Beljan Expressive Bildung

Über Ausdruck, Entfremdung und die Fähigkeit zu lernen
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-3-7799-8896-0
Verlag: Julius Beltz
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Deutsch, 171 Seiten

Menschliche Wesen lernen, indem sie sich in Auseinandersetzung mit den Artikulationen der Welt, ausdrücken und mitteilen. Was aber geschieht, wenn diese expressive Fähigkeit beschädigt ist oder blockiert wird? In seiner neuen Studie untersucht Jens Beljan die zentrale Rolle der Expressivität im Lernprozess. Menschen entdecken sich selbst, ihre Verbindung zu anderen und ihren Platz in der Welt, indem sie das, was sie als bedeutsam empfinden, in Tönen, Farben, Formen und Bewegungen ausdrücken, aber auch in kollektiven Ritualen und Institutionen objektivieren. Doch Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten können verloren gehen und verkümmern. Auf Grundlage der Resonanzpädagogik plädiert Beljan für die aktive Förderung des menschlichen Ausdruckspotenzials. Er zeigt, dass Lernen und Bildung nur dann wirklich stattfinden können, wenn Menschen sich mitteilen - und dass der Verlust von Ausdruckskraft zu Entfremdung führt.

Jens Beljan, Jg. 1982, Dr., ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Institut für Bildung und Kultur der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. Seine Arbeitsschwerpunkte sind Resonanzpädagogik, Bildungsphilosophie und Identitätsbildung. Außerdem arbeitet er an der Edition und Kommentierung des Pädagogik- und Psychologie-Bandes der Kritischen Gesamtausgabe Friedrich Schleiermachers.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Beljan, Jens

Leseproben

Preface

Charles Taylor

1

This is an extremely interesting work. Its subject is Bildung. This is a term for which we have no handy term in English. In French we might say “formation”; but in English we have to use many words. The apt translation would include “education”, but go beyond that to include whatever it is in our upbringing that we need to live full, well-rounded lives. Dr Beljan offers a theory, a notion of what these needs consist in, and this would give us an adequate notion of “Bildung”. He will end up answering this question about “Bildung”. But en route to this answer, he has some very interesting things to say about what I want to call “philosophical anthropology”. By this I mean the terms and concepts that one needs in order to properly to come to terms with and understand human beings and human society. Here I find his contribution extraordinarily interesting and fruitful.

In elaborating a philosophical anthropology, a crucial choice is usually made. Some thinkers try to identify the crucial motivations of human beings. For instance, control over the means of production, power or prestige. The assumption here is that these are obvious, easily identifiable, and uncontroversial. Dr Beljan takes another route. What must be sought here is what is really important, what gives meaning to our lives; but this is not something that we know straight off, although we might be ready to give an answer at any moment by mentioning some religious allegiance, or a political or national one, or an ethical outlook, or a commitment to some cause or career.

But his main point is that this is not necessarily the final answer; we take a part in formulating what is of basic importance to us, throughout the whole process of our education and beyond. So, an adequate theory of Bildung has to allow for, even to a certain extent enable us, to track this process of self-definition as it unfolds. And this process is brought forward by our attempts to articulate, or in other words express, what our goals and values really are.

Expression is a key term, as the title of this work indicates. Towards the beginning of the work, this passage occurs: “Gefühle, Gedanken, Absichten oder Ideale sind nicht schon da, bevor sie entäußert werden, sie entstehen vielmehr im Ausdrucksakt und durch Artikulationsprozesse. Der expressive Akt realisiert und erschafft zum Teil, was gefühlt und gedacht wird, welche Ziele für uns existieren sowie welche Werte wir in unseren Leben als wirksam erfahren.“ (p. 17). A corollary to this is that, as Axel Honneth puts it, in this area any “finden” has an element of“ erfinden” (p. 133).

Before we come directly to the consequences of Beljan’s theory for the education of our young people, it might help to work out further the philosophical anthropology implied in the choice above to define it in terms of the sources of meaning. It follows from the crucial role of self-definition in our development, that we don’t just find these sources ready-made or -defined; we have to collaborate in defining them. And this entails a long process in which our previous formulations are called into question, and revised. Furthermore, this is a process which involves both finding (Finden) and invention (Erfinden).

