Composing an “Agon” and “Lettering a Public”: Democracy Between Binaries?

In response to ongoing expansion of neoliberal ideology in democratic education, this essay details a classroom experiment that attempts to “redo,” or “recraft” democracy. Recrafting democracy, in this context, takes shape in active efforts to compose an agonistic public sphere through a specific kind of “lettering a public.” As described, intentionally inefficient student efforts to “care-fully” compose, revise, and mail democratic letters allowed a more reciprocal and felt form of democratic deliberation to unfold. The essay describes the “Dear Demos” course assignment and articulates how the experiment in doing democracy might work to contest neoliberal notions of efficient, technocratic models of self-governance.

Conatus, the Will to Persist: An Introduction

The papers collected in this issue address a variety of aspects of the concept of conatus ranging from the explorations of its roots in early ancient Greek thought to its application on modern theories of democratic education. The conatus is a special relation between the parts of a monad and their subparts and the subparts of the subparts to infinity, which ensures that each part and subpart is a part of this monad and not of any other. As a fundamental trait of monadic existence, the conatus is manifested in a multiplicity of facets that sustain the persistence of any real existence. It is thus obvious that there is still a vast field of such manifestations of conatus that awaits philosophical exploration, especially in the realms of Social Ontology and of the Philosophy of Nature.

A New Conatus for the New World: Dewey’s Response to Perfectionist Conceptions of Democratic Education

We argue for a reconsideration of the claim that Spinoza’s perfectionist conception of education was ushering in a form of radical humanism distinctly favorable to democratic ideals. With the rise of democratic societies and the corresponding need to constitute educational institutions within those societies, a more thoroughgoing commitment to democratic social ideals arose, first and foremost in American educational thought. This commitment can be seen especially in Dewey’s philosophy of education. Specifically, Dewey and Spinoza had strikingly distinct conceptions of the overall aims of schooling. While Spinoza takes the aim of education to be the perfection of a student’s original nature, Dewey takes education to involve the collective acquisition of an additional nature, reflecting the norms and expectations of one’s specific community. In this paper, we juxtapose these two distinct conceptions of education alongside one another, with an eye towards illuminating the limitations of a perfectionist theory of education for the individual, as we find it in Spinoza, within a democratic society.

Radikale Demokratiebildung

Radical Democracy Education In the article, the question of the form of democratic education is central. Especially the Anthropocene gives rise to future tasks that must be theorized on the basis of a more radical understanding of democratic coexistence and that require a new form of democratic education. Fundamental to this is a change in the basic epistemological assumptions of democratic education. In the process, interfaces with artistic practices emerge. Ideas of methodical implementations arise in the context of aesthetic practices.

The statue of Glauco. Reflections on human nature during the pandemic

The statue of Glauco that the sea and the storms have disfigured so as to make its appearance more like a ferocious beast than a god, is the famous image with which Jean Jacques Rousseau, in the Discourse on the origin of inequality, questions himself on Human Nature, in a reflection that will have its purpose both in the political project of the Contract and in the pedagogical project of the Emilio. The image serves in fact to reiterate that that deterioration, that ugliness, is only external and that the statue (the man) has remained in its depths beautiful and good, since in him the feeling of piety, of his own and of his remains unchanged. dignity and the vocation to freedom of others. If this were not the case, there would be no possibility for political democracy and democratic education. The growing social inequalities, the artificialization of feelings and relationships due to technology, as well as the spread, after the pandemic, of a sort of mass "claustrophilia", a love for the closed, for one's own, with the consequent rejection of everything that comes from "outside", which is different, foreign or new, seems instead to give credit to Hobbes's thesis, namely that Human Nature is violent and aggressive and that man is always a wolf for the other man. However, it will be the task of the arts, sciences and, above all, of education, to demonstrate that, under the debris left by the salt, Glauco has remained good and that he can rediscover his true essence, the beauty of his original substance.