Conditions of Education

Up to this point, anyway, it’s still difficult to talk about a real «education». Concepts like «training», «imitation», «shaping», «communication», «care», «teaching» (also in the Latin etymological meaning of “leaving marks”), «learning», «sociabil­ity», «ecological coevolution», «development» and so on.

Of course, all of them are important concepts in Pedagogy, but they may be also elaborated by disciplines that don’t study the human education, but only the animal behaviour. Consequently, they can be considered necessary conditions, but not enough to qualify education as «human». In fact, education doesn’t exist with­out a «subject-person» who educates, educates him/herself and is educated while educating someone else or him/herself.

For this reason, Agazzi doesn’t rediscuss long-standing issues that affected the Pedagogy of the Twentieth Century (starting from his father), such as: “is educa­tion, for everybody, a self-education of the subject-person or is it always a hetero­education, in the sense of supposing the intervention of an external educator? Is self-education the result of the education received from another subject-person, so that it would exist only after the end of the educational process, or is it a dimen­sion that intersects, for nature, the education received from another subject-person all life long? In other words: is there an age in life, not only on a psychological or juridical level, but also on an ontological one, in which it is possible to affirm, pedagogically, that one is not yet a subject-person, and an age in which at last one can become a subject-person thanks to the received education?”

Agazzi, instead, moves his attention towards the exploration of the features necessary to talk about the subject-person in general and the subject of education in particular, where the genitive is both objective and subjective.

On the contrary, human intentionality cannot be reduced to a unique naturalis­tic-materialistic explanation. In fact, it mediates and overcomes experience. The human subject captures, in his/her intellectual intuition, the empirical individual only in the framework of an abstract concept, in other terms of a “universal” that transcends it. S/he is not able to understand the multiplicity of experience except through a unity that can’t be found within experience itself, and that has noth­ing sensible, even if it has links to what is sensible (Agazzi 1981). The seman­tic, analytic logos goes together the apophantic, syntethic one, as often stressed by Agazzi. Indeed, it is its necessary completion (Agazzi 1964, 1975, 1995a, b) and indicates an exclusively human specificity. The perspective of the “whole” to make reasons of the “part” and of the “synthetic” to talk sensibly of the “ana­lytic” cannot be eliminated, even in science in the modern meaning.

Two other fundamental characteristics of the subject-person are rooted on this specific human ontological openness, that makes him/her a full-fledged subject of education: freedom and inner identity. Without inner identity, freedom to choose between good and bad, true and false, beautiful and ugly would be without personal responsibility. The subject-person would have neither faults nor merits. At this point, talking about each human person’s dignity, justice, truth, or falsehood would become impossible. The very civil cohabitation between subject-persons would be irreparably compromised: that is, compromised in language, relationships, thought (Agazzi 1993). Surely, freedom and inner identity of the subject are never absolute, in the historic and empirical context. They are not self-sufficient and closed. In fact, they also refer to a whole that founds them while goes beyond them.

Only a subject provided with intentionality, that means with logos, freedom/ responsibility and inner identity, can be followed by the subjective and objective genitive of education. Otherwise, it remains in the horizon of a human subject who could train and be trained, imitate and be imitated, shape and be shaped, commu­nicate and be communicated, teach and learn, care for and be cared for, and so on. Nevertheless, it could not integrate all these dimensions in a personal unit, taking them on critically, with intentionality, logos, freedom/responsibility and identity. Agazzi has proven and experienced several times in person this transition, as con­firmed by some examples, also very simple, that, in different ways, represent para­digmatic experiences of all people who grow up.

Since he was a child, he had a keen interest in the natural sciences: flowers, animals, chemical and physical phenomena. “As a refugee in a remote village in the Bergamo valley, in order to escape to the air raids”, his father had put in his hands the entomology and science books by the well-known French natural­ist Jean Henri Fabre, who was recommended at that time for his combined sci­entific rigor, anti-scientism (maybe a little parenthetical) and elegant divulgation. Similarly, on physics, in order to sort the disordered experiences that Evandro was making on his own account, his father had given him to read 800 facili esperienze di fisica, written for Editrice La Scuola by Mons. Angelo Zammarchi, a very fine science man and a great popularizer. Therefore, once finished secondary school, he intended to enroll himself in Physics. His family, in particular his father, pushed hard for philosophy. When Gustavo Bontadini moved from the University of Pavia to the Catholic University of Milan, Aldo Agazzi didn’t hesitate and imposed himself upon his son in a somewhat authoritarian way (by that time, he was lec­turer at the University of Padua with a contract provided by Luigi Stefanini). But eventually his university years, thanks to the encounter with that great theoretical philosopher, persuaded Evandro he had made the right choice. A suffered decision was endorsed: it became something he wanted and, more importantly, a course of action he should have adopted.

In his family and in the social and parish environment, attended when he was young, he breathed every day the firm belief in the Thomistic “natural desire to know God”, in the reference that transcendence was get in the immanence and in the idea that these would be just the visible signs of the biblical anthropology about man created in the image and likeness of the Creator. In 1947, his mother, a very sensitive person, published a book that collected and reordered, in an itinerary offered to all the families, the methods used for growing these beliefs in Evandro and his brother Albert, their second son (Agazzi Carminati 1947).

Agazzi reproduces this maturation process also with respect to many contents of that Zivilisation which was typical at the time of his youth. These contents, i.e. that set of rules, concepts, behaviours, and external and conventional values, would be taken on critically in order to give them a new form, with new reasons. They become fully his Kultur, his Bildung, a justified personal way of acting to educate himself more and more while he was educating himself and, at the same time, educating others.

Agazzi has often justified all his philosophical and cultural work in the light of this well-known quote by Hegel: “philosophy is its own time learnt with thought. Therefore, it is just as foolish that a philosophy can transcend its present world, as that an individual could leap out of his time (Hegel 1821)”.

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