Stud Philos Educ DOI 10.1007/s11217-015-9488-x
Kierkegaard, Despair and the Possibility of Education: Teaching Existentialism Existentially Ada S. Jaarsma1
•
Kyle Kinaschuk2 • Lin Xing3
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Abstract Written collaboratively by two undergraduate students and one professor, this article explores what it would mean to teach existentialism ‘‘existentially.’’ We conducted a survey of how Existentialism is currently taught in universities across North America, concluding that, while existentialism courses tend to resemble other undergraduate philosophy courses, existentialist texts challenge us to rethink conventional teaching practices. Looking to thinkers like Kierkegaard, Beauvoir and Arendt for insights into the nature of pedagogy, as well as recent work by Gert Biesta, we lay out the four qualities that we propose characterize ‘‘existentialist’’ teaching practices: an emphasis on teaching over learning and on the ‘‘how’’ over the what; the cultivation of newness as well as capacities for resistance. Reflecting on the significance of existentialism for classroom dynamics, we conclude by examining the tensions between existentialist commitments to freedom and prevailing trends in higher education. This essay raises questions about the emancipatory potential of existentialist philosophies, especially in the context of undergraduate classrooms. Keywords Existentialism Pedagogy Gert Biesta Søren Kierkegaard Constructivism Despair
& Ada S. Jaarsma
[email protected] Kyle Kinaschuk
[email protected] Lin Xing
[email protected] 1
Department of Humanities, Mount Royal University, 4825 Mount Royal Gate SW, Calgary, AB T3E 6K6, Canada
2
Department of English, University of Toronto, St. George Campus, 170 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5R 2M8, Canada
3
Mount Royal University, 4825 Mount Royal Gate SW, Calgary, AB T3E 6K6, Canada
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As our title suggests, we are interested in what it would mean to read, learn and teach existentialism existentially. What happens when we invite existentialist texts to teach us how to teach? Are there approaches to the classroom that emulate the commitments of existentialists to the transformative nature of subjectivity, passion and freedom? Thinking about the three words in our title, the questions that motivate the essay are the following. First, what prompts are given by existentialist thinkers themselves about how existentialism might be taught ‘‘existentially’’? In this essay, we look in particular to Søren Kierkegaard, a ninety century existentialist thinker who greatly influenced twenty century existentialists like Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt, for such cues. Second, how might such prompts be translated into what we would like to call existentialist teaching practices? Third, taking seriously the challenges posed by the corporatization of higher education, what kinds of resistances to neo-liberal pressures might become possible through such teaching? This third question evinces our own commitments to engaging with existentialism as an emancipatory mode of inquiry. Given the vested hopes that we find in existentialist writings, hopes for liberatory praxis and transformative modes of existence, we wonder about the extent to which such hopes translate into classroom contexts. Conversely, we wonder whether existentialist teaching might yield insights into the hopes of existentialist texts: might unexpected moments in the classroom deepen our understanding of what is at stake in texts by thinkers like Kierkegaard? We pose this question in order to confront its ramifications for real-life classrooms; it is not an abstract matter, but rather a pressing issue for embodied and actual lives, the ways in which existentialist commitments bear upon spaces like classrooms.1 In what follows, we lay out three qualities that seem to be at work within ‘‘existentialist’’ teaching practices. Put briefly, we propose that existentialist teaching demonstrates the following qualities: a pedagogical approach that is at odds with ‘‘constructivism,’’ a framework that characterizes many prevailing practices in higher education, by emphasizing teaching over learning;2 an intensification of the subjective import of the material for students, such that the ‘‘how’’ of the material takes priority over the ‘‘what’’ in ways that foreground the material dynamics of existence; the emergence of newness, which might include new habits or subjective qualities, through an encounter that can be described as an ‘‘event.’’ We also posit a fourth quality, which concerns the capacity to resist ideological imperatives, such as those aligned with the neo-liberal commodification of higher education. Our conclusion examines this hope that existentialist teaching equips students with capacities for resistance. In particular, we look to existential teaching as a way to challenge the disembodied, immaterial, and abstract conception of Philosophy that is all too often evoked by disciplinary conventions. As Charles W. Mills points out, philosophy in North American classrooms—especially philosophy as taught through canonical texts and arguments— presumes abstract generalities that are actually ‘‘covertly particularistic and concrete, in that it is really based on a white experience for which these realities [of slavery, racism and oppression] were not central, not that important’’ (1994, 226). Given that existentialist texts 1
Since we are interested in foregrounding the material import of existentialism, our analysis follows recent work that elaborates materialist, immanent interpretations of Kierkegaard; see Kangas (2007), Burns (2015) and Hughes (2014). For feminist interpretations that explore Kierkegaard’s ontology as relational and embodied, see Assiter (2013) and Battersby (1998).
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‘‘Constructivist’’ pedagogy emphasizes learning over teaching, an emphasis at odds with existentialist insights. For helpful overviews of constructivism, see Sutinen (2008), Splitter (2009), Richardson (2003) and Roth (2011).
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prompt ruptures with the status quo, existentialist teaching should, in principle, undermine the kinds of exclusions that Mills is describing.3 It seems troubling that, despite the commitments of existentialist thinkers to freedom and the new, Existentialism courses—in their methods of instruction and assessment—tend to look like other philosophy courses. What is distinctive about existentialism? We explore this question in the following sections.
