ISSN: 1130-3743 - e-ISSN: 2386-5660
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14201/teri.31485
Stefano OLIVERIO
Universidad de Nápoles Federico II. Italia.
stefano.oliverio@unina.it
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9440-5516
Date received: 23/05/2023
Date accepted: 30/05/2024
Online publication date: 01/01/2025
How to cite this article / Cómo citar este artículo: Oliverio, S. (2025). Hunting for Education: ‘Archaeological’ Speculations on Critique and Paideia [A la caza de la educación: especulaciones ‘arqueológicas’ sobre la crítica y la paideia]. Teoría de la Educación. Revista Interuniversitaria, 37(1), 25-44. https://doi.org/10.14201/teri.31485
ABSTRACT
This paper explores in what sense “critique” can be considered as 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 which it embodies. Finally, it is argued that in the face of contemporary (ecological) challenges we need to complement critique with post-critique, which may help us to recover forgotten dimensions of our educational heritage.
Keywords: world-formation; bildung; myth of the cave; hunting; Heidegger; paideia; critique.
RESUMEN
Este artículo explora en qué sentido la "crítica" puede considerarse como un concepto educativo básico, investigando hasta qué punto es coextensiva con la aparición de la posibilidad de revelar el mundo y la noción (relacionada) del ser humano educable en la tradición occidental. En particular, la atención se centrará en la separación original que hace posible algo como un mundo: se alude a la desunión entre humanos y animales, cuyas características se delinearán a través de un diálogo entre Heidegger y Freire (sorprendentemente similares en sus suposiciones sobre este tema).
En este contexto, se indicará que el punto de surgimiento de esta disyunción ocurre en la caza, a través de la cual los humanos se liberaron de su intimidad con la animalidad y accedieron a una dimensión "más allá" y "por encima" de la naturaleza.
En su proyecto educativo, los griegos seguían siendo conscientes de esta ‘historia’, como demuestra la importancia que la caza tenía en sus mitos sobre y en su reflexión (filosófica) sobre la educación. Esta idea se investigará también rastreando la evolución del gesto de cazar hacia el horizonte que preside la creación de la escuela y la forma de racionalidad y la actitud epistémica que encarna. Finalmente, se argumenta que frente a los desafíos (ecológicos) contemporáneos necesitamos complementar la crítica con la poscrítica, lo que puede ayudarnos a recuperar dimensiones olvidadas de nuestro patrimonio educativo.
Palabras clave: formación del mundo; educación; mito de la caverna; caza; Heidegger; paideia; crítica.
Over the last two decades, the humanities and social sciences have been witnessing a debate—if not a confrontation or controversy—between critique and post-critique. Also, educational theory and philosophy have joined this discussion in the wake of the Manifesto for a Post-critical Pedagogy (Hodgson, Vlieghe, & Zamojski, 2017) and the wide reactions it has triggered off1.
While keeping this debate in the backdrop of the present reflection, in this paper I am not going to contribute to it specifically but rather I will endeavour to raise a more fundamental question about the meaning and significance of critique.
Christiane Thompson (2021) has intimated that we can “understand critique as a basic educational concept. Critique is the mark of educational experience, or Bildung, in that it lays open the shortcomings of our world-disclosing practices” (p. 221. Emphasis added). This is a thought-provoking statement in that the German philosopher of education does not confine herself to mentioning “critique” as a relevant and influential strand or tradition in the history of educational theory but turns it into a fundamental ingredient of the educational experience as such. Stretching this claim a little, one could venture to say that studying education intrinsically entails addressing its critical dimension and/or assuming a critical stance. If this is the case, the status of post-critique in educational theory and philosophy would become, if not utterly contradictory, at least questionable: while appealing to “education for education’s sake” (Hodgson, Vlieghe & Zamojski, 2017, p. 18), post-critical pedagogy would actually risk missing a constitutive element of education.
Thompson introduces her statement when approaching the critical tradition in philosophy of education. I will not follow her reflections but I am interested in pinpointing two concepts which she closely relates to “critique” and which will return in the present argumentation (see esp. section 2): Bildung and world-disclosing practices.
I will engage with this Bildung/world-disclosing/critique circuit by spelling out critique in the terms provided by some post-critical thinkers. In particular, the French philosopher Laurent De Sutter (2019) has suggested that “[d]espite the variety of [critique’s] manifestations, all of them fall within the same relationship to thinking. This relationship to thinking is that of force: thinking must be able to triumph over what it thinks” (pos. 20. Emphasis added)2. Thereby, De Sutter implicitly rehearses some motifs of Michel Serres, possibly the ancestor of the post-critical attitude in his unease about the ethos of critique and its inclination to a judgemental attitude in knowledge (Serres, 1992, p. 199; see also Oliverio, 2020); such a discomfort runs admittedly parallel with Serres’s lifelong confrontation with the problem of violence, possibly the very question lying at the heart of his thinking (Serres, 1992, p. 17). As Bruno Latour (1987, p. 91) puts it, “Serres’ philosophy is free from negation” (emphasis added).
Via Serres and de Sutter, a conceptual constellation starts to be outlined that keeps together the themes of critique, judgement, negation, force and violence: how does this cluster of concepts relate to the aforementioned Bildung/world-disclosing/critique circuit?
