Education and Human Plenitude

The following are brief reflections on developing the relation between moral education and human fulfillment. Below, M. Barros will write: "For us to decide in favor of education for the liberation of man and the humanization of the world is a decision . . . related to our cultural heritage." In a society without fathers, without role models, where new generations want to direct the course of history, a necessary decision must be adopted given that many of the parameters of personal and collective values have been altered. This is why education must be, after all else, a steady and constant process of acceptance of authentic values. As Ortega y Gasset indicates: "In nature there are no levels of reality. All that man does can be more or less authentic and hence more or less real. What we do and what happens to us is not more real than the meaning that it has for us in our life" (Ortega y Gasset, 1944). What is important to us, what has a value may be understood in terms of acquired knowledge. This will have more significance to the extent that it helps one not only intellectually and in dominating the external world, but also by impelling one towards a valuational understanding of what is human. To the extent that reason affirms and purifies its functions, it manages to lose interest in man and his values. Education today must provide a privileged place for values in a world loaded with scientific facts. This is the basis for the contradictions affecting certain teaching styles based upon a harmful axiological neutrality. Education is a moral problem because the student is an ethical being with values. Values is what man does with things and himself by reason of being a person; a world without persons would be a world without values (Alvarez Turienzo, 1983).

Intersubjectivity, Collectivism and Solitude

Man exists and acts together with other human beings, as Barros affirms, without losing sight of the personalist character of human action, whose foundations consist in liberty and responsibility. Joint or participative action makes manifest that the existence of man is coexistence, an encounter between an "I" and a "thou" (Buber, 1969). This encounter is basically defined as dialogue. But if the dialogue is missing, if the intentional referent, i.e. the other, is lacking, then it becomes a monologue, a self-expression (Frank, 1982). The encounter is minimized in this way; there is at best a togetherness but one without love. One is next to another, but each is in solitude, "the loneliness of two in company." If we extend the concept to a multitude, we can speak of the solitude of many in a collective. Collectivism already harms us; it already consumes us, leading us to the most absurd loneliness in the midst of monstrous agglomerations of strangers. We are threatened by a strange solitude born of a lack of communication, regardless of the magnificent information systems now available. We experience an unfertile loneliness in a world fashioned by science, which has thrown us into an alienated and unprotected society that engenders feelings of emptiness from which one escapes with "machine work" or "reckless entertainment." This is why it is important to establish the metaphysical basis, and direct the praxis of intersubjectivity and the encounter-dialogue among men, so as to free one from falling into a collectivism whose necessary fruit is solitude.

Nevertheless, is there a place for authentic solitude; is there some room for the solitude of the wise man and of the monk? Man needs to be alone, to confront the solitude of recollection and reflection, to find and protect himself from the multiple forms of alienation that surround him. They say that man today is afraid to be alone with his spirit. If joint action, participatory community, and intersubjectivity fail to transcend personal dimensions and reach out to the others, it may remain victim to a noisy collectivism that promotes anguish and alienation. Or it renders inaccessible a sense of authentic and necessary solitude at the center of which what is specifically human is furnished.

Psychology, Education and Morality

One cannot entirely direct one's existence; in part one is predetermined by educational, cultural and historical circumstances. Yet one still is left with ample room for development and growth which should be realized with liberty and responsibility, that is, by means of moral options.

The many biological, social and psychological limitations that determine human existence provide the person precisely with the opportunity to permeate his being with meaning and achieve all his possibilities. This is accomplished in terms of the paradigm of joint liberty, transcending all of these limitations. Existence pertains to a world of multifarious possibilities where one is forced to choose. Man is a being who in every situation must decide his liberty. Liberty and responsibility are the two essential dimensions of the moral act, the explicit elements of morality. If morality is so closely connected to human existence, will we find there an equilibrium between the human act and the personality that produces it? Is moral obedience a basic ingredient in the harmonic development of personality? These questions are important because we are concerned with human fulfillment as the fundamental challenge of the 21st century, which challenge was launched precisely by moral education.

Barros has clearly demonstrated that self-determination is the ground for the development of the person. Self-government and self-possession, as its two principle manifestations, bespeak each person as a unique and unrepeatable subject. The two provide one with the conditions for the full realization of one's person to the extent that they guarantee one's personal liberty and responsibility, and establish the road for moral excellence in the educational process.

But, of what morality are we talking? It is not based on the reflexes of conscience (Eysenck, 1976) nor an irrational strength that opposes life and love and generates states of anguish. Neither are we talking about a morality linked to a religious doctrine and even less of a morality that needs to be sustained by the authority of an other-worldly presence. Rather, we are talking about a natural morality based on the virtue of justice. This exists when a community, guided by a sense of wisdom, lives in terms of an agreement of trust and mutual respect, and when each person as a particular individual is capable of accepting his obligations and defending his rights. Although the group is the natural environment for the well-being of the human person and for justice, human interaction, however necessary, does not abolish the primacy of the individual over the group. The subject of morality is the individual before the group.

But when this natural, spontaneous morality, based on the essence of man and the legitimate exigencies of community living, falls into the hands of authoritative elements -- whether religious, political or cultural -- we encounter ethical systems whose principal virtue is obedience and principle sin is disobedience. Such ethical systems inflict scars of guilt and fear of punishment.

The situation would be worse if the ethics rooted in the heart of man degenerated into a morality of conformity, as Barros alludes, whether good or bad. A morality of this type can become insensitive before evil and before values that the majority does not profess. Today, before the impoverishment of human instincts and the waning of traditions that no longer prescribe for man what he must do, we are adopting a morality that paralyzes all initiatives of personal responsibility.