What is ‘‘Existentialist’’ Teaching? We focus in this section on the term ‘‘teaching.’’ Our account of teaching stems in particular from the work of Gert Biesta, whose recent research focuses on the quandary we are most interested in: namely, the challenges to teaching posed by prevailing trends in higher education and the pedagogical insights proffered by existentialism for addressing such challenges. Biesta’s diagnosis of the state of teaching in higher education is a dire one. And it hinges upon a distinction, found within Kierkegaard’s account of knowledge-acquisition, between learning and being taught, between the maieutic or Socratic exchange of knowledge between student and teacher (what Biesta calls ‘‘learning’’) and the existentially transformative moment of teaching (what he calls ‘‘being taught’’). According to Biesta, we need to distinguish between ‘‘learning’’ and ‘‘being taught’’ because only the latter phrase is able to approximate the transformative dynamics of teaching. It is all too common, he writes, that the classroom is oriented entirely towards learning, an orientation that he finds so problematic that it deserves a neologism: the learnification of education (2010, 18–19). Biesta describes learnification in the following terms: ‘‘When students learn from their teacher, we could say that they use their teachers as a resource just like a book or like the internet. Moreover, when they learn from their teachers, they bring their teachers and what their teachers do or say within their own circle of understanding, within their own construction’’ (2013, 456–457). This last word is key because it flags one of the central ideals of constructivism: namely that the student possesses—always already—the resources necessarily for constructing knowledge. When a classroom is governed by the dictates of learnification, it is the student who is prioritized, even adulated, as the repository of knowledge. The teacher, in contrast, is deprioritized to the extent that she could easily be replaced by other resources. In the constructivist paradigm, Biesta points out, the teacher gives nothing new to the student, acting as a midwife who helps the student to recover or give birth to her own knowledge. On these terms, there can be no radical shift in the student’s self-understanding or in how the student engages with knowledge-claims because the student always already has access to the knowledge—and has simply forgotten it; there is no pedagogical event. As Plato puts it: ‘‘if we acquired this knowledge before birth, then lost it at birth, and then later by the use of our senses in connection with those objects we mentioned, we recovered the knowledge we had before, would not what we call learning be the recovery of our own knowledge’’ (Plato 1977).4 3
Mills advocates a pedagogy that takes ‘‘the historical reality of a partitioned social ontology as one’s starting-point rather than the ideal abstraction of universal equality’’ (1994, 229). In this article, we interpret existentialist texts along the non-ideal lines that Mills is arguing for. There are, of course, liberal and idealizing readings of existentialism, but we follow the cues of readers like Gordon (1995), Ahmed (2006), Jaarsma (2009), and Mann (2014) who read existentialism as critical and non-ideal.
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Biesta might be too kind to constructivism—or too ungenerous to Socrates—in this characterization of constructivist pedagogy, however. Considering how Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms explicate the transformative impact of a teacher like Socrates, we wonder if constructivism is better understood as a simulation of Socratic teaching. After all, if the teacher is akin to any other resources, is there really the kind of impassioned encounter with a teacher that we find in exchanges with Socrates?
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In contrast, Biesta proposes that we bring teaching back to the classroom and, by foregrounding teaching instead of learning, commit to an account of teaching that involves transformative dynamics for the student. If students are ‘‘being taught’’ rather than learning, he explains, then teaching is marked by an event that disrupts what students already know. Unlike the Socratic model of learning, which presupposes a stable and reliable temporality (while the student has forgotten what she already knows, she has access to the past and can recall this knowledge), teaching only has meaning ‘‘if it carries with it a notion of ‘transcendence,’ that is, if it is understood as something that comes from the outside and adds rather than that it just confirms what is already there’’ (2013, 453). Biesta’s insights help us to understand why Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Haufniensis is so convinced that it is possibility that is ultimately educative (1981, 156). Interpreting ‘‘transcendence’’ as a formal term, to confront the limits of my epistemic capacities is to encounter an abyss that precedes and exceeds my own temporal frameworks. As David Kangas puts this same point, time only becomes eventful when I give up my grasp upon the re-presentable (2007, 152). It is only by giving up this grasp that I can learn that ‘‘in possibility all things are equally possible’’ (1981, 156): my world, while given, is entirely contingent. The anxiety that results from such an awakening is the site, Haufniensis explains, of education.5 Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms do frequently praise Socrates as an exemplary teacher. We could say that perhaps Biesta moves too quickly past the Socratic model of teaching in his convincing critique of constructivism, given that Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms emulate, themselves, a certain maieutic or Socratic approach in their own writings.6 The pseudonyms insist, however, that we consider the limitations posed by Socratic accounts of learning. What does it mean to go beyond Socrates, they ask? What happens when one’s own subjective truths turn out to be untruths because we cannot recollect the truth through our own resources or temporal framings? What fear and trembling emerge when we, as students, lay claim to the possibility of being taught? And how do fear and trembling undo the embodied habits by which we perpetuate our untruths? In Kierkegaard’s texts, we find these questions explored in depth from varying pseudonymous perspectives. What the pseudonyms seem to agree on is that, if it is possible to go beyond Socrates, this possibility takes place through two kinds of truth-giving: the teacher must provide truth to the student but must also cultivate the conditions for the student to recognize the truth as such. The student undergoes an epistemological transformation, both in terms of the content of knowledge and in terms of capacities for knowledge-acquisition. We can phrase this in more negative terms, as Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms do, as encounters with despair, anxiety and uncertainty. On existential terms, education prompts doubt rather than certainty, reorienting the very focus of pedagogical activity. As Peter Roberts explains, education ‘‘treats not only the objects to be known but knowers themselves as subjects for investigation’’ (2013a, 279). In other words, the
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And so, as Roberts observes, ‘‘To be educated is to live, constantly, with tensions—and the most important of those tensions, between hope and despair, can never be resolved’’ (2013b, 472).
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Or more precisely, to follow Rubenstein’s analysis, perhaps Biesta is focusing too squarely on Climacus’s rejection of Socrates in Philosophical Fragments to the exclusion of Climacus’s subsequent affirmation of Socrates in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Rubenstein’s reconstruction of this double move by Climacus resonates with our account of existentialist teaching: ‘‘There is thus an irreducible difference at the heart of subjectivity—there is no self-identical self…. Is the Socratic encounter antisocial? Is it solipsistic and self-identical? Hardly—it is creative and forward-moving and dynamic, precisely because the Socratic method maintains difference. Without difference, there can be no relation’’ (2002, 361, italics in original).