The remainder of this paper is the endeavour to answer this question by exploring in what sense world-disclosing and Bildung are to/may be understood within the horizon of critique, the latter being approached, in turn, through the aforementioned ‘post-critical’ cluster of concepts. More specifically, an interpretive proposal will be advanced according to which critique is fundamental to (the possibility of) education precisely because it is aligned with negation, judgement, force and violence. Moreover, it will be argued that this is the case insofar as we construe (the possibility of) education in reference to the question of world-disclosing. The vanishing point of the argumentation is that, in our tradition, the human being emerges as educable qua a world-disclosing being and s/he bears the latter characteristic to the extent that s/he has come into the world through an act of negation, judgement, force and violence.
The kind of investigation here pursued may be defined as “archaeological,” by adapting—through some hermeneutical twisting—an insight of Giorgio Agamben (2009). An archaeological inquiry goes back to an archē (=a point of insurgence), which is not a datum locatable in a chronology but is “a force operating in history,” something like the Big Bang, “which is supposed to have given rise to the universe but which continues to send toward us its fossil radiation” (p. 102).
The question, accordingly, becomes: can we identify this event—operating in history but not historically locatable—that continues to radiate in the co-belonging of critique, judgement, negation, force and violence? This event should represent that through which the human being emerged as a world-disclosing and, thus, educable being.
The word ‘critique’ derives from the Greek krinein, which means “to separate” and “to judge.” The German word for judgement, Urteil, nicely preserves this double meaning: indeed, if we hyphenate the term, we have Ur-teil, that is, an ‘original’ (Ur-) disseverance (it is in this acceptation of Ur-separation or Ur-disseverance that the German word will be used in the following): is the possibility of world-disclosing linked to an Ur-Teil in the meaning just introduced? Is the latter the archē that continues to radiate in the education of the human being? Is the event of this Ur-separation the Big Bang from which humanity has emerged as educable (at least in the Western tradition)? And in what sense is this event linked with negation, force and violence?
I will suggest identifying the aforementioned archē and Big Bang in hunting, understood as the event of the separation of the human from the animal, this event being rooted, however, in a pristine imitation of animals, according to a very complicated dialectics that might grant new vistas on what I propose calling the critique/post-critique complementarity. In this respect, we can say, with a grain of irony, that the ontology of the human being as educable is actually a ‘huntology.’
It is crucial to specify something in advance: putting forward the idea of ‘huntology’ does not absolutely imply endorsing the deployment of hunting practices (and what this would involve in terms of the killing of animals) as a pedagogical strategy. Mine will be an ‘archaeological’ exploration and, as should become evident in what follows (see below section 5), its outcome will rather be that of invoking modes of animal/human relationships that build on mutual kinships (Haraway, 2016).
From the contemporary perspective, tackling the theme of hunting in educational theory and philosophy may sound bizarre or, as just mentioned, inappropriate in the purely pedagogical respect (and I completely concur with this latter caution); however, we should remember that—at the very dawn of the Western educational project—the Greeks had a keen awareness of the relevance of hunting when thinking of education, as is manifest in their myths as well as in classic authors like Plato and Aristotle (see section 4). For the Greeks hunting was a preamble to paideia. In his comprehensive examination of the meaning of hunting in Greek culture, the French classicist Alain Schnapp (1997) takes his cue precisely from the idea that investigating hunting is fundamentally dwelling upon “the relationship of the city with the world of the youth” (pos. 145). A full-blown paideia implied the access to the shared knowledge, values, and social know-how of the polis and, therefore, to the polis as the quintessentially human world as opposed to the ‘savage’ environment. Indeed, “the discourse of the instituted city reminds one of the impermeability of the frontier [between humans and animals], the indisputable superiority of human beings over the beasts” (pos. 885). Nevertheless, the Greeks knew that this frontier is something acquired and, therefore, “reversible” (pos. 774). It is not by chance that in Sparta boys were called wolves and in Athens girls were called she-bears. In the Greek genealogies of the human race (see for example Plato’s Statesman 270d-274e) hunting is a mediating stage “from the remotest prehistory to the age of the cities” (Schnapp, 1997, pos. 308). Hence, we can say that the educational significance of hunting in ancient Greece resides in the fact that through hunting the youth ‘repeated’ the transition to culture and to the human world of the polis.
I would like to suggest that, thereby, the Greeks took hunting as literally ‘pro-paedeutic’(= as something that comes before the paideia within the polis) because they had a sense that the very educability of humans was rooted in hunting qua the ‘archaeological’ event of Ur-separation. This does not mean making the Greek paideia ‘critical’ in the modern acceptation of the notion; however, it may contribute to indicating a (further) perspective from which to make sense of critique as a basic educational concept, insofar as we understand it in relation to the primordial disseverance.
Against this backdrop, the remainder of this reflection will be structured in three steps: first, I will show how the Ur-disseverance may act as a hidden presupposition also in critical pedagogy understood stricto sensu and is ultimately rooted in the Western educational project as initiated by the Greek understanding of paideia (section 2); secondly, in reference to Greek mythology, I will indicate that hunting is the place in which the Ur-disseverance (the proto-critical Ur-teil) is consummated, after, however, having been a place where animals and humans encountered each other prior to any ontologically sharp distinction (section 3); and, finally, I will show the reverberations of this archē on Plato’s and Aristotle’s contributions to the Western educational project (section 4). In the concluding section, against the backdrop of this ‘huntology,’ I will hint at how far post-critique could (should?) be considered as an equally basic educational concept.
