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What Renders a Witness Trustworthy? Ethical and Curricular Notes on a Mode of Educational Inquiry

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“It strikes me that, in the interest of coherence, an infinity of impressions have been sacrificed and, along with them, some experienced truth. So it must be reworked.”

-- from Shirley Hazard, The Great Fire (Picador, 2003), p. 87

"Whoever does not simply 'present materials' and 'do proofs' with his students, but rather discovers and inquires, must struggle every moment with the phenomenon that his intuitions overflow the limits of his understanding, and his feelings disclose facts and conditions that he cannot yet conceptualize."

-- Max Scheler, “On the rehabilitation of virtue,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 79 (1, 2005), 21-37, p. 36

Abstract

Bearing witness is a familiar if diversely employed concept. On the one hand, it concerns the accuracy and validity of practical affairs, for example in a court of law, at a wedding, or in a law office. On the other hand, the term can embody powerful religious, social, and/ or moral meaning, whether in bearing witness to historical trauma and human suffering, or in paying heed to everyday, seemingly ordinary aspects of nature and of human life. In this article, we address the question of what renders a witness trustworthy. We characterize ethical and epistemic constituents of witnessing. We examine the work of several exemplary witnesses: W. G. Sebald, Saidiya Hartman, Jonathan Lear, Etty Hillesum, and John Berger alongside Jean Mohr. These sources help us think about the education of a person who aspires to bear witness, whether it be to traumatic events or to quotidian life in educational or other settings. We present criteria of trustworthiness that can support reflection on what we take to be the important place of bearing witness in educational inquiry and practice.

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Notes

  1. Consider also, on a different and distinctive plane, the tradition of testimonio in the Americas, in which indigenous and other communities share public testimony about their conditions, sufferings, identities, strengths, and needs (cf. Bernal et al., 2018). Consider, as well, the moral testimony from numerous teachers in our time, who call attention to the anti-educational if not anti-humane impact of an all-out focus on quantitative measures of learning (cf. Santoro, 2018). If engaged with care, these and related literatures can help students and teachers expand their moral horizons, with consequences that can manifest themselves in any number of generative ways.

  2. Fidelity as an ethical concept differs markedly from instrumental or, worse, manipulative uses of the term (cf. Santoro, 2016).

  3. We use the term ‘existential’ not in its technical philosophical sense, associated with thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, but to denote general aspects of the human condition such as human fallibility, vulnerability, mortality, and the like.

  4. However, for representative instances of his literary and social criticism, see Sebald (2003, 2005, 2013).

  5. In this respect, Hartman keeps company with other writers compelled to get as near as possible to the scenes of life and suffering of their forebears. Sebald (2001, p. 296) mentions, for example, Dan Jacobson’s (1999) affecting quest to walk where his Jewish ancestors walked, in Lithuania, before their destruction in World War II.

  6. For a full context of Lear’s reference, see William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative.” The Journal of American History 78 (4, 1992), pp. 1347–1376.

  7. To consider yet another noteworthy witness, Tzvetan Todorov (1996) has memorably documented how prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps and Soviet gulags sustained moral life through the very smallest human gestures of sharing a blanket, a crust of bread, or a compassionate word. Consider also the redemptive grace, documented widely in the media, of the smallest human touch in our era of the pandemic, wherein a person can witness the power human beings have, in the ordinary, to say ‘yes’ to life. But it bears emphasizing that these truths do not downplay or compensate for the irreparable losses and suffering of human trauma.

  8. See also Georges Didi-Huberman’s (2008) book on the four photos, which inspired Richter and led to a compelling dialogue between the two men.

  9. In marked contrast, the fictional remarks of Holocaust-deniers and other purveyors of crude falsehoods speak to but one truth: that some people will lie willfully and brutally to advance their unjust aims. Consider the monstrous fiction propounded by the new Serbian mayor of a town that had recently been ethnically cleansed of its long-standing Bosnian Muslim community (this was back in the 1990s), in the course of which even the physical and cultural traces of that community were destroyed. When asked what happened to the town’s numerous mosques, he replied: “There were never any mosques here” (Bevan, 2006). The larger point, which would require a separate study to warrant, is that the terms bearing witness and witnessing are normative, as implied in the notions of the social, moral, and educational witness. It is a moral contradiction to refer to ‘a Nazi witness’ or to a Holocaust-denier’s ‘testimony’. They are not eye-, I-, or aye-witnesses. A different vocabulary is required to express accurately and truly what such persons have to say.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their critical comments, which have helped us refine aspects of our argument while also suggesting fruitful lines of further inquiry. We would also like to thank the students in a seminar on bearing witness that we co-taught in the Spring of 2021 for their inspiring and enlightening commitment to deep philosophical inquiry.

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Correspondence to David T. Hansen.

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Hansen, D.T., Sullivan, R. What Renders a Witness Trustworthy? Ethical and Curricular Notes on a Mode of Educational Inquiry. Stud Philos Educ 41, 151–172 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-021-09800-w

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