Hermeneutics and technology as a salvific dialogue for current pedagogy

Abstract

The paper puts forward the controversial thesis that the dialogue between hermeneutics andtechnology is decisive to safeguard an original pedagogy at the service of a free and responsible citizen. To this end, it makes use of Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity as an interpretative structure that reorders the meaning of the notions of technique and technology hitherto hidden in tradition. It is suggested that the original relationship between hermeneutics and technology wouldreveal itself as a salvific relationship for a pedagogy centered not on how to instruct the citizen as to what he should or should not know, but on the primitive and most authentic way of understanding himself. A more proper consideration of the connection between technology and pedagogy, if it is to be effectively based on a philosophical hermeneutics such as the Heideggerian one, should beable to execute what could be called a “hermeneutic turn”; that is, it would be the phenomenological relationship of the human being with technology that would determine the scope, directionalityand relevance of any educational approach. Inopportunely, he wonders whether it could be Plato who shed light on Heidegger’s uncovering task of inverting the poles between technology and the world, and, by the same token, determined a hermeneutics of facticity in which poetic uncovering would pave the way towards a salvific pedagogy of the original thought.