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emphasis of existentialist teaching is on becoming itself, rather than on particular doctrinal or canonical objects of belief.7 In this transformation, the student confronts her own sources of willed resistance: resistance to the enterprise of engaging with new truth claims. Perhaps there are epistemological commitments that she either holds or refuses to hold, commitments that become startlingly foregrounded when the student’s own relations to knowledge become at issue. Why am I studying at all? Why do I hold certain ‘‘truths’’ sacrosanct and others negligible? Am I guilty of over-reaching the scope of my claims, such that my once-universalizing assumptions are suddenly suspect as ableist, racist or otherwise problematic? At what point might I be willing to become open to truths that I simply cannot or would not entertain on my own devices? Notice that these questions are subjective, asking the self to tune into her own embodied perspective, but they are also relational and embodied, compelling the self to confront the willed despair expressed by her own existence in relation to a broader ecological world. Despair, Kangas explains, ‘‘puts the self into contact with its own givenness and, thereby, with givenness as such’’ (2013, 993). As we saw earlier, another word for givenness as such is possibility: things are given for me in this way, but they could be entirely otherwise. And so, by forging encounters with one’s own situated self, existentialist teaching prompts the kinds of questions that are akin to feminist, queer, crip and anti-racist pedagogies more generally: questions that flag, for the self, the inflated and naturalized status that is all-too-often granted to one’s own attributes, habits and identityclaims. What is essential in this discussion, especially in terms of our claim that existentialist teaching undermines constructivist pedagogies, is an insight, one that we would argue is upheld by all canonical existentialist thinkers, that there is no ultimate realm of knowledge or truth that is accessible to us as truth-seekers. We are, each of us, caught in binds of selfdeception. (Put differently, we cannot step outside of the temporal flow of existence, a flow that we can only confront as an abyss that undoes our timelines and representations). Neither teacher nor classroom can undo this predicament. The telos of existentialist teaching, therefore, does not lie in ideals of self-knowledge: we will never become transparent to ourselves. Rather, its telos lies in our capacity as students to awaken to our own self-deception—and, of course, to awaken to the ways in which teachers and others lure us, indirectly.8 Socrates himself was an effective, deceptive teacher.9 Just as we do not want to make the case for naı¨ve portrayals of ‘‘being taught,’’ ones that fall prey to the assumptions of constructivism, we do not want to ignore the fact that teaching involves degrees of deception. What matters is the mode by which such deception is enacted, the ethos by which teacher and students engage in these encounters, and the hope—
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In this way, we share the interpretation, expressed by thinkers like Connolly (1999) and Jager (2006), that Kierkegaard’s most impassioned form of existence, namely the religious, is post-secular. Put in simple terms, by privileging becoming over belief, Kierkegaard’s religious existence is at odds with the secularizing (and objectifying) accounts that predominate in liberal societies.
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As Arcilla argues, methods that presume to be transparent and rational are merely, on existential terms, indifferent to the particularities of students (2013, 492). In contrast to the disinterestedness upheld by thinkers like Rawls, Arcilla elaborates an account of education oriented towards the interested, partial and particular qualities of existence. (Arcilla stages his analysis in the first-person so that his claims resonate with his methods, an evocative example of what it might mean to do philosophy existentially).
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Kierkegaard explains, ‘‘Do not be deceived by the word deception. One can deceive a person out of what is true, and—to recall old Socrates—one can deceive a person into what is true. Yes, in only this way can a deluded person actually be brought into what is true—by deceiving him’’ (1998, 53).
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emphasized so beautifully by Biesta—that ‘‘being taught’’ involves some kind of transcendence that undoes the self’s own vested attachments, timelines and truths. One of our motivations for exploring the existential dimensions of teaching is our recognition of the fact that despair, including for example the vested despair of white privilege, yields manifest, material effects in our classrooms. An existential hope that selves might confront their own despair, then, is also a materialist hope that such confrontations yield more relationally vibrant and inclusive spaces—including spaces like the classroom. Such hope offers a way in which to understand why Beauvoir is so adamant that it is the freedom of others that keeps us from ‘‘hardening in the absurdity of facticity’’ (1976, 71): freedom, becoming-otherwise, is a possibility because of the relationality of our shared world. If my existence is marked by whiteness and if I become more attuned to my complicity with racist systems, confronting the ways in which I enact the habits of whiteness, I become open to its horror; my objectification of others, once a mundane and unnoticed effect of white privilege, slips into an encounter with the finite, actual givenness of my situation. If whiteness can be experienced as an arrogance of the finite, the hope is that such despair yields a becoming-otherwise that is ecologically impassioned, unwilling to perpetuate the habits of white privilege.10 Biesta’s account foregrounds the role of the teacher (teaching requires a teacher) while instilling it with humility.11 This is the key point: rather than inhering in a professor’s doctoral degree or other external forms of validation, the teacher’s identity hinges upon the event of teaching. The teacher occupies an unstable category, and so too does the student; to be a student does not mean to be enrolled at a university as a ‘‘student,’’ but to receive the gift of teaching, which, as we will see, is contingent and cannot be anticipated. Biesta explains that ‘‘the identity of the teacher has to be understood as a sporadic identity, an identity that only emerges at those moments when the gift of teaching is received’’ (2013, 457, emphasis added). This account destabilizes the positions of ‘‘student’’ and ‘‘teacher.’’ We can, depending on the context, be either teachers or students; perhaps we can even be both at once. We note two existential qualities, in particular, that yield teaching’s transformational effects. First, there is an emphasis on the how of teaching that awakens the student’s subjective engagement with the material. There might be a shift in a student’s sense of self, such that her queries, posed in the context of a lesson, gain a degree of urgency or suddenly implicate the very dynamics of the classroom itself. As Climacus puts it, the student might unexpectedly profess that ‘‘subjectivity is truth’’ (1992, 204), a claim that calls into question the assumptions that tend to govern all classrooms, and then might go on to ponder whether, actually, ‘‘subjectivity is untruth’’ (1992, 207). In this latter case, the student’s own trajectory opens up to what Biesta is affirming as ‘‘transcendence’’: to being taught by another. This double movement is what ultimately constitutes ‘‘being taught.’’ The second quality is an emphasis on the contingency of teaching. It is possible that, despite a professor’s claims to authority, students are not actually ‘‘being taught’’ in a given course. It is also possible that, while students might learn knowledge in ways that do not disturb their assumptions or conceptual frameworks (leaving them ‘‘indifferent,’’ as Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Climacus might say), they leave a course without having 10 One way to examine this kind of subjective encounter with despair is to explore the question, ‘‘how does it feel like to be a white problem?’’ For an edited collection that poses this very question and assesses a range of responses, see Yancy (2014). 11 Kierkegaard’s ‘‘double-truth giving’’ provides an existentialist corrective to scenarios in which, as Biesta puts it, teaching is understood to be merely ‘‘accidental to learning’’ (2013, 454).
