Morrow-Torres-Rereading Freire and Habermas

Morrow, Raymond A and Carlos Alberto Torres. 2019.
"Re-Reading Freire and

Habermas: Philosophical Anthropology and Reframing Educational
241
Research in the Neoliberal Anthropocene." Pp. 241-74 in The Wiley Paulo
Freire Handbook, edited by C. A. Torres. Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Wiley
Blackwell.
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Rereading Freire and Habermas

Philosophical Anthropology and Reframing Critical Pedagogy
and Educational Research in the Neoliberal Anthropocene
Raymond Allen Morrow and Carlos Alberto Torres
Introduction
Our Reading Freire and Habermas (Morrow & Torres, 2002) used a thesis of
convergence and complementarity between the two theorists as a reference point
for situating Freire’s project within the larger context of the collapse of the Soviet
Union and post‐Marxist critical social theory. Convergence referred primarily
to the core categories of Freire’s pedagogy, as well as the political strategy that
emerged with his radical democratic approach to the transformation upon his
return from exile to Brazil. In the case of Habermas, the possibility of conver-
gence dates earlier to his break with the pessimistic neo‐Marxism of his Frankfurt
School critical theory mentors in the late 1960s, especially as developed in his
theories of communicative action and deliberative democracy. The question of
complementarity, on the other hand, opened up questions of mutual interrogation,
respective blind spots, and productive points of friction.
To revisit this book after nearly two decades presents a daunting challenge
that introduces various problems of selection, emphasis, and revision in light of
hindsight, subsequent scholarly discussion, and the current horizon of crisis and
possibilities. This task is further complicated by the fact that in the interim we
have not devoted any coordinated effort to the further development of its themes.
This reflects not only that our attention was distracted elsewhere, but that its
favorable if perfunctory reception in the occasional review did not appear to
raise issues that were necessary to respond to. It was cited with some frequency,
though not commensurate with the visibility of Freire and Habermas and without
detailed critical commentary. Particularly noteworthy, as well as disappointing,
was the complete neglect of the book within the community of more specialized
Habermas scholarship, in part a reflection of the more general lack of discussion
of educational theory in that context. If Freire’s untimely death had not
undermined a proposed conference concerned with a dialogue with Habermas,
The Wiley Handbook of Paulo Freire, First Edition. Edited by Carlos Alberto Torres.
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
242 Raymond Allen Morrow and Carlos Alberto Torres
there might have been more of a response. Though the problematic of education
seems more recently to have come to the attention of Axel Honneth—a former
student of Habermas whose theory of recognition has emerged as a major con-
tribution to critical social theory (Honneth, 2012), he surprisingly does not link
his discussion with the contributions of Habermas, let alone Freire, despite the
extensive reception of Habermas in educational theory and research (Murphy &
Fleming, 2009). This neglect is particularly surprising given the centrality of edu-
cational reform in Germany and the democratic public sphere in Habermas’s
earliest writings, the concept of a critical‐emancipatory knowledge interest, the
theory of communicative action, and the leitmotif of collective learning that
underlies his distinction between strategic (or instrumental) rationalization and
social rationalization.
Moreover, Reading Freire and Habermas has been cited primarily to provide
some authority for confirming or clarifying specific points unrelated to the
implications of the Freire‐Habermas relation. Consequently, there was little
effort to extend or further develop the particular issues we introduced, despite
occasional informative exceptions (Borman, 2011; Huttunen & Murphy, 2012;
Knowles & Lovern, 2015). Nor was there much negative criticism, in part a
reflection of the pervasive pluralist spirit of letting a “million Freires” blossom,
despite the wide range of potentially contestable comparative arguments or,
most controversially, situating Freire as a “post‐Marxist” critical social theorist.
Historical Perspective: Themes for Further Exploration

We are writing this chapter on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and more than two decades since Paulo Freire’s pass-
ing. From the perspective of an historicist understanding of social theory—how
theoretical concepts need to be transformed in response to fundamental social
change—such time frames give rise to the necessity of appraising that history of
praxis/reflection. An obvious question thus arises: What have been the interim
historical shifts that need to be taken into account in order to reappraise that
earlier effort? Viewed retrospectively, we would single out four central themes
that we continue to defend and would be particularly suitable for further devel-
opment, though that cannot be taken up here:
●● A defense of a postpositivist, critical modernist conception of knowledge and
the social sciences—shared by Freire and Habermas—that was directed against
both the relativism of radical postmodernism and the certainties of Marxism
(Morrow, 1994). This theme could be expanded along a number of lines, focus-
ing on more recent developments relating to our earlier survey of reproduc-
tion and transformation in education (Morrow & Torres, 1995): more extensive
use of Pierre Bourdieu in light of his later work; reference to subsequent pub-
lications on Foucault’s theory of power, governmentality, and the practices of
freedom; and the need to more explicitly recognize “indigenous methodolo-
gies” (Smith, 1999), especially in relation to participatory action research.
●● Situating Freire in relation to Enrique Dussel’s Latin American liberation phi-
losophy was concerned with deprovincializing Habermas’s European focus
and introduced the perspective of what would now be called Freire’s “Southern
Rereading Freire and Habermas 243
theory.” The subsequent migration of postcolonial theory to Latin America,

which contributed to the emerging concept of the epistemology of the Global
South, confirmed the strategic importance of our concerns. However, the
increasingly influential “decolonial option” and critique of Eurocentric episte-
mology developed by Walter Mignolo and others calls into question the osten-
sible “Eurocentrism” of both Habermas and Freire. Nevertheless, such sweeping
critiques of Western modernity neglect its internal diversity and countermove-
ments, hence forms of “epistemic disobedience” that long preceded Mignolo’s
call for non‐Western resistance and made the projects of Habermas and Freire
possible. In short, their dialogical approaches to questions of local and indige-
nous knowledge, hybridity, and democratization provide (Morrow, 2008, 2009),
we would argue, a persuasive alternative to Mignolo’s proposed strategy of
“delinking” from European modernity (Morrow, 2013a).
●● The discussion of Freire’s relation to liberation theology (which was linked
to Enrique Dussel’s liberation philosophy) suggested another corrective to
Habermas, whose perspective still took for granted the classic sociological
secularization thesis. Only subsequently has Habermas introduced a revised
conception of a “postsecular society” and the problems of “translation” of reli-
gious perspectives in the public sphere (Habermas, 2002, 2008 [2005]). These
debates provide an instructive context for rethinking Freire’s relation to libera-
tion theology as an example of a theological “translation” of his critical peda-
gogy, which is otherwise grounded in postmetaphysical, “secular” theoretical
arguments that for Freire were always framed within what now would be called
a “postsecular” humanistic sensibility, as we will see.
●● Locating Freire in relation to Habermas’s more explicit post‐Marxist critical
social theory provided a strategy for elaborating the implications of the pri-
macy of democratization for Freire, especially in advocacy of participatory and
deliberative democracy and critical citizenship that informed his political
engagements upon returning to Brazil. As he noted in an interview in 1988,
referring to his identification with Henry Giroux’s conception of “critical peda-
gogy,” Marx is a “really critical milestone” and a necessary resource for critical
thinking, but he should not be followed as “a rule, as an orthodox thing”:
“Giroux passes through Marx, but he does not necessarily stay in Marx” (Freire,
Matos, & Rio, 2017 [1988]). The subsequent international proliferation of ref-
erences to post‐Marxist theory suggests an agenda concerned with the further
clarification of these issues in relation to Freire and Habermas (Morrow,
2013b). The term post‐Marxist, it should be emphasized, does not represent
a shared alternative theoretical position, as opposed to diverse critical
theoretical expressions of a rejection of classical “Marx‐ism” as a self‐enclosed
metanarrative of history and prophetic revolutionary political project
(Therborn, 2008, p. ix).
Rereading as Reframing: The Agenda

Largely setting aside the preceding issues, the present “rereading” of Freire and
Habermas focuses on drawing out some of the implications of understanding of
Freire’s historicist methodology, as evident in the metatheoretical foundations
of his social scientifically informed praxis‐oriented pedagogical program.1 The

resulting strategy suggests a revisioning as a returning to and a reframing, in
order to briefly update and bring to a broader audience a project worthy of con-
structive criticism and further development. This task is elaborated in two parts.
Part I reframes the strategy of comparison by clarifying the historicist method-
ology underlying Freire’s praxis‐oriented dialogical pedagogy. The goal of the
first section on the “logic of reinvention” is to reframe the strategy of comparison
by developing a more explicit analysis of the deep structure of Freire’s theoretical
strategy by differentiating its relatively stable, “core” generative categories and
the “peripheral”—contingent, changing, and contextual—social theoretical con-
cepts used for social diagnosis and local contextualization. This distinction
between the foundational and diagnostic aspects of his theoretical program will
serve a number of purposes. Most important, it becomes possible to think about
the process of reinvention more self‐consciously, hence to interpret Pedagogy of
the Oppressed more reflexively, based upon an explicit “critical” and “restorative”
hermeneutics, to use Paul Ricoeur’s distinction. In the process, it becomes pos-
sible to avoid various problematic strategies of interpreting his classical text:
ritualistically as a sacred book, ambiguously in the form of an epigraph whose
meaning can be taken for granted within a particular politically correct canon, or
superficially as a more or less “outdated” precursor.
The second section of Part I focuses on clarifying the core/peripheral theory
distinction—reframed as foundational/diagnostic—through the discussion of a
strategic example of each of the two types of theorizing. On the one hand, in
order to illustrate the logical characteristics of the more stable central ontologi-
cal and pedagogical categories, Freire’s example of reinventing a pedagogy of
“machismo” or gender domination is analyzed. The goal is to illustrate the gen-
erative character of the core concepts and their capacity to operate at three dif-
ferent levels: ontological, ethical, and historical‐empirical. On the other hand,
the historical and changing character of social theoretical concepts and social
diagnosis is illustrated though an analysis of Freire’s shifting perspectives in the
three phases of his career in response to his awareness of changes in the social
sciences, as well as the social realities they attempted to explain and transform.
Part II, however, is concerned with a foundational question that we did not
address adequately in the original Freire‐Habermas comparison. Though we
mentioned the problematic of “philosophical anthropology,” its significance as a
distinctive approach to the theory of human nature and its importance for
grounding Freire’s foundational, core concepts was not clarified. The remarkable
interim expansion of discussions in several disciplines relating to philosophical
anthropology (Dallmayr, 2013b; Honenberger, 2015), however, provides a cata-
lyst for addressing and further developing Freire’s own brief reference to the
“anthropological” assumptions of his pedagogy. Within the pantheon of core
concepts, these post‐Kantian anthropological arguments can be seen to have a
grounding function that is potentially revisable in response to the changing mul-
tidisciplinary scientific findings about the distinctive features of the human spe-
cies. Taken together, in short, Freire and Habermas provide an in‐depth rationale
for a pedagogical “political anthropology,” a term introduced in the early work of
Carlos Torres to describe Freire’s pedagogical project that is further developed
here (Torres, 1978). Recognizing the anthropological foundations of Freire’s ped-

