Pedagogy

Summary

Dominique Pagani approaches pedagogy from a thesis that recurs from one session to the next: the pedagogical is the antechamber of the political12. He first defines it logically as a species of the genus transmission, a middle term that proves as essential as what it transmits, as in Hegel, whose dialectic is a syllogistic2. He traces its historical lineage, from Rabelais and Montaigne to Émile and the Encyclopédie: two critical moments separated by the reign of Louis XIV. He reads the Phenomenology of Spirit as a Bildungsroman, a mediating work in the line of Wilhelm Meister1. He goes back to the Platonic dialogue: in the Meno, knowledge is constituted in the very act of transmitting, and the philosopher must go back down into the cave to free the prisoners23. Regarding Clouscard, he sees in the image adequate to the concept, such as the "potlatch of surplus value", an answer to the Socratic problem: moving from ordinary ideological language to the concept3. In his view, the didactic work from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment aims at a political "critical mass", hence his formula of collective elitism2.

1. 1The Phenomenology of Spirit2 Jul 2018
2. 2#5.1 bis Questions (Facebook Live)2 Nov 2018
3. 3M. Clouscard's reply to C. Morilhat (part 2)10 Sept 2019

Introduction produced automatically from the 3 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.