now apprehended or perceived as present-at-hand, and it is towards entities such as this that we normally direct our philosophical attention. Heidegger’s significant move here is to offer the present-at-hand as a derivative mode of encountering objects, with ready-to-hand constituting the more basic mode that grounds it. Entities occur as present-at-hand only when our ordinary mode of being, in which we are engaged in ‘concernful dealings’ with things (103), is interrupted; when the ‘referential context’ or ‘totality’ is broken (105). This originary mode of being-in-the-world is not to be considered mechanistic, or primitive, for all that it is ‘pre’ or ‘non-thematic’ (107). In fact, ‘circumspective absorption’ in a ‘totality of equipment’ is inseparable from the essence of our shared being as humans – or rather, using instead of ‘humans’ Heidegger’s own neologism – as Dasein, or ‘being-there’. We should not think of the Dasein as indicating a sort of object or a particular being in space and time, but rather the phenomenon, at any point in time, of our already being familiar with and absorbed in what Heidegger calls a ‘world’. This must not be confused with the world of nature, or an ‘external world’; it is the network of relations of significance within which it is possible for humans to engage in meaningful activity – the kind of activity (such as dressing, working, and getting around) in which most of our lives is spent (Dreyfus 1991a: 67). Heidegger’s choice of terminology here calls into question conventional distinctions between subject and object, or mind and world. Dasein is always already taken up in a particular existential project. The world is always presupposed before any particular entity becomes present to consciousness. Heidegger acknowledges the methodological inspiration of his phenomenology to be Husserl’s well-known rallying cry, ‘To the things themselves!’ (Heidegger 1967: 50). Husserl takes over from his teacher Brentano the term ‘intentionality’ to denote the directedness of mental acts towards objects. For Husserl the directly intuited acts and experiences of consciousness constitute the phenomena, the things of which we are immediately aware, prior to any hypothesis or explanation about the objects of these experiences on the level of metaphysics or theory of knowledge (Husserl 2001: 166, 170). Heidegger argues that Husserl’s form of intentionality is derivative of

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a more basic mode of comportment towards things that needs to be described in terms of Dasein, the world, and being-in-the-world; these phenomena are the focus of his method. To readers conversant with discussions of what has come to be termed a ‘phenomenological’ approach in RE, what precedes will not seem particularly familiar. A brief treatment of the reception of ‘phenomenology’ into RE might help to make clear the ways in which Heidegger’s approach differs from that of his former teacher, Husserl. It has been acknowledged that phenomenology made its way into RE via a number of quite different routes in the academic study of religion, and that engagement with Husserl – its originator as a philosophical approach, as opposed to a loosely defined methodology within the study of religion – has been indirect, at best (Barnes 2001; Erricker 1999; Jackson 1997). Nevertheless, two key elements of Husserl’s thought find their way into the more sustained discussions of the ‘phenomenological’ approach in RE, usually credited to their development by Ninian Smart and before him the work of Gerardus van der Leeuw (1967). First, there is the epoche, the ‘suspension of judgement’, which involves bracketing out what Jackson summarizes as ‘the assumptions of common sense and the natural sciences’ – or what elsewhere might be called our ontological assumptions – so that our attention is then turned to the objects of consciousness (the things themselves) exactly as they are given in consciousness (Jackson 1997: 15). In Erricker’s summary, ‘bringing to one’s study the concepts and constructs of one’s worldview is seen as a distortive influence upon the results’ (1999: 77). The second principle is the ‘eidetic vision’. There is less clarity among the three interpreters cited about what this means. Erricker refers to ‘the capacity to gain an intuitive understanding of the phenomenon which can also be defended as “objective” knowledge’ (1999: 77) and Jackson refers to the ‘abstracted “essences”, each of which is distinct from every other’, which ‘are pure phenomena present to consciousness’ (1997: 15). Barnes refers to ‘the capacity to grasp the essence of religious phenomena by means of empathy and intuition’ (2001: 450). A few ideas are conflated rather hastily by each writer. The eidetic vision in Husserl’s thought is an attempt to move from the contingent facts of consciousness towards their ‘ideal’ structures. Although given in subjectivity, such structures or essences are atemporal or abstract, and thus the proper objects of a scientific description of consciousness (Husserl 2012: 14). Intuition refers to the way in which such structures can be known – they are not inferred or deduced, but through Husserl’s phenomenological method of ‘free’ or ‘imaginative variation’ can come to be ‘seen’ as essential to their object (Husserl 1973: 341–9).

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Although empathy is a significant concept for Husserl, what has been preserved as ‘empathy’ in ‘phenomenological’ RE owes more to developments in what Gadamer calls ‘romantic hermeneutics’, and particularly the work of Schleiermacher, who also influenced van der Leeuw (LaMothe 2004: 143). Ninian Smart (1986) is in fact careful to distinguish ‘typological phenomenology’, which he attributes to Husserl and van der Leeuw, from ‘structural empathy’. Since I will be discussing romantic hermeneutics in Chapter 3, suffice it to say for now that this use of ‘empathy’ (which in its development in ‘phenomenological’ RE gets wrapped up with Husserl’s method of bracketing) concerns our coming to understand the minds of others. Husserl’s phenomenology, on the other hand, although it does not deny the reality of an external world (and in fact relies on a concept of empathy with other minds to ground its ‘objectivity’ as a scientific discipline) does not seek to cross to the ‘outside’ of subjective experience to which consciousness is directed. The outside is bracketed off, and the structures of intentionality itself, the pure ‘inside’, are Husserl’s object of philosophical interest. Liam Gearon, I think, puts it clearly when he writes that ‘Smart took a complex discussion from philosophy, as it had filtered through “phenomenology” and applied it very loosely to the understanding of religion as a phenomenon’ (2014: 107). This looseness affects the reception of ‘phenomenology’ into school RE, where the term has come more often to be associated with a hybrid array of social scientific approaches to the study of religion that were imported from the new academic field of religious studies via Smart’s work (most notably the typology of the ‘dimensions’ of religion) than with any particularly sustained engagement with Husserl’s thought. Nevertheless, scholars of RE persist in attempting to interpret ‘phenomenological’ pedagogic practice in light of fragments of Husserl’s thought, which has necessitated this chapter’s engagement with Husserl and vindication of a certain understanding of phenomenology. Gearon also observes, incidentally, that Husserl would have been surprised at the use to which the phenomenological method had been put in the study of religion. There is considerable biographical ambiguity concerning the extent to which Heidegger saw his phenomenological work as a development of or departure from Husserl’s (cf. Carman 2006). Gadamer and Heidegger both liked to claim that they had adhered to Husserl’s methodological principles more rigorously than he; although Husserl tried to bracket out his ontological assumptions, one assumption remains unchallenged. In his desire to ground a scientific discipline on absolute certainty, Heidegger argues, Husserl has taken over unchallenged

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the Cartesian distinction between the privileged objects of consciousness and the outside world (Heidegger 1985b: 107). For Dasein there is no inside and outside, and the mode of givenness of beings as present to consciousness  – the subject/object mode – emerges from a more primordial intentionality which consists of Dasein’s comportment towards a situation, a ‘being-amidst’ or ‘originary transcendence’ rather than a transcendence from mental state to object (Heidegger 1984: 135). A phenomenology that seeks to return to the things themselves, then, cannot assume Husserl’s model of intentionality and prioritize the immediately present objects of consciousness: intentionality itself has to be accounted for. This cannot be achieved by bracketing considerations of being from the phenomenological analysis, but takes us right to the question of the meaning of Being, or of how it is not that beings exist, but that they show up for us as such. To adhere to the method of phenomenology, then, is to find oneself thrust into the project of fundamental ontology. In Heidegger’s words: Ontology and phenomenology are not two distinct philosophical disciplines among others. These terms characterise philosophy itself with regard to its object and its way of treating that object. (Heidegger 1962: 62)

2.3 Ontology – false friend? The way that the term ‘ontology’ is currently being used in RE might provide some barriers to understanding what Heidegger means by a fundamental ontology, although it is not in all cases incompatible. Andrew Wright and Elina Hella, in a contribution to the long-running debate about the connection of the two RE attainment targets, ‘learning about’ and ‘learning from’ religion, argue that the connection between the two is ‘fundamentally ontological’ (Hella and Wright 2009: 53). This is cashed out in three relatively distinct but related ways in their paper: (i) as part of a ‘critical realist’ curriculum that is concerned with the being of real objects, (ii) in a transformational sense: ‘the personal and spiritual development of pupils is dependent on their understanding of the good life, and hence their understanding of ultimate reality’ (58), and (iii) in the references to a ‘non-dualistic ontology’, which allude to key presuppositions of the ‘phenomenographical’1 research approach endorsed by Wright and Hella. Wright and Hella draw extensively on the early work of influential critical realist Roy Bhaskar (1998, 2008), but also depart from him in some important ways. In what follows I will draw out one important difference, which is the implication in their paper and Wright’s accompanying work that RE questions are sui generis

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ontological, in that they are ‘about the meaning and purpose of life and hence of the nature and structure of the ultimate order of things’ (53). As for the first of these (i), the paper sets out the assumption that humans share a desire to live the ‘good life’, and that doing so requires ‘truthful living’, or living in accordance with the way the world actually is. RE, therefore, is important in the curriculum since it has as its object of study the nature of reality; our beliefs about the meaning and purpose of life are ‘intrinsically linked to the realistic question of the ultimate order of things’ (58). Bhaskar’s influence is explicitly acknowledged in the paper: the ‘holy trinity’ of critical realism (ontological realism, epistemic relativism and judgemental rationality) is invoked to illustrate the tension ‘between ultimate reality and our various accounts we offer of ultimate reality’, which is ‘the driving force behind critical religious education’ (Hella and Wright 2009: 62). In other words, there is a way things are in reality, regardless of whether there are or ever were any human minds around to know about it (ontological realism). The ‘way things are’ need not be a fixed framework, but can imply a dynamic or changing reality with more or less enduring causal structures. Our knowledge of reality is always mediated by particular situations and circumstances, which lead to a plurality of conflicting accounts of the way things are (epistemic relativism). This does not lead us (Wright and Hella argue, following Bhaskar) into an arbitrary, or ‘post-modern anti-realist’ situation where one account of reality is as good as any other: although our knowledge, particularly on such contested issues as the ultimate order of things, is always subject to (even potentially radical) revision, and certainly never complete, we can nevertheless make informed critical judgements and (crucially) justify the adoption of a particular standpoint on reality in the face of alternatives (judgemental rationality). Bhaskar’s emphasis on ontology constitutes, at least in its early stages, a response to an incorrect conception of scientific practice that he observes to be widely held in the scientific community (2008); this is based on a Humean conception of empiricism, where the objects of scientific knowledge are claimed to be observable events, or phenomena. This ontology, Bhaskar argues, does not adequately account for what scientists actually do. The ‘constant conjunctions of events’ aimed at in Humean positivism rarely occur in nature. Scientists rather contrive to bring about events by creating closed systems for their experiments, which demonstrates that they are not seeking only to generalize causal laws from what can be observed, but are interested in ‘counterfactuals’, or real possibilities that could happen if circumstances were different, and ‘transfactuals’, or ‘what is really going on irrespective of the actual outcome’ (Bhaskar 2008: 51). Such

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activity is only meaningful if we postulate, below the empirical surface, ‘real structures which endure and operate independently of our knowledge’ (2008: 25). Because such real structures operate in nature (and, for that matter, in society) in open, rather than closed, systems, in which other generative mechanisms are also at play, we cannot assume that the real causal powers of objects will always be actualized even in apparently like situations, or that actualized powers will be observable (Sayer 2000: 11–12). Bhaskar thus proposes a hierarchy of real objects, where the realm of ‘empirical’ (observable) events is contained and exceeded by the realm of ‘actualized’ causal powers, which is itself contained and exceeded by the realm of the Real, which contains the causal powers of a totality of objects, whether such powers are actualized or not. It is knowledge of such powers, Bhaskar argues, that we aim for when we postulate scientific ‘laws’. The real practice of the natural sciences thus calls for and assumes this ‘structured ontology’, rather than the ‘flat ontology’ of Humean ‘empiricism’. Not only are the objects of scientific knowledge, for Bhaskar, not ‘phenomena’, they are also not human constructs imposed on the phenomena. Bhaskar conceives his work as a refutation of various forms of ‘idealism’, which he attributes to assorted postmodern or post-structuralist positions, but also to Kant (Bhaskar 2008). Although Kant’s layered account of human knowledge is at least ‘structured’ rather than ‘flat’, Bhaskar’s critique is that Kant privileges epistemology over ontology. He thus commits what Bhaskar terms the ‘epistemic fallacy’, the reduction of the real world to our knowledge of it. Bhaskar argues in a ‘transcendental’ move – analogous to, but contra, Kant – that the stratified nature of our knowledge is best explained by positing the stratified nature of the reality that conditions it. In proposing a combination of ontological realism and epistemic relativity, Bhaskar avoids – in his view – the positivistic mistake of requiring knowledge to be grounded in unmediated ‘objective’ access to reality, but also the postmodern or interpretivist mistake of claiming that our perceptions or constructions of reality are all that we have access to. Reality has both an ‘intransitive’ and a ‘transitive’ dimension: the transitive dimension, the realm of man-made scientific theories and constructions, has essential explanatory power, but does not exhaust reality; there are also the ‘intransitive’ objects, which ‘for the most part ... are quite independent of us’ (ibid.: 22). Translated into the realm of RE, what Wright argues is that ‘ultimate reality’ (which might be God, or simply the totality of natural objects) constitutes the intransitive dimension of RE, and the claims offered by various religions or alternative faith positions constitute the transitive dimension (Wright 2007a: 131–57). The religious beliefs of others do not, therefore, exhaust the subject

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matter of RE; there is also a contested aspect of objective reality towards which those beliefs are intentionally directed (or that they are about) (183–4). In light of Bhaskar’s structured ontology, Wright does not hold out much hope that pupils’ unreflective acceptance of their own immediate experiences, what you might call the ‘empirical’ realm of RE, will be able to account for the nature of ultimate reality (200). Penetrating the mysteries of ultimate reality will require a deeper reckoning with ontology, which can be facilitated through an encounter with variation, with those who have had different experiences, or with the teachings of the world religions – relatively discrete objects in the transitive dimension which result from the sustained attempts by communities over time to grapple with the intransitive dimension of ultimate reality. In Bhaskar’s thought, the interactions of objects in open systems on one stratum of reality give rise to ‘emergent’ objects on a higher stratum whose activity can no longer be explained with reference solely to the stratum from which they emerged (Bhaskar 2008: 113; Sayer 2000: 12–13). The stratified nature of reality thus gives rise to the stratification of our knowledge into different disciplines or practices – physics, chemistry, biology, psychology etc. – where a higher stratum cannot be reduced or fully explained in the language of the strata below. We cannot account for human decision-making, for example, or the operation of social institutions, solely with reference to the operations of subatomic particles, even though that more basic level gives rise to the levels above. What Wright sometimes appears to claim is that ultimate reality, whatever its nature, constitutes the most basic stratum, or bottom level of reality, and thus gives rise legitimately to its own corresponding knowledge domain (2007a: 26–7). Interpreted this way, the subject matter of RE is ‘ontological’ in much the same way that the subject matter of any legitimate curriculum area is ‘ontological’, in that RE concerns the existence (or non-existence), and the nature, of real objects. The second claim for ontology identified above (ii) is that learning in RE has personally transforming implications (Hella and Wright 2009: 61). At this point I will explore the more general insights drawn from Marton’s phenomenography. These apply in Marton’s work to all learning, but Hella and Wright may also intend a sui generis claim, in that the ‘ontological’ questions raised specifically in RE are also ‘existential’ questions; this will be discussed later in the chapter. Hella and Wright support their ontological claim with reference to Bernard Williams’ clarification of the concepts of truth and truthfulness (Hella and Wright 2009: 58; Wright 2007a: 7–28); a concern with the truth of things will also entail that the learner lives truthfully, although Wright does touch on the possibility of a

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‘metaphysical rebellion’ (27). Given its focus on the good life, RE brings us to question ourselves and our relationship with the world, so that we will change in our being through studying it. It is worth noting that Williams does not intend the ‘truth and truthfulness’ distinction taken over by Wright to be primarily or even specifically connected to questions of transcendence and ultimacy (Williams 2002). Interpreted as a more general insight into the ‘transformative’ aspects of any encounter with truth or the self-understanding entailed in all events of learning, this aspect of Hella and Wright’s ‘ontology’ accords with the hermeneutic account that is developed throughout this book. Finally there is the reference to a ‘non-dualist ontology’ implied in all learning (iii). Although the ‘phenomenographical’ research methodology (Marton and Booth 1997; Marton and Tsui 2004) is cited as the source of this expression, it is unpacked in critical realist terms. Bhaskar’s important caveat is that the acknowledgement of both ontological realism and epistemic relativity does not lead us to posit some sort of inaccessible ‘external world’ or a Kantian realm of things-in-themselves. Ontology and epistemology are not divided. The dualism rejected in critical realism is a dualism of self and world, or between knower and that which is known. Human communities, and individual human beings, are contained or inscribed within the broader totality of real objects. Thus to endeavour to learn about reality, or others, or the world outside of me (in RE terms, learning about religion) is inseparable from learning about myself, or forming my own critical beliefs (learning from religion). In learning about myself, I also learn about reality, and vice versa. My beliefs change because I dwell among real objects and, being real, I am constantly affected by them. I am not as convinced as Hella and Wright that the non-dualistic ontology proposed by Ference Marton for phenomenography is completely or adequately captured in this development of critical realism. Marton writes, in a rejection of some of the dualistic presuppositions of social constructionism: Thus in the book the dividing line between the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’ disappears. There are not two things, and one is not held to explain the other. There is not a real world ‘out there’ and a subjective world ‘in here’. The world is not constructed by the learner, nor is it imposed upon her; it is constituted as an internal relation between them. There is only one world, but it is a world that we experience, a world in which we live, a world that is ours. (Marton and Booth 1997: 13, original italics)

It is in the claim that the world is ‘constituted’ as an internal relation between knower and what is known that Marton’s ontology seems to exceed what is

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offered in critical realism. The term ‘world’, for example, as Marton uses it here, does not have a ready analogue in critical realist thought, although (as we have seen) it does in Heidegger’s phenomenology. The use of ontology here to invoke a non-dualistic approach to learners and what is learnt resonates with Heidegger’s positing of Dasein, in which time-worn internal/external and subject/object distinctions break down. Thus when Gadamer, following Heidegger, looks for an ontology of understanding, what he is after is not some capacity of an acting subject to master an external object, but an ‘event’ that ‘happens to us over and above our wanting and doing’ (Gadamer 2004: xxvi). Dall’Alba and Barnacle, in accounting for what they call, following Ron Barnett, an ‘ontological turn in Higher Education’, have drawn on Heidegger to elaborate the dangers of the prevalence of a narrow epistemological conception of education. A focus on the transfer and acquisition of knowledge and skills, which are considered to be instrumentally valuable, has led to the neglect of the recognition that ‘knowing is inhabited; we cannot step outside it. But it is also transformative – it can change who we are’ (Dall’Alba and Barnacle 2007: 682; see also Barnett 2004). My interpretation, finally, of a claimed sui generis ontological status for RE derives from Wright’s implication that whenever questions of a specifically ontological kind are asked, we inevitably find ourselves asking metaphysical questions about the totality, or the whole, or the ground of all reality, which leads us to the subject matter of transcendence or ultimacy. The question remains open as to whether this is some divine being, the totality of the natural or material order, or something else (Wright 2007a: 18–22). One way of unpacking this is in terms of Bhaskar’s stratified ontology: Wright could claim that there is a distinct stratum of reality, perhaps the ultimate or transcendent, with which RE is concerned. However, something more subtle appears to be going on. Wright also appears to argue that our reflection on the stratification of knowledge – i.e. the growing awareness that ‘some aspects of reality are more significant than others, and some mechanisms are more basic than others’ (26) – naturally leads us to reflect on the ‘ultimate organizing force, structure or being that explains the parts of reality in terms of the whole’ (26–7); in other words, not only might RE be ‘ontological’ in that it is concerned with real objects, it might also be the curriculum home of a specific movement within our understanding of ontology; there are a set of higher order metatheoretical questions, Wright might argue, that are the specific concern of the curriculum area of RE. Wright’s invocation here of the hermeneutic part-whole dialectic is tantalizingly underdeveloped, and in general Wright does not in his oeuvre

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unpack the way in which he takes this movement of thought (wherever it leads) to be universal rather than specifically religious. This is an issue that I will unpack in my more focused discussion of his work in Chapters 6 and 7. For now it ought to be observed that in Bhaskar’s early work at least, ‘ontological questions’ are not simply or even necessarily questions about ‘ultimate reality’. They are ‘transcendental’ questions about what our knowledge-acquiring practices presuppose about the nature or structure of the intransitive domain, or what must be the nature of ‘the real’, such that we can have the kind of knowledge of it that we do. All knowledge-producing disciplines have an ontology, whether they choose to make it explicit or leave it implicit (Bhaskar 2000: 23). Even those who would like to reject ontology in favour of epistemology inevitably reveal themselves to have some sort of ontological commitment, so that (for example) if we take the view that discourse exhausts what is real, this still represents a claim about what is (Bhaskar 2002: 37). Ontology is not therefore in critical realism a specific concern of theology or religions. Wright might, however, take some encouragement from Bhaskar’s later development of critical realism into the ‘philosophy of metaReality’, in which he argues that following through a realist ontology will eventually lead us to a concept of something that we could call God, if we were that way inclined (see Bhaskar 2000, 2002, 2012). Bhaskar’s interest in spiritual questions has been accompanied by a ‘spiritual turn’ in critical realism, where other critical realist colleagues have subsequently felt encouraged to address questions in theology and the philosophy of religion (Archer et al. 2004; Hartwig and Morgan 2011). Significantly, the theologian Alister McGrath has made explicit use in his systematic theology both of Bhaskar’s earlier ‘basic’ critical realism and the later turn to metaReality (McGrath 2006, 2011). However, the spiritual turn has encouraged much criticism within critical realism not only from those who reject Bhaskar’s spiritual conclusions in favour of a Marxist materialism (cf. Craven 2009) but also from those who have drawn dramatically different conclusions about the relationship between critical realism and God. For example, Archer et al. (2004) have marked a significant point of departure where they argue that the principles of ‘basic’ critical realism can underlabour for theology or philosophy of religion as much as for other academic enquiries (not least to establish equal access for confessional perspectives to a debate in which atheism has become an assumed starting point), but they do not endorse the turn to metaReality as a further development within critical realist ontology. Although Wright has engaged recently with the spiritual turn (Wright 2011a, 2011b), he has explicitly distanced himself from elements of Bhasksar’s

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metaReality, particularly Bhaskar’s claim that metaReality is ‘ontologically inclusive’, rather than (as Wright argues) an ontologically exclusive account that is incommensurable with (for example) the claims of Trinitarian Christianity (Wright 2013: 99–117).

2.4 Critical realism and phenomenology To sum up the preceding section, Bhaskar offers a robust, yet critical, realism: there are, for Bhaskar, some mind-independent objects (ontological realism), even if our access to them is always unavoidably particular and situated (epistemic relativity). Bhaskar intends critical realist theory to underlabour for the other disciplines by clearing away some of the theoretical confusion about their own ontological or epistemological suppositions that have come to stand in the way of their progress. In so doing he is unashamedly metaphysical, as is Wright in employing his work. In focusing on the real – on mind-independent objects – both Bhaskar and Wright concentrate on our attempts to discover what is, without questioning the meaning of Being, or asking how it is that beings are revealed or given up. They thus do not venture into the realm that Heidegger designates as properly ontological, but remain in the realm of the occurrent or present-at-hand (what Heidegger designates the ‘ontic’ realm). Bhaskar does not consider this to be a weakness. Although his engagement with Heidegger is most often tangential, Bhaskar identifies him as an ‘anthropist’ and ‘irrealist’, arguing that he commits the epistemic fallacy of reducing reality to our knowledge of it (1993: 205 and passim). I would question this charge. Certainly, the ontological priority of the ready-to-hand does not imply either that the properties disclosed in the present-at-hand are the inventions of the human mind, or that if Dasein ceased to exist then material objects would also cease to exist (Heidegger 1963: 269). Heidegger does not object to the observations that the objects encountered in the present-at hand do not depend for their existence on Dasein, that such objects would persist in a space where Dasein ceased to be, that they existed prior to their discovery by Dasein, or even that they constitute the ontic possibility of Dasein’s existing in reality. Only if we interpret ‘world’ as designating the totality of real objects or entities is any epistemic fallacy entailed in Heidegger’s claim that if there was no Dasein, there would be no world (Tonner 2010: 73). But recall that Heidegger’s ontological aim is to account not for how objects come to be in their present state, but how they are disclosed or are

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intelligible. A key theme to employ here is Heidegger’s notion of the ‘ontological difference’: where metaphysical ontologies (like Bhaskar’s) concern themselves with entities or ‘beings’ (which can exist quite independently of Dasein or the human mind), Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is concerned with the being of entities (which, qua disclosure, cannot be thought of separately from Dasein) (Michel 2012: 211). Heidegger develops a relational account in which Dasein and Being belong together. It is in this context that, without Dasein, there might be certain wooden objects with metal on top, but there would be no hammers (Dreyfus 1991b: 10), and it is in the phenomenon of ‘absorbed coping’, of Dasein’s being taken up in a prior understanding of a totality of involvements, that the derivative mode of disclosure of the present-at-hand (rather than the real existence of certain entities) is grounded. It is to this phenomenon that we need to turn if we wish to give an account of intentionality. Heidegger directly questions any attempt to found this account on (what a critical realist might term) an emergent, stratified theory that begins with ‘material nature’ and moves upwards towards ‘consciousness’, or rather what Heidegger argues is in fact most proximal to us, the ready-to-hand (1963: 131–3). For Heidegger, theorizing in the ontic realm does not bring us to a more basic starting point for comprehending consciousness; to be considering entities even in the terms that are given in critical realism is to have taken in advance a particular stand towards being and to have affirmed a world in which entities of a particular kind might be disclosed. In his most sustained engagement with Heidegger, Bhaskar argues for the ontological priority of the present-at-hand. This goes a little further than the attribution of the epistemic fallacy, but rests on the assertion that the core principles of critical realism – including existential intransitivity, structure, and non-anthropocentricity – are ‘presupposed’ in exactly the kind of activities associated with absorbed coping: ‘ The agent must know that if she hammers too hard the door might – and, at a certain limit, will – break’ (1993: 229). This yields, in Bhaskar’s view, an ‘immanent critique’ of Heidegger’s ontology, as such activities are impossible without these prior presuppositions about the ‘ontic’ realm. This claim seems to misconstrue what is contained in our prior understanding. Our ‘forehaving’ (Vorhabe), the ‘inexplicit grasp that we have of the entire framework and environment in which we are operating’ (Blattner 2007: 14) grounds ‘the appropriation of an entity in explicit interpretation’. But note how the explicit or articulable interpretation is the derived or grounded, rather than the originary, mode. What is contained in our preconceptual

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practice or ‘mastery’ of a situation calls for explicit (and necessarily never total) interpretation when something goes wrong, or breaks down, or even simply when we have an academic desire to construct knowledge about it, but is non-thematic in its average everyday operation and, as a grasp of the whole, will always exceed such explicit accounts. The world is always already known to us, or understood by us, but this is captured in our always already being oriented or disposed towards things in particular ways rather than in our holding, consciously or unconsciously, a particular set of beliefs. Our prior grasp of the whole is ontological rather than propositional; our understanding, as Blattner (2007) puts it, is an activity rather than a ‘what’, and thus Heidegger writes that Dasein ‘comports itself understandingly towards that Being’ (1962: 8). This part of the chapter has done its work if it has shown that some elements of Bhaskar’s use of ‘ontology’, introduced to RE through Wright, are situated within a quite different project from that intended within the ‘hermeneutic phenomenology’ of this book. These two projects are not incompatible, in the sense that Bhaskar’s ‘underlabouring’ project can make a powerful claim to solve many of the problems that occur in theorizing and research practice in the ontic realm, and will be drawn on as analytical tools in the second part of the book. But I am not prepared to leave things there. In a later metaRealistic development of his thought – which does in places reference Heidegger, although Bhaskar does not attribute to him any particular role in this later turn – Bhaskar argues for an idea of ‘non-dual transcendence’ that bears a striking resemblance to Heidegger’s originary transcendence, and claims that an outcome of critical realist thought is the acknowledgement of this state of absorbed coping as a more basic state of human being than the ‘dualistic’ state of theorizing about the present-at-hand (Bhaskar 2002: 89– 90, 140–2 and passim). Interestingly, this development has been criticized by other critical realists as an ‘irrealist’ reversal of Bhaskar’s earlier thought about starting points and fundamental problems (cf. Craven 2009). One further observation remains: relatively early on in his thinking, Bhaskar observes that, ‘a hermeneutical circle (C1) is a condition of any act of enquiry, whether in natural or social science, and that another (C2) is a condition of any dialogue or intersubjective communication at all. In these senses hermeneutics is indeed, as for example Gadamer has claimed, universal’ (Bhaskar 1998: 153). It is within this rather perfunctory acknowledgement that the whole endeavour of a philosophical hermeneutics is passed over by Bhaskar, whereas much is in fact conceded here to Heidegger’s project.

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2.5 What is a philosophical hermeneutics? Heidegger identifies three senses in which the term ‘hermeneutic’ can be attached to his project. First, he acknowledges that the phenomenological description as a method is itself inseparable from interpretation (1962: 62). Heidegger acknowledges that he was captivated by Husserl’s concepts of ‘categorial’ – afterwards ‘essential’ – intuition, but clarified that we never simply perceive or intuit something (Carman 2006: 102–5). While it is certain that there is a directness to our apprehension of the phenomenon (Heidegger refers to this as a ‘grasping’ of the phenomenon), we do not merely see it, but take it as something. This means that we cannot have as our phenomenological aim the freedom from prejudice that Husserl desired, and no phenomenon can be considered selfevident. It is precisely because we already operate within an understanding of being that we are able to thematize being in any way at all, and when we point (as the phenomenologist must) to the ‘things in themselves’ we do not step outside of this original understanding. An important accompanying insight is that the phenomena are not to be confused with representations that are immediately apparent to consciousness. Phenomena are, in fact, often not immediately apparent, but must be made (or allowed) to show themselves. Dreyfus offers that ‘we dwell in our understanding like fish in water’ (1991a: 35). It is precisely because our ‘average understanding’ of being is always presupposed, because it is in fact so close to us, that it is so difficult for us to articulate explicitly. Phenomena can also be covered over by the history of our (mankind’s) attempts to thematize them, so that when we think we are grasping ‘the things themselves’ we are actually concealing and distorting the very phenomena which, if we could only attend to them, would strike us ultimately as clear and powerful. This is made all the more difficult by the fact that the traditional understanding of a phenomenon will always be part of our initial or guiding understanding when attempting to bring it to mind more clearly, so that our understanding ‘may be so infiltrated with traditional theories and opinions about Being that these remain sources for the way in which it is prevalently understood’ (Heidegger 1962: 25). Although our initial understanding must necessarily guide interpretation, traditional ways of understanding may be found wanting in the event of disclosing the phenomenon. Rather than offering a conservative approach, then, Heidegger encourages us to be open to the possibility of radical transformation: in finding what we were looking for, we come to have a new understanding of what it was that we were looking for in the first place.

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The phenomenology of ‘average everydayness’ ought not therefore to be equated with a ‘common sense’ philosophy. Describing our everyday understanding of being requires nothing less than a ‘destruction of the history of ontology’ (Heidegger 1962: 44), something that his teacher Husserl was unable to do for all his emphasis on getting back ‘to the things themselves’. The whole of Heidegger’s project, in its various diverse manifestations from the systematic science of BT to the poetical near obscurity of his later writing, can be seen as a number of connected attempts from different directions to pose the question of the meaning of Being in ways which are not distorted by traditional accounts (and the language that goes along with them) of ‘objects, subjects, language, space, truth, reality, time, and so on’ (Dreyfus 1991a: 36). In the preceding chapter I attempted to demonstrate the ways a hermeneutic phenomenology of education might try to get at a phenomenon – the character of the happening of education as event – while at the same time revealing the traditional epistemological conceptions, metaphors of construction and tendencies towards technological thinking that work to obscure it. The second way in which the term ‘hermeneutic’ can be applied to Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology is that hermeneutics is not only our means of access to the phenomenon but also itself shows up as a phenomenon; as our attempt to interpret being-in-the-world discloses the understanding of the world already present in all comportment, ‘this hermeneutic also becomes a “hermeneutic” ’ (1962: 62). There is a circularity implied here, in that our access to the essence of interpretation itself comes through interpretation. But this is not a vicious circle, and Heidegger intends a substantial positive claim. For all of their preoccupation with hermeneutical problems, and attempts to specify methodological procedures for ensuring correct interpretation, the human sciences have in his view neglected the insight that interpretations are always of something already understood. The question of interpretation in the human sciences is thus ‘ “hermeneutic” ’ only in a derivative sense’ (62). Here Heidegger sets out the area of enquiry of a specifically philosophical hermeneutics – the attempt to thematize explicitly a phenomenon of understanding which is ‘rooted in the existential constitution of Dasein’ (195), and which is in the background of all local or prescriptive accounts of interpretation. For Heidegger’s phenomenology, then, hermeneutics is our way of initially going about things which itself also shows up along the way as a phenomenon that calls for description. The third use of ‘hermeneutic’ in Heidegger brings us back to the project of fundamental ontology that we initially embarked

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on. Hermeneutics is ontologically significant in that the condition of being-in-the-world is a hermeneutic condition: Dasein is ‘the understanding which interprets’ (62). The ‘understanding’ that is fundamental to Dasein should not be thought of cognitively, propositionally or representationally but is rather the ontological condition for the more primordial kinds of activity upon which explicit interpretations are founded. As I go through life I am aware of particular situations or experiences that strike me as confusing or unfamiliar; I am conscious of needing to actively interpret them, and take a stand on their significance. I am also aware of significant branch points – occasions where I need to make a major choice, such as in considering a change of career or relocation to a new town – that will affect the person that I will become. But focusing on such significant subjective moments obscures Heidegger’s insight that all of our ‘concernful dealings’, whether we are tapping our fingers to the tune on the radio as we drive to work, or focusing our attention on vacuuming as close as possible to the skirting board, presuppose that we have taken a stand on the possibilities held out to us by the world in which we dwell. This is not a decision at the level of conscious belief but on the ontological level of orientation towards things. The nature of the stand depends on the ‘work-world’ that is closest to our current activity. If I am considering whether to spend the next couple of hours marking year seven exercise books or preparing more carefully for tomorrow’s year nine lesson (that I should have to choose!), this process of decision-making takes place against the backdrop of my prior commitment to what it means to be a teacher working in a secondary school. If I delay that decision and go and make myself a cup of tea, my masterful coping with teabags, kettle and spoon presuppose my recognition of kitchens as affording me certain possibilities for concernful action. The thematized ‘existential decisions’ I introduced in the preceding paragraph – big decisions about my future career, relationships, marriage or having children, difficult moral choices – take place against a backdrop of orientations that are not in most cases consciously recognized or chosen. It is the fact that morality already has a claim on us, albeit something ‘concealed’ and not ‘mastered’, that offers the possibility of there being a significant moral choice (Heidegger 2011a: 116). This is not to say that I am ‘determined’ in my dealings with the world. Understanding is the projection of possibilities for action – ‘Dasein ‘“sees” possibilities, in terms of which it is’ (Heidegger 1962: 188). This means that as my understanding changes, the possibilities change; thus does my understanding of myself and of the world change. This is not a possibility

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that is ‘grasped thematically’, but which is constitutive of my being – so that as understanding develops, Dasein is transformed. Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle is therefore tied to the ‘temporality’ of Dasein. He argues that our theoretical mode of experiencing time, in a ‘present’, is tied to the derivative realm of the present-at-hand, where entities become ‘occurrent’. He writes that ‘an entity for which, as Being-in-the-world, its Being is itself an issue, has, ontologically, a circular structure’ (1963: 195). Dasein’s being is a state of ‘becoming’: Dasein is ‘thrown’ into a situation where possibilities are already given and understanding always precedes purposive action; yet these possibilities are ‘projected’ on to what is to be understood, and always run ahead of Dasein. Interpretation is never an end point or the acquisition of some knowledge that stands outside of understanding – ‘it is rather the working-out of possibilities projected in understanding’ (189). ‘In interpretation, understanding does not become something different. It becomes itself ’ (188). We are well equipped now to see how Gadamer considers that ‘philosophical hermeneutics’ – the attempt to give an account of the event of understanding – constitutes the universal philosophical problem (Gadamer 1977a, 2004: xxvii). What precedes is sufficient to demonstrate how the hermeneutics Gadamer takes over from Heidegger is not concerned with prescription; he does not wish to specify a method for avoiding misunderstanding – as was the preoccupation of the various attempts at hermeneutic science that preceded – but to develop Heidegger’s expansion of the hermeneutic situation to all human experience. Gadamer seeks to explain what we mean when we say that we have understood, and to take seriously the transformational implications of recognizing understanding as an event of human becoming. A key implication of this is that philosophical hermeneutics cannot be considered an epistemological tool, method or technique. It offers an account on the level of ontological transformation, of how we are always ‘thrown’ into an interpretive situation and how in understanding we are taken up into Being.

