Kevin A Aho

Acceleration and Time Pathologies The critique of psychology in Heidegger's Beiträge

In his Contributions to Philosophy, Martin Heidegger (1999) introduces 'acceleration' as one of the three symptoms -along with 'calculation' and the 'outbreak of massiveness' -of our technological way of 'being-in-the-world'. In this article, I unpack the relationship between these symptoms and draw a twofold conclusion. First, interpreting acceleration in terms of time pathologies, I suggest the self is becoming increasingly fragmented and emotionally overwhelmed from chronic sensory arousal and time pressure. This experience makes it difficult for us to qualitatively distinguish what matters to us in our everyday lives, resulting in a pervasive cultural mood of indifference, what Heidegger (1995) calls 'profound boredom'. Second, by drawing on Heidegger's hermeneutic method, I argue that the practice of mainstream psychology, by adopting the reductive methodology of the empirical sciences, largely ignores our accelerated socio-historical situation, resulting in therapeutic models that have a tendency to construct and perpetuate the very pathologies the psychologist is seeking to treat. KEY WORDS • acceleration • boredom • Heidegger • hermeneutics • psychology Our hour is the epoch of going-under. (Heidegger, 1999)

increasingly mediated by the mechanized acceleration and time pressure of the industrial age. According to Beard, it is not civilization that causes this kind of emotional strain but the unique social forms of modernity itself. 'The Greeks were certainly civilized', says Beard, 'but they were not nervous, and in the Greek language there is no word for the term' (cited in Lutz, 1991: 4;O' Malley, 2005: 385) By the late 19th century, nervousness or 'neurasthenia' had become a ubiquitous symptom of an over-stimulated urban existence. Indeed, it can be argued that emotional exhaustion -emerging in the wake of the technological advent of speed and the compression of time and space -is the most distinctive characteristic of modern living and may represent, what historian Arnold Toynbee calls, 'the most difficult and dangerous of all the current problems [that we face today]' (cited in Ulmer and Schwartzburd, 1996: 329).

One of the historical consequences of an increasingly automated and harried way of life is the proliferation of certain behavioral and mood disorders that, in turn, leads to the emergence and subsequent growth of the mental health industry that treats these disorders. In this article, I suggest that the mainstream mental health professions misunderstand the origins of modern nervousness by interpreting it largely through the procedural lens of the natural sciencesprivileging the standpoint of detached objectivity and adopting a method that reduces the self to an encapsulated object and human behavior to elemental causal interactions. I argue that this disengaged view overlooks, what Martin Heidegger calls, 'being-in-the-world' or 'Da-sein', our everyday involvement in a social and historical background or 'there' (Da) that tacitly shapes the way we live our lives and interpret our own behavior.

Although Heidegger's decade-long seminars with physicians and psychiatrists in Zollikon, Switzerland (1959-71) 1 represents his most sustained critique of psychology, I will be focusing my attention on Heidegger's Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) -translated as Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning) (1999) -which introduces three overlapping characteristics or 'symptoms' that constitute our technological being-in-the-world: 'calculation', 'acceleration' and 'the outbreak of massiveness ' (p. 84). Although much has been written on Heidegger's view of 'calculation' and 'massiveness', particularly in light of his later writings on technology, very little has been made of his conception of 'acceleration', the term used to describe the frantic pace of modern life. By unpacking the relationship between these characteristics I attempt to appropriate from the Beiträge a historically grounded psychology, one that offers a hermeneutic critique of the practice of psychology itself. This critique is based on the fact that mainstream psychology largely overlooks the accelerated historical situation that the client is 'thrown' (geworfen) into, and, as a result, may be unwittingly perpetuating the accelerated patterns of behavior that sparked the client's nervous disorder in the first place.

Acceleration and the Pathology of Boredom

Written in 1936-8, Heidegger's Beiträge is considered to be his most important book after Being and Time (1962). The Beiträge consists of six 'joinings' or 'fugues' (Fügungen) which, taken together, repeat the same disclosive movement of western history from different perspectives. 2 The first fugue, 'Echo', is the primary focus of this project. Echo signals the end of metaphysics, intimating the total withdrawal of the 'question of being' (Seinsfrage) in the age of global technology. According to Heidegger, the distinctively western understanding of being is moving toward its nihilistic endpoint in the technological age. 'Nihilism' occurs when we no longer ask the ontological question concerning the being of beings -of how and why beings manifest or show up as they do -and are instead totally occupied with consuming, exchanging, and producing beings. As [START_REF] Heidegger | Introduction to Metaphysics[END_REF] says in his 1935 lecture course, Introduction to Metaphysics, '[Today] we encounter beings everywhere; they surround us, carry us, enchant and fulfill us, elevate and disappoint us, but where in all this is the being of beings, and what does it consist in?' (p. 34). In the age of nihilism, the world is understood solely as a vast storehouse of objects to be manipulated, consumed, and quantified by means of 'machination'. With global machination, beings are only to the extent that they are 're-presentable', 'made', or 'can be made' in terms of calculable production and exchange. To this end, beings are revealed or show up in 'lived experience' (Erlebnis) in only one way, as something useful, measurable, and familiar to everyone [START_REF] Heidegger | Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning)[END_REF].

What is significant in the Beiträge is the way in which our contemporary forgetfulness of the question of being is felt. [START_REF] Heidegger | Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning)[END_REF] refers to this feeling as 'shock', a shock accompanied by 'compelling distress' (nötigende Not) (p. 79). However, what is particularly shocking today 'is the lack of distress' itself; our way of living is so active, busy and occupied with things that we have no time for distress (pp. 79, 277, all emphases are from original sources unless otherwise indicated). In order to come to grips with the ways in which modern life embodies a hidden distress we must get a clearer picture of what Heidegger means by the self.

Against the modern view of the self that we inherit from Descartes, Heidegger suggests the human being (Dasein) is not to be interpreted as a being (Seiende), a quantifiable material body or an immaterial mind. Dasein is a shared, sociohistorical 'happening' (Geschehen) or way of being that opens up a horizon or 'clearing' (Lichtung) of intelligibility, a horizon that shapes the way beings are understood and matter to us in our everyday lives. The self, on this view, is always already 'absorbed' (aufgehen) in a public world and is properly understood not in terms of its objective properties but in terms of what it does, 'proximally and for the most part -in [its] average everydayness', such as handling tools, driving to work, surfing the net, shopping (Heidegger, 1962: 16) This means I am invariably involved in the acts and practices that 'They' or 'Anyone' (das Man) are involved in. And if I am what I do, then I am an indistinguishable 'Anyone'. I interpret myself as a teacher, a husband, or a homeowner because I have been 'dispersed' (zerstreuen) into the public roles and practices of others. Thus, 'the self of everyday Dasein is a they-self . . . As a they-self, the particular Dasein has been dispersed into the "they" and must find itself' (Heidegger, 1962: 129).

Shaped by a public horizon, we invariably 'fall prey' (Verfallen) to modern assumptions, prejudices, and social fads. In today's turbo-capitalist economy, for instance, the self is interpreted as an autonomous subject who, for the most part, values busy-ness, careerism, and conspicuous consumption. Such public self-interpretations give our lives a sense of security and comfort, providing the illusion of living well because we are 'doing what [everyone else] does' (Heidegger, 1962: 223). In short, our understanding of things is mediated by the world into which we are thrown. The problem today is that we are thrown into a worldview of global machination, a worldview that is totalizing insofar as it 'blocks off' or 'conceals' any other way to interpret beings, including ourselves (Heidegger, 1977a: 33). To this end, the present age 'masters' us to the extent that we are forgetful of the historical values and 'guiding determinations' that preceded it (Heidegger, 1962: 20).

As mentioned earlier, Heidegger's Beiträge identifies three fundamental 'symptoms' of modernity that signal the 'darkening of the world and the destruction of the earth . . . calculation, acceleration, and massiveness' (Heidegger, 1999: 83) Calculation is revealed in the way all things in the world are quantifiable and organized in terms of instrumental principles. Through the lens of calculation, the mountain stream shows up as acre-feet of water, the forest as board-feet of lumber, and an office building full of human beings is quantified as 'human resources'. In the technological age, all things are subject to the governing rules of calculation and 'the incalculable is here only what has not yet been mastered' (p. 84) Thus, calculation becomes the 'basic law' of human behavior, where the organic rhythms of life are organized and compressed with schedules and plans, and the day is broken down in terms of the productivity of hours, minutes, seconds, and even tenths-of-seconds. Indeed, in today's global economy, where mere fractions of seconds can translate into the gain or loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars, the rules of calculation are increasingly regulated by a second symptom of the modern age, acceleration.

Acceleration captures the ways in which our everyday life involves a relation to speed, a frenzied tempo or 'mania' embodied in the current tendency of 'notbeing-able-to-bear the stillness' (Heidegger, 1999: 84) [START_REF] Levine | A Geography of Time[END_REF] calls 'time urgency'. Levine suggests that the accelerated self can be identified as one who continually glances at his/her watch and checks his/her cell phone; speaks quickly and becomes frustrated when someone takes too long to make a point; eats, walks and drives fast and becomes angry when caught in slow-moving traffic; is compulsively punctual and follows lists and schedules to manage his/her day; and finds it difficult to wait in line or sit still without something or someone to distract or occupy him/her.

