Even when written by a single author, a book is never a solitary effort. Underpinning every book is a wide expanse, a universe of shared experience wherein the book, sinking its roots, finds its nourishment and grows. I believe it is important to acknowledge such a concrete, bodily space, which acts as both a magma surrounding oneâs attempt and a rational framework guiding oneâs construction. This is the space of conversations and waiting, study and dialogue; it is the space of hearing and responding, of patience and excitement, imagination and painstaking work. It is the growing terrain where challenging feelings, compelling questions, exciting thoughts and sensations difficult to pin down chase and find each other, sometimes producing ideas worth developing and sharing, sometimes not. However, this is also the space where one finds and experiences oneâs limits, inadequacy and failuresâin a sense, a book is also the result and the exposition of such limits, failures and inadequacy.
The space where a book develops is a space we both inhabit and produce, create and undergo. Of course, such a space is made up of oneâs own work, intentions and choices. However, when writing a book, we must also acknowledge that outside of any rhetoric, it is the book itself that compels us to respond. Paradoxically, one is thrown into the book one writes.
This is so because one may decide which article to read, which passage is worth analyzing and which not; moreover, the conversations one has with family, friends, and colleagues are also the result of oneâs choices. However, we will never know in advance which ideas we will find in the articles read, nor will we be able to predict which feelings, emotions, questions and thoughts will arise while in conversation with friends, colleagues or family. Stated differently, even when pursuing a deliberate endeavor, the ways we are affected by others and the world are outside of our intentions and choices. As a result, we must acknowledge that our feelings, projects, desires and even thoughts are not at our disposal because they are deeply affected by the unpredictable encounters we experience through living. In other words, there is a radical undergoing that affects even oneâs conscious thinking and choices.
It is exactly this process of being affected in unpredictable ways that pushes us forward. Of course, this is not to deny oneâs agency, which would be senseless. Rather, the point is to position oneâs agency where it belongs, namely between two diverse kinds of uncertainty and unpredictability: the uncertainty of our connectedness, of our being-affected-by, which lies behind us, and the unpredictability of the universe of experience we open up through our actions and thinking, which lies beyond us. In a sense, as I wish to make clear throughout the book, we are projected into the future exactly because we are exposed and affected in unpredictable ways. Thus, when thinking about our existential condition, we experience ourselves as, at the very same time, behind and beyond our own understanding and comprehension. I think that an important part of both educational and philosophical work lies in acknowledging what is, at the very same time, behind and beyond that kind of alleged self-mastery that a significant part of educational discourse still assumes as its grounding and ultimate terrain. In this sense, preserving the very unpredictability of oneâs and othersâ connectedness and beyondness is at the core of our educational and philosophical work.
The book I present, then, attempts to pin down, along different guidelines, the work I have done over the last five years. Central to this book are, of course, Dewey and Heidegger. Throughout the interlaced study of their writings, I found myself reading Dewey with a Heideggerian lens, as it were, and, conversely, reading Heidegger with a Deweyan lens. Such an approach, I believe, has allowed me to reveal something that would have remained hidden or underestimated when considering each thinker in his own right.
Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian writer, once wrote that any great novelist creates her own predecessors. This is true for the force, the power, if you wish, of any great novelist lies exactly in forces us to read previous novelists in her own light, thus highlighting aspects of the predecessorsâ work that, otherwise, could have remained hidden or underestimated. Otherwise stated, the imaginative power of any great novelist reach out into the past as well as into the future. In this case, in a very concrete sense, it is the present that illuminates the past, imbuing that past with new and diverse features. Accordingly, I hope that the analyses of Deweyan and Heideggerian oeuvres will illuminate one another, thus revealing new and unseen features of both oeuvres. Moreover, in interweaving Deweyâs and Heideggerâs thought, it is my hope that the sense of beyondness, interrelatedness and being-with-others emerging from such an interlaced reading may help us build and tend to something not already contained in what is here and now, thus welcoming what is other than ourselves and fundamentally uncertain and unpredictableâwhich, as I wish to argue, is one of the central aims of education.
Specifically, I wish to argue that both Dewey and Heidegger conceived of the human condition and human existence as fundamentally uncertain and uncanny: human beings are jeopardized and delivered over from the very beginning, and this condition continues throughout oneâs entire life. We will come to see that for both Heidegger and Dewey, we are, on the one hand, thrown into the world, delivered to an uncanny and uncertain conditionâin Deweyâs words, we âcannot escape the problem of how to engage in lifeâ (Dewey 1922, p. 81). For Dewey, as well as for Heidegger, we are always-already vulnerable and exposed because âexperience is primarily a process of undergoing a process of standing something; of suffering and passion, of affection, in the literal sense of these wordsâ (Dewey 1917, p. 10). In Heideggerâs words, âDasein stands primordially together with itself in uncanninessâ (Heidegger 1996/1927, p. 264). However, such an undergoing, such an uncanniness, is also the condition by which we can âoverreach ourselvesâ (Heidegger 1992/1929â1930, p. 165), fulfilling the âbroadening of the selfâ (Dewey 1913, p. 89) that is education. This fulfillment is possible because for Dewey, undergoing âis never mere passivityâ and experience is always âa matter of simultaneous doings and sufferingsâ (Dewey 1917, p. 10). In Deweyâs understanding, the subject is always pushed out into the future, enlarging and emancipating its experience, thereby deepening and intensifying its quality. For Heidegger, a similar dynamic comes to define uncanniness and Daseinâs condition, which is embedded with projecting and transcendence, namely, the ways in which âDasein chooses itselfâ (Heidegger 1992/1928, p. 190). Such a choice, in turn, âis the summons of the self to its potentiality-of-being-a-self, and thus calls Dasein forth to its possibilitiesâ (Heidegger 1996/1927, p. 253). Thus, both Dewey and Heideggerâalthough differentlyâhighlight the subjectâs exposure and vulnerability while also framing this condition as essential to the âpotentiality-of-being-a-selfâ/âbroadening of the selfâ to occur.
However, my attempt is not an analysis of Dewey and Heidegger per se. My reading of the two thinker...