2.6 Hermeneutics in religious education – the story so far The direction of travel in this chapter – from Heidegger towards Gadamer – has enabled the ontological and universal aspects of philosophical hermeneutics to come to the fore, and laid the groundwork for a more detailed discussion of Gadamer’s dialogic development in the following chapter. Treatments of

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hermeneutics in the literature of RE in England and Wales – even where there has been explicit engagement with Gadamer – have not grasped these two elements of his thought. Even in Wright’s work – as I will demonstrate in the following chapter – where there has been the most sustained engagement with Gadamer, the specifically ontological significance is not fully recognized, leading to a denial of the universality and a restriction of the scope of hermeneutics. In the literature of RE in Europe, on the other hand, a broader scope for hermeneutics has been acknowledged (see, for example, Lombaerts and Pollefeyt 2004, and in particular Hermans 2004 and Meijir 2004). My task in this book is to address this neglect rather than explain its causes. However, I could speculate that the more hospitable European engagement with Gadamer is due to more than simply a more widespread academic understanding of a ‘continental’ philosophical tradition that has been decisively influenced by Heidegger. The German educational ideal of Bildung, to which Heidegger and Gadamer both offer explicit and purposeful contributions (cf. Nicholson 2011 and other contributions to Fairfield 2011), is a distinctive feature of much European educational discourse, whereas in Anglo-American contexts it is only beginning to experience a renewed interest, and here originally from scholars with what might be considered a distinctly ‘international’ perspective (cf Biesta 2002; Gur Ze’ev 2002). Heidegger is virtually ignored in the philosophical treatment of RE in England and Wales, except as an implicit influence on various ‘postmodern’ positions in the debate (see my treatment of Erricker in the following chapter, as well as Wright 1996, 2004 and Gearon 1995). Therefore where hermeneutics is invoked in the context of England and Wales, it is not as a development of these rich educational and philosophical traditions but rather as an imported methodological concern from an academic discipline considered to pertain to the subject matter that is being taught. Such concerns are local and restricted in their scope. Thus, for example, and most commonly, we find discussions imported from theology and textual criticism more generally in relation to the issue of the interpretation of the Bible and other sacred texts. See, for some examples of relatively non-specific engagements with textual hermeneutic considerations, Watson and Thompson’s consideration of ‘Interpreting Scripture’ (2007) or Stern’s considerations (2006) of questions of text and context or the reader’s meaning against the meaning of the text, or Cooling (2013) for a consideration of Gadamer (albeit via Thiselton) in relation to the teaching of the Bible. Such treatments ignore the ontological insight that hermeneutical considerations, educationally speaking, go all the way down, as it were, and do not simply

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concern the targets to which they have been most commonly applied in the academic disciplines. A more sustained engagement by Robert Jackson identifies a decision to limit the scope of hermeneutics to specific questions within the social sciences, explicitly eschewing Gadamer’s universal formulation (1997: 142). Jackson’s ‘interpretive’ pedagogy for RE promises a hermeneutic development of the broadly ‘phenomenological’ tradition he critiques (1997; 2004). An alternative name by which his work is known – the ‘ethnographic approach’ (cf. Jackson 1996; Francis 2012) – indicates the direction of travel from academic religious studies and, more specifically, a methodology of the social sciences. The philosophical aspects of Jackson’s argument are filtered through anthropologists and ethnographers of religion who have engaged with Gadamer’s work (such as Jacques Waardenburg), and his discussion of Paul Ricoeur is largely tangential or filtered through the work of Clifford Geertz, but, nevertheless, part of his critique of Husserl’s phenomenology could be seen to resonate with Gadamer’s key insights. In relation to Husserl’s aim that the knower must ‘bracket out’ his assumptions or presuppositions, Jackson writes that there are problems with the notion of epoche, of distancing or putting into parentheses one’s presuppositions, as a methodological tool. The phenomenologists of religion introduced above say little about how to achieve epoche, and there is evidence from their own work that they could not go much beyond the intention to achieve it. (1997: 21)

Note that Jackson’s criticism of the concept of bracketing out prejudice is not, at this stage, a philosophical one. Rather than questioning the desirability or possibility of bracketing, Jackson questions its efficiency as a methodological tool in the phenomenological arsenal. He goes on to elaborate the role of the Christian theological agenda in giving names to phenomena and ordering the hierarchy of meaning structures in phenomenological approaches. However, his claim that ‘most of the phenomenologists mentioned above use the terminology to designate individual phenomena derived from their Western and Christian backgrounds’ (21) suggests that, for Jackson, this form of prejudice is undesirable but not inevitable. He clarifies that it is the ‘intention’ of laying one’s presuppositions aside that is important, ‘even though one can probably do no more than try to be aware of at least some of one’s presuppositions’. The aim of trying to be thus aware is viewed as ‘a step towards impartiality’ (24). Although Jackson draws attention to the difficulty of ‘bracketing’ one’s preconceptions, it seems that the defining preoccupation of ‘phenomenological’

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approaches with seeking to understand a culture in its own terms remains a theoretical ideal for him. Rather than rejecting epoche, Wilna Meijir observes, Jackson opts for a ‘pragmatically mitigated version’ (2004: 23). This view can be seen expressed in a rather confused statement by Waardenburg, who Jackson presents as a model for his ‘new phenomenology’: Hermeneutics, as the art of understanding what other people mean – the art of ‘reading’ their expressions – appears to be one of the basic concerns of the humanities. It should be distinguished from philosophical hermeneutics as developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, which reflects on more theoretical problems underlying the practice of understanding. Scholarly hermeneutics is concerned primarily with the understanding of other people’s expressions in their own terms, rather than with the scholar’s self-understanding in his or her own terms. (Waardenburg 2007: 89–90)

It seems that Waardenburg misrepresents the distinction between philosophical and methodological hermeneutics as a distinction concerning what is to be understood, or the terms in which that which is to be understood is interpreted, rather than between an ontological description and a prescriptive methodology. In his subsequent elaboration of the edification of the student, which draws on the work of Richard Rorty, Jackson appears to acknowledge the ontological transformation that would render any event of understanding an event of selfunderstanding, but ultimately stops short of this, arguing rather that taking a stand on a question or issue tends to go hand in hand with ‘grasping another’s way of life’, but not inseparably so (1997: 130). Jackson’s attempt to separate religious learning ontologically into a distinct neutral moment of empathy that can then be (optionally) followed by a critical evaluation of what has been understood renders him susceptible – for all his recognition that the formation and critique of ‘values’ is an essential component of RE – to Wright’s critique of ‘romantic’ hermeneutics (discussed in the following chapter). Although Jackson acknowledges that ‘the process of interpretation has to start where the interpreter is at’ (1997: 24), he elaborates that the ‘hermeneutic circle’ to which he is referring in his work – filtered through van der Leeuw and Dilthey – is Schleiermacher’s part-whole model of textual interpretation. Jackson’s rejection of phenomenological ‘essentialism’ turns on the dynamic tension between the individual religious believer (the part) and the religious community considered as a whole. This is not, then, Heidegger’s universal formulation of hermeneutics, which concerns the projection and transformation of the interpreter’s fore-understanding and (let us recall) ‘breaks right through’

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this circle (Gadamer 2004: 296), but a dialectical account of the subject matter of RE, which turns on the interpretive relationship between individuals and the communities to which they belong. Jackson offers this formulation in opposition to positing the ‘essence’ of a religion, which is advocated by his phenomenological predecessors. Although Jackson makes an attempt to elaborate the ‘conversation’ between a student and this subject matter (1997: 139–40), his attention has been more successfully focused on offering an ethnographic account of the subject matter of RE than on a hermeneutic conception of a student’s encounter with that subject matter. Wilna Meijir thus observes that ‘his first object in view is not a concept of (religious) education, but a sound (ethnographical, methodological) model for presenting religions’ (2007: 125). In response to these criticisms, and perhaps also due to a subsequent exposure to European debates about RE, Jackson has subsequently acknowledged the relevance of Gadamer’s work for his own project (2004: 92–4); however, some aporias remain largely unresolved and serve as an indicator of the work that must be attempted by a hermeneutic account of RE’s educational aspects. Jackson’s account, while nodding at the hermeneutic demands of the classroom context, largely restricts itself to the relationship between interpreters and their religious subject matter (and it is the subject matter itself that needs to be grasped as a ‘part-whole’ relationship between believer and community). This, as Meijir recognizes, is largely neglectful of a rich constellation of hermeneutic relations that takes in teacher, students and object of study (this will be pursued further in Chapter 4). Additionally (and Meijir employs Gadamer to emphasize this critique) Jackson limits his treatment of the dialogue with ‘tradition’ to the particular community in which a believer is situated. This is almost, I think, a semantic pitfall within the discipline of religious studies, where scholars are accustomed to discussing particular ‘religious traditions’; certainly it is not only Jackson within the RE debate who limits his discussion of tradition in this way. For Gadamer, tradition designates the ‘effective history’ that constitutes the standpoints of participants in a dialogue; it is their shared tradition that makes mutual understanding possible. The event of understanding in RE is thus an (ontological, transformative) event that occurs ‘within’ tradition: this will be further explored in the following chapter. Finally, Jackson’s focus on the representation of religion embroils him in a long-running debate with Wright where each characterizes the other as either nominalist (Wright’s attack on Jackson) or essentialist (Jackson’s response to Wright) in their conception of their object of study. This high profile debate amounts to a diversion in the literature of RE in the UK and can be attributed to

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a failure to make a distinction between the partners in a dialogue and the subject matter that is at issue between them. The dialogic nature of the hermeneutic situation will be developed in Chapters 3 and 4, and this particular disagreement between Jackson and Wright can then be addressed in Chapter 7.

Note 1 Once again nomenclature vexes us. Ference Marton, the originator of the phenomenographical method, takes pains to clarify that phenomenography as an empirical research approach ought not to be considered much more than a ‘cousin by marriage’ of phenomenology (Marton and Booth 1997: 117).

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3.1 Introduction This chapter will explore Gadamer’s dialogic development of Heidegger’s hermeneutics, which will be related to the much disputed Kehre in Heidegger’s thought. Most significantly, this treatment will enable us to consider two possible criticisms of philosophical hermeneutics, namely that it either (a)  subjectivizes understanding and thus renders the interpreter the sole arbiter of the truth of the text or (b) yields authority to the text and thus constitutes a conservative or uncritical approach to interpretation (cf Warnke 1987: 107–38 for the twin criticisms of conservatism and subjectivism). These criticisms will be exemplified through discussion of two writers on RE: Andrew Wright, who engages in detail with Gadamer’s work but ultimately finds him conservative and must supplement philosophical hermeneutics with a ‘critical hermeneutics’ derived from Habermas, and Clive Erricker, who does not criticize Gadamer but appropriates hermeneutics within a ‘relativist’ framework and thus (I hope to demonstrate) misrepresents him. Each thinker contributes significantly to the RE debate: Wright raises important considerations about the intentionality of the subject and the inadequacy of prevailing ‘empathetic approaches’; Erricker recognizes the historicity of the subject matter of RE and signposts the inevitable decentring of specifically ‘religious’ concerns that this work will also endorse. However, each thinker neglects the ontological reach of philosophical hermeneutics and resorts in the end to an epistemological interpretation; Gadamer’s rich concept of the ‘tradition’ is also shown to be undeveloped in both writers, although it is integral to understanding how philosophical hermeneutics might reshape our understanding of the educational situation.

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3.2 Heidegger, language and the Kehre A distinct difference in style characterizes the more deliberately poetic expression of Heidegger’s later works, such as ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ or ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ discussed in Chapter 1, and the more technical endeavours of the earlier BT, discussed in Chapter 2. There is considerable debate as to the extent to which we should consider there to be two ‘Heideggers’ – what Richardson (2003) has called ‘Heidegger I and Heidegger II’ – or whether we should see Heidegger’s work as a continuous attempt to get at the same question from different stylistic directions. Certainly, in light of Heidegger’s own claim that every philosopher only really thinks one essential thought (Heidegger 1976: 50; see also Barkty 1979), I have already noted that Heidegger never abandons his attempt to think through the meaning of Being. However, proponents of the ‘two Heideggers’ thesis are inspired by the fact that Heidegger himself pronounces a turning or reversal in his work, the notorious ‘Kehre’, which is the source of much contestation in Heidegger scholarship (Hemming 1998; Löwith 1995; Richardson 2003). This is often characterized as a turn from focusing on the existential analytic of Dasein (this term is often abbreviated by critics to the human ‘subject’, despite Heidegger’s efforts to avoid this identification) towards that ‘clearing’, the ‘there’ in which Being is given. The earlier project might be thought of as being concerned with ‘meaning’, whereas the latter turns to the ‘truth’ of Being (Hemming 1998: 395). This has led in some cases to a characterization of the two Heideggers as either a postmodernist who privileges the human subject as the site of the happening of being, or a thinker who, in his turn towards Being as such, as something which is ‘given’ to man, resorts to mysticism or returns to his theological beginnings (Lowith 1995; Philipse 1998: 172–210, 296–317). This polarization of Heidegger’s thought can account for the significant diversity in the critical reception of Heidegger, but does not accurately construe the ‘relation of being and human being’ that is consistently implied in Dasein throughout Heidegger’s work (Linge 1977: li). In his discussion of Heidegger’s influence on Gadamer, Linge observes that Heidegger’s claim that ‘of course only as long as Dasein is (that is, only as long as an understanding of Being is ontically possible) “is there” being’ (1962: 255), seems to incur precisely the charge of subjectivism that Heidegger seems to criticize in BT. But note from the discussion in the preceding chapter that Heidegger’s charge of ‘subjectivism’

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depends on the separation of subject and object that Heidegger seeks to avoid in his designation of Dasein. Viewed from this perspective, it is the technological desire to conceive an objective and stable reality, and thus make ‘man’s vision and thinking … determinative of truth and being’ (Linge 1977: xliix) that represents the ‘humanization’ of Being in Western thought. Dasein (beingthere), in contrast, is thrown, already out ‘there’ in Being. In the later Heidegger, the image of the clearing does appear to supplant the designation of Dasein, but note (albeit with due consideration for the ‘iridescence’ of Heidegger’s later poetic thought) that the clearing is also identified with Dasein (Heidegger 2011b). Rather than supplanting Dasein, then, the image of the clearing draws out what was already present in Heidegger’s neologism: the recognition that ‘it is not we who grasp being, but being that grasps us’ (Linge 1977: lii). In a letter that is now published as a forward to the classic text on the two Heideggers, Heidegger urges that the thought of ‘Heidegger II’ can only be arrived at by way of ‘Heidegger I’, and that ‘the thought of [Heidegger] I becomes possible only if it is contained in [Heidegger] II’ (Richardson 2003: xxii). I concur with Hemming (1998) in reading Heidegger’s proclaimed Kehre not as marking a chronological or biographical reversal or stage in his own thought, but as an ontological event, a disclosure of the essence of thought. Nevertheless, the stylistic shift in Heidegger’s biography is vital here: where hermeneutics had been such a distinctive feature of Heidegger’s earlier work, this concern is dropped in favour of a focus on the redemptive power of poetry, where language is brought to centre stage as the ‘house of Being’ (Heidegger 2011b: 161). This claim is echoed in Gadamer’s assertion that ‘Being that can be understood is language’, but Gadamer does not resort stylistically to the poet as saviour. In what follows I will argue that Gadamer’s development of Heidegger and his incorporation of the Kehre into his hermeneutic ontology – in the form of his adoption of a dialogic model of understanding – is of the utmost significance: he conceived of Truth and Method (TM) as an attempt to bring Heidegger’s experience of the ‘turn’ to expression in the hermeneutic consciousness (Gadamer 1977b). Recall, from Chapter 1, Heidegger’s critique of the ‘aestheticization’ of the work of art. The work is not at the disposal of the critic, as if he could then make detached judgements about its appeal or quality. Rather, the work for Heidegger is an ‘event’ in which truth happens and claims the interpreter. Being is also ‘eventful’, and rather than designating substantive objects in reality it designates the happening of the disclosure of truth. In Chapter 2 we saw how the ontic realm, in which objects ‘occur’ and to which particular properties can be ascribed, is derivative of an originary mode of being into which Dasein is thrown and in

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which objects are always already understood against a background that can never be fully thematized. In his later concentration on language as the site where Being comes into view, Heidegger is at pains to resist any suggestion that language is a tool which is at the disposal of a human subject or that it maps a pregiven reality and could be employed to convey ‘information’ about that reality (Scheibler 2000: 110). Rather, he writes most famously that ‘Die Sprache spricht’, language speaks (2001b: 189). Whereas BT points us to the originary transcendence of Dasein, the later Heidegger argues that ‘language itself is raised into the clearing of Being’ (2011b: 179) and points us to the ‘original saying’, which is a showing or pointing, but also holds in reserve ‘the unsaid’, which is at the same time ‘concealed as something unshowable’ (2011c: 294–5). Language then comes to be identified with the background region of Being where entities are uncovered or disclosed. Scheibler (2000) points out that this does not constitute a turn away from the human being: language ‘needs’ human beings, who must also ‘listen’ to language. Additionally, it is Heidegger who first identifies that ‘[a] speaking from language can only be a dialogue’ (cited in Scheibler 2000: 114).

3.3 Dialogue and the fusion of horizons Gadamer writes that ‘language has its true being only in dialogue, in coming to an understanding’ (2004: 443). He echoes Heidegger in that this coming to an understanding is not the purpose of language, but it is what happens in and through language: it is not a willed action that uses language as a means or tool but ‘a life process in which a community of life is lived out’ (ibid.). Gadamer thus argues that dialogue is ‘primary’ in the hermeneutic phenomenon and returns to the Platonic dialectic as his original model for the hermeneutic situation. The ontological significance of this model has often been neglected in educational literature (cf. for clarification Biesta 2012b: 95–6), although some attention is occasionally paid to Gadamer in discussions of the value of the ‘Socratic dialogue’ or of the need to get students ‘into dialogue’ in the classroom (see Lefstein 2006 for an illuminating treatment of the variety of conceptions of dialogue in educational practice). It is not Gadamer’s intention to point out that understanding is facilitated through dialogue, so that students will understand better if we can encourage them to have more conversations or conversations of a particular kind (although this is undoubtedly sound pedagogical advice). Rather, the point is that whenever understanding occurs, this event has some of the essential dialectical characteristics of a conversation.

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I once attended a conference devoted to the issue of ‘student engagement’ in higher education. In discussions with different contributing students it became clear that they felt their tutors had a specific and narrow view of dialogue, not considering their students to be ‘engaged’ unless they were making frequent verbal contributions (asking questions) in lectures and seminars. A common feeling among the students was that they did not need to engage their teachers in verbal conversation in order to be ‘in dialogue’ with them; they were ready to open themselves up to be challenged by what teachers had to say to them, and to test teachers’ ideas against their own prejudices. This was a dialogue with the tutor that could occur without the tutor’s being present, for example in students’ discussions with peers about a given subject matter. This experience captures something of what is meant by the ontological significance of dialogue. A student who does not engage with a teacher verbally or even at a particular moment when the teacher is bodily present might nevertheless be responding to a question or ‘making her speak’ in the way that Gadamer suggests we ‘make the text speak’ in the hermeneutic event (discussed later in this chapter). The characteristics of dialogue or conversation exhibited in the hermeneutic phenomenon are as follows: the interpreter is in an I-Thou relation with what is to be understood, which is a relationship of mutual ‘belonging’ (Gadamer 2004: 352). The ‘Thou’ is not an object but has something to say to us; we cannot therefore discover what the text ‘contains’ by the strict application of an objective method any more than we learn from a partner in dialogue by applying behaviouristic predictions about their likely responses (352–3). We come into dialogue because there is something about which we want to know the truth and we recognize that our interlocutor has something to teach us about it. Acknowledging the value of our partner means being open to the possibility that the dialogue will proceed in a direction that we had not anticipated, that we will discover something new or come to realize the inadequacy of our initial understanding – we will be ‘transformed’ by the encounter. Thus Gadamer argues that we risk ourselves or our prejudices in dialogue (2004: 299), and he contrasts this with an encounter where we empathize with the other, and see where they are coming from, so to speak, but hold ourselves separate from them. Such an encounter, which claims complete understanding of the other prior to any engagement, is more akin to a form of domination than a dialogue, and ‘robs [the other’s] claims of their legitimacy’ (354). The paradox of the Meno might be invoked at this point (Gallagher 1992: 194–7; Hermans 2004). The well-known question at issue in Plato’s dialogue is that if what is to be learnt from the other is already known, then it need

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not be learnt, but if it is unknown, then how can learning begin, since we do not even yet know what it is we need to learn, or how to recognize another’s authority to teach it to us? Gadamer’s solution here echoes arguments of Heidegger’s: firstly, that what is to be interpreted is already understood, and secondly that the hermeneutic circle is not a vicious circle, but an enabling one. It is here that Gadamer responds to what he terms the ‘enlightenment prejudice against prejudice itself ’ (2004: 273). It is only if we operate according to a model of a ‘disinterested’ or ‘objective’ approach, where we bracket out our preconceptions, that understanding cannot get underway. Without some sort of pre-understanding (here Gadamer echoes Heidegger’s Vorhabe or fore-having), some projection or anticipation of what the other has to say to us, we do not come into dialogue. Thus while we do well to remember that at least some of our pre-judgements will likely be found inadequate in our engagement with the other (it is in this experience of being ‘pulled up short’ that Gadamer locates the possibility of a truly educative or transformative understanding), it is our prejudices that bring us into dialogue. Once again it is worth acknowledging the ontological, as opposed to epistemological, significance of what is offered here: prejudices are not judgements, but are rather ‘biases of our openness to the world’ (Gadamer 1977a: 9). Gadamer adds that ‘it is not so much our judgements as it is our prejudices that constitute our being’ (ibid.). To revise a prejudice in dialogue is, then, to be transformed through that dialogue. In fact, as I hope to show in my discussion of Wright, the idea of ‘revising’ a prejudice in dialogue assumes a subjective activity that does not get things right ontologically. It is better to say that, through dialogue, our prejudices are transformed. Dialogue is characterized by its structure of question and answer. ‘No assertion is possible that cannot be understood as an answer to a question’ (1977a: 11). To enter into dialogue is to bring a question, and the dialogue continues – provided interlocutors are not speaking at ‘cross purposes’ (2004: 360) – with the interplay of question and answer. The dialogue continues as long as what is under discussion shows itself to be ‘questionable’: ‘To question means to lay open, to place in the open. As against the fixity of opinions, questioning makes the object and all its possibilities fluid’ (361). The connection with our prejudices here is that they determine not only the finite nature of what we already know, but the ways in which what is new can show up as unfamiliar or questionable, or as calling for interpretation. This is how Gadamer employs the image of the horizon: to have a horizon means both to have ‘a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision’ but also ‘not being limited to what is nearby but being able to see beyond it’ (301). To have a horizon is to be able to ask

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questions. I will emphasize again the ontological character of the question: we do not actively choose to have particular questions, ‘we say that a question too “occurs” to us, that it “arises” or “presents itself ” more than we raise it or present it’ (360). The question also has a universal significance as it is ‘implicit in all experience’ (356). ‘Recognising that an object is different, and not as we first thought, obviously presupposes the question whether it was this or that’ (ibid.). We should not, therefore, restrict the hermeneutic phenomenon to the literal conversational situation, but extend the ‘logic of question and answer’ into the originary intentional realm elaborated in the preceding chapter. Both participants in a dialogue bring their own questions. Inasmuch as the dialogue is underway, there is some convergence in the nature of these questions, but inasmuch as dialogue is necessary, these questions are not identical. It is not as if the participants bring to the dialogue the same clearly articulated question, but a different answer, and then examine the answers together to see which will ultimately be found wanting. There are, for Gadamer, no ‘eternal’ or ‘transcendent’ questions with which all humans have always been grappling, so that we could turn to a partner or text and compare their answer to that question with our own. Gadamer here refers to R. G. Collingwood, who observed that his philosophical colleagues, thinking in terms of transcendent questions, always found the answers presented in the ancient texts to be wanting in comparison with their own (Aldridge 2013; Collingwood 1978). Gadamer further invites a contrast between questions and ‘problems’. Problems tend to be attached to a particular disciplinary method; they have a predefined set of solutions, and the task of the thinker is to choose between them. A problem thus restricts the way in which the subject matter is able to show up – it cannot be disclosed in ways which have not previously been defined or set out by the method. Questions, on the other hand, allow for unexpected discoveries (Thiselton 2007: 3–7; Weinsheimer 1985: 8). Because of its ontological connection with prejudice, the question can accommodate mystery and indeterminacy, where the ‘problem’ cannot. Recall, following Heidegger’s development of the ‘fore-conception’ discussed in Chapter 2, that our prejudices are projected in advance without being thematized; the relevant judgements cannot be brought to consciousness prior to the event of dialogue (it is characteristic of a ‘method’ that it works to specify and thus limit the ways in which the matter at hand can be revealed), and questions must be teased out or brought to light as the dialogue continues. Thus there is a provisional element to the question – it contains an inherent limitation, in that it is my question, but this ownership is also an enabling factor, as it contains the motivation for my engagement in dialogue. Problems, on the

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other hand, have ‘fallen out of the motivated context of questioning’ (Gadamer 2004: 369). Advocates of what is often called ‘Socratic questioning’ in the classroom would likely encourage students to ask more questions about the object of study, or to identify explicit questions. Again, this is undoubtedly good pedagogic practice. However, this epistemological focus does not capture the importance of Gadamer’s assertion of the question’s role in dialogue: to have a question is already to be oriented in a certain way towards the subject matter. If we further attend to the fluid, transforming and indeterminate nature of the question in dialogue, then to be a questioner means to be in question, as we risk transformation in terms of our orientation towards the subject matter: ‘To reach an understanding in a dialogue is not simply a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were’ (2004: 371). What becomes clearer by this point is that the situation of ‘belonging’ in understanding does not only consist of the I-Thou relation, but incorporates in a threefold constellation the two interlocutors and the subject matter that is at issue between them: ‘To conduct a conversation means to allow oneself to be conducted by the subject matter to which the partners in the dialogue are oriented’ (360–1). A similarity with the well-known ‘instructional triangle’ of teacher, student and subject matter will be explored in the following chapter. Interpreters of Gadamer who have not fully grasped the ontological significance of the question (I count Wright among them) have tended to fall foul when interpreting Gadamer’s much-debated claim that ‘the goal of all attempts to reach an understanding is agreement concerning the subject matter’ (2004: 292). Much of the criticism of Gadamer the ‘conservative’ can be forestalled in the recognition that agreement – the word here that Gadamer uses, Einverständnis, is translated by one colleague as ‘mutual adequacy of comprehension’ (Aldridge 2013: 80) – ought not to be identified with ‘consensus’. Claims that Gadamer is too trusting of the text, or too ready to submit himself to its authority, seem to conflate the idea of agreement in dialogue with Gadamer’s call for us to take seriously the text’s claim to truth, and therefore interpret agreement as assent to the substantive truth claims made by the other – which Gadamer expressly rejects as ‘agreement in content’ (2004: 293). That we would not seek to agree with any and all texts in this way seems so much to have been taken as selfevident by the majority of Gadamer’s defenders that it is rarely explicitly pointed out in the literature. To agree in the sense of understanding does not require that we share the same opinion or sentiment; in fact, this would appear to be

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ontologically inadequate for understanding, since to feel something together with someone is not necessarily to understand them, any more than achieving complete empathy with a historical figure, and thinking what they thought in their historical situation, would furnish us with anything that might be called historical understanding (Aldridge 2013; Collingwood 1956: 289). An etymological sensitivity might draw our attention to the topological character of Einverständnis, where agreement here means to stand in a related way to the subject matter. This is not an agreement in judgements, but a transformation in our orientation that makes possible the continuation of dialogue. Agreement, then, should be understood in terms of the question: there is a convergence between interlocutors over the way in which the subject matter should be interrogated. This convergence is an event of understanding, and implies a transformation of each interlocutor and an emergence of the subject matter that is at issue between them; something new ‘henceforth exists’ (Gadamer 2004: 385). The question, then, is used by Gadamer to indicate an orientation towards the subject matter; in the event of understanding the two participants in dialogue come to share an orientation towards the subject matter, or arrive at a shared question. But vitally this does not mean to be of the same mind. Gadamer’s topological imagery is essential here: the event of understanding is characterized as a ‘fusion of horizons’; each participant’s horizon is transformed so that they can now stand in a related way to the subject matter – but they do not now stand in the same place. The participants do not share the same perspective, but each has altered their perspective so that it can to a certain extent accommodate the perspective of the other. My qualification ‘to a certain extent’ is important here. A difference in orientation or perspective is maintained in this fusion; the subject matter is thus still ‘in question’. To achieve a shared question is, therefore, to arrive at a new stage of questionability, and thus the dialogue continues – ‘the art of questioning is the art of questioning even further – i.e., the art of thinking’ (2004: 360). Understanding is best conceived along the lines of the Heideggerian ‘becoming’ discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. It is an event which has no clear beginning or end, and is always already underway and ‘on the way’. It is because we understand one another that dialogue continues. The crucial point here is that the ‘agreement’ entailed in the fusion of the horizons is a necessary condition for any sort of substantive disagreement about the truth of the matter; we must agree in order to meaningfully disagree. Otherwise we are simply talking at cross purposes. Agreement is therefore both the presupposition and the aim of any dialogue; that we are in dialogue means that we are already in agreement, that the dialogue continues means that the other’s perspective

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remains sufficiently unfamiliar to make agreement our continuing aim. ‘Every conversation presupposes a common language, or better, creates a common language’ (371). We come full circle when we acknowledge that ‘the fusion of horizons that takes place in understanding is actually the achievement of language’ (370). It is thus that Gadamer is able to resist any sort of incommensurability thesis, or (as he puts it) ‘linguistic relativism’ (1977a: 15). He points to the human experience of learning a language. Speaking different languages does not mean that we live in different worlds – rather, the possibility of learning a new language, of having our ‘linguistic circle’ merge with another’s, offers the possibility of expanding our world. We return here to the eventful ontology of understanding. Language is not a tool at the interpreter’s disposal. Understanding is a productive event in language that encompasses both participants in the dialogue and that which is at issue between them: ‘It is not that the understanding is subsequently put into words; rather, the way understanding occurs – whether in the case of a text or a dialogue with another person who raises an issue with us – is the coming-intolanguage of the thing itself ’ (2004: 370–1).

3.4 Dialogic/textual priority There is some disagreement among interpreters as to whether Gadamer prioritizes ‘conversation’ or ‘reading’ as his hermeneutic model (Gallagher 1992: 320–31; Ricoeur 1981; Rorty 1982). In asserting the ‘primacy of dialogue’ I have taken Gadamer at his word (2004: 363). It is easy to see, however, how the charge of ‘textualism’ gets off the ground: I have argued in Chapter 2 for Heidegger’s radical reappropriation of hermeneutics – extending its significance from the conventional situation of the interpretation of written texts to the defining characteristic of human being. Readers coming to TM will then perhaps be surprised by the amount of space Gadamer gives to discussing the more traditional situation of the interpretation of written texts; this could seem like a retrograde step, and could certainly constitute a barrier to comprehending the universal scope he intends for hermeneutics. Gallagher accepts the charge of textualism and supplements Gadamer with an alternative ‘educational’ model of hermeneutics that has been influential on the central argument of Chapter 4 of this book (Gallagher 1992: 319–52). Nevertheless, I maintain that it is Gadamer’s dialogic relationship of belonging to the subject matter that is of particular significance for the educational

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endeavour, and I must thus offer another explanation for Gadamer’s apparent textual preoccupation in TM. Again taking Gadamer at his word, I would emphasize that although Gadamer takes the problem of hermeneutics to be universal, he views the scope of TM as more limited, that is, to ‘inquire into the consequences for the hermeneutics of the human sciences of the fact that Heidegger derives the circular structure of understanding from the temporality of Dasein’ (2004: 268). In other words, having acknowledged Heidegger’s decisive contribution to widening  the scope of  hermeneutics, Gadamer’s intention in TM (while he everywhere acknowledges that hermeneutics is a ‘universal’ situation) is to elaborate the transformation that Heidegger’s ontology implies for the specific discussion of how the human sciences can contribute to the pursuit of truth. This does not, Gadamer is keen to point out, entail a new textual critical ‘method’, but rather a recognition that ‘method’ will always be found wanting in the event of truth. In later writing, Gadamer accepts that he overplayed his hand somewhat in this narrowing of scope; in setting up the human sciences in opposition to the ‘methods’ employed in the natural sciences, for example, he admits that he was largely unaware of parallel ‘hermeneutic’ turns that were going on in the field of natural sciences even as he was writing TM (Gadamer 1997: 40–1). However, it does explain why Gadamer occupies himself exclusively with the business of the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) – understanding historical events, relating to tradition, and reading and interpreting the classics. This interpretive decision can, I believe, be further justified by employing one of Gadamer’s own hermeneutic principles, the ‘fore-conception of completeness’ (Gadamer 2004: 363). Gadamer’s substantial justification of dialogue as the primary hermeneutic model makes sense in context if we understand that it is to be employed in situations not hitherto considered dialogically – that is, the interpretation of texts – so dialogue is the universal hermeneutic model, with reading constituting a special case of dialogue. Gadamer acknowledges that ‘a text does not speak to us in the same way as does a Thou. We who are attempting to understand must ourselves make it speak’ (2004: 370). But here he is considering a common-sense objection to the application of his model, rather than wheeling back significantly from characterizing the text as an instance of the Thou. A text still has something to say to us. We do not go into dialogue in order to learn ‘about’ our partner, but to learn ‘from’ them. Similarly, when seeking to understand a text we do not only apply appropriate methods of textual and historical criticism but take seriously its claim to truth, which puts us in a similar mutual relationship of belonging, a relationship which is similarly

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oriented around a shared subject matter that is between us. The logic of question and answer still holds. The text brings its own question – Gadamer is at pains to distinguish this question from an author’s question (296) – and the interpreter must still be prepared to be put into question by the text; the text holds a power to pull the reader up short when his or her projection turns out to be inadequate to the task of understanding. Both the text’s and the author’s meaning will be transformed in the fusion of horizons. Having argued for a dialogic model over ‘textualism’, I must explain the continued importance of the term ‘text’ in this book. In the following chapter I intend to develop a sophisticated picture of the complex of hermeneutic circles in the educational event in which the term ‘text’ is made to do a significant amount of work. In educational literature the terms ‘object of study’ and ‘subject matter’ tend to be used interchangeably to denote that object towards which a student’s attention is immediately directed in learning (and with which they are, according to the preceding argument, brought into dialogue). I would prefer to keep the term ‘subject matter’ to denote that which is at stake or at issue between the participants in this dialogue (what Gadamer calls die Sache). Although these two components of the hermeneutic situation must be kept distinct, the significance of die Sache is not often acknowledged in educational literature – so even in Chris Higgins’s sensitive hermeneutic treatment of the intentionality of the classroom, no distinction is made between the object of study and the subject matter in the sense of die Sache (Higgins 2010). Therefore, following Gadamer, I use the term ‘text’ to denote the object of study or the stimulus that calls for interpretation in the classroom situation. Lest I be accused of returning to a model of reading, I will emphasize that the term ‘text’ denotes a wide variety of possible partners in dialogue, so that even when Gadamer takes over a characterization of our relationship with the world as ‘reading the book of nature’, we find that the relationship with this text is a dialogic one; our very understanding of nature is a reciprocal event that is the achievement of language (Gadamer 2004: 182; see also Wachterhauser 2002: 66–7).

3.5 Wright’s criticism – Gadamer the conservative1 Wright’s sustained engagement with Gadamer stands more or less alone in the literature of RE in England and Wales to date (Wright 1997, 1998, 2000, 2007a). The early three-stage heuristic planning model Wright offers for critical RE (2000, see also Hookway 2002) explicitly adopts a Gadamerian picture with

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some similarities to that sketched out above, although it has now been largely superseded by a ‘variation theory’ approach that draws on the work of Ference Marton (Marton and Booth 1997; Marton and Tsui 2004; Hella and Wright 2009; Wright 2007a). RE learning must first engage the horizon of understanding of the pupil, then present the religious horizon of meaning; the final stage Wright refers to as the ‘engagement between horizons’. Significantly, Wright – following Habermas – rejects the notion of a fusion of horizons and argues that Gadamer’s hermeneutics must be supplemented by a critical perspective. I hope to demonstrate in what follows that Wright takes over from Habermas a neglect of the ontological, dialogic and universal aspects of philosophical hermeneutics, and thus tries to make a truncated and distorted version of Gadamer fit into his broader ‘critical realist’ framework; what is left of Gadamer after this treatment plays little significant role in his later pedagogical project. My concern here is primarily to respond to Wright’s charges of dangerous conservatism; in a later chapter (seven) I hope to show that the version of Gadamer developed here, which stands up robustly to Habermas’s criticisms, offers a significant improvement to Wright’s overall project. Wright acknowledges some of the ontological aspects of Gadamer’s project elaborated above – for example, that philosophical hermeneutics attempts an ‘analysis of the nature of understanding itself ’ rather than offering a method for correct understanding (Wright 2007a: 185). Wright also affirms and develops the dialogic character of understanding, citing the need for the text to ‘assert its own truth against one’s own fore-meanings’ (Gadamer 2004: 272). Wright takes over Gadamer’s critique of the ‘bracketing’ of romantic hermeneutics, and is thus able to offer a powerful criticism of ‘empathetic’ approaches to RE. Wright finds a ‘romantic’ hermeneutic to be explicit in so-called  ‘phenomenological’ approaches, and (possibly) latent in the interpretive approach of Robert Jackson and the Warwick project (Wright 2007a: 192–200). What characterizes this hermeneutic is a pedagogical intention to ‘bracket out’ consideration of the truth of another’s beliefs in favour of an understanding that consists of an empathy with our partner in dialogue. The first intervention of philosophical hermeneutics here would be to demonstrate that empathy cannot account for understanding: our prejudices concerning what the text has to say to us cannot be bracketed out because they are themselves the enabling elements of understanding. Gadamer thus argues that the ‘transposition’ implied in the event of understanding is of a particular kind – we put ourselves in another’s shoes, if you will, but it is we who are in their shoes. This is why Gadamer argues for a fusion, rather than an identification, of horizons (cf Aldridge 2013).

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The second contribution of Gadamer’s critique of romantic hermeneutics is to argue that bracketing is not only impossible but undesirable: Wright offers that ‘no amount of empathetic engagement with a text can answer the question as to whether what it has to say is actually true’ (2007a: 185–6). It is easy to see the appeal of a bracketing of truth in the context of the growing multicultural and religious diversity in the classroom that accompanied the development of the ‘phenomenological’ approach in school RE: taking the question of the ‘truth’ of students’ beliefs off the table arguably reduces the risk of an explicit conflict over truth claims arising in the classroom (see Gearon 2014: 100–10 for a discussion of the appeal of an apparently ‘neutral’ methodology). However, Gadamer argues that some risk is essential in dialogue, as we must be prepared for our partner to call into question our prejudices or our fore-conception of the subject matter. Minimizing this risk requires deciding in advance that our partner has nothing to say to us, and this decision has negative educational and ethical consequences. Educational, because it is tantamount to deciding in advance that we can learn nothing from our partner about any shared interest or concern, and ethical because it constitutes a refusal to take seriously the other’s claim to truth. What originally looked like a tolerant approach to classroom dialogue now shows up as one of its deficient forms (this will be picked up in the following chapter). The most significant contribution of Wright’s development of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is his attention to the intentionality of the RE dialogue (what the dialogue is about). He identifies that ‘the crucial hermeneutical question to be resolved concerns the proper object of study’, and in his critique of the romantic hermeneutic he properly restores the threefold ‘communion’ in which the two participants in dialogue allow themselves to be conducted by a shared subject matter; it is this subject matter (die Sache) which falls out of the dialogue in the so-called empathetic approach to RE. The variety of possible shared objects of concern in an RE dialogue is bewildering, and could include: ‘religion’ as a universal phenomenon, religious experiences, God, an individual’s own beliefs or the shared beliefs of a religious community, and so on. Wright adopts from Bhaskar’s critical realism the distinction between the transitive and intransitive dimensions of reality, as well as the depth structure of the empirical, the actual and the real, to offer a sophisticated analysis of the possible objects of study, and I will draw on these tools in my own discussion in Chapter 7. However, in identifying the ‘transcendent-order-of-things’ (2007: 201) as the proper object of study for RE, I will later argue (Chapters 6 and 7) that Wright neglects another element of Gadamer’s intentional picture, which is the phenomenon of the ‘emergence’ of the subject matter.

