Paedagogica Historical Lever or Mirror in the Making of the History of Education?

Abstract

“Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on our guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posits a ‘pure, will‐less, painless, timeless knowing subject'; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason’, ‘absolute spirituality’, ‘knowledge in itself: these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direc‐ tion, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing'; and the more emotions we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’ be.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals) As an ‘epilogue’ to this special issue on postmodernism in. the history of education the author...