Three Epiphanic Fragments: Education and the essay in ...

Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain

Annual Conference

New College, Oxford

30 March – 1 April 2012

Three Epiphanic Fragments: Education and the essay in memory Mr David Aldridge

Oxford Brookes University

[email protected]

Three Epiphanic Fragments: Education and the essay in memory “Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria?” (Joyce, 1992: 50) More than thirty years ago David Farrell Krell pointed to the important contribution a phenomenology of memory could make to our understanding of the educational endeavour, drawing attention to the shared fate of memory and education at least since Plato. Krell is careful to point out the limitations of contemporary empirical research into the relation of memory and education, and the psychological conceptions of ‘memory as mechanism’ and ‘memory as repertory’. With regard to the first, he argues that conceptual models of remembering as ‘retrieval’ presuppose a Cartesian understanding of the ‘we’ that retrieves, and indeed presuppose the very ‘retrieval’ that they wish to explain, in that “animal spirits must remember what they are looking for even before the mind knows those memories” (Krell, 1978: 137). With regard to ‘memory as repertory’, Krell observes that the experimental situations exploring the connections between memory and learning have by necessity focused on short term recall, and minimised – for reasons of research consistency – the “interest factor” (and the place of what Krell calls ‘romance’). He conjectures that, “Perhaps those who prove to have excellent memories...are precisely those who through docility or credulity forget readily who they are and what they want, in order to conform to the examiner’s demands,” demonstrating “much less about the talents of the individual than about the irrationality of a system whose interests are universally short term” (141 – 142).

Krell introduces the phenomenological conception of ‘memory as project’, focusing on the neglected question of the identity of the ‘we’ or ‘I’ that remembers. “For phenomenology, memory is a project of memory into memory” and “Its field of concentration is what behavioural science calls long-term memory.” This is sketched out only briefly in the paper cited, but draws on Heidegger’s understanding of the ‘project’ as “an effort cast toward a future, out of a past, through a present”. The Erinnerungsversuch or ‘essay in memory’ “confounds the categories and the temporal modalities.” Krell finally and tantalisingly draws attention to Heidegger’s Zusammenhang des Lebens, the “’connectedness of life’ in which Dasein somehow maintains itself constantly” (Heidegger 1962: 425). The project of memory will need to be unpacked further in what follows.

Dall’Alba and Barnacle (2007) have drawn attention to a more recent ‘ontological turn’, at least in the sphere of Higher Education, where education is conceived as “transformative – it can change who we are” (632). One prominent development of the relation between education and the being of the learner is Pádraig Hogan’s exploration of the ‘politics of identity’ in education (2004). Attempting to steer a path between the two poles of identity as something transmitted (which would lead educators toward the charge of indoctrination) and identity as chosen (which could induce the charge of arbitrariness), Hogan argues for a conception of the development of identity as “unforced disclosure” (89-90). Such a conception of education would, for Hogan, admit of a universal justification even in the absence of a transcendent or ahistorical account of human nature. Emphasising that human understanding takes place within a historical context or tradition, and would always therefore be provisional, Hogan argues that education would be guided by hermeneutic virtues such as attentiveness to prejudice, an openness to provisionality and the voice of the other, and a general acknowledgement of the finitude of human understanding. The experience of learning itself, he argues, would be “epiphanic” in character. Here he develops, by way of Richard Ellman and Charles Taylor, Joyce’s understanding of epiphany as “the sudden ‘revelation of the whatness of a thing’” (Ellman, 1983: 83).