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In his recognition that hermeneutics involves transformation into a communion in which the interpreter’s horizon of meaning is transformed, as well as the dissolution of the traditional relation of questioner and object into one where the questioner is herself interrogated, Wright appears to acknowledge some of the ‘eventful’ character of understanding (186). However, this is not fully acknowledged throughout the account that follows. Wright points to the need for prejudices to be ‘modified’, and to a ‘trial and error approach’ (Wright 2007a: 186; see also Bleicher 1980: 108–16), and argues that the interpreter ‘will attempt a new projection in the light of the lessons learnt as a result of her initial encounter’ (186). My point here is not to pick Wright up on how rigorously he heeds Gadamer’s specific language, but to warn of a danger that dogs the interpretation of a strictly philosophical hermeneutics. The event-like ontology of Gadamer’s account of understanding is in tension with a conception of interpretation as an epistemological task for which the active subject tries out and tests the appropriate tools; this is a tension that leads some interpreters (as in this case), despite Wright’s citing of Palmer’s warnings (Wright 2007a: 187; see also Palmer 1969: 162–7), to the identification or construction of properly hermeneutic ‘methods’. As I have already elaborated above, Gadamer is not antipathetical to ‘method’ – in fact, as a component of prejudice we will not get far in any attempt to interpret without some prior method or explicit or implicit sense of the questions that can be asked of the text. The difficulty comes when one tries to augment Gadamer’s account of the universality of the hermeneutic situation (in which prior method is always found wanting) with some further method that has the aim of ensuring ‘correct’ understanding or avoiding distortion; such attempts are equivalent to denials of the universality of the hermeneutic situation (in which case one would seem to be able to do quite well hermeneutically without invoking Gadamer’s philosophical development at all). Wright summarizes Habermas’s critique of Gadamer in terms of (i) an ‘inherent idealism’, (ii) a ‘neo-Hegelian consensus theory of truth, in which both horizons of meaning merge into some middle-ground compromise’ and (iii) a lack of critical rigour. Wright’s ultimate concern is (iv) ‘the possibility that one or other horizon of meaning might be irredeemably mistaken: in which case the fusion of mutual understanding needs to give way to the rejection of one horizon by another’; the implication in Wright’s treatment is that Gadamer’s theory cannot provide for this sometimes desirable outcome (2007a: 189). Wright’s account of the well-documented engagement between Habermas and Gadamer conflates some important terms and ultimately does not present

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Habermas’s critique in the strongest light. The criticism in terms of ‘inherent idealism’ (i) is a case in point. Habermas levels at Gadamer a charge of linguistic idealism which has some potential to interact with the critical realist perspective that Wright has elsewhere elaborated (see Bhaskar 1993: 375), but this is only implicitly developed in Wright’s discussion, in sometimes misleading terms. Wright rather claims for Habermas, attributing to Ingram (1987), that ‘the hope for spiritual rejuvenation lies within language itself ’ and that ‘Habermas seeks to recover the original emancipatory promise of the Enlightenment by transforming our understanding of the nature and scope of language’ (2007: 188). The strategy for achieving this is not immediately clear in Wright’s account, although it has something to do with defending ‘a form of rationality that transcends the limitations of instrumental reason by introducing a critical dimension to the very heart of interpersonal discourse’ (2007a: 190). If we pay heed rather to the texts that constitute the more or less direct correspondence between Gadamer and Habermas (see, for discussion, How 1995, or Warnke 1987), we see that Habermas’s charge of linguistic idealism is levelled at Gadamer’s claims for the universality of the hermeneutic situation, and the claim that ‘Being that can be understood is language’ (2004: 470). Habermas contends that ‘the linguistic infrastructure of society is a moment in a complex that, however symbolically mediated, is also constituted by the constraints of reality’ (1988: 173–4). An example of this constitution of language would be how ‘a change in the mode of production entails a restructuring of the linguistic worldview’ (ibid.). If the scope of hermeneutics is only this ‘linguistic infrastructure’ (as Habermas contends), this reduces its purview to ‘a restricted part of the totality, one capable only of furthering the processes of cultural transmission’ (How 1995: 167) – so that hermeneutics, if it is to be critically rigorous, must be supplemented by a causally adequate framework for explaining linguistic distortion. It is not therefore universal in scope. Habermas develops the sustained analogy of psychoanalysis, which Wright does not explore, to indicate a diagnostic method for determining when the external systems (of power, for example, or labour) have worked from the outside to distort language. We will develop this when we discuss Wright’s third charge. Returning for the time being to the charge of ‘idealism’ in context, we see that Wright’s version of this charge has less to do with Habermas’s explicit claims and more to do with a pragmatic approach to the fusion of horizons, conceived as a ‘consensus’ in which ‘both horizons of meaning merge into some middle-ground compromise’ (2007: 189). This is ‘idealistic’ in that such consensus may not be achievable, and also in that when shared agreement appears to have been achieved, this

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might well be the product of rhetorical or other domination rather than mutual consent, or it might be ‘premature’ (191). Much of the earlier work of this chapter has been directed at demonstrating that this conception of Gadamer’s idea of agreement is simply mistaken. But we do not leave our discussion there. Wright opposes to the (‘idealized’) fusion of horizons Habermas’s regulative principle of ‘communicative action’, which allows for ‘ongoing conversation between horizons’ (2007a: 191). In his account of Gadamer and Habermas, Paul Ricoeur observes a central disagreement between the theories of the two writers: ‘The first … [Gadamer’s] is turned towards a consensus which precedes us and, in this sense, which exists; the second [Habermas] anticipates a future freedom in the form of a regulative idea which is not a reality but an ideal, the ideal of unrestricted and unconstrained communication’ (1990: 294). In identifying Habermas’s ‘ideal’ speech situation (which he does not name) as a regulative principle rooted in present reality, and Gadamer’s agreement as a pipe dream, Wright has things, it appears to me, completely on their head. Elaborating Habermas, in fact, Wright cannot help but write that ‘ideally, all partners in the educational context will enter it with an initial commitment to the truth’ (2007: 191, my emphasis). It is Habermas here, rather than Gadamer, who would incur the charge of ‘inherent idealism’ that Wright attempts to level. Wright does, however, insightfully identify the centrality to the event of understanding of an ethical commitment to the disclosure of truth; but in the next chapter we will see that this is a distinctive and vital feature of Gadamer’s dialogic ontology rather than a ‘pious vow’ (Ricoeur 1990: 294). As an initial response to criticisms (iii) and (iv), and the implication that Gadamer’s account is lacking in its potential to insulate us from the dangers of the distorting and dominating effects of language, we might recall that Gadamer’s intention is description, not prescription, and that (as Wright cites) he is ‘not proposing a method, but … describing what is the case’ (Gadamer 2004: 512). Gadamer’s attempt to explain what happens when we understand, therefore, might no more be expected to be proof against incorrect understanding than medical training is intended as an inoculation against the flu virus. However, a stronger defence than this can be offered, which rests on acknowledging the specifically ontological significance of understanding conceived as an event in tradition. Wright’s discussion of Habermas’s critique of Gadamer hastily passes over the important terms ‘tradition’ and ‘lifeworld’, both of which have significant technical resonance in both Gadamer’s and Habermas’s work. A citation of Warnke refers to ‘the possibility of ideological distortion within the tradition’s

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self-formulation’ (Wright 2007a: 189; Warnke 187: 140) but ‘tradition’ is not referred to again in Wright’s treatment of Habermas’s critique, despite its central place in the debate between the two thinkers. Intriguingly, Wright argues, ‘As we noted earlier, “lifeworld” refers to the given, pre-reflective horizon of meaning through which members of society live out their everyday lives: the assumptions, values and expectations that they take for granted and which do not require analysis or justification’ (187). In the context of the chapter cited, this might seem to connect to the concept of a ‘horizon’ that has been introduced in Wright’s discussion of Gadamer, but on close examination the term ‘lifeworld’ is not used earlier in that chapter but was in fact previously introduced in Wright’s text, with little technical development, in a discussion of Jackson’s pedagogical approach, where lifeworld is taken to refer specifically to the ‘immediate lifeworlds of pupils’ (150) (or, in context, to the particular religious or other cultural communities – we colloquially sometimes even say ‘traditions’ – to which pupils belong). The first important element of a defence against Wright’s charge here rests on what Gadamer terms the effective history: our understanding is historically conditioned. Our prejudices are as they are because of our history within a tradition (2004: 2009). Differences in perspective are accounted for by differences in effective history, whether that is conceived in terms of cultures with different histories, or of the temporal distance between a contemporary reader, say, and a classical text. When the fusion of horizons occurs, it is enabled through a recovery of what is shared by the participants in a dialogue. It is this broader sense of what is shared, in fact, that Gadamer intends by the ‘tradition’. Tradition is the totality of historical influences that have become significant in an interpretive moment; it thus both contains and is productive of the moment and possibility of understanding. In fact there is some merging of terminology in Gadamer here. In the same way that one can have a ‘horizon’ and there is also a ‘historical horizon’ that encompasses one’s own horizon and that of the classical text (330), so one can exist within a wider ‘tradition’ that encompasses local or parochial concerns and makes possible their mutual translation and understanding. Ultimately, the ‘mode of being’ of tradition is seen to be language (459); tradition is the historical sedimentation and infinite reserve of the ‘unsaid’, that can never be fully brought out into the open, but underpins all that can be said (How 1995: 122). Habermas’s charge of linguistic idealism, introduced above, fails because of the distinction he tries to draw between the tradition, conceived in a restricted cultural sense, and concrete ‘real’ factors that might work to shape it from

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without. As How elaborates, ‘Tradition as [Gadamer] described it, is formed precisely from elements such as labour and political domination, and … these are bound up with our prejudices; but as factors in our tradition they also happen in and through language, not outside it’ (How 1995: 168). We must recall here the Cartesian distinctions between subject and object, self and world, and inside and outside that we have done so much to think past in previous chapters. The fundamental ontological achievement of Heidegger’s conception of the hermeneutic circle is that ‘the world itself is in the circle’ (Hoy 2006: 194). When Gadamer writes of the ‘rehabilitation of authority’ and the ‘willing submission to tradition’ (2004: 278–85), then, this is not to be understood conservatively as the authority of a ‘particular’ tradition, but of the linguistic tradition that is the condition for the possibility of mutual understanding. When Gadamer uses the term ‘prejudice’, he does not refer to the prejudices of a particular culture or group, but something smaller, something that can be much more individual and local, to the extent that a historically effected event of understanding will be ultimately contingent and personal. On the other hand, when he speaks of tradition he is not thinking, as we often speak, in terms of a cultural group, or a religious ‘tradition’, but of something much larger that is conducive to mutual understanding precisely in the encounter with the ‘other’, or the encounter between what we might have been inclined to call ‘traditions’ in that smaller sense. The moment of understanding is characterized as an event in tradition through which the tradition itself is transformed (Gallagher 1992: 105–7). The extent to which this is a departure – ontologically speaking – from restricted, epistemological conceptions of understanding is illustrated in Gadamer’s analogy of ‘play’ from the first section of TM. He originally applies this to the aesthetic situation, but it can be extended more broadly once we see artistic interpretation as a particular instance of understanding (2004: 102–18). The players give themselves up to the game and an event emerges which transcends them as individual actors. ‘Play is not to be understood as something that a person does’ (104). Players ‘lose themselves’ (103) in the event of the game’s ‘being-played’ (How 1995: 27). Gadamer reminds us that in familiar contexts when we use the word ‘play’ metaphorically (such as the ‘play’ of light or waves) what is intended is a ‘to-and-fro movement’ (2004: 204) in an in-between space, rather than something that can be reduced to the goals of individual participants. In the moment of understanding (which is the play as such), familiar notions of authority and autonomy, subject and object, dissolve or break down. ‘The players are not the subjects of play; instead play merely reaches

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presentation … through the players’ (103). This event is not the achievement of an individual who stands outside of tradition or holds tradition up in front of him, but is conditioned by effective history, without being fully constrained by it. It is precisely in the encounter with the unexpected, and its accompanying ‘bringing up short’, that an event of understanding finds the possibility of selftranscendence. The reflexivity of tradition rests in its being both constitutive of a horizon and possible to be encountered as ‘other’ (354). Any horizon is therefore always parochial or contingent, but can be amplified, expanded or disclosed in a critical moment. This critical moment is a transformation in the tradition itself but is not a break with tradition. For this reason criticism of a tradition can never be ‘complete’ but always happens from within (301). Wright argues that ‘it is impossible to abstract language from the various power structures operating within society. Reason can function instrumentally in the service of such power structures, in the process imposing ideological representations that lead to the loss of freedom and distortion of truth’ (2007a: 189). We are now well equipped to grasp this charge more clearly in the context of the Gadamer-Habermas debate. Habermas’s concern is that hermeneutics might open us up to ‘be played’ by a distortion in language so fundamental that it totally colonizes our lifeworld. If there is no possibility of standing outside of the hermeneutic ‘game’, then there is no possibility of being emancipated from this ideological distortion. What is necessary therefore is a reconstruction of the rule system that structures human understanding. The psychoanalytic analogy is vital here. The psychoanalyst’s subject is unable to discern the repressed causes of his or her hysterical or compulsive behaviour   – he or she thus submits to the ministrations of an analyst who has constructed a theoretical framework for distinguishing normal from deviant behaviour (Habermas 1988; How 1995). Similarly only a general and systematic ‘theory of communicative competence’ (rather than one rooted in a particular cultural context or situation) would enable us to critically distinguish a systematically distorted from an ‘ideal’ communicative situation (Habermas 1990). For Habermas, then, the introduction of a critical method ‘reaches the parts that hermeneutics can’t’ (How 1995: 180). There is a problem, Gadamer points out, with the psychoanalytic analogy (Gadamer 1986; How 1995). The therapeutic situation of analyst and patient is embedded within a broader shared understanding or tradition. The authority of the analyst rests on a recognition of the patient’s neurotic condition; this validates the analyst’s attempts to explain the patient. In what sense, however, has the linguistic tradition as a whole submitted itself for an explanation of its neurotic

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or pathological condition by the critical theorist qua analyst? Such an attempt neglects the extent to which the interpreter is constituted by the tradition he or she is attempting to explain. The psychoanalyst’s authority to stand over and above their patient is legitimated within a broader tradition – it could have no parallel therefore in a ‘critical stance’ that might be taken outside of the tradition as a whole and could be insulated from further ideological distortion. This dissolution of Habermas’s critical augmentation or ‘depth hermeneutics’ does not leave us powerless against ideological manipulation. Rather, the possibility of a response lies in the more nuanced understanding of key terms like ‘prejudice’ and ‘tradition’ that I have offered above. Recall firstly that Gadamer does not deny the possibility of ideological distortion. Some of our prejudices are no doubt found wanting in the event of understanding, and some of them will turn out to have been ‘mistaken’ in a meaningful sense. These misconceptions might well be the result of ideological manipulation at the hands of individual agents or systems; we have acknowledged that all of the ‘real’ causes of ideological distortion have been accepted by Gadamer as within the compass of tradition: they are where our prejudices ‘come from’ (1977b: 31). Gadamer’s rehabilitation of prejudice does not eradicate the pejorative, Enlightenment sense of prejudice, but subsumes the negative sense within a broader understanding: some of our prejudices are distorted or mistaken, but by no means all are. Our present understanding can rest on misconceptions that need to be challenged. Such misconceptions are identified in the immediacy of the moment of understanding, as we recognize their interpretive inadequacy for the task at hand, but this recognition is enabled through the operation of those prejudices which, in this situation, are productive; the result is always a transformation in our being and the production of new prejudices. Thus Gadamer is able to write that hermeneutics ‘renders every ideology suspect in that it makes prejudices conscious’ (1990: 244). In the event of understanding we see, ‘with new eyes’ (245), prejudices that previously operated in an unthematized way, behind our backs. This hermeneutic insight can be extended to a critique of cultural ideologies or ‘traditions’ (in that smaller sense) or social systems in which we find ourselves, or which we encounter. But any critique here would be enabled by the broader shared tradition in which the critique was situated. Thus no ideology, however distorted, could be totally incomprehensible to us or incommensurable with our understanding. In this context, it is not clear what it would mean for the shared tradition to be distorted, far less for a horizon to be ‘irredeemably mistaken’. This does not seem to capture what is intended either in the sense of the tradition or of a horizon.

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This rejection of incommensurability or irredeemable distortion is not simply asserted in opposition to Wright’s and Habermas’s claim for its possibility. Rather, we might urge, following Ricouer (1990), that it is presupposed in their position. Habermas’s fear of the possibility of the total colonization of the lifeworld emerges from his critique of technical rationalism (which resonates, incidentally, with elements of Heidegger’s critique of technology) (Wright 2007a: 190; Habermas 1991). That is to say, even positing – as Habermas does – the possibility of total and incomprehensible ideological distortion, rests on some prior successful understanding, and ultimately then on a presupposition of shared agreement of the sort that Gadamer intends. If successful, Habermas’s diagnosis of instrumental reason, and any alternative rationality that might be opposed to it, are the achievements of tradition, rather than tools which can be levelled in a critique of tradition. To recapitulate, then, hermeneutics accounts for the possibility of self-criticism and the transformative understanding of tradition, but it will not offer us, however humbly we might want to apply it, a method for ensuring ‘correct’ understanding or for determining, once and for all, where ideology is at play or communication has been distorted. Alan How writes of Habermas that he ‘understood Gadamer’s work rather too well for his own good in that once he had taken hermeneutics on board he had great difficulty in making off with the ideas he wanted and leaving the rest behind’ (1995: 120). How is it that Wright, in a similar way, can so confidently affirm so much of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics but ultimately seek to modify or (what it amounts to, in my reading) reject his key insights? The answer can perhaps be seen in the pedagogical aims of Wright’s work: he seeks laudably to steer the RE teacher between the two poles of encouraging pupils either simply to express personal or communal responses to religion along the lines of a reader-response theory, or to seek an unreflective ‘empathy’ with religious believers. What teachers need, therefore, is a methodology for a ‘critical’ RE, which is tantamount in Wright’s view to adopting Habermas’s critical revision of Gadamer. It would be hard to conceive of a pedagogical contribution to the RE debate that did not specify (implicitly, at least) a procedure for the correct understanding of religions. It is for this reason that Wright argues that ‘the crucial hermeneutic question to be resolved concerns the proper object of study’ (2007a: 200) and then offers a definition of that object. He then offers, in the following chapter, a methodology for ‘wrestling with truth’ that provides guidance on how students can test the claims of a particular religious tradition against reality. This approach seems both to reject Gadamer’s key insight that method will not exhaust truth, and to reduce the ontological significance of

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hermeneutics to a set of epistemological procedures that might be employed by an autonomous subject. Hermeneutics thus becomes only a stage in Wright’s thinking, a stepping stone towards an appropriate critical methodology for RE, and is thereafter discarded without remainder.

3.6 Erricker’s appropriation – Gadamer the ‘relativist’ Erricker’s engagement with Gadamer is brief and tantalizing: he is actually explicitly addressed only in direct response to Wright’s own interpretation (Erricker 2000: 59–60). However, elements of Erricker’s vision for RE accord with the Gadamerian ontology sketched out above. In an article entitled, ‘Shall we Dance’ (2001), Erricker draws attention to the limitations of offering an epistemological procedure for the appropriate representation of religions, characterizing spiritual learning as ‘a process of inquiry into ourselves and others that is not constrained by a pre-imposed conformity’ (34). The ‘dancing’ of the title develops Hayden White’s (1985) notion of ‘diatactical’ discourse, which ‘presumes a different relationship between the discourse itself, its putative subject matter, and contending interpretations of the latter because it involves a self-critical aspect as well as being critical of others’ (Erricker 2001: 24). The notion of dance is developed in the article in a way consistent with our earlier consideration of the indeterminate ‘play’ of light in an in-between space. Erricker acknowledges that integrating this understanding of discourse into pedagogy would be radically transformative of our notions of education; he challenges institutionalized and instrumentalized notions of schooling by calling for a ‘poetics’ (34) that resonates with the Heideggerian poetics called for in my first chapter. Elsewhere Erricker cautions against the reduction of ontology to epistemology (Erricker 2000: 70). He argues that ‘the idea of product or theory is nothing more than an extrapolation from the process or the ontological activity of living’ (70–1) and that ‘we do not have to agree about what to do in a situation by referring back to an epistemological position as the basis of action’ (60). This recalls the Heideggerian insight into the primacy of practice (Blattner 2007 and our discussion in Chapter 2). Erricker argues, promisingly, that ‘what is being proposed here is a new conception of the classroom: a place of conversational activity within the disorderliness of everyday social life; a place of unfolding thought and performance that will have political effect’ (73). In this unfolding, he argues, ‘we cannot speak of a final product, that is, a point

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at which “knowledge” is established’ (71) and ‘There is no “chart”, no fixed map to journey by’ (ibid.). However, I would caution against celebrating too soon a convergence of positions. Following the work of John Smith (Smith 1998, 1999; Smith and Deemer 2000), Erricker claims that Gadamer is advancing a relativist position, which he commends on the grounds that ‘there is no longer a “contrary” to place in opposition to relativism’ (Erricker 2000: 59; Smith 1998: 25). He unpacks relativism as the recognition that ‘all observation is theory laden’ or ‘the “knowing subject” is now recognised to be intimately a part of any claim to knowledge’ (Erricker 2000: 60; Smith 1998: 25). There is an inconsistency here about the nature of ‘theory’ that mars the ontological position that Erricker seems to want to advance, but it does not seem that Gadamer would have much of a problem with the second of these statements   – to the extent that he was concerned with ‘knowledge’, in any case. However, it is the conflation implied in Erricker’s claim that ‘no progress can be made in attempting to ground the debate on morality, spirituality and values on positions that refer to “objectivity” or “truth”’ (2000: 59) that causes some concern. I am happy to agree with Erricker’s jettisoning of ‘objective’ knowledge – even Wright would be prepared to agree, following Bhaskar’s ‘epistemic relativism’, that this particular ontological train has now left the station. But we have seen that the happening or ‘event’ of truth is a primary concern of philosophical hermeneutics. The conflation, and concomitant rejection, of ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’ is surprising here considering Erricker’s clear desire for an education ‘that will have political effect’ (73) and his signposting of another possible conflation between ‘relativism’ and ‘postmodernism’. Also surprising, given his emphasis on ontology, is Erricker’s claim that a rejection of ‘objectivity’ leads us into the embrace of ‘subjectivity’ (76–7). In response to a criticism that relativism espouses the notion that ‘anything goes’ (Erricker 2000: 59; Smith 1998: 33; Tate 1996: point 15), Erricker makes a distinction between a relativist position, exemplified in Gadamer’s arguing for a ‘hermeneutic of good faith ... [striving] for ever increasing honesty ... through dialogue’ (Erricker 2000: 59; Smith 1998: 31) and a ‘radical postmodernist position’ (Erricker 2000: 60), as exemplified in Derrida’s identification of the ‘radical incommensurability of different standpoints’ and the ‘fundamental obstacles to consensus and community’ this presents (Erricker 2000: 60; Smith 1998: 31). Erricker argues both that it misrepresents relativism to conflate and align it with postmodernism, but also that ‘it is misleading to presume that the two terms are utterly distinct’

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(2000: 60). There is a fine line to be walked here, and I am not sure that Erricker walks it successfully. Take, for example, Erricker’s claim that ‘we can inhabit whatever world we choose to construct and justify it accordingly because there are no rules to say that we cannot, except the rules we choose to make’ (73). This is not an implication that I would wish to attribute to Gadamer. Elsewhere Erricker presents a ‘narrative pedagogy’ underpinned by the claim that ‘all “knowledge” is relative’ (Erricker and Erricker 2000: 194) and offers as the aim ‘the construction of worldview’, claiming that ‘the whole process represented is dynamic, with no end point envisaged where the “worldview” is a finished product, and with no sense of “development” except change’ (199). In his ‘Shall we Dance’ paper, Erricker takes as his example, coincidentally with our discussion of ‘play’, the pedagogical use of an artwork. He writes that his ‘diatactical’ model ‘seeks to engage with the complexity of interpretation that arises with engagement with a work of art with irresolvable interpretive differences arising out of the relationship between the event captured, the intention of the artist and the experiential engagement of the viewer’ (2001: 33). Note the claim that interpretive differences are ‘irresolvable’. However, Erricker immediately follows up with, ‘This does not leave the process as uncritical, however, because the self-critical aspect arises as we reflect on our own figurative interpretation in relation to that of others’ (ibid.). Erricker’s concern that his pedagogical approach should maintain a critical possibility is picked up in Wright’s equally provocatively titled response to his paper, ‘Dancing in the Fire’. Wright argues that Erricker’s position lacks moral substance. There is something profoundly disturbing in the implication that photographic images of the Holocaust should be appropriated as a means of enhancing and stimulating our private imaginary worlds, rather than engaged with as witnesses to a historical reality. ... The silent witness of the photographic images at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem provides the dispossessed of the Holocaust with ‘a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters’ (Isaiah 56:5), and demands a hermeneutic in which understanding is inseparable from moral obligation. (2001: 127)

Wright’s introduction of the Holocaust here as an indicator of moral significance does not overstate the case, in my view, particularly when we consider the preoccupations that have characterized Habermas’s critique of hermeneutics, or the cautionary considerations that I introduced about Heidegger at the outset of this work. It will be a poor situation indeed if philosophical hermeneutics cannot respond to this.

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Erricker’s sources, however, seem simply to assert, following Rorty, that the moral imperative will prevent relativism from descending into a ‘wild, unknowable play of differences’ (Smith and Deemer 2000: 891), and it is not clear that Erricker in his earlier work does much more than make similar assertions. One thing to note is that the criticality asserted by Erricker cannot be identified with Wright’s version of criticality, in which students are led to question their own interpretations of the ‘empirical realm’ of reality in relation to claims made by the ‘prototypical’ forms of religions about the level of the ‘real’, or in which students apply judgemental rationality to deliberate between the contrasting claims of different faith perspectives (Wright 2007a). Erricker’s is rather a deconstructive criticality, aimed precisely at the ‘prototypical’ religious identities that Wright presents. This criticality would dissolve ‘grand narratives’ in favour of students’ own ‘small narratives’ (Erricker and Erricker 2000: 194) and would emancipate them even from such colonizing empirical constructs as the notion of religion itself (Erricker and Erricker 2000; Erricker 2001). In later work (2010), Erricker seems to have undergone a dramatic shift in pedagogical approach. Following time spent as an inspector of RE in Hampshire, UK, and having observed a significant amount of RE teaching over his career, Erricker presents the observation that, in some classrooms, ‘there can be affective engagement but cognitive skills are not appropriately addressed and the substance of religions can be marginalised’ (33). Additionally, ‘Religious presence and practice as they happened in the world and social affairs were seen as difficult things to enable students to engage with. There was also, as a result, no attempt to be critical of religion’ (34). Erricker goes on to ask, ‘Might there be a way in which to deliver RE in which contesting understandings, different knowledge bases and disciplinary approaches and consistent learning progression might be incorporated to form the purpose of the subject?’ (66). The ‘conceptual enquiry model’ that Erricker presents then offers a spiral curriculum in which students develop skills of interpretive enquiry by progressing firstly through concepts which are shared in all human experience, proceeding then to those which are shared by all religions, and finally to those which are unique or particular to specific religions (see Aldridge 2012 for further analysis). This seems a far cry from the earlier Erricker, who sought to ‘awaken a radical, critical and experiential interest that would be difficult to contain and direct’ (2001: 34) in a pedagogy that took its lead mostly from children’s own responses to the stimuli provided (see for example, Erricker and Erricker 2000; Erricker 2000) and in which there would be ‘no sense of “development” except change’ (Erricker and Erricker 2000: 199). Although Erricker’s ‘criticality’ throughout

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this and subsequent work (see also Chater and Erricker 2012) still maintains a spirit of suspicion of disciplinary boundaries and epistemological constructions of religion, Erricker has explicitly moved away from building his pedagogical approach on the more radically constructivist principles he endorsed in earlier work (compare Erricker 2010: 77–80 with Erricker and Erricker 2000).

3.7 Conclusion – criticality, conservatism and truth Where, then, does this discussion leave us? Does a flirtation with Gadamer in the educational sphere inevitably run aground on the issue of moral responsibility, leading to the need to augment hermeneutic universality with a critical methodology? Note how the implied alternatives to criticality differ with each thinker. For Wright the danger to the student is colonization by a distorted text or ideology. Erricker, on the other hand, seems to have moved towards a critical methodological approach in response to the dangers of distortion of the subject matter by students who have not paid sufficient attention to its difference or importance. It is intriguing that the same thinker can give rise both to critiques of radical subjectivization and naïve conservatism, until we see that, in Gadamer, there is no real choice to be made here. First note that subjectivity, at least inasmuch as it might be conceived as a threat  or danger, is not an alternative to conservatism. If the hermeneutic circle were to ‘imprison[s] us in our own outlook’, the danger would be that the hermeneutic analysis ‘is too traditionalist and thus politically suspect because it seems unable to challenge the cultural and political status quo’ (Hoy 2006: 195). So what we have here is rather two different moments of conservation – the conservation of self and the conservation of the other or alterity. My contention is that in the event of understanding, both moments of conservation are in play, and it is the dialogic relationship between these two conserving tendencies that leads to the possibility of truly new or transformational understanding within the tradition. It is the tension between these two moments that leads to the ‘bringing up short’ by the text that is productive in Gadamer of new understanding (2004: 270). Rather than there being (as Erricker presents it) a choice to be made between a deconstructive or a reconstructive hermeneutics (see also Michelfelder and Palmer 1989), a deconstructive recognition of the alterity of the text ensures that the interpreter does not ‘read only what is familiar back into the text’ or ‘in the effort to find a unity of meaning … overlook tensions and contradictions that are also at play’ (Hoy 2006: 199). On the other

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hand, ‘The circle could also not be purely deconstructive, since there must first be an assumed meaning that is deconstructed, and the discovery of tension and contradiction is itself a projection of an understanding of what is really going on in the text’ (ibid.). We are prevented from fully understanding this process if we take ‘critical thinking’ to be the achievement of an individual subjectivity, or a tool or method that could be applied to the text (see Williams 2012 for a Heideggerian critique of ‘thinking skills’). Rather we must heed Gadamer’s notion of the back-andforth play of projective understanding in an ‘in-between space’. No methodology can be offered in advance of the moment of understanding, nor can any method determine the balance in any particular case of its deconstructive or reconstructive aspects. This ‘may be part of what makes interpretations interestingly different’ (Hoy 2006: 199). This situation allows for a critique of tradition (what Hoy calls ‘the present’s interpretation of how it has come to be what it is’), which involves not ‘a complete break with tradition’ but a break with ‘a prevalent or mistaken understanding of the tradition’s possibilities’ (Hoy 1996: 198). So there is a conservative element here, in the form of a recovery, but also a transformation or renewal in the form of the disclosure of ‘concrete possibilities in the tradition that have been lost from sight’ (ibid.). But the notion that self and dialogue partner or text might be ultimately incommensurable is rejected on account of their mutual constitution by tradition. We thus find ourselves affirming the possibility of the Heideggerian ‘event of truth’ in the form of a disclosure or unforgetting in the tradition’s selfformulation.

Note 1 Although this criticism has developed independently and over several years, I acknowledge here that a similar line is offered briefly in Wivestad’s review of Wright’s work (Wivestad 2011). I am certainly indebted to Wivestad for bringing to my attention Alan How’s (1995) illuminating treatment of the Gadamer-Habermas debate.

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Hermeneutics and Education

4.1 Introduction This chapter considers the implications of philosophical hermeneutics for the well-known ‘pedagogical triangle’ of teacher, student and subject matter. We find our way to what is specifically educational in the hermeneutic dialogue by considering examples of deficient or degenerate conversation. The close relationship between the ‘instructional’ (or pedagogical) triangle and the hermeneutic situation can then be emphasized, particularly once we acknowledge Heidegger’s requirement that the teacher must learn to ‘let learn’. All hermeneutic situations, it will be shown, are educational. How, then, moving beyond this global understanding, can hermeneutics inform those local situations that we wish to think of as specifically educational (i.e.  schooling)? This leads us to consider the constellation of hermeneutic circles that constitute the event of classroom learning. An important distinction will be made between the ‘object of study’ and the ‘subject matter’. The subject matter – Gadamer’s die Sache – ‘emerges’ in the event of learning, which implies a transformation of teacher, student and curriculum. We are then well equipped to consider the preoccupation in RE in England and Wales with the relation between learning about and learning from, which reveals itself to be serendipitously attuned to Gadamer’s observations about the relationship between interpretation and application, and thus of broader educational significance than simply the RE context.

4.2 Deficient dialogues In the event of understanding a new understanding is reached. This is an event in tradition which transcends participants in the dialogue. The ontological

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significance of this event as a moment of self-transformation of each of the participants has been emphasized. But let us consider the explicit educational significance: every hermeneutic event, in being directed towards a new understanding, aims at learning. The question then naturally arises: in dialogue, what is learnt about (and in RE in the context of England and Wales, we might also add learnt from)? This can be further explored by considering some derivative dialogic situations in which a new understanding is not reached. One form of degenerate dialogue has already been introduced in the discussion of ‘empathy’ in the previous chapter: the exclusion of the other that comes about when we pursue mutual understanding without aiming for agreement over the subject matter. In an early discussion of dialogue, Gadamer acknowledges that we do not in conversation only learn about the subject matter, but also about our interlocutor – ‘For in speaking about something, Dasein always expresses itself at the same time’ (1991: 37). This raises the possibility of a dialogue which does not have agreement as its aim: ‘Its motive is not to secure the disclosure of this matter, but, rather, to enable the participants themselves to become manifest to each other in speaking about it’ or for each ‘to become explicitly visible in his being to the other’ (37). ‘Community cohesion’ defences of RE have often drawn on this form of ‘being with one another’ (for an early example, see Schools Council 1971: 23). The argument goes, that once the possibility of agreement over contested questions has been put aside, our affective relationship with others stands to improve through this kind of mutual understanding. Gadamer contends that this form of dialogue has a distinctly different ethical significance: ‘For a person who thinks that he understands another person who contradicts him in some way and that he understands him without agreeing with him has by that very means protected himself from the other person’s contradiction’ (37) and ‘one rigidifies oneself in ways that make one, precisely, unreachable by the other person’ (38). This kind of ‘being with another’ both ‘pushes the other person away’ and claims in advance of the event of dialogue an understanding both of the other and of oneself according to which this holding at a distance is justified (38). Sometimes we might find ourselves reaching a final agreement in dialogue. At this point the conversation comes to a satisfying end. More often than not, however, we find that we do not agree or do not fully agree. This does not indicate an unsuccessful dialogue, but an ongoing one: ‘An inability to come to a shared understanding is never a final outcome but indicates only that one has been unable to bring the process of understanding to a conclusion, and therefore requires resumption of the conversation’ (Gadamer 1991: 39). Recall

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the provisionality of the agreement entailed in understanding: the dialogue continues because we agree sufficiently over the way in which the issue at hand is to be interrogated for there to be a need for further dialogue over our differing standpoints. We must ‘agree to disagree’ in that we must agree in order to meaningfully and productively disagree, and for the dialogue to continue. But this is not the sense in which we normally use the expressions ‘agree to disagree’ or ‘agree to differ’. These more often refer to those situations where we come to an understanding that we will not, or cannot, agree. Gadamer observes that this failure to reach an understanding ‘is sometimes interpreted in such a way that the contradiction that has emerged is taken as a positive result – that is, as showing a difference in assumptions that are not open to discussion’ (39); here we ‘discover’ that the source of our disagreement is our holding two irreducible standpoints (one might, in RE, refer to our holding a ‘theistic’ or a ‘secular worldview’, for example). ‘Agreeing to differ’ at this point prematurely closes down dialogue and ‘excludes the other person in his positive function’ (40). Our relevant assumptions do not constitute an inflexible bedrock for dialogue and are not undiscussable: for Gadamer the dialogue continues by ‘(precisely) making those assumptions the subject of the conversation’ (40). We should clarify at this point an issue of intentionality which will become more significant as the chapter progresses. I have not claimed that our interlocutor (or the speaker herself) cannot become the subject matter (die  Sache) of the dialogue. We have observed already that each is always necessarily implicated and transformed in any event of understanding, but we can also conceive of a form of dialogue that is ‘about’ us or our interlocutor more directly, such as when we engage in conversation about our real motives for a particular action, or about whether we are well suited for a future career. In educational contexts we might have such conversations in a mentoring situation, or when we meet with pupils to discuss their targets and achievements. In these kinds of situations, it is more appropriate to say that one of the interlocutors has in fact emerged in some way as the subject matter of the dialogue, as well as their being learnt about in the usual way, ‘in passing’ as we consider some further issue. This said, what marks out a dialogue from a deficient form, in this case, remains the desire to reach agreement. If we ‘agree to differ’ with a friend about the career to which we are most suited, this is tantamount to saying that we do not value their opinion sufficiently to continue exploring the reasons for our difference on this important matter. If a teacher ‘agrees to disagree’ with a student over the student’s achievement in the last term, neither stands to learn from the other any longer.