I will take my cue from a consideration of how far the animal/human Ur-separation qua the archē of human educability continues to operate as a “fossil radiation” also when critique stricto sensu is more distinctly in the foreground. In this respect, a particularly illustrative instance is provided by Paulo Freire: when introducing the notion of the “minimum thematic universe” (Freire, 2018, p. 97), strategic for “the program content of [dialogical] education” (p. 96), Freire feels the need “to present a few preliminary reflections” (p. 97), which remarkably have everything to do with a clear-cut distinction between humans and animals: the former, as
the uncompleted beings … [are] the only one[s] to treat not only [their] actions but [their] very self as the object of [their] reflection; [instead] the animals […] are unable to separate themselves from their activity and thus are unable to reflect upon it (Ibidem).
It is noteworthy how Freire portrays the animal condition:
Because the animals’ activity is an extension of themselves, the results of that activity are also inseparable from themselves […]. Animals are, accordingly, fundamentally ‘beings in themselves.’ […] Their ahistorical life does not occur in the ‘world,’ taken in its strict meaning […]. Animals are not challenged by the configuration which confronts them; they are merely stimulated. […] they cannot expand their ‘prop’ world into a meaningful, symbolic world which includes culture and history (pp. 97-98. Emphasis added).
To adopt the vocabulary introduced in the previous section, animals are depicted as incapable of world-disclosing and, accordingly, without any access to educational experience qua Bildung. I will suggest interpreting these Freirian tenets with some insights of Heidegger, which will enable us to create a bridge to the theme of paideia and, thus, to the very insurgence of the Western educational project.
Two preliminary remarks are opportune. First, while Heidegger rejects a proper kinship between the Greek paideia and the German Bildung (Heidegger, 1997, pp. 114-116), he recognizes that, imperfect as it may be, the translation of paideia through Bildung represents the best option (Heidegger, 1996b, p. 217). Moreover, Heidegger (1992a) seems to invite us to rethink of Bildung in terms of Weltbildung (world-formation) and to establish precisely here the threshold between the animal and the human: the human being is world-forming, whereas the animal is poor-in-world. Recovering the Greek meaning of paideia and framing an understanding of Weltbildung could be construed, accordingly, as two aspects of the same undertaking for Heidegger.
The notion of Weltbildung is introduced through an argument analogous to that operating in Freire: indeed, Heidegger (1992a) sets an opposition between “environment” (Umgebung), “behaviour” (Benehmen) and “poverty in world” (Weltarmut), on the side of the animal, and “world” (Welt), “comportment” (Verhalten) and “world-formation” (Weltbildung), on that of the human. Animal behaviour (Benehmen)
as a manner of being in general is only possible on the basis of the animal’s absorption in itself [Eingenommenheit in sich]. We shall describe the specific way in which the animal remains with itself […] as captivation [Benommenheit]. […] Captivation is the condition of possibility for the fact that, in accordance with its essence, the animal behaves within an environment but never within a world (pp. 347-348. Emphasis in the original)3.
These views lead to the conclusion that “the essence of animality means: The animal as such does not stand within a manifestness of beings. Neither its so called environment nor the animal itself are manifest as beings” (p. 361. Emphasis in the original).
The expression “manifestness of beings” refers to Heidegger’s interpretation of the idea of alētheia (which is usually—and inaccurately in his opinion—translated as “truth”). Saying that the animal is absorbed in itself and captivated within its environment is co-extensive with saying that it is incapable of alētheia. Thus, the latter and Weltbildung are intimately correlated: forming a world—viz., not being simply imprisoned in an environment—means the dis-closing of a domain in which beings may appear as such and do not operate, accordingly, only as stimuli, as Freire puts it when speaking of the animals as only stimulated (incidentally: it is precisely this difference that we risk evaporating when conceiving of educational settings in terms of ‘learning environments’).
Discussing Freire through some tenets of Heidegger has led us to an initial understanding of why and in what sense the Bildung/world-disclosing/critique circuit is here referred to the animal-human disseverance. In order to take a step forward and to link this discussion with the very dawn of the Western educational project, I will now touch on Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato’s myth of the cave in the Republic, one of the key narratives of Western culture and, moreover, an eminently educational one.
Plato introduces the notion of paideia (and of its ‘opposite’ apaideusia, that is, absence of education) in connection with the ideas of “our nature” (Rep. 514a), of the “conversion of the whole soul” (periagōgē holēs tēs psuchēs) and of alētheia.
Heidegger seems to oscillate between two readings. In Plato’s Doctrine of Truth, he confines himself to construing the connection between paideia and apaideusia (= the absence of education) in terms of a “transition” from the latter to the former (Heidegger, 1996a, p. 217); instead, in a course of 1931/1932 he insists on their “confrontation” (Heidegger, 1997, p. 114): an element of intimate conflict is thus read in the in-between of paideia and apaideusia. It is the latter reading that is more significant in the present context, as will become evident in the following.
In the same text, Heidegger (1997) is clear in understanding the term “nature,” according to his interpretation of the Greek word, as “arising and standing in the open” (p. 115). Saying that paideia is “our nature” does not mean, therefore, merely that it is the ‘core’ of the human being but rather it hints at the specific way in which the human being stands in the open.
In this wake, also Plato’s further definition of paideia as “a conversion of the whole soul” can receive a more radical interpretation. As Heidegger has repeatedly reminded us, the Greek word psuchē cannot in any way be translated with ‘mind’ so that only a sort of psychological-epistemic conversion would be at stake in paideia (Jaeger, 1944a, pp. 292 ff.). By hermeneutically bending other passages in Heidegger, where he shows that psuchē has to do with the ‘essence’ of life, we could say that paideia is rooted in a ‘conversion’ within the domain of life as a whole, which inaugurates a different regime of ‘openness.’ And it is in this horizon that the intimate link between paideia and alētheia will be here investigated because it enables us to reconnect it to the question of the animal/human disseverance.
