A Philosophy for Education. A Return to Self-Knowledge

Vico’s First Oration in the collection of his inaugural lectures to students at the University of Naples, On Humanistic Education (Vico, 1993), is devoted to the praise of self-knowledge. For Vico, such knowledge is gained through the passion of learning that is applied to the study of all the disciplines concerned with knowledge. "Know thyself” is to know the world around us so that we acquire the wisdom, not simply ‘of’ the world but of ourselves within it. Wisdom, sapienta, is not knowledge itself; it is the knowledge that gives the self the power to grasp an issue in its many-sidedness as a whole. Wisdom does not, therefor, follow a system or set of ideas "beyond” or "above” the matters of concern, but rules, as it were, from "within” the particulars of a context: its judgment is exemplary, a precedent is established for our future conduct.

Thus, as we have seen, wisdom exercises the spirit of prudence and acts of eloquence which together help us to articulate the complexity of situational wholes. It is noteworthy that Vico includes all the subjects of the curriculum as passions of learning and includes disciplines such as mathematics and science which develop through the exactitude of formulas and empirical evidence. Clearly, it would be absurd to cast doubt upon the great success of these disciplines, and there is no indication that Vico is inclined to their exclusion from the capacity of wisdom. Thus, whilst, as we have seen, his philosophy draws particular attention to an aesthetic rationality, his idea of wisdom does not exclude the contributions of Science and Mathematics and the pragmatic disciplines of Technology.

In his helpful introduction to the ‘Orations’ contained in On Humanistic Education, Professor Verene points to the significance of the Greek idea of paideia as a concept of education distinct from mastery of the different subjects of the curriculum:

‘Paideia’ as an ideal... is the notion of bringing the student as a whole to the level of human culture. This process is distinct from any system of education or curriculum. It is the actual process the human spirit goes through as it absorbs the various subject-matters of human knowledge and develops a relation to them and to the world of language and civil affairs. This is not a process that is alternative to the intellectual mastery of subjects. It fully endorses and includes the absolute importance of straight learning, but it does not see such mastery as separate from the education of the citizen and the true achievement of humaneness. (Vico, 1993, p. 14)

This inclusiveness that unites the "straight learning" of all the subjects of human knowledge within the broader framework of citizenship and humanity is, of course, welcome and necessary. But throughout these essays we have attempted to make the case for the unique contribution of the aesthetic in the determination of human identity - of who we are and how we should become what we are. The relationship that the learner establishes with science, mathematics or technology is quite distinct from the relation that enriches the learner in the pursuit of the aesthetic or of the wisdom of a philosophical outlook. The major argument of this book is that the art of learning of the latter supplies the necessary context that allows the former to maintain a benevolent role in human affairs. Without that context, the sheer usefulness of objective knowledge becomes central to the mind, and the aesthetic declines into the periphery of an entertainment.

This contextual understanding seeks its own truth - the truth of identity, which is the accordance of the self with that which it accepts as its measure in making the world. A scientist can identify herself as a follower of the discipline of science but would not accept as ‘her’ measure the data that confirm her hypothesis. The truth of science lies in its independence from any self-related conclusion. But this is the essential feature of an aesthetic rationality: in reading a poem or reflecting on a painting, we are privy to the working of the artist’s mind within the work - the joint labour of her expression and our complementary understanding of it is an identification.

Think again of Rilke’s exclamation in his appreciation of the statue of Apollo: "I must change my life!" This is the rationality which seeks its own development: it seeks an identity, an order, defined by wonder and wholeness, which escapes the contingency of the world - in art itself, which invites us into its many different worlds, in the rhetoric and practical wisdom that informs public affairs, and, ultimately, in the ethics of human interaction. We can then experience a unity to thought and feeling and understand at once how this insight is both personal and interpersonal, intrinsically self-related and intrinsically communal.

I use the word "ultimately" in respect to the ethics of human interaction in the belief that the ethical is the guiding principle of self and social development. Without the moral notions of care, sharing, and faith in our purpose, the idea of the self within its community would not exist: the common sense would not prevail to prevent the self’s abandonment to a limitless freedom. Of course, a morality may well arise from expediency, namely, the need to survive.

But one of the great gains of an historical perspective to the development of the mind that arises from Vico’s work is the idea that reflection upon experience leads to a sequence of qualitatively different modes of orientation, the three ages of the gods, the heroes and the human. We can grasp therefore, how, reflection upon the human situation can lead to considered judgments of care and sharing. But the third, dominated by the barbarism of rationality and a seemingly endless striving for equality, he held, was doomed to a crisis that leads humanity inevitably to a return to the early stage of poetic identification. My reading of Vico suggests that any modern identification would not, however, copy the morality inherent in the myths of past gods and heroes, but would, as Holderlin suggested, fashion an imagination that incorporated a sensitivity relative to our uncertain times.

This is not to recommend the abandonment of Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare, for our history is part of our modernity. But, if we are to oppose the contemporary despair that has alienated the individual and is destroying the world, we need to prioritise that sense in which aesthetic expression offers us a kind of balance and wholeness beyond the pressures of the contingent, an identity which is also an integrity. We must formulate an education that can do justice to this aim.