agogy facilitates a deeper understanding of his historicist methodology and the
generative character of his core concepts that make possible the distinctive ongo-
ing “reinventions” that are an inherent feature of his praxis‐oriented pedagogy.
As we will conclude, developing these anthropological foundations also has cru-
cial implications for confronting the epochal challenge of the environmental cri-
sis. Though we mentioned environmental movements, we did not adequately
address the fact that ecopedagogy had become a new—if unfinished—focus for
writing and publication at the end of Freire’s career (see Misiaszek and Torres,
Chapter 25 in this volume). The subsequent labeling of the “anthropocene,” as
roughly beginning with the industrial revolution, provides a new reference point
for rethinking ecopedagogy, as well as a new agenda that both supplements and
requires revising the older questions relating to social justice education, critical
citizenship, and educational research (Misiaszek, 2017).
Part I: Reframing the Comparison of Freire

and Habermas
Freire and the Logic of Reinvention Versus Reconstruction
Though recognizing the historicism of Freire’s pedagogical methodology, our
earlier comparison with Habermas did not adequately address the depth struc-
ture—the metatheoretical foundations—of his praxis‐oriented pedagogical pro-
gram, which is quite distinct from social science research programs and
paradigms. We tended to view Freire’s critical pedagogy as a relatively seamless,
consistent whole because our reference point was the “progressive postmodern-
ism” that he eventually identified with upon his return to Brazil, which explicitly
rejected the epistemological certainty and class reductionism that was often
apparent in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Nevertheless, we questioned this later
self‐description in terms of the then fashionable terminology of postmodernism,
which reflected the circumstances of his dialogue with Henry Giroux and Peter
McLaren. Instead, we located the deeper affinities of his position with the post-
foundationalism of the later Habermas.
Nevertheless, our earlier strategy did not adequately address the historicist
methodology or “logic of reinvention” underlying Freire’s approach. A distinc-
tion used in the history and philosophy of science to analyze natural scientific
research programs (Imre Lakatos) can be adapted for this purpose: the “core,”
defining concepts that are essential and foundational for a theoretical project or
paradigm, as opposed to “peripheral” arguments that can be dispensed with or
changed in response to novel research findings that call them into question. In
other words, a research program can revise or even reject its peripheral theories
without jeopardizing the foundational core theory.
The case of the human sciences, however, is rather different because the object
of inquiry—human history—changes continuously, often in terms of a sequential
logic described through periodization and sometimes evolutionary concepts.
Nevertheless, social life does have deeper, species‐specific ontological aspects that
remain constant (e.g. subject–object relations, the interpretive capacities of sub-

jects) and make possible the generation of these historical variations. In contrast to
the slow evolution of nature, the “nature” of society—the basic organizational prin-
ciples of its reproduction and transformation—often change fundamentally over
relatively short periods a time, a point implicit in the d
istinction between evolution
and revolution, or historical classifications of types of societies.
To return to the case of Freire, his praxis‐oriented pedagogical program can be
contrasted to scientific research programs. Though dependent upon and informed
by the historical social sciences, Freire’s goal is not a social science research pro-
gram oriented toward the production of new knowledge. Its focus is instead on the
use of educational institutions (whether formal and informal) and pedagogical
processes more generally (e.g. in social movements, civil society, and democratic
dialogue) for the transformation of society through the facilitation of critical‐
reflexive consciousness and its practical embodiment in social action. The criteria
of adequacy are thus not based on the growth of knowledge, but the capacity to
generate diverse contextual “reinventions” that provide validating justifications
and reconfigurations of the core concepts. The outcome is a praxis‐oriented pro-
gram, hence a generative framework of general concepts and questions for inform-
ing and motivating transformative pedagogical practices. Thus, the relatively stable
core categories become activated pragmatically through their interpretation and
translation as social practices in particular “applied” context of learning.
Consequently, a comparative review of the more successful examples of critical
pedagogy projects reveals the constant uncoupling and recoupling of the core,
generative categories with the situated and contingent social theoretical con-
cepts relating to epochal diagnosis and local contextualization. This contrast can
be characterized as a distinction between the foundational concepts (hence,
core, generative) of the pedagogical paradigm and the diagnostic concepts, hence
the social theoretical and methodological assumptions that guide contextualiza-
tion. This metatheoretical understanding was first anticipated in the early writ-
ings of Carlos Torres with the identification of Freire’s foundational political
anthropology as the generative framework for understanding Freire’s dialogical
pedagogy in relation to social research and historical contextualization (Torres,
1978), first exemplified in his research on the politics of nonformal and adult
education (Torres, 1990), and later “reinvented” for Latin American popular edu-
cation more generally. Similarly, Henry Giroux in the mid‐1980s, but writing for
a North American audience, popularized a conception of critical pedagogy as a
“language of possibility,” identifying the distinctive function of the core peda-
gogical categories as follows: “What Freire does provide is a metalanguage that
generates a set of categories and social practices that have to be critically medi-
ated by those who would use them for the insights they might provide in differ-
ent historical settings and contexts” (Giroux, 1985, pp. xviii–xix). Nevertheless,
he neither explicitly recognized the anthropological dimension Freire’s pedagogy
nor elaborated the specific methodological and sociological implications of
contextualization, The distinctive contribution of our book on Freire and

Habermas was thus an attempt to synthesize these issues in terms of a critical
social psychology—which we would now reemphasize is grounded in a political
anthropology—and its relation to the late Freire’s pluralistic understanding of
social theoretical diagnosis and its convergence with critical social research
understood as a crucial resource for the “reflection” necessary to further
develop praxis.
From this metatheoretical perspective, the core generative concepts take the
form of a transformative “methodology,” though not a “method,” a distinction
found in the postpositivist social science literature. A social scientific method is
a specialized technique, for example, survey research, that is relatively indifferent
to the purposes of values that guide its use. In contrast, a methodology in this
more technical sense refers to an overall strategy for investigation (e.g. research
design) that may use a variety of technical methods, as long as the process of
investigation is guided by specific purposes and explicit values. In the case of
critical social theories based a “critical theory of methodology,” the research
design is based on linking analysis agency and structure (e.g. social and cultural
reproduction) with values relating to processes of liberation and humanization
and the reduction of alienation and dehumanization (Morrow, 1994). Similarly, a
Freirean methodology—as a praxis‐oriented pedagogical program—necessarily
gives primacy to the strategic role of dialogical learning, but this does not
preclude the use of more structured instructional methods if they contribute to
the overall goals of a critical education project.
The distinction between the stable foundational and changing diagnostic con-
cepts also has important implications for reflexive validation and further devel-
opment of Freire’s pedagogy. Even if particular educational experiments may
appear to fail or not live up to expectations, the resulting necessary criticisms
have no direct relation to refuting the validity of his core concepts, even if prob-
lematizing the adequacy of the diagnosis underlying particular applications.
Consequently, such failed “praxis” should give rise to “reflection” based in part
on critical evaluation research. Indeed, from this perspective, the history of the
“reinventions” of Freire provides a potential comparative laboratory for develop-
ing more adequate criteria of “failure” and “success,” as well as informing the
construction of more empirically grounded diagnostic strategies and contribut-
ing to the reconstruction of core concepts.
The existing critiques of the use of Freire’s as a “method” are thus valid to the
extent that they target strategies that lose sight of conscientization as part of a
larger emancipatory pedagogical process. Where such “radical” critiques often
go astray is that they often tightly and a historically couple his core concepts with
a specific, time‐bound and situational diagnosis, as in the case of Freire’s appar-
ent embrace of revolutionary Marxism‐Leninism in chapter 4 of Pedagogy of the
Oppressed.2 To this day, there are contexts—especially Latin America—where
the vague but dogmatic mantra of this understanding of Freire’s “Marxism” and
“socialism” is ritually repeated in a “sectarian” manner that lacks adequate his-
torical and empirical “reflection,” as Freire would say.
Freire’s Understanding of Reinvention: Rethinking “Machismo”

