“Cunctando restituit rem”: Teaching, Grown-Up-Ness And The Impulse Society

In his book on the rediscovery of teaching, Gert Biesta suggests that “the educational task consists in making the grown-up existence of another human being in and with the world possible” (Biesta, 2017) and highlights how much this is needed in the era of the “impulse society” (Roberts, 2014). Against this backdrop we will follow and interweave two argumentative trajectories. First, in opposition to the frantic temporality imposed by the impulse society we will construe teaching in terms of a manifestation (and an exercise) of ‘cunctatio’ (Brunstad, 2017), a Latin concept which means hesitating, waiting or delaying in acting or doing; it refers to a break in the course of action. Such a break is called a caesura in English. The caesura breaks the dynamic movement and stops for a moment the energy contained in the movement. Thus, energy is gathered and an energy field emerges, which can trigger new forces. In the world of music, the break is understood as the precursor of something new or the reinforcement of what was. Novelty and reinforcement are then possible outcomes of the break. During the break a space for awareness is opened up. We will argue that one of the symptoms of the erosion of teaching in contemporary educational settings is precisely the erasure of this exercise of ‘cunctatio’ through the pre-established results with which teachers are expected to comply. Secondly, we will explore how the specific temporality of ‘cunctatio’ is conducive to a grown-up-ness- promoting engagement with the subject-matter. Subject-matter is not at the centre of Biesta’s reflection. Indeed, his existential take on teaching has to sidestep this dimension as unredeemably related to the ‘hermeneutic gesture’ of learning (= learning as making-sense of the world). Instead, we would reclaim the role that the staying in a dialogue with a subject-matter can play in helping students to cultivate the “acknowledg[ment] [… ] that the world “out there” is indeed “out there”, and is neither a world of our own making nor a world that is just at our disposal, that is, a world with which we can do whatever we want or fancy” (Biesta, 2017), to which grown-up-ness amounts to. However, for this to happen, the subject-matter is to be addressed within the ‘state’ of the aforementioned ‘cunctatio,’ which only restitutes – or better re-institutes – the matter, as we interpret the verse of Ennius in the title.