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encountered the possibility of the new. This is key because the transformative effects of teaching hinge upon the very possibility of the new. In Arendt’s terminology, teaching contributes to the emergence of natality.12 The new, however, cannot be predetermined by exercises or lesson plans, not even by instructors who are following Biesta’s cues and are employing the persuasive deceits of teaching practices; its contingency is an essential component of existentialist teaching. And while we cannot script the new, we can examine the ramifications of pedagogies that fail to foster such edifying confrontations with despair. For example, as Robin DiAngelo’s research demonstrates, white habits and subjectivities are often so resistant to confronting despair that they exhibit defensive, argumentative behavior—behavior that DiAngelo describes ironically as ‘‘white fragility’’ (2011, 55). In order for classrooms to become more emancipatory spaces, we need to forge strategies by which to call out such behavior as existentially, as well as politically and morally, abhorrent. DiAngelo suggests that white selves need to ‘‘learn to learn’’ in order to become willing participants in undermining racism (2011, 61). In the next sections, we explore the existential nature of ‘‘learning to learn,’’ as well as its liberatory aspirations.
Subjectivity is Untruth In our discussion of Biesta’s affirmation of existentialist teaching, we briefly referred to the ‘‘double-truth giving’’ that marks the event of teaching. In this section, we explore Climacus’s account of what Biesta affirms as ‘‘being taught’’ in light of classroom experiences and our own subjective reflections.13 Climacus makes a distinction between how an individual approaches ‘‘objective knowledge’’ and ‘‘subjective knowledge.’’ This distinction hinges on the object of knowledge itself. Discussing this passage in our own Existentialism classroom, we searched for examples of ‘‘objective’’ forms of knowledge; we contrasted these examples with what we recognized as ‘‘subjective’’ forms of knowledge in order to call out their seemingly indifferent or unquestionable status in our own epistemic lives. Our discussion, in other words, called forth the kinds of diagnoses that we described above as confrontations with despair. Our ‘‘objective’’ examples ranged from the Enlightenment ideals of objectivity (if we need to point to ‘‘logic’’ or ‘‘reason’’ as the ultimate qualities of knowledge, are we not exemplifying an obsession with objectivity as such?) to dialogue (if we follow a thinker like Habermas and translate Enlightenment ideals into the classroom, are we not simply shifting the realm of objectivity to the intersubjective back-and-forth of discussion?) to grades (most students in our class seemed to agree that this example posed dire
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Arendt introduces the concept of natality in Love and Saint Augustine and develops it in The Human Condition. Natality is a capacity for newness that is intricately bound to the possibility to begin again and to participate in political action. Arendt explains that ‘‘the beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting’’ (1998, 9). Natality is integral to plurality: political action allows individuals to disclose their identities while also holding out the possibility for beginning anew. For a fuller explication of Arendt’s conception of natality, see Fry (2014).
13 This exploration of existentialist teaching could just as productively occur through close readings of passages by Beauvoir, Nietzsche, Sartre, Fanon or Arendt. It would be valuable, moreover, to examine the tensions between existentialist thinkers about what a concept like ‘‘subjective truth’’ means in the context of pedagogical encounters.
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ramifications for our classroom activities: if our knowledge-gathering projects are always animated by the quest for high grades, are we not caught in the binds of external validation?). What seems crucial about these examples is that they each serve as a kind of existential diagnosis: of our selves as knowers (our own vested ideals and habits) and of the force exerted by knowledge claims (of the ways in which truth-claims of others might over-ride those of our own) and of our own classroom (the affective, somatic context in which we are seeking—or not seeking—knowledge). We note that these diagnoses are especially marked by degrees of self-reflexivity. One way to cultivate existentialist teaching, we think, is to forge possibilities for students to recognize the operative epistemic and behavioural norms at work in the classroom. What is essential in this discussion, however, is the caveat that such forging is only ever proffered as a possibility. Each student needs to be able to opt out of existential reflection or self-diagnosis, at any time; we are adamant that, while a course’s design might allow for subjective engagement, there needs to be many degrees of freedom for students, including the freedom to move through a course with what Climacus would call indifference.14 After all, the freedom that marks the nature of individual existence (what Sartre calls ontological freedom) includes the freedom to choose to choose—or to evade such choice all together.15 The ever-present spectre of grading emerged frequently in the course of our reflections. Kierkegaard predicted this very situation, pointing out that, in the present age, freedom collides with an increasingly widespread tendency to measure phenomena like learning through aggregates (such as the GPA). Such numbers, Kierkegaard warns, externalize and level the passion of existence into bland mirages of enthusiasm (1978, 69): all the more persuasive as proxies for passion because they replace singularity with the mechanical functions of coins, committees, and statistics. Aggregates might seem as if they capture the existential happenings of learning, but, he explains, they only impoverish our spirited capacities for becoming-otherwise. As we turned from Kierkegaard to Beauvoir, wondering about how to undermine the subjective pull of grades, we became caught by the distinction, asserted early in The Second Sex between being (or immanence) and becoming (or transcendence). In her own reflections, Lin wrote, ‘‘Am I being-student or am I becoming-student?’’, a diagnostic question with enormous consequences for her relationship to her role as student. One way to understand being-student, she concluded, is in terms of that student’s indifference to being taught, an indifference marked by too-attentive focus on being graded and securing ‘‘objective’’ validation. A form of bad faith, this scenario involves self-deception, in that the focus on grading stands in for more impassioned forms of interest. Even raising the possibility of becoming-student shifts the hold exerted by such self-deception, exposing it as contingent rather than inevitable. Lin’s query prompts us to consider the limitations of teaching itself: given that we were not able to evade the necessity of grades in our 14 An indifferent student remains unchanged; there is no moment of ‘‘being taught.’’ Following Biesta, we could say that regardless of whether a student earns an A in a course, if she is not transformed then teaching has not occurred. Of course what matters here is the nature of such transformation; we reflect on this in the following section. 15 Sartre writes that ontological freedom cannot be evaded: ‘‘In fact we are a freedom which chooses, but we do not choose to be free. We are condemned to freedom’’ (1984, 623). Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Judge William explains that it is possible to evade choice by choosing not to choose: ‘‘there eventually comes a moment where it is no longer a matter of an Either/Or, not because he has chosen, but because he has refrained from it, which also can be expressed by saying: Because others have chosen for him—or because he has lost himself’’ (1987, 164).