The complex character of Freire’s core pedagogical concepts as part of a critical
pedagogical methodology can be illustrated by considering his own discussions
of reinvention, which refer primarily to social theoretical recontextualization
and a rejection of unreflexive, mechanical efforts to “import” his pedagogy into

different social and cultural contexts. To use the terminology just introduced, the
primary focus of his understanding of reinvention is thus on revising the periph-
eral, social theoretical assumptions that inform the contextualization of educa-
tional reform. As he put it:
Reinvention requires of me that I recognize that the historical, political,

cultural, and economic conditions of each context present new methodo-
logical and tactical requirements, so that it is always necessary to search
for the actualization of … ideas with every new situation. In other words,
the way that I struggle against machismo in Northeast Brazil cannot be
possibly the same way that one should fight against machismo in New
York City (Freire, 1997, p. 326).3
This emphasis on reinvention as recontextualization is certainly appropriate for

relatively routine forms of translation, such as generalizing the “Freire method”
of adult literacy training in developing the broader agenda of “popular educa-
tion” in Latin America. In this case, the learners have sociocultural similarities as
part of the popular classes, but the methodology is extended to formal education
and the range of educational levels. But even in the case of popular education it
is a necessary to recognize a second type of analysis: reinvention as conceptual
reconstruction of the core categories. For example, “critical literacy” applied to
children has rather different implications than for illiterate adults, and these can
and have been illuminated by developmental psychology, as well as generating
new research questions about individualistic, cross‐cultural bias in Piaget’s mod-
els of cognitive and moral development. Indeed, such reconstructive possibilities
are an essential dimension of the generative potential of the core concepts. Hence
from his own radical historicist perspective, every contextual reinvention requires
some degree of conceptual reconstruction involved in the respecification and dif-
ferential elaboration of his core categories. This process is enabled by the high
level of generality of his core concepts and complemented by bodies of empirical
research and accumulated practice in particular domains. Though this kind of
analysis could be extended to other generative concepts (and their negative
opposites) such as dialogue or conscientization, Freire’s example of machismo
has the advantage of illustrating some particularly important issues.
The methodological issues involved in conceptual reinvention—which is to say
conceptual reconstruction—raise other complex and often controversial issues.
Freire’s use of the example of machismo is thus particularly illuminating because
relates to questions that he confronted explicitly only later on in his career when
faced with feminist critiques of his earlier apparent class reductionism and exclu-
sive focus on male workers. The previous distinction between the logic of contex-
tual reinvention and conceptual reconstruction, however, can help deal with these
issues. The problematic of machismo can be traced back to gender domination as
a particular form of oppression, a concept whose multiple dimensions he
addressed only later. Viewing oppression as a foundational generative concept
sensitizes us to how it operates at various levels: ontological (hence, anthropologi-
cal, as a form of dehumanization distinctive of the human species); ethical (as a
violation of human dignity, freedom, and autonomy); and historical‐empirical (its

appearance in different social formations and configurations of domination).
At the first level, given its generality as an ontological concept, oppression can-
not be reduced to the Marxian concepts of “working class” or “proletariat,” which
are very specific to capitalism and alienated wage labor. Such social forms of
formally “free labor” emerged only very late in human history and have also
undergone fundamental transformation in the history of capitalism.
Consequently, slavery—the most dehumanizing form—and “bondage” more
generally, can best described as the primordial form of oppression, a point implicit
in Freire’s use of Hegel’s “master–slave” metaphor as a transhistorical concept
useful for describing the generic structure of domination, at least in its agent‐
based form.
As a level of an ethical concept, oppression takes on a normative or value mean-
ing that becomes the basis of social critique, as well as directing attention to
empirical issues related to power and domination. The terminology that Freire
used to describe the negative effects of oppression originated in concepts of
alienation and reification (i.e. treating like a “thing” or “object”) originating in
Hegel and Marx, though supplemented by the interpretations of Erich Fromm
and Frantz Fanon. The effects of the exercise of oppressive power—as expressed
in the many forms of domination evident in social history—are generated by
processes of “alienation” and nonrecognition through which humans become
“estranged” from and deprived of their innate capacity for freedom and auton-
omy. Consequently, even though they are ontologically “subjects” by “nature,”
they are treated as if they were inhuman “things” or “objects” (hence reified and
dehumanized). Further, alienation theory can be extended to an ethical critique
and the analysis of the domination of nature (Dickens, 1996).
At the third level, as an historical‐empirical concept, the meaning of oppres-
sion is necessarily historical and contextual, a point obscured by essentializing
uses of the term. As a generative, ontological category, oppression also takes
many historical forms in modern and premodern social formations, for example,
social class, gender, race, colonialism, and dehumanizing responses to differences
more generally (e.g. sexuality, disability, ethnicity, etc.). Though most of these
forms of oppression long preceded capitalism, it has exploited such preexisting
prejudices—given the intrinsic moral indifference of markets—in the absence of
specific legal regulation and its enforcement.
Most important, the contextual analysis of oppression as an historical‐empirical
concept presupposes supplementary sociological and cultural anthropological
theories that are grounded in empirical and historical research, necessarily
fallible and subject to progressive revision in light of the social history of domi-
nation and social reproduction (Morrow & Torres, 1995). Otherwise the
eloquent metaphor of a “pedagogy of the oppressed” becomes subject to rhetorical
abuses in the context of sectarian polemics, whether in the populistic identifica-
tion with an undifferentiated collective class subject such as “the people,” or the
political fragmentation characteristic of identity politics, resulting in the paradox
of an “oppression olympics” in competition for claims to victimhood (Hancock,
2011). Important theoretical advances have provided new conceptual resources
for addressing the empirical and historical complexity of domination, but it has
proven difficulty to translate that understanding into effective transformative

practices. For example, oppression in feminist theory has been instructively dif-
ferentiated in terms of its “five faces”: exploitation, marginalization, powerless-
ness, cultural imperialism, and violence (Young, 1990, pp. 39–65). Similarly, the
concept of “intersectionality” (originating in feminist and race theory) has
emerged as part of a critique of class reductionism and in response to the multi-
dimensional character of domination (Hancock, 2016). Nevertheless, integrating
these insights into the construction of political projects based on “unity within
diversity” as advocated by Freire requires candid recognition of how an obsessive
focus on identity politics has unwittingly contributed to the rise of right‐wing
populism and obscured the foundational realities of increasing inequality and
the need for economic redistribution (Fraser, 1997; Honneth, 2017).
Contingent Social‐Theoretical Analysis: The Three Phases

of Freire’s Education as an Educator
The primary objective of our second example is to introduce some of the
hermeneutic issues of interpretation posed by the historical development of
Freire’s work and its assumptions about diagnostic social scientific concepts. We
take a middle road with respect to the classic question of authorial intention:
the author’s self‐understanding cannot be ignored, and yet creative authors
cannot be fully conscious of their intentions or anticipate the full implications
and tensions within their own arguments, especially as evident in posthumous,
competing uses and interpretations. Comments by Rosa‐María Torres provide a
useful point of departure:
During our interview in 1985, he corrected me that his work is not split in
two: the first Freire, and the latter Freire. Rather, it is one single Freire in
movement, in a perpetual state of learning and in continuous reflection
about his own work. (Torres, 1998, p. 1)
We qualify his self‐understanding, by relating it to the two forms of theorizing in

his work—the foundational and diagnostic. Yes, there is “one single Freire in
movement” that revolves primarily around the continuity evident in what we
have described as his core, generative pedagogical concepts. Nevertheless, at the
level of assumptions about knowledge and the social theoretical concepts that he
used to contextualize his pedagogy, his diagnostic thinking underwent impor-
tant changes that require some form of periodization, which we describe in
terms of the three phases of his career. But even here there is a basic continuity of
intention that cannot be ignored: repeated, if rather vague and general references
to the relation between “science,” liberation, conscientization, and dialogue.
From the perspective of his career as a whole, this continuity of scientific inten-
tion can be summarized as follows: that the contextualization of his pedagogy
must be guided by an understanding of objective social reality that is informed by
reflexive, nonvalue free, social scientific analysis sensitive to relations of power
and domination. Reflexivity here implies simultaneous responsiveness to the
diversity of standpoints, competing forms of empirically grounded evidence, and
awareness of the necessary dialogue between expert and popular knowledge (or
expert and lay knowledge as characterized by sociologist Anthony Giddens’s
conception of a “double hermeneutic”). The three phases of his career were
defined by changing interpretations of the requirements of realizing this
multifaceted intention.
Our strategy can be also justified by a related expression of Freire’s self‐
understanding, again from the 1985 interview:
Over and over again he demanded that his critics contextualize his work
historically, acknowledge the evolution of his thought and his self‐
criticism, and allow him … the right to continue thinking, learning and
living beyond his books and, in particular, beyond Education as a Practice
of Liberty (1967) and Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1969), where many
admirers and critics left him virtually suspended. (Torres, 1998, p. 1)
Without such an historical perspective, debates about the “true” Freire are
resolved either by arbitrarily selecting particular citations that fit one’s theoreti-
cal agenda or concluding that he was simply inconsistent. An example of the
latter is Ronald Glass’s provocative critical contention—based on citations from
throughout his career—that Freire’s epistemological approach was “lacking clar-
ity.” Most seriously, “he equivocated between accepting the radical indetermi-
nateness of knowledge and arguing for a natural science kind of certainty.”
Consequently, “if knowledge is tied to human interests (Habermas) and relations
of power (Foucault) that embed ideological commitments … then explanations
of oppression continually beg the question of their validity.” What is thus required,
Glass concludes, is a “nonfoundational” approach (Glass, 2001, pp. 21–22).
Glass’s critique can best be addressed—as we did in our earlier study—by a con-
sideration of Freire’s intellectual development—his “education as an educator”—
using the perspective of the “final Freire” and his related unconscious convergence
with Habermas’s postfoundationalism as a reference point for reassessing the
previous two phases. These three phases were closely related to his geographic
locations, professional responsibilities, and political engagements:
1) The pre‐exile period before 1964 was defined by development of an innova-
tive adult literacy program, a process that was supplemented by related agri-
cultural extension experience in Chile (Torres, 2014). This phase was guided
by an elite‐mass model of society and a liberal democratic approach to the
contribution of education to “fundamental democratization” as part of a
developmental nationalist project of modernization in Brazil as understood
within the emerging Latin American tradition of dependency theory. A cru-
cial aspect of his methodological approach to dialogical education was the use
of multiple empirical methods to investigate the social realities and popular
culture of learners, especially the ethnographic analysis of generative themes
and the use of participatory action approaches to community and local devel-
opment (Flores‐Kastanis, Montoya‐Vargas, & Suárez, 2009). This phase was
interrupted by a military coup in 1964, which reflected an elite response to
the perceived threat of mass, grassroots democratic mobilization, though
framed in the ideological rhetoric of anticommunism.
2) The exile period from 1964 to 1980, which involved extensive international
experience: relocation in Chile from 1964 to 1969, followed by a year of teach-
ing at Harvard, and then work for a decade as an educational consultant for the
World Council of Churches in Geneva. The experience in Chile culminated in
a Marxist turn that can be related to the trauma of exile, his exposure to the
remarkable international reception of Marxism in Chile, and his conviction
that in most of Latin America that the only alternative to fascist authoritarian-
ism was revolution as envisioned by the Cuban revolution, especially the
example of Che Guevara. A problematic feature of this Marxist phase (which
was extensively shared by a Latin American intellectual generation), however,
was a tendency to see Marxism in foundationalist terms as a self‐sufficient,
scientific program of theory and praxis that could dispense with dialogue with
the “bourgeois” social sciences. In practice, however, his work with the World
Council of Churches included consultant activities with both new revolution-
ary regimes and democratic reform projects sponsored by governments and
nongovernmental organizations. Consequently, there was an unresolved ten-
sion between the democratic and revolutionary models, especially because, as
critics charged, he unsuccessfully attempted to graft his dialogical pedagogy
onto a Marxist‐Leninist conception of revolutionary “democracy” based on
“communion” with “the masses” or “the people.” This persistent democratic
deficit was also reflected in the lingering Eurocentrism of Latin American rev-
olutionary theory, especially its lack of understanding of the experiences of
African descendants of slaves and indigenous peoples. Such problems in his
initial appropriation of Marxist theory arose in part from not realizing the con-
flicts between the humanist (existential, phenomenological, historicist) and
antihumanist (structuralist) interpretations of Marxism that he attempted to
integrate in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Moreover, this initial engagement with
Marxism did not give any evidence of a deeper understanding of Gramsci, the
primary reference point of his relation to the Marxist tradition in his third
phase, as part of a complex Gramsci reception in Brazil (Coutinho, 2012).
3) The period of his return to Brazil in the 1980s until his death in 1997 included
work as a university professor, engagement with the radical democratic
Worker’s Party headed by Lula da Silva, and a 2‐year effort at the end of the
1990s to initiate the reform of the public education system of Sao Paulo
(O’Cadiz, Wong, & Torres, 1998). Though the resulting new social theoretical
perspective was not treated in a systematic way, his political involvements gave
priority to democratization for realizing broadly socialist goals, his social anal-
ysis rejected class reductionism and recognized the diversity of oppression,
and epistemologically he embraced a “critical” or “progressive postmodern-
ism” that rejected both relativism and dogmatic claims to certainty in favor of
reflection on praxis informed by a plural understanding of social research
(Freire, 1993; Freire & Macedo, 1993). In questioning his use of the terminol-
ogy of postmodernism to describe this phase, we argued in Reading Freire and
Habermas that the more theoretically sophisticated postpositivst philosophy
of social science provided by Habermas and contemporary critical social the-
ory and research could more effectively clarify what he had in mind. Moreover,
this interpretation is also in principle consistent with Freire’s relation to a
democratic, historicist Gramsci in this period, at least to the extent that