As a consequence, acceleration reveals a unique relation to time. In the course of my everyday life, I am captivated with or 'entranced' by the exciting things I encounter 'now'. For [START_REF] Heidegger | The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude[END_REF], living in the 'now' leaves me in a constant state of 'limbo' because I am unable to ask how or why I am captivated with particular things and where this captivation might take me: Being caught up in the Present (Gegenwart) cuts me off from an authentic awareness of, what Heidegger calls, 'primordial temporality'. 3 To the extent that the accelerated self is absorbed in the 'now', I forget how my life is shaped by the past and the future, by the temporal structures of 'situatedness' (Befindlichkeit) and 'projection' (Entwurf). Situatedness refers to the past insofar as I am always already 'thrown' into a socio-historical situation that determines how things affect me in terms of certain temperaments or moods. Projection refers to the future insofar as I am always 'ahead-of-[my]self' (sich vorweg) as I ceaselessly 'run forward' into possibilities, into already available social roles, practices, and identities, until my greatest ownmost (eigenst) possibility, death [START_REF] Heidegger | Being and Time[END_REF]. Busily captivated by the 'Present', I forget that I am a 'thrown project'; I forget the 'Past' (Gewesenheit) and the 'Future' (Zukunft), that is where my everyday self-interpretation comes from and where it is heading. Consequently, says [START_REF] Heidegger | Being and Time[END_REF], 'the Present leaps away from its authentic future and from its authentic having been' (p. 348).

To this end, the symptom of acceleration reveals a self that is fragmented and disjointed to the extent that it is pulled apart by competing commitments and investments that are always, for some reason, urgent. Ironically, this kind of fragmentation can often be experienced most intensely on days of 'leisure'. As I wake up on a sunny Saturday morning, I have no obligation to go to the office but I am still pulled into the 'now' as a jumble of pressing possibilities. I must wash the car, mow the lawn, pick up the dry cleaning, check my email, go for a jog, buy groceries, pay the bills, and if I finish these tasks I can watch the football game in the evening. By day's end I am not relaxed and contented but exhausted, wondering where the day went. Thus, as Kenneth [START_REF] Gergen | The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life[END_REF] points out, the paradox of accelerated living is that it does not result in exhilarating satisfaction but often with a feeling of being defeated and overwhelmed. This feeling of defeat is prompted by, what cardiac psychologists Diane [START_REF] Ulmer | Heart and Mind: The Practice of Cardiac Psychology[END_REF] call, 'hurry sickness', referring to a self that suffers from 'severe and chronic feelings of time urgency that have brought about changes affecting personality and lifestyle' (p. 331). 4 The self is caught in a repeating cycle of behavior, a 'time pathology' that nervously hungers for more things, more distractions, and interprets his/her self-worth in terms of quantitative accomplishments and the accumulation of material goods. Drawing on over two decades of clinical experience, Ulmer and Schwartzburd identify three areas in which acceleration affects the self in detrimental ways. First, in terms of physical health, the experience of time pressure and chronic sensory arousal contributes to the proliferation of heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, emotional fatigue, insomnia and increasing tendencies toward hostility and rage. Second, in a social or interpersonal sense, acceleration contributes to the fragmentation of relationships and the emotional support systems of family and friends which take time to develop and sustain, leading to an increasing sense of isolation and loneliness. Finally, on a psychological level, Ulmer and Schwartzburd identify a general mental state associated with acceleration that has 'received little attention in the empirical literature', a mood described as 'a personal, perhaps even spiritual, barrenness or emptiness spawned by the chronic struggle to accomplish tasks, which can lead to a rather joyless existence and give rise to covert self-destructive behaviors' (p. 332). According to Heidegger, the accelerated self is, quite simply, suffering from 'boredom' (Langeweile). Thrown into a harried world, we are so nervous, so sped up that we become indifferent, unable to qualitatively distinguish which choices, commitments, and obligations are significant or matter to us.

Although 'anxiety' (Angst) is the mood that receives the most attention in Being and Time (1962), in his 1929-30 Freiburg lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1995), Heidegger offers an analysis of the mood that best captures the temperament of accelerated living, 'boredom'. 5 In these lectures, Heidegger distinguishes between three kinds of boredom: 'becoming bored with something' (Gelangweiltwerden von etwas), 'being bored by something' (Sichlangweilen bei etwas), and 'being bored' (Sichlangweilen) itself. 6 The first kind of boredom is the ordinary conception, referring to how I encounter or find certain things or situations. For instance, I may 'become bored with' a particular book, a long drive, or waiting for a flight in the airport. Indeed, I can even find myself boring. When I am bored with something, I feel uninterested, 'indifferent', and 'depressed', and I must find a way to 'while' (Weile) away the time (Heidegger, 1995: 117). 7 This feeling of indifference is 'conspicuous' insofar as it has an object; I am bored with such and such.

Consequently, this form of boredom is 'halting' or transient insofar as it comes and goes in the course of my life. For instance, once my plane takes off after waiting in the airport I am no longer bored. To this end, 'what is boring comes from outside . . . A particular situation with its circumstances transposes us into boredom ' (p. 128).

This kind of conspicuous boredom is contrasted with a second, more profound kind. 'Being bored by something' is less obtrusive than the first kind of boredom because it emerges when I make no effort to 'while away' the time. [START_REF] Heidegger | The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude[END_REF] gives the example of a dinner party filled with good food, music, and conversation. At the party, I do not notice myself 'killing time' because I am caught up in the 'now', in the activities and gossip of the social event. When I am absorbed in these kinds of public pastimes, it is difficult for me to notice my own boredom. In the shared moment, I am doing -eating, drinking, laughing, singing -what 'anyone' (das Man) and everyone does. Thus, this type of boredom remains hidden and inconspicuous. It is, as Heidegger says, 'admittedly hard to find, and this is precisely because it presents itself in a public manner ' (p. 112). Indeed, it is only after I return home that I realize I was bored the whole time, yet I cannot point to a particular conspicuous thing that made the party boring. The party as a whole was boring. It just took up time. Hence, this more profound kind of boredom does not refer to the way we encounter particular things. Rather, it arises inconspicuously in our involvement in certain public situations, therefore 'it does not come from outside: it arises from out of Dasein itself ' (p. 128).

Although the second form of boredom is more primordial than the first to the extent that it conceals itself, it is similar to the first form insofar as it is situational; it lingers for a while and then goes away. This is to be contrasted with the third, most profound kind of boredom, one that is no longer situational but refers to the mood of the modern world itself, the entire socio-cultural horizon that we are currently involved in. [START_REF] Heidegger | The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude[END_REF] says, 'being bored' or 'profound boredom' (tiefe Langeweile) designates that 'it is boring for one'. The 'It' (Es), in this case, is the totality of social relations that make up the world; it is 'beings as a whole ' (p. 134, 138). Profound boredom, in this regard, is not transient; it does not come and go but rather captures the fact that the world itself is boring, and 'everyone' is bored. In this regard, profound boredom does not refer to my own private, emotional states which are affected by a conspicuous thing or an inconspicuous situation. In profound boredom, 'we are elevated beyond the particular situation in each case and beyond the specific beings surrounding us' (p. 137). Profound boredom, therefore, is regarded as a structural feature of modern existence itself, a characteristic of our 'situatedness' (Befindlichkeit).

Again, situatedness, our 'where-we're-at-ness', 8 refers to the way in which we find ourselves invariably thrown into a shared world that attunes or affects us in terms of public 'moods' (Stimmung). Because I always find myself in a situ-ation that matters to me, I am already 'attuned,' already in a mood (Heidegger, 1962: 137). Thus, for Heidegger, the German word Stimmung is not, at its deepest level, to be understood subjectively, in terms of my own individual feelings or 'states-of-mind'. Rather, Stimmung is the condition for the possibility of these individual states of mind. 9 This means boredom is not in me; boredom is already 'out there'. It is the shared 'atmosphere' I have been thrown into, an atmosphere that opens up or discloses in advance the way things and experiences will affect me psychologically and emotionally. [START_REF] Heidegger | The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude[END_REF] explains:

It seems as though a [mood] is in this case already there, so to speak, like an atmosphere in which we first immerse ourselves in each case and which then attunes us through and through. It does not merely seem so, it is so; and, faced with this fact, we must dismiss the psychology of feelings, experiences, and consciousness. (p. 67) As a fundamental attunement or 'ground-mood' (Grund-Stimmung), profound boredom refers to an ontological condition that attunes the accelerated self in the technological age, a self that continually seeks to be filled up with things and is immersed or 'swept away' in 'whatever is going on or happening around [it]' (p. 124).

Profound boredom becomes ubiquitous because all I do is 'pass the time' with the various things that occupy and consume me during the day. My whole life is organized and managed in terms of busily 'driving away whatever is boring' by means of filling up an underlying feeling of indifference or emptiness through constant activity: work, eating out, exercising, traveling, and shopping. [START_REF] Heidegger | The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude[END_REF] refers to activity that is endlessly dispersed in the production and consumption of things as 'self-forming emptiness' (p. 126). The historian of psychology, Philip [START_REF] Cushman | Why the Self Is Empty: Toward a Historically Situated Psychology[END_REF], agrees with Heidegger, describing the 'empty self' as one [who] seeks the experience of being continually filled up by consuming goods, calories, experiences, politicians, romantic partners, and empathic therapists in an attempt to combat the growing alienation and fragmentation of its era. [It] is dependent on the continual consumption of nonessential and quickly obsolete items or experiences . . . accomplished through the dual creation of easy credit and a gnawing sense of emptiness in the self. (p. 601) On Heidegger's view, the empty self is 'anyone and everyone', and because it is so pervasive our own emptiness remains hidden from us; it is, as Heidegger (1995: 127) says, 'peculiarly inconspicuous'.