Three Epiphanic Fragments Under review – please do not cite without author’s consent 2

The epiphany is illustrated with reference to Heidegger’s (2011) treatment of the pair of peasant shoes, in which Van Gogh’s painting of a mundane object “sets forth a previously familiar world in a way charged with a meaning previously undetected” and renders it “newly intelligible” (Hogan: 2004, 91-92). The student is transformed by this epiphany in that she comes to be ‘embraced’ within a new world of which she was previously ‘scarcely aware’. What can also be opened up through an epiphany of learning is not only a new way of experiencing the significance of the world but also the ‘pour soi’ of pupils – epiphanies are “the means by which one’s own most potentials are uncovered and appropriated. In short, they are unforced disclosures and affirmations of identity.” It is part of Hogan’s conception of epiphanies that they are ‘unexpected’ and constitute “interruptions of the kind of learning which is routine and unreflective in character.” Epiphanies should be distinguished from experiences which become routine; they are likely to be neglected if teaching and learning is thought of as habitual in nature. The ‘epiphanic art’ is set against instrumental conceptions of teaching and learning that might aim for impressive grades but do not suggest new possibilities for the disclosure of a student’s identity. In later work, Hogan has not made ‘epiphany’ such a significant part of his educational proposals. However, in The New Significance of Learning (2010), a chapter on ‘Opening Delphi’ draws on the work of literary critic and Heidegger interpreter George Steiner. We cannot help but think of the Delphic incitement to self-knowledge, as well as Heidegger’s Greek temple, the paradigmatic Kunstwerke, which ‘opens up a world’ (Heidegger 2011: 107).

Paul Smeyers’ justification of the language of poetry in educational theory (2002) takes Heidegger’s discussion of the temple as its point of departure. Smeyers’ argument resonates with Hogan’s in that the work (of education, conceived artistically) sets up ‘a world’ for the student. Smeyers elaborates on Heidegger’s distinction between the ‘earth’ and the ‘world’ of the work of art, where the former refers to the existing reality and the latter to the being of existing reality, or the “context in which we view [entities], the unified fabric of relationships which gives meaning to the day-to-day world.” The ‘earth’ of the work of art corresponds to what Smeyers refers to as the material of education – the “textbooks, poems, particular activities *the teacher+ wants the children to engage in.” The material is an indispensible part of the educational experience in the same way that the earth is an integral part of an artwork, but since the earth always remains partially hidden this “rules out the obsession with measurement and ranking” (81-82). Again echoing Hogan, Smeyers emphasises the unexpected way in which earth is disclosed and world is created: this cannot be captured in calculative thought and in a certain way the educator does not, indeed cannot, know what they are doing. Testing or assessing in relation to instrumental aims, however complex, neglects the insight that, “the possibilities of the content that is offered are never fully realized, can never be fully realized.” Education is characterised as an ongoing process of becoming, in which, “Gradually, the identity of the child takes shape as the realization of some of her potentialities” (96 – 98).

The problem that opens up for us at this point is the challenge of reconciling Hogan’s ‘interruptions’ with Smeyers’ gradual process of becoming. Although Smeyers ‘grounds’ the opening of the new world in more mundane or repetitive tasks, Hogan’s epiphany is a break with another kind of more habitual learning. The choice of the language of epiphany emphasises the sudden or unexpected nature of a singular event. Although Joyce and subsequent ‘modernist’ literary criticism have done much to ‘secularise’ the theological term, epiphany stills carries the sense of a sudden external revelation which fractures or transcends quotidien life. The question arises here of how to categorise the other experiences (of learning?) that do not fall into the category of epiphany (if indeed there are any). Three options appear to be available here: firstly - and this is what Hogan seems to suggest in places - that there are two kinds of learning, one everyday kind which has 'merit', but which cannot be considered truly educational, and the moment of interruption or epiphany, which can. In much the same way Andrea English (2011) distinguishes between an everyday kind of learning and an experience which entails negativity and interruption, which can be characterised as genuinely transformative


