E-Journal of Philosophy of Education:
International Yearbook of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan, Vol. 4, 2019

Teaching for the Possibility of Being Taught:
World-Centred Education in an Age of Learning
Gert BIESTA
Brunel University London & University of Humanistic Studies

1. Introduction: The need for a recovery of teaching
Over the past twenty years a rather common critique of teaching has emerged inmany research publications and policy documents. Again and again we hear that socalled ‘traditional’ teaching – where the teacher speaks and students are supposed to listen
and absorb information – is bad and outdated, and where something allegedly more
modern, focused on the facilitation of students’ learning is seen as good, desirable and ‘ofthe future.’ While the opposition between ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’ is itself alreadya bit stale, we should also not forget how traditional the critique of traditional teachingitself actually is. John Dewey already made the point, as did many educators in many
countries around the world before and after him. The critique of traditional teaching is
also not entirely valid, because even in classrooms where teachers speak, and students sit
quietly, a lot of things are actually happening. In this regard I agree with Virginia
Richardson’s observation that “students also make meaning from activities encounteredin a transmission model of teaching” (Richardson, 2003, p. 1628).
It is also ironic that some of the most popular technology-mediated forms ofeducation – such as TED talks, MOOCs and the numerous professional and amateur
instructional videos on YouTube – are all staged in traditional ways, with someone talking
and explaining so that others can watch, listen and learn. This begins to suggest that there
actually may be something wrong with the critique of traditional teaching rather thanwith traditional teaching itself. Yet making this point and trying to establish a moregeneral case for the recovery of teaching is fraught with difficulties because nowadays
the most vocal arguments in favour of teaching come from the conservative end of thepolitical spectrum, aimed at re-establishing the kind of order and control that apparently
is lacking in modern society and modern education (for a different take on this issue seeTeaching for the Possibility of Being Taught

51

Meirieu, 2007). This seems to suggest that the only progressive alternative lies in thedemise of the teacher and a turn towards learning; a turn where the teacher only exists asa facilitator of otherwise ‘autonomous’ learning processes.1
The problem here has to do with the binary construction of options, that is, with theidea that the only meaningful response to authoritarian forms of teaching – teaching as
an act of control – lies in the abolition of teaching and a turn towards learning. Whatremains remarkably absent is the exploration of a third option that focuses on thereconstruction of our understanding of teaching along progressive lines. Yet it is in suchan option – which relies on the idea that freedom is not an escape from external influences
but rather has to do with establishing a ‘grown up’ relationship with what may haveauthority in our lives – that we can see the beginnings of an entirely different response toauthoritarian forms of teaching.
In my book The Rediscovery of Teaching (Biesta 2017) I have tried to make the casefor such a third option, beyond teaching as control and beyond learning as freedom. This
has involved discussion of a range of topics, including the question what it means to exist
as subject in and with the world; how much learning education actually needs; what
teaching may have to do in emancipatory education; and what all this means for the workof the teacher. In this presentation I will focus on one particular thread of the bigger
argument that brings together two key questions of the wider discussion, namely thequestion whether teaching is necessarily a limitation of the student’s freedom and whether
learning is automatically an expression of this freedom.
In what follows I start from the contention that to the extent to which the critique of
traditional teaching is a critique of teaching as control, this critique is valid as it highlightsthat under such conditions the student can only appear as object of the teacher’s intentions
and interventions, but not as a subject in its own right. (This is also the central point inPaulo Freire’s critique of ‘banking education’ – see Freire 1993, pp.52-53.) I then argue
that the suggestion that we can overcome this problem by turning to students and theirlearning and, more specifically, their acts of sense making and comprehension, is notreally a way out, because such acts of sense making emanate from the self and return tothe self and thus run the risk that the self remains to itself rather than that it is drawn out
of itself, towards the world. In more philosophical terms I suggest, pursuing a line ofthought from Emmanuel Levinas, that our subject-ness is precisely not constituted
through acts of signification but is rather called forth from the ‘outside,’ in response, so

I use ‘autonomous’ here to refer to the idea that these processes are supposed to be going on anyway, irrespectiveof the presence of the teacher.

1

E-Journal of Philosophy of Education: International Yearbook of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan, Vol. 4, 2019

52

G. BIESTA

we might say, to the event of ‘being addressed.’ It is in this event that a different meaningof teaching manifests itself and it is this meaning that I seek to recover in this presentation.

