A specialist in the thought of very demanding authors such as Kant, Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur, Jean Grondin has been teaching philosophy, mainly at the University of Montreal, for 40 years. In The spirit of education (PUF, 2022, 208 pages), he asserts, audaciously, that “the purpose of education is spiritual or it is not”.
Education transmits, of course, valuable technical knowledge and know-how, but this utilitarian aim, dominant today, does not sum up its purpose. Education, whose ultimate goals, argues Grondin, are metaphysical, “must help us to live”. It must help pupils “to recognize a meaning in existence itself and to make it more worth living”; it must allow access to the cosmic religious feeling which Einstein said was “the most powerful and the noblest motive for scientific research”. For Grondin, education must aim high, very high, much higher than it currently does.
However, the philosopher is not naive. “What are the chances, he wonders, of seeing this hope and this spirit of education transmitted in our educational institutions? Let’s have no illusions, they suck. Totally. ” For what ? Quite simply because another metaphysics, which is unaware of itself and therefore does not recognize itself as such, dominates our time.
The vision of the world that prevails today is “flat materialist” and postulates, explains Grondin, that “the only realities that exist would be material realities, resulting from a movement of atoms devoid of finality and meaning” . Consequently, continues the philosopher, we will not say to the pupils of our schools that “if education exists, it is to lead their intelligence to discover the meaning, the order and the beauty of things and therefore that of their own existence”.
Grondin describes this neglect as tragic and says he is distressed by a fashionable teaching of the day deprived of spiritual orientation. “Do we have the right, he launches in a cry from the heart, to tell them that life is only a coincidence without reason, that our cultures are viscerally flawed, that the human is only a rogue monkey and that existence is therefore hopeless? »
In a vibrant eulogy of the profession of educator, Grondin evokes the teacher’s insomnia caused by the paradoxes of his task. Do we ever know if what we teach achieves its goal? Is it a question of pleasing or of awakening consciences, even if it means, sometimes, jostling them? We must, of course, always offer and aim for excellence, while leaving no one behind. But what is excellence? A quantifiable performance or an openness to wisdom?
In a world where knowledge is accessible at our fingertips, its simple transmission is no longer enough and must be accompanied by an education “to discern what deserves to be seen, read and transmitted”.
Finally, the metaphysical question is the great business of the profession of educator. How to convey this idea that reality and our existence are meaningful, at a time when the question of the meaning of things is considered a fad from ancient times?
In The beauty of metaphysics (Cerf, 2019), Grondin defines this discipline as “the vigilant effort of human thought to understand the whole of reality and its reasons”. Metaphysics is the name of the questioning of the reason and meaning of the world and of existence. We can therefore affirm that “all visions of the world — and to be human is to have a vision of the world — are based on a metaphysics”, writes Grondin in The spirit of education.
To the strictly materialist vision of the world of our time, the philosopher opposes that of Plato, according to which, as illustrated by the allegory of the cave, the rational study of the world makes us discover that reality is composed of ideas and of beauties — constancy, kindness, finality and intelligence — “which allow us to think that the world is not the result of chance”, writes Grondin.
The human, he continues, cannot content himself with noting the existence of things and of his life; “he wants to know why they are the way they are, where they come from and where they are going”. The principle of reason animates him: he seeks the reason for everything and, as soon as the door opens, the “ultimate Reason of things”, which he calls God, Good or Nature.
This, concludes Grondin, is the spirit that should animate education in all subjects. The world, despite its occasional disorder and its tragic share, is beautiful and meaningful; our existence too. We want to say, paraphrasing the singer Renaud, that if the school does not teach that, young people are right to cry out “stop everything! »
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature in college.