Kierkegaard or Sisyphus? 286 P H I L O S O P H Y O F E D U C A T I O N 2 0 1 3 PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION 2013 ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ Cris Mayo, editor © 2013 Philosophy of Education Society ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ ⎜ Urbana, Illinois Kierkegaard or Sisyphus? Education’s Meliorative Despair Kip Kline Lewis University Cornel West has said that the best kind of education is one in which a student realizes that his or her “worldview rests on pudding.” 1 He is also fond of describing the same notion as a necessary and good kind of “unhousing” of parochial beliefs. This seems to be related to what Peter Roberts has in mind in his description and defense of despair’s role in education. He says, “Education promotes not greater certainty but greater doubt — and with doubt can come despair.” Roberts’s essay, “Education, Faith, and Despair: Wrestling with Kierkegaard,” successfully exam- ines this seminal notion of Kierkegaard’s in light of philosophical thought in education. That there is some kind of relationship between education and despair that is worthy of exploration is made clear through the essay. Ultimately, Roberts makes three arguments related to despair and education: (1) Contrary to a common belief, despair is not a problem requiring a solution. (2) Education, rather than assisting us in averting despair, can be a force that deepens it. And (3) this is not a reason to avoid education. On the contrary, it provides an impetus for pursuing education all the more. Roberts suggests that the despair associated with education is a kind of despairing of the self. He says, “In becoming educated, it is expected that we will come to question much that was hitherto taken for granted, such that we will never be the same again. Education renders the world problematic; it treats not only the objects to be known but knowers themselves as subjects for investigation,” and later he asks, “What … is at risk when we submit ourselves to the process of education? It is, as Kierkegaard recognized, ourselves.” In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard states, “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.” The idea here is that the self comes onto the scene as an activity of relation. We might say that the self is not so much a thing, but an action. When there is an imbalance in this activity, we experience despair. And this imbalance (here I am taking the liberty of steering around God or “the power which posited” the self as Roberts and Michael Theunissen claim is permissible) refers either to desire for too much finitude or desire for too much infinitude. As Theunissen describes, We do not want to be what we are as human beings who are defined by both necessity and finitude as well as possibility and infinitude, and we want to be what we are not, that is, a pure possibility and infinitude, which in its purity is inhuman, or a pure necessity and finitude, which alienates us from our being human. 2 Roberts says that there is a sense in which “we risk it all” in the educative process because “we can never go back” to not knowing what we now know about the world and about ourselves. “Our despair resides, then, in the imprisonment we face as hostages to our own memories, our own heightened awareness of injustices that were hitherto obscured for us, our own minds full of accumulated knowledge,” he claims. Perhaps this is related to our not wanting to be ourselves in that awareness of