Gramsci’s concepts and political strategies become subject to criticism from
the social sciences and diverse sociopolitical standpoints (Mayo, 1999).
Part II: From Philosophical Anthropology

to the Anthropocene and Ecopedagogy
Philosophical Anthropology: The Social Construction of What?
This theme is concerned with reframing the relations among the core pedagogical
concepts, especially their ontological foundations and characteristics. Though we
mentioned philosophical anthropology in our earlier study, it was not explicitly
differentiated as a particular strategy for conceptualizing an ontology of human
nature. Instead, our Freire‐Habermas comparison referred more concretely to a
“critical social psychology of the dialogical and developmental subject” and rather
ambiguously to a “postfoundationalist humanism.” The task of this section is to
situate Freire’s philosophical anthropology as a specific post‐Kantian approach to
human nature and its relation to domination, freedom, autonomy, and a “post-
secular humanism.”4 As well, we locate the foundational basis of convergence
between Freire and Habermas here, especially in the distinctive form of a political
anthropology that gives primacy to humanization and collective learning. The
question of reconstructing Freire’s political anthropology thus becomes one of
identifying the configuration of ontological concepts that, beyond the example of
oppression discussed earlier, define the overall unity of his pedagogical program.
Though we mentioned that Freire’s dialogical and developmental conception of
the subject suggested a “philosophical anthropology,” our Freire‐Habermas study
did not elaborate its possible significance beyond the following prefatory com-
ment: “Whereas social and cultural anthropology as an empirical discipline was
primarily concerned with the analysis and description of cultural differences, phil-
osophical anthropology involved reflection on the constants and uniformities of
the human species” (Morrow & Torres, 2002, p. 91). Another way of introducing
the topic is to ask philosopher Ian Hacking’s question: “the social construction of
what?” (Hacking, 1999). So‐called “blank slate” theories of human nature based on
complete environmental determination neglect this question and can no longer be
taken seriously from the perspective of neo‐Darwinian theory (Pinker, 2002). Even
Marx referred to human “species being” in contrast to “dog” being, so it is difficult
to deny that he had a minimal philosophical anthropology of human nature based
on assumptions about biological predispositions of humans as historical beings,
though the details of what he had in mind and its relation to Hegel and Feuerbach
and his later writings remain disputed (Geras, 1981). Though the early Marx influ-
enced both Freire and Habermas, their anthropologies also include insights from
German idealism, American pragmatism, Freud, Fromm, Piaget, and many others
as part of a critical social psychology, which we described as follows:
We view both as working within a shared critical theory of the dialogical

and developmental subject. Their approach presumes a “dialogical subject”
because it rejects a monological and transcendental theory of the subject,
that is, one based on an abstract, metaphysical “I” that individualistically

“knows” the world. Instead, they locate selfhood and identity formation in
contexts of intersubjective communication. Their strategy is “develop-
mental” because it argues that identity formation has, despite variable cul-
tural contents, directional potential for growth than can be fully realized
only under optimal conditions of socialization. With respect to Habermas,
such concerns are most evident in his preoccupation with a theory of
communicative action, moral development, and emancipatory reason. In
the case of Freire, parallel concerns can be detected in terms of what has
come to be called his pedagogy of liberation and conception of cultural
action. (Morrow & Torres, 2002, pp. ix–x)
To shift the focus to the philosophical anthropology implied by such a historical

social psychology introduces a number of new questions. Because our primary
reference for addressing this question here is Freire, the earlier discussion of the
logic of contextual reinvention and conceptual reconstruction provides a point
of departure. The central concern is the question of relations among the core
pedagogical concepts, especially the significance of his fundamental social ontol-
ogy of the “human” understood as a philosophical anthropology of a very par-
ticular type: a political anthropology. As suggested in the earlier discussion of
machismo and gender domination, concepts such as oppression, dehumaniza-
tion, and humanization are generative and operate at different levels: ontological,
ethical, and in concrete empirical‐historical configurations. Philosophical
anthropology thus represents a particular approach to the ontology of generative
concepts such as oppression. Not all of the core concepts, however, are ontologi-
cal, as opposed to comparative ideal types, for example, banking versus critical
education. Before turning to these anthropological issues, however, a digression
on the problematic of philosophical anthropology is necessary.
Many authors unfortunately use the term philosophical anthropology as sim-
ply synonymous with theories of human nature. To take a recent example from
the philosophy of education, in an otherwise laudable neo‐Deweyean effort to
compare the philosophical anthropological foundations of the political philoso-
phies of Dewey, John Rawls, and Leo Strauss, authors Fleury and Garrison fall
back on a standard dictionary definition of the term as a theory of human nature
(Fleury & Garrison, 2014), thus ignoring work on philosophical anthropology
relating to the American pragmatist tradition (Margolis, 2009; Pihlström, 1998).
Consequently, their use of the term adds nothing to their argument, which suf-
fers from a failure to identify philosophical anthropology more historically and
precisely as a specific, post‐Kantian tradition that originates in the writings of
Kant, Herder, Hegel, especially the “left” Hegelians Feuerbach and the early
Marx. Though such questions—summarized by Kant as “what is man?”—were
anticipated by Hume and Rousseau’s discussions of human nature, Kant’s critical
epistemology framed the topic in terms of what he called “anthropology” as part
of a distinctive ontological theory of human nature and conceptualizing its rela-
tion to human history and freedom. Human nature—without further qualifica-
tion or methodological specification—refers to so many different, conflicting,
and incompatible theories and methodologies—from the scientism of Skinner’s
behaviorism and sociobiology to speculative metaphysics of theology—that it is

of limited use in the context of social theory. And philosophical anthropology
serves only to overcome this vagueness when situated within the trajectory of
German idealism and historicism, including the influential early twentieth cen-
tury reformulations of authors—to cite some more well‐known examples—such
as Max Scheler, Karl Jaspers, and Ernst Cassirer (Glock, 2012). Though Habermas
has personally avoided identifying directly with German philosophical anthro-
pology because of its conservative uses, one of his earliest publications was in a
philosophical dictionary entry in 1958 that provided a succinct definition of
enduring value that has an obvious relation to aspects of his own project
(Honneth & Joas, 1988). As noted critical theorist Fred Dallmayr recently put it:
Regarding the original meaning of philosophical anthropology, I still find

Jürgen Habermas on target when he writes that it “integrates and digests
the findings of all those sciences which—like psychology, sociology, arche-
ology or linguistics—deal with “man” and his works,” while it is “not in
turn a specialized discipline.” Perched “between empiricism and theory,”
its task is “to interpret scientific findings in a philosophical manner”
(Dallmayr, 2013b, p. 363)
Habermas’s own first installment on his own political anthropology appeared a

decade later in the form of the theory of the critical‐emancipatory knowledge
interests elaborated, as he put it earlier, “perched between empiricism and the-
ory” (Habermas, 1971). Similarly, also in the late 1960s, Freire refers to his “vision
of man” as a “scientific humanist one”:
Our pedagogy cannot do without a vision of man and of this world. It for-
mulates a scientific humanist conception which finds its expression in a
dialogical praxis in which teachers and learners, together, in the act of
analyzing a dehumanizing reality, denounce it while announcing its trans-
formation in the name of the liberation of man (Freire, 1972, p. 20, 1985,
p. 57). Emphasis added.
The task of this introductory discussion is primarily to situate the problematic of

philosophical anthropology in relation to Freire’s pedagogy, describing it as a
“political anthropology.” A more extensive discussion would require a compara-
tive analysis of competing anthropologies, for example, post‐Kantian theological
anthropologies, of which liberation theology is a radical variant (Dorrien, 2012),
as well as the more influential German anthropologies in the early twentieth cen-
tury (Rehberg, 2009).
Discussions of Freire’s Anthropology