In his critical reflection on Rilke, Heidegger (1992b, pp. 226 ff.; 1994b, pp. 284 ff.) contrasts two kinds of “the Open”: on the one hand, there is the Open as the incessant advancing within the realm of being, much in the sense in which we speak of “open sea” and this is the meaning that Rilke gives to the word, by making it a privilege of the animal (Heidegger, 1992b, p. 226); totally different, and separated from it through an “abyss” (Ibid., p. 237), is the Open as the unconcealedness (alētheia) of beings that lets beings as such arise and be present (Ibidem). The Open of Rilke is rather what is closed off, while the Open in the sense of the alētheia is a kind of manifestness of beings as such.
Against this backdrop, we can say that between apaideusia and paideia there is not merely a transition but rather a confrontation: indeed, the very possibility of paideia―as our nature, that is, as the human way of standing in the open―is rooted in the breaking out of the undisclosed openness, typical of the animal, into that unconcealedness of the being as being which belongs to the world. This is a dimension accessible only to that being, the human, which is welt-bildend, world-forming.
Accordingly, we could venture to say that the conversion of psuchē as a whole, which paideia is, is derivative from and rooted in a turning inside out (periagōgē) of ‘life’ as a whole, through which the dimension of the world is dis-closed. In other words, while other living beings, like animals, remain closed off in the environment as a constellation of stimuli (as in Freire), humans gain access to the world and to the manifestation of beings qua beings. As Giorgio Agamben (2004, p. 69) has remarked, the ‘latency’ which dominates in the very core of alētheia4 could be construed as the undisclosedness which is typical of the animal. Therefore, the alpha privative of alētheia would refer to a struggle against this (animal) latency.
We have, thereby, added one more facet to the discussion of the Bildung/world-disclosing/critique circuit: while through Freire and Heidegger we have seen it as referred to the animal/human disseverance, through Plato and Heidegger we have now read it not simply in terms of a separation but rather of a confrontation. In this sense, we must ‘hear’ this confrontational note resonating within the notion of paideia itself. At the already established human level this plainly involves a reference to a going beyond the absence of education (apaideusia). However, there is a deeper, ‘archaeological’ dimension: the very possibility of paideia is rooted in a fight against the animal latency, that is, the very domain of (human) paideia emerges through an overturning within the domain of life itself.
In the reading here proposed, this original struggle—which ends up by instituting the animal as animal and the human as human, that is, open to education because welt-bildend—haunts Greek mythology in terms of the insistent recurrence of the theme of hunting. We have now to turn to the meaning of this connection in order to better explore the deepest layers of the Greek paideia and, more generally, of the Western educational project.
In the books of the history of Western education, the ideal of paideia is mostly traced back to the age of the polis or, earlier, to the aristocratic education in Homer. However, in Greek culture the first pedagogue—portrayed on pottery and recited by poets—was the centaur Chiron. He5 taught his pupils hunting and medicine (=the arts of the kill and of the cure), and wisdom. Chiron, as a centaur, was half human and half animal. In the figure of Chiron, the Greeks have delivered to us both the image of a paideia not yet humanistically inflected and the paradoxical idea of hunting as a space of encounter (and not yet definite disseverance) of animals and humans.
Roberto Calasso (2016, p. 20) has noted that for the heroes brought up by Chiron “hunting was the first element of paideia” insofar as it was “the first test of aretḗ” (Ibidem). This is an important specification: in mythical times, hunting was not exercised because it was “useful” or, as will be the case later in the polis, because it was instrumental in preparing the youth for the toils of warfare by strengthening the body (Barringer, 2001, p. 11).
With an apparently enigmatic formulation, hunting is defined by Calasso (2016, p. 20) as an activity in which “the animal revolts against itself and attempts to kill itself. Before being protagonists of so many stories of metamorphoses, the great hunters were themselves the result of one metamorphosis”6.
To draw upon the vocabulary of the previous section, the realm of metamorphosis precedes that original disseverance establishing animals and humans as belonging to separate domains. In the realm of metamorphosis,
the change was continuous as subsequently it would happen only in the cave of the mind. […] When hunting had its beginning, there was no human who chased an animal. There was a being that chased another being. […] With pastoralism and agriculture, the animal was only an animal, separated forever from the human being. For hunters, instead, the animal was another being, neither animal nor human, chased by beings who were neither animals nor humans. When there took place that event that was the event of any story before history, when there took place the separation of something that would be called human from something that would be called animal, nobody thought that wisdom—the old and the new wisdom—could be found unless in someone who participated in both forms of life. (pp. 15-16 and 20. Emphasis added)
Some comments are appropriate in order to relate these annotations of Calasso to the argument that I have been developing here. First, we need to distinguish two kinds of hunting: one is the ‘mythical’ hunting, which is the first element of Chiron’s paideia and takes place in a domain―that of metamorphosis―in which the animal/human Ur-separation has not yet been consolidated. Therein, hunting is a domain of the encounter of two beings, which can change their respective positions, rather than the confrontation of two species at two different “levels of vitality” (Ortega y Gasset, 2008, p. 81), as will be the case for (the second kind of) hunting occurring once the animal/human separation has taken place. Instead, the mythical hunting is the manifestation of a continuity and potentiality of constant change (=metamorphosis) that, subsequently, as Calasso avers, will persist only in “the cave of the mind.”
Before exploring these two kinds of hunting, it is appropriate to dwell upon this latter expression. The apparent meaning refers to the fluidity of appearances in the stream of consciousness (and/or in dreams) but I suggest reading this phrase of Calasso in relation to what has been argued in the previous section when discussing Plato’s parable of the cave.
