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Education as Recollection, Encounter and Ascent
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12537 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1987 |
4,664 Words |
| Author
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David J. Levy
David J. Levy is professor of sociology at Middlesex
Polytechnic in London. He has written widely on social
theory, including two books, Realism (1981) and Political
Order, which is still in press. |
Anamnesis is the title of a book of essays by the political philosopher Eric Voegelin, first published in Germany in 1966. A marginally different grouping of pieces appeared under the same title in 1978 in an English translation by Gerhart Niemeyer. Both books present the core of the philosophy of consciousness that informs the argument of Voegelin's great work Order and History--a philosophy of consciousness in which, true to the lesson of two of his earliest influences, Max Scheler and Henri Bergson, Voegelin presents the historic path of consciousness not as a smooth and steady road to secular enlightenment but as a record punctuated by what he calls "leaps in being." A leap in being is not to be constructed merely as a sudden insight or cognitive advance in man's knowledge of truth, but as a becoming of Divine truth in the world. The human psyche is the place of its happening but not itself the source of the truth that surfaces within it.
In title, Anamnesis recalls the earliest and perhaps the most illuminating of educational myths--Plato's doctrine of recollection of truths lodged deep in the soul. These truths are implicitly known at a certain level of the psyche but do not enter the conscious mind until drawn from the depths by the questioning of the teacher. Plato explains the subconscious presence of these truths in terms of reincarnation, a doctrine that he may have come to accept, under Pythagorean influence, during his first visit to the Greek cities of Sicily and southern Italy about 387 B.C. The fact that Plato's first presentation of education as anamnesis, in the Meno, shows Socrates leading a slave boy to articulate mathematical truth by questioning alone makes the Pythagorean connection certain. For the school Pythagoras conceived the immateriality of mathematical truth and the endurance of an immaterial soul across successive incarnations as two aspects of a single religious revelation of ultimate spiritual reality.
On the surface at least, Plato's concerns were, at this stage of his life, ethical and political rather than metaphysical. This reflected the influence of Socrates, who, for all his opposition to the sophists, belonged like them to a generation that had turned away from the speculative cosmic concerns of the Ionian thinkers toward the immediate affairs of human conduct. Indeed, how far Plato was "converted" to Pythagoreanism and thus turned in a metaphysical direction during his residence in Tarentum will always be a mystery. What is important in the present context is that the encounter with the Pythagorean doctrine of reincarnation provided Plato with a way of articulating the knowledge, acquired during his education by Socrates, of the objectivity of truth. For the truths
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