Before turning to a reconstruction of Freire’s anthropology, it is instructive to
briefly review what has been described as the “relatively scant” literature on
Freire’s theory of human nature (Harris, 2011, p. 20), which can be characterized
as rather uneven, conflicting, and at times rather confused. Broadly speaking,
with occasional exceptions to be discussed later, two kinds of approaches domi-

nate: ritualistic and dismissive. On the one hand, there are ritualistic, apprecia-
tive commentaries on his theory of human nature that may mention philosophical
anthropology but provide no in‐depth clarification of its history, methodological
foundations, or significance for his other core pedagogical concepts. This ten-
dency is particularly evident in the literature in Spanish and Portuguese. The
term is primarily used to give a certain philosophical authority to his pedagogy,
without making a comparative effort to situate his anthropology by relating it to
either competing versions or how he exactly he used the German sources that
were his primary source of inspiration. At best, such interpretations simply list
authors who influenced Freire’s anthropology, then review his work in terms of
his conception of what one author has called a homo educandus that grounds an
“anthropology of liberation” (Hernández Romero, 2010). Unfortunately, some
also read into his concepts meanings that conflict with his explicit intentions,
such as equating the “incompleteness” of humanization with the ideal of “per-
fectibility” (Perdomo, 2014 [2009]).
Nor has the question of philosophical anthropology been central for those who
have reconstructed the Freirean legacy in Brazil. The comprehensive Freire dic-
tionary published in Portuguese and Spanish has no entry on the term, though it
is occasionally mentioned in passing: “Freedom is a concept central to Paulo
Freire’s anthropology, around which he constructs his pedagogical theory”
(Streck, Redin, & Zitoski, 2015 [2008], p. 308).5 Even in the extensive study edited
by Moacir Gadotti and others, the only significant reference to philosophical
anthropology is an article by Carlos Alberto Torres who makes reference to
German “anthropology” (Spengler, Alfred Weber, and Max Scheler are men-
tioned), as one of several influences on Freire, without detailing the exact impact
(Torres, 1996, p. 118).
The dismissive approaches, on the other hand, contend that Freire’s theory of
human nature contributes little to his project, or should be simply abandoned
because of its problematic assumptions. For example, one commentator tries
comparing Freire’s understanding of human nature with Richard Rorty’s anti-
foundationalist neopragmatism, rather than the more congenial Dewey. He con-
cludes that such concerns are “distracting” and “unhelpful”: “his assumptions
about the universality of human nature, albeit a good rhetorical tool, are not very
central to his perspective on education” (Gungor, 2012, p. 133). Frank Margonis
goes so far as to claim that Freire’s pedagogy is “constrained” by its “dialogical
philosophical anthropology” because it leads to “deficit portraits” of oppressed
students, arguing that “we need to reconcile the aims of critical pedagogy” by
abandoning an “a priori commitment to the dialogical self ” (Margonis, 1999,
pp. 103–105). This apparently well‐intended effort to avoid Eurocentrism thus
simply ignores the literature on the “pedagogy of difficulty” that confronts issues
relating to emotion and resistance as central to Freirean pedagogy (Boler, 1999).
Moreover, Margonis is in effect dismissing Freire’s dialogical presupposition on
purely political grounds, despite a more recent convergence in a number of dis-
ciplines that reconfirms its transhistorical anthropological validity: “It is the use
of differentiated techniques, among them symbols, in dialogic communication
that contributes to the evolution of the human species as the dialogic species”
(Weigand, 2010, p. 13). A similar and even more damning denunciation of Freire’s
philosophical anthropology can be found in the work of Chet Bowers, who has
long viewed Freire’s pedagogy as the “trojan horse” of Western neoliberalism.
The key to his critique is a caricature of Freire as an advocate of “total autonomy,”
thus downplaying his stress on solidarity, dialogue, and historical contextualiza-
tion (Au & Apple, 2007). This tactic leads to the conclusion that he should “be
viewed as an essentialist thinker whose philosophical anthropology is based on
Western assumptions that were also the basis of the Industrial Revolution”
(Bowers, 2005, p. 132).6
An alternative strategy for analyzing and reconstructing Freire’s philosophical
anthropology, especially as a distinctive political anthropology, was introduced
in the early work of Carlos Torres. The problematic of Freire’s anthropology was
first noted in the eloquent foreword of the original Portuguese (and Spanish) edi-
tions by Ernani Maria Fiori, who pointed out that “anthropology becomes educa-
tion” with political intent as a “pedagogy of the oppressed” (Fiori, 1970, p. 13),
even though in the book Freire explicitly referred to cultural and social anthro-
pology only in the context of ethnographic analysis of generative themes.
Creatively building on Fiori’s suggestion, Carlos Alberto Torres, writing in 1977,
went further by describing Freire in terms of a “scientific pedagogy” whose epis-
temological dimensions are grounded in a “political anthropology” concerned
with the insertion of human consciousness in history (Torres, 1978, p. 7). This
“scientific” characterization—which resembles Habermas’s conception of “post‐
metaphysical” theory—is of strategic importance because of the tendency in the
early reception of Freire in Latin America and elsewhere to view him somewhat
misleadingly and too narrowly as a “Christian thinker” (Jarvis, 1987), partly
because of his early association with the Catholic Action Movement.
Though Torres’s early discussion of Freire’s anthropology raises a number of
issues worthy of further exploration, in the present context we can only high-
light the strategic importance given to Hegel’s master–slave metaphor as an
anthropological concept, an analysis that eventually appeared in an English
version nearly 20 years later (Torres, 1994). Our focus here, however, is limited
to a basic reconstruction of Freire’s self‐understanding of his anthropology in
retrospective reflections.
Freire’s Self‐Characterization: A Minimalist Reconstruction

Though Freire makes frequent reference to human nature throughout his career
in contexts relating to defining “man,” it appears that only once in his later work
does he explicitly discuss, however briefly, the possibility that his pedagogy con-
tains a philosophical anthropology. The resulting self‐characterization raises
some interesting questions, including drawing attention to the difficulty that
authors may have in self‐reflection and reconstructing the multiple dimensions
of their own work. For example, the minimalist reconstructive strategy used here
must piece together the central themes of his references to his anthropology
because they are never presented in a more unified, systematic way. In the dis-
cussion that follows Freire’s anthropology is reconstructed in the form of three,
interrelated theses.
The key reference to the anthropological grounding of his pedagogy appears in

a section of about four pages in the Pedagogy of Hope, which is presented some-
what anecdotally as a response to his critics. In these recollections on the writing
of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he could have also referred to Fiori’s original intro-
duction to the Portuguese edition, in acknowledging that “a particular anthro-
pology is implicit (when not clear and implicit)”:
Ultimately, or perhaps one might say, in the overall context, not only of the
passage cited, but of the whole book (could it have been otherwise?), a
particular anthropology is implicit (when not clear and explicit)—a cer-
tain understanding or view of human beings as managing their nature in
their own history, of which they become necessarily both subject and
object. This is precisely one of the connotations of that nature, constituted
socially and historically, which not only founds the assertion made in the
passage quoted, but in which are rooted, consistently, I feel confident,
the positions on political pedagogy that I have argued over the course
of the years. (Freire, 1994, p. 97)
Here is the passage to which he refers, using the earlier and more familiar trans-
lation in Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being
fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the
desire to pursue the right to be human. As the oppressors dehumanize
others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized.
As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors power
to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity
they had lost in the exercise of oppression. It is only the oppressed who, by
freeing themselves, can free their oppressors. The latter, as an oppressive
class, can free neither others nor themselves. (Freire, 2005a, p. 56)
Clearly, this is a rather condensed version of the highlights of his anthropology

that neglects many subthemes and a key complex of issues. To examine his claims
more closely, these two citations can be broken down into two, interrelated the-
ses. It is important to recall that as anthropological claims, they need to be tran-
shistorical, hence not specific to capitalism or modernity. The first citation
introduces the argument that humans “manage their own history,” which can be
rephrased in terms of an ontology of humanization that gives direction to his-
tory, hence the possibility, implicit in this passage, of “progress.” As he puts it in
the original text, humanization is viewed as an “ontological vocation” that is
directed against “dehumanization.” Accordingly, in every phase of human his-
tory, from hunting and gathering tribes to the present, this struggle for overcom-
ing dehumanization through humanization must be evident in some form. For
purposes of discussion, this will be called the historical ontology of dehumanization‐
humanization as a species‐specific struggle (also a collective learning process)
for freedom and autonomy within relations of solidarity. Humanization is also an
“ontological vocation,” which is described as follows:
It is because this is “the way we are” that we live the life of a vocation, a
calling, to humanization, and that in dehumanization, which is a concrete
fact in history, we live the life of a distortion of the call—never another call-
ing. Neither one, humanization or dehumanization, is sure destiny, given
datum, lot, or fate. This is precisely why the one is calling, and the other,
distortion of the calling. (Freire, 1994, p. 98)
An ambiguity of this macro‐historical formulation, however, is obvious: what is

the motivational and social psychological basis—the anthropological subject—of
humanization? Part of the answer to this question can be found in the second
thesis regarding the social psychological dynamics underlying the struggle for
humanization: the ontology of struggle as oppression‐liberation. The focus here is
on the primary obstacle to humanization as oppression: the oppressors use of
“violence” to abrogate “rights” that are implicitly universal in some sense (most
inclusively, the “right to be human”). Moreover, oppressors also dehumanize
themselves in the process of dehumanizing others. Only the oppressed, in the
process of “freeing themselves” (hence a process of liberation or emancipation)
can overcome this violent relation of domination exercised by the “oppressive
class,” simultaneously, freeing the oppressors. The oppressive class can neither
free themselves nor the oppressed. It is important that such passages (e.g. refer-
ence to social classes) should not read as empirical descriptions specific to capi-
talism, as opposed to “anthropological” generalizations. Consequently, reference
to rights here takes a transhistorical form and need not refer to formal legal
rights in the modern sense and may apply to customary rights in tribal societies
struggling against the rise of chiefdoms and empires. Similarly, “class” here
should not be taken in an exclusively capitalist sense. Nor should oppression be
limited to immediate interpersonal relations, thus excluding impersonal struc-
tural relations of domination.
Though not mentioned in these brief remarks, the allegory of Hegel’s master–
slave dialectic as a struggle for recognition informs the ontology of oppression‐
liberation and its relation to the potential process of mutual recognition that
liberates both oppressed and oppressor. This theme is discussed by Freire else-
where in relation to particular historical cases of domination, especially peas-
ants, workers, and the colonized. Human history was thus constituted by the
episodes of particular forms of domination‐liberation.
Upon closer examination, however, the preceding self‐description of his
anthropology is incomplete from the perspective of his work as a whole because
it neglects to clearly identify the dialogical, development subject that is the condi-
tion of possibility of the two more political dimensions. Yet he does consider this
issue in Pedagogy of the Heart in a series of comments about human nature more
generally: “I cannot think the issue of liberation, and all that it implies, without
thinking about human nature” (Freire, 2000, p. 87). The key claim is related to
“dialogism”:
I now return to the discussion of a dialogic relationship, while a fundamen-

