Toward an Imperfect Education

Facing Humanity, Rethinking Cosmopolitanism

Sharon Todd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781594516214
• eBook ISBN: 9781317250227
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The theory of cosmopolitanism is built on a paradoxical commitment to a universal idea of humanity and to a respect for human pluralism. Toward an Imperfect Education critiques the assumed "goodness" of humans that underwrites the idea of humanity and explores how antagonistic human interactions such as conflict, violence, and suffering are a fundamental aspect of life in a pluralistic world. This book proposes that the inescapable difference between humans compels our ethical and political observations in education. Todd persuasively argues that facing humanity in all its complexity and imperfection ought to be a central element of the cosmopolitan project to create a more just and humane education. Informed primarily by poststructural philosophy and feminist theory, she focuses on how sexual, cultural, and religious difference intersect with universal claims made in the name of humanity. Individual chapters develop a novel framework for dealing with antagonism in relation to human rights, democracy, citizenship, and cross-cultural understanding.

1
Facing Humanity: Crisis and Inevitability

They spoke to me of people, and of humanity.
But I’ve never seen people, or humanity.
I’ve seen various people, astonishingly dissimilar,
Each separated from the next by unpeopled space.

Fernando Pessoa¹

Why speak of humanity when we speak of education—particularly if, as Pessoa so eloquently expresses, we cannot meet “humanity” but only people in all their diversity? Do we not risk endangering our concern for actual persons in our appeals to a humanity we can never face, greet, confront, or listen to? It appears nonetheless to be a common enough assumption that there is some intrinsic connection between the project of education and the idea of humanity itself. This connection has been a central feature of a wide range of educational viewpoints, most notably in the grand humanistic traditions of bildung and liberal arts education.² On these views, education is fundamentally about the development of those qualities that are seen to contribute to a sense of human flourishing: dignity, respect, creativity, freedom, and rationality, to name but a few. Though debates exist about which qualities deserve the most attention, the appeal to humanity as a condition of becoming not merely an educated person but a human subject who is deeply connected to others, both morally and politically, has resonated quite loudly. Indeed, as early as Kant’s 1803 treatise on education, the modern idea of humanity has been used as a way of framing education’s contribution to the creation of a more humane future.³

On the face of it, this appears to be a welcomed line of thinking, especially given the present scope of social breakdown and violence around the globe. And it is precisely this line of thinking which is reflected in the current turn to a cosmopolitan direction in education, with its blending of concerns for world citizenship, human rights, democracy, and cross-cultural understanding (e.g., Kemp 2005; Noddings 2005; Nussbaum 1997a). In particular, as we will see in more detail in the next chapter, the cosmopolitan project also seeks to educate for global awareness and unquestionably positions a “shared humanity” as a condition of world citizenship beyond the narrow borders of national identities (Heater 2002). As one of the most cogent apologists for cosmopolitanism, Martha Nussbaum writes:

The accident of where one is born is just that, an accident; any human being might have been born in any nation. Recognizing this, we should not allow differences of nationality or class or ethnic membership or even gender to erect barriers between us and our fellow human beings. We should recognize humanity—and its fundamental ingredients, reason and moral capacity—wherever it occurs, and give that community of humanity our first allegiance. (1997a, 58– 59)

Calling for such an allegiance can be seen, I think, as a complex moral, political, and educational response to a seeming “failure” of humanity, in which the bettering of the human condition is thought to be at least partially accomplished by educating youth in the arts of human coexistence founded on what we share we others. Not only confined, then, to a philosopher’s dream of a better world, the term humanity is also regularly placed in the company of such words as “cultivating,” “nurturing,” “promoting,” or “caring for” by organizations such as UNESCO—words which suggest that humanity is something indeed desirable to educate for even if it is not immediately in evidence.