The modern self, therefore, does not even know that it is bored because it has grown into a temperament of boredom. This makes profound boredom doubly oppressive. Initially, the frantic pace of modern life makes it increasingly difficult for us to distinguish which choices and commitments actually matter to us in our lives. And when we cannot distinguish what matters we become indifferent. Everything is equally important because nothing stands out, nothing matters. 'In this ennui', says [START_REF] Heidegger | Messkirch's Seventh Centennial[END_REF], 'nothing appeals to us anymore; everything has as much or as little value as everything else, because a deep boredom penetrates our existence to the core' (pp. 50-1).

Yet, on a more profound level, we are oblivious to our own indifference because this is what it means to be in the modern world, '[because] what is boring is here diffused throughout the particular situation as a whole, it is far more oppressive -despite its ungraspability. It oppresses in and during the inconspicuous way in which we are held at a distance in our passing the time' (Heidegger, 1995: 128). As a result, the more profound the boredom, 'the more silent, the less public, the quieter, the more inconspicuous, and wide-ranging it is' (p. 134). And the boredom of the technological age has become so powerful, so pervasive that the accelerated self 'no longer has any power against it' (p. 136). When the world as a whole shows up as a totality of instrumental things to be consumed, produced, and exchanged in order to 'pass the time', then everything is swallowed by indifference, including human beings: 'All of the sudden everything is enveloped and embraced by this indifference. Beings have -as we say -become indifferent as a whole, and we ourselves as these people are not excepted ' (p. 138). This totalizing aspect of profound boredom points to the third concealment of the present age, 'the outbreak of massiveness'. In the Beiträge, [START_REF] Heidegger | Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning)[END_REF] suggests that the accelerated self has become enfeebled because 'the unfettered hold of the frenzy of the gigantic has overwhelmed him under the guise of "magnitude"' (p. 6). Today, we are living in the reign of 'the gigantic' (das Riesenhafte). The world emerges as a global network of compressed, hyper-fast relations that constantly pull us 'everywhere and nowhere all at once', where 'everything gets lumped together into a uniform distancelessness' (Heidegger, 1971: 166).

For Heidegger, the reign of 'the gigantic' has its roots in the ancient Greek conception of technology, understood as techne . Initially, according to Heidegger, techne was conceived in terms of a harmony or rapport with nature, of gently 'releasing' that which is 'brought forth' to become the very thing that it is. For instance, the Greek craftsman was, for Heidegger, one who builds 'the old wooden bridge' that 'lets the river run its course' (Heidegger, 1977a: 17;1977b: 330). 10 This is opposed to techne  in the modern age, where the hydroelectric plant forces the river into a reservoir, into 'water power'. The accelerated outbreak of massiveness occurs when all beings are forced to come out of concealment in only one way, as a calculable, exchangeable resource, a 'standing reserve' waiting to be consumed, 'challenged' (Herausfordern) and 'enframed' (Gestell). (Heidegger, 1977a: 5, 19) It is for this reason, says [START_REF] Heidegger | Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning)[END_REF], that the reign of the gigantic 'drives out every other possibility of revealing' (p. 91).

Today, the accelerated self is 'bewitched, dazzled and beguiled' by the total domination of the gigantic, soothed by the frenzy of usable, consumable beings (Heidegger, 1966: 56). [START_REF] Heidegger | Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning)[END_REF] suggests that the reign of the gigantic is one where we are all in a state of restless 'enchantment' with beings to the point that we can no longer protect ourselves from enchantment: 'One has only to know from where the enchantment comes. The answer: from the unrestrained domination of machination. When machination finally dominates and permeates everything, then there are no longer any conditions by which to detect the enchantment and to protect oneself from it' (p. 87). Thus, enchantment with beings -rooted in calculative and accelerated ways of being -comes 'to be accepted and practiced as the only way' of being (Heidegger, 1966: 56). It is for this reason that the accelerated self is in danger of living a fundamentally barren life, one that pathologically seeks to fill an underlying emptiness.

Acceleration and Modern Psychology: A Hermeneutic Critique

How can the practice of psychology break through the illusion that our busy enchantment with beings may be a product of indifference with the world as a whole, an indifference that blocks off and denies any other understanding of being? The concern is that the modern self is dispersed and scattered among consumable beings, and, as a result, it is in on the verge of total fragmentation, with no cohesive, unifying sense of who it is. This is precisely why, according to [START_REF] Cushman | Why the Self Is Empty: Toward a Historically Situated Psychology[END_REF], the frantic cycles of consumption continue: This is a powerful illusion. And what fuels the illusion, what impels the individual into this illusion, is the desperation to fill up the empty self . . . It must consume in order to be soothed and integrated; it must 'take in' and merge with a self-object celebrity, an ideology, or a drug, or it will be in danger of fragmenting into feelings of worthlessness and confusion. (p. 606)

The situation is particularly troubling if we understand that mainstream psychology largely overlooks the social and historical conditions that create this modern sense of fragmentation by uncritically adopting the disengaged and mechanistic perspective of the natural sciences.

Understood as 'the science of mental processes and human behavior', the discipline of psychology is a historical outgrowth of the 18th-century paradigm of the natural sciences in two fundamental ways. First, psychology is concerned with a specific 'method' or procedure based on the observation of material objects in causal interaction, interaction that can be empirically tested and systematically quantified, resulting in the discovery of general laws. In this regard, modern psychology attempts to reduce behavior to elemental causes that are measurable, testable, and repeatable. Indeed, as Bertrand [START_REF] Russell | Our Knowledge of the External World[END_REF] suggests, one of the goals of psychology was to develop 'a mathematics of human behavior as precise as the mathematics of machines' (p. 142; see also [START_REF] Gergen | Social Psychology as History[END_REF]. Second, psychology seeks a perspective of detached objectivity, what Thomas Nagel (1979: 208) calls, a 'view from nowhere' that is free from the distortions and misleading assumptions of everyday life. This disengaged perspective downplays the fact that our emotional well-being is largely shaped by a concrete social and historical context, focusing instead on the physical pathology of the individual. From this standpoint, psychology is left with a very narrow approach to therapy, one that is concerned with 'repairing damage within a disease model of human functioning' (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000: 5).

In his Zollikon Seminars, [START_REF] Heidegger | Zollikon Seminars[END_REF] maintains that all of the various manifestations of modern psychology, including psychoanalysis, are held under 'the dictatorship' of the scientific method that reduces human behavior to elemental causal interactions and views emotional suffering from the perspective of detached objectivity. [START_REF] Freud | Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud[END_REF] confirms Heidegger's criticism when he claims 'psychoanalysis must accept the scientific Weltanschauung' (my emphasis) because 'the intellect and the mind are objects for scientific research in exactly the same way as non-human beings . . . Our best hope for the future is that intellect -the scientific spirit, reason -may in the process of time establish a dictatorship in the mental life of man' (p. 171; see also [START_REF] Askay | Heidegger's Philosophy and Its Implications for Psychology, Freud, and Existential Psychoanalysis[END_REF].

Today, the 'scientific spirit' has emerged as psychopharmacology, which has replaced psychoanalysis as the dominant therapeutic model. On this view, the psychiatrist invariably refers to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV; APA, 1994), a document that catalogues a massive list of observable pathologies, identifies various symptoms, and prescribes ways in which to treat the causes of these symptoms. A client, for instance, with observable symptoms of depression is prescribed medication in order to fix the biologically determined cause, specifically, the chemical levels of serotonin and dopamine in the brain. The medication will balance these levels, block out the feelings of depression and emptiness, and allow the client to effectively and functionally re-enter his/her rapid-paced world. This approach to therapy is problematic.

First of all, psychopharmacology, like psychoanalysis, presupposes a conception of the self that is, in no way, trans-historical. It is a conception rooted in uniquely modern assumptions of individualism and causal determinism [START_REF] Taylor | The Moral Topology of the Self[END_REF][START_REF] Cushman | Why the Self Is Empty: Toward a Historically Situated Psychology[END_REF]. The therapist interprets the client as an encapsulated thing or object that needs to be fixed by means of instrumental techniques and fails to address the underlying socio-historical etiology that may be contributing to the client's disorder. Furthermore, the therapist interprets the mental health of the client largely in terms of his/her competence in handling the frantic pace of modern life, and this has a tendency to perpetuate the very social conditions that manifested the feelings of indifference and emptiness in the first place. [START_REF] Taylor | The Moral Topology of the Self[END_REF][START_REF] Cushman | Why the Self Is Empty: Toward a Historically Situated Psychology[END_REF]. In short, by ignoring the fact that the practice of psychology itself and the emotional conditions that it treats are shaped by our involvement in a particular social and historical situation, our own emptiness, as [START_REF] Heidegger | The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude[END_REF] says, continues to remain hidden from us.

Indeed, it can be argued that many of the newest illnesses in the latest DSM are a direct result of accelerated social conditions. Among these we might include: (1) the most ubiquitous anxiety disorders mediated by chronic sensory arousal and time pressure, such as 'panic disorder', 'generalized anxiety disorder', and 'social phobia'; (2) personality disorders perpetuated by a culture that values rapid multi-tasking and racing thought patterns, such as 'obsessivecompulsive personality disorder' and 'attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder'; and (3) impulse disorders based on socially determined expectations of instant satisfaction or gratification, such as 'pathological gambling and shopping disorder', 'kleptomania', and 'intermittent explosive disorder'. The mechanistic approach to curing these illnesses results in a paradox if what is causing the disorder is itself an accelerated, mechanized way of living.