2. Education and the ego-logical worldview
Central to Levinas’s work is his attempt to overcome what, after Levinas (1969, p.
35), we might call the ego-logical view of the world, that is, the way of thinking that starts
from the assumption of the existence of the self, in order then to thematise everythingoutside of the self. Levinas’s thought is, however, not a simple reversal of this gesture but
comes closer to what elsewhere (Biesta 2008) I have referred to as an “ethics ofsubjectivity.” This expression indicates that Levinas seeks to approach the question ofhuman subjectivity through ethics rather than through knowledge. In his work there is, inother words, no theory about the subject, no truth-claim about what the subject is, butrather an attempt to identify the situation where the self begins to matter, or, more
precisely, where I matter, where it matters that I am I and not just anyone.
When Levinas writes that he “describe[s] subjectivity in ethical terms” (Levinas,
1985, p.95) he seeks to highlight that he sees responsibility as “the essential, primary andfundamental structure of subjectivity” (ibid.). He emphasises, however, that
responsibility here “does not supplement a preceding existential base” (ibid.). It is not thatthe subject first exists – as a self-sufficient ego or subject – and only then encounters a
responsibility or decides to take on a responsibility or to become responsible. It is rather,as Levinas puts it, that “the very node of the subjective is knotted in ethics understood as
responsibility” (ibid.). Responsibility, in the helpful formulation from Zygmunt Bauman(1993, p.13) is thus to be understood as “the first reality of the self,” the first ‘moment,’
the first ‘situation’ where the self begins to matter.
To suggest that responsibility is the first reality of the self – or more precisely: thatthe encounter with responsibility is the moment where the self is called to be a self – isvery different from how contemporary educational theories and practices conceive of thestudent. In such theories and practices the student is depicted crucially as a learner, that
is, as someone who is trying to ‘make sense’ of the situations he or she encounters. The
turn from teaching to learning, and the encompassing ‘learnification’ of educational
discourse and practice (for the latter term see Biesta 2010), rejects the idea that it ispossible for teachers to give anything to their students – and it particularly rejects the ideaof teaching as the transmission of knowledge from the teacher to the student. It argues,
instead, that students are continuously engaged in processes of sense making andThematic Research: Rethinking Teaching: Toward the Reconstruction of (Philosophy of) Education

Teaching for the Possibility of Being Taught

53

interpretation, and that the task of teachers is to construct learning environments in whichsuch sense making can take place and, through, facilitate students’ learning in and throughsuch environments.
In my book I have used the image of the robot vacuum cleaner to show what such alearner-centred approach to education entails, also in order to make clear what isfundamentally lacking in this set up. Robot vacuum cleaners are indeed able to performtheir task – cleaning the floor – autonomously, that is, without the need for help from theoutside. What is even more interesting is that, over time, robot vacuum cleaners canbecome more efficient at performing their task. If at first the pattern they follow is guided
by the particular algorithm they were programmed with, over time they become moreadjusted to the environment in which they are operating, moving around tables, chairs
and other objects, rather than bumping into them. This shows that robot vacuum cleaners
can learn or, more precisely, that they can adapt to their environment in an intelligent way.
While their learning is autonomous in that it occurs without any intervention from theoutside – without any direct intervention from a teacher, so we might say – this does notmean that their learning cannot be influenced. The way to do this is by putting themachine in a different environment so that it needs to adapt to differing environing
conditions. While such learning remains a lifelong task – each new situation requires
adjustment and adaptation – the machines may nonetheless become more skilled andefficient at adapting to new situations.2
I believe that the way in which robot vacuum cleaners work, provides us with aremarkably accurate picture of a, and perhaps even the prevailing contemporary
educational imaginary. This is an imaginary that sees education as a learner-centred
endeavour, where it is ultimately for learners to construct their own understandings andbuild up their own skills, and where the main task of teachers is to provide arrangements
in and through which such processes can happen. In this situation the teacher does, indeed,
no longer transmit anything but designs learning environments for students in order tofacilitate their learning. Similarly, students are not engaged in passive absorption but inactive adaptive construction, and it is through this that they acquire the skills andcompetences that make them more able at adapting to future situations. This also shifts
the meaning and position of the curriculum, which no longer exists as the content to betransmitted and acquired but becomes redefined as a set of ‘learning opportunities’ in andthrough which students, in a flexible and personalised way, pursue their own unique

The idea that the very aim of education is to become more effective at adaptation to changing situations is, forexample, the key premise of so-called 21st century skills.

