Between Philosophical Whole and Pedagogical Wholeness

One of the most present categories in Agazzi’s thought is «whole». A philosophi­cal way, one might say, to mean the God of theology and Jesus Christ’s God of Christian religion; or to shrink from partiality, to dread reductionism, to bring back the parts to their entirety.

Agazzi uses this category at every level of his activities: theoretical, in particu­lar, but also pragmatic, social, existential and even concerning too human aca­demic trafficking. He is never for an aut aut. Always attentive to an et et, though always affirming unflinchingly his positions. Therefore, he is an explorer of the reasons of composition, rather than of conflict. Also taking on responsibility for his own choices and, if it is the case, for his own mistakes.

It is easy to imagine how this category was important as a directive of his educational action in teaching and, accordingly, how it may also be legitimately referred to as the general principle of a theory of education that, subsequently, it is essential not to betray in practice.

At the pedagogical level, his father and the environment of Editrice La Scuola of Brescia,^[104] thanks to the encounter with Christian activism, had developed this category under the name of «wholeness» (“integralita”, i.e., whole education of the person). However, Agazzi uses this category sparingly. He prefers his own con­cept. In substance, however, the concordances between the philosophical concept of the whole and the pedagogical one of wholeness are obvious.

The principle of placing every partial educational action or every auto-educa­tive maturation of some single aspect into the entirety of the whole education of the person, inserted into history, is a valid principle even at the pedagogical level.

Let us take, for example, the subject-person of education. It is not pure spirit, God’s breath mentioned in the Bible. It is also the subject of a body with a mind and a brain, connected to a world in history, all without solution of continuity, by its own nature (physis). Education, therefore, is not «whole» or «entire» if it abstracts the subject-person from his/her environment and from history. Nor if one aims only at a rationality and at a mind able to explain everything. This is a Pascalian theme par excellence,^[105] but also very dear to Agazzi, who used it mainly to deal with the problem of evil and the defeats of theodicy (Agazzi 1992a, b, 2014).

In order to practice the «integral» education of the subject-person, it is neces­sary to use at the same time world, history, environment, spirit, forms of ration­ality, psyche, corporeality, sensitivity, motility, sociability, manual dexterity, expressiveness, in a harmony that must be regularly sought and pursued in its «right moments», starting from the genealogy of each human person and from the environmental and historical context within which it is stratified. We must hold together, with the balance of the «right time», all the just mentioned dimensions. But every dimension has its own «wholeness» of parts that should not be forgotten or, worse, betrayed.

Rationality, for example, cannot be limited to the identification with the nous, it must always involve the logos. And the logos cannot be only the theoretical one, it must also be extended to the technical-technological and practical-moral one. The same applies to the body, psyche, sensitivity, motor skills, sociability, expressive­ness, dexterity, sociability, memory, and, not least, for the established cultural forms that in every time draw the boundaries of the encyclopaedia of knowledge (sci­ences, philosophy, humanities, techniques, technology, arts, history, religion, myth).

An education that forgets the duty of these continuous ironic intersections and that theorizes the preliminary resection of some of them, would violate the peda­gogical category of wholeness and would end up impoverishing the quality and the sense of each one’s and everyone’s education (this issue doesn’t matter the “world” of practice, where you cannot do everything all together in the same time).

This general perspective explains Agazzi’s insistence on three themes that he has always presented as educationally strategic for students, in schools and univer­sities, for the professional journal he directed («Nuova Secondaria»), and last but not least, for his own scholarly production.

The first theme is interdisciplinarity in research and teaching. Agazzi has never underestimated the identity of object, method and language, typical of every sci­ence, and consequently, of the disciplines featuring in school and university cur­ricula. He never tolerated, in this regard, dilettantism and superficiality. There is no way to carry research in the sciences or teaching in school subjects unless both of these are thoroughly and rigorously understood. He himself, in order to write about philosophy of physics studied physics, in order to write about mathemati­cal logic studied mathematical logic, and so for geometry, etc. And he did so in a brilliant way. There cannot be philosophy “of” something unless these direct and deep knowledge of that “something” (Agazzi 1992a, b): otherwise, it would be only an empty talk. With the same determination, however, precisely in order to do well in scientific research and in teaching school subjects, it is essential to hang out with interdisciplinarity (Agazzi 1994). One needs interdisciplinarity, first, as an attitude of mind, a heuristic style of thinking, an ethical and cultural custom, as openness to newness. Secondly, as an epistemological perspective: reaching the most problematic boundaries of each science and cultivated discipline, discover­ing the historical and theoretical relationships that they have with other sciences and contiguous or distant disciplines, identifying similarities in the objects, meth­ods and languages used to verify the opportunity of conscious contaminations that enable unprecedented views in scientific research or cultural and educational strategies increasingly integrated into the school. But also, thirdly, interdisciplinar­ity is necessary as orderly organization of cooperative research between scientists and of didactics between teachers of different school subjects.

The second theme often discussed by Agazzi regards the humanistic value of science and technology and, reciprocally, the scientific and even technological value of the humanities. This circularity is suggested by the very structure of opera- tionalism and of Agazzi’s epistemological objectualism. If it recognizes the exist­ence, according to an old classification, of the mathematical, physical and natural sciences on one side, and of the human sciences (including philosophical, social, historical, literary, psychological, artistic sciences) on the other, it sees in opera­tional objectualism the assurance that both the former and the latter constitute, in different ways, «scientific» and intersubjectively strong knowledge.

It is no coincidence, then, that the third theme that has always characterized Agazzi’s concerns and interventions is that of the centrality of a «philosophy of the human being». This cannot arise from any particular science, either natural or, though it might seem more reasonable, human or social (such as psychology, soci­ology, cultural anthropology, linguistics, history, etc.). Nor it can arise from the sum of all the different scientific elements of knowledge, that are already existent or will exist in the future. In a way or another, these elements always have some­thing to do with experience and transform the «things» of experience, in order to study them, into «objects» endowed with a restricted number of properties. Now, if we could extend scientific exploration to the whole of human experience in the world, two problems would still remain unsettled: (a) sciences of whatever nature do not study «things», but «objects with certain properties», that are related to «things» without exhausting them; (b) the whole of these «objects», which have an empirical reference that allows us to «know» them in a certain and reliable way, still does not solve the problem of the whole, because the whole of the sen­sible does not include that of the supersensible, which is essential, as mentioned, to mediate cognitively the former of the two problems.

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