(English calls this Umlernen). It might alternatively be argued that all learning has the character of an interruption, to which one might very reasonably ask, "an interruption of what?" Finally, it might be argued that much of what passes for learning should not, on the grounds established by Hogan and Smeyers, rightly be considered as such. In broader philosophical terms, we might ask about the temporality of the educational epiphany: What is the duration of this moment? When does it occur? The question of whether the epiphanic moment is characterised by disruption or continuity is often addressed in the reception of Joyce (cf, for example, Beja 2004), and it is to this literary discussion that we will eventually need to return in order to shed light on this problem. It might be argued that this is an unnecessary digression into questions of literary form, structure, and theory, given Hogan’s closely argued and carefully qualified appropriation of the term for educational purposes, but much of the educational significance of what I argue in this paper hinges on certain unacknowledged ‘literary’ aspects of the epiphany even as it is appropriated by Hogan. The quotation with which the paper opens, drawn from the character Stephen Dedalus’ stream of consciousness in Ulysses, reminds us of the close connection epiphany has with memory in modernist literature, not only in Joyce but also (if not moreso) in the other great epiphanist and explorer of memory, Proust. The quotation also alludes to Joyce’s early endeavour of collecting ‘epiphanic fragments’ - brief, uncontextualised prose reports of his own experiences of epiphanies, which he often reworked, sometimes more than once, into his later more substantial writing. It is not clear to what extent Joyce intended the ‘fragment’ as a distinctive literary form in its own right, as he did not publish these epiphanies. Dedalus’ recollection of this intention in Ulysses in fact seems to deride the endeavour as the pretension of a hubristic young artist. Nevertheless, the ‘fragment’, conceived as a short narrative account of a singular moment of discontinuity in one’s perception of the world, will serve as a starting point for our investigation of the educational epiphany because of its initial correspondence, if not to the way we tend to remember our ‘education’ as a whole, at least to the way in which transformative educational memories can be reported in the literature.

It would seem reasonable at first glance to assert that what we remember of our education (whether accurately or otherwise) tends towards the ‘material’, in Smeyers' sense of the word. And why should this not be so? It is indeed the verb conjugations, the dates, the formulae and the topological terminology that we actively attempt to remember, that we devote time to 'memorising'. By contrast, it is not clear how a gradual process of becoming might constitute an object of memory. The educational formation or emergence of my identity might be of the utmost centrality to my being, but as an adolescent I also grew in height, I filled out, I developed sexually, but these are gradual processes that I do not remember happening - even though they were fundamental transformations. We might recall how Alice, in the midst of her personality crisis in Wonderland after an intense period of physical transformation, reaches (unsuccessfully, as it happens) for the ‘material’ of her education to establish her continuing identity – her multiplication tables, and the location of capital cities she learned in Geography (Caroll, 2010: 7). The material or ‘earth’ of education, as Smeyers argues, extends beyond this factual or technical content: any of the members of my GCSE French class with whom I am still in touch, to this day (although they are no longer clear on which verbs take être in the past tense and which avoir) remember the entertainingly dated pictures in our textbook, or the curious way that our teacher could fix two badly behaved students at opposite ends of the classroom equally in his gaze in a single moment. Such recollections might be of a person, or a class, or a singular moment, but they hardly qualify as transformational, in the sense of a new world being opened up. You could say they are memories of ‘schooling’, rather than of education.

It is to the work by Andrea English (2011) - already cited above as an example of the literature on ‘transformational’ learning - that I am indebted for drawing my attention toward Edward Said’s account of an interruption of his educational experience, the first of my three chosen epiphanic


fragments. Said, having been asked to write an essay “On Lighting a Match”, is challenged to move beyond the mechanical or descriptive account he proudly submitted. “For literally the first time in my life, a subject was opened up for me by a teacher in a way that I immediately and excitedly responded to. What had previously been repressed and stifled in academic study—repressed in order that thorough and correct answers be given to satisfy a standardized syllabus and a routinized exam designed essentially to show off powers of retention, not critical or imaginative faculties—was awakened, and the complicated process of intellectual discovery (and self-discovery) has never stopped since.” (Said, 1999: 231)

