Teaching and the Dynamics of Recognition

1. Conversation Concrete 2. Education 3. Friendship Teaching and Recognition 300 P H I L O S O P H Y O F E D U C A T I O N 2 0 0 2 Buber uses these two distinctions, abstract–concrete and one-sided–mutual, to generate three forms of dialogue. If there is a “pure” form of dialogue, then, it would seem to be friendship, which lacks neither concreteness nor mutuality. As if saving the best for last, Buber concludes his typology with friendship, which he calls the “the true inclusion.” That Buber sees abstraction and one-sidedness as defects, even if non-fatal ones, is further supported by the fact that he does not even bother to name and consider the type of inclusion/dialogue that is abstract and one-sided. Buber argues that teaching involves a lofty asceticism because teachers cultivate an atmosphere in which their wills and desires are constantly checked by their experience of the other side. To manipulate or enjoy one’s students, Buber reasons, involves a “falsification” of one’s role, besides which “all quackery appears peripheral” (ED, 95). In hoping that teachers do not use or abuse their students, Buber says nothing very controversial. At the same time, we must wonder whether a teacher can truly rejoice in her communion with students if she never feels acknowledged by them in return? Buber knows very well that it is not only the child who longs for communion “in face of the lonely night” (ED, 88). Today’s teachers are yesterday’s children, longing not only for communion, but confirmation, in who they are and what they do. Does Buber imagine this asceticism as a price of maturity? Is the need for confirmation one of those “childish things” that we must “put away” once we become adults and offer our help to the next generation? Is this something that an adult can renounce? Is teaching under such conditions sustainable? These questions take on a new meaning and force when we turn from the work of Buber to that of a later intersubjective theorist, Jessica Benjamin. MUTUAL RECOGNITION IN ASYMMETRICAL RELATIONSHIPS In The Bonds of Love, Benjamin sets out to think Hegel and Freud together and to go beyond both. In particular, she wants to join Hegel’s dialectical, intersubjective account of human consciousness to Freud’s insight that the infant does not initially know where it ends and its mother or the world begins. According to Benjamin object relations theory from Freud to Mahler is governed by the “assumption that we grow out of relationships rather than becoming more active and sovereign within them, that we start in a state of dual oneness and end in a state of singular oneness” (ED, 18). Such theories may understand the infant’s individuation as a relational process, but they remain one-person psychology, neglecting both the child’s interest in the world of others, and the role of the mother’s subjectivity in the process of individuation. Drawing on the work of Daniel Stern and D.W. Winnicott, Benjamin sets out to construct a genuinely intersubjective account of human development. In such a view, Benjamin writes, “the issue is not only how we separate from oneness, but also how we connect to and recognize others; the issue is not how we become free of the other, but how we actively engage and make ourselves known in relation to the other” (BL, 18). For Benjamin, this need to be known by the other, what she calls recognition, “is so central to human existence as to escape notice.” (BL, 15). Comparing human development to photosynthesis, she says that recognition is akin to the sunlight fueling the process (BL, 22). Recognition is a constant and crucial presence in human interactions, though it can take many forms: “to recognize is to affirm, validate,