2

E-Journal of Philosophy of Education: International Yearbook of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan, Vol. 4, 2019

54

G. BIESTA

learning trajectories.3
If I were to characterise the underlying view about the human being and its
relationship to the world, I would suggest calling this a hermeneutical approach and, moregenerally, a hermeneutical worldview.4 The reason for this lies in the fact that the humanbeing is depicted here first and foremost as a sense-making being, that is, as a being who
is in relationship with the world – natural and social – through acts of interpretation andmeaning-making. Such acts are issued from the self and return to the self ‘via’ the world.
In such acts the world thus appears as an object of our sense making.
Now one could argue that this is simply how things are. One could argue, in otherwords, that this worldview is true, that human beings are basically sense-making beings
capable of intelligent adaptation to every changing circumstances, and that we should
therefore build our understanding of knowledge and communication, but also of ethics,
politics, and education upon this premise.5 But one could, of course, also pause for a
moment and ponder whether this worldview is as inevitable as it would seem, perhaps
by asking what is not conceivable within the confines of this worldview.
There are two questions I would like to raise in this regard. One is whether in thisworldview the world, natural and social, can speak – and whether it can do so in its own
terms and on its own terms. The second is whether in this worldview we can be spoken
to, that is, whether we can be addressed (which actually is the question about the very
possibility of teaching). The hermeneutical worldview – or if one wishes: the worldview
of intelligent adaptation – seems to preclude these two options. The reason for this lies in
3

It is perhaps important to note that while this imaginary is contemporary – by which I intend to say that it is shaping
contemporary educational practice in many contexts and settings – its theoretical frame is not new. We can find it,
for example, in the theory of autopoietic systems, that is, of systems that are able to regenerate themselves in constantinteraction with their environment – an idea that was developed in biology by Humberto Maturana and Francis
Varela (see, for example, Maturana, Varela & Uribe, 1974; Maturana & Varela, 1980) and that was further develop
by Niklas Luhmann in his theory of social systems (Luhmann, 1984; 1995). A key insight of Luhmann’s work isthat autopoietic systems (such as, for example, human individuals) cannot participate in each other’s autopoiesis –which means, for example, that they cannot take part in each other’s adaptive activities or cognitive constructions –but that they can be in each other’s environments so as to have an indirect effect on each other’s autopoiesis. Perhaps
the most famous example of the way of thinking that underlies the ideas outlined above can be found in the work ofJohn Dewey, whose understanding of action, communication and learning is indeed based on a view of the humanorganism as being in constant transaction with its environment, constantly trying to establish a dynamic equilibrium
through processes of doing and undergoing, to use Dewey’s phrase (see, for example, Biesta & Burbules, 2003;
Biesta, 2009; and for Dewey’s philosophical account Dewey, 1925). And in Dewey’s work we can indeed find theclaim that “we never educate directly, but indirectly by means of the environment” (Dewey, 1966, p.19).
4
The reference to hermeneutics does not ‘cover’ all positions and views that go under this heading. As I will makeclear later in this chapter, the use of this notion is particularly inspired by Levinas.
5
I am inclined to say that pragmatism – particularly in the work of Dewey and Mead – provides one of the mostdeveloped examples of this ‘programme.’ This presentation can therefore also be read as an exploration of the limitsof the pragmatic worldview and everything that has emerged from this worldview, including a theory and practiceof education.
Thematic Research: Rethinking Teaching: Toward the Reconstruction of (Philosophy of) Education

Teaching for the Possibility of Being Taught

55

the fact that the hermeneutical worldview depicts a universe that is immanent to myunderstanding, that is immanent to my acts of comprehension, acts that always aim tobring the world ‘out there’ back to me. While such acts of comprehension do have an
object – hermeneutics is not phantasy or pure construction – this object always appears
as an object of my sense making and, in this sense, remains dependent on my acts ofsignification. It is in relation to these very questions – the question of immanence and thequestion of signification – that Levinas provides a rather different point of view. In thenext two steps of my presentation I will briefly discuss some of Levinas’s key ideas withregard to these issues.

