Resonant Education

The articles in this symposium make two important contributions: they introduce and explain the powerful but opaque philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy; and they show how his philosophy illuminates central issues in education. Their accounts also diverge in interesting ways, raising provocative questions for the philosophy of education.

The contributors describe how being with captures Nancy's core ontological claim. The basic level of human being is in relation to others. As David Hansen articulates, we exist only “in common,” through activities with others.¹ This does not mean that we are subsumed into a group, however. We are simultaneously singular-plural. “Being with” captures individual distinctiveness as well as connectedness, without reducing one to the other.

The contributors argue that for Nancy the paradigmatic human activity is not individual cognition about the world, but is instead listening. As Eduardo Duarte Bono says, we must replace “the [Cartesian] philosophical subject” with “the listening subject,” and we must replace the predominant visual metaphor with a musical one.² Instead of standing apart from the world and observing it, we “resonate” with something in the world and are taken out of ourselves by it. As Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon and Megan Laverty say, “the listener's search for meaning … is a search guided by felt resonance rather than intellectual cognizing, at least initially.”³ The traditional philosophical focus on internal self-reflection, according to Nancy, impedes genuine listening and distorts our relations with others and the world.

Nancy does not eliminate the subject, but he focuses on resonant subjectivity. Our basic mode of experiencing the world involves resonating with aspects of it. Duarte Bono explores this musical metaphor, describing how listening to music involves a “letting go” of oneself and an openness to experience. Together with Haroutunian-Gordon and Laverty, Duarte Bono shows how music evokes meaning, how it can be transformative even though it does not contain analytic messages. Hansen describes this as a “pre-cognitive” responsiveness to the world.

Touch is another important metaphor for Nancy. Unlike vision, touch involves contact with others and a distinctive immediacy. It is a second-person experience, in contact with something next to me. This contrasts with the third-person experience of analytic abstraction associated with vision and the Cartesian subject. René Arcilla explains how this emphasis on resonance and touch demands a different attitude toward experience — an “opening” or an “expansion of being.” According to Arcilla, Nancy calls for “bearing witness and lyrically summoning other witnesses.” We should not strive for “conclusive epiphany,” but for “perpetual intimation.”⁴

This is a process-based philosophy, emphasizing becoming. Haroutunian-Gordon and Laverty describe how meaning emerges gradually in listening, through resonance that connects to prior experience but remains open to the world. This process does not end with a final judgment. Hansen shows that, for Nancy, human life involves an unending series of “co-appearances.” There are no stable individuals or stable groups that are ontologically prior. We exist only as we are with others, across a series of spontaneous, contingent, unique events. Arcilla uses the metaphor of “dance” to capture this — we are all involved in this dance, with ongoing responsiveness to and interconnections with others.

Each time we encounter and resonate with others it changes us, and it changes them. This means that individuals travel unique pathways. Haroutunian-Gordon and Laverty describe how an individual potentially becomes a new person in each experience, across the series of events that make up a life. Hansen summarizes Nancy's account of an individual “as a being who embodies a lived, dynamic history of responses to experience, and who is influenced by others who are responding in their distinctive ways.” Individuals are distinctive and deserve respect not because they possess a moral core, but because of their unique pathway across experience and their ability to take distinctive stances and engage others.

Listening and “being with” thus have an ethical dimension. Individuals have dignity, based in their unique histories and their capacity to engage with and draw out resonance in others. We owe others true “listening,” which Haroutunian-Gordon and Laverty characterize as being open to more challenging meanings, as opposed to simply “hearing” others by employing familiar categories. We owe others openness and respect. Hansen describes this moral obligation in the context of teaching, arguing that teachers must attend to the distinctiveness of individual students and unique moments. Instead of imposing abstract categories, or dealing in exchange value and instrumental rationality, we must be open to and engage with others — acknowledging their unique history of engagement in “the dance” and their capacity to evoke resonance in us.

Arcilla connects Nancy's ontology to politics, describing the kind of “we” implied by our “being with.” The Cartesian subject presupposes autonomous individuals who pursue self-determination, fundamentally separate from others. In contrast, Nancy argues that people are always already with others. This presupposes some kind of collective. But Arcilla argues that two kinds of collectives on offer at this historical moment do not suffice. On one hand, we have universalizing visions that presuppose we are all the same, typically taking the norms of one ethnic or economic group as allegedly universal. On the other hand, we have essentializing identity politics that claims some ethnic or economic characteristic binds together supposedly homogeneous groups. Both of these erase the uniqueness of individuals and close off spontaneous, unexpected experience. Nancy wants a sense of community that is not based on fixed, shared characteristics. Instead, he imagines a community based in our mutual participation in the ongoing dance of engagement with others.