How a Holistic Conception of the Human and Objective Spiritual and Ethical Values Can Be Used as a Basis for Youth Education

New Wave Research Colloquium 6.10.2017The Significance of Spiritual Values in Contemporary

Education and ResearchSnellman College, Finland

Timo Purjo, PhD

Outline

Mission

• In search of the kind of education that would support a young person’s spiritual and ethical growth towards responsible humanity

• Education with such ethical goals leads to fundamental ethical obligations also for the educator and his educational actions

• A conscious concept of the human being is as much ethically as it is ontologically foundational

A well-grounded holistic concept of the human Lauri Rauhala (1914-2016)

Rauhala’s holistic conception of the human being

A. Situationality

B. Physicality

C. Consciousness

a) Psychic level

b) Spiritual level

Personhood of an adolescent

• Consciousness is the main channel in educational influencing– Higher dimension of consciousness, the spiritual abilities and their strength, is crucial

– Viktor E. Frankl (1905-1997) defines several spiritual skills that serve as helpful tools for practical youth education in life skills

• A child as a spiritual person – Beda Wicki: A child has spiritual capacities already in early childhood and those capacities can arise in practice if roused

– Janusz Korczak: A child as a co-magician in performing miracles, in education

– Ellen Key: Children should be treated as individuals who actively create their own lives, and not as a specific species of children

Recognitive attitudes

• Recognizing the adolescent as a person– Heikki Ikäheimo: Recognitive attitudes of respect, love and esteem as means of realization of personhood

– Respecting a young person means believing and trusting in the young person’s possibilities of growing and developing into a responsible personality according to their concealed individual potentials

– Whereas the recognitive attitude of respect makes us persons in the first place, the recognitive attitude of love is something that makes our lives as persons better in various ways

– In his phenomenology of education called Pedagogical love Simo Skinnari depicts educational goals in light of Plato’s values: Through loving education an ethicality of will (cf. goodness), aesthetic character of emotion (cf. beauty) and empathy (cf. beauty – or love), and veraciousness of thought (truth) can grow in a young person

Educational or pedagogical love

• The purpose of love in education– Frankl: Love is an intentional act that is directed to the extraordinary and unique being of the loved one as a spiritual person, to his spiritual core and his most intimate innermost

– Max Scheler (1874-1928): Love is a spiritual move towards the highest possible value of the loved one

– Through educational love we do not see the young person as she is but also as what she could be and what we think would be possible for her to become

– Educational love, when understood as seeing the adolescent as a spiritual person – i.e. her genuine being and the possibilities created by values in her – helps them to actualize all the values that love has and that only love can make visible

Meaningful life as the goal of education

• Meaningfulness as directedness towards values– Frankl: Searching for meaning and purpose in life means being directed towards the value potential that is reserved for each individual human being

– Everything that can be seen as a potential meaning must be valuable and, when something valuable has actualized, meaningfulness can also be experienced

– The question is about directedness towards such values which are related to objective values

• Scheler’s theory of objective values– The essence of values is their validity irrespective of the time and place e.g. Plato, cf. Skinnari

– Values are independent of both individual humans’ subjective valuation and the prevailing valuations in single societies and cultures

Values as educational tools• Objective vs. subjective values – Values are always lived in an individual, unrepeatable and unique way

– Objective values provide a foundation for the critical evaluation of various individuals’ or communities’ subjective valuations– they can be used as independent indicators, “yardsticks” of the value content of what is currently appreciated

– with their help it is possible to ponder over one’s own or commonly prevailing valuations

– in that way they can be used for evaluating whether everything that we strive for or many other people also strive for is worth desiring

• Scheler’s value hierarchy– In Scheler’s value structure, pleasure and vitality are at the two lowest levels and spirituality and the values of the holy are the two highest value groups

Values as educational tools• As humans are spiritual beings, their growth and development specifically require an abundance of spiritual values. Persons who have acquired a sufficient number of spiritual values to their worldview can be called civilized.

• However, according to Scheler, even being civilized is not enough as humans must strive to reach the highest level, the area of holy values. The core value of the holy value level is the value of the person, and the values of the holy are actualized in the experience of love that the encounter of two persons makes possible. The use of Scheler’s value hierarchy in practical education,

see Ulla Solasaari’s works

Values as educational tools

• Frankl’s universal routes to discover meaning– Frankl substituted Scheler’s value hierarchy with 3 categories reflecting different main routes to discover meaning in life

– These are existential pointers of direction and facilitators in practical decision-making are

a) creating a work or doing a deed in order to be able to direct herself towards spiritual values and their goals

b) experiencing values as goodness, truth and beauty for instance via nature or culture, or by encountering another human being in the very uniqueness of this person – i.e. by loving her

c) taking a brave, courageous and dignified stance to one’s predicament in case she must face a fate which she cannot change – a stance which allows a steadfast bearing of the blows of fate

– In life opportunities to focus alternatively on this or that group of meanings varies. Sometimes we are addressed to enrich the world by our actions, at other times to enrich ourselves by our experiences.

Values as educational tools• Scheler’s ordo amoris– Scheler sketched ordo amoris, a concept of the order or ordering of love, in his famous unfinished manuscript

– Scheler illustrates the essence of ordo amoris by a metaphor of a shell or housing. A human carries with her a housing from which she cannot escape. She perceives the world and herself through the windows of her housing, nothing more or different like that is visible to her. This selective mechanism of her personal and unique ordo amoris determines also her will – and thus also the person’s will to meaning. All those individual and practical things that constitute the possible values (within some value group) and meanings (within some route of meanings) to be fulfilled at a given moment are governed and circumscribed by the readiness for being affected. The material what a person actually notices and observes is determined by her ordo amoris, her order of interest and love.

– Thus ordo amoris should also be taken into account when discussing how adolescents can find meanings and values in their lives – it should be included in the toolbox of practical value education of the youth

Finally

“Whoever has the ordo amoris of a man has the man himself. He has for the man as a moral subject what the crystallization formula is for a crystal. He sees through him as far as one possibly can. He sees before him the constantly simple and basic lines of his heart [Gemüt] running beneath all his empirical many-sidedness and complexity. And heart deserves to be called the core of man as a spiritual being much more than knowing and willing do.”

References

• More on youth education • More on values