Love Letting: Recognising Sexual Difference as the Basis of a New ‘Praxis’ and ‘Ethos’ of Love

I propose to re-think what is perhaps the pre-eminent moment for the very concept of a ‘Western education’: Plato’s allegory of the cave alongside the work of Luce Irigaray and Martin Heidegger in a ‘re-vision’ of education as a re-turning to the ‘birth’ of the concept. This chiasmic return, I argue, allows a contemplative and sensual (re)appreciation of what we, in the West, might understand education to be. In this re-turning I find strong support for the notion that education, if it is to be more than simply ‘training’, must necessarily be set against the technological model that aims only to “insert… vision into blind eyes” (Plato, Republic, 518c) and, must, instead, work to cultivate (in recognition of the foundation of meaning as our way of being-with) an ethos and praxis of love maintained in the thinking of sexual difference.