3. An opening in an opening: Levinas on signification and sense
In his essay ‘Signification and Sense’ (Levinas 2006 6 ), Levinas explores theconditions of possibility of signification, broadly conceived as acts of sense making orinterpretation. One line in the argument he puts forward concerns what he refers to as the“anti-Platonism in contemporary philosophy of signification” (Levinas, 2006, p. 18).
This anti-Platonism entails the claim that “the intelligible is inconceivable outside thebecoming that suggests it” (ibid; emph. added.). It is the idea that “(t)here does not exist
any signification in itself that a thought could reach by hopping over the reflections …
that lead to it” (ibid.; emph. in original). Or in slightly more concrete language, it is theidea that “all the different cultures, are no longer obstacles that separate us from theessential and the Intelligible (but are) the only possible paths, irreplaceable, andconsequently implicated in the intelligible itself” (ibid.).
Levinas thus describes a situation of total immanence where all our meaning making,all our signification, occurs inside culture and history and derives its meaning from such
cultural and historical contexts. He characterises this as anti-Platonic because for Plato“the world of significations precedes the language and culture that express it” so that itremains “indifferent to the system of signs that can be invented to make this world present
to thought” (ibid.) Plato, so Levinas argues, believed in the existence of “a privileged
culture (that) can understand the transitory and seemingly childish nature of historicalcultures” (ibid., pp. 18-19); a privileged culture that, so we might say, could give sense tosignification and make sense of signification. Levinas suggests that in contemporary
6

A different English translation was called ‘Meaning and Sense, see Levinas, 2008; the original French version was
published in 1964 under the title ‘La Signification et le Sens’.
E-Journal of Philosophy of Education: International Yearbook of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan, Vol. 4, 2019

56

G. BIESTA

philosophy of signification this option is no longer considered to be possible. What we
find instead is a “subordination of intellect to expression” (p.19; emphasis added), that is,a situation where everything we can say or express has to be expressed in and throughexisting cultural and historical discourses and contexts and gains its meaning from suchdiscourses and contexts.
For Levinas this not only poses a philosophical problem, which has to do with thequestion where signification actually gets its meaning from. It also poses a practicalproblem, which has to do with the question how communication is actually possible if it
is supposed to happen entirely ‘inside’ existing cultural and historical frameworks. And
it poses an urgent political problem, because, as Levinas puts it, this “most recent, mostdaring and influential anthropology keeps multiple cultures on the same level” (ibid.,p.20). According to Levinas the contemporary philosophy of signification thus amounts
to cultural and historical relativism. Because of its total immanence, contemporary
philosophy of signification lacks a criterion that would allow us to make a judgement
about the ‘quality’ of differing interpretations, so as to be able to distinguish between
those that ‘make sense’ and those that do not ‘make sense,’ to put it bluntly. According to
Levinas contemporary philosophy of signification simply “takes satisfaction [secomplait] in the multiplicity of cultural significations” (ibid., pp. 25-26), which – and thisis important for my line of argument – manifests itself as a “refusal of engagement in the
Other” (ibid., p.26). Yet it is precisely in the latter ‘movement’ that Levinas sees an‘opening,’ that is, a way out of the predicament he sees.
There are two dimensions to how Levinas constructs his argument here, and along
both lines he seeks to establish two points. The first point is that signification “is situatedbefore Culture” and the second point that it is “situated in Ethics,” which, taken together,means that ethics is the “presupposition of all Culture and all signification” (ibid., p. 36;
emph. added; capitals in original). Rather than refusing engagement in the Other it isprecisely this engagement which, according to Levinas, is the origin of sense in that itprovides an “orientation” (ibid., p. 26). In a first step Levinas characterises this orientation“as a motion from the identical toward an Other that is absolutely other” (ibid.). Thisorientation which “goes freely from Same to Other” is what he refers to as “a Work”(ibid.; capitals in original). Yet for the Work to be radically Other-centred it “must not bethought as an apparent agitation of a stock that afterward remains identical to itself” –which is Levinas’s way of saying that engagement in the Other should not leave the self
unaffected or unchanged – nor must it be thought “as similar to the technique that …
transforms a strange world into a world whose otherness is converted to my idea” (ibid.)– which I read as another way of describing what, above, I have called the hermeneutical
Thematic Research: Rethinking Teaching: Toward the Reconstruction of (Philosophy of) Education