We have already seen that the Platonic myth can be read as somewhat recounting the animal/human disseverance. We can now add that this happens at two levels: for the sake of brevity we can call them the ‘human’ and the ‘archaeological.’ First, if we construe the cave as “the cave of the mind,” we refer to that (psychic) domain that presupposes the already happened animal/human separation and, therefore, after the regime of metamorphosis being left behind. In the latter, there was the possibility of a continuous change from one form to another, whereas in the new regime ‘animality’ is negativity. Indeed, in this new regime the condition of being in the cave is apaideusia because it is an animal-like condition: the protagonists of Plato’s tale (Plato, 1995) are imprisoned and cannot move (Rep. 514a-b), that is, they are Freirian “beings in themselves” “submerged.” Accordingly, at this level paideia qua “our own nature” (Rep. 514a) occurs as a flight into the open away from the risk of relapsing into an animal-like condition.
It is revealing that in Plato this escape into the open towards the light of the Sun—viz. the conversion of the whole psuchē—does not happen smoothly but through an act of “force” (Rep. 515e6). This act of force, this tearing oneself away from an animal-like condition takes place, in the Platonic myth, when the Ur-separation has already occurred and the human psychic domain has already been established. However, I would like to insinuate that this gesture refers back also to that Ur-separation through which humans disengaged themselves from their absorption in their environment.
This is the second (‘archaeological’) level implicit in the myth of the cave, as I suggest reading it. It indirectly points to that gesture through which “the animal revolts against itself and attempts to kill itself,” as Calasso (2016, p. 20) puts it. Homo7, who in the realm of metamorphosis was only one being among other beings chasing each other, raises himself above the other species and turns into the master predator, homo necans, who atones for this gesture of killing by associating it with a sacrificial killing, which should redeem it (Burkert, 1983). Thereby, the regime of metamorphosis—and the kinships it was built on—was brought to an end.
It was an act of incredible violence, in which Homo set himself free from nature. It is the proto-critical gesture that establishes Homo as the educable species, to the extent that paideia as the conversion of the whole life is “our own nature” and, thus, something separated by a chasm from the rest of nature. It is an access to alētheia as the (violent) negation of the latency of the animal condition or, to put it better, of that metamorphic condition prior to the animal/human disseverance.
We need to delve more deeply into the (hi)story we have been reconstructing and we must come back to the two kinds of hunting mentioned above in this section. Indeed, there are two dimensions (or, perhaps, moments) of hunting which, while interwoven, should not be confused. I have called the first—in an admittedly unsatisfactory manner—the ‘mythical’ hunting, the activity taught by Chiron: it is hunting as the domain of the encounter of beings not yet separated by an ontological gulf.
However, hunting is also “the place where the primordial disseverance is consummated, that divergence from which all the others descend” (Calasso, 2016, p. 118). With a memorable expression, Calasso comments: “Humans became metaphysical animals during hunting” (p. 21). I suggest interpreting “metaphysical” in a double meaning: first, as the movement beyond nature which establishes our own nature (which is paideia); and, secondly, as the establishment of the “zoological hierarchy” of which Ortega y Gasset (2008, p. 81) speaks when engaging with (this second kind of) hunting.
The cruciality and intricacy of the phenomenon of “hunting” is in the interweaving―but also distinction―of these two moments. And, in a sense, therein may the complementarity of critique and post-critique be ultimately rooted (see below section 5).
In order to unravel this tangle of meanings, I will switch from the vocabulary of myth to that of science, by appropriating some tenets of Serge Moscovici (1994). The Romanian-French social scientist highlights that humans have made themselves humans “by preparing themselves for their task as hunters. In other words, they have attempted to acquire attitudes, methods [and] to get in contact with a determined part of the environment, which is an undertaking that completely transformed them genetically, socially and technologically” (p. 92).
Insightfully, Moscovici calls this process the becoming human of hunters and he distinguishes it from the becoming hunters of humans. Thereby, he indicates a difference of two moments of hunting, substantially parallel to the one introduced via Calasso. As I suggest understanding it, the second moment already presupposes the animal/human separation and finally relaunches it at a higher level. The becoming human of hunters (=the first moment) means, instead, that at the beginning of his evolutionary trajectory Homo did not dissociate himself from other animals but rather his “main business was to multiply and enrich the bonds spun with this [animal] world […]. As well as we penetrate the mysteries of chemical reactions and nuclear fissions, what mattered to [the hominids] was to penetrate the secrets of the bison, the horse and the deer” (p. 93).
In the vocabulary of Calasso (2016), the becoming humans of hunters (= the first moment of hunting) thrives on a process of imitation of “other beings, which were not called animals yet” (p. 125). Homo first had to imitate the behaviours of other predators and, in this appropriation, he initiated a dynamics which culminated in the animal/human Ur-separation and, thus, in the opposition to “the zoological continuum” (p. 119).
The final metamorphosis (and, thus, the end of the regime of metamorphosis) is the becoming hunters of humans and this is the ‘second stage’ of hunting: in this, the regime of the imitation (which still bore the affinity with the realm of metamorphosis) is replaced by the regime of prosthesis (=the use of weapons, the very ancestor of technology), “[a] passage accompanied by an immense increase of power (still ongoing) and a progressive cancellation of the commonality with the rest of nature” (Calasso, 2016, p. 127).
