Hunting for Education: ‘Archaeological’ Speculations on Critique and Paideia

Abstract

This paper explores in what sense “critique” can be considered a basic educational concept, by investigating to what extent it is coextensive with the emergence of the possibility of world-disclosing and the (related) notion of the educable human in the Western tradition. In particular, the focus will be on the original separation that makes something like a world possible: the reference is to the partition between humans and animals, whose features will be outlined through a dialogue between Heidegger and Freire (strikingly similar in their assumptions on this topic). Against this backdrop, the point of emergence of this disseverance will be indicated as occurring in hunting, through which humans set themselves free from their intimacy with animality and accessed a dimension “beyond” and “above” nature. In their educational project, the Greeks still maintained an awareness of this ‘history,’ as is evident by the importance that hunting held in their myths about and their (philosophical) reflection on education. This idea will be investigated by also tracking the evolution of the gesture of hunting towards the horizon which presides over the creation of the school and the form of rationality and the epistemic attitude that it embodies. Finally, it is argued that in the face of contemporary (ecological) challenges, we must complement critique with post-critique, which may help us recover forgotten dimensions of our educational heritage.

Keywords

• world-formation
• bildung
• myth of the cave
• hunting
• heidegger
• paideia
• critique