Finally, there is an ethics that, following the demands of the individual and the community and guided by the individual as value, takes root in the heart of man without conformist or authoritarian supports to inspire him to interpret and realize what is best in him. This is the best interpretation of the natural morality, which we will call a morality of aspiration (Deeken, 1984). It is a morality without guilt or fears, one directed, instead, toward personal realization. "Morality according to this conception consists in aspiring to what is best or the goal toward which we are oriented. This means growing as a human being and developing one's human capabilities to the fullest"(Deeken, 1984, p. 93). Indeed, the moral task consists in developing one's personality in harmony with what is most valuable in oneself. Morality as an ethical enterprise consists in a permanent, free and responsible decision about values, about what most relates man toward his spiritual enrichment and the consummation of his mission in this life.

The ethical and religious dimension of the human act frequently have been ignored by psychology and especially by psychotherapy. Many psychologists would definitely reject -- or accept with scruples -- the notion that the morality of the human act may constitute the ground for the dynamism of personality. What do unconscious motivations, mechanisms of repression, phenomena of transference, and self-realization, self-esteem and the desire for pleasure or power have to do with morality? Are we not speaking irreconcilable languages and confusing for example psychotherapeutic design of whatever sort with moralizing motives? Many psychologists ask these questions. But it is not a question of moralizing or of reducing psychological health to moral premises; it is rather a matter of not falling into the danger of psychologizing psychological acts which would be a devaluation of the spiritual and its personal and unique dimension. Psychologism sees, disguises and masks, hidden motives, defensive mechanisms, neurotic manifestations, absurd sublimations, etc., which distract from the real problem of the patient. The existence of the patient escapes psychologism. Jasper affirms that the human is a being who decides; one is not a being purely and simply but decides in each case "what is" (Frankl, 1983). The psychic states declared by a patient to a psychotherapist are acts of moral self-judgment, given that they presuppose an ought to have been, i.e., personal values professed by the patient. Regardless of how desperate and how depressed he may be, the patient confesses from the point of view of his spiritual world, the locus of his values, although they be accepted and lived in terms of a mitigated sense of liberty and responsibility. Psychology and especially psychotherapy have not had the courage to admit two fundamental theses: (1) that an ideal, a cause and even a whole life acquire greater excellence when covered by the mantle of morality; (2) that the human person, in the depths of one's being, feels the need to behave morally, whereas what is immoral makes one lose his harmony.

The following are essential to the morality of the human act and its connection to one's psychological fulfillment.

Ethical Conscience. In man there exists a moral instinct, a tendency to behave morally. We shall refer to this as his ethical conscience. The ontic conscience discovers a being that is; the ethical conscience discovers a being that is not yet but who should be. This being who is not yet stands before the possibilities of his self-realization as a person. We must not personify this ethical what-ought-to-be as an internalized authority, as this would have negative results for ethics. Instead, ethics as what-ought-to-be, as an aspiration, a goal, or the best option, is understood as the "voice of our total personality that expresses the exigencies of life and growth" (From, 1976, p. 54). It is an autonomous conscience, independent and personal, that executes the good and the valuable not by obeying the voice of authority but as a result of the pleasure and satisfaction that it experiences in so acting. This type of ethical conscience exists in all men; although mitigated, it is always present as the voice that orients the organism towards the end that is latent within one's being (From, 1985).

Liberty and Responsibility. The condition of being free and responsible unveils the core of human existence. In effect, the essence of man is to be "open to the world" (Sheller, 1976), i.e., always to be oriented towards something or someone: human acts are always intentional. Moreover, to be a person means to be oriented beyond oneself, to be self-transcendent. The multiplicity of possibilities that this offers for existence evokes the human person to realize in each case only one possibility, viz., the best one. Man cannot evade in every moment the necessity of responding freely to his to-be-able-to-be. We have referred to the various factors limiting liberty and responsibility, but the art of liberty consists in transcendenting them.

Life as Mission. Life understood as mission orients us towards values. The mission of each man is not unique; neither are his values which depend on him for their realization. Sheller talks about situational values in contrast to eternal values that are valid in every occasion and for all persons. Situations are linked to a specific situation and to each person in particular. This singularity of mission to realize values confers on human existence a character of moral obligation. Hence, there is little sense in talking in general terms of the mission of people in life, rather we should talk of my mission in each particular instance. The mission that each one has in life is something that no one can deny, although a party as function of self-interest may not recognize it. Goethe provides a wise reflection on knowing our mission in life: "How can one know himself? Never by reflection, but by means of action. Try to fulfill your duty and you will know yourself. What is your duty? Simply what the day requires (cited by Frankl, 1983, p. 78)?

If the ethical conscience is in our spirit as an intuitive vision of what-ought-to-be, if liberty and responsibility are constitutive characteristics of human existence and if the life's mission leads us toward the realization of specific values, would it be necessary to isolate the human act and to disengage it from its moral dimension on the suspicion that its ethical rank could deform it? Would we not deactivate the dynamic and harmonic development of personality if we deprive it of finding what is most valuable so that it can aspire to live in conformity to this value? "The morality of aspiration challenges man to develop his own human potential" (Deeken, 1983, p. 93). We should not be afraid to demand to look morally for what is best in us and live in conformity to this. It is time to end the Epicurean era in psychotherapy and substitute it with a Stoic era (Frankl, 1984). We can no longer delay the orientation of man towards moral values and the exigencies of a more disciplined and abnegated life.

Universidad Católica Andrés Bello

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