Two main ‘operations’ mark (the second stage of) hunting as that place where the primordial separation happened: the gaze that isolates something as a target (Calasso, 2016, p. 19) and the possibility of striking a target from a long distance (p. 118). I want to suggest reading this thematic constellation through the Heideggerian (and, indirectly, Freirian) tenets introduced above. We should think of the two ‘operations’ as intimately entwined: the isolating gaze marked by the as-structure (looking at something as a being and, then, as a possible target) and the possibility of striking the target from a distance are two sides of the same event, namely the breaking (out) of the ring of stimuli (typical of the animal) and the institution of the human as what Sloterdijk (2001, p. 293) calls “the animal of the distance.”
The metaphysical animal as the animal of the distance is also the ‘theoretical’ animal that gazes and tracks its objectives from afar (this is, incidentally, the reason why hunting will become a key metaphor in Plato [Classen, 1960] and in subsequent philosophy for the pursuit of the noblest cognitive achievements). The human paideia, then, brings Homo into the open, away from the absorption in any animal milieu, turning him into a ‘theoretician.’ Where imitation was should ‘theory’ become and it is ‘theory’ that ensures the clear-cut partitions of the domains of beings (see the next section).
It is appropriate to recapitulate the argumentation developed thus far: the intent has been that of interpreting the Bildung/world-disclosing/critique circuit through the view of critique as linked with force-negation-violence (as a post-critical attitude suggests). In the previous section, we have identified a pattern of thought that considers animals as imprisoned in an environment and humans, instead, as open onto the world and as accessing the manifestness of beings. We have seen this confrontation operating within the concept of paideia, which is our own nature to the extent that we humans tore ourselves from the rest of nature and, principally, from the latency and the captivation of animals.
In this section, we have explored in more depth this event of separation, by distinguishing a regime of metamorphosis where there is no final ontological chasm separating animals and humans and the regime inaugurated by the animal/human disseverance. The latter makes the human emerge as the being who is world-forming and ‘theoretical,’ viz. able to see things from afar and hit them. This separation took place in hunting. The species Homo at the beginning hunted by imitating the other animals and this is a (first) stage in which the separation had not been consummated yet. However, then humans became hunters (=the second stage of hunting), by breaking the ontological continuum and breaking free from nature through the use of prostheses.
This is a dramatically concise outline of a story that both myths and sciences in their different languages recount. It has been thematized here because it is arguably the backdrop to the emergence of the human being as an educable animal. The educational experience is intimately related to world-disclosing and the latter has been here read as a violent and confrontational dis-enclosing of the animal captivation within an environment and an access to the world and to alētheia; accordingly, hunting as an anthropogenetic undertaking is also the preamble to paideia in a much more radical meaning than in the Greek polis.
And, indeed, the theme of hunting is anything but alien to Plato and Aristotle, whose “philosophy of education […] is the origin from which we live, the tradition which leads us” (Fink, 1970, p. 7). And it is to them that we will turn in the next section.
In the final section of book 7 (822d-824a) of his Laws, Plato engages with the issue of hunting in education and the discussion is literally framed by two seemingly similar but actually significantly different sentences, which are worth quoting.
The first, at the very beginning of the section (822d), reads: “We may now say that our laws concerning subjects of education have been completed. The subject of hunting […] must now be addressed in a similar manner.” The second, at the end, is: “So now, at last, we may say that all our laws about education are complete.” Due to the partial overlapping of the two sentences, the ‘philologically correct’ hypothesis is that the brief treatment on hunting is a kind of supplement, motivated by the appearance of Xenophon’s short treatise Hunting with dogs (see Jaeger, 1944b, pp. 177-178).
I would like to advance, however, a more speculative interpretation. In particular, I want to highlight a very remarkable difference in the two passages: in the first sentence, Plato speaks literally of “the laws about what can/should be learnt as far as it belongs to paideia” (paideias mathēmatōn peri nomima), while in the second he mentions only “all the laws … about paideia” (panta … paideias peri nomima). In the first sentence, there is an explicit reference to the mathēmata, which disappears in the second. The question revolves around how the issue of mathēmata (= subjects, studies) enters the story here reconstructed.
Some comments on this point are appropriate: hunting is not a completion in the sense of the addition of one more subject. More radically, hunting is not something belonging to the realm of the mathēmata understood in a fundamental way. In Heidegger’s words, “ta mathēmata means, in Greek, that which, in his consideration of beings and dealings with things, man knows in advance: the corporeality of bodies, the vegetability of plants, the animality of animals, the humanity of human beings” (Heidegger, 1994a, p. 78). From this perspective, hunting does not come to complete paideia by rounding out a curriculum but rather by pointing towards a dimension that comes before the disclosing of the realm of learning and knowledge. In the latter realm, the distinctions and distantiations between the domains of reality are always already established; instead, the introduction of hunting refers us back to the proto-critical event that makes something like a paideia, as a conversion of the whole life, possible. And it is in this sense that it evokes the whole of paideia—that is, paideia plus what makes it possible.
We should not miss the dramatic note of this (hi)story. In Calasso’s (2016, p. 20) aforementioned words, in hunting, “the animal revolts against itself and tries to kill itself.” This revolt of the animal against itself is a way of describing, in the language inspired by mythology, that struggle which dominates the very core of paideia—as linked intimately with alētheia—and refers back to the very emergence of human paideia. For this reason, hunting cannot be one of the mathēmata: the latter presuppose those distinctions/separations of the domains of reality that have come ‘into the world’ in hunting, viz. in the event of the disseverance producing the animal and the human. As aforementioned (see section 1), hunting is pro-paedeutic, it comes before the human paideia.
