Abstract

Education has come to mean the transmission of information, rather than the intimate awareness not just of things but of the learner's relation to things. Whereas the practice of paideia associated with modem philosophy has involved an effort to isolate the human in opposition to and contradistinction from that which is non-human, the metapaideia in question here is a practice of self-education, which is not "about the self"---not a given self—-so much as it is about the constitution of the self through dialogue with all that is other than self. That is, metapaideia follows from the question, "Where am I?," a question open to all possibilities, not, that is, to a universal as such, but to a universal dialogue or to a dialogue with the universe, an exchange with every aspect of the subject's situation.