Graeme Nicholson follows Heidegger and Gadamer in developing an ontological dimension in education, asking “What must happen to the pupil, what must happen to the teacher, if the two of them are indeed to understand and know their subjects?” (2011: 62) He concludes that, “Intellectual awakening is just as valuable a part of education as the transmission of doctrina,” (75) and in illustration of this claim he recounts the following epiphany (my second fragment): “Mr Gerald Mosher taught both English and French to our class. On one occasion he copied out for us a number of poems by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron (they were not in our text book), and, over a few sessions, he called attention to their differences of subject and style. Then he arranged an informal quiz: presenting us with further poems by these authors, but concealing their names, we were to see if we could tell who had written each one. I did well on the quiz: no doubt that helps me remember the occasion; but I also remember thinking, for the first time, that I might like some kind of literary vocation. This happened to me when I was twelve years old, sixty years ago.” (71) My third fragment is a reminiscence of my own, recorded for this paper: The first paper I studied for my undergraduate Classics degree was on the Iliad. Dr Donald Fowler taught us Homer with Derrida alongside. I remember noticing that my small group seminars with him were radically different from my other tutorials: elsewhere we talked of a complex web of literary allusion, here we talked of 'intertextuality'. The key awakening here also related to the world picture presented by a text - I came to see it in its ambiguity, incompleteness and ultimately incoherence. I realised that my tutor was subversive and that I was being encouraged to be subversive, and to see that reading itself could be subversive, or conservative, but was always an inseparably political and ethical act. With regard to the question of how to situate the epiphany in relation to ordinary or habitual events, we could firstly consider the role of the ‘material’ of education in each of these recollections. The doctrina of the educational experience is more than incidental to each recollection, in that the epiphany cannot in each case be divorced from the subject matter which ‘grounds’ it; but in each case the memory is not of what was “learned” in the sense of being able to be recalled factually – in fact, it is the realisation of the difference between critical or imaginative learning and accurate recall of the information required by the syllabus that constitutes Said’s epiphany. However, the broader sense of the ‘earth’ that grounds the world that is set forth can be observed in the fact that each recollection seems to be as much a memory of a person - Said’s teacher Baldwin, Mr Mosher and Dr Fowler respectively - as of an event. While we might want to separate out our memory of a particular person from our memory of the ‘sudden’ epiphany in which they played a part, it remains that in our recollection of an epiphany, different modes of remembering are at play. Our memory of a person – of what they were like, their habits, and such like – is not easily situated in a particular date, time or


moment, and thus our moment of ‘interruption’ shows itself to have certain moorings at least in some kind of continuous experience.

We should pay further attention to the modes of remembering in the selected fragments. A distinction has been made since classical times between memory as pathos, or something which befalls the remembering subject - ‘evocation’ in Ricoeur - and recollection conceived as an active task - ‘search’ (Ricoeur 2004: 26-31). Although neither Said’s nor Nicholson’s account - situated as they are within particular a network of literary motives - should be read as an attempt at a phenomenological description, each is analogous to a public form of reminiscence with which we are all familiar, one in which the retelling is inseparable from the recalling: both constitute the occurrence of the memory itself. Neither of these recollections, I should imagine, is being experienced for the first time, although each writer would not be able to identify the ‘first’ occasion of recollection. In fact, these events will likely have been recollected countless times, either publicly or privately, and often for similar reasons in similar contexts; they have likely been refined and distilled in the telling. The remembering subject is thus active, creative even, in an act of recollection. This applies equally to the act of private reminiscence: the ‘thickness’ of memory (Casey, 2000b: 264 – 266) means that certain aspects of an experience may be called to mind on one occasion and others on another. In neither case is the memory considered incomplete or inaccurate (70 – 71); this suggests that acts of recollection are not a mechanical process of recovering a pictorial repetition of events, but are autonomous and selective.