The way therapy is provided today illustrates this paradox. With market forces and health trusts imposing time restraints on patient visits, today's psychiatric sessions are increasingly compressed and mediated by assumptions of efficiency and cost-effectiveness, where the therapist is there to either quickly teach the client cognitive-behavioral techniques or prescribe and refill psychotropic medication. Thus, by overlooking the way in which the practice of psychology itself is shaped by an accelerated world, psychologists and psychiatrists have not only been treating the accelerated self, 'they have also been constructing it, profiting from it, and not challenging the social arrangement that created it' (Cushman, 1990: 609).

Even alternative forms of therapy that do not focus on the pathological condition of the client fail to articulate the fundamental role that our socio-historical situation plays in determining emotional well-being. Charles [START_REF] Guignon | Hermeneutics, Authenticity, and the Aims of Psychology[END_REF] critique of the renewed interest in 'positive psychology' is a case in point. 11 Positive psychology is defined as 'a science of positive subjective experience, positive individual traits, and positive institutions [that] promises to improve the quality of life and prevent the pathologies that arise when life is barren and meaningless' (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000: 6). To this end, positive psychology does not address the observable symptoms of the disorder. Rather, it embraces the active agency of the client who now focuses his/her energies not on the dark moods of emptiness and ennui but on the positive and optimistic qualities of life, even if such qualities are simply illusions: 'One of the most impressive findings . . . of positive psychology is that positive illusions and unrealistic optimism are in fact beneficial to people, helping them cope with stressful events and extending their lives' (Guignon, 2002: 86). This refocusing on positive illusions will allow the client to interpret himself/herself as a 'deci-sion maker with choices, preferences, and the possibility of becoming masterful [and] efficacious' (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000: 8).

What remains problematic is that the optimistic values promoted by positive psychology are not timeless; they are themselves products of a technological economy aimed at efficacy and quick-fixes. For instance, as [START_REF] Guignon | Hermeneutics, Authenticity, and the Aims of Psychology[END_REF] points out, the client does not embrace the positive virtues of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics such as shame, wittiness, pride, and courage, nor does he/she focus on the Judeo-Christian virtues of humility, selflessness, and meekness. Rather, the psychologist asks the client to focus on uniquely modern values that accommodate the interpretation of the self that psychology inherits from Cartesian and empiricist epistemologies. Thus, the self is interpreted as an enclosed, masterful, autonomous subject that can manipulate and effectively control surrounding objects. This leads the client of positive psychology to focus on values such as 'self-determination' [START_REF] Schwartz | Self-determination: The Tyranny of Freedom[END_REF], 'adaptability' [START_REF] Vaillant | Adaptive Mental Mechanisms: Their Role in a Positive Psychology[END_REF], 'creativity' [START_REF] Simonton | Creativity, Cognitive, Personal, Developmental, and Social[END_REF], and 'individual happiness' [START_REF] Buss | The Evolution of Happiness[END_REF].

In doing so, the now optimistic and self-assertive client will be empowered, able to master the accelerated work-world as an effective and optimally functioning individual. This means, however, that the therapist fails to acknowledge the fact that the client's positive values are themselves socially and historically constructed. This results in a twofold dilemma. First, the therapist overlooks the possibility of older, alternative virtues that are part of our shared history such as communal belongingness, attachment, and dependency in favor of ultra-modern individualism and autonomy. The therapist, therefore, is unable to address the client's contemporary experience of isolation and emptiness because the client continues to interpret himself/herself as a self-reliant subject who is cut off from the world rather than someone who belongs to it. Furthermore, by uncritically adopting the values of a technological economy, positive psychology reinforces the same instrumental, accelerated way of living that initially brought about the client's feelings of emptiness.

To this end, Heidegger's project reveals how psychology continues to 'misinterpret' the self as either a masterful, subjective consciousness or a quantifiable, causally determined object. 'I am always disturbed by [psychology's] misinterpretation of being-in-the-world', says Heidegger (2001: 271), 'it is conceived either as a present-at-hand [thing] or as the intentionality of subjective consciousness'. For Heidegger, psychology is called to acknowledge the ontological fact that the self is always already 'being-in-the-world', and it is this ongoing involvement in the world that makes possible the modern interpretation of the self. This is why understanding human existence in terms of Dasein can be so helpful to psychology. With Heidegger, the world is not interpreted as a container filled with objects within which the self resides. Rather, the world is a meaningful nexus of social relations, and the self is already concretely involved with and embedded in this nexus. As [START_REF] Heidegger | Basic Problems of Phenomenology[END_REF] says, 'self and world belong together in the single entity, the Dasein. Self and world are not two beings, like subject and object, or I and thou, but self and world are the basic determination of the Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of being-in-theworld ' (p. 318).

By dismantling the philosophical assumptions of the modern worldview, Heidegger shows us how the practice of psychology can be enhanced by focusing on the socio-historical aspect of the manifestation of individual pathologies. Modern psychology, on this view, does not discover timeless principles of human behavior. The therapeutic practice of psychology itself is a historical phenomenon, the result of an increasingly accelerated, mechanized, and individualistic way of life that began to take hold in the late 19th century, a way of life that brought with it its own brand of emotional malaise. Turn-of-the-century philosophers and social theorists, like Heidegger, responded to this cultural transformation by introducing and redefining terms -such as anxiety (Kierkegaard), boredom (Simmel), alienation (Marx), disenchantment (Weber), the mass man (Ortega y Gasset) and anomie (Durkheim) -in order to engage these emerging pathologies. Thus, in order to properly understand the self, psychology must come to grips with the movement of history that shapes the understanding of who we are. Indeed, 'to understand history', as Heidegger (1997: 7) reminds us, 'cannot mean anything else than to understand the self'.

Conclusion

We can summarize Heidegger's contribution to modern psychology in the following way. First, by identifying interconnected 'symptoms' of modernity in the Beiträge -'calculation', 'acceleration ', and 'massiveness' -Heidegger (1999) reveals how the frenzied pace of technological life embodies a 'hidden distress' in the inconspicuous cultural mood of boredom. By emphasizing a standpoint of detached objectivity, psychology overlooks the social forms that manifest this shared feeling of indifference and fails to recognize the ways in which the modern self drives away this indifference with the frantic consumption and production of goods and services. This disengaged perspective makes it all but impossible for psychologists and psychiatrists to recognize how they participate in the construction of the accelerated self.

Second, by emphasizing how our everyday understanding of things as well as our moods and dispositions are always already mediated by a socio-historical situation, Heidegger deconstructs the modern conception of the self as an autonomous subject or a biologically determined object. He, therefore, undermines the traditional interpretation of the detached therapist who neutrally examines the objective symptoms of the client. By uncritically adopting this interpretation, psychology neglects the concrete situation that is already there, shaping the emotional state and comportment of client and therapist alike. Heidegger reveals that the therapist is, first and foremost, not a disengaged spectator but a 'being-in-the-world', pre-theoretically involved in the public practices and assumptions of modernity. In this regard, the self is what Heidegger calls, 'ex-static'. As human beings, we 'stand outside' of ourselves because we are already woven to the particular worldly context -of equipment, institutions, habits, and prejudices -that we are involved in everyday.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Heidegger's project opens up the possibility for mainstream psychology to broaden its approach to treatment by incorporating a wide-ranging historical and cultural understanding of individual pathologies [START_REF] Cushman | Constructing the Self, Constructing America[END_REF][START_REF] Dreyfus | From Depth Psychology to Breadth Psychology: A Phenomenological Approach to Psychopathology[END_REF][START_REF] Askay | Heidegger's Philosophy and Its Implications for Psychology, Freud, and Existential Psychoanalysis[END_REF][START_REF] Guignon | Hermeneutics, Authenticity, and the Aims of Psychology[END_REF]. This understanding enables the psychologist to break free from, what Heidegger (2001) calls, 'scientism', where science is dogmatically accepted as 'the new religion' insofar as its method alone can provide us with the objective truth about human behavior (p. 18). In his Zollikon Seminars [START_REF] Heidegger | Zollikon Seminars[END_REF] explains, 'science is, to an almost incredible degree, dogmatic everywhere, that is, it operates with preconceptions and prejudices which have not been reflected on. There is the highest need for doctors who think and do not wish to leave the field entirely to the scientific technicians ' (p. 103).

By regarding the human being as 'an object which is present-at-hand', psychology ignores our ontological character, that prior to any objectification, we are a finite, socio-historical way of being, a way of being that opens up the Dasein, the 'clearing' or 'there' that makes any worldview, scientific or otherwise, possible. Heidegger's hermeneutic approach to psychology reveals the extent to which science is always already grounded in an unfolding historical horizon. Such an approach can release the therapist from the dogmatic prejudices of the scientific method and release the client from an increasingly narrow definition of the self that is rooted in modern assumptions of individualism, selfreliance, and busyness. It is largely on the basis of these assumptions, after all, that the contemporary experiences of isolation and nervous indifference manifest, leading so many into therapy in the first place.

Notes

A draft of this article was presented to the American Society for Philosophy, Counseling, and Psychotherapy (ASPCP) at the American Philosophical Association Central Division Meetings in Chicago, April 2006.