Although such appeals to humanity are constructed on supposedly positive, universal ideals, such as dignity, reason, respect, and freedom, there is an unsightly side to the apparent idea of “goodness” that is contained in the term humanity itself. What such affirmative statements on humanity reveal about the possibilities of education is nothing other, it seems to me, than an admission that the present human condition is in crisis.⁴ After all, when organizations such as UNESCO, or when cosmopolitan educationalists appeal to humanity, they are hoping to counteract the very devastating realities of social dissolution that plague societies throughout the world and to unite us under a banner of respect for what we share as human beings. Schools, then, often are called upon to educate—and yes, to socialize—the young into becoming more humane citizens. Derek Heater (2002) has noted that “there is such an abundance of hatred, injustice and violence in this world that one would properly court ridicule by naïvely suggesting that schools could readily replace this condition with cosmopolitan harmony” (164). Yet equally, he suggests, we cannot think that education can make no contribution at all in addressing injustice. Instead, Heater claims, it is more fruitful to embrace an equivocal position when it comes to making lofty educational claims about the amelioration of the human condition (2002, 165).

Taking a modest, equivocal position with regard to what education can accomplish in responding to violence and inequity across human differences requires, in my view, a critical re-evaluation of the idea of humanity itself. My main reason for advancing such a position emerges in light of what I see as the way humanity is conceived along the lines of an oppositional stance to all that is undesirable in human interaction. To use it, therefore, as an appeal to politics, ethics, or education means blinding ourselves to the very human aspects of our inhuman actions.⁵ Thus the idea that education can ameliorate certain global conditions under the sign of humanity is a worrying proposition, not least because it fails to recognize that the very injustices and antagonisms which are the targets of such education are created and sustained precisely through our human talent for producing them.

Simon Critchley (2007) has recently voiced a warning along similar lines. He remarks that since humanity has been used to justify the exclusion of those with whom we are in conflict, “the slightly further left amongst us should also be careful about invoking the signifier of humanity in any oppositional politics” (143). Humanity, in his view, has been used as a justification for the so-called legitimate annihilation of those whom have been deemed enemies. Similarly, Chantal Mouffe (2005) notes that throughout history the “wars raged in the name of humanity were particularly inhuman since all means were justified once the enemy had been presented as an outlaw of humanity” (78).⁶ Thus the tendency to use the idea of the humanity as a moralistic ground for exclusion should raise suspicion about our use of the term in educational circles. If one of the purposes of education is indeed to transform the small injustices which plague our lives in the social (and not the grander scope of global violence, as Heater intimates), it must, in my view, take a more critical attitude to the idea of humanity which serves to underpin this very purpose. My task here, then, in offering such a reconsideration of humanity in relation to education in general, and cosmopolitanism more particularly, is not to plea for a new humanism, which states—unequivocally—what counts as human “flourishing” and “fulfillment”; nor is it a call for a more definitive picture of human nature. Instead, I focus here on the idea that the possibility of acting in the name of humanity lies in our capacity for betraying it. That is, the idea of humanity itself must include human limits as well as human possibilities and needs to be read in relation to the very violence and antagonism that inheres in specifically human interaction. Therefore what follows shifts from a position in which education is seen to “cultivate” an ideal of humanity, to a position in which education concerns itself with the more concrete—and difficult—work of “facing” humanity. For if education is going to work toward a more peaceful future that fully recognizes the plurality of human lives, I argue that it must do so without appealing to an idealized humanity that is solely based on universal and intrinsic goodness. The primary question to be addressed, therefore, is how do we imagine an education that seeks not to cultivate humanity, to borrow from Nussbaum (1997a), but instead seeks to face it—head-on, so to speak, without sentimentalism, idealism, or false hope?

In response to this question, the first section of this chapter discusses the inhuman in relation to the idea of humanity and suggests that humanity needs to be thought beyond the polarities of humanism and antihumanism. The second section delves more directly into the question humanity poses for education, drawing primarily on Kant, Hannah Arendt, and Luce Irigaray. Here I identify the problem of equating humanity with goodness and universalism, and discuss the limitations of education itself in promoting humanity as a justification for its aims. The next section discusses violence and suffering as inevitably intertwined with ethical (nonviolent) possibility and how this challenges an equation of humanity with any simple notion of the Good (Levinas 1969; 1998a). It, moreover, puts forth the view that it is only in facing humanity that we can more adequately conceive of advocating an educational responsibility for dealing with injustice. I conclude with a few ideas about how facing humanity can act as a motivation for what education can hope to accomplish, and how this promotes a rethinking of cosmopolitanism as an aim of education (a task which is taken up more fully in the next chapter).

