Seeing the appearing world: René Arcilla's pedagogy of availability

Abstract

In this essay I argue, first, that René Arcilla's project in his book Wim Wenders's Road Movies: Education without Learning, can be understood as an effort to draw the reader away from a conception of personhood grounded in the Enlightenment and towards an expressive-romantic conception. Yet the sense of the person to which Arcilla leads the reader alters the Romantic conception considerably. Arcilla is attentive not only to how a disengaged, instrumental and fragmented approach to life can lead one astray but also to how a highly individualised search for authenticity and truth can sever one's connection to others and the world. In his proposal for a certain kind of education, Arcilla transcends and yet retains key components of the individualism that has troubled so many critics of both strands of the modern identity. The second argument of this essay is that a distinct pedagogical approach can be detected in Arcilla's text, one that is aligned with his conception of the kind of self into which the reader is being educated. In essence, Arcilla enacts the shifted conception of education that his book describes.