ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

Educational practice used to have an alleged affinity for hermeneutic theories. However, a thorough investigation into the relation between the ontology called universal hermeneutics and the educational epistemology defies any practical or theoretical dependence of education on philosophical hermeneutics. The concept of human finitude, which constitutes the very core of philosophical hermeneutics, accounts for very few educational implications, if any. Neither the educative experience nor hermeneutic experience is reducible to certain commensurable themes in common. Based on the notion of human finitude, ontologically oriented educational research conceptualizes the nature of educational experience as a specific kind of primordial mode of being. Human being`s educational potential is also subject to the concept of existential finitude, which, in turn, leads us to the fundamental hermeneutic dimension, historically effected consciousness. The traditional approaches to the conceptualization of educative potential have often neglected this critical and fundamental dimension. while unduly emphasizing such foundational and metaphysical qualities as objectivity and rationality. In contrast, the new orientation to the conception of education asks us to listen to the genuine and unique voice of educative experience in which we dwell. Education, as a negative and reflective mode of being and becoming, cannot be and cannot do everything, according to the hermeneutic insight. Thus unwarranted disciplinary complacency no longer affects the mode of educational inquiry. The renewed mode of educational inquiry is supposed to clarify the unique structure and content of educative experience itself beyond the conventional way of superficial, exaggerated description of educative potential, within the conceptual boundary of human finitude on which hermeneutic experience can be founded firmly. It is also expected that this negative approach will yield much prosperous and constructive arguments about the unique and substantial concept of education.