Humanity and the Inhuman

The idea of humanity historically often appears on the scene as a sort of compensation for the devastation and suffering humans themselves have been responsible for creating. The various appeals to humanity in foundational documents such as the American Bill of Rights, the French Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, and the UN Universal Declaration followed precisely on the heels of the devastation wrought by colonialism, the ancien régime, and the Holocaust, respectively. Similarly, the European fascination with various aspects of the cosmopolitan project in the fairly recent past has come about in the shadow of the wars and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. Even more recent, the urgency with which democratic, global, intercultural, and interreligious themes have been placed on the educational agenda is directly related to the highly polarized situation created after the US terrorist attacks and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The idea of humanity seems to have become a sign under which to mobilize forces against our “human, all too human” gift for mutual hatred and destruction. With this said, it would appear that our very hope in promoting the kind of humanity these rights-based documents call for is also paradoxically bound up with the idea that our humanity has abandoned us, or, more to the point perhaps, has been abandoned by us. Thus the rhetorical force of “humanity” is actually made more meaningful against the very backdrop of its seeming negation.

Yet, appealing to humanity as a ground for nonviolence, conflict resolution, or civil peace—that is, as the opposite of that which we find difficult to bear— risks, to my mind, the erasure of the very human element to be found in “inhuman” violence, suffering, and civil hardship. Indeed, as Drucilla Cornell (2003) warns us, while violence is inexcusable on ethical grounds, there is nonetheless a human face that belongs to those who commit it (174). She argues that even terrorists are covered under the Kantian “ideal of humanity” umbrella; for without this protection, she warns, one falls easily into a justification of “inhumanity” itself. Although I am sympathetic to Cornell’s attempts to complicate what has become in the US a black-and-white portrayal of the human-inhuman divide, unlike Cornell, my purpose here is not so much to argue that everyone is part of some ideal of humanity as to propose that the idea of humanity itself can be rethought as containing the human capacity for violence without seeing that violence merely as its negation. On this view, an idea of humanity includes within it both the capacity for dignity and freedom as well as the capacity to do harm to others. What needs to be explored further, of course, is how conceiving humanity on these terms can effectively motivate us to an ethical position of nonviolence. By this I mean an ethical position that does not sidestep the very question of violence as a human possibility and that does not return to certain humanistic accounts of the “goodness” of humankind that merely serve to mask our undesirable elements.

Alain Badiou, in his recent book, The Century (2007), explores two positions which he claims have attempted to rewrite the discourse of humanism in the postwar European context: a radical humanism envisaged by Jean-Paul Sartre and a radical antihumanism advocated by Michel Foucault. In the first account, the human is conceived as filling the emptiness left by the “death of God.” On Badiou’s reading, this radical humanism builds on a view of philosophy as anthropology—that is, philosophy begins in the idea that human beings create their own systems of meaning for which they must assume responsibility. In the second account, the human is to be thought in terms of the void created by the “death of Man” as a universal or transcendent subject. Badiou argues that such radical antihumanism sees philosophy as thought, as “a thinking which lets an inhuman beginning arrive” (2007, 172). What is of importance to note for my purposes here is that both positions largely have been abandoned. In Badiou’s eyes, these now have been replaced by a classical humanism “without a God,” which merely reduces humans to a species, to a biological body, to DNA and cellular composition; it has, he claims, become a “projectless humanism,” an “animal humanism” (2007, 175). What have been eclipsed as well are the inhuman aspects of the human condition, which have the possibility of opening new beginnings for philosophical reflection. Badiou suggests that what is needed is a rethinking of the human that moves beyond both radical humanism and radical antihumanism without falling back on depictions of “man” in crass materialistic terms of genes, cells, and neurons. He is adamant that where we need to start our thinking is with the inhuman truths of human existence itself (2007, 175).

