Introduction

education and ontological amnesia

pp. 1-24

in: Kaustuv Roy, Education and the ontological question, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Abstract

Ontological bearing, or the orientation toward what is, is simultaneously both an intuitive-corporeal grasp of the cosmological condition of organismic presence, as well as an immanent ethicality with regard to presence—the concurrent incidence of freedom and truth. Therefore one might infer that the necessary and sufficient condition of moral action—such as, for example, education—is the quest for, and the co-arising of freedom and truth, which results in the alignment of the microcosm with the macrocosm, or the collective psyche with the cosmic soma. From essence we derive bearing, and from such bearing, ethical action; and herein lies the relevance of ontological study for education. The highest ethical and educational aim, across cultures, is to be a light unto oneself. But this "light" correctly understood is not something metaphoric, personal, cultural, temporal, or epistemic. It is rather an ontological luminescence, an intuition of the numinous, directly and corporeally realized. It is the unprecedented turn of the being toward Being. Thus ethics, ontology, and education are seen to be a tightly knit bloc of existentials.