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Existentialism course, was there still a possibility of securing the passions of becoming, the open horizon that Beauvoir explains is the sign of transcendence? Kierkegaard’s portrayal of the present age does suggest that we can hold out hope that religious inwardness might emerge, despite the leveling and spiritless effects of grades, but what exactly does such hope look like in our own classrooms? Lin’s query also leads to uncomfortable, anxiety-provoking reflections about teaching itself. As Lin’s own reflections evince, differing professors enact pedagogy with varying degrees of ‘‘becoming’’ (instructors themselves often animate classrooms with palpable expressions of despair. Are instructors willing to ‘‘become’’ teachers, rather than ‘‘be’’ in accordance with prescribed, predictable scripts? The very shared dynamics of the classroom are at stake in such a question). Existential diagnoses are, by definition, risky. They lead to questions about self-deception, like the one that Lin posed to herself, that prompt anxiety and disrupt classroom conventions. They might prompt students to reflect on the attitudes of their own professors: in a given classroom, is one’s professor interested or disinterested when it comes to truth-seeking? Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms frequently call out professors as exemplary of what Sartre or Beauvoir would call bad faith, more invested in explaining the objective nature of existence than confronting existence subjectively (1992, 145). A tension in our account of existentialist teaching, indeed, might be the fact that, while teachers become more important (as Biesta argues, ‘‘being taught’’ requires a teacher), their deceptive practices become exposed as in need of scrutiny. Existentialist teaching is only possible, indeed, if instructors seek ways to mitigate their own discomfort in the face of students’ scrutiny. And given the materialist dynamics of classrooms, we might pause here and wonder about the variable degrees of freedom enjoyed by professors. Some instructors need worry much less about discomfort, even if their students are paying more attention to their pedagogical practices, because some bodies wield much more epistemic authority than others, given prevailing scripts about whiteness, masculinity, and other marked attributes. Existentialist teaching, it seems, extends beyond the bounds of individual classrooms; it involves finding ways to mitigate the inequalities that mark the contemporary university. After all, as Beauvoir explains, to will my own freedom is to will the freedom of others.16 We can diagnose the existential modalities of instructors, their varying degrees of becoming-otherwise, by reflecting on the ways in which they (or we) enact solidarity and work to establish more emancipatory, accessible universitycommunities.17 Another form of discomfort—one that may be inevitable in the context of existentialist teaching—is the reflexivity that conversations provoke towards the classroom itself. When diagnosing the qualities at work within the classroom, students might start to ask: is our own classroom guilty of conditions that mark bad faith? Are there guiding conceits that structure our behaviour that undermine, rather than enable, our capacity to ‘‘be taught’’? Echoing the terms by which Beauvoir described her own asymmetrical conversations in the introduction to The Second Sex, do more men speak than women in our classroom (2011, 5)? Do more white students speak than students of colour? (And when such dynamics are 16 Keltner points out that, in Beauvoir’s statement, the point is not that I must work for the freedom of others in order to become existentially impassioned myself. Rather, Beauvoir is describing freedom as the simultaneous work of solidarity with others (2006, 208). 17 Greene has, perhaps more than any other thinker, explored the risky but politically vital import of existential pedagogy, especially in terms of subverting racializing exclusions (1988, especially 87–116). Corporatized, neo-liberal universities emphasize excellence in teaching, but at the expense of solidarity, freedom and often the very activities involved with ‘‘being taught.’’ For more on this point, see Jaarsma (2015).