1. These seminars began in September of 1959 as a series of lectures with Heidegger and psychiatrists from the University of Zurich's medical clinic, Burghölzli. The seminars later moved to the house of one of Heidegger's close friends, the psychiatrist Medard Boss, who lived in Zollikon. See [START_REF] Aho | The Missing Dialogue between Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty: On the Importance of the Zollikon Seminars[END_REF] for further discussion of the importance of the Zollikon Seminars and the role they play in Heidegger's project of fundamental ontology. 2. Besides 'Echo', Heidegger lists 'Playing-Forth', 'Leap', 'Grounding', 'The Ones to Come', and 'The Last God' as the other fugues. These fugues are not to be understood as progressive or chronologically ordered, but as repetitions of the same movement of history or 'be-ing', which [START_REF] Heidegger | Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning)[END_REF] refers to with the 18th-century orthography Seyn:

In each of the six joining the attempt is made always to say the same [das Selbe] of the same, but in each case from within another essential domain of that which enowning names. Seen externally and fragmentarily, one easily finds 'repetitions' everywhere. But what is most difficult is purely to enact in accord with the jointure, a persevering with the same, this witness of genuine inabiding of inceptual thinking. (p. 57)

3. Heidegger dismantles the ordinary interpretation of time, understood as a linear 'process' (Vorgang) or sequence of 'nows' that can be measured and organized by means of clocks and calendars into hours, days, weeks, and years. For Heidegger, everyday 'clock time' is itself made possible by 'primordial time', understood as an interconnected manifold of the 'ecstatic' structures of Past (Gewesenheit), Present (Gegenwart) and Future (Zukunft). These structures represent the a priori scaffolding or frame of reference on the basis of which things can show up as the very things that they are. 4. According to [START_REF] Ulmer | Heart and Mind: The Practice of Cardiac Psychology[END_REF], hurry sickness can be diagnosed if the subject suffers from, among other things: (1) 'deterioration of the personality, marked primarily by loss of interest in aspects of life except those connected with achievement of goals and by a preoccupation with numbers, with a growing tendency to evaluate life in terms of quantity rather than quality'; (2) 'racing mind syndrome, characterized by rapid, shifting thoughts that gradually erode the ability to focus and concentrate and create disruption of sleep'; (3) 'loss of ability to accumulate pleasant memories, mainly due to either preoccupation with future events or rumination about past events, with little attention to the present' (p. 332). 5. This course expands on Heidegger's inaugural Freiburg lecture given on 24 July 1929 entitled 'What Is Metaphysics?' In this lecture, the mood of boredom is explored for the first time. 6. Here I am indebted to [START_REF] Emad | Boredom as Limit and Disposition[END_REF] for the thorough analysis of Heidegger's conception of boredom. 7. To this end, the German word for boredom captures something that the French or English renditions cannot. Langeweile is literally the unpleasant mood that accompanies an empty stretch of time; it is 'the lengthening and lingering of the while (Weile)'. See Emad (1985: 67). 8. This translation is taken from Hubert [START_REF] Dreyfus | Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time[END_REF] who suggests that the term conveys 'being found in a situation where things and options already matter' (p. 168). 9. See [START_REF] Aho | Metontology and the Body-Problem in Being and Time[END_REF] for a more involved discussion of Stimmung and the ways in which it shapes our own emotional states. 10. [START_REF] Heidegger | Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning)[END_REF] confirms this shift from the pre-modern to modern manifestation of techne  in the Beiträge when he writes:

What happens to nature in technicity, when nature is separated out from beings by the natural sciences? The growing -or better, the simple rolling unto its end -destruction of 'nature'. What was it once? The site for the moment of the arrival and dwelling of gods, when the site -rested in the essential swaying of be-ing. (p. 195) 11. For instance, the journal American Psychologist recently devoted an entire volume (55/1, 2000) to the resurgent movement of positive psychology.

  This letting oneself go with whatever is happening around us is possible only if, from the outset, we constantly let whatever is going on come toward us, come up against us, just as it is given. It is possible only if we are entirely present [ganz Gegenwart] in the face of whatever is happening around us, or, as we say, only if we simply make present[gegenwärtigen]. (p. 124)

TIME & SOCIETY16(1)


Andrew Metcalfe

come   L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire

Becoming Who You Are

The time of education

Andrew Metcalfe and Ann Game

ABSTRACT. Desirous time is not conducive to learning because its fantasies are distractions from the present moment, the time when genuine creative possibilities emerge. In contrast, the time of love, of an I-Thou relation, is the time of potential and infinitude. This is when engaged learning occurs, and when students develop the practices that open them to a creative way of being. In contrast to the future-oriented linearity of desirous time, the time of creative learning is the time of presence. This argument is developed using interview material from well-known Australians and well-regarded Australian teachers. KEY WORDS • patience • potential • presence • the present • whole

Desirous Time and the Time of Love

In this article we explore the time and ontology of creative or deep learning, a transformative, wonder-filled process in which we learn about the world and ourselves anew through engagement. In order to develop an understanding of the temporality of these experiences, we make a distinction between identitybased and relational pedagogies, between teaching through a desire for knowledge and teaching with a love of learning (see also [START_REF] Liston | Love and Despair in Teaching[END_REF]. This distinction reflects a tension, common in education debates and practices, as well as debates around knowledge, between a desire for certainty on the one hand, and openness to the unknown, to surprise and change, on the other.

The difference between these pedagogic approaches can be understood in terms of the difference between the Hegelian logic of desire and Martin [START_REF] Buber | I and Thou[END_REF] I-Thou relation of love [START_REF] Game | Creative Knowledge[END_REF][START_REF] Metcalfe | Everyday Presences[END_REF]. The Hegelian scenario is that of a desire for self-certainty and identity, a desire for mastery of otherness and the unknown [START_REF] Hegel | Phenomenology of Spirit[END_REF]. Despite their deconstructions of the desire for self-certainty and mastery, post-Hegelians retain the basic formulation of desire: the primacy of identities, self and other, that precede social relations. [START_REF] Cixous | Sorties[END_REF], for example, speaks of a desire which 'would keep the other alive and different' (p. 79), and a movement towards the other in a proximity that avoids merger or appropriation. The alternative is between two forms of identity, separate or merged. Deconstructions of Hegel focus on the impossibility of a complete mastery or appropriation: there is always an excess that is unknown. Logically this unknown is elsewhere, eluding us in an endless deferral that produces a restless 'never settling' movement [START_REF] Cixous | Sorties[END_REF]; see also [START_REF] Derrida | Margins of Philosophy[END_REF]. Thus, despite the undoing of mastery, a desire for knowledge is necessarily governed by an end. Desirous time involves living in the future, taking us away from the present moment. [START_REF] Buber | I and Thou[END_REF] used the term 'I-It' to describe the logic of this Hegelian world of finite subjects and objects located in linear-Euclidean time-space. He distinguished this from the infinitude of an I-Thou relation. The latter relation refers to a primary relationality: 'I-Thou establishes the world of relation ' (p. 11):

When Thou is spoken, the speaker has no thing for his object . . . Thou has no bounds . . . The relation to the Thou is direct. No system of ideas, no foreknowledge, and no fancy intervene between I and Thou . . . No aim, no lust, and no anticipation intervene between I and Thou . . . (pp. 3-12) In an I-Thou meeting there are no identifiable subjects, objects and desires. It is not that these are transcended, but rather that no identification can be adequate, no identity can serve as a conclusion of knowing. What I know in the eternity of the meeting is not an endless amount of knowledge but a knowledge of the mystery, the no-thing-ness, of the whole: 'in each Thou we address the eternal Thou' (p. 6). Such meetings are characterized by wonder.

The time of an I-Thou meeting is the present:

The present, and by that is meant not the point which indicates from time to time in our thought merely the conclusion of 'finished' time, the mere appearance of a termination which is fixed and held, but the real, filled present, exists only in so far as actual presentness, meeting and relation exist. The present arises only in virtue of the fact that the Thou becomes present. (Buber, 1958: 12) In this time, the unfolding present holds within it all time, but, in contrast to chronological or linear time, the past here is not a flashback to what has been and the future is not anticipation of what is to come. Past and future exist in the eternal as phenomena of the present. This, as Buber suggests, is the time of presence, the time of being, the time of the fullness of living (see also [START_REF] Heidegger | On Time and Being[END_REF][START_REF] Loy | What's Wrong with Being and Time: A Buddhist Critique[END_REF].

With the suspension of a subject's desire for an object, Buber's I-Thou is a relation of love: 'Love is between I and Thou . . . Love is responsibility of an I for a Thou' (Buber, 1958: 14-15). This love has the qualities of the 'transformative, enlarged love' that [START_REF] Liston | Love and Despair in Teaching[END_REF] says nourishes students' and teachers' souls. Drawing on [START_REF] Murdoch | The Sovereignty of Good[END_REF], Liston argues that this is a form of love that 'takes the individual beyond his or her personal concerns to a clearer, less noisefilled focus on beauty . . . and on the world around and beyond us ' (p. 81). It allows us to accept mortality and uncertainty with humility and to attend to the reality of the learning situation before us, here and now, without anticipation. This patient and attentive state is essential if teachers are to play their part in helping students engage with the larger world, finding the connections between their lives and this world that show 'that significance exists' (Liston, 2000: 95-9).

To make this argument about the time of education, we will draw on a research project on 'teachers who change lives'. We interviewed 13 well-known Australians and 22 teachers, the latter coming from all levels of formal education and a diversity of disciplines, including maths, languages, sciences, humanities, theatre, music, art and sport [START_REF] Metcalfe | Teachers Who Change Lives[END_REF]. In semistructured interviews, we invited all interviewees to talk about their experiences of life-changing teachers, and the teachers to talk about their own teaching practices and experiences. We encouraged all participants to re-enter and recount specific experiences.

The aim of this project was to develop a relational understanding of education, addressing the question: what happens between teachers and students in effective, engaged learning and teaching? Thus, we took the relational tradition of phenomenology as the basis of our conceptual framework and methodology. In phenomenology, participation is the principle of knowledge: we know, not as subjects observing objects, but through our being in the world. In other words, the site of knowledge is the relation: we know and learn 'with' rather than 'about' others. In our interviews, both we and our interviewees learned more than we had previously known about learning and teaching.