tal practice to human nature and to democracy on the one hand, and on the
other, as an epistemological requirement …. This is how I will work through
the issue of dialogism. Instead of describing a profile of the concept of

dialogism, I will begin by attempting to comprehend its foundation, what
makes of it a strategic requirement, rather than solely the tactics of “smart”
subjects toward reaching results. Dialogism must not be understood as a
tool used by the educator, at times, in keeping with his or her political
choices. Dialogism is a requirement of human nature and also a sign of the
educator’s democratic stand. (Freire, 2000, p. 92, emphasis added)
Such “dialogism” can be rephrased and expanded to construct a third anthropo-

logical thesis: an intersubjective ontology of the dialogical, development subject.
This subject is also implicitly developmental, as evident in Freire’s frequent refer-
ence to the dialectic of “being” and “becoming.” Translated into the language of
developmental psychology, the early formation of the individual can be viewed as
passing through formal (and “existential”) stages of cognitive, moral, and ego
understanding that stabilize as “being” at particular stages but are compelled to
always “become more.” In other words, this third anthropological thesis refers to
the innate potential for humanization that is undermined most visibly by the
historically pervasive dehumanizing effects of oppressor‐oppressed relations.
Again, it is important to recall that oppression here is a transhistorical category
that can be metaphorically translated into the paradigmatic image of master–
slave, as the most extreme readily recognizable form.
Another crucial feature of Freire’s anthropology is that the processes of becom-
ing and humanization are ultimately an expression of what Erich Fromm called
“biophilia” as a primary innate human disposition relating to the love of life on
the part of a dialogical species, despite its potential sociohistorical deformation
as the destructive “necrophilia” that underlies dehumanization.
To summarize, Freire’s understanding of his political anthropology, when
pieced together, can be summarized in terms of three ontological theses that can
be phrased in his basic terminology, as supplemented by important clarifica-
tions. Taken together, for Freire these three anthropological characteristics
define the uniqueness of the human species and its relation to freedom and
autonomy:
●● That evolutionary and social history has a contingent potential for directional-
ity as cumulatively evident, despite regressions, in processes of dehumanization‐
humanization; awareness of such humanizing possibilities gives rise to moral
obligations that constitutes a distinctive human “vocation”;
●● That humanization is constructed in part through struggles of oppression‐
liberation, whose intersubjective logic can be understood metaphorically in
terms of Hegel’s allegory of recognition in the master–slave dialectic and the
principle that no one can be free until all are free;
●● That the necessary condition of possibility of humanization and struggles for
mutual recognition is a dialogical (and developmental) subject whose self‐
understanding is constituted through mutual recognition and a dialectic of
being and becoming that can flourish only under conditions of relative nonop-
pression that release the potential of biophilia and reduce its pathological
distortion as necrophilia in relation to both society and nature.
Each of these foundational anthropological arguments are based on generative

concepts in the sense described previously, referring simultaneously to three
kinds of questions: (a) an ontological focus on species‐specific, innate predispo-
sitions and potentialities; (b) an ethical dimension that can be articulated and
debated communicatively given the human capacity for moral reasoning and
reflection; and (c) the historical world of agency, structure, and social conflict
through which such issues becomes concretized in particular social relations,
institutions, and struggles. This type of multilevel reconstruction could also be
applied to Freire’s formulation of “dialogism” just cited, which can be recon-
structed as follows, using his phrasing:
Ontological: “dialogism is a requirement of human nature.”

Ethical: embracing dialogism as part of an ontological vocation: “his or
her political choice,” “a sign of the educator’s democratic stand.”
Historical‐Empirical (here: strategic pedagogical practice); “the tactics
of ‘smart’ subjects toward reaching results” in a particular educational
context.
“Secular Theology” or “Postsecular Humanism”?

Though the preceding discussion suggests that Freire’s self‐understanding is
fairly coherent, especially when pieced together and further specified, there are
various reasons to argue that it needs to be supplemented by more systematic
reconstructions that go beyond his own self‐understanding. These issues can
be illustrated by what is de facto the most influential—if brief and cryptic—
description of Freire’s anthropology in a widely cited essay by Stanley
Aronowitz, which was given widespread visibility by being cited in Donald
Macedo’s introduction (Freire, 2000) to the 30th anniversary edition of
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 2005b [1970], p. 25). Unfortunately, he does
not provide any clarifying comments and then mysteriously omits the following
citation in the 50th year edition:
Freire’s pedagogy is grounded in a fully developed philosophical anthro-

pology, that is, a theory of human nature, one might say a secular libera-
tion theology, containing its categories that are irreducible to any other
philosophy. (Aronowitz, 1993, p. 12)
Each phrase in this concise, instructive formulation raises issues that are not
really addressed in the rest of Aronowitz’s article but need to be either problema-
tized, qualified, or underscored. Most generally, in simply equating philosophical
anthropology with a theory of human nature, readers are again provided no
guidelines for reflecting on the theoretical and methodological significance of
Freire’s theoretical strategy beyond the provocative yet puzzling characterization
of it as a “secular theology.” Unfortunately, this term is unsatisfactory for at least
three reasons. First, it is now questionable because secular theology has taken on
very different, often conflicting, meanings in subsequent discussions within the
field of theology, where it is associated with the “death of God” debate and later
“postmodern” theology influenced by Jacques Derrida. Freire’s pedagogy is sim-

ply not directed toward these kinds of issues.
Second, the reference to secular theology could also be erroneously interpreted
as linking Freire with the kind of messianic eschatology often attributed to Marx’s
philosophy of history. Freire’s conception of humanization as “incompletion” and
rejection of social class as “the motor” of history explicitly distances itself from
any deterministic or teleological philosophy of history.
Third, given that Aronowitz alludes to a relation between Freire’s supposed
secular theology and his personal support of liberation theology, this terminol-
ogy has encouraged some to exaggerate the significance of the Christian origins
of aspects of Freire’s thought (Kirylo & Boyd, 2017), failing to take into account
the classic distinction between the “logic of discovery” of a theory and its “logic
of justification.” Freire simply does not ground his pedagogy as a “theological
anthropology.” What he does do is suggest that Christians—along with believers
in other monotheistic religions, indigenous polytheisms, or secular humanism—
can all potentially reconcile their beliefs with a pedagogy of liberation whose
appeal is universal. He gives Christian examples of such dialogue and reconcilia-
tion because he can speak from authority given his personal experience. From
this perspective, Christianity cannot persuasively claim a unique or “privileged”
status as a necessary condition of access to worldly liberation. For this reason,
Gustavo Gutiérrez, one of the most influential founders of liberation theology,
made a clear distinction between “liberation” as a sociopolitical concept and “lib-
eration” in the theological context of Christian redemption. In contrast to human
freedom and autonomy, which as Freire reiterates is not a “gift,” “The Bible pre-
sents liberation—salvation—in Christ as the total gift, which… gives the whole
process its deepest meaning …. Liberation can thus be approached as a single
salvific process” (Gutiérrez, 1973 [1971], p. x). Similarly, as the French Catholic
philosopher Gabriel Marcel—one of Freire’s early sources of inspiration—con-
cluded, referring to his distinction between “being” and “having” (a theme also
found in the non‐Christian Erich Fromm and adopted by Freire):
It is quite possible that the existence of the fundamental Christian data

may be necessary in fact to enable the mind to conceive some of the
notions which I have attempted to analyze; but these notions cannot be
said to depend on the data of Christianity, and they do not presuppose it…
I have experienced {the development of these ideas} more than twenty
years before I had the remotest thought of becoming a Catholic‐cited in.
(Treanor & Sweetman, 2016)
Aronowitz also raises another issue that needs to be treated with caution:
describing Freire’s anthropology as “well developed.” That may be the case in the
sense of being comprehensive in scope when reconstructed, nevertheless it is
merely sketched in an accessible outline form, without any technically detailed
theoretical justification as a philosophical anthropology. It can be argued, in
other words, that it is clearly unfinished and in need of further development in
relation to later discussions and research, as we have suggested in the case of our
Habermas comparison.
Aronowitz’s final point—that Freire’s categories “are irreducible to any other