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called out, does white fragility result?) When queer or otherwise dissident dynamics emerge, does the classroom straighten itself through the normalizing practices that Sara Ahmed identifies in her queer phenomenology (2006, 562–68)? Given the importance of such questions, especially for students who are most implicated in whatever classroom dynamics seem to be at work (those whose facticities do not align with the idealizing, white presuppositions of the philosophical canon), it seems essential that existentialist teaching make use of extra-canonical, as well as canonical, curricular texts. In other words, we worry that Existentialism courses that focus solely on the four most-canonical thinkers (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Sartre) will not equip students with sufficiently critical resources by which to identify, think through and call out as existentially problematic the norms of whiteness, able-bodiedness or gender normativity in the classroom.18 After all, as Maggie Nelson demonstrates in her own reflections on studying Existentialism, if every existentialist thinker who embraces his freedom happens to be a man, then as a student it becomes hard not to wonder if women have somehow not yet begun to exist (2007, 112). A word that Climacus uses, over and over, is ‘‘indifferent’’: an individual’s very existence becomes ‘‘indifferent’’ if that person is seeking truth objectively.19 While Climacus distinguishes between objective and subjective objects of knowledge, he goes on to emphasize the distinction between modes of knowledge-acquisition: we can approach knowledge objectively or subjectively. If we are engaging with knowledge objectively, our very existence might be characterized as indifferent or accidental. We lose our openness to uncertainty; we miss the riskiness of existential choice (of choosing to choose, as Kierkegaard puts it) when we look to experts to tell us what to think and how to think. In contrast, an individual’s very existence becomes passionate, engaged, more qualitatively real, when that person is seeking truth subjectively. The how, in such cases, takes priority over the what. When Climacus asserts that ‘‘truth is subjectivity,’’ he is predicting that the quality of our existence intensifies when we take up relations to knowledge subjectively. Here we might return to the first distinction, described above, in which an object of knowledge might be objective or subjective. In line with other existentialist thinkers, Climacus emphasizes the fact that, as individuals, we are existing: we are embodied, situated and finite, always in the process of becoming. Any ‘‘knowing’’ that does not relate to existence is only accidental knowing, Climacus explains (1992, 205). Subjective knowing, then, has to be essentially related to one’s own existence.20 If we were to stop our discussion here, we would find ourselves in a Socratic approach to learning. Indeed, Socrates is the model that Climacus looks up to. No teacher can produce subjective truth for me; Socrates can only be the occasion for my own inwardness. However, in a pedagogically noteworthy turn, Climacus adds a step in his account of 18 In an extensive survey of North American Existentialism courses that we undertook as preparation for writing this article, we discovered that these four thinkers are, to a startling degree, the most represented thinkers on Existentialism syllabi. 19 Climacus writes, ‘‘The way of objective reflection makes the subject accidental, and thereby transforms existence into something indifferent, something vanishing. Away from the subject the objective way of reflection leads to the objective truth, and while the subject in his subjectivity becomes indifferent, the truth also becomes indifferent, and this indifference is precisely its objective validity’’ (173). 20 This movement from objective to subjective knowledge is what tends to characterize existential education. As Saeverot, Reindal, and Wivestad explain in their introduction to a recent special issue on Existentialism and Education: ‘‘[E]xistential education is not about obtaining objective truth, it is rather a matter of obtaining subjective truth’’ (2013, 443).
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knowledge-acquisition. ‘‘But actually,’’ he writes, ‘‘subjectivity is untruth’’ (1992, 209). For students who have read more Kierkegaard or other existentialists, this step will likely not be a surprise, even if it might cause epistemological or cultural shock.21 Climacus himself acknowledges the riskiness of such a move (1992, 210–211; van Riessen 2013, 71). But, contrary to conventional accounts of existentialism, existentialist philosophers refuse to endorse hope in our own voluntarist or individualist capacities. And so Climacus makes this turn for two reasons: first, he doesn’t want us to slip into false confidence, thinking that we possess resources to attain real passion by ourselves on our own terms. (Constructivism, in other words, is not sufficient for existential transformation, despite its commonsensical appeal in current higher education practices).22 Second, he wants to push religious inwardness beyond the realm of ‘‘subjectivity.’’ He wants to go beyond Socrates.23 And here self-reflexivity goes further than the facticity of the classroom or the relative passions of the professor to the very conditions of possibility for self-transformation.
Contingency and the Emergence of the New In this section, we examine another quality of existentialist teaching: namely, its contingency. By ‘‘contingency,’’ we mean several things. As we commented briefly above, our interest in the possibility of existentialist teaching includes the caveat that it not be mandated as an essential ‘‘outcome’’ for students who are enrolled in a course. The contingency of ‘‘being taught,’’ to employ Biesta’s terminology, rests entirely on the willed passions of students to immerse themselves in the self-reflexivity of truth and untruth. We would argue, though, that the contingencies of the classroom (its affective and material dynamics, the specific students who happen to be enrolled in that course during that semester) bear upon the willingness of students to risk ‘‘being taught.’’ This willingness, moreover, is often linked to the design-choices of the instructor. By emphasizing teaching over learning, as Biesta advocates, we hope that it is clear that our account of existentialist teaching puts instructors more on the hook than they might be otherwise. Although its efficacy is ultimately contingent, the design of a course (which includes its curriculum, exercises and modes of assessment, classroom practices and set up) is itself worthy of existential reflection on the part of professors. It is not that a lesson can be explicitly designed, ahead of time, in light of a blueprint that specifies the necessary conditions for existentialist teaching; no blueprint will predictably yield subjective passion. But we do claim, alongside thinkers like Tim Ingold whose recent research on design shows that it is possible to design an environment in ways that are open-ended, that 21
Since learnification saturates our current cultural moment—and since its paradigm includes an approach to learning called ‘‘constructivist’’—certain versions of ‘‘subjectivity is truth’’ seem to pervade most students’ everyday educational experiences. And so it is Climacus’s turn towards untruth that marks the radical, pedagogical challenge of existentialism, not the initial turn towards subjective truth. 22 For a defense of constructivism, see the edited collection Fosnot (2005). For examples of critiques of constructivism that resonate with our essay, see Bozalek et al. (2014). This latter collection includes a range of anti-colonial and liberatory strategies that are at odds with the voluntarism of the constructivist framework. 23 According to Climacus, who employs the Christian terminology that marks all of Kierkegaard’s writings, Socrates does not have an understanding of sin. For Socrates, every individual has the capacity to explore truth subjectively and ‘‘recollect’’ what is true. The main point for Climacus is that religious truth cannot and can never be proven objectively. In fact, to approach the Christian incarnation story objectively is to move far away from religious inwardness (1992, 212).