Hence, we can add that this paideia is mathematic and is related to the emergence of the human as the ‘theoretical animal,’ that is, the animal who gazes and strikes from afar (and, therefore, it is connected to the second kind of hunting: see the previous section). Turning to Aristotle (1972) will enable us to show, from one more perspective, how far this view of what theory is all about has much (if not everything) to do with the question of killed animals.
To make my point I will appropriate some insights of Mario Vegetti (1996), who studies “a path of Greek scientific rationality in the age of its constitution: that path at the end of which only dead animals or, to put it better, killed animals can be classified” (p. 22). At the beginning, this was not the case. As Bruno Snell (1953) highlighted, from Homer up to the fifth century B.C., animals “are the mirror in which the man [sic] sees himself” (p. 203). This was the “fossil radiation” of that imitative relationship which Homo had at the start of his evolutionary trajectory. And this still holds in the first treatise of Aristotle, Historia animalium, in which the ‘taxonomy’ of animals refers to them as living and bearing many similarities with humans, even at the level of learning and teaching processes (see Hist. anim. IX 608a 13ff.). There is, in other words, “a coming and going and a transit between the animal and the human, a passing through the mirror” (Vegetti, 1996, p. 26).
The cognitive counterpart of this specular similarity is the idea of metis (Detienne & Vernant, 1974) as a kind of astuteness and practical knowledge, which is able to cope with the specificities of the situation and which belongs both to animals and humans. This cognitive alternative still resonates in Carlo Ginzburg’s (1979) idea of a scientific paradigm—totally distinct from the modern Galilean one—that would be particularly significant in the human sciences and is related to the tracking of clues and to a kind of “low intuition” that “[t]ies closely the human animal to the other animal species” (p. 93).
The animal-mirror progressively disappeared from Greek culture and this process was co-extensive with the emergence of the idea of an epistemic rationality and theory, understood as the disinterested study of the animal. In Aristotle, this shift is particularly evident in his transitioning from a taxonomy of living animals (and their behaviours) to their morphological examination:
[…] a new style of rationality, the rationality of the method, the experiment and the scientific theory is outlined and it distances itself from its objects, it neutralizes them, it sterilizes them, so to speak, in order to gain a full cognitive dominion over them, whatever the costs of this dominance. From this moment on, the appeal to dissection becomes constant; it is, in a strong sense, the theoria of the animal […]. When it establishes itself, the new rationality cuts its bond of friendship and sympathy between the animal and the human. (Vegetti, 1996, p. 42)
In the vocabulary of the present reflection, the establishment of theory as the chief cognitive operation and, thus, as the goal of the paidetic project is the latest upshot of the proto-critical gesture of disseverance and therein lies the intimate bond between theory and critique. It is more than a textual curiosity that one of the most intense reflections of Aristotle on science (episteme) and paideia is not in his logical or psychological treatises but rather at the very beginning of De partibus animalium, the most advanced ‘theoretical’ culmination of his study of the animal. Indeed, as Vegetti notes,
[a]gainst the backdrop of the new style of rationality […] there is an institutional place, which is the third great novelty of the fourth century B.C.: the school. […] Along with being a temple and a workshop, […] the school imposes also new forms of the organization and transmission of knowledge: first, its disciplinary articulation. […]. To the scientific discipline does a specific form of the transmission of knowledge correspond: the treatise, where the new rationality orderly proceeds in its path, accumulates its knowledge […] and it is transmitted to the students of the school. […] The school and the treatise are, thus, the scene where the relationship between the scientific rationality and the corpse of the animal—whether killed or dissected according to methodic requirements—is represented. (pp. 43-44 and 46)
This school is ‘mathematic’ to the extent that it operates through the separation of domains, which are presupposed as that which should be learnt in advance (=Heidegger’s mathēmata). The school emerges as the place of theory rather than of metis, of the objectifying gaze rather than the living encounter, and of the detached knowledge (and, thus, of the treatise or textbook) rather than of the tracking of clues.
In the subsequent Greek culture, the homology between practices of dissection and practices of writing will be insistently highlighted (Vegetti, 1996, p. 57). Thus, it may not be too far-fetched to say that the school as the scene of the dissection of life and its writing is the heir of that second stage of hunting, in which “the animal revolts against itself and kills itself,” to return to the formula of Calasso.
Against the backdrop of the consummated suppression of the latency of the animality (= a-lētheia), the learning as mathēsis will turn into a tracking of the truth as orthotēs (Heidegger, 1996a)8, viz. as the correctness of the gaze in accordance with the different mathēmata. In the school as the temple of theory and critique, the old wisdom of Chiron—the ability to shuttle between the forms of life—seems no longer to carry much weight.
In this paper, I have proposed an archaeological-speculative inquiry to make sense of the idea that critique is a basic educational concept, intimately related to those of Bildung and world-disclosing. By drawing on the etymological meaning of critique (to separate and to judge) as well as on some contemporary post-critical understandings of the latter and by valorizing also the role of hunting in the Greek paideia and in the Greek myths, I have suggested identifying in hunting the archē, the point of insurgence of the conditions for the Western educational project. Indeed, therein is that separation between animal and human ultimately consummated that operates as a fossil radiation in our tradition, up to the foundation of the school and its didactic medium, the treatise or textbook.
However, hunting, in the mythical era of Chiron, the first pedagogue, had been the domain of the encounter between species on a plane of kinship, imitation and metamorphosis. Is there something to learn from this? I do not think that we can evade the ‘paidetic’-‘critical’ project but perhaps contemporary (ecological) challenges appeal to the need to recover portions of the ‘old’ wisdom, to revise what the French philosopher Baptiste Morizot (2016) calls the Neolithic revolution and its metaphysical “ontological maps,” which presuppose the gulf between humans and animals, and to blaze new (ontological) trails.