Teaching for the Possibility of Being Taught

57‘gesture,’ bringing what is other into my understanding. That is why Levinas insists that
the Work needs to be understood as “a movement of the Same toward the Other that neverreturns to the Same” (ibid., emphasis in original).
If the Work is really done without any returns, without anything coming back to us,
then it is also important, so Levinas argues, that we do not think of it as something that
fulfils some kind of need we would have – such as the need to do good or the need tocare for the other – as in such cases the fulfilment of the need would be the ‘return’ we
receive. In this context Levinas introduces the notion of desire (see ibid.). Yet here desire
is not to be understood as desire for fulfilment, which is why Levinas writes that “(t)heDesire for Others – sociality – arises in a being who lacks nothing or, more exactly, arises
beyond all that could be lacking or satisfying to him” (ibid.). In desire the ego goes out tothe Other “in a way that compromises the sovereign identification of the Ego with oneself”(ibid.). Desire so conceived is therefore non-egological. But how should we ‘approach’
this “desire for Others that,” according to Levinas, “we feel in the most common social
experience” (ibid., p.30)? Levinas observes that “(a)ll analysis of language incontemporary philosophy emphasizes, and rightfully so, its hermeneutic structure” (ibid.),that is, that our approach to the other is to be understood as an act of signification, an act
through which we try to understand and make sense of the other. Levinas, however, isafter a “third option” where the other is neither “collaborator and neighbour of our cultural
work of expression [nor] client of our artistic production, but interlocutor; the one towhom expression expresses” (ibid., emphasis added).
Precisely here we find a first and crucial ‘opening,’ in that Levinas suggests thatsignification is precisely not an egological act. It is not a gesture through which the ego
generates meaning, it is not self-generated expression ‘onto’ a world. Signification, inother words, is not hermeneutics because, as Levinas writes, “before it is a celebration of
being, expression is a relation with the one to whom I express the expression” (ibid.;emph. added). The Other “who faces me” is precisely for this reason “not included in the
totality of being that is expressed,” because in that case – and this is the crucial step in theargument – the other would only be a ‘product’ of my signification; the Other would be
my construction. The Other rather arises “behind all collection of being, as the one towhom I express what I express” (ibid.). That this is so, Levinas argues, is because it is
only through the presence of the Other as interlocutor that “a phenomenon such as
signification [can] introduce itself, of itself, into being” (ibid.).
That is why, as interlocutor, as the one to whom I express the expression “and whose
presence is already required so that my cultural gesture of expression can be produced,”
the Other is “neither a cultural signification nor a simple given” but rather “primordially,
E-Journal of Philosophy of Education: International Yearbook of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan, Vol. 4, 2019

58

G. BIESTA

sense” (ibid., emphasis in original). Here we have to remember that ‘sense’ for Levinas
is precisely that which gives our signification meaning and, going on from this, gives ourlife direction. Levinas emphasises that this ‘turn’ “means returning in a new way to
Platonism” (ibid., p.38) because it allows to go beyond “this saraband of countless
equivalent cultures, each one justifying itself in its own context” (ibid., p.37).
What Levinas is beginning to suggest, therefore, is that signification is not the ‘firstreality of the self,’ which means that we should not think of ourselves as sense-making
beings, but that sense-making only ‘makes sense’ in the encounter with the Other – anencounter which Levinas characterises as fundamentally of an ethical ‘nature.’

4. A second opening: The question of communication
Before I draw this discussion to a close there is one more aspect of Levinas’s line ofthought that needs to be brought in, a line which responds to the point raised above about
the question how communication – or with Levinas’s term: interlocution – is actuallypossible. It has to do with the question how the Other actually can be an interlocutor, and
it is here that I would suggest that a second ‘opening’ occurs.
While Levinas acknowledges that the manifestation of the Other is produced “in theway all signification is produced,” that is, through an act of my “comprehension of the
Other” which, as Levinas emphasises, is “a hermeneutic, an exegesis” (ibid., pp. 30-31),
the Other does not just come to me as a ‘product’ of my signification. After all, if thatwere the case then signification would remain the original event even if this signification
would have an ethical ‘quality,’ for example, arising from my intention to want to do goodto the other or care for the other. In addition to the appearance of the Other as phenomenon,as product of my signification, there is therefore also what Levinas refers to as the“epiphany of the Other” – an epiphany that bears its own significance, “independent of
the signification received from the world” (ibid., p. 31), as he puts it. The Other “not only
comes to us from a context but signifies itself, without that mediation” (ibid.). It is thisunmediated presence which Levinas refers as ‘face’ and it is to the epiphany of the facethat Levinas refers as ‘visitation’ (see ibid.). Face, so we might say, ‘breaks through’ its
signification, that is, through its image. This is a process of ‘deformalization’ (Cohen,
2006, p. xxxi) where the face speaks and where this speaking “is first and foremost thisway of coming from behind one’s appearance, behind one’s form; an opening in the
opening” (Levinas, 2006, p. 31).
But the face does not speak in general – its speaking is not “the unveiling of theThematic Research: Rethinking Teaching: Toward the Reconstruction of (Philosophy of) Education