Avoiding abstractions, phenomenology is concerned with direct and specific descriptions of experiences, of the space and time of our relations with others [START_REF] Merleau-Ponty | Phenomenology of Perception[END_REF]. Our empirical research was not designed to be representative or to provide data from which generalizations could be drawn, but, rather, to provide details of particular experiences and situations, through which we might gain a sympathetic understanding of the universality of good teaching. Our writing is also guided by a participatory principle, aiming to evoke the quality of experiences so that they might resonate with those of readers. By inviting readers to reflect on the similarities and differences with their own experiences, this form of writing allows for a creative dialogue with the text [START_REF] Bachelard | The Poetics of Space[END_REF].

Changing and Educing

In our research, we found that good teachers were aware of the unhealthy nature of their pedagogic desires and strategies, however well intentioned these may be; through concentrating on potential rather than expectation, through patience rather than a desire for pre-established outcomes, they had learned to live with the unknowing that comes with presence.

Let us exemplify this mature unknowing. Mr Schubert was the life-changing teacher nominated by writer Nick Jose. Mr Schubert was a senior teacher whose students had a record of great distinction in public examinations, yet Mr Schubert did not work towards particular outcomes. In a letter to an ex-student, he explained: A teacher's work can properly be judged only by its long-term outcome, of which, in the nature of things, he can normally expect to know little or nothing: he works, as it were, largely in the dark. Additionally, there is the question of what criterion it is appropriate to use. Recently, at a dinner at the School, I sat between [A], who was still plainly excited by being newly appointed a judge of the Supreme Court, and [B], who makes no bones about his satisfaction with his role in shaping the policies of the Reserve Bank. But, perversely perhaps, I am even more impressed by [C], who tells me he still always has his Donne on his bedside table, or [D], who claims that he reads more poetry than anything else.

Nick's own account of Mr Schubert's practice confirmed the importance of this humility, innocent of strategy:

Mr Schubert had a really deep love of literature. The texts he chose for us were fantastic texts he had a passion for, and, however strange his manner, he was able to convey that passion. He was very sensitive to literature and was always . . . challenging us to tap into quite powerful forces in our lives, and that was a way of letting us be ourselves.

He seemed blissfully unaware of the effect he was having on us. He would be there, he would rub his nose a lot and he'd read out these bits, like the quote from Othello -'an old black ram . . . tupping your white ewe'. It was electrifying! Because he was blissfully unaware, we thought it was okay too. He treated us absolutely as if we were mature people intellectually. Mr Schubert's teaching drew, it seems, on an undefined range of hopes for his students. He might have hoped that they would be successful in their careers; he hoped that they would serve others; he hoped that they would be sustained by their relationships with books. These hopes, however, never settled into finite desires that would allow him to appraise his success with each student. Eschewing a desirous, purposive hope that would take him away from the present, Mr Schubert taught with what [START_REF] Hillman | Suicide and the Soul[END_REF] says is an altogether different, religious sense of hope. He quotes St Paul: 'For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.' This is an infinite hope, a patient and courageous hope, based on interest and curiosity and not, like desire and expectation, on a finite object or outcome. This is a hope open to the surprise of time, and therefore able to be realistic about our place in the world. Not projecting abstract fantasies onto the future, it is a hope that accepts tomorrow as the unfolding of today. It finds in tomorrow what it knows it is not in a position to expect today, and yet it finds it as the fulfilment of the as yet unknown significance of the present. 1 There is genuine creativity and yet it leads us to become what we (don't yet quite know we) are.

As Nick Jose insisted, Mr Schubert's teaching doubtless had 'successful' outcomes, but to achieve them he had to set expectations aside in his daily classroom work, concentrating simply on the students as they were, then and there. His task as teacher was to establish a classroom in which students could be changed through their encounter with John Donne. Mr Schubert didn't try to control the outcome of this relation. He loved what he did, and shared what he loved, and had faith in his students and his beloved poets. As Nick put it, 'what the teacher does is in the here and now, that's where it happens, and then there is this distant harvest, which they have to just trust in. Teachers can't predict exactly what will happen. Their work is an act of faith.' Mr Schubert's bemusement about his effect on students recalls Socrates' claim that teaching is an impossible project (see [START_REF] Felman | Psychoanalysis and Education[END_REF]. It was a bemusement shared by all the teachers we interviewed. They were uneasy about our idea of life-changing teachers, insisting that it is teaching that is powerful, not teachers; the miracle comes from what teachers and students do together, how they change in ways that no one could have expected. They told us that teachers who try to change students are imposing themselves on students, trying to control the future by limiting students to what the teachers can themselves imagine. Ethical teaching, they insisted, is fundamentally a process of educingdrawing out. Teachers can help by keeping students open to aspects of their potential that the unfolding of lived time has not yet revealed, but they cannot do the learning or the living on their behalf.

Potential and Wholeness

In their account of the face-to-face encounter, [START_REF] Levinas | Ethics and Infinity[END_REF] give a classic account of the infinitude of relational logic. This is the logic of love rather than desire, of potential rather than expectation, and through it we enter the eternal and universal that underlies the profane temporality of subjectivity, objectivity and desire:

Access to the face is straightaway ethical. You turn yourself toward the Other as toward an object when you see a nose, a forehead, a chin, and you can describe them. The best way of encountering the Other is not even to notice the color of his eyes! When one observes the color of the eyes one is not in social relationship with the Other . . . There is first the very uprightness of the face, its upright exposure, without defense. The skin of the face is that which stays most naked, most destitute . . . [T]he Other, in the rectitude of his face, is not a character within a context. Ordinarily one is a 'character': a professor at the Sorbonne, a Supreme Court justice, son of so-and-so . . . Here, to the contrary, the face is meaning all by itself. You are you. In this sense one can say that the face is not 'seen'. It is what cannot become a content, which your thought would embrace; it is uncontainable, it leads you beyond. (pp. 85-6) When Levinas says 'you are you', he is not associating you-ness with a selfcontained identity, but rather with an essence that is being-ness. The word you is like the words now and here: it indicates a presence that can be experienced as a whole but never known as a totality, never defined, contained. Levinas is referring to an I-Thou relation.

When we asked Sharon Cheers, a primary school teacher, what she saw in her students, she spoke of their blooming, and described it in a way that reminded us of Levinas's account. Her teaching relied on her ability to see in each student their particularity:

You can definitely see talent in people, but you can also see them as a person. That constantly amazes me. You can go down to that pre-school and their personalities are there. They are true little people. So in saying you can see their talent, you can certainly see aspects of their personality that are strong, but whether or not that's a talent or just them, I don't know. In terms of something that you measure, in terms of competition, I wonder: Competition in what? Competition in being a good person? Competition in being able to answer closed questions correctly? How do you measure a good thinker against a better thinker? You can always set something you can measure and then compare students against that, but that's leaving out a whole lot. I suppose that's the whole other thing, how do you measure education?

To see the effect on students of the teacher's holistic vision, let us cite Jenny Oliver's account of her maths teacher, Mr Simpson. In her senior high school years, Jenny had become burdened by people's expectations, pigeon-holed as a future lawyer or doctor on the basis of high marks. Rather than conform, she was on the point of dropping out entirely. Mr Simpson not only allowed her to find her way back, he helped her find her own vocation as a primary school teacher:

He was so there for me, so gentle and so kind and he listened to what I said when other teachers had lost their patience or didn't know what to do with me. Absolutely encouraging. When I think about teachers like him, that's the classic thing in my head: they made me feel like me! Mr Simpson got the picture, he got the whole personality. And I guess I became even more me because I was totally devoid of anxiety. When people have expectations of you they see one slice only, whereas Mr Simpson saw the whole and I could flourish.

Jenny was debilitated and constrained by the pressure of expectations. Mr Simpson made a difference because he saw that she would always be more than dux of her class, a doctor or a teacher, even if she were any of these things. Any defined identity would be only a slice of Jenny. Being there for her, Mr Simpson helped Jenny to relax and be herself, to find joyful ways of realizing her potential. The world was again full of open promise. When Mr Simpson saw his students, he saw the potential that made each unique and incomparable. This insight underlay his ability to draw out the students' potential by drawing out the best work they could do.

It is important to be conceptually precise here, for potential is a word with different understandings that have different implications for teaching. As Sharon implied, potential is often confused with talent, seen as a measure of innate ability. To see the student's potential in this sense is to assay them as raw material and, on the basis of this, set educational expectations. The temporality here is future-oriented linearity, involving prediction and projection of a preestablished identity. Jenny, for example, was generally expected to become a doctor, and expected herself to maintain her brilliant academic record. Although often presented as a form of praise, such expectations actually constrain the student's potential, establishing an identity that becomes a measure of their life. In the face of these expectations Jenny experienced such anxiety that she lost a sense of the inherent value of education.

A richer sense of potential, one based in an I-Thou rather than an I-It relation, arises when teachers like Mr Simpson see students in their uniqueness, as whole people whose capacities exceed any definition or prediction. Instead of setting up external standards that distract students from their current situation, these teachers only ask for what the students can do at any given moment -their best. All they require is that students commit themselves, refusing to hold back because they think they've done enough or reached their limit. They're asking not that students be the best but that they do their best.

