Being and Learning : A Poetic Phenomenology of Education

Education is not an art of putting sight into the eye that can already see, but one of turning the eye towards the proper gaze of Being. That's what must be managed!" Plato insists. This claim is the take-off point for Eduardo Duarte's meditations on the metaphysics and ontology of teaching and learning. In Being and Learning he offers an account of learning as an attunement with Being's dynamic presencing and unconcealment, which Duarte explores as the capacity to respond and attend to the matter that stands before us, or, in Arendtian terms, to love the world, and to be with others in this world. This book of 'poetic thinking' is a chronicle of Duarte's ongoing exploration of the question of Being, a philosophical journey that has been guided primarily through a conversation with Heidegger, and which also includes the voices of Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, as well Lao Tzu and the Buddha, among others. In Being and Learning, Duarte undertakes a 'phenomenology of the original': a writing that consciously and conspicuously interrupts the discursive field of work in philosophy of education. As the late Reiner Schurmann described this method: "it recalls the ancient beginnings and it anticipates a new beginning, the possible rise of a new economy among things, words and actions." Being and Learning is a work of parrhesia: a composition of free thought that disrupts the conventional practice of philosophy of education, and thereby open up gaps and spaces of possibility in the arrangement of words, concepts, and ideas in the field. With this work Eduardo Duarte is initiating new pathways of thinking about education.