ABSTRACT
Where the post-secular blurs the boundary between the secular and religious, then religious ideas can cut across secular culture in interesting ways. The notion that education entails a moment of submission is such an idea. By submission I understand a range of ideas, from a certain modesty and humility, to a consideration or respect for authority (of the object of inquiry more than the teacher), to more radical forms of self-negation where education entails a change in the being of the student. Such ideas of self-submission cut across both religion and education. In this chapter I want to show that every movement of learning entails a kind of epistemological submission or affirmation that generally goes unnoticed and unthematized.1 I will argue that one has to engage in a kind of pre-critical ‘primary affirmation’ in order to undertake the kind of learning necessary for a critical engagement with what one learns. That this is in contrast to the empirical tradition of the tabula rasa need not suggest an idealist/rationalist approach. Rather, following the Heideggerian theme developed thus far, this approach is best described as hermeneutical. I propose that any movement of learning is based upon an entry into a hermeneutical circle:2 one finds oneself always already thrown into an interpretation which in some sense has to be temporarily affirmed or adopted in order to be either absorbed and integrated, or overcome and rejected. Speaking of the level at which we already begin within an affirmed pre-understanding or interpretation, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1967, 352) describes hermeneutics as proceeding “from a prior understanding of the very thing that it tries to understand by interpreting it.” I intend to illustrate this principle through a constructive retrieval of an unfashionable pedagogical concept: submission. Consistent with my general approach thus far, I will draw on a range of traditions that contrast with the modern liberal Western perspective, in which the constructive role for submission has been almost entirely unthinkable.