Casey argues, quoting Thomas Mann, that “Retelling this past in discourse of several sorts…we articulate its structure and come to know it from within again. We come to know it better, more completely and more poignantly, than if we had left it unreminisced, un-unfolded in logos, un-explicated in ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’” (Casey 2000b: 121). There is no mistaking a certain literary collaboration on the part of the reminiscing subject: in fact, Casey conjectures that “writing may even be its optimal mode of realization” (118). Returning to the literary origins of our epiphanies, Joyce’s fragments are characterised by a fleeting quality or an ‘evanescence’ (so Stephen Hero claims, at least). For some critics, they are in many cases ‘thin’ to the point of obscurity. For others, the elaborate re-working of the epiphany in a more substantial literary context deprives it of its essential quality. There is no doubt that the epiphanies thicken significantly in their fictional re-working: events and characters gain a history and a resonance with other aspects of the text as additional allusive cornflour is stirred in. The case of reminiscence is the mirror or reverse of this: the ‘thin’ or ‘fleeting’ quality of the remembered epiphany belies the thickness of the material of memory in which it is grounded: for Casey, the term thickness captures (among many other things) the fact that memories posses “a depth not easily penetrable by the direct light of consciousness,” are “sedimented in layers,” have “historical depth,” and “a concentrated emotional significance” (Casey 2000b: 265). The point is that in recollecting or reminiscing, we cut off a thin slice from this thick matter of memory, and we are responsible for the angle of the knife.

However, the autonomy of the remembering subject is limited: my own ‘epiphanic fragment’ brought this home to me, which is the ultimate reason for its inclusion in the paper. Although this is a well-rehearsed memory, I have never thought of it as an educational epiphany: the form of the recollection has on this occasion been dictated by the context of the two recollections that inspired me to bring it to mind. I was not arbitrarily free at the moment of recollection – no other memory would have ‘done’ in its place. However, this is a fruitful and productive limitation, as this new juxtaposition of the remembered moment with others of a similar kind afforded fresh insights into this experience that I had not had before, while at the same time I remembered in a way which is as true to the past as any recollection of this event I have had. This worked in both directions, as I was acutely aware of the sense of ‘remembrance’ or ‘commemoration’ that often pervaded this reminiscence, as Don Fowler tragically died young while I was an undergraduate. This served to ‘thicken’ my reception of the preceding fragments, as I realised that with the time elapsed between event and recollection in each case, these


memories were likely both pervaded by this additional commemorative layer or texture. Such thickening has occasionally been a feature of co-reminiscence with friends, and serves to demonstrate that our memories have an ‘intertextuality’ which is to an extent out of our hands.

We might thus turn to Gadamer’s characterisation of understanding as an ‘event’ in which neither text not interpreter can be clearly defined as either subject or object. In understanding Krell’s introduction of memory as project, and the question of the identity of the ‘we’ that remembers, it may not be appropriate to speak - as I have so far - of a ‘remembering subject’. There are a couple of other ‘ways in’ to this insight into memory. Heidegger’s neologism in Being and Time dissuades us from bringing conventional notions of agency into the threefold temporal structure of Dasein, the being for whom its own being is an issue. Hogan draws attention to Gadamer’s interesting formulation of the “conversation that we ourselves are” – a dialogue in which our identity is what is at stake (Gadamer 1975: 340). Heidegger’s conception of the ‘project’ could be understood as a hermeneutics of memory: each of the recollections described above interprets the past in the present moment in the light of future plans. Thus one’s own life history is ever capable of being interpreted anew, and new moments of significance might be identified – we never remember the same way twice, any more than we understand the same way twice. However, such recollections are constrained by the possibilities inherent in the being of Dasein.

Considering the way in which possibilities might be preserved in being leads to a conception of memory that has not yet been considered here, one which is captured to an extent in Casey’s concept of the “unresolved remainder” (2000b: 266 – 267). Casey identifies Heidegger’s contribution to phenomenology to be the stress on the realm of being-in-the-world, the realm of “all that remained over after an intentional analysis of...consciousness had been accomplished.” This brings us to the possibility of a non-intentional account of memory rooted in the ontology of Dasein, which I promised in my abstract. Our traditionally epistemological notions lead us to resist the idea that memory might be rooted in our lived being in a way which goes beyond simple understandings of habit or ‘body memory.’ However, Gadamer writes that, “It is time to rescue the phenomenon of memory from being regarded as a psychological faculty and to see it as an essential element of the finite historical being of man” (1975: 14). As a companion insight to Krell’s challenging observation that our short term retention of knowledge relies on a forgetting of the self, we might add that the self remembers its ongoing transformation unknowingly.