In the vocabulary of the present paper, the classic ontological maps are the outcome of the “proto-critical” gesture of the animal/human Ur-teil. Instead, Morizot (2016, 2018) invokes diplomacy and negotiation with other species as the only solution in contemporary scenarios, which ultimately aims at a co-habitation of different ways of life. This “geopolitical” project (to adopt Morizot’s adjective) entails a revised ontology and builds on a complex epistemological turn pivoting on the practice of tracking understood as “decrypting and interpreting tracks and imprints in order to reconstruct the animal perspective” and as “inquiring, on the basis of this world of indices that reveal the habits of the fauna, into its way of inhabiting amid us and in interlacement with other” (Morizot, 2018, pos. 190). This cognitive strategy goes counter to or, at least, problematizes the ‘Aristotelean’ theoria of the killed/dissected animal and rather resembles Ginzburg’s alternative scientific paradigm, although Morizot sees it also as a remote precursor of the emergence of the scientific mind
In any case, we can say that there is a connection of this form of knowing with the first kind of hunting, before the human/animal disseverance. In depicting this epistemology, there recur in Morizot (2016, 2018) concepts like metamorphosis or the idea of the recognition of common ‘ancestralities’ between animals and humans that enable us to (partly) move into the perspective of the animal according to the logic of what Viveiros de Castro (2017) defines as “perspectivism.” In the vocabulary introduced in section 3, it is a recovery of that dimension of imitation marking hunting as the “becoming human of hunters” (Moscovici, 1994, p. 92) but also of that “old and new wisdom of participating in different ways of living” that we have encountered in Calasso (2016, p. 20).
Like Calasso, also Viveiros de Castro (2017) refers this wisdom to the shamanic epistemology:
By seeing nonhuman beings as they see themselves (again as humans), shamans become capable of playing the role of active interlocutors in the trans-specific dialogue and, even more importantly, of returning from their travels to recount them; something the “laity” can only do with difficulty. […] Shamanism is a mode of action entailing a mode of knowledge, or, rather, a certain ideal of knowledge. In certain respects, this ideal is diametrically opposed to the objectivist epistemology encouraged by Western modernity. (pos. 872-875)
Due to the restraints of space, I cannot explore here in more detail these aspects, appropriate them in an educational-theoretical key and, thereby, develop a fully-fledged argumentation, which must be postponed to a further paper. However, I want to intimate, in conclusion, that they point in the direction of an understanding of post-critique as a recontextualization of the aforementioned old (and new) wisdom and, thereby, as the recovery of a repressed dimension of paideia. The pivotality of such a recovery is brought to the foreground by some contemporary challenges, linked with the appeal for a new natural contract (Serres, 1995) and the need to stay in the trouble by making kin in the Chthulucene (Haraway, 2016).
In this respect, and from the ‘huntological’ viewpoint outlined in this paper, post-critique needs to be considered as an equally basic educational concept and not merely as a reaction to the shortcomings of critique and not even as something that can replace completely critique, insofar as both are rooted in the event of hunting as the preamble to paideia (hunting being a somewhat double-barrelled event). Accordingly, also from this ‘huntological’ perspective, we must think of critique and post-critique as complementary in the acceptation introduced elsewhere in reference to the more specific debate occurring in educational theory (Oliverio, 2020).
Perhaps it is once again mythology that grants us the clue to the importance of this complementarity in a thoroughly educational key. Chiron was struck by a poisoned arrow of Heracles. The wound could not be healed but, being immortal, Chiron could not die. Due to his suffering, however, he preferred death and passed his immortality to Prometheus, who had become mortal after his confrontation with Zeus in favour of the humans. The human adventure supported by Prometheus, the god of the prosthesis and the prosthetic knowing, builds on the gift of a suffering being, half animal and half human, which sanctioned the definitive severing of the bond between the animal and the human. From that point on, humans seem to have lost the sense of the possibility of a paideia not always already inflected by the break with the animal. Exhilarated (and even intoxicated) by our progress we tend to overlook this fact. We do not have to dismantle our (techno-scientific, Promethean) achievements, but we cannot afford to forget the backdrop from which we have emerged, especially when education in the contemporary world is at stake. Perhaps one of the deep reasons for inquiring into and learning to inhabit the critique/post-critique complementarity is to (finally) reciprocate Chiron’s gift.
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1 In the growing literature the reader is referred at least to the special issues appearing in Teoría de la Educación (32(2), 2020) and in on_education. Journal for Research and Debate (3(9), 2020) as well as to Bittner & Wischmann (2022).
2 Unless otherwise specified, all translations from non-English works are the present author’s.
3 For the English version, I will draw upon the translation of William McNeill and Nicholas Walter (see Heidegger, 1995).
4 The word alētheia is composed of an alpha privative and of a root of the verb “lanthanein” that refers to hiding, latency.
5 When speaking of Chiron, I will use the masculine pronoun/possessive adjective to conform to the grammatical gender of the original Greek word.
6 The movement of “the revolt of the animal against itself” resonates with the Platonic phrase of a periagōgē, which, as aforementioned, is a “revolt” of the whole of life and, thus, the confrontational passage from one form of life to another.
7 When speaking of Homo as a species, I will use the masculine pronoun/possessive adjective to conform to the grammatical gender of the original Latin word.
8 I cannot follow further, in this context, this Heideggerian clue, which might be conducive to quasi un-Heideggerian outcomes, by unveiling a sort of deep complicity between orthotēs and alētheia.