The Democratic Public To Be Brought into Existence and Education as Secularization

Abstract

entities, idealized signs of idealized referents. Communication is extracting the message from irrelevant and conflicting signals—noise. Interlocutors are allied in a struggle against noise; the ideal city of communication would be maximally purged of noise. But there is noise internal to the message—the opacity of the voice that transmits it.34 ExiStEncE and Education aS SEcularization 11 Volume 30 (2) 2014 Biesta nicely links Lingis’ rational community with the modern community Bauman, and he points out how the school system in modernity has been understood principally as an agency to build rational communities both in Lingis’ sense35 and in Bauman’s.36 By elaborating on Lingis’ idea that the “other community is not simply absorbed into the rational community; [and it] [...] forms not in a work, but in the interruption of work and enterprises,”37 Biesta relates the two communities to two distinct dimensions of learning and education (learning as the acquisition of something external (knowledge, values, skills) and learning as a response to a question), without invoking any complete replacement of the one with the other. The educational reinterpretation of Lingis’ reflections made by Biesta allows the latter to prepare a conceptual platform to discuss the issue of education and the democratic person,38 privileging an Arendtian rather than a Deweyan perspective. Dewey is not dismissed, and his merits in fostering education through democracy instead of education merely for democracy are explicitly recognized, but Arendt appears to Biesta to provide us with a view which breaks from any individualism39 and of any instrumentalism.40 Although I agree with many aspects of Biesta’s proposal and understand some of his misgivings, I would like to suggest an alternative ‘Deweyan’ idea of the community of those who have nothing in common with recourse to the considerations just developed on the munus (with an eye to Esposito’s remarks). This will require an exploration of a third dimension of the semantic spectrum of officium (the officium as munus and understood, therefore, through a peculiar hermeneutical bent, within the horizon of the act of giving), what can be called officium2. This could offer a viewpoint that enables us to grasp the scope and the import of the notion of the Great Community and the way in which it is constitutively educative. But to get there and to capture a possible ‘Deweyan’ meaning of officium2, I have to investigate the meaning of officium1 (that related to the role of officials) and pick up again the thread of the discourse on officials and transubstantiation, from which this reflection on the officium has taken its cue. 2. bEyond thE logic of thE imPErativE: SEcularizEd tranSubStantiation and dEmocratic Education aS