This process has several stages, which Dr Beljan enumerates in Part III as first, figuration, then making more precise or explication, then transformation, creation, exploration, and disputation. His unpacking of this is a great contribution to philosophical anthropology, because it tells us a great deal about how this process of self-definition works, both in a single life, and in the exchanges between people.

In particular, his notion of “articulation” is very interesting. We usually employ this term to describe how we spell things out to make the matter at hand more understandable. But we can also use it to describe how the parts of a larger object relate to each other. Dr Beljan points to an important insight that this double meaning partly conceals: I, the subject, articulate some difficult matter by further explanation; but I, the organism, can be understood as articulated into different limbs. And these two are related because, at the most basic level, our grasp of our environment comes through our sense of our limbs and what they are capable of. I see a field in front of me, and I know that I can go forward normally on foot; I see a rocky hill, and I know that I can only tackle it by arms and legs working together. We “grasp” the landscape through our ability to navigate and handle things in it. (A basic point of Merleau-Ponty).

But I don’t feel I should continue on this line, because the basic point of the essay concerns education, and I must return to that, I just want to signal how rich this paper is in anthropological suggestions.

2

To the main thesis: The notion is that the central point of Bildung is to facilitate growth in our capacities to express, articulate, discover, and create meaning for ourselves and others. Does this mean that we must encourage all forms of expression? What about narcissistic forms? What about expressions of hatred?

We need criteria; how to distinguish healthy from unhealthy forms of expression. The answer offered is that forms are good when they aid further development and unacceptable when they don’t. The intuition underlying this is that, for example, joining a movement organized around hatred and rejection of immigrants certainly closes down certain directions of growth (e.g., what you might learn about life by befriending them), and doesn’t seem to open up any new ones. This certainly sounds very plausible, but what we need is an account of the kind of loss, blindness or malfunction which can make some young people incapable of seeing this.

For this, Dr Beljan proposes a concept of “alienation” (Entfremdung); certainly not that of Marx or Hegel, but with some echoes of that of Rahel Jaeggis. This concept of alienation doesn't see it as the failure to realize some essential nature, but rather touches on the manner agents relate to their goals and the way they realize this relation (p. 104-105). Here he draws on the work of both of Rahel Jaeggi‘s theory of “acquisition” (Aneignung) and Hartmut Rosa’s theory of “resonance”. For both theorists, human fulfilment involves an ongoing communication between self and world in which we “resonate” with our surroundings (Rosa) or can “make our own” this communication (Jaeggi). Building on this, Rosa proposes a notion of alienation as a breakdown in this continuing inter-movement.

But this is not to say that we can ever envisage a life completely free of alienation. Life always goes on, and new blockages can arise: distances between agent and world open up; our world may become hostile and unreadable in new ways. The fully realized life isn’t alienation-free, but repeatedly alienation-overcoming.

When we turn to apply this understanding to education, we can conclude that exchanges between teachers and students are positive when they open up the latter to further such openings; for instance, when today’s lesson offers points of contact for a further step (Anschlussfähigkeit); or when it overcomes certain forms of rigidity in the stance of the students (Beweglichkeit); or when it obviously calls for further learning (Erweiterung) (pp. 121-122).

What works directly against such healthy development is repression: where students’ self-expression is forbidden or ignored; and also another important factor, which he calls reduction. The latter is a tendency inherent in large bureaucratic organizations, where policy is determined on the basis of easily identifiable criteria. In the case of education, this can mean that programmes are drawn not in function of the students’ outlook, needs or interests, but on the basis of readily identifiable markers such as their age or background.

Both repression and reduction ignore the crucial human reality, that “wir müssen uns in unserem Dasein als bejaht erleben, um einen expressiven Zugang zu uns selbst auszubilden“ (p. 135).

3

In short, I think this thesis is an extremely interesting and insightful work, both in answering its main target question about education, and in laying the ground for ...