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There are other forms of deficient ‘being with’ one another. Sometimes we shoot the breeze. Two or more people engage in aimless conversation. We are passing the time. We might throw some jokes around, taking pleasure possibly in the act of speaking itself, but with nothing specific or important on the table or commanding our attention. Here we are engaging in what Heidegger calls Gerede (translated in Macquarrie and Robinson as ‘idle talk’). Heidegger claims not to disparage this everyday phenomenon, but nevertheless his ontological exploration marks it out as a degeneration from the kind of relation that Gadamer denotes by term ‘dialogue’ (1967: 211–4). He writes: Because this discoursing has lost its primary relationship-of-Being towards the entity talked about, or else has never achieved such a relationship, it does not communicate in such a way as to let this entity be appropriated in a primordial manner, but communicates rather by following the route of gossiping and passing the word along. (212)

What is lacking in such an exchange is a relationship to die Sache, the subject matter or the issue at stake. This is not to say that such an exchange does not involve mutual understanding, but rather that it does not advance or transform the participants beyond the shared understanding or ‘average intelligibility’ that ‘has already been “deposited” in the way things have been expressed’ (211). There is ‘a hidden way in which the understanding of Dasein has been interpreted’ to which ‘Dasein is constantly delivered over’ (ibid.). What goes on when we engage in Gerede is that we reinforce or preserve this shared or ‘average understanding’, or it is perpetuated through us. States of mind are thus perpetuated in ‘wider circles’ and take on an ‘authoritative character’ – ‘Things are so because one says so’ (212). There is a closing off of possibilities for new disclosure because we ‘do not so much understand the entities which are talked about; we already are listening only to what is said-in-the-talk as such’ – we engage in a verbal form of scribbling (212). In such situations, everything has already been understood; Being has already been disclosed. No hermeneutic circle is at play here, and no event of understanding occurs. Although the ontological implications of these claims extend beyond a literal speech situation, one can illustrate idle talk by turning to those public ‘gnomes’ of everyday speech, such as: ‘You get what you pay for’ or ‘You win some, you lose some’. Such claims do not admit of challenge, but expect assent; they contain and restrict the possibilities for the further development of the dialogue. Idle talk can then be seen to have an ethical implication. There are other gnomes  – like, maybe, ‘One ought not to speak ill of the dead’ (or a whole host of other

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‘one oughts’ or ‘one shouldn’ts’) – that call to mind Heidegger’s critique of ‘das Man’ or ‘the they’: The dominance of the public way in which things have been interpreted has already been decisive even for the possibilities of having a mood – that is, for the basic way in which Dasein lets the world ‘matter’ to it. The ‘they’ prescribes one’s state-of-mind, and determines what and how one ‘sees’. (213)

This is not, of course, all bad – the ‘public way in which things have been interpreted’ constitutes the essential background from which intersubjective talk can emerge: ‘In it, out of it, and against it, all genuine understanding, interpreting and communicating, all re-discovering and appropriating anew, are performed’ (213). Heidegger criticizes idle talk as ‘groundless’. This charge needs careful consideration so that it is not confused with the call for a foundational perspective beyond the hermeneutic circle, or outside of language. It refers rather to the fact that ‘understanding has been uprooted’ (214) so that the participants in this kind of talk are no longer allowing themselves to be conducted by the thing or the issue at hand. A Dasein that maintains itself in idle talk is described as ‘alongside the world’ and ‘toward itself ’. This topological language constitutes a clarification of the intentionality of idle talk, in which participants have fallen out of the usual relationship of ‘belonging’ to a subject matter. Where dialogue participants are bound together by a common concern, and are thus bound to the subject matter, nothing can be understood without ‘making the thing one’s own’ rather than relying on an ‘undifferentiated kind of intelligibility’ (Heidegger 1963: 213). Although ‘shooting the breeze’ or making small talk might appear to have little to do with the classroom context, Heidegger’s Gerede identifies a possible situation where a concern with a shared subject matter has been replaced by ‘passing the word along’ or the transmission or perpetuation of a kind of ‘average intelligibility’. Leaving aside his emphasis on a particular shared subject matter (in the language of reality, ultimacy and transcendence), Andrew Wright offers a compelling account of how a widespread public understanding that we must be tolerant of all beliefs, or that religious questions are simply a matter of opinion, has the effect of turning the attention of students in RE classrooms towards the discourse itself, or towards themselves, and away from the subject matter at stake. Drawing on the sociological work of Doug Porpora, he describes what could be construed in somewhat Heideggerian terms as a situation of ‘existential uprootedness’ in which ‘contemporary society … construes identity predominantly in terms of networks of relationships with family, friends

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acquaintances and work colleagues. The result is a contraction of meaning: moral space has relevance only insofar as it impacts on social space, while metaphysical space is disregarded almost completely’ (2007a: 1). Wright cites Porpora’s claim that in answer to questions like, ‘What is the meaning of life?’, ‘we quote Douglas Adams or Monty Python and laugh’ (Porpora 2001: 58). Bereft of a mutual concern for the subject matter, RE can become a sort of passing the word along. At this point we have an opportunity to develop in more detail a critique of Richard Rorty, who has been employed explicitly as the source for Jackson’s (1997) notion of ‘edification’ in RE. Elements of this critique will also complement our discussion of Erricker’s approach to RE in the previous chapter, for whom, recall, there is ‘no sense of “development” except change’ (Erricker and Erricker 2000: 199). In addition to explicitly appropriating Gadamer’s hermeneutics, Rorty has drawn significantly on the work of pragmatist and philosopher of education John Dewey, as well as taking over Oakeshott’s motif of the ‘conversation of mankind’. We ought to recognize that although Rorty intends no trivialization by employing this term, the metaphor he employs to characterize the conversation is a ‘useful’ sort of ‘kibitzing’ (2009: 393). This kind of talk is usually understood alternatively as a commentary (wanted or otherwise) running alongside a game or some other kind of event, or as a kind of idle gossiping. Recall Hogan’s criticism of arbitrariness in that Rorty’s kind of discourse ‘turns its back on anything like a joint search for truth and seeks its fulfilment instead in that which is aesthetically new or different’ (Hogan 1995: 149). This criticism is echoed in Garrison et al.’s (2012) evaluation of Rorty’s use of Dewey, in which ‘the relativism of vocabularies and language games may easily turn out as arbitrariness’ (172). Kibitzing differs from Heidegger’s Gerede in an essential way: rather than drawing on a shared ‘average understanding’, it requires an encounter between different worldviews, which Rorty characterizes as ‘incommensurable’. Great care is needed here. Rorty characterizes hermeneutics as ‘discourse about as-yetincommensurable discourses’ (2009: 343) and presents Gadamer as a champion in the ‘struggle against the assumption of commensuration’ (Bernstein 1991: 89). Taking his inspiration from Thomas Kuhn, Rorty elaborates that by ‘commensurable’ I mean able to be brought under a set of rules which will tell us how rational agreement can be reached on what would settle the issue on every point where statements seem to conflict. These rules tell us how to construct an ideal situation, in which all residual disagreements will be seen to be ‘noncognitive’ or merely verbal, or else merely temporary – capable of being resolved by doing something further. (Rorty 2009: 316)

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If this is all that is meant by commensurability, then we can indeed see in philosophical hermeneutics a recognition of the problems of such an assumption. This is the substance of Gadamer’s critique of Habermas discussed in the previous chapter (Habermas is also one of Rorty’s targets here). However, Rorty’s work (and in particular his portrayal of the encounter between worldviews as so much kibitzing) tends towards a stronger claim for incommensurability, in which we could be forgiven for thinking of different languages and traditions as ‘self-contained windowless monads that share nothing in common’ (Bernstein 1991: 92). We have seen previously that Gadamer’s philosophical form of hermeneutics entails a rejection of this claim, in that ‘there are always points of overlap and crisscrossing, even if there is not perfect commensuration. ... Our linguistic horizons are always open’ (Bernstein 1991: 92). Of course, the claim that no two languages are ever in principle incommensurable does not necessarily entail that  in any particular interpretive moment we can be sure that we have not failed to ‘understand “alien” traditions and the ways in which they are incommensurable with the traditions to which we belong’ (ibid.). Rorty rejects a notion of truth as correspondence to some ‘real’ state of affairs in a world ‘out there’. So far, so Heideggerian. He then rejects or radically reinterprets the traditional notion of objectivity, so that it ‘does not refer to “the way things really are”, but to the presence of, or the hope for, agreement among inquirers’ (van Veuren 1993: 191–2). Rorty then throws the hermeneutical baby out with the bath water, however, when he thus lets a relationship with the subject matter fall by the wayside. As we have seen previously, ‘The world is in the circle’ (Hoy 2006: 194), but what is also in the circle – as opposed to ‘out there’ – is the relation to the subject matter. A lack of attendance to the subject matter, which binds participants together or keeps them in the circle, marks out Rorty’s conversation as a hermeneutically deficient account of dialogue, despite his professed adherence to Gadamer and Heidegger. As Caputo observes, ‘Rorty is delighted with the critique of “method” in Gadamer and Heidegger, but he is stalled at the notion of a “truth” which eludes method’ (1983: 662). In abandoning (as Heidegger does) the correspondence theory of truth – what Rorty calls the ‘mirror of nature’ – he takes up instead ‘the mirror play of words in which words lead to more words but never to the matter itself ’ (663). This criticism resonates with an aspect of idle talk, which is more concerned with its own discourse than with getting to grips with the truth of the matter at hand. Rorty’s ‘new’ hermeneutics ‘seeks only to recognise the plurality of discourses and is content to keep a civil conversation going’ (Caputo 1983: 665). Although there is an emphasis on encounter, difference, newness and

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tension, which is not found in idle talk, Rorty’s thought leads us towards a dichotomy where ‘either we are speaking about reality or we are just talking’ (668); Rorty’s ‘conversation’ or ‘kibitzing’ is thus simply idle talk that has cast off any ontological pretensions. Caputo reminds us of Heidegger’s alternative here, expressed in topological terms as Dasein or there-Being, where thought ‘is not a “subject” standing over and against “reality” … or an “object”, but it is wholly given over to Being as the place where Being emerges into manifestness’ (668). Thus Heidegger rejects ‘ocular’ metaphors, through which the assent of the individual subjectivity is accorded in relation to self-evident objects, but maintains the matter for thought, die Sache, through a set of aural metaphors of ‘hearing, hearkening to’ and (in German, etymologically related to these aural metaphors) ‘belonging’ (670). A rejection of foundationalist thinking does not entail a rejection of the truth of the matter, which is disclosed in language and exerts a call on the participants in dialogue. A danger inheres in Rorty’s account. Influenced by Wittgenstein and the concept of language games, as well as the ‘pragmatist’ account of language as a tool for human progress, Rorty characterizes language as both a game we play and as a tool we use to reach agreement. In each case, the game is one created by the players and the agreement is the achievement of the interlocutors. This differs significantly from the philosophical hermeneutics presented in the preceding chapters. Gadamer also likens dialogue to a game, but it is a game that plays us; understanding is an achievement that is reached ‘in’ language, but we do not use the conversation in order to understand – rather, understanding is an event that befalls and transforms us (and transcends ‘us’, at least in the sense of autonomous and separate subjects relating to objects in dialogue). The Heideggerian sense of ‘belonging’ can be further understood in Gadamer’s claim that we are a conversation (2004: 340). We belong ontologically to our subject matter because ‘to conduct a conversation means to allow oneself to be conducted by the subject matter to which the partners in the dialogue are oriented’ (360–1). Once die Sache is removed from this picture, it loses its power to conduct the dialogue and to call to attentive participants and make claims on them. In this case, and if language is seen as a tool to be used by participants with no restrictions apart from mutual assent, the danger is that the power to command assent could be transferred to the interlocutor with more skill in manipulating or employing that tool. Rorty is well known for siding with the sophists against Plato (Rorty 2009: 157), whereas Gadamer, as we have seen, favours Plato in this engagement. The goal of the sophists was ‘to defeat one’s opponents via skill of argument rather than to arrive at truth’ (Barthold 2010: 2).

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Where the dialogue’s ‘belonging’ to the subject matter (Plato’s ‘ti estin’) is lost, then, the path to rhetorical domination by superior skill lies open. This is not to say, incidentally, that philosophical hermeneutics has the power to insulate or protect us from rhetorical domination. Recall from the preceding chapter that it is Gadamer’s aim simply to describe ‘what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing’ (2004: xxvi). Gadamer’s account of understanding does allow us, however, to explain why such an instance of rhetorical domination would not constitute an event of understanding. For Gadamer, the Platonic dialogue exemplifies an ethical relationship where, ‘within this pure self-abandonment to the facts of the matter, the real potential of speaking with others consists in letting the other person help one in the process of gaining access to the facts of the matter’ (1991: 39). Two related forms of what Gadamer calls ‘degenerate speech’ arise when ‘a genuine co-relationship with the other person, in being toward the facts of the matter, is missing’ (50). That speech can degenerate is attributed to a ‘possibility of human existence’ – phthonos, or the ‘concern about being ahead of others’ (44–5). This can give rise to ‘inauthentic’ or ‘fallen’ speech situations in which talk ‘should reflect back on the talker in a way that distinguishes him or her in a positive way’ (45). Speech thus takes on an ‘agonistic’ character, where instead of laying ‘one’s assertion open to the other person’s response’ (39) in a repeatable motion towards agreement over the facts of the matter (and where a contradiction would be productive of ‘new insight’ and point towards a new direction for the dialogue) the speaker seeks to cut off the possibility of the other’s ‘free response’ and aims rather at getting her agreement or refuting her. This in turn is made possible by a ‘seduction’ that inheres in discourse, where speech itself can appear to have knowledge (45). Separated from a need for ‘adequacy to the facts of the matter’, the ‘strength’ of an argument can be sought for its own sake, or simply for the sake of winning the contest. This is a form of degenerate speech explicitly identified in Plato’s early work, where the speaker ‘claims knowledge of everything’ (47), in that she already knows in advance that no argument will be adequate to toppling her conception of the matter at hand. In this case the facts of the matter become unimportant (in fact concealed) and only ‘ascendancy over contradiction’ matters to the speaker. This kind of speech is exemplified in the making of public speeches, where the crowd cannot answer and only the impression made by the speech is important. Gadamer identifies the counterpart of this kind of speech to be ‘refutation of others for the sake of refutation’ (49), which has the sole intention of silencing the other. In each case the aim is to present oneself as ‘the one who knows’ (51).

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In summary, we have seen how the deficiency of certain forms of dialogue is related to the issue of intentionality, or of what dialogue is ‘about’. Dialogues can become deficient when participants cease to seek agreement over some shared concern but instead seek only to become ‘manifest’ to one another, when certain assumptions are taken to be ‘undiscussable’, or when participants engage in ‘idle talk’ and turn their attention to the discourse rather than its subject matter. The ethical implications of this are that the other is excluded from dialogue, or that participants engage in rhetorical competition, or that the conversation is susceptible to rhetorical domination. It is the intentional relationship of ‘belonging’ to a subject matter, which Gadamer describes as a state of ‘pure selfabandonment’ (1991: 39), that excludes these possibilities from the hermeneutic event of understanding. Of course, philosophical hermeneutics is in no way intended or able to ensure that participants in a dialogue allow themselves to be conducted by the subject matter in its unfolding or emerging (which is tantamount to ensuring that dialogue happens); furthermore this will be seen to be particularly difficult in educational contexts.

4.3 The pedagogical triangle, authority and the hermeneutic situation The threefold unity of teacher, student and subject matter – the pedagogical triangle – is a commonplace in educational thought. In diagrammatic form (cf. Figure 4.1) it can make powerfully clear the relational aspect of education (it concerns the activity of both teacher and student) as well as the mutual belonging of teacher and student to the subject matter (they are commonly placed underneath the subject matter, in a subordinate position). The similarity to the hermeneutic event of dialogue is striking. Shaun Gallagher has in fact argued that in place of either a dialogic or textual paradigm, learning should be offered as the fundamental model for understanding the hermeneutic situation (1992: 319–52). While I do not want to displace the dialogic model (because of its capacity in what follows to inform our understanding of learning) this fruitful interaction between the two contexts is acknowledged. What distinguishes a dialogue that is productive of understanding from deficient versions is the continuing possibility that each participant might learn from the other about the subject matter. In fact, I would go as far as to say that (i) the pedagogical triangle and the hermeneutic situation constitute an identical context (all dialogues are educational), but that (ii) informed by a hermeneutic understanding of

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Subject matter

Student

Teacher

Figure 4.1 The instructional or pedagogical triangle

subject matter, the pedagogical triangle does not in fact capture what school practitioners would recognize as an educational context. It might be objected against (i) that the distinctive roles of teacher and student are not replicated in the hermeneutic situation. Recall, in response, that the interpreter is required to approach the text with the anticipation that it has something to teach him. However, we have established that the interpretation of a text – in which the student must make the text speak – is a subset or special category of the broader dialogic paradigm, in which it makes more sense to think of a doubling of the teacher-student relationship: each participant in the dialogue continues in the hope of learning something about the subject matter from their interlocutor, so that each stands as both teacher and student in the hermeneutic situation. This will not satisfy a reader who wants to maintain a distinctive role for teacher and student, where the teacher has a gift to impart to the student. A few further things can be said about this. The first is that there is no requirement for an ‘equality’ of participants in dialogue, at least in terms of their having an equality of prior access to the subject matter. It would be rare and surprising indeed, given the diversity of human horizons and the complex variety of experiences that go towards constituting the ‘effective history’ of a particular perspective, if the prejudices of each interlocutor turned out to be ‘equally’ sufficient in their grasp of the subject matter at hand; in fact, given that the relevant prejudices would be different, and largely unthematized in advance of dialogue, it is not even clear what equality would mean in this situation. The

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possibility of understanding requires rather that each approaches the other with the expectation that he or she has something to teach him; the recognition of one participant as ‘teacher’ would then constitute a movement in understanding, and a relatively common one. Alternatively, there are those informal situations when we approach someone we trust as ‘teacher’ and find that our dialogue has enriched us both. Let us consider that Gadamer takes the Platonic dialectic as his paradigmatic hermeneutic situation. The figure of Socrates and his method of questioning has also been offered as the paradigmatic educational situation (cf. Hogan 1995), and the ‘learning paradox’ of the Meno has been claimed as the definitive problem for both education and hermeneutics (Gallagher 1992; Hermans 2004; Marton and Booth 1997). But in his dialogic procedure – the recognition of the aporia as a starting point, his claim to know nothing and his willingness to learn from his interlocutor, his valuing of dialogue and mutual enquiry – it is the virtues of a student or enquirer that Socrates (or at least the mythic Socrates) is modelling. His authority and status as a teacher are derived from no external source and from no privileged epistemic access to the subject matter, but solely from this: the recognition that his interlocutors learn from him in dialogue. The reality of the classroom situation is, of course, that there are teachers and there are students; in this sense the teacher’s de facto role is predetermined and does not emerge in the event; nevertheless, the possibility of students’ learning from their teacher rests on the teacher’s willingness to learn from her students. This does not require that the teacher will take away from the event a transformed understanding of the object of study in her discipline (although, speaking only anecdotally, this is a possibility to which teachers of RE are often open) but that the teacher will nevertheless be transformed ontologically in her engagement with students. If she is to understand a student and be understood by that student, there must be a fusion of horizons in which a shared subject matter – the subject matter of the classroom dialogue – emerges. This entails that the teacher will discover and respond to particular aspects of how the subject matter is construed by an individual student, or particular prejudices or fore-conceptions that are at play in the way students are construing the subject matter. Thus the teacher’s own horizon is expanding to accommodate that of her students, and her own prejudices are continually transformed as the dialogue continues. There is always the possibility that the teacher is surprised, or pulled up short, by a student’s contribution to the dialogue; she will find that her own prejudices concerning the subject matter of the classroom dialogue are inadequate to following the subject matter in this new direction, and she must

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modify her teaching practice along the way. This ‘to-and-fro of teaching  and learning’ (Hogan 2009: 65) need not be consciously enacted by the teacher or student (recall that understanding ‘befalls’ participants in dialogue rather than being the achievement of either participant); it is because it happens in an implicit and largely unthematized way  that we might, following Heidegger (2011a), refer to a ‘craft’ of teaching. This is what is intended in Heidegger’s instruction that the teacher must learn ‘to let learn’: a teacher must be open to the particular potentialities of her students, and the ways in which they might or might not be receptive to particular attempts to advance the subject matter, in much the same way that the carpenter must get to know his materials and not attempt to work against the grain of the wood. This is a knowledge that comes only in the event and cannot be theorized or worked out in advance; hence van Manen and others have discussed the ‘tact’ of teaching (van Manen 1991; English 2014). Although we have acknowledged the de facto role of the classroom teacher, this hermeneutic conception of the pedagogical triangle nevertheless forces a reconsideration of the teacher’s de jure authority or moral legitimacy; in this sense the teacher deserves the name only to the extent that a fusion of horizons occurs in the classroom dialogue. Pádraig Hogan (1995) offers the distinction between teaching conceived as ‘custody’ (whose historical dominance he attributes to a Christian conception of education as imparting the gift of redemptive knowledge, as discussed in Chapter 1) and as ‘courtship’, which he traces to a Socratic origin. The teacher who earnestly feels that a subject has ‘something rich and enduring to offer’ (Hogan 2009: 65) does not engage in a ‘process’ so much as an ‘unfolding interplay’ or ‘venturing’ (ibid.), a ‘wooing’ of ‘students’ attentions and efforts’ (77) that sometimes enables a student to ‘unearth’ or ‘understand something more of her own particular promise, of her own aptitudes and limitations’ (65). He continues: ‘I have to make overtures to the students on behalf of that idea’ (66), and we might insert here the full gamut of tactics, sometimes successful, sometimes unsuccessful, that the teacher might imaginatively and tentatively employ as the occasion seems to demand: perhaps a version of Oakeshott’s list of ‘hinting, suggesting, urging, coaxing, encouraging, guiding, pointing out, conversing, instructing, informing, narrating, lecturing, demonstrating, exercising, testing, examining, criticizing, correcting, tutoring, drilling, and so on’ (1989: 70). What is distinctive here, however, is that ‘I’ve put a foot wrong if, in any instance, my approach presumes some proprietorial claim on the minds and hearts of students’ (Hogan 2009: 65). The contrast to Hogan’s portrayal of teaching as this kind of ‘heartwork’ is to be found in those stereotypical instances where teachers ‘use a “teachery” kind of voice that’s higher and louder than natural speech and

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who spend much of their time giving orders and reprimands  … maintaining order and discipline among the ranks below themselves while conforming to the orders of a class of superiors’ (67). For Gadamer, authority is conceded to others in a moment of ‘recognition’ or ‘free’ acknowledgement (1986: 263). We ‘concede to others an authority based on what we perceive as their superiority in matters of judgement, knowledge or some other quality’ (How 1995: 172). The recognition of authority, then, is another emergent product inseparable from the event of understanding, and in teaching and learning contexts, this recognition is due to the extent that the teacher is successful in her attempts to ‘open up a world’ for her student. This does not mean that educational situations are free from the possibility of domination (far from it) but that ‘there is a distinction to be made between the way the powerless are forced to accept something, and an authentic acceptance, or acknowledgement of authority. [Gadamer] does not make the distinction sharp, and implies that there is no a priori way of distinguishing one from the other’ (ibid.). In fact,  although  Gadamer argues in TM that ‘all education depends on’ the fact that ‘the authority of what has come down to us  – and not just what is clearly grounded – always has power over our attitudes and behaviour’ (2004: 281), in his later response to Habermas he offers ‘the system of education’ (my emphasis) as an instance where authority is dogmatic (1986: 285). The problematic interaction between the educational or schooling ‘system’ and the pedagogical triangle so far developed will be considered in the next section.

4.4 The new educational triangle and the complex of hermeneutic circles The phenomenologist Shaun Gallagher argues, in applying what he terms a ‘moderate hermeneutical approach’, that ‘education is essentially a “larger” process than that defined by the student-teacher relationships or the usual conceptions of teaching and learning’, including ‘the essential and necessary participation of individuals, be they teachers, students, or institutions’ (Gallagher 1992: 180). Drawing on the philosophical hermeneutics elaborated in the preceding chapters, we might say that viewing education ontologically, as a transformative event in the Heideggerian sense, will take into account a richer constellation of hermeneutic situations than has previously been considered in the literature of RE. Gallagher appropriates R S Peters’ claim that ‘individuals are “put in the

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way” of educational experiences. … Teachers and students find themselves in a process that encompasses them and cannot be reduced to their individual efforts’ (180). He elaborates on this complex of interconnected dialogues as follows: Learning requires (a) a dialogue or circulating relationship between an individual learner’s fore-structure and the subject matter; and (b) a dialogue between the teacher’s understanding and the pedagogical presentation. These two kinds of dialogue or interchanges are not unrelated; as parts, they enter into a third dialectical interchange which constitutes the whole of the classroom situation – (c) the give and take of discussion, the interchange of interpretations between teacher and student. (74)

The weaker contention of this book is that the literature of RE has tended to focus on one or other of these dialogic contexts at the expense of others – usually at the level of either the teacher’s interaction with subject matter or the student’s understanding of the subject matter. Thus it is not uncommon for hermeneutical questions about the appropriate representation of religions, or the interpretation of religious texts, to be imported from the disciplines of religious studies or theology respectively (see Chapter 2). The stronger contention of this book is that none of the literature to date has engaged with the ontological implications of the interrelation of these dialogues in the classroom context. In philosophy of education, an imprecision in terminology has dogged attempts to fully elaborate this interrelation of hermeneutic circles. This imprecision rests on a tendency even in hermeneutically informed accounts to refer to the lesson content, stimulus or object of study as the ‘subject matter’ of a lesson or educational moment, while also translating Gadamer’s term die Sache, or the matter which is at issue in the event of understanding, as ‘subject matter’. This leads to situations in which ‘subject matter’ is locked into a particular location in this constellation (as it is even in Gallagher’s threefold, above) when more properly, if what we have here is three connected hermeneutic relationships or dialogues, some shared ‘subject matter’ is at issue in all of them. I propose firstly for theoretical clarity to continue to use the term ‘subject matter’ in place of Gadamer’s die Sache, the thing or matter at hand, and to depart from ordinary pedagogical use and interpose the term ‘text’ (albeit broadly understood in the manner elaborated in the preceding chapter) to denote collectively the object of study, lesson stimulus or content – whatever, in short, is placed directly before the student by the teacher. That the text is not identical to the subject matter, in the sense of die Sache, is illustrated in the following diagram of the new educational triangle (Figure 4.2) which I view largely as the centrepiece of this work.1 It is in relation to this model

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Text’s horizon Text

FPO Subject matter

Teacher

Student

Student’s horizon

Teacher’s horizon

Figure 4.2 The intentionality of the educational event.

of the intentionality of the learning event that I am able in Part 2 of the book to meaningfully advance the debate about the appropriate subject matter of RE. Gallagher’s important insight is that although all hermeneutic situations can be considered educational, there is something more complicated going on in an educational situation like the classroom, which we might think of as a more deliberate or self-consciously educational situation than the dialogue so far discussed. Perhaps we might refer to the ‘constructed’ educational situation, using the language we introduced by way of contrast to the ‘poetic’ approach discussed in Chapter 1. Inspired by Gallagher’s threefold, we firstly see that in an explicitly educational situation – the classroom, for example – three dialogic interactions are in play. Since each of these dialogues, as a moment of understanding, has its educational dimension (even if that is in the sense of self-education or of ‘making the text speak’), it follows that the new educational triangle consists also of three interlocking pedagogical triangles of the kind I have previously described. In this three-in-one we see that the educational triangle is thus a ‘sacred triangle’ in ways not anticipated even by Paul Standish’s use of this image (Standish 2014). The teacher’s pedagogical practice is informed by an understanding of the text; she is thus bound to the text in a circular relationship in which some subject

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matter is at stake. The student also understands the text in some way, and is thus bound into another hermeneutic circle in which some subject matter is at stake. Finally the teacher attempts to engage the student in dialogue about the text and guide his understanding, and the student seeks to learn from the teacher, which means that on the bottom line of the triangle we have the dialogic situation par excellence in which both student and teacher attempt to understand each other; each projects his or her anticipatory understanding, and finds it transformed, in the to-and-fro of classroom interaction. Again, there is some subject matter at issue between them. We have already noted a hermeneutic ‘doubling’ here, in that both teacher and student learn from each other. A deliberately or self-consciously educational situation adds to the hermeneutic moment described in the preceding section in that it brings together the teacher’s understanding of the object of study, or text, with that of the student; it thus entails the unification of three related hermeneutic moments. Students will understand texts to some extent regardless of their teachers’ presentation of them or their intentions on their students’ behalf. There is always also the possibility of Dewey’s ‘collateral’ or unexpected learning in the sense that a student cannot but understand his surroundings, and therefore cannot avoid learning, albeit in ways that the teacher might find unconducive to the kind of classroom environment she would prefer to maintain (cf. Dewey 1998: 49). In that sense, any moment of understanding in which a student is involved will to some extent be ‘educational’ (productive of new understanding), regardless of the teacher’s efforts. Both teacher and student are involved in a great deal more hermeneutic circles, and their horizons are being continually transformed by a great deal more dialogic exchanges, than we have been able to illustrate in this diagram; each is at any moment already ‘perched on a pyramid of past life’ (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 457). But the coherence of what we would recognize as a deliberately educational endeavour relies on a convergence between the teacher’s understanding of the text and that of the student, which is, at least for the teacher, the aim of the classroom interaction. It is for this reason that the ‘subject matter’ or shared concern has been placed in the centre of this triangle, at the intersection of three hermeneutic relationships. The moment of understanding that is relevant to this deliberately educational endeavour is not only one in which a student ‘understands’ a text, or even one in which a student ‘understands’ a teacher, but also one in which there is a convergence between the student’s understanding of a text, the student’s understanding of the teacher, and the teacher’s understanding of the text.

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Although it will resist specification in advance of any particular situation, we can say a great deal more about this subject matter and the sense in which it emerges:

(i)

The subject matter is properly said to emerge because it is the mutual achievement of three hermeneutic relations which converge in the event of learning. This emergence cannot be predicted in advance, because the teacher necessarily cannot have ‘total’ knowledge of the horizon of the text, or of the student’s horizon of understanding, and therefore cannot predict the ways in which each student’s horizon will be transformed in this encounter, but can only respond to and accommodate these transformations. This entails that the subject matter that emerges necessarily emerges differently for each different student in the classroom. In this sense, all classroom learning is to an extent ‘unintended’. The teacher’s anticipatory projections can never be adequate to the horizon of even one of her students, let alone a group of thirty. (ii) The situation expressed in the educational triangle is not an ‘ideal’ situation. Granted, students and teachers can speak or act at cross purposes, and students can often fail to take seriously the demands of texts in ways that have been explained in this chapter. Likewise, we must acknowledge that teachers can fail to be open to being transformed by the claims of their students. There is always the danger that students or teachers will take an ‘agonistic’ approach to learning, or regard either teaching or learning as a contest to be won, rather than enter into a ‘co-relationship’ of ‘being toward the facts of the matter’ (Gadamer 1991: 50). What is attempted in this diagram, however, is not a prescriptive goal but a description of the ontological conditions that necessarily obtain when mutual understanding has taken place in an educational context. As we have seen in previous chapters, understanding can never be considered ‘complete’, since it entails a fusion of horizons rather than a total identification of horizons. For this reason, however, it does not make much sense either to speak of any moment of understanding as ‘partial’. Rather, we are better off saying that, to the extent that mutual understanding occurs, it consists in the constitution of a shared ‘subject matter’ across the three dialogic relationships described, but this subject matter is always emergent and provisional. (iii) This subject matter cannot be explicitly thematized or captured in a theoretical abstraction. This is firstly because the subject matter is dynamic and subject to continuing transformation. Teacher and

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student are each engaged in two hermeneutic dialogues, both of which are circular, and therefore transformative of their horizons of understanding. The student’s horizon of understanding, for example, gives rise to anticipatory projections, or fore-structures of meaning, in two dialogues (that is, diagrammatically, these fore-structures run along two sides of the triangle). The two hermeneutic circles are connected, and a transformation of the horizon of understanding effected by a fruitful understanding within one circle will transform not only the fore-structure of understanding operating within that circle but also projected understandings in the related dialogue on the other side of the triangle, and vice versa. The student is involved in a tentative, backand-forth relationship with the text or object of study, but also with his teacher. Any provisional understanding achieved in his dialogue with his teacher will be applied to, and tested in, his engagement with the text. The teacher is similarly implicated in two connected circles. She brings her understanding of the text, and of her student, to bear on her interaction with that student, but this understanding is subject to transformation. She may (ontologically speaking) ‘return’ to the text with a new fore-structure or projection as she comes to know more about her student, and therefore interrogate the text with fresh insight, or with a transformed sense of the question that it might pose to that student. This transformed sense of the question is then brought back into the dialogue with her student. These to-and-fro movements along both sides of the triangle are inseparable for each participant. An interpreter does not step outside of one circle in order to participate in the other, but the alternate circle is in each case an enabling element of the interpreter’s horizon of understanding. Although we cannot represent this diagrammatically, another way of understanding this insight is to think of each of the two circles in which a participant is involved as being ‘inside’ the other. The second reason that we cannot explicitly thematize this subject matter is because it describes an ontological relationship with the world rather than the epistemological achievement of individuals. We have here a continuation of Gadamer’s image of linguistic circles merging into ever larger circles within a shared tradition, rather than the result of a unified effort by individual subjects to bring some object into presence. Intentionality here is not to be thought of representationally, in terms of the subject matter’s ‘being present’ to consciousness, but (recalling Heidegger’s response to Husserl) as a state of being-towards, or directedness. The

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co-relation to the subject matter that emerges is not one of ‘knowledge’ but of orientation: in the moment of understanding, text, student and teacher come to be oriented towards the world in a related way. That relationship, as we have seen, is best understood in terms of the question – student, text and teacher have come to an agreement over the manner in which the subject matter is to be interrogated. This is not to say, as we have seen, that there will not be a great many matters on which they do not agree.

4.5 Application and belonging – or, so what? So what, indeed, does this imply for the teacher looking for methodological guidance? In previous chapters I have argued against the possibility of a critical theory or method that could ensure a student’s ‘correct’ understanding. Additionally so far in this chapter I have implied, but not yet fully elaborated, a tension at the heart of the educational endeavour. Recall the difference introduced early on in the book between the ‘problem’ and the ‘mystery’. Hermeneutic understanding is not properly – or at least exhaustively – methodical, in that it relies on the interpreter’s openness to what is strange in the text. Any purposes that an interpreter brings to the text – in the form of prejudices, or the fore-structure of understanding – are necessarily transformed in the event of understanding. So the event of understanding is not a moment that could be ‘constructed’ or prepared for in advance by one seeking understanding. Any aim that an interpreter might bring to the moment of understanding stands to be transformed through dialogue as the interpreter himself is transformed, in the same way that any method will necessarily fall short of transformative understanding. Recall the model of play: we do not ‘use’, ‘apply’ or ‘weigh up’ our prejudices. They constitute our being and it is rather in the to-and-fro of the dialogue that productive prejudices do their work and others are transformed. Thus there is a necessary sense in which transformative understanding is aimless; understanding does not accompany any particular method employed by an active subject, but rather ‘befalls’ someone who is disposed in a certain way towards dialogue – that is, someone who submits to being conducted by the subject matter. A professional teacher can hardly see her work as aimless, and thus a tension emerges in the educational event. The possibility of a fusion of horizons in the educational event relies on that openness, on the part of both teacher and student, to being transformed by the unfolding dialogue. A teacher cannot

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foresee the emergence of subject matter and must thus necessarily, as much as her student, commit to being conducted by the demands of the dialogue as it unfolds. Yet the conditions of systems of schooling are such that we think of learning in terms of lesson plans, units of learning, programmes of study, and schemes of work. A teacher who is to be considered responsible must be able to demonstrate a commitment to designing learning experiences in accordance with the most up to date research and carefully recorded evidence of student achievement. Since the moment of understanding is indeterminate, and in any case different for each student, the educational imperative to ‘move on’ to the next stage in a predetermined programme of study necessarily interrupts or forecloses dialogue. Rather than transforming in the to-and-fro of classroom interaction, the teacher or other curriculum designer’s prior understanding of the subject matter predetermines the possibilities for its disclosure in the learning event. Thus our most educational efforts appear to be, in a hermeneutic sense, anti-educational. I have argued (Aldridge 2013) that the moment of understanding is in tension with the curriculum or scheme. But I do not hereby describe a hopeless situation; this is a familiar dialectical relationship between the intended and unintended aspects of the classroom situation with which many teachers will readily identify. Some ‘scheme’ is inevitable in that the teacher’s interaction with a student is structured in advance by a projection, or anticipatory understanding, of the contribution a particular text might make to a student’s development, and this will have been informed by the teacher’s anticipatory projections of her student’s horizon of understanding (the teacher’s ‘prejudices’, you might say, in relation to her students). The tension between these anticipatory understandings and what ‘emerges’ in the event corresponds to the tension between reconstruction and deconstruction in understanding elaborated in the previous chapter. It is the tension between fruitful and unproductive prejudice. This tension is resolved, as we have seen, in a manner which is more rightly considered ‘tactful’ than methodical. There is no doubt, however, that the teacher’s room for tactful movement is restricted, perhaps disastrously, by too close a prescription of the progression of curriculum content of RE, as we will explore in detail in Part 2 of this book. Given that we cannot prescribe a pedagogical method, what can be said that is of use to the classroom teacher, in general terms, before we go on in subsequent chapters to consider the specific challenges of RE? Granted, we cannot outline a procedure that will ensure ‘correct’ understanding on the part of the student, but nevertheless – in the descriptive spirit of what has been offered so far in

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this chapter – we have said a great deal about the ontological conditions that will obtain whenever this convergence of three dialogic situations has occurred. Perhaps the aspect that will prove most illuminative for classroom practice is the language of ‘belonging’. In the moment of understanding, teacher, student and text will find themselves in a relationship of mutual ‘belonging’ to the subject matter and thus, through this relationship, to each other. We might be able to offer, then, not a prescriptive method, but an ethical or existential orientation that could guide teaching practice. In the same way that understanding befalls a participant in dialogue who has a certain ethical disposition towards the dialogue – a willingness to submit to the subject matter and an openness to being transformed by the claims of a partner – so the moment of understanding occurs in the classroom (inasmuch as the teacher has control over this) when a teacher is disposed towards the educational moment in a particular way – that is, has as her goal not some specific understanding, but the mutual ‘belonging’ to the subject matter of teacher, student and text. Without wishing to anticipate in too much detail the arguments about curriculum content and disciplinary identity that will follow in the second part of this book, the idea of belonging can be seen to cut through perennial debates about pupil-led versus knowledge-led curricula that still loom large in general educational debate. Belonging will entail that the ‘interests’ of both student and text are taken seriously in the educational event. Thus a teacher will need to take into account the demands that the text is made ‘relevant’ to the student, and also that justice is done to the text, or that the student engages in some way that is ‘authentic’ to the concerns of the text. But these demands are not balanced in any way that could be determined or prescribed in advance. We have seen that the relationship with the subject matter is to be conceived in terms of the constitution of a shared question. This question cannot be reduced to the question that the pupil brings in advance to the text. The question is transformed in the moment of understanding, and becomes the question that the text puts to the student. This question similarly cannot be reduced to the question that the text’s author intended, or the question intended or understood by the community that produced the text (although an awareness of such considerations will undoubtedly inform the teacher’s tactful presentation of the text to the student, so that ‘the text’s question’ might emerge). The relationship of mutual ‘belonging’ is illuminated in terms of the question. The student has made the thing his own (Heidegger 1963: 213) in coming to see the way that the text is ‘in question’ for him. But he has also come ‘into question’ in relation to the subject matter, in that the text has put a question to him;

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understanding entails an acknowledgement of the text’s claim on the interpreter. In this way Gadamer is able to offer a critique of a deep-seated assumption in the history of hermeneutics, the distinction between subtilitas intelligendi and subtilitas applicandi (2004: 306–10). For Gadamer, there are not two separate movements, in which the interpreter first understands the text’s meaning and then discerns its relevance to his own situation or the manner in which it can speak to his own interests. There is rather only a single movement, and these two aspects are inseparable in the event of understanding. In RE in England and Wales there has been considerable debate about the two attainment targets, AT1 (Learning about) and AT2 (Learning from). At this point I recapitulate some elements of my discussion of the attainment targets from Chapter 1 because I wish to offer, in keeping with Malpas’s notion of Heideggerian ‘iridescence’ introduced in that chapter, another significance for this distinction in addition to the ‘strife’ between earth and world. The attainment targets have their origins in a phenomenological distinction offered originally by Grimmitt (1987), which was then formulated into two attainment targets in the SCAA model syllabuses in the 1990s (SCAA 1994), and was finally ‘canonized’ in the non-statutory national framework (QCA 2004). Questions have been asked about how to balance the two targets and about the dangers of over-emphasizing one or other aspect, as well as about the intelligibility of the two moments (Aldridge 2011; Maybury and Teece 2005; Teece 2008, 2010). Robert Jackson has questioned the possibility of always expecting a moment of application, although he has argued that some critical appropriation of the religious content understood by the student is desirable. Perhaps Hella and Wright have come closest to acknowledging the inseparability of subtilitas intelligendi and subtilitas applicandi when they have argued that coming to know the world will always imply an element of self-knowledge (Hella and Wright 2009, and my discussion in Chapter 2). Some recognition of the inseparability of this moment is probably implicit in Erricker’s proposal to replace the two attainment targets with the single target of ‘interpreting worldviews’ (Erricker 2010). However, when the two aspects of RE learning are seen as elements of a unified ontological movement, rather than a prescriptive methodology, much of this debate is resolved. It does not make sense to require, for example, that students firstly understand a text authentically before they can apply it to their own lives, or to argue that relevance to a student’s experience takes educational priority over any particular religious knowledge or content. There is no ‘undifferentiated kind of intelligibility’ (Heidegger 1963: 213) that could precede productive

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understanding. Viewed in the light of Gadamer’s insight into the inseparability of ‘application’ from understanding, the distinction between ‘learning about’ and ‘learning from’ looks not so much like a local debate within RE as a rare hermeneutic success in describing an ontological necessity in all learning: rather than ‘learning from’ being a desirable possibility that might be ‘added on’ to RE learning, there is in fact no ‘learning about’ in any curriculum area without a concomitant ‘learning from’.

