Passion and Knowledge

Abstract

Nothing that can be called thinking is formalized or formalizable; nor can it be likened to a mechanical process (Church's hypothesis). Rather, thinking sets into motion human imagination and passion.Having already written extensively on the imagination,' I will limit myself here to outlining its basic structure. At the two opposite poles of knowledge, as well as in its center, lies the creative power of the human being, that is, radical imagination. It is thanks to the imagination that the world is presented in this form and not in some other: it is imagination that creates axioms, postulates, and the fundamental patterns that subtend the structures of knowledge; finally, it is imagination that both furnishes the hypothetical models and idea-images of knowledge, and makes possible their potential development and/or insight into them. This imagination, however, both in itself and in its essential operations – which include its social forms, experienced on this level as the creation of an anonymous collective force – is neither formalized nor formalizable. Obviously, the imagination contains – just as does everything else that exists – a totalizing, identity-bearing dimension (which for brevity's sake we have elsewhere called ensidiqt,ce)2; but this dimension of the imagination is not the essential one, neither in its operations nor its results, no more than the arithmetic relations between tones are the essential element of a Bach fugue.

Reclaiming learning

“…In another interview, Castoriadis’s notion of learning parts company with Biesta’s, as it becomes diversified to contain a clearly affirmative sense. Instead of considering learning as a purely animalistic adaptation mechanism or an instrument of a conservative institution; and instead of pleading for teaching without learning or for going beyond learning, Castoriadis writes: ‘if the teachers are not capable of inspiring children with love both for what they are learning and for the act of learning, they're not teachers’ (Castoriadis, 2005: 318). 6 So, what will happen in a world ‘without learning’ (the affirmative one)?…”

“…6 So, what will happen in a world ‘without learning’ (the affirmative one)? For Castoriadis, this would be a world where the adaptive and profit-making sense of learning would have triumphed: ‘without that, one may possibly exit from high school like some kind of exam fiend, but not as someone open to the world with a passion for this enormous dimension of human existence that is knowledge’ (Castoriadis, 2005: 318).…”

“…Those who endorse it do not balance ‘well the two components’. In his ‘opinion, teaching is of course educating within an institutional framework’ and assisting ‘students to acquire their autonomy; but it is also getting them to love knowledge and the process of its acquisition, which cannot occur without learning things’ (Castoriadis, 2005: 322-3). Without a positive sense of learning that is not adaptive, the person’s autonomy is impossible: ‘I don't see how one can form students as autonomous beings, in the true and full sense of the term, if these beings don't learn to love knowledge, therefore if they don't learn.…”

“…Without a positive sense of learning that is not adaptive, the person’s autonomy is impossible: ‘I don't see how one can form students as autonomous beings, in the true and full sense of the term, if these beings don't learn to love knowledge, therefore if they don't learn. It's almost a tautology’ (Castoriadis, 2005: 323).…”

“…6 ‘There is no pedagogy if the student doesn't cathect, in the strongest sense of the term, at once what she is learning and the process of learning; and she can cathect it, for that is how humans are made, only by means of the cathexis of a concrete person, by means of a Platonic Eros’ (Castoriadis, 2005, 318).…”