philosophy”—has taken on increasing importance because it recognizes the
depth of Freire’s originality, casting doubt on the many conflicting efforts to
reduce Freire to some shorter or longer list of influences or appropriate him in
the name of a particular revolutionary vision. One of the major advantages of
Freire‐Habermas study was to compare two completely independent, yet conver-
gent political anthropologies.
The most fundament problem with Aronowitz’s formulation, beyond the
issues just noted, is that the label “secular theology” has connotations that
obscure the distinctive epistemological status of Freire’s postmetaphysical
anthropology, in Habermas’s sense of the term (Habermas, 1992), making it
qualitatively different than theology—a mode of metaphysical thought—or
essentialist thinking more generally. Freire’s anthropology is neither purely “sec-
ular” nor is it “theological” in a meaningful sense: grounding itself in a concep-
tion human‐divine relations, as part of a salvational historical motif of liberation,
or even an appeal to faith as “ultimate concern” in Paul Tillich’s sense.
Consequently, the resulting cosmopolitan humanism is potentially open to
diverse forms of life and conceptions of ultimate meaning as a framework for
pedagogical praxis, without claiming to provide a substitute for or alternative to
any of them. In other words, Freire’s radical democratic humanism is no more
theological than contemporary normative political philosophy in general.
Nevertheless, the theme of secularity remains of crucial importance but needs
to be reframed in relation to more recent discussion of “postsecular society” by
Habermas and others. Freire’s position was not purely secular because it was not
based on militant atheism in the sense of popular forms of “secular humanism.”
As Habermas now acknowledges, in revising his earlier uncritical acceptance of
the Weberian secularization thesis in discussing contemporary “postsecular
society,” religious contents necessarily must be included in the public sphere
through complex processes of reciprocal “translation,” which is to say, a detailed
elaboration of what Freire would call dialogue: “To be sure, this requirement of
translation must be conceived as a cooperative task in which the nonreligious
citizens must likewise participate if their religious fellow‐citizens, who are ready
and willing to participate, are not to be burdened in an asymmetrical way”
(Habermas, 2008 [2005], pp. 131–132).
Freire’s anthropology was thus from the beginning postsecularist in the sense
given to that term by Habermas, given his concern with dialogue with diverse
religious and secular perspectives and recognition of the need for translation—
hence reinvention—of critical pedagogy in the context of many forms of life. And
it is in this context of mutual translation that we need to understand his excite-
ment with the emergence of liberation theology as a complement to his pedagogy
of liberation. As a noted in a letter to a young theology student in 1969, alluding
to his excitement: “Sometimes I think that although I am not a theologian but
rather enchanted by theology, this has influenced many aspects of what I see as
my pedagogy”—our translation as cited in (Torres, 1981, p. 36). Fred Dallmayr—
who acknowledges the example of Freire—has critically and constructively
reformulated Habermas’s concept of the postsecular under the heading of a
“postsecularist humanism” that embraces dialogue with non‐Western religious
traditions as part of a shared concern with the “humanization of humanity”

(Dallmayr, 2013a). This postsecular dimension has enabled Freire’s pedagogy to
become a “traveling theory” that has appealed to Christian and non‐Christian
audiences around the world.
Nevertheless, Freire’s proposed dialogue with religious traditions is a demand-
ing one that requires forms of critical thinking that are threatening to religious
traditionalism and fundamentalism of all kinds. Indeed, as in the case of Hegel’s
theory of religious alienation, Freire recognized the dehumanizing potentials of
religion, its contribution to “social sin” in its alienating forms, an issue evident in
the problematic role of the Catholic Church in the history of Latin America
(Torres, 1992). Despite the continuing vitality of liberation theology among intel-
lectuals, the sobering reality has been its stalled growth as a popular movement
and the massive expansion of evangelical Protestantism in Latin America, Africa,
and elsewhere (Hagopian, 2009). In short, a critique of religion is built into the
generality of his anthropological categories: a recognition of the alienating
potentials of religion, capitalism, or any other institution that dehumanizes and
violates human dignity. Paradoxically, the Bible never condemned the institution
of slavery, and Christians discovered a critical hermeneutics necessary for doing
so only in the wake of the Enlightenment secularization of theological accounts
of freedom in German idealism and slave revolts inspired by reading the Bible
“from below.”
Postmetaphysical Political Anthropology: “Programmed to Learn”

Habermas’s postsecular turn has also made him more sensitive to the methodo-
logical difference between theological and non‐metaphysical, philosophical jus-
tifications of emancipation:
Already the communicative‐theoretical version of the concept of emancipa-

tion in Knowledge and Human Interests could be “unmasked” as the secular-
izing translation of the divine promise of salvation. (Of course, since then I
have become more cautious when using the expression “emancipation”
beyond the area of the biographical development of individual persons,
since social collectives, groups, or communities cannot be imagined as
subjects writ large.) I only want to say that the evidence of my relation to a
theological heritage does not bother me, as long as one recognizes the meth-
odological difference of the discourses; that is, as long as the philosophical
discourse conforms to the distinctive demands of justificatory speech. In my
view, a philosophy that oversteps the bounds of methodological atheism
loses its philosophical seriousness. (Habermas, 2002, p. 160)
Assuming that Freire’s postsecular humanism is grounded in a form of postmeta-

physical philosophical anthropology as defined by Habermas, it also makes a
claim to indirect scientific justification in sense of being “perched between empir-
icism and theory.” Freire’s justification of his pedagogy can be viewed as implicitly
accepting a similar understanding of the “methodological difference” between
theological and scientific argumentation. Consequently, even though he
ccasionally did engage in appeals based on theological arguments, as in using his

o
personal voice as a Christian when speaking to Christian audiences, these discus-
sions were not part of the grounding of his pedagogy as an autonomous, univer-
salizing project. Nevertheless, Freire never pursued the grounding of his “scientific
humanism,” despite oblique references to the evolutionary theory of Teilhard de
Chardin. Even then he avoided taking a position with respect to Teilhard’s theo-
logical interpretation of history, focusing primarily on the link between Teilhard’s
“hominization” and his own understanding of “humanization.” Nor did he ever
refer to Fromm’s investigation of the implications of the research on the evolu-
tionary origins of aggression, as part of the justification of his own scientific
humanism (Fromm, 1973). Unfortunately, such questions have also been almost
completely neglected in the neo‐Freirean legacy. Nevertheless, Freire’s aspiration
to ground his anthropology post‐metaphysically is implicit in a reference that
kept cropping up in his later writings, though drawing almost no commentary:
citation of Nobel Prize French geneticist François Jacob’s 1991 reference in an
interview to the human species as “programmed to learn.” Freire deploys Jacob to
justify several claims: as indicating an innate predisposition the relates to hope
and the “inconclusive” nature of human beings (Freire, 2000, p. 44); as a source of
“ever‐increasing curiosity” in the pedagogical relationship (Freire, 1998, p. 32); the
thesis that “we are indisputably programmed beings, but we are in no way pre‐
determined” (Freire, 2005a, p. 169); and the contention that problem is not the
opposition between the “innate” or “acquired” but “the relationship between the
two” (Freire, 1994, p. 97). And, of course, the necessary complement of being
“programmed to learn” is to be “programmed to teach,” as observed by the devel-
opmental psychologist Erik Erikson: “Care is a quality essential for psychosocial
evolution, for we are the teaching species” (2001, p. 205).
The originality of Freire’s political anthropology derives from his effort to syn-
thesize the relations between three themes he discussed half a century ago, whereas
for the most part such issues have been discussed separately in specialized research.
And indeed, there is now an extensive body of interdisciplinary empirical
research that has reconfirmed Freire’s basic intuitions and posed new questions.
Dehumanization‐humanization, for example, has been increasingly studied in
psychology and philosophy, along with related issues such as degradation and
humiliation (Haslam & Loughnan, 2014; Kaufmann, Kuch, & Webster, 2011).
With respect to the second anthropological theme, the origins and character of
oppression and its relation to egalitarianism have become widely discussed in
primatology and evolutionary theory (Boehm, 1993, 1999). And an increasingly
influential form of contemporary “republican” liberal political philosophy, “non-
domination” has become a prerequisite of the exercise of freedom (Pettit, 1997),
which complements in significant ways Axel Honneth’s recognition theory of
freedom (Honneth, 2014 [2011]).
Finally, the third theme was the focus of our earlier discussion of Freire’s ontol-
ogy of the dialogical, developmental subject under the heading of critical social
psychology in relation to Habermas (Morrow & Torres, 2002, pp. 90–114). That
discussion could now be extended in relation to the work of primatologist and
comparative psychologist Michael Tomasello (a recent winner of the prestigious
Stuttgart Hegel Prize) and his collaborators, for example, (Tomasello, 2008).
Significantly, Tomasello provides an empirically rich and systematic confirma-

tion of “shared intentionality” as the foundation of the “ontological gap” between
humans and animals (Tomasello & Moll, 2010). Freire has argued for more than
a half a century that the anthropological distinctiveness of the human species
derives from the shared intentionality based on intersubjectivity as the condition
of possibility for critical consciousness and the historicity evident in projects
related to “becoming.” His early articulation of this thesis can be traced to his
appreciation of the philosophy of the Mexican‐Catalonian philosopher Eduardo
Nicol (1907–1990), who was in turn strongly influenced by the philosophical
anthropology of Ernst Cassirer. As Freire notes, Nicol makes dialogue “indispen-
sable to the act of knowing,” hence subjects thinking in relation to each other as
part of a “co‐subjective‐objective” relation, “whose action on the object would be
one of ‘co‐participation’ ” (Freire, 1974, pp. 123–124). This ontological and epis-
temological theme reappears more empirically in Freire’s reference to the “co‐
production” of knowledge and the “co‐intentional” nature of education (Freire,
2005b [1970], p. 69).
Moreover, even in the domain of literacy pedagogy where Freire began, there
has also been a profound transformation propelled by research in many different
fields, including neuroscience. Such work confirms Freire’s insights into the pri-
ority that needs to be given to “critical literacy” in a sense that includes but goes
beyond conscientization: “reading is not just about ‘decoding’ the information
before our eyes … It is within the process of transforming individuals into literate
beings, that society itself is transformed” (Wolf, 2016, p. 3). Moreover, such
research opens up new avenues for exploration. On the one hand, unlike lan-
guage, literacy is primarily a social construction and implicitly a site of social
contestation related to sociocultural reproduction: “we were never born to read.
The brain that reads is not a given. Literacy is a cultural invention, which means
that there is no genetic program that can dictate its design” (Wolf, 2016, pp. 3–4).
On the other hand, given that “the brain that learns to read ‘deeply’ cannot be
assumed,” we are confronted with a new challenge for critical literacy posed by
the “fragmented, less focused” reading style of the “digital reading brain” which
threatens “the very kind of intelligence that has flourished from the historical
development of sophisticated, expert reading” (Wolf, 2016, pp. 4–5).
The Epochal Challenge: From Political Anthropology to Ecopedagogy

