Walter Benjamin's contribution to education is analyzed

The result of a study conducted at UNESP: a book that offers reflections on the impact of German philosophical concepts on contemporary education.

By Fábio de Castro

Agência FAPESP – With a view to understanding the contributions of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) to the field of education, Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP) researchers analyzed texts in which the German thinker developed the concepts of “experience” and “cultural formation,” which were formulated as an attempt to offer alternatives to the widely accepted belief that human development is rooted in the rigidity of scientific knowledge and Cartesian thought.

The book “Experiência e formação em Walter Benjamin” (Experience and Formation in Walter Benjamin), recently released by Editora Unesp, presents the results of the master’s research conducted by Caroline Mitrovitch. The dissertation, funded through a FAPESP fellowship, was defended at Unesp’s Science and Technology School in Presidente Prudente (SP) under the orientation of Divino José da Silva.

In the book, Mitrovitch analyzes three essays by Benjamin that are centered on concepts of cultural formation and experience: “Experience and poverty,” “On some motifs in Baudelaire” and “On the concept of history.”

According to the author, although the study has an essentially philosophical and conceptual character, it also has an intentional approach that focuses on the fundaments of education.

“The objective was to discuss the concepts of experience and cultural formation proposed by Benjamin with a view to projecting them for the formulation of a new concept for education in contemporary society,” the author said in an interview with Agência FAPESP.

In her reflection, Mitrovitch seeks to understand how the concepts of experience and cultural formation contribute to a vision that opposes the hegemony of Cartesian thought and logic, creating more possibilities for the process of personal development.
 
“I sought to bring these concepts to contemporary education. In education, it is as if the source of knowledge is rooted in something beyond the hegemonic order, affirming the reality of a degraded and fragmented day-to-day. All this makes sense if we consider that the background for Benjamin’s concept of experience is a notion of non-representational knowledge,” she explains.

The author explains that her reflection on the meaning of education was based on an ethical-aesthetic analysis of Benjamin’s texts. “It is an ethical reflection because it looks not only at education, but what it should be. And it is aesthetic because we are speaking of a narrative that describes the ‘real’ in a more artistic manner than the simple rational portrait of reality,” she says.

In Benjamin’s thinking, the universal character of knowledge is not abstract because it deals with knowledge that has no pretense to being scientific discussion. This knowledge is an aesthetic concept, and as such, the concept of education that he refers to brings with it an aesthetic dimension, merging with the subject in concreteness,” says Mitrovitch.

The synthesis of the book’s proposal consists of seeking to understand that in the universe of a German author, experience can be considered formative, and it seeks to understand the type of formation that is involved with an experience.

“This experience is based on the idea of common sense, which is not, in essence, the universality of reason, but rather has its meaning instituted by the community. Renewing the common world is what characterizes the formative dimension of Benjamin’s concepts of experience,” she says.

The formative dimension of the concept of experience is possible, according to the author, due to the creation of feelings that flourish given the conceptual abandonment of a thought by images – a narrative structure closer to the urban landscape than the background of modern life.

In this manner, formative experience does not have the pretense of rooting any knowledge whatsoever, but only affirms openness to the meaning of knowing. Benjamin’s concept of formative experience could thus be characterized as meaning the fight for life, the capacity to survive culture, and doing so with a smile,” highlights Mitrovitch.

“An ethical aesthetic attitude presents itself as an alternative to practical theory in renouncing pragmatism, and consequently idealism, in favor of the poetry of education, and in favor of the creation of niche experiences of knowledge without the ambition of exposing unquestionable truths,” she says.