Whereas talent is an objective thing that can be tested and measured from the outside, no words can describe potential. It comes as epiphany, Jenny Oliver told us, through the wonder of direct encounter with the infinite. Potential is not a thing that is seen but a sense of wonder that is experienced through a love of learning. The teacher can see the students' potential because students reopen the teacher's horizons: What I see in the children in my class is their potential. It is an epiphany. For me as a teacher, it's an absolute privilege. When I look at them, when I look at their writing, and I see what they have the ability to be, oh my gosh, like leaps and bounds beyond me. When I think about what I want them to learn, I want them to see what their potential is, and to realize it as best they can for themselves.

It is interesting to look at Jenny's story alongside the account we were given by Kym Lawry, a high school teacher, of the responsibility of the teacher. Because Kym knows what students and others offer him, because he knows that potential unfolds through playing a part of a whole, he knows that it will only be the students' relations that give them lives that will fulfil their potential: I'm passionate about teaching physics, but a physicist's view of the world is just one part of the story. It's a nice coherent story, but you have to say, 'Look, physics offers one way of looking at the world, find some others. Find something that excites or engages you. You have to do more than just survive, get a house and a car. You have to find meaning.' That's why my involvement in the school is wider than physics. I've run trips to Samoa where we've got involved with primary schools and Australian Volunteers Abroad.

In a holistic sense, my role as a teacher is to play a small part in equipping students to become successful humans. What you're hoping to do is help them become happy, positive, enthusiastic, committed, just, engaged members of their society. I want to show them that there are lots of different ways in which they can be involved in life and make a contribution. This is not old-fashioned charity, but a sense of responsibility: what's your response to the world?

Teachers like Mr Simpson and Kym Lawry have faith that if the students go about their lives with an open heart, they will find their unique paths and fulfil their potential. Students whose lives are most whole and most fulfilled will be those who become most engaged with their work, with other people, with the world and with themselves. Whether in school or outside it, engagement is the way to learning and learning is the development of engagement. By engaging with other people's realities, we learn to draw out our own potential and become most fluently and creatively ourselves.

What teachers ask is that students maintain openness, an honest relation with their lives. The teacher's responsibility is to help them develop awareness of issues that might alienate them from their work, and they do this, with love's honesty, by calling the students' attention to work that is anything less than whole-hearted.

Many interviewees turned to organic metaphors to discuss these responsibilities to students. Jenny Oliver said that Mr Simpson let her 'flourish'; English teacher Judith Moreland-Mitchell spoke of students 'blossoming'. The philosopher Raimond Gaita told us that teaching was a planting of seeds:

Years after I first met [Martin Winkler], when I despaired of teaching, he told me that there are two ways to think about teaching. One is to dream of pulling a switch that will make a thousand lights come on. Another is nourished by the image of passing a candle from one person to another, or of planting seeds, not knowing when or where they will grow. It was the wisest advice about teaching that I have ever received. The seeds he planted in me were then still germinating. They grew only many years later, when I wrote Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, which I dedicated to him.

Whereas the logic of prediction presupposes an already determined world, a finite world without creative possibilities, potential is experienced in a living organic world. To anyone with eyes to see, the seed already has within it the history of life; it holds an evolutionary potential that is never finalized. Each seed is unique, yet each is the whole miracle of life. Good teaching relies on the ability to see this universal essence in the uniqueness of each student.

It is this logic of potential that accounts for the remarkable fact that teachers find qualities in a world governed by quantities. However many students they have in a year, however many years they have taught, good teachers find the unlimited capacity to be amazed by the uniqueness of each student. Competition is used in schools to help students extend themselves, but teachers' relations to students are not based on competitive rankings. There is no competition for the teacher's respect.

A consequence of the teacher's vision is their need to accept the uncertainty of lived time. Martin Winkler's tone has hope but no triumphalism. He knows that any attempt to guarantee the outcomes of teaching removes the life of the process. We can plant seeds, and nurture the vulnerable seedlings in our care, but their fate is as open to delight and disappointment as the rest of life. We cannot control life but if we can learn from its ups and downs, we can grow, and it is growth that gives life a sense of wholeness.

Passion and Patience

Passion is one of the words most used about good teachers, and it is commonly assumed that it signifies the energy inputs made by teachers to students. The foregoing discussion has implied, however, that this assumption relies on a faulty understanding of the temporality of creative learning and teaching. The quality of energy in the lively classroom is not restless or adrenalin-based. It is a liveliness that has within it a stillness, because it is working with a potential that is already present.

Sharon Cheers alluded to this slowed-down and opened-out sense of time when describing the dynamic characteristic of the classrooms of her mentor, Alison Pegus:

As soon as you walked into Alison's classroom, you could tell it was working. There was lots of movement, lots of different things happening, but there was still a sense of calm. It's a feeling more than anything. You could tell she was not just listening for the sake of listening, but really listening to understand what's going on for that child. I suppose her passion came through everything she did.

Passion is a word commonly confused with desire, but Sharon's insistence on the significance of classroom atmospherics indicates its basis in a relation that is open rather than driven. Passion, enthusiasm and inspiration are all concepts from religious tradition, pointing to a spiritual and soulful vitality that emerges when people come together. The hum of the classroom involves everyone, yet is beyond the control of even the teacher: something happens, without anyone making it happen. This is an understanding of spirituality that places it within the ordinary world, for the classroom spirit comes from these children and this teacher at this moment.

While Sharon links Alison's passion to calmness, broadcaster Julie McCrossin links passion and patience when describing her life-changing teacher, Mrs Miller:

Passion, patience and boundless personal relationship with each girl, they're the three qualities of a great teacher like Mrs Miller. The most passionate, erudite, curious hunger for learning: that was the spirit I got from Enid Miller and it's alive and well. Mrs Miller's passion was her genuine love of reading, literature and performance: 'she wasn't bunging it on, she was absolutely authentic: she really loved Donne and Shakespeare'. Mrs Miller's patience was evident in the faith she had in the girls' ability to learn through performance: she allowed them time to find their own ways into the roles and hence the plays. Her boundless respect for each girl manifested her compassion: 'she had the ability to make everyone feel special. She really cared; that's the human connection.' These three qualities came together in the curiosity that characterized Mrs Miller's classroom. Julie said, What I mean by really teaching is the ability to arouse, to stimulate to learn, so that the student is made curious and wants to take independent additional action. They're enthusiastic, electrified. Good teachers have a gift, a vocation, and the core of it for me is that they want you to learn as much as they want to learn themselves. In fact it goes deeper than that. Mrs Miller thought she could learn from students. She felt how Julie and the others responded to the trauma of Lady Macbeth and in this way she could experience the trauma of Lady Macbeth afresh.

The classrooms of Alison Pegus and Mrs Miller combined passion with patience, movement with stillness, exuberance with respectful attention. Such combinations remind us that passion, as its etymology implies, is an energy that involves passivity. It is something you receive, something that moves you; it is the compassion of patient devotion. By suspending the trajectory of the desirous self, passion returns students' attention to the task at hand, to the present. Patient and receptive, it provides the time students need if they are to mature.

Think of Mrs Miller's students performing Shakespeare in class. They are not rushing to interpret Shakespeare, and they are not distracted by the prospect of exams. They simply devote themselves to the particular lines of speech before them, playing with them until they ring true. When the lines resound with the vitality of a full body, who is providing the energy? Is it Shakespeare? Julie? Lady Macbeth? Western civilization? Mrs Miller? What time are the students in? Who is active here and who is passive? It is the unanswerability of these questions that gives passion its cognitive power. When it is passionate, the work of Mrs Miller's students will be true to both Shakespeare and the students. This authenticity will be the proof that lessons have been well learned.

In her account of Mrs Miller, Julie several times linked enthusiasm and passion with curiosity. Open to receive what lessons have to offer, interested to see what they will learn about Lady Macbeth and what she will teach them about themselves, students face their day with faith and hope. This is not a curiosity that seeks satisfaction but one that enjoys being part of Shakespeare's universality. It is not faith in any thing, or hope for any identifiable outcome; it is acceptance that the only life available is the one that unfolds from here and now. This class matters. It is not a lesson about life: it is life, it is the world.

What happens if, by contrast, passion and love settle on an object? When lovers define themselves through the beloved person or thing, the other loses their infinitude and becomes an object, desired as an idealized reflection of the lover. This is an ethic that blocks learning because it disrespectfully denies difference. Without difference, the desirous self is closed off from the whole, and potential is reduced to the narrowness of a subject's aims.

Ritual and Presence

If education is a relational process, and teachers cannot unilaterally generate a creative learning experience, they nevertheless have a crucial role in establishing the conditions within which relationships can flourish. For example, kindergarten teacher Vicky Yannikouros told us that she devotes the whole of Term 1 to establishing the routines that make her students feel physically and emotionally safe. Without this safety, she told us emphatically, no child can learn:

Once you've established this feeling of safety, you can vary your teaching mode. The class hums along. So, I'm not advocating running a militant classroom where children can't breathe without putting their hand up. On the contrary, I think those routines in a sense free them.

Vicky believes that the generation of this order is the most difficult task facing teachers. Yet, once it is established, classroom management becomes inconspicuous, able to rely on patterns of conduct integrated into the learning envi-ronment. Without this reliable authority, students feel abandoned, too anxious to learn.

