The Mood of Disquiet and Education

Starting from the idea of mood as a means of relating between subject and world (Husserl; Merleau-Ponty; but also Simmel), the hypothesis of this paper is to explore disquiet as a crucial existential situation within education. Confused with a temporary and inappropriate feeling (such as insecurity, fragility, inability to take decisions, antisocial behavior or juvenile restlessness), currently disquiet assumes negative features, even to the extent of becoming a social disease. On the contrary, from the point of view of the philosophy of education it is a matter of rediscovering the deepest reasons that identify the original condition of the subject within disquiet, removing it from the psychologistic simplification which attempts to medicalize it or to relegate it to spaces of existential marginality. In this sense, there are at least three quite significant perspectives. In the first place, Kierkegaard’s restless conscience fulfills the subject’s ethical horizon, where both the transformative-educational act of freedom and the personality of the individual are always safeguarded. Secondly, the uncanny according to Freud and its most recent reinterpretation by Lacan show how the revelation of what should remain hidden is not only an experience of fear or upset, but also an opportunity for personal knowledge and self-disclosure (according to Lacan, the unveiling of one's own desire). Thirdly, the existential experience of Jasper’s limit situation reveals itself as the primary source of transformative knowledge, which builds both one’s idea of the world and one’s own existence. In this way, however, Jaspers corrects the concept of education as “shell” with the (restless) transformation as inner-Bildung. These three variations – among many others – of the primordial disquiet of the individual go, then, with the phenomenologies of the disquiet of the world. Describing our time as characterized by indifference (Sennett), uncertainty (Bauman), risk (Beck) and neo-cynicism (Sloterdijk), disquiet risks becoming the sign of a weakness rather than the ability of thought and questioning knowledge. From an operative point of view, then, the hypothesis of a pedagogical legitimization of disquiet emerges as a fruitful feature of the relation between subject and world. This becomes possible by acting in educational practices both starting from a more marked historical-cultural awareness of the processes of homogenization of the human and, above all, starting from a preliminary attitude of attention to the discordant ways of behaving towards reality. Thus, for example, the unthought (Rilke), adventure (Jankélévitch), metaphor (Blumenberg), digression (Jankélévitch) can become tools of knowledge (including teaching/learning) that protect and enhance a way of feeling the world and build with it a twine of meanings which allows education itself to escape from the small meshes of both technicality and repair so as to become, in turn, a restless exercise of search for the self and existential planning. Such overturning of the preliminary perspective (“manoeuvre for Bildung”), which catches the dimension of possibility and makes it alive, vital and real, allows then education and reality to attempt the reconquest of the original sense of human.