Note 1 I acknowledge a shortcoming of this diagram, which to some extent Higgins attempts to address in his own diagrammatic depiction of the intentionality of learning (2010), in that I have only considered the pedagogical relationship between a teacher and a single student, rather than a group of students. I have also neglected the way in which a student’s interactions with other students will contribute to the constitution of a relevant horizon of understanding. I accept that there is more fruitful thinking to be done in this area, but I hope at least that in this chapter, through the focus on the individual dialogic exchange, I have gone some way towards addressing what Heidegger has termed the teacher’s disregard for ‘the differences and distinctions within the concrete student manifold’ (2002: 40).

5

Hermeneutics and Religion

5.1 Introduction How to begin such a wide-ranging brief? There is not space in the present volume to do justice to the ways that hermeneutics, even the specifically philosophical hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer, has impacted on theology and the study of religions or philosophy of religion. An alternative approach would be to attempt to grapple with the notoriously elusive engagement between Heidegger or Gadamer and the question or issue of the divine. This would be in keeping with the approach taken in this work so far, but even here there is too much to say. (In any case, Heidegger and Gadamer will inevitably be ‘present’ in what follows). I hope so far to have made a case for the transformation of education implied by hermeneutics, which is not fully grasped if we confine ourselves within epistemological or methodological parameters. I hope that I have thus already demonstrated the shortcomings of thinking of hermeneutics only in terms of a method for correctly interpreting texts – imported largely from theology – or of an approach to ‘dialogue’ conceived unproblematically in the sense of a religious dialogue, or of importing any particular methodological approach from the discipline of religious studies, however hermeneutically informed. All of these implications will be developed in more detail in Part 2 in relation specifically to the endeavour of RE. However, having made the ontology of understanding an educational concern, rather than one which specifically concerns the study of religion, I have in a sense short-circuited much of the ‘subject-specific’ debate we might have had about subject matter or justification; the ‘emergence’ of subject matter is equally problematic across the curriculum. But there is another way of looking at this: in a special way teachers of religion are already well-disposed to accept the educational arguments presented thus far. This might appear to be an anecdotal claim that is very difficult to support with empirical evidence, but I will try to do so by another route (one which will,

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in fact, take us back to divine texts, through dialogue, and on to disciplinary understandings, of a sort). I will begin my necessarily superficial survey of the transformational engagements between hermeneutics and religion with what is likely to be most familiar to teachers of religion trained in the theological tradition: the historical relationship with the interpretation of texts (and specifically that paradigmatic text, the divine revelation). This will entail some further consideration of what is intended by the happening or event of truth in hermeneutics. I will then go on to explore some conditions for the happening of truth in dialogue, with specific consideration of a ‘religious’ dialogue between a theist and an atheist. Finally, I will explore in detail one way in which it has been argued that an encounter with hermeneutics might transform some key concepts in the study of religion, including God, the secular, faith and transcendence. In doing so I unapologetically focus on the thought of a particular ‘post-secular’ thinker, Gianni Vattimo. The movement of the chapter will be to argue that philosophical hermeneutics begins and ends with the divine, or as Vattimo puts it, appropriating Heidegger’s use of the term: that philosophical hermeneutics has a ‘divine destiny’. This is not perhaps a movement that all readers will accept in theological terms; even among those who apply Gadamer and Heidegger’s thought, Vattimo is undoubtedly at the more radical end of the spectrum. The argument of the second half of the book does not rely on accepting Vattimo’s christology, but on working through the educational implications of its possibility as a contribution to the dialogue that is RE.

5.2 Text and truth Divinity is ‘built-in’ to the classical etymology of our technical terminology. There is no denying the connection between the Greek hermeneuien – to express, explain or translate – and the god Hermes, whose task it was to perform all of these functions as a mediator between men and the gods, who exist beyond human understanding. Palmer notes: ‘The Greeks credited Hermes with the discovery of language and writing – the tools which human understanding employs to grasp meaning and to convey it to others’ (1969: 13). Theological (or more specifically Biblical studies) usage is responsible for the transference of the Greek term into technical parlance, and is thus often offered as the paradigmatic or original instance of hermeneutics. Palmer offers Danhauer’s Hermeneutica sacra sive methodus exponendarum sacrarum litterarum (1654) as the earliest recorded occurrence of the word as a book title, and in which it refers to the exposition

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of the rules, methods or theory that govern interpretation (Palmer 1969: 34). Palmer notes that the theological tradition predates the technical terminology, and can be traced back as far as the rules governing the interpretation of the Torah in Old Testament times. Once this is acknowledged, however, it must also be noted that despite its preponderant usage in the modern English language tradition to denote interpretive interests of a theological nature, the other hermeneutic traditions – that is, the literary and the legal – can also be read back into ancient times. Gadamer acknowledges (2004: 175–84) – and other scholars have elaborated convincingly (Eden 1997) – the extent to which theologians from the patristics onwards drew on the resources of the pre-Christian tradition of classical rhetoric for their hermeneutic insights. Although Jensen remarks that ‘hermeneutical reflection began when the old myths about the gods did not make sense any more’ (2007: 9), one might privilege here the observations that the myths were ‘old’ and that they no longer made sense; the specifically theological content of this claim could be seen as an accident of the development of hermeneutic questions within the Western academic tradition. We have seen so far how Gadamer draws heavily on the Greeks – particularly Plato – as the source for his dialogic attempt to grapple with the problem of unknowability, but the unknowable (at least as we find it in TM) is an other or a tradition from which we are separated by a cultural or ‘temporal’ distance, rather than a being or experience that is sui generis unknowable. Although theological examples or insights are woven throughout the text of TM, they do not serve as Gadamer’s focal examples – even the theologian Schleiermacher is acknowledged primarily for his recognition of the universality of the hermeneutic situation (and for his turn towards a ‘romantic’ hermeneutic from which Gadamer wishes to wheel us back). Rather, it is through an extended discussion of the encounter with art that Gadamer expresses his insight that understanding constitutes the happening of truth, through the ‘exemplary significance of legal hermeneutics’ that he illustrates the claim that all ‘understanding’ involves ‘application’, and from the example of history that he draws out the concept of the historically effected consciousness, and the insight that any event of understanding constitutes the recovery of a shared tradition. Yet it is precisely these insights that have proved so decisive for theologians in their understanding of the Bible. The most influential translator of the ideas of Heidegger and Gadamer into the theological consciousness is Anthony Thiselton (1980, 1992, 2007), who diagnoses the theological situation to which Gadamer speaks as ‘the whole fundamental issue of the relationship between exegesis and systematic

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theology’ (1980: 307). How can the Christian community draw on a repository of accumulated insights (the ‘tradition’) at the same time as weed out false judgements that have proved ‘unfruitful’ to the interpretation of the Biblical text? Thiselton argues of the medieval period that ‘too often a theological preunderstanding … brought about a premature and uncritical understanding of the text, in which the text was forced to say only what was required by a given theological tradition’ (315) and which excluded the possibility of ‘new truth’ (316). However, Gadamer would warn against any suggestion that the text could be understood without reference to a prior theological tradition (or, ontologically, without being enabled by a fore-structure that would inevitably include commitments of a theological nature). This presuppositionless access to textual meaning is, however, what John Calvin sought in the ‘objectivity’ of the Reformation. The preceding chapters have demonstrated the paucity of a subjective/objective distinction for making sense of what happens in the event of understanding. Labouring under such a dichotomy, Calvin saw the pursuit of the ‘natural’, ‘simple’ and ‘true’ meaning of scripture – the ‘literal sense’ – as the only alternative to the belief that ‘its fertility consists in the various meanings which anyone may fasten to it at his pleasure’ (Thiselton 1980: 316). We might contrast fellow reformer Luther at this point, who argues that scripture needs to be ‘brought home’ or ‘experienced’ by the interpreter in order to be understood (Eden 1997: 4). Thiselton argues that the results of Martin Luther’s conscious hermeneutic strategy, and what Calvin falls prey to unwittingly as a result of his attempt to recover the sensus literalis, are the same: the outcome in each case is ‘a fusion of horizons in which often any tension is covered up’ (1980: 317). Where Karl Barth praises Calvin because in his commentary ‘a distinction between yesterday and today becomes impossible’ (ibid.), Stendahl sees here less a Gadamerian ‘homecoming’ and something more akin to what literary theory might call a ‘colonization’ of the text: ‘What is intended as a commentary becomes a theological tractate expanding in contemporary terms what Paul should have said about the subject matter as understood by the commentator’ (318). Although he does not credit Luther with seeing how it must be done, Thiselton allows that he at least acknowledged that while man places himself ‘under’ the word of God, he must also ‘appropriate its truth as his own’; he thus anticipates Gadamer’s fusion, that preserves a productive tension between the horizon of the reader and the horizon of the text. Indeed, in locating understanding in the dialectic between the strange or the foreign and the familiar (or ‘home’), Gadamer has been called the ‘secular Luther’ (Eden 1997: 4).

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It is quite conceivable that Gadamer downplays the divine moment in his historical account of hermeneutics, and thus does not fully recognize the extent to which his account of understanding has been preconfigured by the history of theology. Yet, of course, Gadamer’s account of tradition and the historically effected consciousness allows for, and in fact requires, the conditioning of understandings in any present moment by the accumulated understandings of the past. We might introduce at this point the work of the scholar Mohammed Arkoun, writing in French about the hermeneutics and reception of the Qur’an, when he identifies the societies of the Book-book: those societies whose relationships with all texts (books) have been fundamentally structured by their relationships with an originary text, The Book (Arkoun 1994, 2002). Gadamer’s claims, initially startling when applied to all texts, are fundamentally ‘at home’ when viewed in the context of the relationship of the faithful to the divine word: the text is a source of truth, it has transformational potential (it can ‘change your life’) and it has a living meaning, in that its message can constantly be ‘made new’ by interpreters in different ages and situations. In Gadamer’s specifically philosophical hermeneutics, these elements all transfer into the universal account of the event of understanding as existential orientations towards the partner in dialogue that are necessary conditions of the fusion of horizons. So we come to a point of clarification about what is meant by the happening of truth in dialogue. I will begin by drawing again on Andrew Wright, who includes an intriguing discussion of Gadamer’s treatment of the truth of the work of art in a section where he advocates ‘the intrinsic value of the pursuit of truth’ (2007a: 122–7). Wright once more demonstrates a significant sensitivity to the ontological elements of Gadamer’s account, but again does not extend this into his overall methodological position. Wright situates Gadamer’s perspective in relation to the subjectivization of aesthetic experience; art is neither to be seen as a vehicle for ‘an empathetic engagement with the subjective emotions of the artist’ or for ‘our sensual delight’ (123). Rather, Wright argues that the worth of art ‘lies in its ability to challenge our ordinary horizons of understanding by opening out new horizons of meaning, new ways of looking at the world, new avenues towards truth’ (ibid.). He continues: ‘These potential new horizons are embedded in the painting itself, and could not be available to us apart from its ontological reality’ (ibid.). Wright continues with a brief but sensitive elaboration of the ontology of play that characterizes the experience of transformation by the artwork. He accepts that ‘we must play the game seriously by losing ourselves in it’ (124) and cites Gadamer on ‘the primacy of play over the consciousness of the player’ (Wright

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2007a: 123; Gadamer 2004: 105), continuing that ‘the real subject of the game … is not the player, but instead the game itself ’ (Wright 2007a: 123–4; Gadamer 2004: 106). I have already argued (in Chapter 3) that Wright later fails properly to acknowledge the event-like character of the moment of understanding that is entailed here. Here these observations are marshalled in support of Wright’s reasonable claim that ‘the game becomes an intrinsic end in itself, something that is uniquely worthwhile and as such requires no further justification or explanation’ (124). Wright’s extension of the play-like character of the encounter with art into other spheres is also legitimate. We have seen that in Heidegger’s discussion of ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, and Gadamer’s treatment of the truth of the artwork in Section 1 of TM, art is offered as the paradigmatic, but not unique, happening of truth. The local implications elaborated in relation to art are in each case extended into a universal description of the hermeneutic experience. Wright argues that when we ‘lose ourselves’ in this way, the ‘objects, people and beliefs’ that we encounter ‘become for us at the time intrinsically valuable and worthwhile’ (124). We might add to this that it is precisely the disposition of charitable (one might even say loving) acceptance of the other’s claims to truth that makes possible the event of understanding and the happening of truth. Wright does, however, offer a consequence of this ontological account that does not follow, hermeneutically speaking. He argues thus: ‘If these are all intrinsically worthwhile activities that flow from the brute fact of our existence, then absolute worth lies in seeking to engage with, and respond to, the ultimate order-of-things’ (ibid.). It is hard not to see intellectual sleight of hand in such a radical departure from the implications of Gadamer’s thought, which we will in any case elaborate in more detail now. As Vattimo elaborates in his discussion of ‘Art’s Claim to Truth’, Gadamer’s defence of the ‘extra-methodological truth of the human sciences’ begins ‘precisely with the recognition that there is an experience of truth in art, insofar as the encounter with the work of art truly transforms the interpreter’ (Vattimo 2008: 87). This event includes the transformation of the artwork (or for the human sciences, once we have extended this insight, the tradition) since ‘the work, too, is loaded with the trace of interpretation left by that particular encounter’ (ibid.). Thus the event or happening of truth, which comes to pass always in dialogue, entails the birth of a ‘novum’ – both interlocutors in the fusion of horizons ‘recognize each other not as they were before but as discovered anew, enriched and deepened in their being’ (135). Vattimo continues that ‘the novum that dialogue gives rise to is also elaboration, corroboration, return to itself of what

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already was’ (ibid.). This is a return, however, that always follows a discontinuity or breakdown of equilibrium, or, ‘The situation of misunderstanding from which every interpretation starts’ (ibid.). Vattimo elaborates the etymological connection between Erfahrung, the transformative ‘experience’ entailed in the event of truth, and fahren, to undertake a voyage, in which ‘the experiences and encounters leave their mark’ on the traveller (134). He reminds us that ‘the possibility that the other, or something new, will present itself is safeguarded only by its belonging to a domain that always already mediates it with whatever it enters into relation’. It is only possible against that shared background, the tradition, or ‘the universal medium of language’. It is thus that we are able to reconcile each individual happening of truth with Heidegger’s notion of truth as horizon, or ‘the light which makes beings visible’ (Vattimo 2008: 150). The event of truth is possible because we live ‘in’ truth (cf. Cooper 2002: 54). We can now understand the implications of recovery and recognition entailed in every disclosure of truth. Recall that throughout this work understanding has not been conceived epistemologically. Rather than enabling the discovery of any particular facts about the world, ‘understanding is more primordially the disclosure of what Heidegger calls possibilities’ (Hoy 2006: 184). Possibilities are existential commitments already projected on to what is to be understood; they are what makes it possible for Dasein to have a ‘world’ in the Heideggerian sense. This is best understood, as we have seen, as an inexplicit ‘comportment’ or directedness rather than factual knowledge or conscious decision: ‘What it is sensible to do in a particular situation is already laid out in advance in a genuine understanding of the concrete possibilities’ (Hoy 2006: 185). We do not ‘choose’ possibilities either capriciously (or arbitrarily) or in the sense of conscious deliberation. Rather, we discover them in the happening of truth that occurs in the encounter with the other. It is thus that the happening of truth always entails ‘self-knowledge’, not in an epistemological sense – in the form of an explicit or thematized awareness – but ontologically, in the sense of coming to a new existential orientation towards the subject matter. We should emphasize this educational aspect of the happening of truth: it is an event of becoming, in which Dasein becomes more fully what it is. This is a transformation that makes possible new possibilities, and thus Dasein’s dialogic involvement with the world continues. Dasein is a being that cannot but understand. The education of Dasein is thus never complete or final. One implication remains, and it is one that Wright neglects in his development of the hermeneutic aspects of truth. No disclosure can ever be total.

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As we have previously discussed, any coming to light in Heidegger’s Lichtung or ‘clearing’ leaves something else in shadow; thus there is ever the possibility of new interpretation, and no methodological approach will provide an exhaustive account of the means of access to the truth of a given entity. There will always be an excess of possibilities. This stands, though Wright would not agree, even for the methodological perspective or paradigm of critical realism. Although Wright would concede that no human being could ever be in possession of total or unrevisable truth, but only provisional knowledge, he would nevertheless want to see in the minimal realistic consensus of critical realism an ontological envelope that could contain and establish the conditions for any progress in knowledge or happening of truth. In Chapter 2 I argued essentially for the philosophical primacy of phenomenology over critical realism. What the inexhaustible truth of the work of art demonstrates, in Heidegger’s thought, is the limitations of any ‘determination to restrict what is to count as knowledge of the world to a particular domain’ (Cooper 2002: 60). If raised to the level of an inclusive totality, the metaphysical preoccupations of critical realism are at odds with the insight that is to be gained from the disclosure of truth in the artwork, in that (in the manner of a philosophy that has taken on a scientific notion of entities) ‘it is blind to its status as only one way of disclosing’ (56). Given that critical realism operates unapologetically within the ontic realm of the being of entities, rather than addressing the ontological question (in Heideggerian terms) of ‘the preconditions for any given way of disclosure ... to be possible’ (Cooper 2002: 56), what it offers is tantamount to a description of the kinds of problems and questions that have become meaningful for us in our current epoch. It is the technological phenomenon of ‘enframing’ (discussed in Chapter 1) that limits the possibility of recognizing that Being might be disclosed differently in a future epoch. The happening of truth within critical realism can only ever be, following Heidegger’s critique of the ‘correspondence theory’ and the dissolution of the distinction between ‘self ’ and ‘world’, truth in a derived sense. As Vattimo argues, following Gadamer, ‘Even when we speak of correspondence, we have in mind propositions verified in the context of paradigms, the truth of which consists above all of their being in community’ (2005: 51). There is another way of saying this: we can hardly sustain any engagement with Gadamer, it appears to me, without acknowledging that there are no transcendent questions, and thus that there are no transcendent truths, conceived in the sense of answers to those questions. Alan How, commenting on Gadamer, argues that ‘there is no true original Hamlet, it exists neither in the intentions of the author nor in

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the fixed words printed on the page, but in what happens on the occasions it is played’ and that ‘audiences at plays, (unlike academics), do not find they have a problem with the “relativism” of there being more than one possible truthful explanation’ (1995: 33). Rather, the audience are ‘drawn into the play’ and ‘[find] themselves in it’. Thus, ‘The living of life eliminates relativism’ (ibid.). Thiselton acknowledges this in the case of theology when he cautions that ‘claims about so-called timeless truth demand careful clarification and assessment’ (1980: 440). This is what it means for an encounter with scripture to be an encounter with a living truth.

5.3 The happening of truth in dialogue I have already argued (in Chapter 3) that my account of the dialogic nature of learning should not be overhastily appropriated as a call for more dialogue, conceived in the literal terms of speech and conversation, in the classroom. These are undoubtedly good things, but it is the task of a different kind of book to argue for their value (cf., for example, Alexander 2008). This would be an altogether too explicit rendering of Gadamer’s contribution to the RE question. Rather, I have argued that the moment of understanding, in ontological terms, has some of the essential characteristics of a dialogue. It is with this note of caution in mind that I do now offer an explicit example of a religious dialogue, taken from the pages of Margaret Archer, Andrew Collier and Doug Porpora’s collaborative work, ‘Transcendence: Critical Realism and God’ (Archer et al. 2004). We are introduced to two friends, Mary (a Christian) and Thomas (an atheist). The discussion begins thus: ‘When Mary meets with her atheistic friend, Thomas … . Thomas tells her that her belief in God is irrational’ (17). Digressing briefly, the discussion that follows demonstrates that Mary and Thomas’s relationship is of a kind that can sustain such a blunt challenge! Nevertheless, as an opener, this perhaps would not be the way a teacher might go about framing the dialogue that is RE in her classroom. A reader who is concerned about the explicitness of such a challenge being levelled at a student will want to consult my discussion of Paul Standish’s educational phenomenon of impudence, in Chapter 7. Thomas supports his claim with reference to Durkheim, Freud, Marx and Feuerbach’s explanations of religion. Mary’s response is to engage with these thinkers, and on her next meeting with Thomas she is able to recount each explanation. She observes that while each explanation is plausible, they are not mutually supporting, saying ‘none of these guys demonstrates that it is his

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explanation that is correct and not one of the others’ (ibid.). Thomas is a little nonplussed by this, and even more so by Mary’s claim that none of them ‘even bothers to rule out the possibility that people believe in God because there actually is a God that people are experiencing’. It becomes clear that he ‘has not actually read these authors quite so closely’ (18). Mary then introduces the ‘so-called anthropic coincidences’ and offers the ‘fine-tuning’ argument for God’s existence. There is a challenge for Thomas here. He has been inclined to think of his atheistic perspective as the one that rests on ‘science’ and ‘rational argument’ rather than ‘faith’, and here Mary is using inference from scientific evidence in support of her perspective. Thomas now has some reading of his own to do. The back-and-forth continues. We hear that ‘eventually, Thomas comes across the many universe theory, and Mary is forced to concede that this is equally plausible an explanation for our universe’s appearance of design’ (19). But all of this is ‘just the beginning’ (ibid.). Archer et al. draw out some implications from the dialogue they have presented. A first observation is that ‘the burden of proof is actually asymmetrical, relative to our personal experiences’ (16). Relationship with God is ‘not just a belief for Mary, but also a continuous sensation’ (17). This means that Mary does not need automatically to move to a position of agnosticism when presented in dialogue with an opposing perspective that she cannot conclusively disprove. This remains the case even when we realize (let’s say, in the case of a dialogue between a Western-born Christian and a Saudi Arabian Muslim) that – but for an accident of birth – either interlocutor may well have held their opponent’s views. The possibility of faith for Mary rests on the consistency of her continual projection of a divine narrative on to her daily experience of the world; it all holds together. This is the situation in which she finds herself; it is the point to which her ‘effective history’ has brought her. Taking her faith seriously does, however, present Mary with a duty to attempt to understand Thomas’s challenge and make a response to it. Neither, Archer et al. argue, does this situation ever necessarily arrive at the point of a ‘relativist impasse’ (18). As we have seen in Chapter 4, there are possibilities for this dialogue to become degenerate or deficient. Thomas and Mary might firstly decide that their respective assumptions – theism and atheism  – are incommensurable and thus ‘undiscussable’. Each might then become insulated from risk or the possibility of transformation by the other. There is now no danger that they will ‘fall out’ or be made uncomfortable by the dialogue. But the cost of this is that each has come to view the other in such a way that they no longer take seriously the other’s claims to truth. They have decided in advance that they have nothing to learn from each other. Another possibility

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is that the truth of the matter ceases to be an issue for them and they turn rather to kibitzing. Archer et al. invoke Rorty’s claim that ‘the truth is not important; what is important is ongoing discussion’, arguing in response that if ‘the views with which Mary and Thomas begin their discussions are no worse than the ones at which they might arrive by the end’, then ‘discussion is rather pointless’ (19). Archer et al. argue that Mary and Thomas model for us the ‘Haverim’ of the Jewish tradition. ‘Haverim are study partners who inspire each other’s intellectual growth by lovingly challenging each other’s claims to the truth’ (19). It is the very nature of Mary and Thomas’s loving relationship, or their ethical orientation towards each other, that means that truth is at issue for them. Each takes seriously the other’s claims to truth and thus ‘risks’ him or herself in the conversation. It is only by being open to risk that each is transformed by the encounter, conceived by Archer et al. in terms of their ongoing intellectual growth. I want to develop further hermeneutic implications of this hypothetical dialogue by taking it in a direction that Archer et al. do not discuss. Let’s imagine that one of the interlocutors (I am going to choose Mary) comes to depart from her original standpoint and affirm that of her partner. I should get it on record (another digression) that a ‘conversion’ of this kind is neither an aim of RE, nor is it likely often to happen. But Mary’s openness to being transformed by Thomas’s claims to truth entails, at least, that she risks this possibility; it is something that is at stake between them. I will argue in Part 2 of the book that recognizing this possibility as an ontological condition for the dialogue that is RE has significant implications for how we conceive of the subject matter of that dialogue, and thus the ‘curriculum’; but for now I want to make two further observations. Although neither Mary nor Thomas holds irrational beliefs, a change of heart in this dialogue is not going to come about through rational debate alone. We can imagine that a variety of experiential factors might contribute to the reasonable grounding of each faith perspective, and in any case the stance of each participant in dialogue is not reducible to an explicitly thematizable ‘narrative’ or ‘worldview’, so much as an existential projection of possibilities for meaningful existence, or a comportment towards the world. Thus Mary is unlikely to change her mind simply because she comes to the realization that her arguments for God’s existence do not hold up. Neither can Thomas’s naturalism rest on his ability to demolish any arguments for God’s existence that might come his way. Mary will not disinterestedly weigh up two competing accounts or holistic pictures of ultimate reality and come to a rational or active decision that one is a better fit for it all than the other. Rather, as each participant ‘hearkens’ or allows him or herself to be ‘conducted’ by the subject matter before them,

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this is productive of a disclosure in which Mary (for example) might be led to affirm that renouncing belief in God has become a possibility for her. This would constitute a conversion in the fullest sense: a turning around, a re-orienting through dialogue of her being towards the subject matter, rather than the subjective achievement of a rational agent. My second observation concerns what becomes of the ‘subject matter’ in such a circumstance. We could be forgiven for thinking, from Thomas’s charge at the outset, that the dialogue had been ‘about God’, but by the end this is by no means clear. The dialogue is likely to continue, but now Mary will have a whole bundle of issues that she is likely to want to work through with Thomas. She will likely need to develop a new account of religion, given that she has previously been inclined to think of the grounds of Christianity, at least, in terms of the revelation of a transcendent reality. But the dialogue is not really ‘about’ religion any more. Mary may well want to develop a new holistic explanation to account for particular events or experiences she has previously explained in terms of God, but the argument is not really about God any more either. Mary will likely have questions about the grounds of meaning, purpose and value in her new life. These are not, now, questions that she will want to answer in terms of God or religion, but they represent the natural continuation of the dialogue. The significance of this is that, as Mary and Thomas have transformed, what is at issue for them has also transformed, and a new subject matter has emerged. I will argue in Part 2 of the book that if the curriculum space for RE is to contain a transformative, and thus educational, dialogue, it must allow for the possibility of this transformation of the subject matter, and not preclude it in advance.

5.4 A divine destiny for hermeneutics? I wish now to extend this process of considering how the dialogue between religion and secularism might transform in a more radical direction by engaging at some length with the hermeneutic philosophy of Gianni Vattimo. Vattimo might be called a post-secular philosopher or a philosopher of the return of (or the return to) religion. I will indulge in the briefest biographical narrative, because Vattimo’s account of the phenomenon of religion at the turn of the twentieth century is inextricably linked to his recognition of his own return in his twilight years to the Catholic faith of his upbringing and youth, and his eventual confession, in response to an enquiry from an old friend, that he believes that he believes (Vattimo 2002: 2). Born in 1936, he studied philosophy

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under Luigi Pareyson at the University of Turin before travelling to Heidelberg to study hermeneutics with Hans-Georg Gadamer. Raised as a Catholic, Vattimo recalls attending the parish church at the age of ten and in fact resolving to study philosophy in order to contribute to the formation of a ‘new Christian humanism’ (ibid.). ‘For a long time’, he writes, ‘I woke up early to go to mass, before school, before the office, before university lectures’ (1999: 20). I will assume the loss of his faith, since Vattimo’s emphasis on a ‘return’ implies at least a temporary absence or departure, although this may not be the terminology he would choose, and this is not in fact a part of his biography that Vattimo discusses in great detail. In his interpretation of the collective experience of the return of religion, what returns is something that had never gone, and could never go away, even if in that return it registers itself more explicitly as an absence or departure of what might readily be recognized as religious. For the time being, suffice to say that perhaps Vattimo, a homosexual, found himself at odds with the church’s teaching on sexuality and the authority of the clergy, both of which he continues to publicly and vehemently criticize, at the same time as he became engrossed in the study of Heidegger and Nietzsche, the ‘death of God’ philosophers, who were to shape the course of his subsequent academic career. He writes that over time he ‘distanced’ himself from his Christian heritage, but adds ‘(or so I believed)’ (1999: 33). One of Vattimo’s best-known works is a commentary on Nietzsche in which Heidegger is present as the destiny of Nietzsche’s thought (2001); this concept of destiny, which expresses something of the relationship between a thinker and his tradition, is also central to his account of the relation of secularism to the Christian tradition, as we shall see. Although he was influential in Italy from the 1970s onwards, English translations of Vattimo’s major works appeared in quick succession only in the early nineties – their names illustrate how he captured something of the spirit of the age: The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture (1991), The Transparent Society (1992) and The Adventure of Difference: Philosophy after Nietzsche and Heidegger (1993). It is in these texts that Vattimo develops his hermeneutics of ‘weak thought’, or the ‘weakening of Being’. Vattimo’s starting point is Heidegger’s attempt to escape metaphysical or objectifying categorizations by conceiving of Being as an event rather than an objective structure. He writes: The objects of our experience are given only within a horizon; this horizon, like the light that makes things appear, is not in turn objectively visible. If we are

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capable of speaking of Being, we must conceive of Being as horizon and as light, rather than the general structure of objects. Since it is not an object, Being does not possess the stability assigned to it by the metaphysical tradition. (2002: 21)

Vattimo draws attention to Heidegger’s claim that thinking of Being as an event means recollecting Being’s history. Heidegger puns that denken is andenken, thinking is remembrance. Vattimo recalls Heidegger’s claim that the point is ‘to take a leap into the liberating abyss of tradition’ (Heidegger 1992: 94–102, in Vattimo 2002: 22). It is a liberating leap because it shakes the claim of the order of beings to be held as the eternal and objective order of Being. The leap does not give us more truthful or more complete knowledge of what Being objectively is, it only tells us that Being is neither objective nor stable. Being manifests itself as an event with respect to which we are always engaged as interpreters somehow ‘on the way’. (Vattimo 2002: 22)

A shift from self-confessed ‘nihilism’ occurred when, towards the end of the twentieth century, Vattimo published the short book whose title literally translates from the Italian as ‘believing that one believes’ (1999). The style of the text is a radical departure from his previous work, taking on a biographical and conversational tone appropriate to an intellectual writing about his personal recovery of Christianity, rather than writing as a theologian. At no point is it Vattimo’s intention to provide a systematic or fully worked out theology, and he acknowledges that his is a heterodox view within the faith. His Christianity is a minimal christology recovered or recalled from the Catholicism of his youth. Although it precedes the events of 9/11, the work has a distinctly post9/11 flavour. Vattimo likens the return of religion in his own thought to the return of religion in the collective experience of Western culture, a culture long proclaimed to have been secularized but which now more than ever sees religions flourishing in a variety of forms, including fundamentalism. He acknowledges that an aspect of the return of religion in his personal life might at least in part be attributed to a physiological impulse deriving from his experience of the mortality of friends and loved ones with whom he would have liked to spend more time, and observes that the historical circumstances bringing back the problem of faith share a trait in common with the physiology of ageing: in both cases the problem of God is posed in relation to the encounter with a limit as the occurrence of a defeat: we believed that we could realize justice on earth, but now recognise that it

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is no longer possible and turn our hopes to God. Death hovers over us as an ineluctable event, we escape from despair by turning to God and his promise to welcome us into his eternal kingdom. (Vattimo 1999: 24)

However, it is to the phenomenon of the weakening of Being that Vattimo attributes the resurgence of a credible Christian perspective: If God is dead, if philosophy has recognised that it cannot with certainty grasp the ultimate foundation, then philosophical atheism is no longer necessary. Only an absolute philosophy can feel the necessity of refuting religious experience. ... Since God can no longer be upheld as an ultimate foundation, as the absolute metaphysical structure of the real, it is possible, once again, to believe in God. True, it is not the God of metaphysics or of medieval scholasticism. But that is not the God of the Bible. (2002: 6)

Vattimo equates the nihilism of his weak thought with secularism, heralded as it is in Nietzsche’s work by the announcement of the death of God. He acknowledges the paradox of being led back to the Christian faith, ‘or to something that bears a striking resemblance to it’ (2002: 3), from the most anti-Christian of writers. By a similar turn, he is able to claim that secularization, emerging as it does from the death of the God of metaphysics, is the destiny of Christianity. Here he draws attention to another of Heidegger’s etymologies, where destiny or fate (Geschick) bears a close resemblance to Geschichte, or history (Vattimo 2002: 21). The circularity implied here is best illustrated by returning to Vattimo’s account of the return of religion in his own life: I have begun to take Christianity seriously again because I have constructed a philosophy inspired by Nietzsche and Heidegger, and have interpreted my experience in the contemporary world in the light of it: yet in all probability I constructed my philosophy with a preference for these authors precisely because I started with the Christian inheritance, which I have now found again, though, in reality, I had never abandoned it. (1999: 33)

In a final twist, Vattimo is able to interpret this destiny of secularization as prefigured or prophesied in the Christian message, so that nihilism itself becomes the meaning of the message of incarnation. Central to Vattimo’s understanding of the incarnation is the concept of kenosis, the divine self-emptying of God in the person of Christ. Here he acknowledges the influence of René Girard. He writes: ‘Christ shows that the sacred is violence, and opens the way to a new human history that can be called “secularised”’ (1999: 10). This unmasking of

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the sacred entails a rejection of the transcendent principle of natural religion. Luca D’Isanto, Vattimo’s translator, writes thus: Christ’s incarnation, according to Vattimo, reveals that Being is not a principle … that can be described or represented to sensible intuition, but rather an event that occurs as an announcement of language and is oriented towards spiritualization and kenosis. … Vattimo argues that kenosis shows that the divine is fully involved with historicity, with the horizon of language, insofar as it reveals God as peaceful, dialogical Word. (D’Isanto 2002: 10–1)

In secularization, thus conceived as the self-emptying of God into language, ‘God descends from the heavens of transcendence … thus fulfilling the transition announced by the gospels, after which we shall no longer be called servants or  … children, but friends’ (2002: 39). In the incarnation, God weakens himself by emptying himself into creation to be subject to an infinity of interpretations. Thus the end of metaphysics is seen to be the fulfilment of the Christian message, a message which itself is summed up by Vattimo as the announcement of the death of God. The rejection of the transcendent principle enables for Vattimo a true intellectual charity grounded in the acknowledgement of the weakening of Being. Thus I argue, following Vattimo, for the ‘divine destiny’ of hermeneutics, conceived in the sense of a transformative disclosure, or recovery of one’s history, through dialogue. For Vattimo, ‘Hermeneutics is the development and maturation of the Christian message’ (2005: 47). This is more than simply a recognition of the history of ideas in the Western world, but makes possible an affirmation of Christianity as an inseparable element of our effective history. In response to Rorty’s claim that Vattimo’s compelling image of kenosis renders him nevertheless no more inclined to feel closer to Christianity (Rorty 2005), Vattimo argues that ‘the Christian revelation has cogency insofar as we recognize that without it our historical existence would not make sense … our culture in its broadest sense would not make sense if we removed Christianity from it’ (Vattimo 2005: 53). He goes on: ‘It is far more reasonable to believe that our existence depends on God because here, today, we are unable to speak our language and to live out our historicity without responding to the message transmitted to us by the Bible’ (ibid.). For Vattimo, the weakening of God implied in the non-objectification of truth unites the death of Christ on the cross with the announcement of the death of God in philosophy. Both of these lead us into hermeneutics, into dialogue, because, ‘the only truth revealed to us by Scripture, the one that can never be demythologized in the course of time … is the truth of love, of charity’ (2005: 50–1). Recall that the possibility of transformative dialogue rests in a

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charitable orientation of openness that cannot be ensured or guaranteed. Thus Vattimo finds in Heidegger’s pronouncement that ‘only a god can save us’ the recognition that the possibility of mutual understanding is dependent on the loving disposition of each participant, and thus ‘our only hope for survival rests in the Christian commandment of charity’ (Vattimo 2005: 54).

5.5 Concluding remarks I accept that there will be resistance to this interpretation (and let us recall, following Nietzsche, that it is, after all, ‘only’ an interpretation). I would like to address some critical comments that might be levelled. I firstly accept that Vattimo’s christology is partial, and that his is a (self-avowedly) ‘heterodox’ view within Christianity, but I also apply his account precisely because it problematizes such appellations. I also accept that – as has been recognized by critics (cf., for example, Arkoun 2005) – Vattimo’s account of the secular is grounded in an exclusively Christian account of religion. Vattimo is not the first to claim that the concept of the secular is a peculiarly Western, and specifically Christian, invention; he acknowledges his own indebtedness to Weber (Vattimo 2002: 35– 6). It may be that this interpretation has only a restricted, ‘local’ application  – another story altogether might be told in one of Arkoun’s other societies of the Book-book, and another entirely within a tradition that has had a quite different relationship with scripture. However, this localization of the narrative of transcendence would have the outcome of expanding, rather than limiting, the scope of Vattimo’s conception of weak thought, since a genuinely inclusive RE will need to entertain the possibility of these different local narratives encountering and even further transforming each other. I would like to signpost now the implications for a curriculum of RE. It will become tempting in Part 2 of the book to think of the dialogue that is RE in terms of a focus on ‘transcendent reality’ or ‘ultimate questions’. Vattimo’s perspective is interesting because it proceeds by taking transcendence ‘off the table’, not through rejecting a theistic account, but by offering an interpretation that endorses a specific divine narrative and sees the rejection of transcendence as its fulfilment or destiny. An educational accommodation of this perspective need not proceed by accepting its transcendent truth (which would not, in any case, be immanently possible), but would need to consider the ontological conditions of a dialogic situation that could take seriously the ‘risk’ of being transformed by this, and other, interpretations of religion.