The problematic of the epochal crisis represented by the anthropocene provides
a dramatic illustration of a central theme of the previous discussion: how histori-
cal recontextualization may have important implication for rethinking and
reconstructing Freire’s core pedagogical categories, especially as supplemented
by the insights of subsequent research in the natural and human sciences. The
neglect of the environmental crisis in our previous Freire‐Habermas compari-
son, for example, contributed to overlooking the question of how questions of
oppression and dehumanization‐humanization also have implications for rela-
tions between the human species and nature. This theme had been introduced
in the later “dialectic of enlightenment” phase of Max Horkheimer and Theodor
Adorno’s critical theory in the early Frankfurt School, which proposed an
a nthropology that viewed the domination of humans and nature as a tragic expres-
sion of instrumental reason (Leiss, 1974). Habermas’s theory of communicative
action, however, rejected the pessimistic anthropology of his mentors, stressing
instead the potentialities for collective learning and ecological democracy
(Gunderson, 2014b). Dealing with these issues requires a longer term reconstruc-
tion of Freire’s project that confronts the epochal challenge of linking philosophical
anthropology to what has been described as the imperative of a “future” environ-
mental ethics (Gare, 2016). That theme was not adequately addressed in our earlier
study on Freire because of our neglect of his use of the concept of “biophilia,” which
he appropriated from Erich Fromm. The particular anthropological significance of
biophilia derives from both its status as an innate love of life and its potential nega-
tion and deformation as “necrophilia” as expressed in “antidialogical” action. We
would now view biophilia—which Fromm explicitly linked to his later environmen-
tal concerns—as a key mediating bridge between Freire’s philosophical anthropology
and ecopedagogy (Gunderson, 2014a).
The theme of biophilia also draws attention to the need for further developing
a series of more general issues relating to the Fromm‐inspired psychoanalytic
dimension of Freire’s anthropology and critical social psychology. Unfortunately,
Freire does not discuss the biophilia‐necrophilia distinction in any depth, which
could give rise to misunderstandings. Most important, Fromm’s use of biophilia
does not depend upon the later Freud’s pessimistic drive theory based on a polar-
ization of the “instincts” of life and death.7 As in the case of the relational and
intersubjective wings of the object‐relations tradition of psychoanalytic theory,
Fromm views destructiveness as derivative from the “crippling” frustration of
biophilia, not as an independent, destructive anthropological drive in the form of
an “instinct”:
It is the outcome of unlived life, of the failure to arrive at a certain stage

beyond narcissism and indifference. Destructiveness is not parallel to, but
the alternative to biophilia… Necrophilia grows as the development of bio-
philia is stunted. Man is biologically endowed with the capacity for bio-
philia, but psychologically he has the potential for necrophilia as an
alternative solution. (Fromm, 1973, p. 366)
Subsequent to our earlier study, ecopedagogy and the naming of the anthropo-
cene have introduced a form of environmental crisis theory of epochal signifi-
cance, hence requiring fundamental reconsideration of the contingent social
theoretical and political assumptions of contextualization. Moreover, the more
recent issue here is one of potentially cataclysmic human‐induced climate
change, not merely the more potentially manageable, sustainability issues of pol-
lution, environmental degradation and resource depletion. To be sure, education
is only one site for responding to these issues, but one of strategic longer‐term
significance given its anticipatory responsibility for developing critical citizen-
ship capable of facilitating the stable and resilient forms of democratic delibera-
tion that need to balance concerns with the more traditional emancipatory
principles of redistribution and recognition (Fraser & Honneth, 2003) with the
challenge of the anthropocene (Misiaszek, 2017; Torres, 2017).
Notes
1 Constraints of space and focus preclude analyzing the relation of Freire’s
educational praxis program to other intellectual sources or “matrixes” of Latin
American liberation philosophy, especially the complementary “sociological
matrix” represented by Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda (1925–2008),
as exemplified in his pioneering development of participatory action research
(Flores‐Kastanis, Montoya‐Vargas, & Suárez 2009; Mendieta, 2016).
2 It should be recalled that the final, fourth chapter was not part of the original
draft and was somewhat hastily written in response to the reaction of colleagues
who wanted him to apply his pedagogy to the then topical question of
revolutionary leadership. Consequently, the chapter was not primarily concerned
with a general theory of revolution, as opposed to providing strategic, if
somewhat idealistic cautions for already existing revolutionary parties that had
seized power through a coup d’état against authoritarian regimes.
3 The imperative of reinvention was thus integral to Freire’s overall approach. As he
insisted in a conversation with Moacir Gadotti and Carlos Alberto Torres after a
lecture at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1991, in a conversation with
led to his approval of a Paulo Freire Institute that was implemented in Brazil in
November of that year, he did not want a fellowship of followers because he
should be reinvented, not repeated.
4 The anthropological approach represented by Freire and Habermas can thus be
seen as a variant of a “left ontology,” to use the somewhat problematic term of an
otherwise interesting recent anthology that nevertheless fails to discuss
philosophical anthropology and does not adequately address Habermas’s
ontological position (Strathausen, 2009).
5 This important resource is now available in English with a new preface (Torres, 2012).
6 Bowers’ analysis can be compared to an earlier, distinctive Latin American
critique of Freire by the Argentinian philosopher and anthropologist Rodolfo
Kusch (1922–1979), a pioneering defender of the “barbarism” of indigenous
culture against the pretentions of European “civilization,” in an essay that was
included in an early book by Carlos Alberto Torres (Torres, 1981, pp. 139–155).
The focus of Kusch, however, was not directly on Freire’s anthropology, as
opposed to his developmentalist assumptions about modernizing popular
indigenous culture. Kusch has subsequently been revived as part of Walter
Mignolo’s decolonial project, which provides a more sophisticated alternative to
Bowers critique of Freire. For example, Catherine Walsh, now associated with the
decolonial network, was an early member of the Freire network in the United
States who became disenchanted with Freire though her work with indigenous
peoples in Ecuador, despite a more recent partial reconciliation in viewing him as
a “grandfather” and “ancestor” (Walsh, 2015). For a critical response to the
decolonial approach from the perspective of Habermas and Freire, based on
recognizing the realities of hybridization and possibilities for dialogue between
indigenous and critical modernist knowledge, see (Morrow, 2013a).
7 The anthropological implications of Freire’s rather selective and limited reliance
on Fromm’s social psychoanalytic interpretations (Freud is never cited) remains a
relatively unexplored topic, despite the more recent Fromm revival (Braune, 2014).
But such questions are of crucial importance not only for ecopedagogy but
further developing the psychoanalytic dimensions of Freire’s theory of liberation
along lines consistent with object‐relations theory and Honneth’s recognition
theory (Honneth, 1996 [1992]), thus rejecting the classic Freudian “death instinct”
drive model shared by Lacan and Marcuse, despite their completely opposed
political interpretations (McLaughlin, 2017).
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Morrow, Raymond A and Carlos Alberto Torres. 2019.

"Re-Reading Freire and

Rereading Freire and Habermas

Historical Perspective: Themes for Further Exploration

theory.” The subsequent migration of postcolonial theory to Latin America,

Rereading as Reframing: The Agenda

of his social scientifically informed praxis‐oriented pedagogical program.1 The

here (Torres, 1978). Recognizing the anthropological foundations of Freire’s ped-

Part I: Reframing the Comparison of Freire

remain constant (e.g. subject–object relations, the interpretive capacities of sub-

Freire’s Understanding of Reinvention: Rethinking “Machismo”

and a rejection of unreflexive, mechanical efforts to “import” his pedagogy into

Reinvention requires of me that I recognize that the historical, political,

This emphasis on reinvention as recontextualization is certainly appropriate for

violation of human dignity, freedom, and autonomy); and historical‐empirical (its

proven difficulty to translate that understanding into effective transformative

Contingent Social‐Theoretical Analysis: The Three Phases

We qualify his self‐understanding, by relating it to the two forms of theorizing in

democratic, historicist Gramsci in this period, at least to the extent that

Part II: From Philosophical Anthropology

We view both as working within a shared critical theory of the dialogical

that is, one based on an abstract, metaphysical “I” that individualistically

To shift the focus to the philosophical anthropology implied by such a historical

behaviorism and sociobiology to speculative metaphysics of theology—that it is

Regarding the original meaning of philosophical anthropology, I still find

Habermas’s own first installment on his own political anthropology appeared a

The task of this introductory discussion is primarily to situate the problematic of

Discussions of Freire’s Anthropology

with occasional exceptions to be discussed later, two kinds of approaches domi-

Freire’s Self‐Characterization: A Minimalist Reconstruction

The key reference to the anthropological grounding of his pedagogy appears in

Clearly, this is a rather condensed version of the highlights of his anthropology

An ambiguity of this macro‐historical formulation, however, is obvious: what is

I now return to the discussion of a dialogic relationship, while a fundamen-

the issue of dialogism. Instead of describing a profile of the concept of

Such “dialogism” can be rephrased and expanded to construct a third anthropo-

Each of these foundational anthropological arguments are based on generative

Ontological: “dialogism is a requirement of human nature.”

“Secular Theology” or “Postsecular Humanism”?

Freire’s pedagogy is grounded in a fully developed philosophical anthro-

“postmodern” theology influenced by Jacques Derrida. Freire’s pedagogy is sim-

It is quite possible that the existence of the fundamental Christian data

Aronowitz’s final point—that Freire’s categories “are irreducible to any other

traditions as part of a shared concern with the “humanization of humanity”

Postmetaphysical Political Anthropology: “Programmed to Learn”

Already the communicative‐theoretical version of the concept of emancipa-

Assuming that Freire’s postsecular humanism is grounded in a form of postmeta-

­ ccasionally did engage in appeals based on theological arguments, as in using his

Significantly, Tomasello provides an empirically rich and systematic confirma-

The Epochal Challenge: From Political Anthropology to Ecopedagogy

It is the outcome of unlived life, of the failure to arrive at a certain stage

Gunderson, R. (2014b). Habermas in environmental thought: Anthropocentric

Jarvis, P. (1987). Paulo Freire: Educationalist of a revolutionary Christian movement.

Treanor, B., & Sweetman, B. (2016). Gabriel(‐Honoré) Marcel. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.),

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ccasionally did engage in appeals based on theological arguments, as in using his