Teaching for the Possibility of Being Taught

59

world” (ibid.). Rather the face speaks to me; the face addresses me, the face summonsme. It is precisely here, so Levinas argues, that “(c)onsciousness loses its first place”(ibid.) because “the presence of the face signifies an irrefutable order – a commandment– that arrests the availability of consciousness” (ibid.). Levinas emphasises that in thismoment of interruption consciousness is challenged by the face, but that it is crucial tosee that this challenge “does not come from awareness of that challenge” (ibid.) because
in that case, again, signification would come before the address. That is why Levinas
emphasises that it is “a challenge of consciousness, not a consciousness of the challenge.”(ibid, p. 33) This visitation is therefore “the upset of the very egoism of the Ego” (ibid.).
It is important to see, however, that this does not amount to the destruction of the Ego but
rather to what we might call a decentring; a decentring through which the ego gains its
unique significance. As Levinas explains, the responsibility “that empties the Ego of its
imperialism [rather] confirms the uniqueness of the Ego,” a uniqueness which lies in thefact “that no one can answer in my stead” (ibid.). And discovering “such an orientation
for the Ego means identifying Ego and morality” (ibid.) – and hence the moral ‘origin’ of
the Ego-as-subject, which is precisely what I have tried to express in the idea of an ethics
of subjectivity.

5. The criterion, communication, and the origin of signification
I have followed Levinas’s argument in detail in order to show how this line ofthought addresses the problems with the contemporary philosophy of signification,
which were the question of sense – Where does signification get its meaning from? – thequestion of communication – How is communication possible in a radically plural
universe? – and the question of the criterion – What makes it possible for us to evaluate
systems and traditions of signification? Levinas’s line of thought provides an answer tothese three questions, not so much to each of the questions separately but more in an
overlapping and interlocking way.
One key insight is the observation that signification is not an egological act oraccomplishment but consists of a relation with the one to whom I express an expression,
the one to whom expression expresses, as Levinas puts it. Signification thus derives its
sense from this particular ‘event’ or an ‘encounter’ with another being. In this relation the
Other does not appear as object of my signification, but as interlocutor. That is why the‘appearance’ of the Other is a matter of epiphany. And what appears is not an image of
the Other – which again would make the Other into the ‘product’ of my signification –E-Journal of Philosophy of Education: International Yearbook of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan, Vol. 4, 2019

60

G. BIESTA

but what Levinas refers to as its face.
It is important to see that just as the face is not the product of my signification, theepiphany of the face is also not a matter of the other’s signification of me. The face does
not thematise me; the face does not make me into an object of its signification. Rather theface speaks to me. This speech – and this is crucial as well – is not a revelation of the
Other that I am just to receive.7 The key idea here is that the face speaks to me or, to be
more precise: the speech of the face addresses me (and here we need to emphasise boththe fact that the face addresses and that the face addresses me, in the singular, and not justanyone, which means that this is a first person matter and not a general theory or truth).
It is an address in which my ‘imperialism,’ my being with myself, is interrupted,
where my consciousness is challenged – “(t)he face disorients the intentionality thatsights it” (ibid., p.33) – and where I am called to respond, albeit that I always have thefreedom not to respond to this call, because the call is not an obligation but a call. It isprecisely in this moment, in this ethical event, that the Ego gains its significance, precisely
because it appears beyond/before/outside of any signification.
In short, then, the criterion that Levinas has been searching for appears here as ethics;
communication is not a matter of the exchange of meaning(s) but has its origin in theaddress, in the being-spoken-to; and it is in the ethical event of being addressed thatsignification acquires its sense, that significant becomes possible or, with the more precise
formulation Levinas offers: that signification introduces itself into being.

