In my wildest dreams I am an omnipotent god. I do the most unbelievable things without even trying. I go anywhere I want, I create, I destroy, I eat, I drink, I fuck without the least objection to my will. However, somewhere inside my brain I know those are dreams, the workings of a feverish imagination. I know I will have to wake up and also to deal with how much my mind can conceive and how little my frail body can actually accomplish.
I presume it’s safe to say we are all dictators in our dreams? “Everybody wants to rule the world”, etc. Apparently we would all reshape this planet if we could, so that it might fit our idea of a decent habitat, and, not surprisingly, the most popular religions offer man the possibility of finding eternal bliss in an afterlife which in practice will bring exactly that: a life in our own terms.
Come to think of it, both things (unchecked freedom in this world, endless bliss in the next one) amount to the same. We want power. We want to do what we want without thinking abou the consequences. Without thinking, period. We want to freely exercise our will and see all of our desires fully realized. Pronto. And we would be deceiving ourselves by thinking pious, humble religious people who “give up everything” in this world to obtain salvation in heaven are a natural and solid objection to this view. For they want the same thing you and I want, they just learn how to be patient, how to cope with how things are in this cruel world, so thar they may obtain their “treasures in heaven”. They merely postpone what you, you ambitious vermin, claims to want right now: unbridled power.
There’s no blame to be laid here, I am not criticizing my neighbor’s hypocrisy, at least not this time, for both he and I are- natural beings. A product of nature. No matter if he believes a deity made this world especially for him. He is a natural creature too, what, in relation to us, is basically the same as saying: he is an animal. And what does an animal want? To survive. To survive as long as he can. You’re not different, in this respect, from your dog. And what’s the difference in relation to the human animal, does he have any natural advantage over other animals in this never ending fight for survival, for the next day? Of course he has. I will not talk here about all the abilities of the human brain and how it’s a much more impressive machine than the brains of even the most intelligent animal species. This is not the place for this. I will only say our brain should not be seen as anything more than what it most surely is: a tool for survival.
Both the guy who dreams of being a despot in this world and the one who prefers to dream of being a sultan in the next one, use their brains to live and to cope, both of them are richly endowed with one of the truly amazing talents of our brains: imagination. See, a despot dreams of being THE cruellest, the meanest, the most tyrannical despot ever. He never fulfills this desire. His cruellest moments are all confined within the limits of his imagination. Ditto for the child of heaven. He actually believes he will experience the utmost freedom, the utmost joy, the utmost realization when “that great day” comes. He seldom can actually express what his blissful neo-existence will consist of. He has a feverish imagination, he has to have one if he must fathom this poor grain of sand we proudly call “our planet” was especially made by a divine hand, and made for him (!), but this imagination does not go far enough to bring us a convincing picture of heaven.
But whether Christian, whether atheist, whether rich or poor, whether North American or Brazilian, it is a fact that a human being, a man, has to learn the means to “get by” here on this earth. It doesn’t matter if he thinks that life here is worth little or worth a lot, whether this one is for him just a passage or our complete existence, all the life we will ever know. In any case, he has to adapt, survive and gain means, gather strength, to face everyday life and the struggle of all against all that constitutes human existence.
In this context, each one will have more or less limited access to the fruits of education, which is nothing more than another tool for survival, the most complete of all, certainly, but just a tool, which we must learn to use correctly, or we end up being easily manipulated by those who learned to use it better than us.
First of all, I need to stop looking at education with idyllic eyes and be a little cynical about it. There is nothing romantic about being educated. On the contrary, it is often a painful process. The picture of a guy innocently pursuing knowledge, as something that will take him “beyond” himself, placing him on a plane distant from everyone else, appeals, of course, to our aesthetic taste, but it is flawed. Our understanding is necessarily limited. Our capacity for perception often becomes confused. Many a time, we want to deceive ourselves about things. So, if we go after an idealized knowledge, we will be looking for a ghost, because if knowledge has no use in the construction of our being, what use does it have? Knowledge is something to be used, because if it isn’t, it won’t be worth anything, it will just be a collection of data congesting our brain. Wikipedia and the internet already perform this function.
Furthermore, I must consider what kind of education I need at the stage of life in which I find myself, and whether my education is sufficient to perform the functions I propose to perform at the moment, serving, moreover, for my entertainment, and for the solidification of my intellect, that is, [I need to know] if the knowledge I have is really rooted in my brain, as part of me, or if it escapes me all the time, like a kind of food that my organism cannot digest.
I take Horace’s “Nil admirari” (not to be surprised by anything) as a starting point in everything in life. I don’t get surprised either by things or by people. This I achieve based on the assumption that I am on the same level as all of them, and as I know what they all want deep down, at the bottom: the same as me. I cannot, therefore, assume a position of enchantment or wonder in reference to knowledge. I love books, I’m a bookworm, but I had to learn to tame my love for the written word, so as not to let myself be “carried away” by the enthusiasm for each new idea, each new worldview, each new understanding that I see presented in an opus. Acting like this, I manage to read anything that may somehow interest me, by reading things with more curiosity than admiration, although I truly respect the intellectual work of someone who sometimes took years, decades, to write a book.