At the close of his Second Oration Vico exhorts his audience to be true to themselves:

Come, then, finally, let us consider ourselves! Let us be merciful to our selves! Let us make a sacred covenant with ourselves. The Fetiales (priests in Ancient Rome devoted to Jupiter, the God of Faith) are here to witness this covenant. They will give us the solemn words. Let us repeat after them. Let us obey the law of nature which commands each of us to be true to himself/. It is within our power because it is indeed within us. It is for our well-being because it is indeed our nature. (Vico, 1993, p. 71)

The idea that our true self is a natural phenomenon makes sense for Vico because he believes the self to be naturally implanted with the divine: "The divine reason is in God, and it is called Divine Wisdom. It can be known only by him who possesses wisdom, and then it is named human wisdom" (Vico, 1993, p. 67). We discover ourselves when we discover the divine wisdom within us. The transcendent exists within the real so that there is a harmony between the human, the natural, and the divine which is open to discovery through self-reflection: one has to examine oneself and abandon foolish thoughts to find the transcendent wisdom that exists within. As we have seen, the tradition of finding an inner wisdom continues through Keats’s "soul making" and the practice of "negative capability"; the latter, which stresses caution in judgment, evokes Vico’s philosophy of prudence and attempting to see the whole.

But one is more conscious of uncertainty and struggle within the Romantic movement, a greater sense, perhaps, of the weight of a largely indifferent world framing the occasional "peak experiences” glimpsed in Nature and other humans. After the Romantics we enter the fraught worlds of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and, later, the bleakness and despair of Kafka, Beckett, and Orwell. But the poetic vision is not dimmed, for great poetry exists at the intersection of despair and joy. The poet praises in order to rescue us from a world that has become in its pleasures and in its defeats indifferent to joy. Only within the state of a shared wonder can a common sense and a common faith exist so that individuals prosper. We are increasingly aware of the growth of an ideal contradictory to that state. It is the Machine God which regards humans as its subsidiary parts. It is a highly creative religion whose message is its results. We can greet with pleasure the power of new medicines, for example, but feel at the same time that a too-dominant technology will impair our sense of being human.

I have used the phrases "a kind of balance” and "an identity which is also an integrity” in earlier chapters to suggest the way in which an aesthetic consciousness may support and enliven the modern sensibility. To understand the nature and development of that balance of an identity that exists as an integrity, it is necessary to define a whole that is qualitatively different from the one that is the sum of its parts. It may be useful to repeat the criticism often levelled against the theory of abstraction that argues that a concept is formed through the observation of the parts, so that, for example, chairs, bookcases, and tables are identified as furniture. The critique of this theory rejects the mere observation of particulars in forming a concept, since, it is argued, to be able to connect one part with another requires in the first instance "a point of view” that unites them in principle as examples, a point of view which exists as the basis and the accompaniment to the progress of the unifying idea. We can bring all sorts of objects, differing in shape and purpose, into a room and call them furniture; it is their use and their appeal in a certain space that defines that point of view.

In the same way, we can experience widely different acts of human kindness but immediately recognise the whole: the idea guides the discovery in its development from one instance to the next in what Husserl (1902) called a process of "ideational abstraction”. I have argued that William Blake’s "fourfold vision” is an example of the development of this imaginative, metaphorical abstraction, in which one single observation may transform into another at a higher, and more inclusive, level: the thistle becomes the grey old man, the grey old man, the world of an intimate and inspiring whole, the realm of universal ideas - goodness, understanding, faith - that are the guiding principles for an ethical standpoint.

Metaphor establishes identity through assertion, at first through direct association - thunder ‘is’ the voice of Jove - then as an aesthetic suggestion: - life is a progress through a vale of tears, we are, in Rilke’s (1946) metaphor, “bees of the invisible” - and so forth. In these latter examples there is a hidden negative - there isn’t a tearful rain, we are not bees - so that the metaphor plays with words and the words play with us. Just as a scientist detaches a hypothesis from data to make predictions, so the artist presents a playful comparison of a possible truth of existence beyond the ordinary. Both are exercises in the freedom of thought.

I find Rilke’s “bees of the invisible” enormously powerful, suggesting, as it does, how our identity arises from the gathering of those ideas that feed us, and which can be stored in the hive of the mind! (My exclamation mark arises from a sense of the absurdity of ‘specifying’ the meaning of a metaphor by reducing it to such prose; the metaphor is fist lived, the known). An effective metaphor directly creates another world for experience, a paradigm shift in thought and feeling that suggests new ways in which you can live your life. But the work does not impose itself upon you; it invites your taking its being into your own. It can thus provide a perspective on those other identifications which occur as part of the routine of the everyday - identifying with parents and friends, adopting the latest fashions, the latest technologies. The work of art stands for itself, invites your entry, and is always there for you in its power to suggest different ways of being alive.

Vico insists that imagination and memory are dominant features of the mind during childhood and adolescence, and that these should be cultivated through education in its earliest phases. For the early learner the world is, and should be, primarily a place of wonder and discovery. That world opens onto the natural world in its rich diversity, the breadth and depth of language itself, and the presence of others in their independent existence. The role of the teacher is, then, to provide opportunities for the expression of these natural inclinations and towards the understanding of each of these. There are, I think, many fine examples of such teaching in the early years and primary stages of development in which we can observe the self-expression of the learner apparently at one with the aims of the teacher and the needs of society.

But then, it seems inevitably, the transition occurs, the division arises between the learner and the authority of the material to be learned: the learner must be informed of the laws of mathematics or physics, the history of nations, or the forces which shaped the natural world and the creatures therein. Clearly, the value of such direct, authoritative teaching cannot be denied; my concern is that, without the necessary imaginative self-involvement of the learner in this learning process, education becomes something "out there”, made by others who have the requisite authority in distinct subject matters that exist as separate entities in the curriculum. Any breadth of vision, which could situate the learner in a broader framework of understanding, is curtailed as educational relevance is directed to the achievement of the grade.