6. Teaching for the possibility of being taught
I started this presentation with critical questions about the all too common critiqueof traditional teaching – a critique that seems to have become the new dogma ofcontemporary education. I showed how this critique has led to a demise of teaching and
7

I do not have the time in this presentation to engage in detail with the distance between Levinas and Heidegger,
but this is one point where this distance appears and where, in my view, Levinas crucially moves beyond Heidegger.
Whereas, to put it briefly and crudely, Heidegger and Levinas both see a similar problem with signification – namelythat signification is egological, that it is driven by the self and always returns to the self – Heidegger proposes thatthe alternative to signification is reception, where we receive what speaks to us and care for it, whereas Levinas
proposes that the alternative to self-enclosed signification lies in the fact that what speaks to us addresses us, singles
us out, and summons a response. Whereas pure receptivity is ultimately criterion-less – it has no criterion to ‘select’or judge what it should care for – Levinas ‘moves’ us from receptivity to responsibility, where the question for me is
not how to receive and hold, but to ask what is being asked from me (with the emphasis, once more, on me in the
singular, not on anyone in general). The distance between Heidegger and Levinas is also the reason why, earlier inthis presentation I identified two different problems with the hermeneutical worldview – not only the problem how
the world can speak in its own terms but also how we can be spoken to.
Thematic Research: Rethinking Teaching: Toward the Reconstruction of (Philosophy of) Education

Teaching for the Possibility of Being Taught

61

the teacher and a turn towards learning; a turn where the teacher can only exist as a
facilitator of otherwise autonomous learning processes.
The reason for the emergence of the turn towards learning seems to lie in the factthat ‘traditional’ teaching is perceived as an act of control. The key problem with the ideaof teaching as control is that in such a relationship the student can never appear as a
subject but remains an object of the teacher’s intentions and interventions. Yet what
emerges from the ideas put forward in this presentation, is that the option that is proposed
as a response to the idea of teaching-as-control, namely the idea of learning as meaning
making or signification, suffers from the same problem in that in acts of signification thelearner also cannot appear as subject.
One way to understand why this is so has to do with the fact that acts of signification
are issued from the self and return – ‘via’ the world as I have put it – to the self.
Signification, so we might say, keeps the self to the self; to its own frameworks ofinterpretation and sense-making. Another way of looking at this, is to say that in its
ongoing attempts to adapt and adjust to always changing environing conditions the self
remains an object vis-à-vis the environment it is trying to adapt to. While such acts ofcreative adaptation may help the self to survive, it never results in a possibility for the self
to exist. The question that never arises, to put it differently, is whether the environment towhich the self is trying to adapt is an environment one ought to adapt to, an environment
worth adapting to. The self – and perhaps we should say: the adjusting or adaptive self –can never out of its own generate a criterion with which to evaluate that which it isadjusting to. It is thus ‘caught,’ as an object,’ by that to which it is adjusting – an issue I
tried to make clear with the image of the robot vacuum cleaner.
This is where the ‘opening’ Levinas establishes has its significance, as it shows that
our subject-ness is not constituted from the inside-out through acts of interpretation andadaptation, but is called into being from the outside, as an interruption of my immanence,an interruption of my being-with-myself, of my consciousness. This, as I have tried toshow, is neither the moment where I interpret the other, nor the moment where I listen to
the other, and it is also not the moment where the other makes sense of me, and in thisregard, it is entirely outside of the realm of signification. It rather is the moment where I
am addressed by the other, where the other, to use Levinas’s words, “[calls] upon theunique within me.”
Here we encounter an altogether different account of the ‘event’ of teaching, onethat is precisely not aimed at control, at the exercise of power and the establishment of anorder in which the student can only exist as object, but rather one that calls forth thesubject-ness of the student by interrupting its egocentrism, its being-with-itself and forE-Journal of Philosophy of Education: International Yearbook of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan, Vol. 4, 2019