This can be extended to explain a problem identified at the outset of the paper – how to explain how the opening up of worlds of possibility may be ‘remembered’ even when this is not retained in reflective consciousness, or how transformational education manifests in the memory apart from in those moments which are recalled as epiphanies or awakenings. I am occasionally saddened when I realise that no particular moment of intimacy I share with my infant son will be remembered in his adult life, and yet these moments will be preserved in our relationship, in that they will form the continuous ‘background’ of our future interactions: any judgements I have been able to make about my own father’s affection for me were based on an interpretation of contemporary events that only showed up against just such a background in my own being. As Merleau-Ponty writes: “Van Gogh’s paintings have their place in me for all time, a step is taken from which I cannot retreat, and, even though I retain no clear recollection of the pictures which I have seen, my whole subsequent aesthetic experience will be that of someone who has become acquainted with the painting of Van Gogh.” My own epiphany (as well as Said’s and Nicholson’s) is preconditioned by my lived memory, and these and other transformative experiences are retained in the memory of my being, regardless of whether they can be recalled in reflective consciousness. “We are, as Proust declared, perched on a pyramid of past life, and if we do not see this, it is because we are obsessed by objective thought” (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: 457).

What of my other aim: that I would illustrate the specifically educational value of the remembered epiphany? The secret here is to understand how the memory, in Krell’s words,


‘confounds…the temporal modalities’ – or to resolve the problem of the temporality of the epiphany, and the question of interruption versus continuity. It would be hard to argue that interruption is not a feature of educational experience – any account of education that attempts to do justice to philosophical hermeneutics will need to recognise the continuous “bringing up short” of the interpreter by what is unfamiliar in what had previously been encountered as familiar (Gadamer 1975: 270). However, there is an issue of emphasis here: the ontological account of the relation of memory and education developed above draws our attention not to the importance of remembering what is learned, but in the role that ‘remembering’ plays in any learning experience. Shaun Gallagher, discussing the well-known educational paradox of the Meno, develops a hermeneutic interpretation of Platonic anamnesis, where each event of understanding consists of a recollection of possibilities already inherent in our being, our pre-reflective prejudices or the forestructure of our understanding (1992: 194 – 197). Every event of understanding is characterised by departure and negation, certainly enough, but also by homecoming and recognition.

This is nowhere more apparent than in Heidegger’s discussion of Van Gogh’s painting of the peasant shoes, used by Hogan to illustrate his appropriation of ‘epiphany.’ This painting occasions a truth about the shoes, or rather opens a world of significance in which the shoes are situated. The fact that “the artwork lets us know what shoes are in truth” (Heidegger, 2011: 102) is opposed to the fact that “Everyone knows what shoes consist of” (100). We certainly do not come away from the artwork knowing only about peasant shoes what we knew before. But if the painting is to occasion a disclosure of truth, there must be an element of recognition in what we learn about the shoes. If we have never seen the peasant women for whom the shoes serve as equipment, there is no possibility of us assenting to the truth of the revelation, at least as far as it concerns her world. If the truth that is to be revealed in an educational epiphany concerns the student and her abilities, the student’s life and achievements to that moment must be read in the context of the evaluation: would Nicholson’s recognition of his literary vocation, for example, in my second fragment, have been possible in the context of an ongoing experience of inarticulacy and failure to achieve in literary situations? Thus an experience of return, of coming home to the possibilities of one’s being, accompanies the ecstasis of an epiphany. This is as true of the theological use of the concept as of the secular.