Part Two

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6

Aims and Subject Matter of Religious Education

6.1 Introduction We now come full circle and are able to address RE head-on, explicitly considering that constellation of questions that constitutes the ‘pedagogical’, according to Grimmitt’s expansive definition of pedagogy as ‘a theory of teaching and learning encompassing aims, curriculum content and methodology’ (Grimmitt 2000a: 16). In this chapter I intend to consider aims, justification and curriculum content, which will ultimately lead us to clarify what can be said about the ‘subject matter’ of RE. I will address the question of methodology, or at least something like it, in Chapter 7. I will begin by considering the debate about the justification of RE as a discrete curriculum domain. I will make close reference here to the correspondence between John White and Andrew Wright in the pages of the British Journal of Religious Education (White 2004, 2005; Wright 2004b, 2005). This is not because their debate is in any way ‘definitive’ of such discussion (although White’s paper remains at the time of writing the most read article on the journal’s online site) but because – particularly viewed in the wider context of each writer’s work – their distinctively philosophical exchange enables us to situate the RE debate within the wider philosophical question of the purposes of curriculum. I will consider aims-based and subject-based approaches to curriculum, and ultimately argue for a version of ‘curriculum as conversation’ that follows from the hermeneutic description of education set out in Part 1 of the book. I am then able to return to the main point of disagreement between White and Wright, which is the importance of what Michael Hand has called the ‘possibility of truth’ argument for RE. I will argue that within a hermeneutic conception of curriculum, the ‘possibility of truth’ of religious texts remains an integral guiding

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principle, but will transform in such a way that it cannot (and need not) provide a transcendent justification of RE as a distinct curriculum domain. I will also make particular use of the deposition Heidegger gave to the de-Nazification committee in Freiburg in 1945. So we also come full circle in another way, because the question, ‘Why Heidegger?’ is raised again. Heidegger’s deposition and the question of RE seem like an odd pairing. I will not deny that it is uncomfortable. Although this is the closest thing that we have to an ‘apology’ for his political views, Heidegger dwells very little on his motivations for becoming involved in national socialism, and explicitly refuses to offer a recantation. Instead, he offers a statement of the contribution that he ‘bequeaths’ to the German University; a ‘testament’, as he puts it. Given Heidegger’s continued emphasis on having chosen Socrates as his pedagogical model, and his self-identification as a ‘tragic educator’ (Heidegger 2002: 43), one can hardly imagine that he is not making a conscious allusion to Socrates’ own Apology, which – at least as Plato recounts it – was no ‘apology’ at all. I will not attempt the defence that Heidegger does not offer. I do not think one can be given. I will say that this ‘ad hoc’ (Ares and Axiotis 2002: 43) treatment of paideia is also perhaps the closest thing we have to a sustained account of Heidegger’s educational philosophy (ibid.: 44). Two themes in particular in this deposition – the general notion of value in education, and the diagnosis of higher education as being ‘in the thrall of theory’ (Heidegger 2002: 39) – pull together much of the argument of Part 1 of this book in a way that pertains specifically to the curriculum question. I am less concerned that Heidegger takes higher education – the university – as his specific focus. This is the context in which he has taught. The themes are transferable to our interests here in large part because the school curriculum that we are discussing has historically taken as its model the disciplines of higher education, but also because (as we will see particularly in discussing the ‘possibility of truth’ argument) the distinctions between schooling and higher education are not as sharp as might sometimes be suggested.

6.2 John White and the justification of religious education White asks, ‘Should religious education be a compulsory school subject?’ (2004) and concludes that it should not, or at least not for an hour each week from the ages of five to sixteen – some five hundred hours of curriculum time. He considers and finds wanting three possible arguments that might be levelled in

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its favour, each derived from the 2004 non-statutory framework’s statements on the importance of RE (QCA 2004). White firstly considers the claim that RE should serve as a vehicle for moral education. He recounts a history of the relationship between religious and moral education – particularly the way in which RE came to be seen as means of promoting civic integration after the Second World War – covering in the process ground similar to that covered in the account I sketched out in my opening chapter. White’s conclusion is that ‘Religious Education is in part prisoner of its own history’ (2004: 161). He concedes (grudgingly, it must be admitted) that religions offer one possible account of the grounds of morality. But he goes on to assert – reasonably, I feel – that ‘few of RE’s proponents today, if pressed, would accept’ that ‘morality was inconceivable without religion’ (161). White then introduces two different ways in which we might be approaching moral education – motivationally or epistemologically. If our aim is to motivate students to behave morally, or to adhere to certain ethical principles, then this would be better effected through the ethos of the school: the actions we choose to praise, reward or model and those we choose to sanction or condemn. Encouraging students to act morally on religious grounds is, for White, liable to confuse the issue – particularly for those ‘secular-minded’ students who do not order their lives in relation to God’s wishes. It might in fact undermine their inclination to behave morally (see also Hand 2003: 159). If, on the other hand, our aim is epistemological – to assist students in thinking rationally about the grounds of moral action – then given that there are also secular approaches to the grounds of morality, this discussion is not best situated in a curriculum domain that has an explicit focus on religions. It is in this light that Tillson (2011), for example, has suggested replacing RE with a discrete subject named ‘ethics education’. This would be a curriculum area in which discernment of ‘the good life’ is our primary focus. Religious and other perspectives would have a voice in this, but there would be no privileged focus on religions as the primary bearers of transcendent truth claims. White suggests that this discussion could be conducted in a nonprejudicial way through ‘personal, social and health education’ (PSHE). White secondly considers the importance of developing pupils’ understanding of the world religions, agreeing that ‘it is a proper part of civic education that children should learn about different groups in their society and their beliefs’ (2004: 161). He goes on to limit the importance of this justification for a discrete curriculum domain. Firstly, because religious groups are representative of only a ‘minority’ of the population, and secondly because there are a range of other groups holding beliefs about how best to live a human life (he lists vegetarianism,

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feminism, artistic pursuits, and others) that would also have some claim to curriculum space. White recommends that the requirement for students to encounter, understand and respect alternative views can be met through other curriculum subjects such as history or (again) PSHE, in which additionally he does not detect the danger that the approach might be to ‘commend’ such beliefs rather than have students understand and critically evaluate them. Finally, White considers a view which he does not find in the non-statutory framework document and which he considers to be a ‘new’ rationale for the subject, drawing largely on what Hand has called his ‘possibility of truth’ argument. Hand argues that that the existence of God is firstly an open question: ‘Some religious propositions are sufficiently well supported by evidence and argument as to merit serious consideration by reasonable people’ (Hand 2003: 162). Secondly, this is an open question of momentous importance. In the case of non-believers, for example, ‘If there were an omnipotent deity with ultimate control over human destiny, his existence would demand a massive reorientation of thought and conduct’ (ibid.). Thus Hand argues that the amount of curriculum time currently allocated to RE is roughly commensurate with the time needed to develop facility with the ‘distinctive kinds of evidence and argument’ that are involved in making decisions about religious truth (ibid.). Finally, he suggests that a curriculum endorsing this aim would shift from empathizing to evaluating, and that, ‘There would be much less attention to the differences between particular religions and much more to the differences between religion and irreligion’ (163). White agrees that these questions are important and should be addressed at some point during compulsory schooling. However, he resists Hand’s claim that religious arguments are epistemologically unique, and continues to maintain that they do not deserve the amount of curriculum time Hand would argue for. Additionally, he questions the level of sophistication required for children up to the age of sixteen to form a ‘reasonable’ opinion on these matters. Finally, he offers that there might be the opportunity to ask these questions in curriculum areas other than RE, where – again – there is no danger that a focus on ‘religion’ might imply to children that ‘the weight of evidence falls on the pro-religious side’ (163).

6.3 Andrew Wright’s reply White devotes a significant portion of his original paper to argue that secularism prevails widely in contemporary society, and Wright allocates an even greater portion of his reply to argue against this claim of White. However, both writers

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later in the correspondence acknowledge that to some extent here they have been pulled into a diversion (White 2005; Wright 2005). Given that Wright’s eventual justification of the subject bears a close resemblance to Hand’s ‘possibility of truth’ argument, the relative numbers of subscribers to the various perspectives in the religious debate become largely irrelevant. What matters is that there are reasonable claims on each side, leading to an open question in the public sphere. As Wright argues, ‘The principle of social consensus alone is an inadequate criterion for truth and meaning, since it is perfectly possible for the concerns of the majority to be misplaced’ (2004b: 167). Wright claims to agree ‘wholeheartedly with White that religious education cannot be adequately justified as a dimension of broader moral education’ (173). He consequently does not address White’s treatment of this argument. Wright is not alone in having argued that it would put an unfair pressure on RE to expect it to develop morality in a motivational sense when all teachers and all curriculum areas should be accountable for it (see also Eaude 2012). In fact, however, in a later analysis of the exchange Wright suggests that he and John White are not in complete agreement here. Wright takes White’s claim that morality is best addressed in neutral curriculum space to mean that there is a ‘single’ morality that can be advocated without reference to religion (2007a: 113). He then takes this as evidence that White has attempted to ground curriculum design on the assumption of the non-religious view that there is no transcendent basis for morality. If this reading is correct, it supports the charge of implicit ‘secular confessionalism’ that Wright levels at White throughout their correspondence (Wright 2004b, 2007a: 124–5). This is not, however, White’s assumption. What White actually denies is that religion is a necessary ground for morality. He is prepared to accept that children must engage in enquiry into the possible grounds for morality, but simply does not see discrete RE as the place to do this (2004: 158). A close reading of Wright’s later analysis also reveals, furthermore, that he does see a special place for his conception of RE in the development of morality, at least in an epistemological sense: It follows that the pursuit of truth has an important role to play in the cultivation of a harmonious society: judgements about whether to respond to a moral challenge with tolerance or resistance require a broader moral framework and, in the absence of any agreement as to which of many available frameworks is the most appropriate, we must make informed choices between them. To do so requires an appropriate depth of understanding of the worldviews that support different moral visions. (2007a: 113–14)

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The particular contribution of RE to the curriculum is as the space where we can explore the ‘ontological foundation’ of our worldviews or beliefs about the order of things – and consequently about morality, which flows from these beliefs. Furthermore, this cannot for Wright be cleanly separated from the motivational sense of moral education, because of the relationship he has argued between truth and truthfulness. In other words, getting the ultimate order of things ‘right’ matters, since it is in accordance with this that we tend to live our lives. Wright’s attempt to downplay here the extent to which RE is a vehicle for moral education rests, I think, on his resistance to the possibility that RE could be reduced to the study of morality. Thus he argues, in response to White’s acceptance that civic education requires an understanding of religions, that ‘the underlying aim [is] not simply to assimilate factual knowledge about a range of religious beliefs in order to better respect and tolerate members of minority religious communities, but to wrestle with the fundamental truth claims put forward by religious groups, and of their secular counterparts, on the assumption that these claims are intrinsically important’ (171). I would add that Wright’s claim for moral education could not be understood as the instrumental or paternalistic promotion of any particular set of moral principles – even a comprehensive form of liberalism – since (he argues) there are some fundamental moral differences between alternative perspectives (2007a: 29–51). However, I would not see this as departing fundamentally from White. White would also present to students a variety of different components or models of human flourishing (including different models of ethical being and different accounts of the sources of ethics), with the aim of students’ making informed choices between them; he would simply do this through the vehicle of the curriculum as a whole, or as a part of PSHE, rather than through a discrete curriculum subject. Overall, Wright identifies his approach to the importance of RE with Hand’s ‘possibility of truth’ argument, although he uses the language of the ‘question of ultimate meaning and truth’ rather than focusing explicitly on the existence of God. He also argues that his approach would take much more account of the differences between religions, on the grounds that their beliefs are in many cases fundamentally incompatible. The question of what kind of God exists, for example, rather than just whether God exists, is for Wright part of the momentous import of the subject. Wright also accepts White’s point about the nomenclature of ‘religious education’ biasing students in terms of their receptivity to the alternative accounts of ultimate reality that are on offer. Wright’s implied solution – that we follow the example of strong school departments who have added ‘philosophy’ to the name of the subject – is not fully thought through,

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in that it implies that ‘philosophy’ constitutes a ‘secular’ perspective  – thus, a different perspective from that of religion – on questions of ultimate importance (as if students would then choose between religion and philosophy). In any case, I argued early on in the book that this is not simply a matter of semantics and public relations; Wright’s concession here, we will see, is of great significance. Also significant, and somewhat inconsistent with the overall tone of the argument, is the concession that Wright makes in the following remark: ‘Whether or not such issues are approached through the teaching of religious education as a discrete subject, or thematically in an interdisciplinary manner, seems to me to be a pedagogical issue best reserved for classroom practitioners. The compulsory teaching of religious education could legitimately embrace either approach’ (2005: 27). Here Wright loses sight a little of where the argument started, and cedes a great deal of ground to White. There is one clear point of difference between the two thinkers, then, and one which remains slightly more obscure. The first divergence ultimately comes down to whether the question of the true nature of ultimate or transcendent reality is of sufficient importance to merit 500 hours of curriculum time across a student’s career, and in a discrete curriculum space (although note that Wright wavers surprisingly on the second issue). White’s response to the possibility of truth argument is in three parts, as we have seen – the question of how much sophistication is required for children to make decisions about matters of religion, the question of whether it requires a distinctive kind of thought and therefore distinctive curriculum space, and the question of whether it is a significant priority given the other demands on curriculum time. White is not clear about exactly how he balances each of these considerations. It does seem somewhat difficult, however, to accept the possibility of truth argument within the terms Wright and Hand have framed it and then downplay the discussion of these questions as a significant curriculum priority. Where elsewhere White successfully evades Wright’s charges of secular ‘confessionalism’, his position here could indicate an implicit assumption that the matter has been pretty much resolved in advance, or that it is not so much the open question that Wright and Hand both claim. I will return later in this chapter to the ‘possibility of truth’ claim, and how it is transformed in a hermeneutic approach to curriculum. As for the second point of divergence, Wright’s clarification of his response (2005) focuses on the ‘intrinsic’ value of RE. In his use of this specific language, and his affirmation of White’s alignment of his position with that of Paul Hirst and R. S. Peters, Wright potentially draws this exchange into the context of the broader debate about whether decisions about curriculum should be made on the

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basis of aims or subjects. White is perhaps the most well-known contemporary advocate of the ‘aims-based’ approach in philosophy of education. Wright’s implication could be that whereas White has been arguing about the curriculum in instrumental terms, he ought to be thinking in terms of the intrinsic value of particular fields of intellectual endeavour. In this, Wright would be operating consistently with a number of other ‘critical realists’ who have defended a subject-based curriculum – for example Leesa Wheelahan (2010), who draws on Bhaskar’s transcendent argument for the stratification of reality in layers that correspond, albeit with fuzzy edges, to the separation of academic knowledge into disciplines. A word of caution is necessary here: it is characteristic for the question of whether to justify curriculum design on the grounds of aims or subjects to become embroiled in other distinctions to which the question is related but not identical, such as whether the curriculum should be ‘pupilcentred’ or ‘knowledge-centred’. The debate is also sometimes conflated with another one that offers the choice between knowledge, on the one hand, and skills or competences on the other (as in Young et al. 2014: 62–4). White has argued that there is not a cut and dried distinction between an aims-based rationale and a subject-based approach. The matter at hand is not (in his view) whether subjects constitute an alternative to aims. White defines R. S. Peters’ single aim for education as ‘initiation into intrinsically valuable activities to do with the pursuit of truth’ (Reiss and White 2014: 77). Peters is able to move from this single aim to a list of subjects divided on disciplinary grounds. In White’s view, however, these activities are not intrinsically valuable, meaning that we need to generate a curriculum in line with a more complex picture of aims and sub-aims. So in the recent high profile debate between White and Michael Young over the possibility of a curriculum for powerful knowledge, Young’s curriculum has not, in fact, eschewed aims. He argues for a curriculum that will serve both redistributive justice in the community as a whole, and the individual student, by empowering students with the disciplinary knowledge needed to engage in an informed way in the debates that shape our society. Young then hands over to the academic communities, as the guardians of relatively stable means of access to powerful disciplinary knowledge, the responsibility of ordering the curriculum, arguing that White’s alternative curriculum would be susceptible to ephemeral or politically interested influences (Young et al. 2014; Young 2012). White responds that Young assumes the value of the status quo. For White, decisions need to be made about which academic disciplines are more useful for the student than others, and about the differing stages of development at which certain kinds of knowledge are more appropriate, which leads us at least in part

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away from the academic communities and back to educational considerations of aims that Young avoids addressing head-on (White 2012; Reiss and White 2014). In his later analysis of the exchange with White, Wright offers the following clarification of his position: ‘[White] has no more shown why the pursuit of autonomy and specifically the freedom to designate for ourselves that which is of ultimate value constitutes an end in itself, than I have offered grounds for my claim that the pursuit of truth is intrinsically valuable’ (2007a: 125). Expressed in these terms, the disagreement does not seem to be so much about whether particular areas of the curriculum are to be considered intrinsically rather than instrumentally valuable, so much as an aims-based question about the end to which educational endeavour is properly directed. It would misrepresent White, I feel, to characterize his argument as the claim that autonomy ‘trumps’ truth as an end for education. In fact, in their statements elsewhere on the ultimate ends of education there is considerable convergence between White and Wright around ‘the common quest for the good life’ (Hella and Wright 2009: 53, and see, for example, Reiss and White 2014: 78). The distinction might better be conceived in terms of the extent to which autonomy as opposed to a relationship of submission to truth is constitutive of flourishing. Wright’s position here, if I read his implication correctly, accords with an epistemological criticism of the notion of ‘doxastic voluntarism’ that has been made by Hand. Beliefs are not formed, for Hand, as matters of free choice or taste. They ‘are one of the ways in which the world impresses itself upon us, not one of the ways in which we impress ourselves on the world’ (Hand 2015: 35). We do not choose the perspective that is the right ‘fit’ for us but ‘believe what we do because of how things strike us’ (ibid.). Elements of Wright and Hand’s position here accord with the account of the disclosure of truth in dialogue that has been developed in Part 1 of this book: I have argued that the ‘autonomy’ of the deliberative agent has been overplayed in descriptions of the event of understanding. However, I have also argued that epistemology has been overplayed in these accounts, and this gives rise to a hermeneutic element to which (as I hope to demonstrate) neither Hand nor Wright has paid sufficient attention.

6.4 An education without aims? So far, then, our discussion has moved within an aims-based framework for making decisions about curriculum. Is an alternative possible? Responding to a paper by Paul Standish entitled ‘Education without aims?’, Michael Reiss

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and John White ask whether it is possible that Standish can be ‘suggesting that education must or should be aimless’ (Standish 1999; Reiss and White 2014: 77). Later they claim that ‘it is difficult to defend the notion that education should be aimless’ (ibid.). Yet this is a position that I have advocated in Part 1 of this book. I have used this language, not in the sense of a prescription, but in the sense of aimlessness being an ontological condition for transformative dialogue. This is indeed difficult to defend in the context of what Smeyers calls ‘education nowadays’ (2002: 87). I am going to press, rather than mitigate the point, however, by adding and defending Paul Smeyers’ claim that ‘in some sense, the educator does not know what he is doing, therefore a language of means and ends will never do’ (2002: 100). Heidegger argues (speaking of the university rather than schooling) that ‘it cannot be an instrument of social engineering or, more generally, simply a means to an end, without ceasing to educate’ (2002: 30–1). The first theme that I want to focus on in Heidegger’s deposition is the connection between the correspondence theory of truth and the notion of value in the pedagogical exchange. I have discussed how Heidegger ‘came to see that the idea of truth as adequacy of exchange between two things, representation and what is represented, was itself but an instance of figurative disclosure ... that had become fixed in our imagination’ (Heidegger 2002: 36). This involved a ‘fatal relocation of truth away from concrete things themselves as they naturally show and reveal themselves in the richness of our vernaculars’ which could only be effected by ‘a general notion of value, a common denominator by which the equality of exchange is to be measured’ (ibid.). Whereas truth as aletheia designates ‘this primordial, concrete truth as world disclosure, which does not efface difference and accentuate identity in order to prevail’, truth as correspondence entails ‘a reduction to what is held in common’ (ibid.). For Heidegger, the theoretical abstraction of truth – wherein ‘the fundamental relation is that of mind to the world, regarded as a relation of subject to object by way of representation’ – makes possible the commodification of education. ‘The exchange abstraction is thus imparted to the learning experience from without to give it the form and substance of a quid pro quo, a relation in which the teacher offers something of value in return for something else of value to the student’ (39). What enables the recognition of the universal value of the educational commodity is ‘theory’s rise to the level of the general equivalent’ (40). The teacher’s role is to ‘represent the general equivalent’, which requires that he ‘disregards the differences and distinctions within the concrete student manifold and addresses himself to the faceless, abstract student that is his

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counterpart’ (ibid.). In this situation, when the ‘exchange value’ of commodities is known, ‘the student [is] defined only in relation to the prior notion of the teacher as what the teacher is not’ and also as ‘on the way to becoming like the teacher, as aiming to be that which the teacher is’ (40). One might compare a therapeutic situation in which the patient comes to the doctor without the power to diagnose his own illness, but knowing the end state he wishes to be in. This is a state from which he currently falls short or is currently ‘negatively determined’. The doctor alone can diagnose and recommend treatment, and thus ‘knows what he is doing’; he is invested with a certain authority to dispense knowledge. For Heidegger, ‘Such an approach implicitly makes use of the metaphysical distinction between being and becoming’ (ibid.). We have seen that the event of becoming cannot be separated from the disclosure of possibilities. The student always already projects possibilities into the learning context, although the educational endeavour is predicated also on her not yet realizing what she might become. There exist worlds that have not yet been ‘opened up’ for the student, and of whose value she as yet has no inkling. Those possibilities for the student are unknown to both teacher and student. The educator has to discern what is ‘at work’ in the curriculum content for a particular student at the same time as attempting to ‘open up a world’, or helping the student to see the possibilities for her in the object of study. The disclosure that occurs here happens then for both teacher and student. What is ‘at work’ in the curriculum emerges for both of them in the event of understanding, in the to-and-fro of the teacher’s tentative attempts to ‘practice the evocative’ (Smeyers 2002: 96). In Hogan’s terms the teacher attempts to ‘woo’ the student into an affirmation of the possibilities in his subject, all the while taking into account the ways in which the child is responding to his efforts. ‘Only in such a way can a real education come forward’ (Smeyers 2002: 96). Heidegger therefore argues that ‘one must go back to the figure of Socrates in order to find an example of teaching and learning at odds with the law of exchange’ (2002: 39). Famously refusing to accept payment for his teaching, Socrates was freed from the contractual responsibility of providing anything of predetermined value, and was not invested with the ‘authority that can impede communication’ (41). Heidegger argues that ‘my paradigm of teaching and learning is the Socratic conversation, the question and answer between individuals who embody the pedagogical scene concretely in ever shifting and undefined ways, such that their respective identities may be thrown into doubt’ (41). The identities of student and teacher enter into a to-and-fro relationship,

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since the student’s ignorance is ‘never simple and unqualified’ and the teacher cannot know in advance what will emerge in the dialogue. It would be tempting here to say that the teacher does, even in this account, have an aim. This is how Reiss and White ultimately characterize Standish’s paper: that even for Standish education has a purpose, although it might be ‘ineffable’ (2014: 77). The ‘aim’ I might be implying here, then, could be identified alternatively as the ‘becoming’ of the student’, or the ‘disclosure’ of possibilities, or the ‘happening’ of truth. Certainly, as we have already seen, this is an aim that does not easily support an ordering of curriculum design or planning – I have argued that it would be in tension with these activities (Aldridge 2013, and Chapter 4). But I would not even want to acknowledge these events as aims of education. To think of the teacher’s – or the student’s – efforts as ‘aiming for’ this emergent and indeterminate moment of disclosure in an objective way would neglect the ontological significance of my arguments in Part 1 of the book. Recall Gadamer’s claim that ‘the more genuine a conversation is, the less its conduct lies within the will of either partner’ (2004: 385). We do not come to a conversation with a particular end in mind, but fall into or ‘become involved in it’ (Fairfield 2011b: 79). Thus, Fairfield argues, ‘a genuine conversation’ (as opposed to an instance of coercion, say) ‘is never the one we wanted to conduct’ (79). Participants are led by the subject matter as it emerges and no-one can know in advance what will ‘come out’ of it. Fairfield continues thus: ‘Insofar as anyone or anything presides over the conversation in an educational setting, it is the subject matter itself that does so, the text, the problem, or question that orients the discussion, rather than any particular participant, be it professor or student’ (ibid.). So we might argue that educational activity has an intrinsic value. It is the dialogue, inasmuch as it is genuinely transformative in the Gadamerian sense, that is good. This is what Hogan (2009) intends when he argues for the ‘integrity of educational practice’. The integral good of human dialogue cannot be identified (in the manner that Reiss and White imply) with some overall human good, which might provide an overarching aim for education that could then give rise to sub-aims and consequently offer us a means of ordering curriculum. Smeyers observes that ‘no final “solution” for the essence of what makes us human, for the quest of the meaning of life, can be offered’ (2002: 98). This is true, I think, even in the case of apparently minimal conceptions of the aim of education; as an example we might take White’s ‘human flourishing’, which supposedly offers a range of choices and leaves the actual content of the individual’s flourishing a matter to be filled out by the student’s autonomous choice. Standish implies

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that even the tacit assumption of the importance of rational autonomy, prevalent in debates about the aims of education, might be an instance of a disclosure that casts other possibilities into shadow, a self-perpetuating element of how educated people are liable to think about the aims of education in the ‘modern age’ (1999: 39). He offers as an alternative the idea of authenticity, in its crudest form denoting ‘a direction towards the discovery of one’s real nature’, which calls ‘into question the nature of the relation to the cultural heritage and also the epistemological presuppositions upon which an initiation into forms of knowledge is based’ (39–40). Recall that I have previously questioned the extent to which the disclosure of possibilities could be thought of in terms of free choice or rational deliberation. Any attempt to provide for the educational dialogue a final ordering or general valuation of things that matter implicates us in that enframing or totalizing explanation that is the essence of technological thinking (see Chapter 1). ‘As in other areas, in an educational activity, a not the, way of being human is shown – a way which realizes education and, through this, one’s existence. Concealment conceals and dissembles itself ’ (Smeyers 2002: 98). Standish offers that ‘a seemingly logical progression leads towards systems of aims and objectives and to a preoccupation with performativity which dominates the curriculum. It is not difficult to imagine the dystopia which this suggests’ (1999: 41–2). Citing Dewey, he continues thus: ‘Over-arching or supposedly ultimate aims are to be viewed with caution, as these may exert a limitation of the “freeing activity” which education should incorporate’ (42). We see in Dewey’s ‘freeing activity’ here the openness of interlocutors to being led by the subject matter in whatever direction it demands. Dewey writes, ‘ Too rarely is the individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil’s mind and the subject matter’ (Dewey 1916: 108–9 in Standish 1999: 42). The imposition of aims, for Dewey, constitutes a ‘distrust of the teacher’s experience’ (ibid.). The ‘integrity’ of the experience of RE is further compromised by instrumental justifications that might be offered in its favour, for example that it can support community cohesion, or that it might promote tolerance, or even the upholding of ‘fundamental British values’. Standish argues – employing the analogy of town planning – that ‘it is not difficult to imagine a dystopia in which everything about the town is determined by the aims (and the surveillance) laid down by its governing body. This would be an Orwellian distortion of what we commonly think of and value as the town’ (1999: 41).

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Continuing for a moment with Standish’s analogy, note that we do ‘value’ the town. But this cannot be a ‘valuing’ thought of in a subjective sense, or explicitly as part of a final ordering of things that matter. Rather, we must recall here Heidegger’s account of value not as something chosen, but as the inexplicit background of human activity. To be taken up into or ‘have’ a world is to have in advance certain ‘paths for authentic existence’, a preordering of possibilities that resists final or total thematization (Smeyers 2002: 87). Thus both Hogan and Smeyers have advanced an account of the educational moment as world disclosure. We can think of this disclosure in the crudest terms as being the affirmation of possibilities to ‘go on’ within a particular subject area. Hoy writes that, in learning physics, ‘the student is thus becoming a physicist’ (2006: 184). A student who hears the call of what is on offer in the curriculum domain of physics, then, or for whom a world is opened up through her study of physics, might be led to affirm the coincidence of the practice of physics with her life project. She has found her vocation in physics. But this would oversimplify matters because of the extent to which one’s ‘project’, in the Heideggerian sense, is not something of which one can be fully or consciously aware. It resists explicit thematization, since the complexity of what is always ‘at issue’ in human existence (Hoy 2006: 184) is not reducible to any single question – for example, of what job I should do, or how I should act in this or that situation. The response to the world that is opened up must be thought of as always gradual, or ‘on the way’. Heidegger argues that ‘we are in the vocative, in the condition of being called’ (2002: 37). Each student, addressed by the teacher as ‘you’ rather than in terms of general equivalence, will therefore be addressed differently by the curriculum, and what is called forth will indeed be ‘evoked’ in the sense of a recognition, albeit not in explicit or conscious terms, that ‘this way of life is for me’ or even simply ‘this is how I will go on’. This will not be a movement that a student could identify ‘at the time’ or in any particular moment. As Krell has written, the seeds of epiphany may require a certain ‘darkness’ and ‘proper growing time’ (Krell 2011: 87; Aldridge 2014). Teachers will not in most cases ‘see the final fruit of their labours’ and the explicit epiphany or sudden realization of a new way of being is likely to be rare, or an interpretation that comes later in life (Aldridge 2014: 523). It follows that the value of the curriculum domains cannot be thought of in terms of general equivalence. No student can value it all; as Smeyers writes, ‘All subjects and ways of life exhaust the attention of the learner, exhaust her potential, compete with each other for the best place, pretend the ultimate answer’ (2002: 97). This goes also for the teacher, who ‘specializes’ in a particular subject,

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and thus makes a commitment to its potential for all learners. Even in primary education, where teachers do not explicitly specialize, Hogan acknowledges that teachers will be ‘more attracted to some of the subjects than others’ (2009: 64). Yet all teachers must realize that ‘education can only exist in this struggle of offering something on the one hand, but keeping the possibilities open on the other’ (Smeyers 2002: 97).

6.5 A curriculum of disciplines Smeyers acknowledges that education conceived as the opening of a world cannot do without its materiality. It must be ‘earthed’ in particular activities: ‘the capitals of the European countries, the formulas of this or that chemical element, mathematical algorithms, what happened in 1979, and so on and so forth’ (92). We might then look for an ordering of curriculum domains that transcends the prejudices and particular attractions of the individual teacher, and return to the subject-based curriculum rationale. I would caution at this point against equating the ‘earth’ or materiality of the curriculum with a ‘reality’ on to which the disciplines or subject areas might map. Young has attempted to establish a curriculum that is safe from the ephemeral demands of competing political positions by anchoring it in the relative stability of the academic disciplines. In order to defend against the claim that his ‘powerful knowledge’ is actually to be identified with ‘knowledge of the powerful’, Young argues that ‘knowledge is “powerful” if it predicts, if it explains, if it enables you to envisage alternatives’ (Young et al. 2014: 74). It is distinguished from ‘knowledge that does not offer the knower any specific intellectual resources’ in that it is distinct from common sense or everyday knowledge, it is ‘systematic’, and it is ‘specialized’ (74–5). This does account for the differences between academic knowledge and everyday knowledge, certainly, but a sociological description of academic disciplines does little to account for the explanatory power to which Young wants to attest. A more thoroughgoing critical realist position is more successful here. A similar argument to Young’s is proposed by Wheelahan, who draws more explicitly on critical realist concepts of stratification, deep ontology and transfactuality (see my discussion in Chapter 2). In accounting for the explanatory power of disciplinary knowledge, she argues, ‘World before word … the academic disciplines are themselves complex realities; they are partly constituted by social relations because they are social products, but they are also partly constituted by the objects they seek to study’ (2010: 74–5).

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The disciplines do not all connect with their ‘objects of study’ in the same way. There are the ‘abstract sciences’ – such as physics, chemistry and biology – that ‘abstract particular structures and causal mechanisms to demonstrate their actions’ (Wheelahan 2010: 79–80; Collier 1997). Then there are the concrete sciences – such as geography and the human sciences – which ‘focus on the emergent outcome of many causal mechanisms operating at different levels in open systems’ (Wheelahan 2010: 80; Collier 1997). There is also, in Wheelahan’s picture, a role for the humanities and creative arts that is more than ‘epiphenomenal’: ‘Students need to be inducted into systems of meaning within the humanities and creative arts as with any other discipline if they are to become “suitably knowing subjects” who are able to extend knowledge and engage in debates’ (2010: 83). The place of the humanities in education would therefore be in relation to the transitive dimension of knowledge (see Chapter 2) in that they ‘provide access to society’s conversation about itself ’ (2). We could digress at this point to explore how RE would fare in an ordering of the curriculum along ‘social realist’ lines; there is far from a consensus here, and no scholar has really tackled this head-on. It would be easy to admit that religious texts and communities have a part to play in ‘society’s conversation about itself ’. However, this contribution is easily relegated to the ‘epiphenomenal’: Young argues, for example, that ‘religious ideas are not knowledge in the sense we use in this book’ (18). Our duty as educators then is simply to ‘respect such beliefs and values’ (ibid.). Wright has argued forcefully against this reduction of religious intentionality to the ‘transitive’ domain, but this does not significantly help his case for discrete RE in a ‘realist’ curriculum. RE could correspond to theology, which might qualify as an abstract science: reality is organized into strata that are broadly physical, chemical, biological etc., and to this we might add ‘transcendent’. But RE would be an unusual case, in that while there are heavily contested matters within the disciplines that correspond to the other strata, the existence of the strata themselves – and thus their correspondence with reality in broad terms – is not contested, whereas the existence of the transcendent reality to which theological discourse purports to refer is itself subject to contestation. Elsewhere Wright argues against aligning compulsory RE solely with theology or any other single academic discipline, advocating an interdisciplinary approach that would suggest that religious exploration is more akin to a concrete science (Wright 2007b). This would be consistent with the way it has been treated by other critical realists such as Archer et al. (2004). Within the academy, it is largely unproblematic to think of religious dialogue as an interdisciplinary enquiry into a concrete object of concern; it is not uncommon for concrete

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objects to be contestable and in a state of transformation, emergence, or flux. However it would be difficult to argue for the necessary status of the study of God or transcendent reality in a curriculum of subjects that are ‘partly constituted by the objects they seek to study’. This would seem, again, to presuppose the existence of the concrete object under discussion. Young identifies that religion is ‘one of the sets of values which people live by’ (18). He further argues thus: Criteria for powerful knowledge are concerned with truth; they are not ways of valuing different cultures of beliefs. This distinction between truth and value puts a responsibility on teachers to distinguish between respecting the values that their pupils bring to school and challenging the validity of their explanations in relation to the criteria of different subjects such as history or biology. (2014: 77)

This fact/value distinction is not a necessity in critical realism (see Bhaskar 1998: 58–60; Wright 2007a: 17, 169). Wheelahan argues that the conversation for which students are being prepared ‘includes debates about how society should respond to perceived threats such as global warming, but also debates about society’s values, norms and mores and questions such as whether banks need more regulation, whether the nation should participate in war, or how refugees should be treated when they land on foreign shores seeking asylum’ (2010: 2). But Wheelahan nevertheless argues, citing Andrew Collier, for an ‘objectivity’ about value, which means ‘trying to make one’s beliefs and values conditional upon what is objectively true and valuable. … Objectivity as an attitude means openness to refutation by data derived from the real objects with which we are concerned’ (Collier 2003: 137, in Wheelahan 2010: 47). Note here how the value of the curriculum domains rests on their possibility to provide criteria for determining ‘what is objectively true and valuable’. Following Heidegger’s critique of higher education, the division of the curriculum into specialized subject areas would seem to be the mechanism through which the ‘general equivalence’ of the correspondence theory of truth is imported from higher education into schooling. Advocates of the subjectbased curriculum would have it that subjects are to be valued because of their correspondence to a particular academic discipline, stratum of reality or concrete object (see Groff 2004: 48 and Hartwig 2007: 484–8 for a discussion and eventual affirmation of the importance of the correspondence account in critical realism). The value of curriculum is thus established by correspondence rather than disclosure. This promises another final ordering of curriculum into an ‘Aristotelian empire of knowledge’ which is ‘inclusive’ and ‘claims all

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known terrain for itself ’; it civilizes even poetry and makes it ‘subject to the higher scientiae’. As a result, ‘all spaces are now within, and the totality of space must become all the space that is’ (Heidegger 2002: 38–9). I am, of course, in my words of caution here, not suggesting that science teachers (or RE teachers for that matter) should not rightly draw on the principle of correspondence in challenging students, for example, who adhere to a literal doctrine of seven-day creation, but rather warning against a curriculum construct in which value is predetermined rather than disclosed differently for different students as they come to ‘dwell’ or find a ‘sense of place’ in a curriculum space. Interestingly, for Wheelahan it is ‘abstract theoretical knowledge’ that enables students to participate in ‘society’s conversation’ (2010: 1), whereas for Heidegger it is ‘theoretical abstraction’ that has made possible the distinction between ‘head and hand’ that has so disfigured the pedagogical relationship (2002: 39).