62

G. BIESTA

itself. This is not only a teaching that puts us very differently in the world. We could evensay that this teaching puts us in the world in the first place. It is (a) teaching that draws us
out of ourselves, as it interrupts our ‘needs,’ to use Levinas’s term, and in this sense frees
us from the ways in which we are bound to or even determined by our needs and desires.
A final question this raises is whether the teacher appears in this set up as theinterrupter, as the one who addresses the student, calls the student to be a self, calls upon
the unique in the student – in order to uses phrases that, by now, have hopefully become
a little more familiar. While this may occur in teacher-student relationships, there are two
problems we should be mindful of. One is the risk that if we task teachers with the workof interruption, we may very quickly return them to the very place from which we tried
to release them – where the teacher ends up as the ‘power figure’ who ‘provokes’ thesubject-ness of the student. The other problem when we think that the teacher is the one
who addresses the student is the suggestion that the address can only come from theteacher which, obviously, is not true.
This is why I wish to suggest that key for the work of teachers is not to seethemselves as interrupters or ‘addressers’ but rather as those who try to turn students awayfrom their being-with-themselves and try to turn them towards ‘the world,’ that is towards
what may address them. Such a world-centred approach t education can never guaranteethat students will encounter an address, nor can it predict where the address may comefrom. But it is a teaching that at least tries to keep the possibility of the occurrence of theexperience of ‘being taught’ open.

7. The return of teaching
We have arrived, then, at the option that seems to be absent in the current way inwhich the critique of traditional teaching is being formulated, where the critique ofteaching-as-control immediately ends up with the idea of learning-as-freedom. In thispresentation I have not only tried to argue that a different alternative is possible. I havealso suggested that a different alternative ought to be possible. These ideas, then, begin tooutline a non-egological approach to teaching, an approach that is not aimed atstrengthening the ego, but at interrupting the ego-object, at turning it towards the world,so that it can become a self-subject.

Thematic Research: Rethinking Teaching: Toward the Reconstruction of (Philosophy of) Education

Teaching for the Possibility of Being Taught

63

References
Bauman, Z. (1993). Postmodern ethics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Biesta, G.J.J. (2008). Pedagogy with empty hands: Levinas, education and the questionof being human. In D. Egéa-Kuehne (ed), Levinas and education: At the intersectionof faith and reason (pp. 198-210). London/New York: Routledge.
Biesta, G.J.J. (2009). Pragmatism’s contribution to understanding learning-in-context. In
R. Edwards, G.J.J. Biesta & M. Thorpe (eds), Rethinking contexts for teaching andlearning. London/New York: Routledge.
Biesta, G.J.J. (2010). Good education in an age of measurement: Ethics, politics,
democracy. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Biesta, G.J.J. (2017). The rediscovery of teaching. London/New York: Routledge.
Cohen, R.A. (2006). Introduction. In E. Levinas, Humanism of the other. Urbana andChicago: Illinois University Press.
Dewey, J. (1925) Experience and nature. In Jo Ann Boydston (ed), John Dewey. The
later works (1925-1953), Volume 1. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois
University Press.
Dewey, J. (1966[1916]). Democracy and education. New York: The Free Press.
Freire, P. (1993[1972]). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New, revised 20th anniversary edition.
New York: Continuum.
Levinas, E. (1969[1961]). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority. Pittsburgh, PA &The Hague: Duquesne University Press & Martinus Nijhoff.
Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and infinity. Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Pittsburgh,
PA: Duquesne University Press.
Levinas, E. (2006). Humanism of the other. Translated by Nidra Poller With an
introduction by Richard A. Cohen. Urbana and Chicago: Illinois University Press.
Levinas, E. (2008). Meaning and sense. In A.T. Peperzak, S. Critchley & R. Bernasconi(eds), Emmanuel Levinas: Basic philosophical writings. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press.
Luhmann, N. (1984). Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp.
Luhman, N. (1995). Social systems. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Maturana, H. R. & Varela, F. J. (1980). Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of theliving. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
Meirieu, P. (2007). Pédagogie: Le devoir de résister. Issy-les-Moulineaux: ESF éditeur.
Richardson, V. (2003). Constructivist pedagogy. Teachers College Record 105(9), 1623–
E-Journal of Philosophy of Education: International Yearbook of the Philosophy of Education Society of Japan, Vol. 4, 2019

64

G. BIESTA

1640.
Varela, F.J., Maturana, H.R. & Uribe, R. (1974). Autopoiesis: The organization of living
systems, its characterization and a model. Biosystems 5(4), 187-196.

Thematic Research: Rethinking Teaching: Toward the Reconstruction of (Philosophy of) Education