Stephen Hero’s eponymous narrator draws attention to an object’s need to achieve an epiphany. Of the Ballast Office clock he says, “I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin's street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany,” and also (half-joking), “It has not epiphanised yet.” Rather than being fragmentary, a moment frozen in time, this suggests a conception of epiphany as having a duration, as something which gradually unfolds. Richard Kearney, discussing epiphanies in Joyce and Proust (2005), argues for a ‘developmental reading of epiphany’ and offers the possibility that the entire novel Ulysses is itself an epiphany from beginning to end, in which the epiphany of the library scene (“the truth is midway”) “mutates and migrates” throughout the book, and is both prefigured and repeated. He recalls Heidegger’s ‘project of memory’ in his reference to ‘anticipatory memory’, “which recalls the past into the future through the present.” In Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, Marcel undergoes five related epiphanies which are actually experiences of involuntary memory – a chance juxtaposition of sound and sight brings about a recollection of an earlier experience which is now recognised (Kearney refers to anagnoresis) in its fuller significance. Kearney draws attention to this doubling or double epiphany, and to the fact that it is in the recollection that the epiphany occurs. Thus in the moment of epiphany (and again, this is a literary moment, a ‘single annunciation’ with a certain duration and gradual unfolding) the temporal distinction between the remembered experience and the present reflection is weakened. “Marcel the actual author is returning from the future to meet with Marcel the aspirant author of the past. The epiphany of the present serves as the ‘star-crossed road’ where past and future traverse each other.” This is an insight which can be legitimately extended


beyond the literary context, if we agree with Merleau-Ponty that, “Time is not a line but a network of intentionalities” and that “Within things themselves, the future and the past are in a kind of eternal state of pre-existence and survival” (2002: 478). A full grasp of the educational significance of epiphany presupposes not only a departure from epistemological or representational accounts of memory but also an account of memory’s temporal structure that moves away from traditional metaphors of a succession of events with a given causal direction.

I propose that descriptions of epiphanies, such as those offered by Said and Nicholson, do not constitute interruptions to an ordinary past experience of some kind but constitute an interpretation in the present moment of a continuous transformative process. However, the recollections of the past which purport to describe transformative epiphanies in fact represent a fusion (verschmelzung) of the remembering present with the material of the past - where material should be understood as the “native soil” of recollection (Casey, 2000b: 263) rather than the factual contents of learning that could be assessed or tested. As such, epiphanies represent aspects of the individual’s projected self-understanding that arise from possibilities inaugurated in the past gathered together (‘recollected’) into an originary moment, rather than interruptions of past experience. It is as the writer that he now is that Nicholson appreciates the significance of his earlier experience. Said lends a particular significance to his recollection: in the sentence immediately following the account cited, he attributes the intellectual incentive for his awakening to the experience of being “out of place” (1999: 231). He thus alludes to the title of his memoir and gathers together the whole narrative movement of his autobiography into a single moment – this is certainly the quintessential literary expression of the Zusammenhang des Lebens. Particular educational epiphanies constitute the “gift that keeps on giving” and are significant only to the extent that they continue to offer possibilities for the disclosure of future projects and the affirmation of identity – in short, to continue to be memories that are in themselves educational. The limitations of space allow a brief first foray into the implications of these observations for educational practice. The role of the teacher as the evoker, who calls students forth into the acknowledgement of the possibilities inherent in their being, is clear in both Hogan and Smeyers, but note the explicitly vocational nature of both Said’s and Nicholson’s epiphanies. Mine more haltingly so – perhaps as befits the recollection of someone who remains only haltingly aware of their vocation. I included my own ‘epiphany’ in this paper even though I was aware it had less claim to representing a momentary experience than its two models. I am more satisfied about this now that I have offered a problematisation of the sudden or momentary nature of the epiphany, and implicated the present reflection on the past experience in the notion of ‘epiphany’. I have often wondered whether I have a ‘bad’ memory, but I also suspect that pulling together one’s sense of vocation into a neat originary event requires a certain literary collusion with memory that I did not have the inclination (or artistic ability?) to perform. All of the epiphanies discussed here can in fact be arranged along a spectrum of more or less self-conscious literary endeavour. In that we are to an extent the artists of our own identities, we are also responsible for the way in which we remember our past experiences. But we must not neglect Hogan’s desire to moderate a post-modern sense of identity construction: the recollection of an epiphany is not an arbitrary process, but must belong to the possibilities inherent in our being; it must be rooted in Casey’s ‘native soil’ of experience. The native soil of memory recalls the ‘earth’ of the work of art, and this is a connection that is consciously made by Krell, who situates the solution of the problem of conservation/ construction, passivity/activity, storehouse/ interior decorator in “a circle neither of heaven nor hell but of world and earth” (1982: 505). While Hogan sees the student as the ‘material’ of education, and Smeyers the subject matter, in which new possibilities can shine forth, what emerges in this paper is the possibility of the past as the ‘material’ of memory, which calls for a no less poetic engagement.