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instructors can teach in ways that solicit the unexpected. Indeed, Ingold uses a phrase, in the context of his analysis of design, which exemplifies what we mean by existentialist teaching: ‘‘learning to learn’’ (2013, 1). Learning to learn, Ingold explains, occurs when ‘‘the world itself becomes a place of study’’ (2013, 3); learning emerges out of immanent, material scenarios. This point reinforces the riskiness, even despair, of learning. Recall DiAngelo’s insight that whiteness all too often expresses an unwillingness to learn to learn, an unwillingness that translates into the palpable, ongoing violence of racist scenarios. How can we shape our classrooms in ways that call out such despair, such that its denial of the contingency of the given becomes no longer sustainable? Learning to learn is itself contingent—contingent upon factors as diverse as the dynamics of the classroom, each individual’s subjective capacities, the texts being read. But it can be hailed through intentional teaching practices, including Socratic practices of deceit and persuasion.24 Such practices might include exercises that prompt the kinds of self-reflexive questions like the ones we describe above. It likely includes explicit attention to the critical work that decolonizing, feminist, and queer scholars identify as essential to existentialist thinking. Bonnie Mann, for example, explains that the diagnoses that might result from an encounter with The Second Sex cannot depend upon voluntarist approaches to consciousness, as if we can change our ideas simply by argumentation, logic or abstractions. Mann explains, ‘‘If one’s very consciousness is formed in the fire of one’s value-laden prejudices, one can’t, by an act of conscious determination, put them out of play’’ (2014, 26). Whereas a classroom that ignores its own dynamics will likely presume that each student has access to the same range of ideas and can arrive at valid arguments using sound methods, an existentialist classroom must confront its own contingencies. Mann explains that Beauvoir’s phenomenological practice leads to ‘‘an account of how contingent features are intertwined with and parasitic on the general features of human existence, to such an extent that they cannot finally be disentangled’’ (2014, 28). To translate Mann’s interpretation into the context of an Existentialism classroom, there are neither non-contingent nor universally common features of knowledge-seeking that will resolve the inevitable quandaries involved with ‘‘being taught.’’ This is an education that reaches ‘‘beyond education’’ (Baldacchino 2009), a pedagogy that operates ‘‘without a project’’ (O’Byrne 2005). Design is always present. As Sara Ahmed explains, ‘‘spaces are already oriented, which makes some bodies feel in place, or at home, and not others’’ (2006, 563). Like other environments, the classroom—with its clock on the wall, its assemblages of desks and tables, its varying degrees of accessibility, its culturally specific discourses and practices— welcomes some individuals more than others. And this aspect of contingency, which has to do with the facticity of our bodies in relation to the shared space of the classroom—is itself open for diagnosis. Thinking about her own teaching practices, Ahmed muses: The pedagogic encounter is full of angles. How many times have I read students as interested or bored, such that the atmosphere seemed one of interest or boredom (and even felt myself to be interesting or boring), only to find students recall the event quite differently! Having read the atmosphere in a certain way, one can become tense: which in turn affects what happens, how things move along. The moods we arrive with do affect what happens: which is not to say we always keep our moods. 24 See Schonsheck (2003) and Nowachek (2014) for examples of pedagogical practices that take cues from Sartre and Kierkegaard and that prompt dissonance, irony or humour through indirection or misdirection. In an analysis of Kierkegaard’s own indirection, Borman makes the convincing argument that persuasion (as the converse of deception) requires its own analysis (2006, 256). It seems noteworthy to us that existentialist teaching prompts recognition of the deceptive nature of teaching as such.
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Sometimes I arrive heavy with anxiety, and everything that happens makes me feel more anxious, while at other times things happen which ease the anxiety, making the space itself seem light and energetic. We do not know in advance what will happen given this contingency, given the hap of what happens; we do not know ‘exactly’ what makes things happen in this way and that. Situations are affective given the gap between the impressions we have of others and the impressions we make on others, all of which are lively. (2010, 41, emphasis added). We do not know, Ahmed points out, what prompts the ‘‘hap’’ of a certain happening; we also do not know what the subjective meaning or experience of a hap might be for others, nor its somatic impact on how a person inhabits the classroom. What we do know, however, is that—to pull out the last word in this citation—an enormous range of factors contributes to the liveliness of classrooms. Contingency here means indeterminacy, unpredictability and the risky joy of liveliness. The other meaning of contingency is found throughout existentialist texts. According to thinkers like Kierkegaard and Arendt, the new itself is contingent: neither pre-determined, nor conditioned by teleologically oriented plans. And existentialist teaching is necessarily oriented towards the emergence of the new. As Biesta argues, ‘‘The very point of education is precisely not to repeat what is already there but to bring something new to the scene’’ (2013, 452, emphasis added). Simply put, we cannot bring anything new to others, as teachers, if we solely reproduce what is already within our own horizon of intelligibility. Even ‘‘learning to learn,’’ after all, easily converts into consumerist simulations of effective pedagogy (Biesta et al. 2011). So how do we create and open up spaces that increase the chances for the new to emerge, especially in the context of classrooms that are overdetermined by roles, scripts, and epistemological assumptions held by both instructors and students? We have been using the words ‘‘existentialist’’ and ‘‘existentially’’ to demarcate specific kinds of teaching practices. It seems worth noting that these words are modifiers. Existential transformations, we argue, are best understood as modal: as modifying any lesson or classroom. As a modifier, the term ‘‘existentially’’ is open-ended. While it is not dependent upon specific content, it is essentially dependent upon the particularities of a teaching scenario: this moment, this classroom, these classmates, this teacher, and this lesson plan. As we have observed, however, while instructors are responsible for their curricular design-choices, there can be no reliable roadmap for moments in which students are ‘‘being taught.’’ Derrida supplies a way to make sense of this seeming contradiction between curricular design, the contingency of teaching, and the new. To take up one of Derrida’s key terms, ‘‘being taught’’ might be understood as an event. The event, according to Derrida, necessitates its own repetition but, at the same time, always needs to begin again: ‘‘Repetition and first time: this is perhaps the question of the event’’ (1994, 10). The tension that Derrida identifies between the singularity and the repeatability of the event of teaching, which is implied but not explicit in Biesta’s discussion, points to the existential nature of the event. If we think about teaching in light of the event, we cannot rely upon objective models or archetypes for implementation. There are no roadmaps for the emergence of the new. The event of teaching must be iterable, but this is repetition with a difference. Every instructor knows that a given lesson plan, enacted multiple times in different classrooms, results in different and unexpected moments. The event points to a more important kind of unexpectedness than such routine difference, however—to what Arendt refers to as