6.6 Curriculum as conversation There is an alternative to attempting to justify curriculum in terms either of a predetermined set of explicit aims for education or of correspondence to a stable set of academic disciplines or aspects of reality. The alternative moves curriculum out of the realms of ‘justification’ and into a state of dialogue, extending the hermeneutic account of education offered in Part 1 of this book beyond the classroom situation and into the question of curriculum more broadly. The curriculum theorist William Pinar has identified a notion of ‘curriculum as conversation’ that draws on the work of Michael Oakeshott (Pinar 2012: 181–204; Oakeshott 1959). In his claim that conversation is an ‘unrehearsed intellectual adventure’ that cannot conform to a predetermined intellectual end (1959: 11), Oakeshott is in tune with what precedes in this chapter and also in Part 1 of the book. Bruner, also, has argued that ‘curriculum is like an animated conversation on a topic that can never be fully defined’ (1996: 116). However, Pinar observes that these kinds of dialogic or conversational observations (consistent with the hermeneutic approach so far elaborated) have tended to be applied in a restricted sense to classroom discourse rather than the curriculum more broadly. It is possible to acknowledge the hermeneutic aspects of individual school subjects as ‘domains for conversation’ but then to take for granted that those subjects necessarily ‘mirror the academic disciplines’ (2012: 195). This would constitute a limitation or foreclosure of the conversational insight, in which ‘conversation’ becomes ‘classroom talk’ (195) and is ‘relegated to teaching and

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technique, not content’ (196). Pinar proposes to see the question of the value of the curriculum domains itself as a matter for conversation between teacher and student. The alternative is that ‘school “conversation” will be scripted’ and ‘disconnected from students’ lived experience’ (197). The pressing issue is not, for Pinar, to ‘orchestrate these conversations so that students can enter into them’ (Applebee 1996: 52, in Pinar 2012: 197) but to organize the curriculum in such a way ‘that students’ entry into intellectually engaged conversation is made more likely by making the academic content more compelling’ (197). Pádraig Hogan develops precisely this notion of curriculum as conversation, and precedes it with a caveat: ‘The reciprocal dependencies between education and society in the present day … mean that the sovereignty proper to teaching and learning must be a qualified, rather than any absolute one’ (1995: 236). In other words, what has preceded in this chapter on the ‘aimlessness’ of education is bounded within an understanding of education shaped at least in part by the need to prepare students for public examinations. Pinar also cautions, more strongly, that ‘the aggressive use of standardized examinations cannot countenance a curricular conversation’ (2012: 192). We might advocate for RE here a particular freedom on the curriculum question, given that – almost uniquely in a student’s school experience – RE is a compulsory subject that is not in principle constrained by the requirements of external examinations. On the other hand, it is commonly lamented that spiritual concerns are held to ransom in a curriculum that is, pragmatically and politically, directed towards performance in public examinations. This digression serves to indicate the tendency for the curriculum conversation to be thwarted by ‘non-educational concerns’ (Hogan 1995: 242). Whether the current organization of the curriculum has been so far distorted or ‘deformed’ (Pinar 2012: 188) by performative thinking as to make dialogic possibilities unrealizable without radical change remains an open question that I have entertained from the outset and will return to in my final chapter, although (following the discussion in Chapter 3 of the book) we would need to reject the suggestion that the curriculum discussion could be ‘irredeemably’ distorted. Rather, these material conditions – such as the real presence of school examinations – would be constituting factors of the tradition and potentially able to be brought within the scope of the dialogue (i.e. students and teachers could come to reflect on the ways in which their own educational activity is shaped by performative priorities). Hogan argues simply that we offer the academic domains in the hope that pupils might ‘discover something of the historian in themselves, or something of the linguistic aptitude and appreciation in themselves, or something of the

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scientist in themselves’ (1995: 237) and so on. The choice of what is held out and what is not is potentially revealing of the educational community’s (or school’s) commitments to what matters. As Applebee argues, ‘The disciplines exist because thoughtful people care about the traditions of knowing and doing that they represent’ (1996: 10), and which of those are offered to students says something about what an educational community cherishes as good, or beautiful, or worthy of repute. But these value commitments (we might also call them ‘prejudices’) are in the background of the dialogue and cannot be totally or finally spelt out. In terms of the ‘conversation’, they remain open questions. The curriculum domains can only be ‘held out’ to the student; their value will be disclosed in the educational event. Thus ‘a balanced curriculum needs to be adjusted in some crucial measure to the pupil’s ownmost abilities, aptitudes, sensibilities and potentials. These are the constituents of emergent identity in the pupil … and teachers must deal with endless varieties of them’ (239). This restates an observation made in Part 1 of this work. The endeavour of building a curriculum ‘for all’ will be in tension with the aim of developing a curriculum for this child in his or her becoming: ‘What may be a balanced curriculum for one pupil may not be balanced for another’ (Hogan 1995: 237). The further implication is that the division of the curriculum into specific domains, and the content of those individual domains, is itself a matter that is constantly in question. The issue of curriculum justification becomes then a matter of ‘disciplines and canons and their claims to cultural worthiness’ (Hogan 1995: 240). We could develop Hogan’s observation in terms of Alan How’s distinction between canons and classics, drawn from Gadamer’s exposition of the enduring value of what we have inherited in the tradition. The ‘classic’ is distinguished from the ‘canon’ in that its value is not transcendentally determined. Canons are fixed and chosen. On the other hand, ‘We do not wholly choose what counts as classic; rather, the movement of tradition evinces the sense of the text’s contemporary significance’ (How 2011: 54) and ‘the classic has constantly to prove itself anew by speaking differently to succeeding generations’ (54–5). As participants in an educational tradition, we find ourselves ‘always already’ faced with a curriculum. The curriculum domains are to an extent our inheritance: they lay out for all involved the paths and possibilities for the educational endeavour. The value of curriculum, inasmuch as this valuing can be likened to the educator’s ‘prejudices’, is not ‘chosen’ or ‘decided’ by the educator. We do not choose our prejudices. But this does not mean that curriculum is unrevisable: we have learnt in part one of the book how a tradition can transform and become subject to a revaluation. The decisive factor here would

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be the encounter with the other in dialogue – in this case, the student or group of students. Hogan cautions that ‘claims to cultural worthiness are not the same as educational fruitfulness. A subject or topic of widely acclaimed cultural worth, and in the hands of a competent teacher, may still say little of any significance to pupils who are already deeply prejudiced against it’ (1995: 241). The implication is that ‘canons must in some real sense become flexible and inclusive if they enter the discipline of educational dialogue in a fruitful way’ (ibid.). We are now in a position to see what could be reasonably attempted in any ‘justification’ of a curriculum domain. This would be tantamount to an affirmation of the subject’s continuing educational potential to offer something of value to the curriculum conversation. But this could never be a final justification. There are no transcendent curriculum questions, and the ‘question’ of a subject’s continuing value emerges and transforms. What is ‘at work’ in a curriculum area cannot be exhausted by any particular description or thematization. The educator’s prejudices are as much ‘in question’, and subject to transformation, as the student’s. As How elaborates, ‘Tradition … is as much the bearer of challenge as of comfortable certainty’ (2011: 4). Let us not think of these curriculum values coming into question in epistemological terms, but ontologically, in terms of ‘an orientation of our energy and our appetites’ (Murdoch 1992: 497 in Standish 1999: 45). Thus the materiality of the curriculum is constitutive of ‘possibilities of good where the immediate incorporates a glimpse of something beyond’ (Standish 1999: 45). To treat this explicitly, by devoting a portion of the curriculum to ‘questions of value’ (or ‘beauty’, or ‘the good’, or ‘flourishing’)  – would neglect the insight that the ‘world’ cannot do without its foundation in materiality and its strife with the dark obscurity of the ‘earth’. Recall White’s claim that PSHE might offer a place within an aims-based curriculum that could focus specifically on possibilities for a student’s ‘self-understanding’ gathered under the ‘same umbrella’ (2004: 164). In the context of a curriculum where each domain holds out dialogical possibilities for self-understanding, PSHE stands out awkwardly as a conversational space that has lost its contact with the subject matter (see Chapter 4).

6.7 The ‘Possibility of Truth’ I elaborated in Chapter 4 that all dialogue is predicated on participants’ recognition of a version of the ‘possibility of truth’. An openness to being transformed by one’s interlocutor’s claims to truth, and a willingness to thus

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‘risk’ ourselves in conversation, are conditions for the fusion of horizons that is constitutive of understanding. An affirmation of the continuing place of RE in the curriculum conversation might rest, then, on the possibility that a dialogue with religious content can offer a disclosure of truth. This is the sense in which Hogan assimilates religion within his conversational model: the study of RE might offer to students the possibility of recognizing ‘something of their own religious sensibilities’ (1995: 237). Hogan concedes, of course, that each student has an ‘entitlement to decline’ or to ‘reserve his/her position’. After all, ‘This voice is one of invitation, not compulsion’ (173). At this point I want to clarify that I do not wish to go all the way with Hogan on this one. Hogan’s understanding of what might be attempted in the endeavour of RE appears in this particular treatment to assume a confessional approach. According to Hogan’s account, the religious educator holds out to the student the world of the religious life, to which the student might respond positively or negatively. The problem here becomes apparent when we consider it to be analogous to the case of physics (for example), where the teacher ‘holds out’ the life of the physicist, which some students will to some extent affirm and others not so much. This is a gradual process, and one which is not always successful, but in any case the teacher, because of her commitment to what is valuable in physics, is entitled to continue to attempt to ‘win over’ the student to physics, even when he or she seems quite clearly to have declined that invitation. The teacher thus continually ‘witnesses’ to the truth of physics (and it is appropriate to describe this, I think, in evangelical terms). For a teacher likewise to ‘witness’ to the truth of religion on the grounds of a particular commitment (for example, to Christianity, or even to a version of religious pluralism) seems possible only within the context of confessional education, rather than a curriculum in which the value of the religious life is an open question. I should add that in a later elaboration of a conversational approach to RE, Hogan does acknowledge that ‘to become educated in religion stands in contrast with becoming exclusively nurtured in the beliefs of a particular faith’ (2009: 168). I do not question in principle the possibility of a confessional education, but I have made clear that it is not the focus of this study. My focus is on a nonconfessional RE that would be undertaken with students of all persuasions, potentially by teachers from a range of religious or other persuasions, in the context of state-funded compulsory schooling. Here the RE teacher must witness to a ‘world’ that cannot be linked to a particular theological position, or rather to a diversity of possible worlds. Hogan’s earlier vision of RE is not, in any case, what Wright or Hand intend in their respective versions of the ‘possibility of

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truth’ argument. For each, the momentous importance of the subject lies not in the educator’s commitment to the truth of some specific perspective, but in the existence of competing or alternative accounts of what is true. The responsibility of the educator is therefore to present the alternatives for the students so that they can make critical judgements between them. This focus on alternatives means that the objects of study in RE cannot be confined to ‘texts, sources of wisdom and authority and other evidence’ (REC 2013: 14) drawn from a particular religion, or even religion itself. The subject must admit other texts drawn from secular sources so that non-religious alternatives might be explored. Hence both Hand and Wright have accepted that the nomenclature of ‘religious’ education might be misleading or at least incomplete (see Aldridge 2015, for my own contribution here). The ‘alternatives’, for Wright, are competing accounts of what, if anything, transcends the material world. They are conflicting accounts of ‘ultimate reality’ and what Wright has called ‘worldviews’ (2007a: 178–80, 220–4). Hand offers a useful conceptual clarification of ‘worldview’ in response to a paper by Trevor Cooling (Hand 2012; Cooling 2010). Cooling has argued that any teaching or learning takes place against a background of prior commitments and beliefs and is therefore never ‘neutral’. All education is ‘confessional’ in that it ‘will inevitably take place within a worldview perspective’ (2010: 34). For some, this worldview is religious, for others, it is secular or humanistic. Hand argues that Cooling conflates two senses of worldview. In the first sense worldviews are ‘integrated, general accounts of the whole of human knowledge, experience and value’ or ‘theories of the meaning of life’ (2012: 530). Hand argues that conceived in the sense of theory, it is possible, contra Cooling, not to have a worldview. Some might ‘decline to adopt a “view of things as a whole” because evaluating and choosing between worldviews is difficult and psychologically demanding and it is easier not to bother’ or they might ‘decline on principle, because they judge there to be good epistemic or ethical reasons for worldview agnosticism, scepticism or suspicion’ (534). The second sense of worldview, Hand argues, is to be aligned with the philosophical idea of a ‘conceptual scheme’. This scheme might be innate, as Kant argues, or culturally determined (as in the case of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), but either way it constitutes the conditions for ‘ordering our sensory input’. Conceptual schemes ‘do not assert anything, or purport to explain anything, nor can they be tested against evidence and experience’ (2012: 531). A worldview understood in terms of a conceptual scheme could hardly be called ‘Christian’, or ‘secular’. The business of RE for Hand does not involve ‘conceptual schemes’, but rather the critical judgement of competing theories.

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In the deposition previously discussed in this chapter, Heidegger argues that ‘the task of education’ is concerned with understanding ‘the notion of intentionality’. He reminds us of his own account of intentionality, which ‘is first and foremost to be attributed to Dasein, not to consciousness’. It involves ‘doing something for a purpose, rather than being conscious of something, and hence its meaning as mental directedness is derivative and abstracted from a more concrete, nonrepresentational relatedness to things’ (2002: 42). The university – in focusing on the ‘theoretical over the practical’, and understanding intentionality to be an aspect of consciousness – has implied that ‘the detached, contemplative point of view is prior to and independent of the background practices of involvement and concern with people and things’ (41–2). Heidegger’s indictment of higher education is that by making theory into its principle, the university inevitably conditions the quality of the pedagogic relation. The result is an encounter between teacher and student, mediated by theoretical abstraction, which regards the terms of this relation as a matter of minds meeting together in an act of speculation. (2002: 39)

Heidegger’s model of intentionality will enable us to see the inadequacies in both Cooling and Hand’s accounts. Although he does not draw in this instance on hermeneutics or phenomenology, Cooling makes an important observation when he notes that the whole of our conduct, thinking and activity in educational contexts is already situated. But he restricts himself to epistemology when he describes this in terms of a background of ‘beliefs’ rather than in ontological terms, as comportment or a purposeful relation to things. Wright, similarly, wants to argue that there is more to a worldview than explicit beliefs, but seems unable to embrace the ontological significance of this insight. Ultimately he still conflates the elements into a single account, rather than seeing theoretical understanding as derivative of a prior intentionality. Drawing on the work of N. T. Wright, he argues that worldviews ‘form the grid through which humans, both individually and in social groupings, perceive all reality’ (Wright, N. T. 1992: 32 in Wright, A. 2007a: 176) and normally ‘function on an implicit level’ (Wright, A.: 176). We ‘should not take worldview to imply a primary process of stepping back and adopting some spectator-like perspective on reality, although it is in principle possible to step back from a worldview and reflect on it in such a manner’ (ibid.). Although worldview can ‘emerge into explicit consciousness, for many it remains buried in the ebb and flow of normal life’ (178). This sounds close to Heidegger’s practice turn, until Wright adds, ‘All worldviews contain an irreducible narrative element’ which, although

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more fundamental than theology, nevertheless answers ‘basic questions’ (176). Acknowledging the role of praxis, Wright maintains that one’s choice of life aim ‘reflects the worldview held’, and rather than rejecting a commitment to theory as ‘the basic stuff of human existence’ in favour of an ontological account, he settles for N. T. Wright’s claim that ‘the issue is complicated’ and will include ‘human muddledness’ (Wright, N. T. 1992: 124 in Wright, A.: 180). Wright’s understanding of worldviews as integrated theories or ‘narratives’ that can be subjected to critical scrutiny, in the final analysis, steers close to Hand’s (although Wright disagrees with the claim that it is possible not to ‘have’ a worldview). Although his consideration of background in terms of ‘conceptual schemes’ is phenomenologically wanting, Hand’s inclination to separate considerations of the ‘background’ from ‘having a worldview’ – in the sense of committing to some theoretical account of ultimate reality – is sound. In his dialogue with White, Wright writes of reaching the level of ultimacy at the point where (he draws on Wittgenstein’s image) we reach bedrock and our spade is turned (2004b: 168). However, Wright neglects phenomenological possibilities here to which Wittgenstein would have been sensitive. We reach bedrock not in the sense of totality or finality, but rather in that our spade has hit the dark, earthy preconditions of representational thought. This background resists thematic explanation and exceeds any attempts to capture it in terms of theoretical abstraction. The background that Cooling wants at times to call worldview cannot be correctly thought of as Christian, or religious, or secular: it exceeds all of these possibilities for complete description (and it is not well described as a ‘view’, but better as a bearing or comportment). The possibility of mutual understanding or criticism across worldviews presupposes that one’s worldview is not the furthest back one can go. Any, but not all, of our assumptions can become discussable through dialogue. This is a hermeneutic possibility even in Wittgenstein’s thought, that Wright acknowledges when he writes that the ‘notion of forms of life and language games opens up, rather than denies, the possibility of cross-cultural understanding’ (2007a: 165). On the other hand, in privileging the epistemological activities of ‘critical scrutiny’, ‘accepting the best supported view’ and letting ‘beliefs be determined by evidence’, Hand undermines his own account of why it is impossible for us to ‘believe whatever we want’. Responding to Harry Brighouse’s ‘religious choice’ justification of RE, Hand argues against ‘autonomous individuals choosing between religions on the basis of judgements of fit’. He nevertheless even here restricts his account of the response to truth to the derived, representational mode of conscious or explicit assent ‘to different propositions about what the

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world is like’ (Hand 2015: 35). Neither Hand nor Wright convincingly explains how truth exerts this transformational power over the thinker. Hence the importance of supplanting the epistemological model of ‘critical judgement’ with an ontological picture of the disclosure of truth in dialogue. We are already purposefully involved in the world, and in our comportment towards any situation we project interpretive possibilities. The very nature of Dasein is interpretation; through dialogue those interpretations change and develop, and Dasein can become more fully what it is. The disclosure of truth consists not in coming to assent to a new theory, but in recognizing or recovering possibilities for becoming. In the moment of disclosure, it is not one’s theory, then, that is in question, but one’s being. As Heidegger summarizes in his deposition: ‘Intentionality as comportment and truth as world disclosure go hand in hand’ (2002: 42). Hand argues that the difference between the followers of religious and irreligious paths is not like the difference between someone who ‘chooses’ to be a barrister rather than a barista, or a physician rather than a physicist, because the former turns on the cognitive component of adherence to a creed, which is not a matter of choice. From a phenomenological perspective, the distinction is less clear. Coming to work as a barista, or a barrister, or a physician, may not be a matter of ‘choosing’ a life that fits but of a ‘becoming’ that consists in the disclosure and affirmation of possibilities for being. Hand makes two observations that undermine his version of the possibility of truth argument: firstly, the acknowledgement that it is reasonable not to have a worldview, and secondly the acknowledgement that we can quite reasonably commit to a worldview even when there is ‘insufficient evidence’ to say which of two views is right (Hand 2015: 38). In the face of these acknowledgements, while the theoretical question of God’s existence – or of the correct account of ultimate reality – remains of momentous import no doubt in terms of the cultural canon, it loses its value as a central ordering principle in educational terms. It falls foul of White’s doubts about the extent to which it is a curriculum priority, or about the level of sophistication that school students need in order to engage in the religious debate. To put this another way, Hand argues that responsible students will exercise ‘indirect control’ over their beliefs by considering the evidence carefully and responding to alternative worldviews – but how many alternatives do they need to consider, and how far must their careful scrutiny extend? Consider the child who believes in God’s existence but has had limited engagement with the various alternative theories. However, she knows that this is an open question in the public sphere and that even the most highly qualified

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theologians and philosophers are not likely to be able to produce an argument that will decide the matter one way or the other. And in any case, she finds philosophy hard. What motive force is there for her to engage systematically, in increasing degrees of sophistication, with the various arguments for or against God’s existence, in the face of competing curriculum priorities? Or the child who refuses to subscribe to a final or ultimate theory and knows that this is a reasonable perspective. Can a justification be offered for requiring this child, for an hour a week for the whole of his compulsory schooling, to engage in the activity of evaluating competing accounts of the ultimate order of reality? To recall Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s account of intentionality, these kinds of theoretical activity are entirely appropriate once one has entered that derived mode of theoretical abstraction that accompanies encountering a problem. But our account of the educational value of RE must acknowledge that there are students for whom the ‘problem’ of offering a final or ultimate account of reality does not emerge. Recasting the ‘possibility of truth’ argument in ontological terms, then, requires that we see the truth concerned not as the truth of one or other holistic theory of being, but as the possibility of disclosure in the dialogic encounter with a particular text or object of study. What emerges in this encounter is a shared question; it is the question that the text puts to the student and that puts her being into question (see Chapter 4). This question cannot be thought of as a single recurring question at the level of totality or the whole, but as a constantly evolving product of the event of understanding, of the fusion of the horizons of student and object of study. As we saw in Chapter 5, this might be a question that a teacher could originally cast in terms of transcendence, or God’s existence, or in religious terms, but in the dialogue that ensues there is the possibility that the subject matter will radically transform. The educational significance is that ‘the risk of the situation, connects internally with the arousal and direction of passionate energy, with the kind of quest with which the learner must be engaged’ (Standish 1999: 45). As Hogan writes, ‘For this uncovering to happen  … the field of study in question must be experienced by us in such a way that our sensibility does not altogether recoil. We must experience it as something which is at least tolerable, understandable, and of sufficient significance to us that we are prepared to co-operate in putting some effort into its study’ (1995: 240). I risk possible caricature here. Perhaps I am offering an anti-intellectual or overly ‘progressive’ stance. I am aware of the objection that to see the value of the ‘world’ that is held out in RE requires developing a hard-won sensitivity to the way things are done in the disciplines of philosophy, theology or religious

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studies. I am open to this. For the shared question to ‘belong’ to the text will necessitate an engagement with disciplinary tradition, and an element of philological or exegetical awareness, although ‘belonging’ cannot be reduced to this or thought of in terms of the systematic structuring of knowledge. But I would argue here against the head/hand distinction that this critique implies. The development of a student’s intellectual capacities within a particular subject cannot be distinguished from her comportment. She is always ‘stretching out, with a hand reaching for something’ (Heidegger 2002: 42) within a particular, inexplicit existential project. This is best illustrated with a recollection of my own. At school I was adept at memorizing noun declensions and verb tables. I was also a poor runner and swimmer. At the time I was inclined to think of this in terms of things I was good at or not so good at, and was quite happy when in sixth form my extracurricular lessons in Classical Greek clashed with ‘double games’. I would tell people I was not a ‘physical’ person. I went on to study classical languages at university, with the intention of becoming an academic philologist. In later life, as I sit with my family on the beach and find myself nervous of entering the water, I lament not applying myself to swimming lessons. I have also discovered some of the satisfaction which comes with developing fitness through distance running. I see now that a world was being held out to me in physical education, a world whose possibilities I did not at the time affirm, whereas other possibilities for my being translated more directly into an application to the hard and tedious graft of learning vocabulary and verb tables by rote. As we have already remarked, the ‘epiphanies’ of education can indeed be slow-boil affairs. The point of this reminiscence is that my educational success in some areas and not others cannot be easily explained in epistemological terms  – as the innate possession, or deliberate development, of certain capacities or aptitudes  – but must be seen in terms of world disclosure, of commitments made and inclinations developed (albeit not always consciously) in accordance with an unfolding sense of identity. We must finally meet head-on Wright’s claim that ‘absolute worth lies in seeking to engage with, and respond to, the ultimate order-of-things’ (2007a: 124). Let us consider also Gadamer’s claim that we should not ‘assert the irreducibility of a difference of opinion’ but must make ‘those assumptions the subject of the conversation’ (1991: 40). The recognition that in authentic dialogue we seek always to make our assumptions discussable would perhaps seem to drive us back eventually to a discussion of our ‘ultimate’ or ‘final’ assumptions. So Susanna Hookway, in a methodological model developed in

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the light of Wright’s work, argues that we should begin by making explicit the range of ‘worldviews’ on offer (2004: 4–5). When encountering any religious content, the perspectives of each worldview on that issue should be presented to students, so that students can make critical judgements between them. This has the effect, in practice, of driving a dialogue with any object of study back towards the single question of which worldview is correct. But given that, as we have seen, worldviews are not for the most part likely to change in the light of rational debate, a reification of worldview can be counterproductive in that it might reinforce the impression that assumptions are undiscussable. Students can come to understand any disagreement in terms of their holding a different worldview, and thus hold each other at arm’s length in a way elaborated in my discussion of deficient dialogues in Chapter 4. Gadamer’s observation that authentic dialogues do not allow their assumptions to become undiscussable is an admonishment not to think of students’ positions in terms of mutually exclusive theories. As Hogan writes in later work, where religious texts are read in a ‘conversational’ way, ‘environments of learning become more hospitable to appreciating humanity as an inescapable cultural profusion, as distinct from a totality of opposed conceptions of the truth’ (2009: 168–9). This is again better illustrated anecdotally. As a teacher educator I once observed a student teaching a RE lesson on the Holocaust within a unit of work on Judaism. She had chosen as her key question, ‘Where was God?’ At the time I was encouraging a pedagogical model largely based on Hookway’s. I thought the student’s question poorly phrased. It did not seem the kind of question that each worldview (theistic, secular postmodern etc.) could have a perspective on, but seemed to expect some sort of theistic response. The range of possible answers seemed to me to be either various nuanced theological responses, or a catch-all, ‘He wasn’t there because he doesn’t exist’. I suggested, ‘Why do people suffer?’ as an alternative, which the student declined for reasons that she could not fully articulate. However, as I watched the lesson I had something of an epiphany of my own. Although it oversimplifies a hermeneutic account to think of a single question emerging between a teacher and her group of students, I was nevertheless able to see a question emerging in the explicit classroom dialogue, through the animated interactions between the students and the teacher. Under the teacher’s tactful and tentative handling, what emerged in the lesson was a serious engagement with something like the question of how it is possible to live a human life in the face of terrible suffering. I saw students taking a stand on this deep and troubling issue, and responding sensitively to the views of others. I realized that this dialogue could not have emerged within

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a view of RE that sees the subject always thrown back to a single question of which account of ultimate reality is right. Addressing this lesson in terms of the differing perspectives of each worldview on why suffering happens would have been an example of the ‘impudent’ practice I will admonish against in the following chapter. It would have become a matter of deciding between incompatible perspectives on a ‘problem’ of evil. I also had to acknowledge that without the explicit emphasis on worldviews, the question emerged in a way that might equally have had its starting point in a history lesson, for example, or English. I realized that once we resist the temptation to reify its subject matter, the dialogue of RE is not easily contained within the boundaries of a particular domain of the curriculum. In response to Wright’s claim that there is a natural epistemological movement towards total or ultimate meaning, I would offer Heidegger’s reminder that ‘the Socratic dialogue, is … resistant to a totally logical mapping, for it meanders around, tells myths, takes detours’ (2002: 38). Further, I would offer that ‘great thinking has rarely been a matter of pronouncing upon the pros and cons of a thesis’ (2002: 37). The possibility of truth in dialogue (as we acknowledged, in the religious context, in Chapter 5) cannot be restricted to a determination between two or more opposing alternatives. There is, in the fusion of horizons that Wright has rejected, something of a movement towards the whole, in that we are, ontologically, ‘linguistic circles’ ever merging (Gadamer: 1977a). But this is an ontological movement that is necessarily never complete rather than an epistemological movement towards a total explanation. Understanding involves a part-whole dialectic, but this is never a matter of the relation of all the parts of reality to a complete, inclusive whole. Rather, the movement that leads us into dialogue is a movement towards the other, towards what always lies beyond or outside of our experience. This movement has been described by some thinkers  – Levinas would be an example – as transcendence, but crucially this would be a transcendence that ‘does not fall within the philosopher’s totality, and therefore the attempt to study religion through critical evaluation of its truth or falsity, appears nonsensical’ (Strhan 2012: 35). Although we have argued against a moral aim for RE, we can acknowledge that there is an ethical significance to the movement into dialogue. We cannot argue that dialogue has a moral aim, but in its unfolding it both presupposes and develops what might be called a certain ‘virtue of receptivity’ (Strahn 2010: 41). Gadamer writes that ‘a person who is called experienced has become so not only through experiences but is also open to new experiences’. There is an ‘openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself ’ (2004: 350).

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6.8 Conclusion The hermeneutic observation that subject matter emerges in dialogue is as relevant at the level of the justification of the domains of the curriculum as it is at the level of classroom interaction. Educators find themselves always already presented with a curriculum. I emphasized in Chapter 1 the historicity of a curriculum that currently provides a space for the study of religious texts or objects of study. Any justification of the continued place of this ‘canon’ on the curriculum, however, is contingent upon the continuing potential of these texts to offer possibilities for dialogue in which students’ being can come into question. These questions need to be thought of in an ontological, emergent sense. They cannot be thematized in a complete or exhaustive list or reduced to a single, ‘religious’ question. Furthermore, as we have seen, the questions will transform along with the transformation of the student and the emergence of the matter of shared concern between student and object of study. Therefore we must admit that other, non-religious objects or texts will also make contributions to this ongoing dialogue, and that the dialogue cannot necessarily be contained within a particular disciplinary domain.

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7.1 Introduction I have suggested that Andrew Wright’s Critical RE is a ‘counterpoint’ to the hermeneutic approach developed in this book, and this relationship will be resolved in what follows. Whereas Wright has been criticized for not having worked through closely enough the implications for the classroom of his philosophical account of RE (Jackson 2004: 86; Wright 2007a), he has at least offered critical realism as a ‘heuristic’ model for approaching the design of a learning experience, and offered us a methodology for ‘wrestling with truth’. I have argued, however, that in offering this methodological account, Wright has neglected the Gadamerian insights that he had attempted to integrate into his critical realist approach. What is presented in this chapter is intended for the classroom practitioner, but cannot be thought of as any sort of prescription for successful learning. I have argued that although the teacher cannot proceed without a plan or scheme, this scheme will be in tension with the moment of understanding, which cannot be predetermined. Therefore, if the religious educator engages in a dialogue with students that is conducted by the subject matter, rather than some other sort of interaction that seeks to transform students through rhetorical domination, he does not ‘know what he is doing’ but must submit to the to-and-fro of a ‘play’ in which he is transformed along with them. What is offered here, then, develops and applies to the local situation of RE some elements of the global description offered in Part 1, of what happens to us, and our students, when understanding befalls us.

7.2 Intentionality in religious education I have argued that Wright’s clarification of the ‘intentionality’ of RE constitutes a significant contribution to our understanding of the field, but I have also argued

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in the preceding chapter that his treatment of intentionality is not sufficiently radical. I will further elaborate now by connecting Wright’s account with the constellation of hermeneutic circles described in Chapter 4. Wright argues, following Allen (1987), that ‘at the heart of all distinctively religious phenomena is the intentionality of the participants, which is directed towards the realm of the transcendent, sacred or divine’ (2007a: 184). In Wright’s view, this orientation of religions towards the transcendent, along with an account of reality drawn from critical realism, is decisive in his critique of alternative positions in RE. I will focus on two positions in particular where this critique has been particularly powerful. The first might be thought of as the ‘reductionist’ position, which treats religious questions as concerning purely sociological, anthropological or psychological phenomena. Into this broad category we might arrange advocates of the perspective that religions should be studied for their undeniable influence on society, heritage and culture, but that such study could be conducted as part of history or some other area that does not address religion specifically (see, for example, White’s position, discussed in the preceding chapter). We also might include here advocates of a ‘phenomenological’ perspective imported from academic religious studies, that would inquire into the manifestation of religious belief in religious communities, but would bracket out the question of the truth of these beliefs (see discussion in Chapter 2). Wright does not want ‘to deny the value of the various human sciences as tools for interpreting religion’ (2004a: 212). This is consistent with a critical realist position, in which religions as communities are constituents of a social reality. We have already seen, however, that Wright distances himself from instrumental justifications of the study of religions that would emphasize their importance for understanding one’s cultural heritage, or the contemporary political situation, or even building tolerance for diverse groups within society. He therefore warns against ‘the dangers of raising [the human sciences] to the status of metadisciplines at the expense of more fundamental philosophical and theological investigative tools’ (ibid.). For Wright, it is precisely because religious claims purport to describe transcendent reality that they are educationally valuable, since ‘the potentially transformational power of RE lies in its ability to expose children to the realm of the transcendent’ (ibid.). The study of transcendent or ultimate reality is for Wright the intrinsically valuable element of RE, since students strive to live their lives in accordance with the way the world is. Wright argues that the attempt to teach RE without taking account of religion’s ‘transcendent realism’, rather than being educationally ‘inclusive’, assumes and encourages the implicit position that ‘the majority of ordinary religious adherents have no interest in

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realistic truth’ (2007a: 140). Wright demonstrates convincingly that this is not the case, and reminds us that accepting that religious communities are often concerned with ‘transcendent reality’ does not lead us ‘into an acceptance of the truth of the claim that the transcendent realm is an actual reality’ (2004a: 212). In addition to the reductive approach, Wright is able to caution against educational conceptions of RE that seek to be ‘indifferent to contested truth claims’ or to assume a philosophical perspective that takes the issue of truth off the table. Rather than being ‘tolerant’ or ‘inclusive’, this perspective actually ‘seeks to transmit its particular worldview’ (2007a: 234), be that a comprehensive form of liberalism or a form of postmodernism (or, commonly in pedagogical contexts, both of these together). Wright argues for critical realism as an inclusive philosophical consensus on which educational decisions about RE can be grounded (236–7). Critical realism argues that there is a mind-independent reality, but can remain reasonably inclusive about what the constituents of that reality are. Wright adopts from Bhaskar the position that even certain postmodern or ‘non-realist’ perspectives have an ontology. They might limit such ontologies (for example, arguing that nothing is real outside of ‘discourse’) but claims about the extent or nature of mind-independent reality are necessarily implicit in any contribution to academic debate. Wright therefore argues that his ‘realism’, minimally defined, can incorporate the possibility of the ‘truth’ of nonrealism, whereas an education founded on non-realism could not take seriously the realist intentionality of traditional religious claims (22–5). It follows for Wright that the most inclusive form of RE is one where these differing accounts of reality, including non-realist accounts, can be offered to children for their own evaluation and discrimination. We might compare here various pupil-led or developmental approaches that encourage students to construct their own accounts of religion with no requirement that they aim for knowledge in the ‘intransitive’ dimension. These approaches appear educationally tolerant or inclusive in that they offer a classroom situation in which there is no possibility of correction or conflict, and apparently minimize the imposition of the teacher’s authority (Erricker’s early position, in which there is ‘no sense of development except change’, has been particularly welcomed in RE in primary schools). However, Wright argues that these are in fact indoctrinatory approaches in that they assume and implicitly nurture, rather than offer for critical evaluation, a non-realist ontology. This can be recognized as ‘an explicit form of confessionalism’ (2007a: 147) once we cast it in alternative terms: it is philosophically equivalent to encouraging students to tolerate each other by nurturing the belief that they are all equal creations of Allah.

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A classroom tolerance grounded in an assumption and nurture of religious pluralism or a form of radical theology does violence to those students who subscribe to a ‘realist’ ontology, by misrepresenting their perspective and refusing to take seriously the possibility of its truth. For Wright, the genuinely inclusive position will in fact require the possibility, at least, that students will contradict each other’s claims to truth (albeit with humility, perhaps in the style of Haverim). The educational dialogue needs to be able to entertain the possibility that there is no ‘ultimate reality’, but it cannot presuppose it. The debate between ideological positions and academic disciplines cannot be decided in advance but ‘should take place in the classroom itself’ (236). I accept Wright’s critiques of possible reductionist positions and the seduction of a false inclusivism, although he puts it rather too stridently when he argues thus: ‘If the question of transcendence is bracketed out of the educational equation then the transformative potential of RE is effectively emasculated’ (202). Although Wright does not make the distinction I have offered in Chapter 4 between ‘text’ and ‘subject matter’, we can apply it here and see that in his account the ‘subject matter’ of RE is not religions but the transcendent reality about which religious communities make truth claims. Religions are the dialogue partners with whom we engage in conversation about ultimate reality. They are in my technical use the ‘objects of study’ or texts. This is a powerful elaboration of a missing or often neglected element of the RE dialogue, but it is also the limitation that Wright is unable himself to transcend. The legitimate recognition that we should not foreclose questions of transcendence does not lead us to an assertion of transcendent reality as the unifying and essential subject matter of RE. If we return to the debate between Wright and Robert Jackson addressed earlier in the book (Jackson 2004: 75–86; Wright 2007a: 148–54), we can see more clearly now what is at issue between them. Jackson’s version of the hermeneutic circle has a student building an interpretation of religion (the whole) from an encounter with the parts (individuals, texts, communities). Jackson’s emphasis here is that ‘religion’ is always constructed in a dialectical relationship between individual and tradition, and thus has no fixed essence. Wright, on the other hand, wishes to identify a reasonably stable and discrete ‘prototypical’ identity for religions. Each strenuously rejects the charge of ‘nominalism’ or ‘essentialism’ respectively levelled by his opponent. What is really at issue between Jackson and Wright, however, is not the nature of religion so much as the intentionality of the educational exchange. Where Wright places different ‘discrete religions’ in the position of objects of study in my triangular hermeneutical diagram, with

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‘the nature of transcendent reality’ emerging as the subject matter inside the triangle, Jackson would place the religious texts, individuals and other ‘parts’ interchangeably in the position of objects of study, with ‘religion’ emerging as the subject matter inside the triangle (see Figure 4.2). As I will go on to elaborate, Jackson’s account will be incomplete to the extent  that he argues that the truth or application of the religious content understood is unnecessary to the exchange as he sees it. But Wright errs here also in insisting on his elaboration of the hermeneutic encounter to the exclusion of Jackson’s. Jackson is surely right that a religion can never be presented as a ‘text’ in RE outside of the part-whole relationship he describes. A student could hardly approach a ‘religion’ in its entirety as a partner in dialogue, but could only ever encounter a part which requires interpretation. The part will never ‘exemplify’ religion directly or unproblematically; rather, the way in which that part is encountered as a representative or constitutive part of religion is  dependent  on the fore-structure or projection that the student brings to the hermeneutic exchange. Wright argues thus: Whether religious education should centre on the generic notion of religion, on discrete religious traditions, or on the spiritual lives of individuals is a deeply controversial issue. Although most religious educators recognize the need for some level of dialogue between all three, there is no agreement as to which of them offers the most appropriate default position against which to compare and contrast the others. I will argue that it is the discrete religious traditions that ought to constitute the starting point for the exploration of transcendent truth. (2007a: 141)

In other words, because Wright wants to fix ‘transcendent reality’ as the subject matter of the RE exchange, he chooses to present stable and discrete religious perspectives as the dialogue partners that can offer competing accounts of that reality. But there is another option here, which is to acknowledge that a student’s orientation towards the individual religious text – and the question of whether it is to be interpreted in the light of religion taken as a generic phenomenon, or as exemplary of some particular tradition, or of individual spiritual experience – is inseparable from the emergence of the subject matter. In the moment of application, the student’s position on the text’s claim to truth will incorporate, among other things, a stance on the way in which the text is to be taken as an exemplar. We are – as we have seen in Part 1 of the book – always operating, in this sense, within mutually constitutive hermeneutic circles.

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I have presented a hermeneutic account of RE in which students come into dialogue with religious texts about some matter of shared concern. How that subject matter emerges, or can emerge, depends on the student’s ‘biases of openness’ towards the text rather than explicit theories about the nature of religion. Any attempt to fix in advance the subject matter for dialogue constrains the possibilities for that dialogue, and the ways in which truth might emerge. I argued in Chapter 5 for the possibility that a discussion that purports to be about God or transcendent reality might show itself, in its unfolding, to have something quite different at stake. Additionally, we saw the need (if we are to build the genuinely inclusive philosophical consensus that Wright advocates) for a dialogue that could take seriously the possibility that an understanding of religion might emerge that rejects transcendence as significant for the matter of hand, or takes the fusion of horizons beyond an either/or alternative or choice between worldviews. Wright has convincingly argued that we should not marginalize or exclude in advance the possibility of a dialogue about transcendence. More generally, we do not take religions seriously as partners in dialogue if we are not open to the possibility that their claims to truth might transform us. Any attempt to understand a religion will involve the production of a ‘common meaning’ rather than holding the text at arm’s length. But this insight is lost the moment we deliberately restrict the dynamic possibilities for the disclosure of truth. We can take seriously the possibility of a transformational encounter with religious truth without always needing to be thrown back to the question of transcendence, or even (as I will go on to discuss) the question of reality.