Once a classroom has come to life, the teacher's authority is embedded in the formality of everyday rituals and routines. Whereas imposed routines seem boring and repetitive, the formal routines of a trustworthy environment support the presence that is creatively open. The formality of ritualized time actually produces a fluent attunement to the unfolding of time. Let's examine this by returning to Jenny Oliver's account of Mr Simpson: High school was a troublesome time for me. I took the weight of the Higher School Certificate on my shoulders -the whole angst thing. One of the things that helped was that Mr Simpson's maths teaching was so regular. He was so constant. I can remember we'd walk in and there were mentals. Then he would go into checking homework -we'd do that. Then we'd have a little talk about a new concept. Then we'd do examples -I can remember it so clearly. Then we'd start the homework and also -rain, hail, whatever -if we wanted to see him at lunch time for help, he was there without fail. In the morning, at recess, at lunch time, without fail. I come back to that word, reassurance. It felt supportive, rather than boring. If you create that calm, supportive, anxious-free zone, the doors are open. It encourages that risk taking.

Jenny's trust in the classroom routines was based on her acceptance of her teacher's authority. Because Mr Simpson's greater experience gave him a better sense of what the curriculum required, and of what Jenny could do, the steadiness of his schedules soothed her angst. Instead of being distracted by the future, she could focus on the task before her: when they were doing maths mentals, that was all they were doing. Because of its stillness, the classroom became a sanctuary in Jenny's troubled life.

The logic of this calm, supportive, anxiety-free zone is often misunderstood. People assume that creative work involves personal expression and confessional intimacy. Such an environment, however, makes people too self-conscious to get out of themselves. On the contrary, it is an interested impersonality that allows students to explore the aspects of their lives that elude their self-images. The ritual element of schoolwork held Jenny, opening time and allowing her to fully engage with the problems. Ritual is a form of flow: it allows work to develop grace and fluency by keeping us in the present moment.

With the quiet presence of a shepherd or guardian, Mr Simpson transformed Jenny's experience. We could call the joyful patience of his classroom a 'potential time', comparable to the potential or holding space discussed by [START_REF] Winnicott | Playing and Reality[END_REF]. Within this time, Jenny could easily uncover possibilities hidden from her controlling mind. An error on one day would dissolve when it revealed a better way to approach the problem, or revealed the potential of another question.

Jenny's light awareness of Mr Simpson is like that of a young child playing in the presence of an unintrusive mother. According to [START_REF] Winnicott | The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment[END_REF], this is the situation in which a capacity to be alone develops. When we are alone, we are in the presence of someone else, someone who guards us but who does not need to interfere. Mr Simpson could provide this support because of his own maturity, his own patience and trust, his own ability to hold his fears and desires without projecting them onto a world that is thereby made an external environment requiring control.

When Jenny left Mr Simpson's classes, he remained with her, continuing to support her, in the working rituals she had come to love in his class. In this potential time, she could witness herself with mercy rather than observing herself with judgement; she could have a creative relation with her failings, fears and wounds.

Practice and Maturity

Maturity arises when we learn to live in time. It is the skilful ability to be present and empty, the patience that allows time to unfold. David Ritchie, an actor and teacher of performance studies, told us that it is this maturity that allows us to recognize newness in every repetition:

I have found the more experience you get as a performer, the more you realize the value and mystery of time. We tend to think spatially and visually; language is just full of visual metaphors and it's very poor in temporal metaphors. So when you have the practice and skill to go into something that works in the dimension of time, you are constantly discovering something mysterious and wonderful and terrific. It is a fascinating dimension -stillness and time are very powerful.

Through practice, David can lose his self-consciousness. Entering the life of a play, he brings the play to life, speaking and moving with a rhythm that is just right. Good timing and grace are gifts that practice brings when it makes us humble enough to receive.

To explain how teachers help students develop this mature and skilful relation to time, we will tell a final story, that of oboe player Diana Doherty. When trying to live up to expectations, Diana sought out a famous overseas teacher, initially expecting him to perfect her technique, by eliminating mistakes. At this stage, she was, she told us, her 'own worst enemy', often paralysed by a sense of inadequacy. The turning point came when a dramatic failure forced her to stop and reflect on her relation with her work.

Through talking with a friend, Diana found a holding capacity that allowed her to become aware of the psychodynamics of perfectionism. She could see the harmful effects of self-condemnation, but she could also sympathetically understand the neediness that underlay perfectionism. With awareness, she learned to be alone with her instrument, and enjoy the surprises that arose; things that she once would have regarded as mistakes became moments of interest: What happened there? Does that tell me something about my breathing? What would happen if I changed my posture? This curiosity also changed Diana's relation to perfectionism itself. She learned to treat symptoms of intolerance as useful warning signs; by holding perfectionism she could wait until it redirected her to the love of music. Maturity came, she told us, when tolerance and curiosity transformed perfectionism from saboteur to guide.

Compassionate awareness not only teaches Diana how to play, it teaches her how to teach: I've done a lot of work on myself, addressing my perfectionism, and building a healthy confidence rather than being so critical of myself. This has helped me understand other people. Because being alone in a room with your instrument makes you confront all your imperfections, understanding how you relate to the world is the most important thing. So what I'm doing in teaching is helping a student to develop a way to deal with themselves. Some of these people will not go on to be professional musicians but hopefully these skills will be useful for them, not only in the musical context, but helping them analyse themselves without putting themselves down.

Diana can help students develop a creative relation with time because she is, as she says, holding her own demons. She teaches students by teaching herself in their presence. This is not a modelling of excellence; she is not perfect, she is real. It is awareness of vulnerabilities that allows Diana to be open to her students' potential:

As you become more mature, and learn who you are and what you can do, you become more able to focus on other people rather than seeing everything through the veil of your own insecurity. I think too that aside from teaching, what's really important for me is that I always want to learn, I always want to know more, I always want to get better as a person. I want to be a good example to students of how to be and how to live and so I think, the most important thing, if I'm teaching, is that that doesn't stop me learning.

When Diana talked to us, she used the word 'practice' in two different ways. Early in her career it was a means to an end, a perfection of technique; now it is a musician's way of life, a discipline that has no end. If learning is a way of life, practice is a devotional ritual, an everyday service to your vocation. It is a word, like passion, enthusiasm and inspiration, that carries deep religious resonances.

Practice is the continuation through life of the temporal order provided by classroom routines and rituals. The patience that allows things to happen at the right time is learned through the rhythms of the school day, the slow and precise reading of a literary text, the steps by which you gradually unfold a maths problem.

By holding the desires of the ego, the discipline of practice alleviates anxiety and opens people to what they do not know they need to know. As Diana Doherty insisted, discipline is not a way of being hard on but kind to yourself:

One of my early teachers said it was better to practise as if you did not expect to get to a destination. That changed the picture in your mind and changed what you produced. Before that I would have practised for an hour and thought, I've practised for a whole hour, how come I can't play better yet? I'd be really down on myself and frustrated and I'd just want to go and watch TV.

Students are often told that there's good practice and there's bad practice but I tell my students that any contact with the instrument is better than watching TV. The frequency of the contact is at least as important as the quality of the contact. By encouraging regular practice, I help students develop a healthy relationship with their instrument and themselves. If they expect perfection every time, they won't practise.

I'm happy even with postgraduate students to sit down and look at their timetable and work out a practice programme, because I think that routine and structure in one's day really helps. It keeps the mood healthy and positive; it keeps you focused on what's important, and it removes anxiety and guilt about when to practise. If I don't have a routine I get into an anxious state: I've got e-mails to answer, faxes, letters to answer, phone calls to make, and so I'm anxious because I want to practise but if I practise and I haven't done those things then I can't concentrate on my practice, but if I do those things and I don't start practising until 11.00 then my mood starts to go down because I'm already feeling guilty suddenly, so it just never gets done. But if you always do the same thing more or less everyday you know where you are. I have breakfast at 8.00 and then I practise from 8.30 until 10.00 and then I'll go out and see what I'll do with my day. I feel more comfortable if I've got that practice under my belt first. I can say, 'look, those things can wait, I've just got to practise'. And then I'll feel much more confident talking with these people. This practice regime uses clock time to bring Diana into the stillness and fluency of the present. Like the bells in a monastery, her timetable calls attention to the part of life that matters now, promising that there will be time later for the different aspects of her life. There is a time for dealing with emails and phone calls; there is a time for students, and a time for the family.

Diana's practice is a way of life, the connection between different parts of life. Because the parts are not competing, they can enliven, refresh and augment each other. Rather than feeling fragmented, Diana feels the whole of her life in each of its parts. She feels held by this temporal order because she is becoming who she is.

It is only within the time of presence, the eternal, that the strange logic of this ontology, becoming who you are, can be appreciated. It is this time that makes sense of the simultaneous experience of surprise and recognition in moments of creative learning.

TIME & SOCIETY16(1)

METCALFE & GAME: THE TIME OF EDUCATION

Notes

We thank the students and teachers whom we interviewed for this research. They all enhanced our understanding of the learning and teaching process, but they are not responsible for our interpretations of what they said. Because of a technical problem recording Raimond Gaita's interview, we have relied here on a conference paper (Gaita, 2001) that deals with the main story he told us.

1. While Bloch's (1986) account of the openness of possibilities in the present and the 'Not-Yet-Conscious' resonates with this sense of hope, it is nevertheless based in a linear rather than eternal temporality. From the perspective of presence, similar questions could be raised about the volitional intentionality of Bloch's hope that Loy (1992) raises about the future-orientation of Heidegger's anticipatory resoluteness. ANDREW METCALFE and ANN GAME teach together in the School of Sociology and Anthropology, University of New South Wales, Australia. They have written four books collaboratively: Passionate Sociology, The Mystery of Everyday Life, The First Year Experience, and Teachers Who Change Lives. Additionally, Ann is co-author of Gender at Work and author of Undoing the Social, and Andrew is author of For Freedom and Dignity. ADDRESS: School of Sociology and Social Anthropology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia.

[emails: a.metcalfe@unsw.edu; a.game@unsw.edu]