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natality: a newness that is possible because, as free and existing individuals, we can always begin again (2006, 167). While the design of a course or a lesson plan will likely emphasize canonical texts and content, its enactment in the classroom—the event of a somatic exercise, conversational moment or silent epiphany—can include what Arendt is calling ‘‘beginning again.’’ In our classroom, for example, we turn to the same passages again and again, but perhaps someone else reads aloud, and we try to illuminate a passage’s import by thinking of pressing examples that demonstrate its insights. And while there is no definitive ‘‘answer’’ for how best to interpret a given passage’s relevance, there is the repetition of the philosophy itself, as well as the repetition of the concepts (like ‘‘natality’’, for example, or ‘‘event’’ or ‘‘subjectivity’’). As we seek fidelity to the philosophical concepts in a text, we explore, perhaps in uncomfortable ways, their significance for ourselves and for the questions arising within our classroom conversations. Arendt explains that natality—freedom’s capacity to begin again—is inseparable from the plurality of human existence. Translated into the context of an Existentialism classroom, Arendt’s reflections remind us that we do, in fact, study together. Ontologically, as Britanny Burr and Syd Peacock point out in their creative re-writing of Sartre’s No Exit, we are implicated essentially by the relationality of our existence: ‘‘Even when I am alone, I am existing with others’’ (2013, 206). In the classroom, the liveliness of affect, as Ahmed puts it, can shift our awareness and our somatic habits: suddenly, someone speaks up who has never spoken before. And this moment shifts dynamics in ways that no one was expecting, as some individuals startle in discomfort and others awaken with new vigour. Perhaps a lesson on Kierkegaard’s concept of ‘‘anxiety’’ prompts several students to refer to the facticity of the classroom itself, a facticity so saturated with able-bodied ideals that it is rarely if ever challenged by those whose capacities resist such naturalizing demands. Indeed, one of the conceits of the classroom is usually that disabled students find ways to accommodate themselves to ableist norms, rather than call them out as exclusionary (Price 2011). Moments of existential diagnoses challenge such operative norms, not only in terms of content (speaking out loud about anxiety, for example, despite long-standing implicit bans against addressing anxiety in classroom discussions) but also in terms of ethos and affect. Since the liveliness of the classroom is itself contingent, it can be shaped by its inhabitants with varying degrees of conformity or resistance.
Conclusion: Existentialism and the Possibility of Resistance These reflections point to our hope that existentialist teaching might transform not only students on an individual or subjective level but also the shared space of the classroom. We conclude by raising some questions about this hope. Does existentialist teaching help us, as instructors and students, to cultivate capacities for resistance to prejudice, ideology, and oppression? Is it even possible to teach existentially in the neo-liberal university, where the ontological freedom of students seems subsumed by their status as perpetual debtors, future corporate workers and consumers (Servage 2009; Giroux 2014)? These concluding questions are, of course, mutually implicating. The more we become capable of resistance, the more we sharpen our understanding of the conditions of possibility for existentialist teaching. At the same time, the more we embark upon practices that shape ourselves and our classroom in emancipatory ways, the more at odds we are with the regulative ideals of the corporatized university.
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We maintain that teaching—in order to be designated as teaching—is transformative. Teaching events change the ways in which we engage with others and ourselves, enabling new capacities to live otherwise. To what extent, however, does such an emphasis on ‘‘transformation’’ run up against the ideals, practices and norms that govern the contemporary classroom? In any educational context where grades are the ultimate telos, the anticipation of assessment risks enervating the professor’s creativity and self-confidence (the professor, after all, is also being ‘‘graded’’ through mechanisms like student evaluations and ratemyprofessor.com), and, as we point out above, it risks undermining students’ ability to engage subjectively with truth-seeking. Existentialist philosophy troubles the assumption of what counts as knowledge, especially knowledge that situates itself from an ‘‘objective’’ and disembodied vantage point. While we may not be able to evade the mechanisms of grading entirely, we can disrupt its tendency to value ‘‘objective’’ knowledge above existential uncertainty. Such a disruption, in and of itself, seems to us like a certain cultivation of resistance. Given that the imperatives of grading are part of the facticity of the classroom, subject to the kind of existential diagnosis that prioritizes the how over the what, these imperatives are open to reflection and even, subjectively speaking, repudiation. Rather than a transcendent judgement of a student’s achievements on an exam or in a course, a grade stands as a marker of the dynamics of the university context, dynamics that include the lure of corporatized promises (why else do we grade students, anarchist professor Dennis Rancourt asks, than to present them as future workers to corporations?).25 The transcendence that marks existentialist teaching, in contrast, is of an other order entirely. While the existentialists themselves will differ on the nature of transcendence (Kierkegaard, Arendt and Beauvoir present differing accounts of where, exactly, the possibility of the new resides), they share commitments to the possibility of emancipatory freedom. It seems likely, then, that existentialist teaching, in whatever form it takes, needs to encourage exploration by students and professors of the degrees of freedom in the classroom, while always keeping in mind the capacity of freedom to redress harms and address each other in new ways. In her phenomenological reflections, Ahmed writes, ‘‘So we walk on the path as it is before us, but it is only before us as an effect of being walked upon. A paradox of the footprint emerges’’ (2006, 555). Our classrooms give rise to footprints, as well as the many other kinds of tracks that emerge from varied ways of moving. They also manifest the path of tracks that precede us. If we intensify the responsibility that we bear (responsibility, it seems right to add, held more by professors than by students) for the tracks that leave our classrooms, the effects of Existentialist courses will be tangible in how we move, interact and shape our shared worlds.
25 In an interview, Rancourt explains, ‘‘With grades students learn to guess the professor’s mind and to obey. It is a very sophisticated machinery, whereby the natural desire to learn, the intrinsic motivation to want to learn something because you are interested in the thing itself, is destroyed…. The only way to develop independent thinking in the classroom is to give freedom, to break the power relationship by removing the instrument of power’’ (Freeston 2009). This interview took place in the context of Rancourt being fired from his position at the University of Ottawa because of his refusal to grade students’ projects; his refusal and subsequent firing speak to the quandaries that we are hoping to surface in this essay: quandaries regarding the extent to which ‘‘being taught’’ can occur in the context of the corporatized university system.
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A. S. Jaarsma et al. Acknowledgments We thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful suggestions. This research was supported by a Learning Inquiry Grant from Mount Royal University’s Academic Development Centre.
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