My discussion of the halting nature of my own recollected epiphany with friends and colleagues drew my attention to the possibility that there are others, much later in life than I, who cannot and have never been able to recall similar transformative experiences. Mine even was a one-of-a-kind sort of reminiscence. On might be inclined to see education for epiphany as a very hit and miss affair, or “largely an invisible and unverifiable process” (Nicholson 2011: 75). The developmental understanding of epiphany offered here (as opposed to a fragmentary) at least offers the possibility of seeing students as always ‘on the way’ to epiphany, but nevertheless there are certain uncomfortable implications. The seeds of epiphany may require, in Krell’s words, a certain “darkness” and “proper growing time” (Krell 2011: 87). Kearney (2005) in his discussion of ‘posthumous epiphany’, points out that in Proust, the seed planted in Marcel must die before it can bear fruit. This necessitates that in most cases teachers will not see the final fruit of their labours, or even gain evidential insights into which of their labours are likely to bear fruit in the long term. We will need, in any case, to attune our judgement to the notion of an epiphany-in-progress. We might also want to develop the ways in which we respond to (and encourage?) more negative epiphanies – Stephen Dedalus’ realisation that he should “cease to strive”, or the second-rate footballer’s recognition that he will never be a professional. Not only are Said and Nicholson’s epiphanies both clearly vocational, they are also both realisations of a literary vocation. Similarly, both Marcel and Stephen have their central epiphanies in libraries, and each concerns the kind of writer they will go on to be. It may simply be that if we look to novels or academic literature for epiphanies, these are the kinds of epiphany we will find. But what if the achievement of epiphany is an inescapably literary endeavour? It may be that teacher-poets will have to focus not only on calling forth possibilities from both students and their subject matter, but will have to pay attention to the capacity for achieving epiphany itself and develop it in their students – make poets of them (in the way that Marcel was only able to achieve his epiphany after his “apprenticeship to signs”). It cannot be that the capacity to achieve epiphany might be denied to students who do not find themselves at home in libraries in the manner of Proust or Joyce. Perhaps this points toward the contribution that more technical (or explicitly vocational) curriculum subjects might play in a transformative, ontological account of education, subjects which might sometimes be perceived as playing a less significant part in the formation of identity than others in which questions of meaning and value are more explicitly addressed – what accounts or experiences of epiphany might be provided within these regional ontologies? This might be an interesting point of departure for specialists in other educational fields.


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(1962) Being and Time, Oxford: Blackwell (2011) ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in Krell, D F (ed) Basic writings: Martin Heidegger, London: Routledge Classics, 89 - 135

Hogan, P (2004) ‘The Politics of Identity and the Epiphanies of Learning’ in Carr, W (ed) The Routledge Falmer Reader in the Philosophy of Education, London: RoutledgeFalmer (2010) The New Significance of Learning: Imagination’s Heartwork, London: Routledge

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(1972) ‘Phenomenology of memory: some implications for education’ in Curtis, B and Mays, W (eds) Phenomenology and Education. London: Methuen (1982) ‘Phenomenology of Memory from Husserl to Merleau-Ponty’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 42:4, 492 – 505 (2011) (ed) Basic writings: Martin Heidegger, London: Routledge Classics

Merleau-Ponty, M (2002) Phenomenology of Perception, trans Colin Firth, London: Routledge Nicholson, G (2011) ‘The Education of the Teacher’ in Fairfield, P (ed) Education, Dialogue and Hermeneutics, London: Continuum Ricoeur, P (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting, London: University of Chicago Press Said, E (1999) Out of place: a memoir, London: Granta Books Smeyers, P (2002) ‘The Origin: Education, Philosophy and a Work of Art’ in Peters, M (ed) Heidegger, Education and Modernity, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield

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