Abstract
I discuss what it means for students to have teachers who love their subjects, explain why I mean love of their subjects rather than only passion or great enthusiasm for them. I try to show how the enactment of that love can bring students to a love of the world of a kind I call unconditional because it is not based on a weighing of the good and ill in it. Because my examples are of figures in European intellectual and artistic history, I defend it against the possible charge that it is Eurocentric in the pejorative sense that word has accrued. I express sympathy for the call to ‘decolonise’ universities and their disciplines. I also defend my account against the possible charge that it is elitist and blind to the fact that, because their future often looks grim to them, many young people swing between hope and despair.
THOMAS MORE: Why not be a teacher? You’d be a fine teacher, perhaps a great one.
RICHARD RICH: If I was, who would know it?
MORE: You, your pupils, your friends, God. Not a bad public, that.
(Robert Bolt, A Man For all Seasons)
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Notes
- 1.
She expressed this belief in many of her writings. See for example, “Morality and Literature” (in Panichas 1977).
- 2.
I have elaborated the distinctive cognitive domain in which such a sensibility operates and what, in that domain, it is to “try to see things as they are”, what, indeed, it is for things to be as they are in it. I have called that domain “the realm of meaning”, and argued that it is a cognitive domain in which thought and feeling cannot be separated. (Gaita 2004: Preface and chap. 15, and Gaita 2017: Foreword and Afterword and chap. 6.)
- 3.
In a panel debate about racism (of the “Ideas and Society” series organised by La Trobe University); see the video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyvZ_VrTBbU & t=3761s. (Bond’s entry starts roughly at 57 min.)
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Gaita, R. (2022). Love in Teaching and Love of the World. In: Aldrin Salskov, S., Beran, O., Hämäläinen, N. (eds) Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein. Nordic Wittgenstein Studies, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9_8
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