La autorrealización espinosista como alternativa a la educación antropoplástica

Abstract

In Paideia, Werner Jaeger describes the education of ancient Greece as anthropoplastic: persons must be shaped according to a normative ideal, in a process analogous to that of a potter shaping a jar according to a model. In general, we may call anthropoplastic any type of education that is organized around a pre-existing ideal of the kind of human it wishes to create. In general, we may call anthropoplastic any kind of education organized around a pre-existing ideal of humanity that it wishes to reproduce. The problem with this type of education is that it is reproductive: in as much as it is successful, it will reproduce the errors of a community. Fundamental change can only happen in spite of anthropoplastic education. The spinozistic conception of human flourishing, what Naess has called self-realization, can be used to formulate an alternative idea of education, without a normative model. There are three aspects of Spinoza’s system that are crucial to this alternative view of education: 1. His view on essence: unlike a platonic view (which undergirds an anthropoplastic view of education) in which a single essence corresponds to many individuals, in Spinoza there are individual essences. 2. The concept of conatus: following Naess and Matheron, we can show that conatus is not, properly understood, an impulse towards tautological self-repetition, but rather a creative effort to persevere through change under changing circumstances. 3. The distinction between laetitia and titillation, between the joy that comes from increasing the power of acting of a part of the body (which may be harmful), and that which accompanies an increase in the power of acting of the whole body. As a social body, anthropoplastic emphasis in a certain human type may cause a kind of social titillatio, for example a society emptied of critics and full of entrepreneurs.