Education and Tradition

Education and Tradition

Gadamer explores liberal education, tradition and authority through Greek paideia, beauty and friendship, then questions modern subjectivism, bureaucratic education and the loss of a shared world.

1. 0:00 — Education as drawing out human possibilities
2. 1:49 — Liberal education and freedom of judgment
3. 5:50 — Tradition and the limits of making
4. 7:43 — Ethos: formation through custom and practice
5. 9:45 — Authority and the acknowledgment of tradition
6. 11:45 — Greek paideia and education through play
7. 13:54 — Plato: education and the control of power
8. 17:54 — Sharing beauty without rivalry
9. 19:39 — Friendship, solidarity and common life
10. 22:20 — Hermeneutical judgment and the application of rules
11. 26:05 — The distance between Greek education and modern life
12. 28:08 — Scientific method and the ideal of mastery
13. 31:43 — Descartes, provisional morality and inherited institutions
14. 34:18 — The dissolution of tradition and modern homelessness
15. 38:32 — A crisis of philosophy and self-understanding
16. 42:03 — Kant, Rousseau and the limits of subjectivity
17. 46:22 — Martin Buber and the recognition of the thou
18. 48:58 — Imitation and the personal example of teachers
19. 52:22 — Authority as recognized superiority
20. 55:29 — Bureaucracy, family and personal education
21. 58:22 — The enduring conditions of human life
22. 1:00:07 — Shared experience and practical wisdom
23. 1:02:54 — Memory, renewal and the limits of sovereignty

Hans-Georg Gadamer — 2 recordings in the archive.

Related reading: Truth and Method by Hans-Georg Gadamer.

Philologist. I cannot avoid to begin with some reflections about the words education and tradition. education that I think when one learns to feel the music of the words, the connotations which have the evocative function of language to awaken the the matters which are announced by words. Education certainly gives us then a first very important import information. Education is not a form of making something. Education as you know means that one draws that one leads some out of its [unclear] and unshaped beginning stage so that it is in the end what it is real in the beginning but not in an explicit form. So education indeed is something where we have always present our own limitation over against the pre-given conditions of human life, nature and its infinitude of our own living activities. And then liberal education. Indeed, liberal education is the key word for the way of our humanistic tradition which begins with the Greeks and which goes far beyond ourselves, far beyond our European culture, our American culture. I think it is a question of mankind to find ways of liberal education and of education to liberty. Well, the humanistic tradition of course and education by liberal education. that means to lead somebody to the point where he can accept or refuse what he learned and to which he was accustomed. It is in a way this special excellence of human beings that they are not fixed and streamlined in their reactions by the natural gift they have. They are in a way [unclear] to the natural lines of life. They have choice. And to have choice, you know, is a very difficult and torturing thing. To prefer one thing over against the other is always something what challenges us with the our feeling for the limitation of our insights and the unredeemability of the given decision. So the anthropological background for education is indeed quite decisive for the ways in which we can hope to develop a human style of life. This way of education and of liberal education of course involves that it is not a learning for special purposes and not oriented towards a special usefulness of what one is learning and to which one is built up. Liberal means free from this respect for the usefulness. And you know that the normal word for this the positive equivalent for this…