The Threat of Nihilism: New Educational Opportunities?

The Threat of Nihilism: New Educational Opportunities?

ABSTRACT: If the educator is characterized by a willingness to stand for something and simultaneously willing to care for someone, then the philosophy of authenticity should help the educator out of the problems that the Enlightenment project and some of its critics have created. While our integrative authenticity should rescue us from despair, it should also correct the possible immobilism occasioned by the interpretation of some postmodernist authors. Here, what we take as somehow fulfilling us, to a certain extent also conceived in a naturalistic way, binds us to the ways of structuring our concerns so that others can participate in a common framework. But such a philosophical perspective is confronted with two objections. First, one asks whether it is still ethics given the importance it gives to the empirical level. Second, it is questioned whether there really is a place for the other, whether it in fact transcends subjectivism. This paper deals with some of Nietzsche's central ideas and argues that the reproach of extreme relativism and scepticism is not justified. It concludes that one may find on the contrary an interesting way of dealing with the necessarily individualistic nature of education as well for the educator as for the educandus.

If education can be conceived as an answer from one individual person to another, particularity, care, integrity and trust are of the utmost importance, and so is what "being authentic" means. Of course, an agent cannot articulate a project concerning who she wants to be without a context of intersubjectivity. Such a project must constitute a particularly illuminating example of what can be done in a certain social predicament. Furthermore, authentic identity presupposes a moment of recognition on the part of another. Authentic identity can thus mean pursuing a project in which a willed uniqueness is expressed and the wish for others to recognize this unique person whom we want to become. If the educator is characterized by her willingness to stand for something and simultaneously willing to care for someone, then the philosophy of authenticity, thus conceived, should help the educator out of the problems that the Enlightenment project and of some of its critics have pressed on her. While her integrative authenticity should rescue her from despair, it should also correct the possible immobilism occasioned by the interpretation of some postmodernist authors. Here, what we take as somehow fulfilling us, to a certain extent also conceived in a naturalistic way, binds us to the ways of structuring our concerns so that others can participate in a common framework.