7.3 Truth as disclosure The literature of RE is preoccupied with questions of meaning. The RE Council’s recent report offers as the primary aim of RE ‘provoking challenging questions about meaning and purpose in life’ (REC 2013: 14). As educators concerned with the teaching of religious texts, we are also liable to be concerned with the ‘meaning’ of those texts. We are therefore inclined to ask students to explain the meaning of particular texts, or offer us ‘an interpretation’, as evidence of their understanding of those texts. Both Jackson and Joyce Miller, developing an ‘interpretive’ approach that has in Miller’s case drawn explicitly on my own hermeneutical account, have argued in response to Wright that one can detach the search for religious meaning from

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the attempt to make judgements about the truth of what is understood (Jackson 1997; Miller 2013: 53). I would want to partially reject their position, although this does not really constitute a defence of Wright. My response would be that truth is always at issue in the event of understanding, but that Jackson, Miller and Wright together have not grasped the possibilities of truth as disclosure. This is not truth understood epistemologically, as assent to one or other theory, but ontologically, as the transformational disclosure of possibilities and an orientation in one’s being towards the matter at hand. I have elaborated and defended Gadamer’s claim that the moment of application (subtilitas applicandi) is inseparable from the moment of understanding (subtilitas intelligendi). One cannot understand without a fusion of horizons in which the text’s question is appropriated as one’s own. This means that one cannot understand without becoming oriented to the subject matter in a new way. One cannot therefore understand a ‘meaning’ without taking a corresponding orientation towards truth. I want further to consider the possibility that philosophical hermeneutics drastically reduces the significance of ‘meaning’ in the event of understanding. Recall that part of Heidegger’s ‘turn’ is a possible shift in emphasis from the language of the ‘meaning’ of Being to the language of the ‘truth’ of Being. Even in Gadamer’s application of the idea of meaning (I concede that it would be hard to imagine a philosophical hermeneutics that does away with the term completely), what is essential is a ‘common meaning’ arrived at in the fusion of the horizons. There is no textual meaning prior to this fusion that could then be applied to the student’s own life: in understanding, the student makes the thing his own. As Hoy summarizes, ‘In understanding what is grasped is not the meaning but the entity’ (2006: 189). Thus Gadamer argues, ‘Understanding belongs to the being of that which is understood’ (2004: xxviii). Let us imagine a student who is asked for the ‘meaning’ of these words of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel: ‘Which is easier: to say to this paralyzed man, “Your sins are forgiven,” or to say, “Get up, take your mat and walk”?’ (Mk 2:9, NIV). The question cannot be answered without having at least implicitly made a number of commitments. A literal belief in the historical accuracy of this miracle story would lead the student to affirm Christ’s divinity. A student who is committed to the possibility of a different approach to scripture – in which divine truths might be conveyed through ‘inspired’ accounts that are not historically accurate  – might consider, for example, the belief of the Gospel’s early readers that only God could forgive sins; this student could see here also the possibility of affirming Christ’s divinity, although the student’s explanation of the meaning of the text

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would employ a different kind of evidential basis. But each of these responses assumes a ‘fore-conception of completeness’ that is theological in nature. There are any number of students whose commitment to the truth of the text does not furnish an answer to this explicit question; they are not bound by the need to interpret the different parts of Christian scripture in light of an overall ‘unity’ of theological meaning. These students, in order to furnish an answer to the question, have little option but to offer one or both of the answers that might be offered by the first two students, but to engage in an act of bracketing or ‘holding at arm’s length’. The question might be reframed (for example, as it often is in RE), ‘what does the text mean for a Christian?’ Gadamer discusses a third element in the historical tradition of hermeneutics. Along with intelligendi (understanding) and applicandi (applying), there is subtilitas explicandi (which he construes as ‘interpreting’). Gadamer identifies that explicandi is a special, ‘explicit’ form of understanding. Note the etymological connection in Latin between explaining and explicitness. When we ask students to explain a meaning, what we are asking them to do is to make explicit the moment of understanding. Yet we have argued that this moment constitutes an orientation towards the subject matter rather than a new knowledge that could be easily rendered in propositional form. How does the student who denies Christ’s divinity respond to the requirement to explicate the meaning of the text? He has the option, it seems, of explicitly responding that it has no meaning, or of offering a meaning that it has for Christians, say (but not for him). But this is not to say that the text was incomprehensible, or that the student did not understand the text, or that it did not have anything to say to him. Rather, the student’s understanding was inseparable from an orientation to the truth of the text that could not easily be explicated in response to a question about what the text means. The question thus phrased has led the student to put himself in the shoes of someone who has a different anticipation of what that text might tell him, whether or not he has been intentionally required to do so. It forces, in other words, an ‘empathetic’ approach. The fact that students will answer questions of this kind in this way does not mean that there is an ‘average intelligibility’ which could be grasped and then (optionally) applied or evaluated, as Jackson imagines. An application has occurred to the extent that the student has understood the text. But the explicit meaning that the student has been required to provide does not correspond or do justice to his or her understanding of the text, which has taken the form of an orientation towards its truth. So the detachment of meaning from truth occurs not in the moment of understanding, conceived hermeneutically, but as a

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feature of a classroom practice that would seek to assess students’ understanding through their explicit interpretations of textual meaning. My guidance here is not (as we shall see) that we should replace explicit questions about the meaning of a text with explicit questions about its truth. For a student to pronounce on a text, ‘it is false’, again presupposes an understanding of the text’s meaning that could be firstly explicated and then judged. A student who understands the text of Mark’s gospel, even if he rejects Christ’s divinity, has nevertheless arrived at an understanding in which the truth of the text has been affirmed. Understanding, as we have seen, does not consist in accepting the text’s question and then accepting or rejecting its answer, but in arriving at a new question which is the shared concern of both student and text.

7.4 Impudent practice In an article in which she argues for an ‘interruption’ of current British practice, Anna Strhan claims to feel ‘increasingly uncomfortable at the way in which RE specifications and resources thematise religion as the object of a type of critical thinking, whose truth or falsity can be described and known objectively through rational argumentation’ (2010: 24). She offers a cluster of examples taken from recent religious studies GCSE examinations, in which students are asked of a number of statements, ‘Do you agree? Give reasons for your answer, showing that you have thought about more than one point of view.’ The statements include: ‘God is not real’; ‘Religious experiences prove that God exists’; Suffering makes it impossible to believe in God’; ‘A Christian life is a good life, but it is too strict for most people’ (23). It is perhaps difficult to attribute any direct influence over GCSE specifications to the work of Wright, and Strhan certainly overstates the case when she argues that Wright’s agenda for RE ‘has been largely taken up in British secondary schools’ (27). Nevertheless, Strhan’s critique echoes the concerns of others who have interpreted Wright’s work as preoccupied with asking students to make explicit judgements about the truth of texts (e.g. Jackson 2004; Miller 2013). Strhan questions Wright’s emphasis on ultimacy, asking, ‘Why is “truth” not enough? In John’s Gospel, the most exclusivist interpretation of Jesus in the Bible, Jesus is only seen to claim to be “the way, the truth and the life” (John 14.6) – even John does not see the need to use this language of ultimacy’ (38). She argues that ‘the centrality of philosophy of religion within RE leads students to view being religious as believing that certain statements of knowledge are true’ and continues

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that ‘this is inadequate and a picture of religious truth that many members of religious traditions would disagree with’ (31). Strhan also draws attention to the appropriation of RE as a medium through which certain instrumental aims – as might be found on the specifications for a school’s requirements in ‘citizenship’ or ‘PSHE’ – might be covered, offering as examples, ‘Explain why some religious people might use caffeine’ and ‘How might the teachings of the religion you have studied affect the attitudes of believers towards drug taking in sport?’ Strhan observes that ‘no religious tradition that I am aware of prioritises the issue of performance-enhancing drugs in sport in its moral teachings’ (31). We begin to get a sense here of how an explicitness of aims constitutes a distortion of the subject matter under consideration. Strhan criticizes the organization of A-Level specifications, in which ‘students have so many philosophers of religion and ethics that they need to cover, that they are able to spend barely a week on each philosopher (little more than two hours of teaching) in which time they are expected to understand their theory and be able to critique it’ (40), leading to ‘an approach focused on mastery and points scoring’ (ibid.). This observation does not simply concern the organization of A-Level specifications or the need to take time and study a topic in depth. The broader implication is that when RE is ordered in terms of explicit questions – for example, the reality of God, or the proofs for his existence – a situation emerges in which answering those questions, or at least appearing to do so successfully, becomes more important than hearkening to the emerging subject matter. This gives rise to a classroom situation dominated by pthonos and an agonistic understanding of conversation, which we encountered as a ‘deficient’ form of dialogue in Chapter 4. This reaches its apex in Strhan’s following confession: I always feel slightly shocked when I encounter a Year 13 student who can declare

‘Descartes is crap’, not having read anything by Descartes, but feels that since all that he needs to get an A at A Level is to be able to critique the ontological argument for the existence of God, he is justified in making such a claim. (40)

Strhan’s frustration with this student’s words can be captured in Emerson’s expression, ‘impudent knowingness’, which Paul Standish glosses as follows: The somewhat awkward word ‘knowingness’ refers, for example, to that familiar response of ‘the expert’ who is immediately ready on hearing a new thought to arrest it into his already-worked-out conceptual armoury and theoretical taxonomy. He knows exactly where you are coming from, and before you have finished your paper or your sentence, he has ‘placed’ your words: ‘So you are just saying that ... what you are saying amounts to this ... you are saying the

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same thing as...’ For him it all comes down to this, and reductively so. And the consequence of this is that now that he has your ideas taped, his own position is buttressed and effectively secured against further thought – at least against any thought that does not run along the railway tracks of his own ‘theoretical perspective’. (2014: 255)

Standish extends this notion of impudence into an understanding of teaching practice, where it refers not to a revealing of something shameful, but a revealing of something directly where an indirectness is crucial to its proper appreciation. He contrasts the ‘gentle suggestiveness’ of Renoir with the shock tactics of Brit Art, or The Smiths to punk rock (252). Standish gives the following caution: ‘Uncovering sets of truths about oneself runs into the problem that we all come from origins we cannot fully know and cannot fathom’ (254). Thus, in educational considerations of remembrance, Standish cautions that there is always more ‘data’ that can be collected, and that for any given account of the past ‘there is a danger that the clarity and vividness of the account that is offered may create an illusion of understanding that blocks the relation to what is necessarily immemorial’ (254). An educational impudence is also at play in the privileging of ‘outcomes based learning’ as the sole indicator that learning has taken place, or in the labelling of children and the reification of identity (as we have encountered in encouraging children to adopt or identify a specific ‘worldview’). Standish offers us again the model of Socrates as teacher, where the ‘teacherquestioner approaches the learner often by roundabout routes, working through digressions and false turns in the conversation towards a progressive refinement and intensification of the enquiry, ready to follow, though gently to redirect, the learner’s sometimes wayward responses’ (258). He elaborates this point thus: ‘The thinker, receptive, even reticent in some ways, is attuned to the possibilities of things, understanding that impudence here will allow things to slip away or crush them in his grasp’ (256). Just as the Heideggerian craftsman releases the possibilities of the grain of the wood, so the teacher, as opposed to the interrogator, allows the truth to ‘dawn’. This is an event that needs to be approached with appropriate pudeur. Representing the concern of RE with the disclosure of truth as an explicit pedagogical preoccupation with making critical judgements, or constantly questioning the truth of things, constitutes a lack of pudeur that will hinder, rather than enable, that disclosure. This is something that I realized while working with a group of colleagues who were attempting to translate Wright’s theoretical approach into a set of resources offering detailed methodological guidelines for classroom practitioners. Given that critical realism was concerned

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with the intransitive dimension, or knowledge of a mind-independent ‘reality’, it seemed to make sense to make reality an explicit concern of the classroom. I therefore developed a set of introductory materials that would enable a student starting secondary RE to encounter and evaluate different accounts of reality, including the reality of eternal principles, values, material objects, and ideas. It gradually dawned on me that rather than offering students a ‘way in’ to the subject matter, I was offering them yet another abstract taxonomy by which they could label themselves and more deeply entrench their perspectives. This is not to say that a hermeneutic perspective is not concerned with reality, but that there was a certain impudence in my desire for students to get reality ‘straight’ before they encountered some religious object of study. We have already seen that dialogue does not have as its referent some reality ‘out there’. The participants, their subject matter, and the hermeneutic circle itself are all ‘in truth’; they are grounded in the reality that is their shared concern. Barthold puts the position well: ‘No-one denies that there is a mind-independent reality out there if all this means is that there are objects that exist when humans are not there to talk about them (not even Richard Rorty, for example, denies this). So once one accepts the embeddedness of all knowing, why continue to emphasize the epistemic or aletheic role this “reality” plays?’ (2010: 3–4). There is a lack of pudeur involved in seeing the encounter with truth that is central to RE either in terms of ‘criticality’ or in terms of ‘realism’. If we can grasp the possibility of an orientation towards the disclosure of truth, we can let reality look after itself as the dialogue is worked out.

7.5 The text as teacher In his paper entitled ‘Shall We Dance’, Clive Erricker exemplifies his pedagogical approach through a discussion of Robert Capa’s famous photograph of a soldier walking along a rural lane with a young woman. Although I would not wish to accept every element of the theoretical position in which this example is situated (see Chapter 3), I nevertheless take Erricker’s discussion as a powerful illustration of what it might mean to approach the text as if it had something to teach us that ‘we could not know by ourselves’ (Gadamer 2004: xxxii). Erricker draws on Geoff Dyer’s (1995) analysis of the picture, in which he refers to two alternative captions and acknowledges that ‘the traditional historical question is, “Which of the two captions is correct?”’ (Erricker 2001: 32). Dyer argues that ‘the visual truth of the photo pushes the circumstances in which it

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was taken beyond the edge of the frame, out of sight’ (Dyer 1998: 5 in Erricker 2001: 32) and moves on to ‘create the story of the relationship, intentions, and concerns of the two figures in a temporal sense that extends beyond the moment of the image itself ’ (Erricker 2001: 32). Rather than approaching the photo as a historical source, Dyer chose ‘to approach it as a work of existential art, pregnant with possible meanings for the viewer that went beyond the specifics of the situation’ (Erricker 2001: 32). Accepting the text as teacher does not mean assenting to its substantive claims or the truth of its propositional content. But it does presuppose a standpoint where we cannot ‘see through’ the text or explain it in such a way that it no longer has anything to teach us. This does not suggest a naïve approach to the text where we do not pay attention to considerations of source criticism, historical and cultural context, or the particular biographical circumstances of an author. However, accepting the text as teacher means that we do not identify the question that the text poses to the student with the question it posed to its historical or cultural audience, or the question with which its author was concerned. Neither do we ‘account’ for the text’s creation or constitution in such a way that it no longer poses a question for us. Erricker, in his discussion of Dyer’s interpretation of Capa’s photograph, explains that ‘while there is a sense in which [it] is dependent on some historical information, it is required for servicing the aim of existential engagement with the work of art; not for any factual purpose of itself ’ (2001: 33). Gadamer compares the approach of the historian and the philologist with each other, and with the hermeneutic approach that takes the text as teacher. The historian does not see himself as the addressee of the historical texts, but is ‘trying to discover something about the past through them’ and ‘he examines the text to find something that it is not, of itself, trying to provide’ (2004: 331). He is interested in ‘what is expressed by the words without its being intended’ and must thus ‘get behind’ the text (ibid.). This would seem to indicate a suspension of the hermeneutic attitude. However, Gadamer argues that texts need ‘to be understood in terms of not only what they say but what they exemplify’ (332). I suggested above that the determination of the role of the text as exemplar is inseparable from the moment of understanding: the text’s addressee takes a stand on the manner in which the text will teach him, or how it will serve as an ‘exemplar’. In this light, the comparison between the historian and the philologist shows a difference not of hermeneutic structure, but of fore-conception or particular concern: each takes the text to be exemplary of a different ‘whole’. For the philologist, the text stands as a unity by itself, whereas for the historian it

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constitutes a fragmentary part of ‘the great text of world history (336)’; but the fragmentary text is no less the historian’s teacher although he gets behind it and understands it as product of its time; he ‘understands himself in this great text’ through his encounter with the part (ibid.). Gadamer identifies, as I have argued above, that the explication of the Bible’s meaning requires an ‘existential fore-understanding’ that is Christian (2004: 327). He then asks, ‘But what would a Marxist, who understands religious utterances only as a reflection of class interests, say?’ (2004: 328). Here we draw together some of the arguments that have preceded about the complex intentionality of the RE classroom and the relation of meaning and truth. The student who denies Christ’s divinity has the possibility of understanding the Biblical text in relation to a ‘whole’ that takes in the activity of social forces and the deep psychological motivations of mankind. A standpoint on the text’s truth is inseparable from a commitment to the way in which the text is to be taken as exemplar. The text does not have a meaning of its own (the student has indeed ‘seen through’ this) but nevertheless stands as teacher in that it offers a particular, fragmentary insight into that elusive whole. It follows that the variety of projections at play for different students in the RE classroom will mean that the same text can act as exemplar, or teacher, for different students in a variety of different ways. Introducing a student to source criticism, or psychoanalytic criticism, or historical criticism, or a variety of other ways in which we can become ‘suspicious’ of the text’s claim to address us directly, does not reduce the text’s status as a teacher but rather opens up different possibilities or contexts against which the student might relate to the text as an exemplar. On the other hand, insisting either that the text is to be approached solely as an exemplar of the religious understanding of a particular community or that what it stands to teach us must be understood only in terms of transcendent reality, constrains the possibilities for the text and the student to come together in a moment of ‘belonging’.

7.6 Belonging I have not got very close to matters of pedagogical planning or practice, but I hope to have raised questions – even, perhaps, to have put notions of ‘pedagogy’ and ‘planning’ themselves into question. The question of how to ‘balance’ the demands of the student’s own horizon of understanding (or the project on which she has already embarked) with that of the text (or the possibility of a

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‘new horizon’ that might be opened for her) cannot be answered in advance of the learning event. We do well in our planning – as Hookway has explored in her notion of ‘problematisation’ (2004) – to consider the range of possible presuppositions or motivations that students might bring to a particular object of study, and the ways in which that object might demand to be encountered, in terms of its situation within a particular culture, or history, or a disciplinary problem that a student might recover. But the question that emerges is not our question. We try so very hard to plan for this event explicitly, but inasmuch as a student understands, she does so ‘beyond our wanting and doing’. We have already questioned the notion that we might ‘assess’ students’ understanding by asking for explicit interpretations of the meaning of a religious text. Something more tactful is called for. There are also problems with determining that an educational event has been ‘successful’ – for what could this mean, other than that a student has learnt something about religion that we ‘intended’ them to learn? One observation remains. We have accepted that the explicit educational situation differs from a situation of dialogue in which interlocutors come together out of a shared concern, remain together for as long as they ‘belong’ together to the subject matter, and naturally part ways. As educators we are sufficiently committed to the value of the world we wish to open up for our students that we engage them in dialogue regardless of their initial wanting, and seek to sustain their interest by whatever legitimate means we can. This means that although we must seek to understand and take into account the existential project to which students are always already committed, we wish for them ‘to experience in the imagination forms of existence and ways of life different from the one in which [they] have become immersed in [their] own concrete everydayness’ in the knowledge that, as time goes on … ‘we all narrow our horizons of life, specializing in one thing or another and enclosing ourselves within a particular circle of friendships, interests and acquaintances’ (Vattimo 1992: 10). The belonging then that characterizes understanding ought not to be seen as a comfortable confirmation of prejudice, but can incorporate or ‘oscillate’ with disorientation (ibid.). As Gadamer argues, ‘What constitutes the essence of Bildung is clearly not alienation as such, but the return to oneself – which presupposes alienation, to be sure’ (2004: 13).

Afterword Religion and the Curriculum

Trevor Cooling’s ‘Doing God in Education’ – written for the Christian think tank, Theos – offers a defence of the possibility of a distinctively Christian contribution to public education. Cooling concludes thus: ‘ The sensible way to handle religious commitment in public education is not to treat it as irrelevant clutter, nor to paint it as a threat, but to view it as a resource to be harnessed, which can contribute exciting and fruitful perspectives on the pragmatically-agreed goals of public education’ (2010: 61). Cooling finds himself justifying faith schools along the way, but argues that this is not his primary purpose. What he does not offer is any kind of defence of allocating discrete curriculum time to RE. A lynchpin of Cooling’s paper is the work of Smith and Carvill (2000), whose examination of curriculum and resources in the teaching of modern foreign languages (MFL) exposes the pedagogical assumption of an attitude of consumptive capitalism. By drawing examples from tourism, discussing leisure activities or acting out payment for services, rather than exploring situations that emphasize hospitality, or giving, or trust, the MFL teacher passes on an understanding of language as a means by which we purchase and consume, rather than succour and forgive. The world that is ‘opened up’ for students is one in which language is a means of gaining access to or advantage over a foreign other, rather than a medium through which speakers are called to serve as ‘a blessing to strangers in a foreign land’ (Cooling 2010: 42; Smith and Carvill 2000: 57–8). The critique is telling, and it would be hard to argue, on being presented with this, that it is a view of human fulfilment that a teacher would consciously choose to hold out to a student. However, Cooling’s diagnosis of the problem is more persuasive than his suggested solution. Smith and Carvill go on to elaborate a ‘distinctively Christian’ approach to teaching modern languages, but it can hardly be Cooling’s intention that we should adopt this approach in the context of state schooling. In the RE

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debate, however, suggestions of this kind have been made. Both Barnes (2015) and Felderhof (2012) have produced related arguments for RE. In each case, the whole curriculum more or less implicitly communicates a secular belief system, and RE provides some small opportunity for compensation by introducing students to the possibility of a life lived sub specie aeternitatis. These arguments fail on the grounds that the implied problem of systematic indoctrination is hardly mitigated by ring-fencing a small portion of the curriculum where students can be indoctrinated otherwise, so that curriculum becomes a battleground of implicit confessionalism (see Aldridge 2015, for further discussion). In any case, I hope that my treatment of Cooling’s position in the preceding chapters has rendered implausible the suggestion that the curriculum could communicate anything like a worldview conceived in the sense of some holistic religious or other narrative. Cooling’s argument demonstrates how worlds can be opened up for students beyond or in spite of the intentions of their teachers, and also the possibility of worlds emerging from which students (and indeed their teachers) might wish to turn away. But it would be difficult to identify the colonization of the MFL curriculum by capitalist concerns with the transmission of a ‘secular worldview’, not least because there might be any number of Humanists, for example, who might also find the implied picture of human flourishing to be wanting in important respects. Cooling concedes that ‘people from other worldviews could have reached similar conclusions, for example through distinctively Islamic or humanist reflection’ (2010: 43). It is unsurprising, given the nature of this publication, that Cooling would want to emphasize the specifically Christian origin of Smith and Carvill’s insights. But the importance of Smith and Carvill’s work is not that Christianity, or indeed religion, has any sort of privileged access to such insights. Rather, the importance is that their work demonstrates how the world that is on offer in the curriculum can become questionable. Although Cooling’s account of ‘worldview’ is hermeneutically wanting, he is surely correct when he argues that there can be no ‘neutrality’ in the curriculum. This is the vision of advocates of a subject-based curriculum, like Young, who argues that ‘religious ideas are not knowledge in the sense we use in this book’ but are ‘one of the sets of values which people live by’ (2014: 18) and further presses for a ‘distinction between truth and value’ (77). Young’s work promises a final ordering of the curriculum, an example of what David Cooper has described as ‘a determination to restrict what is to count as knowledge of the world to a particular domain’, a determination in which ‘other modes of thinking and activity’ have been ‘driven into the realm of subjective impression and “choice”’

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(2002: 60). Cooper cites Heidegger’s concern that certain advancements ‘will bring ... rearing and training of humans into conditions ... whose onset can neither be hindered nor even held up in any way’ (Cooper 2002: 60; Heidegger 1999b: 108), along with his more optimistic hope for a ‘“world age in which that which is worthy of questioning will someday again open the door” to reflection on “what is essential”’ (Cooper 2002: 60; Heidegger 1977b: 181). Smith and Carvill’s work attests to the possibility that the curriculum can be cracked open and illuminated anew; this book has continually attested to the possibility of this happening in the fusion of horizons where teacher, student and object of study converge in their orientation towards the subject matter. It is significant that Cooling wants to frame this insight in religious terms but does not want to restrict its happening or significance to a discrete curriculum area. While on the one hand RE teachers might celebrate the particular possibilities for the world to become ‘questionable’ in their own classroom, on the other hand there is the danger that the defence of a particular curriculum space in which such epiphanies might occur reinforces the technological ordering of the curriculum to which Cooper has referred. While other domains supposedly deal with powerful knowledge that will enable students to manipulate and control their material circumstances, a small space is consecrated and set aside for the consideration of questions of value and subjective impression. Cooling sees this. If there is to be a redemptive power in the educational engagement with religious questions, it is effected by religion’s spilling out and becoming worldly, rather than by segregating itself safely within a sacred space. Cooling is not then clear about how this is effected outside of a confessional context, where the answer can surely not be to offer more explicitly Christian understandings of the curriculum to counteract the godless portions. I have argued in this book for a transformational power of the dialogue that is RE that rests on an openness to the possibility of the radical transformation of the subject matter. This has meant that even as I have affirmed the educational value of that dialogue, I have undermined any necessary claim it might have to discrete curriculum space. I have resisted a convenient alignment between RE and any particular academic discipline, on the grounds that this would constrain the possibilities for transformative understanding. If we accept that RE has an emergent subject matter, rather than a fixed concern with God, religions, or transcendence, then we must also accept that any justification of discrete curriculum space given over to dialogue with specifically religious objects of study is contingent upon the capacity of the canon of religious objects to ‘speak’ to students with the transformative voice of tradition. Another way of putting

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this might be that religious educators cannot have their cake (transformational dialogue) and eat it too (the ring-fencing of RE curriculum space). I have argued that submitting to being conducted by the subject matter may lead the dialogue that is RE into other curriculum areas. Such a move has been strongly resisted, for example by Geoff Teece, who claims that ‘the downside is that a case is not made for the subject’s distinctiveness, particularly in relation to the other humanities subjects. We would argue that this has a debilitating effect on the subject that makes it not only prey to integration into areas like citizenship but, even worse, its extinction’ (Maybury and Teece 2005: 181; see also Aldridge 2011). There are two possible interpretations of such concerns. The first is that a spilling over into other curriculum areas will lead to a reduction of the religious subject matter in the hands of non-specialist teachers (for example, to history, by historians). I agree that we must take this concern seriously, but have argued that refusing to ‘risk’ this movement constitutes a reduction of another kind. The second interpretation is that if the discrete allocation of curriculum time for RE is lost, then religious concerns will disappear altogether from the curriculum. This concern I find altogether unconvincing, and we should consider what might motivate such a concern. It seems tantamount to arguing that the authoritative voice of religious traditions must be preserved through an instrumental ordering of the educational endeavour. This approach seems altogether too evangelical, too explicit; it suggests a lack of faith that religious concerns will continue to play a part in the ongoing cultural conversation. I must admit to standing rather closer to Gianni Vattimo on this matter. It may be through a self-emptying into the curriculum, something akin to the kenosis of Vattimo’s weak thought, that RE can exert its saving power. One might ask then to what extent I have offered a defence of RE, rather than simply a defence of a hermeneutic understanding of education. If RE offers an exploration of the meaning of life, then this is to be understood in terms of the disclosure of the truth of life, which is the moment of human becoming, or life itself. This is captured in Standish’s insight into the ongoing educational moment: ‘We find ourselves on a stair. Around every circle another can be drawn. Our finding is a founding, and at every step, every word, every thought there is the possibility of finding or founding something new’ (2014: 256). Yet this is an insight that Standish, no particular advocate of RE, has also often been tempted to express in religious terms, such as the ‘idolatry’ that would attempt to capture the educational moment in a reification of its aims (1999). I see a danger here, in that I might be more successful in suggesting away the case for RE’s

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discrete curriculum presence than in making provision for the continuation of transformative dialogue in the educational experience of students. I accept the possible claims of some RE teachers that their subject area is within their school a place of refuge where a hermeneutic sensitivity of the kind I have described might be sheltered. But here I can only repeat that the transformational potential of this dialogue is likely to be thwarted by a too explicit attempt to ‘make provision’ for it. I should also in closing take seriously the caveat that a weakening of RE into the whole curriculum would introduce a crisis into teacher education, where already there are not enough subject specialists to treat religious questions with sufficient disciplinary sensitivity. Yet the answer to this would not be to attempt to train all beginner teachers in religious studies, or theology, or even philosophy. This would be an altogether too explicit way of thinking about the task at hand, where in any case the promise of religious dialogue is not to be aligned with the particular academic concerns of any of these disciplines. The requirement would be to foster in teachers a hermeneutic sensitivity to the phenomenon of ‘belonging’ I elaborated in the preceding chapter. The recommendation of this book, then, for teacher education, would be to introduce teachers to that rockcleft valley where we began, as the violent storm rages above, and to encourage them to see that ‘the god is present in the temple’.

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Index agreement 85–7, 107–8 as consensus 93–4 aletheia, see truth, as aletheia alienation 194 application 127–9, 186–8 Arkoun, M. 134, 146 art, artwork aestheticization of 27, 80 curriculum as 28–32, 45, 47–8 truth as 21–2, 29, 134–6 Attainment Targets 43–5, 59, 128–9 aural metaphors 113 authenticity 160–2 authority of the teacher 116–19 of tradition 96 autonomy 96–7, 157, 160–1, 173–5 Barnes, L. P. 54, 57, 196 Being, see also event, being as and becoming 71–2, 159, 173–4 being-in-the-world 55–7 meaning of 22–4, 70 weakening of 144–6 belonging 85, 88–9, 110, 113–15, 126–8, 193–4 Bhaskar, R. 10, 59–62, 64–6, 101, 156, 182 critique of Heidegger 66–9 Book-book, societies of 134, 146 bracketing 55–9, 74–6, 83, 90–1, 181–3, 187 canon/classic 168–9 charity 145–6 circle and argument 3–5, 26–7 hermeneutic 1–3, 6, 26, 68, 70, 72, 75–6, 82–3, 96, 104–5, 109–10, 112, 119–25 linguistic 87, 124–5, 178 clearing, the 24–6, 47, 80–1 collateral learning 122 comportment 56–7, 59, 70, 136, 140, 172–6

conceptual schemes 171 confessional confessionalism 153–5, 182–3, 195–7 and non-confessional 6, 11–12, 37–40, 170–1 construction, metaphor of 21, 44–8 conversation, see curriculum, as conversation conversion 140–1 Cooling, T. 11, 73, 171–3, 195–7 coping 31, 67–8, 71 craft 3–4, 47–8, 190 critical, criticality 103–5, see also hermeneutics, ‘critical’ critical thinking 105, 173–5 critical realism 59–68, 91, 156, 180–3, 190–1, see also reality on abstract and concrete sciences 163–5 empirical/actual/real 61 ‘holy trinity’ of 60 MetaReality and the spiritual turn 65–6 as totality 136–7 critical religious education, see Wright, A. curriculum aims based/subject based 155–7, 163–6 as artwork 28–32, 45, 47–8 as conversation 166–9 and exchange value 158–71 as museum or temple 45 rationalizations of 33–43 in tension with understanding 125–6 totalization, final ordering 43–52, 161, 196–7 deconstruction (and reconstruction) 104–5, 126 Dasein 56–7, 66–7, 70–2, 136 destiny, divine (of hermeneutics) 141–6 Dewey, J. 111, 122, 161 dialogue 4–5, 81–9, 104–5 deficient 91, 106–15 education as 115–25

214

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religious example 138–41 and rhetorical domination 114–15 and risk 85, 91 and virtue 178 disclosure, see truth, as disclosure; world disclosure, education as Dreyfus, H. 22–5, 29, 69–70 dwelling 47–8 earth and world 25–32 edification 21, 28, 75 education, see also dialogue, education as; event, education as; world disclosure, education as as becoming 28–9, 47, 159–60, 162, 168, 174–6, 198–9 without aims, aimless 125–6, 157–63 education act of 1944 5–6, 37–8 of 1988 6, 39–40 effective history 76, 95–7, 116, 139, 144–6 historically effected consciousness 132, 134 eidetic vision 57 empathy 1–2, 57–8, 75, 85–6, 90–1, 107 enframing 45–52, 137 epiphany 28–31, 162–3, 176, 197 epistemic fallacy 61, 66–8 epistemology, as reductive conception of learning 64, 99–104, 172 epoche 57, 74–5 Erricker, C. 41–2, 57, 78, 100–5, 111, 128, 183, 191–2 essentialism and nominalism 42, 75–6, 183 ethnographic approach, see Jackson, R. event being as 80–1, 142–6 education as 30–1, 47–50, 70, 119–25 truth as 22, 135–6 understanding as 2, 72, 76, 86–7, 89, 92, 95–7, 106–7, 113–14, 135 exemplar 184, 192–3 fact/value distinction 165, 196 fore-conception of completeness 88, 187 fusion, see horizons, fusion of Gadamer, H-G. 1–5, 64, 69, 78, 80–105, 106–15, 119, 124, 128–9, 131–5, 168, 177–8, 186–8, 192–4

Gallagher, S. 87, 115, 119–22 Gerede 109–11 Grimmitt, M. 43–5, 128, 149 Habermas, J. 78, 90, 92–100, 112, 119 Hand, M. 9–11, 37–8, 152, 154–5, 171–5 Haverim 140, 183 head/hand distinction 166, 176 Heidegger, M. 2–5, 8, 21–32, 45–52, 55–9, 64, 66–72, 78–81, 109–13, 136–8, 142–6, 150, 158–60, 172–4, 186, 197 Hermeneutics, see also circle, hermeneutic ‘critical’ 78, 92–100 descriptive 64, 72, 94, 114, 126–7 educational character of 106–7, 115–25 philosophical 69–72 radical or post-secular 141–6 romantic 90–1 theological 131–4 universal 69, 72–3, 12, 87–8, 92–3, 104, 132, 134 historically effected consciousness, see effective history historicity, of religious education 6, 33, 35–6, 41–2, 78 Hogan, P. 27–31, 47, 111, 118–19, 159–60, 163, 167–71, 175, 177 horizons 83–4, 95, 136 fusion of 86–7, 133 of student, teacher and text 89–90, 120–5 How, A. 96–7, 99, 137–8, 168–9 Husserl, E. 55–9, 69–70, 74, 124–5, 175 idealism 92–6, 123 idle talk, see Gerede impudence, impudent practice 138, 188–91 incommensurability 87, 98–9, 101–2, 111–13, 139 indoctrination 182–3 instructional triangle, see triangle, instructional or pedagogical intentionality 56–7, 108 of the educational event 119–25 primordial 58–9 of religious education 180–5

Index

215

interests 8, 91, 127–9, 194, see also motivation interpretation 187–8 interpretive religious education, see Jackson, R. iridescence 26, 31, 80, 128 I-Thou relation 82, 85, 88–9

ontic 66–8, 79–81, 137 ontology in critical realism 60–2 fundamental 55–9, 70–2 non-dualistic 63–4 ontological difference 23–4 as transformation 62–3

Jackson, R. 10, 40–2, 57, 74–7, 90, 128, 183–8

part-whole dialectic 1–2, 75–7, 183–5, 192–3 Wright’s development of 64–5, 178 pedagogical triangle, see triangle, instructional or pedagogical performativity 29, 32 phenomenography 63–4 phenomenology 54–5, see also Smart, N. Heideggerian or ‘hermeneutic’ 55–7, 59, 69–72 reception in religious education 40–1, 57–8, 89–91, 181–3 Pinar, W. 166–7 Plato 5, 27, 33, 42, 81–2, 113–14, 117, 132, 150 play 2, 26–7, 31, 46, 96–7, 102–3, 105, 112–13, 118, 125, 134–5, 138 poetic, poetry, education as 27, 29, 100 possibility of truth argument 152, 154–5, 169–78 postmodernism 27–8, 101–4, 182–3 post-secular, see hermeneutics, radical or post-secular practice, primacy of 55–7, 100–1, 172–3 prejudice 2–3, 8, 69, 74, 82–4, 98, 116–17, 125–6, 168–9, 194 project, existential 55–6, 162, 176, 193–4 projection 71–2, 75–6, 83–4, 89, 92, 105, 122–4, 126, 136, 139, 141, 159, 174, 184, 193 prototypical identity (of religions) 42, 103 psychoanalytic analogy 97–8 pthonos 114, 189

Kehre 78–80 kenosis 144–5, 198 kibitzing 111–13, 140 knowledge ‘powerful’ 156, 163 of self 62–3, 136 language

79–81, 87, 136, see also circle, linguistic language games 113–15 Lash, N. 4, 12 learning about/learning from, see Attainment Targets Lichtung, see clearing Meno, paradox of 82–3, 117 method, methodology 13, 23 critical 93, 97, 104–5 as enabling 92 as inadequate or limiting 2, 72–5, 82–5, 88, 90, 94, 112, 125–8, 135–7 the phenomenological 55–9 for religious education 99–100, 180–5 motivation 7–9, 11, 174–5, 194, see also interests approach to moral education 151, 153–4 Mouseion, the Muses 33, 45 museum studies 32–5 national framework for religious education, non-statutory 6–7, 42, 128, 151–2 nominalism, see essentialism and nominalism non-realism 182 Oakeshott, M. 30, 111, 118, 166 objective, see subject/object distinction

question 7–8, 82–6, 179, 188 and answer 83–4, 89 being in question 85, 89, 91–2, 127–8, 174 curriculum in question 168, 196–7 existential 62–3 shared 175–6 transcendent 84–5, 137–8, 169

216

Index

reality of mind-independent objects 66–8, 182–3 stratification of 61–2, 164–5 transitive/intransitive dimensions of 61, 164, 190–1 ultimate 61–2, 146, 171–9 recognition 28–9, 136 of authority 119 recollection 143 relativism 87, 100–4, 111, 138, 139–40 religious education history of 35–43 justification of 150–79 and moral education 151, 153–4 subject matter of 6–7, 41, 61–4, 76–8, 91, 180–5, 197–8 Ricoeur, P. 74–5, 94 Rorty, R. 27–9, 31, 75, 103, 111–15, 140, 145, 191 Schleiermacher, F. 1–2, 58, 75, 132 secularism 144–6, 196–7 Smart, N. 40–1, 57–8 Smeyers, P. 29–32, 48–9, 158–63 Socrates 117, 150, 159–60, 190 Standish, P. 51, 157–8, 160–2, 169, 189–90, 198 Strhan, A. 188–90 subject matter (die Sache) 2, 7–8, 84–6, 89, 91, 106–17, 191, 194 emergence of 5, 10, 12, 31, 91, 117–27, 131, 160, 179, 189, 197 transformation of 5, 140–1, 175, 178, 197 subject/object distinction 56–7, 59, 79–81, 96–7, 101, 112, 158–9 submission to tradition 96–7 to subject matter 113–15, 160, 198 syllabus, local agreed 38 tact 117–18, 126–7, 194 teacher authority of 116–19 ethical disposition of 126–8 relationship with student 158–60 technology 99, see also enframing; performativity temple, as cultural paradigm 22

text 1–2, 4, 95, 104–5, 125–8 claim to truth 85, 88, 90, 134 religious 133, 177, 184–8, 194 secular 171 and subject matter 89–91, 120–5, 183–5 as teacher or exemplar 116, 184, 191–3 textual criticism 73–4 as Thou 82 textualism, textual priority 87–9 thematization 69–71, 81, 98, 117–18, 123–5, 136, 141, 162, 169 theoretical abstraction 123–4, 158–9, 166, 172–3, 175 Thiselton, A. 10–11, 132–3 Thou, see I-Thou relation tolerance 42, 153, 161, 181–3 topological metaphor 3–4, 22–4, 26, 86, 110, 113 tradition 69, 76, 94–9, 105, 134, 142–3, 167–8 distortion of 92–3, 95, 97–9, 104 as language 112, 124, 136 religious or theological 132–3, 183–4, 197–8 transcendence 144–6, 178 originary 56–7, 59, 68, 81 as subject matter of religious education 42, 63–4, 91, 110, 155, 164–5, 171, 175, 181–5, 193, 197–8 transformation, see ontology, as transformation; understanding, as transformation triangle instructional or pedagogical 85, 106, 115–19 new educational 119–25, 183–4 truth, see also artwork, as truth; possibility of truth argument as aletheia 23–4, 158 as correspondence 112, 165 as disclosure 27, 80, 105, 157, 170, 174, 185, 190–1, 198–9 as event or happening 21–2, 26, 29, 32, 45, 48–9, 80, 134–8 and meaning 185–8, 192–3 as orientation 187–8 and recovery 105 transcendent or ultimate 42–3, 46, 154, 188–9 transformational 134, 136, 173–4

Index and truthfulness or truthful living 42–3, 62–3, 154 understanding as the condition of Dasein 70–2, 136–7 as event 64, 92 indeterminacy of 126 as ontological rather than propositional 67–8 as transformation 72, 75, 85–6, 92, 97–8, 104–5, 106–7, 123–4, 139, 169 Vattimo, G. 17, 23, 135–8, 141–6, 195, 198

217

White, J. 150–8, 160, 169, 173–4 Wittgenstein, L. 10, 113, 173 world disclosure, education as 27–32, 159, 162–3, 170, 195–7, see also earth and world; truth, as disclosure worldview 49–50, 57, 93, 102, 108, 111–12, 129, 140, 153–4, 171–4, 177–8, 182, 185, 196 Wright, A. 10, 42–3, 59–66, 110–11, 128, 134–5, 136–7, 164–5, 170–5, 181–3, 189 criticism of Erricker 101–4 criticism of Gadamer 89–100 criticism of Jackson 76–7, 183–5 response to White 152–7