The other face of time. Finitude, Education and Hope

Abstract

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The question about the sense of existence and finitude oversteps the reflective scars of an unsettled thought philosophically and pedagogically equipped. The radical questioning of an existential project space at the edge of death is a common inquietude, which caresses everyone’s existence with different times and intensity. In a cultural climate increasingly tending to anaesthetise and confine, as well as to figure the human condition beyond the finitude through its removal, there is the urgent need for a philosophical and pedagogical centralisation of the wakes of sense flickering through the human finitude.

The human being is the one who figures his existence relating to a Heideggerian way, the possible being that dies, unlike animals that perish, because he is incapable of foreseeing this end in his thought. The thought of death, the human ability to reflect on the forward life marks the line between the educable and the uneducable, as suggested by Derrida.

Death, the act of taking charge of the fragile existential finitude, translates in pedagogical terms into the possibility to exercise an intentional ethical-educational responsibility. The problematisation of death in pedagogical-educational terms opens up the possibility of turning it into a condition capable of orienting life by the means of a projectuality that assumes the time of dying in a treatment perspective.

The essay aims to analyse the pedagogical-educational implications of death – extreme expression of human finitude – and, at the same time, it tries to find a pedagogical compass that, along a certain uneven path, could point that horizon, that mobile boundary line where life and death, existence and finitude, sense and non-sense get together within the temporality spectrum. Moving from the myth of Prometheus an attempt will be made to bet in pedagogical terms on Jabès’ possibility of doing otherwise that is hope.

Keywords: Finitude, Education, Hope Death, Pedagogy