There are still teachers who exist in a relation of honour and trust with respect to philosophy, I said, or to thinking. Who seek to honour honour and trust in turn in her teaching. What is a class to her? A room of countable bodies, of FTEs, or of those individuals who must be brought to think, into thinking, and in learning how others think and how to read the written thoughts of those who think and who have changed the image of thought? What does friendship with thinking mean in relation to teaching if not that relation to individuals in view of what there is to be learnt? A relation which implicates the teacher, too, insofar as, in teaching, she is more than a expositor of a text, but must learn to concretise its argument, to provide examples which will bring it, the text, to life for students who are far removed from its author in space and time.
The teacher, teaching, also brings herself close to what is neither programmable or calculable: the example springs from the life she shares with her students, from the tissue of a life that is now to be used - but not used up - as an example to enliven a text, or to bring it back to life. Shared life - life shared between teacher and student - but only in view of what the student must learn to think. Shared life lived in friendship with thought.
Thus it is that friendship is rare, not common. If it is lived between us, it is in terms of what draws us beyond the limit of our competence. Both of us are pressing forward into the unknown where this is not the beyond from which God would spring, nor the wellspring of the good from which all life would emanate, but the very concreteness of our lives, our shared lives.
A concreteness, it is true, which now discovers within itself a movement which may appear, at first glance, to be abstract. But this is not the concreteness, which, as in Plato's dialogue, is sacrificed to the movement beyond the concrete - thus it is that a love for the splendid body of a boy becomes a love for all bodies, becomes a love for mathematics and eventually for that great Idea which can be found in all things. The Idea, if it can be put this way, unfolds in and as experience. It awakens in the concrete; it is its life.
How is this possible? How can the teacher attest to the Idea? The teacher trusts and honours thought; she asks her students to do the same. But in so doing, she opens what, in the concretion of particular lives, in a shared life, is trusted and honoured.
What ultimately programmes and calculates is Capital. It is Capital that assigns everything a price and allows it to be exchanged. Capital seizes what is new as it comes in from the future, it seizes the future, and transforms it into what can be assigned an unequivocal value. Everything can be exchanged; the price of thought itself can be assigned; fees can be charged and the student must pay up. The student is being taught and so must pay, not just for his living expenses, but for being taught.
The teacher is now held accountable to the student, I said. Rightly so, you might say, for the teacher might present bad value for money. There is a contract between teacher and student, and the teacher must honour her side of that contract. And what of the student? As a customer, he has a right to expect something for his money. What does he expect? A good degree. A high degree classification. And if he doesn't get this? He can claim the contract between university and student was broken. He entered into the contract on good faith, but now the contract is broken; his trust - what is now called trust - has been betrayed.
The university, fearing the bad publicity brought about by this breach of contract, is willing to sacrifice the teacher, who, after all, is only on an hourly contract, or at least a one yearly contract that it is easy simply not to renew. The teacher is 'let go' - which is to say in so many words, sacked. The relation of trust - now scleroised into the appeasment of students - has been broken and a sacrifice must occur. Capital must be appeased. But trust is no longer trust and honour no longer honour. Trust and honour have been sacrificed along with the sacrifice of the teacher. Thus do trust and honour disappear in the relationship between teacher and university and between teacher and student.
Now the part time teacher, the teacher on a contract, fears her students. The students want results; they want to be able to have a go at thinking. But to have a go now means that thinking itself must be made to appear simple. The text, the great text, must be cut into digestible chunks. It must be placed alongside other chunks of texts in a textbook, a reader of the history of thinking, of philosophy. And eventually, that textbook will be replaced by a book which paraphrases what was said in the great texts of philosophy. A book written in a univocal language, a language without ambiguity, in which ideas can circulate as information, that is to say, without resistance.
Now the students trust the textbook, and not the teacher. The teacher is an expositor of what is said in the textbook, paraphrasing it, guiding the students through it, so they can obtain good grades. And the space of teaching itself is only a conduit, the academic year a kind of corridor through which everyone must run. A brightly coloured corridor, it is true, which looks pleasing to the student as he dashes through it. But what matters is to run, to extract relevant information in order to graduate with honours and with a good degree.
Teaching has been assigned a price; studying costs. Relations of trust and honour - which are ultimately trust and honour in thinking, as thinking, as the love of thinking, philosophy - have been supplanted by a relaiton of money. Socrates already knew the dangers of this which are the dangers of sophistry: thought becomes technique, the means to that eloquence which could lead the young man to a political career. But Socrates also knows, as he demonstrates with respect to the slave Meno, that there is in the student something which wants to trust thought and to honour it. Precisely what has been sacrificed in our present of Quality Assurance and grade inflation.
What, then of the pedagogy of the concept? What of the Bildungsroman wherein the concrete is as though irradiated from within and experience is that pathein, that suffering through which the image of thought breaks and remoulds itself? But the experience of learning has been captured; teaching, too is seized by those same forces which are supposed to make the university accountable to what are now no more than its clients.