Helena Radlińska’s “Invisible Environment” – the Contemporary Potential of the Category

Abstract

The article is an attempt to examine the semantic potential of the concept of the invisible environment used by Helena Radlińska. Using various concepts and tropes present in the pedagogical tradition and in contemporary humanities, the author tries to answer the question: What dimensions of experience does pedagogical thinking open to when we use the category of an invisible environment? This study was performed in the following few steps. First, the author recalls the original context of the concept located in American social work. Then he traces the semantic shifts in the use of the term invisible environment in Radlińska’s work. At the same time, he reconstructs and argumentatively strengthens the cultural and metaphysical context of this category. In the next step, he recalls the categories functioning in pedagogical literature, among others: invisibility, hiding, noiselessness. An important part of the text is the search for the concept of invisibility (and its synonyms) in contemporary humanities. It turns out that pedagogy can benefit from the clues contained in the works of Charles Taylor, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mikhail Bakhtin, Michael Oakeshott, Jacques Rancière, Michael Polanyi, Hans-Georg Gadamer and others. In the end, the author refers to the typology of aspects of the invisible environment by Lech Witkowski and tries to enrich it with new elements.