It is in light of this call for inhuman beginnings that the present work situates itself—not in order to revive (or continue) the radical antihumanist project of Foucault, but in order to rethink the human element within our appeals to humanity as containing something of the inhuman as well. Jean-François Lyotard (1991) articulates a most fundamental question: “What shall we call human in humans ...” (3). In raising this query, Lyotard’s point is not to suggest that we can give a definitive answer, but that we interrogate our assumptions about the exclusion of the inhuman in our appeals to humanity. Indeed, Lyotard claims that it is precisely the inhuman element inherent in the human condition that premises our educational endeavors (4). He writes:

If humans are born human, as cats are born cats (within a few hours), it would not be ... I don’t even say desirable, which is another question, but simply possible, to educate them. That children have to be educated is a circumstance which only proceeds from the fact that they are not completely led by nature, not programmed. The institutions which constitute culture supplement this native lack. (1991, 3)

Raising the possibility that education actually deals face-to-face with the “inhuman” as a condition of possibility for creating the “human” suggests to me that educational thought needs to begin not with the projection of an already secured and perfected ideal of what counts as human, but upon other terms altogether. Lyotard points out that humanism erases the “unharmonizable” aspects of our existence in seeking a common project and destiny for humankind, and he sees one such unharmonizable aspect lying in the humanity/inhumanity of the child:

Shorn of speech, incapable of standing upright, hesitating over the objects of its interest, not able to calculate its advantages, not sensitive to common reason, the child is eminently the human because its distress heralds and promises things possible. Its initial delay in humanity, which makes it the hostage of the adult community, is also what manifests to this community the lack of humanity it is suffering from, and which calls on it to become more human. (1991, 3– 4)

What Lyotard indicates here is how the idea of humanity actually rests upon the concealment of an inhuman element essential to its survival. In turn, education, he claims, enacts upon the child its own inhumanity in seeking to render the child “human” through “constraint,” “terror,” and even “castration” (4–5). That is, education must impose a humanity that is traumatic to the nascent human subject that is the child.⁷ In this way, then, education can never be an innocent purveyor of humanistic goods but is an institutionalized practice that is fraught with ambiguity, living in the aporetic space that opens up in the encounter between the human and inhuman. What Lyotard points to is that the child (and the student more generally) must learn to become a member of the “community of humanity,” as both Nussbaum (1997a) and Arendt (1992) put it. It is not that the child is “inhuman” in and of itself; but acts as a reminder to adults of both the fragility of humanity and the learning required to become human. In thus moving beyond the terms of humanism and antihumanism what Lyotard asks us to consider is to think of humanity as a problem, as a question for education, and not simply as a solution or justification for it.

Rethinking Humanity as an Educational Problem

One response to the relation between humanity and education, if I may be permitted an oversimplification here, has often led to the development of ideas about what constitutes a shared human existence, how each individual might fulfill its potential in partaking in that existence, and the ways in which education can then structure a path toward the fulfillment of that existence in relation to others. With respect to the pursuit of projects concerning, in particular, social justice, cosmopolitanism, and human rights, education’s roots in the idea of humanity find familiar expression in Kant’s educational thought:

One principle of education which those men especially who form educational schemes should keep before their eyes is this—children ought to be educated, not for the present, but for a possibly improved condition of man in the future; that is, in a manner which is adapted to the idea of humanity and the whole destiny of man ...

But the basis of a scheme of education must be cosmopolitan. And is, then, the idea of the universal good harmful to us as individuals? Never! for [sic] though it m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue Education and an Imperfect Garden
• Chapter 1 Facing Humanity: Crisis and Inevitability
• Chapter 2 Rethinking Cosmopolitanism Along the Fault Lines of a Divided Modernity
• Chapter 3 Not Just for Myself: Questioning the Subject of Human Rights
• Chapter 4 Promoting a Just Education: Dilemmas of Rights, Freedom, and Justice
• Chapter 5 Whose Rights? Whose Freedom?
• Chapter 6 Educating Beyond Consensus: Facing Cross-Cultural Conflict as Radical Democratic Possibility
• Chapter 7 Educating the Sexed Citizen: Irigaray and the Promise of a Humanity That Is Yet to Come
• Chapter 8 Teachers Judging Without Scripts, or Thinking Cosmopolitan
• Epilogue Toward an Imperfect Education
• References
• Index
• About the Author