Teoría de la Educación: Revista Interuniversitaria (Sep 2019)
The intimacy of study as a way of life
Abstract
The aim of this essay is an exploration of the intimacy of the study as a way of life. The starting point for inspiration here is twofold. On the one hand, the ancient Greco-Latin tradition that understood philosophical activity as a spiritual exercise (as an art of living or as self-care). From this perspective, study (both an activity that takes place and a place of studious exile) -referred to this Greek notion of "spirituality"- consists of the experience through which the subject (studious) carries out in himself the transformations necessary to have access to the truth of his affairs, where the traditional relations of the inside and the outside, inner and outward. What is postulated here, then, is that truth is not offered to the subject as a mere act of knowledge, but that it must be modified, transformed and become distinct from itself in order to have the right of access to truth. Thus, a very different relationship is established -to that which predominates in the contemporary pedagogical discourses of the so-called learning society (which emphasizes learning, but not studying)- between the subject and knowledge. On the other hand, this text makes use of a certain image, which tries to account for a central aspect of the intimacy of study: Like Penelope, who makes and unmakes a funerary cloth every day while awaiting the return of Ulysses, so as to be able to resist the pressure of his harassers, study is an interminable activity that, in each day, the atudious repeats the same gestures (in reading, thinking and writing), gestures that allow him to sustain himself in the long fatigue of study and to escape the pressure exerted by an idea of education that must always be focused on results and utilities. In this essay, study is explored, in accordance with all this, as an interminable activity where free time is exercised in a modality of studious exile, in which the practice of reading and writing notes sustain the atudious in the long fatigue of studying.
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