But I cannot be surprised by the result of the work itself, although I recognize, more than anyone else, the hardness of intellectual work. I need this stoic posture if I want, as I do, to have contact with as much culture as my brain can assimilate without “evaporating” in the process and without losing sight of my need for evasion, escape, even romanticism- the sound irrational perception of existence- not becoming, thus, too serious in my own view, laughing at life as one needs to do sometimes.
Nor can I be surprised when someone is more knowledgeable than I am, in a given field.
Mankind has known times when there was an ideal of a human being who knew all things, was interested in all subjects, ie, was literate in the broadest sense of that term. What we might call a Renaissance man. To this day, there has never been a more complete model of this type of man than Leonardo da Vinci. However, recognizing da Vinci’s genius or not, we have to admit that the body of knowledge available at his time was much more restricted than today. Leonardo was indeed a genius and was indeed interested in everything, but even with the precarious level of knowledge in some areas at his time, he was never able to develop his knowledge in a specific field definitively, becoming an authentic and indisputable master of that field. On the contrary. To this day, he figures as the perfect model of a curious man, interested in everything, willing to know everything, and this admirable image we have of him will never change as time goes by. But we have to study the man in the context of his times. The ideal of man that Leonardo (and many others) represented has something romantic about it, because not even the most arrogant guy would be able to presume, today, that he can efficiently store in his brain all the knowledge available to man. And storing it in his brain effectively would mean: using, in practice, all of his knowledge.
That is not possible, not even conceivable.
The degree of knowledge that one acquires today of his own field of work is, in general, limited, what you notice talking to anyone, be he a lawyer, a doctor, a writer or a judge. Acquiring a wide range of knowledge in the most varied fields, then, is unimaginable.
So I accomodate myself to the notion that my knowledge will necessarily be limited, and this right off the bat, and so I don’t get carried away with the level of knowledge in some field that another guy might have. What I need is not go around pretending to have deep knowledge in certain fields where I know I am ignorant. Thus, I cannot want to discuss quantum physics, nor high cuisine. Both these fields are not beyond me, they just don’t interest me, if I really wanted to know them I could, but this at the cost of knowing other things that are much more useful to me.
This concept of the usefulness of knowledge is essential. Yes, indeed, we have to be utilitarian where education is concerned.
Everything useful for understanding (and enjoying) life is useful to be learned. Everything that only throws life into a conceptual confusion, everything that serves to cast doubt on the very reality of life must be seen either as mere curiosity or as something really harmful (counterproductive). I don’t want my mind to be a storehouse of useless knowledge. So I appropriate knowledge by extracting from it, from books, movies, music, etc, everything that is useful to me, leaving aside everything else, without a second thought.
The classic image of the intellectual is that of a boring man. A guy with a lot of theoretical knowledge about the world, but very little social skill, very little ability with practical life, with flesh and blood people. And, of course, the image of a guy who managed, somehow, to save in his head an endless amount of data (information), names, historical events, personalities, etc, sometimes knowing by heart whole books, but perpetually in a bad mood, for not enjoying life for a single moment, not being able to put any idea into practice, for existing, in short, only theoretically. Like a ghost from the world of ideas thrown, against his will, among the living.
What I want is neither the boastful pride of the Renaissance man nor the traditional posture of the intellectual guy closed in on himself, capable of enumerating all the philosophical systems of the world, but without any real ability to face life as it is.
So I redefined education for myself. I need to know what literature has for me, what music has for me, what gastronomy, science, medicine serve for. Nothing exists in vain, nothing should be used or learned for nothing. With each book, I try to find out not only the context in which it was written, what its author intended to say, whatever the story, whatever the ideas defended by the author, but also what the work has to offer me. If the author fails to convince me, after the first 50 pages, that he has something to say to me, I give up the book, no matter if the author is Kant, Emerson or Saramago. I do the same with other arts: Renoir makes a very strong aesthetic impression on me. Picasso does nothing for me.
So I reassess the whole edifice of human knowledge without pretending that I can go up even to the first floor, because what matters to me is that whatever I manage to learn in life, it must have some real use, and can be either put into practice, or used for my improvement, either in the intellectual or in the physical sense of this word.
In this process, I never allow someone to call me ignorant without first knowing if the field of knowledge in which the person claims to perceive my ignorance is really in my interest, and if I really affirmed to master it or something of the kind. I am the judge of my own ignorance, as of my degree of knowledge. I realize my own shortcomings, and I will never try to argue about things I know I don’t understand, because my selfish pride prevents me from doing so.
This is a way I found to give a proper, personal meaning to the very notion of education, in order to be constantly educating myself, because in truth only the individual can educate himself. Others sometimes point us in the right direction, point us to sources of knowledge, help us memorize names and dates, but without our own initiative (and will) to learn anything, all that a master has to give us are empty formulas.
But to the master, our knowledge means nothing. If we manage to convince him that we memorized the formulas he taught us, he is satisfied. It is not for him that we have to learn something, in fact if there is something that time has effectively taught me, it is that to be really educated is to no longer need any master, teacher or guru in life.
To be educated is to be an autonomous being, as autonomous as a human being can be in this world, that is.