This essay (written in response to Steven Nadler’s article in this issue) seeks to interrogate the promise of Spinoza’s perfectionism for education. It does so by first establishing Spinoza’s perfectionism as a striving toward the intellectual love of God, occasioning an investigation of the relation Nadler sets up between Spinoza’s and Maimonides’ perfectionist schemes, and then evaluating the educational currency of such a striving. It is argued that while Spinoza’s highest good is difficult to construe as a widely attainable educational aim, it allows for two different educational pathways, where one focuses on the reeducation of passions via narratives adjusted to the ingenia of students and the other on attaining the highest good. At a glance, these two pathways come across as radically different in their setup, but they are aligned insofar as the stability of the community (agreeability) is a precondition for the striving for intellectual perfection. In parallel, this tracks how a pedagogical relation – being necessarily asymmetrical from the outset – can evolve into a relation of mutual friendship once the striving for perfection is identified and accepted as a common goal.

This paper introduces the symposium on Spinoza on perfectionism and education. It frames the key issue of Spinoza’s perfectionism in terms of a perennial educational problem and introduces the different contributions to this special issue, where Steven Nadler’s main paper is followed by a series of full paper responses by a group of Spinoza scholars and educational theorists. To round off the special issue, Nadler comments on the responses to his main paper.

While it is well known that Plato’s Republic contains arguments both for and against the use of fictions in education (376e–398b), it is less widely recognized (at least in an educational context) that the entire premise of the Republic is a fictional endeavor set up to arrive at the truth of justice in itself. This, in fact, corresponds well with Hans Vaihinger’s conception of the purpose of an expedient fiction, being a fiction that is specifically geared at facilitating the process of truth-striving. As such, this paper argues that the Republic is best read as an expedient fiction, constructed so as to render the truth of justice within grasp of the understanding of the less-than-fully rational (i.e., ordinary) reader.

This paper argues that Rousseau’s lawgiver is best thought of as a fictional teacher of peoples. It is fictional as it reflects an idea that is entertained despite its contradictory nature, and it is contradictory in the sense that it describes ‘an undertaking beyond human strength and, to execute it, an authority that amounts to nothing’ (II.7; 192). Rousseau conceives of the social contract as a necessary device for enabling the transferal of individual power to the body politic, for subsuming individual wills under the general will, and for aligning the good of the individual with the common good. For the social contract to be valid, however, it needs to be preceded by a desire to belong to a moral community that can induce people to join willingly, and that will grant legitimacy to the laws established. If the social contract is the machinery that makes the body politic function, the lawgiver is ‘the mechanic who invents the machine’ (II.7; 191). In this paper we will look closer at the pedagogical functions of Rousseau’s mythical lawgiver by first examining the relationship between the social contract, the general will and the lawgiver. Then, we aim to flesh out a pedagogical understanding of the figure of the lawgiver by way of the two educational dimensions of accommodation and transformation. Finally, we will argue for the importance of understanding Rousseau’s lawgiver as a fictional device allowing for the fundamental and enduring educational task of balancing between the preservation and renewal of society.

On trouve chez Spinoza deux types de modèles (peut-être s’agit-il d’ailleurs de deux interprétations différentes de ce qui correspondrait le mieux à l’idée que Spinoza se fait d’un modèle). En observant et en comparant ces deux types de modèles, on pourrait conclure que l’un est pertinent d’un point de vue pédagogique, et que l’autre ne l’est pas (ou bien moins). Curieusement, celui qui n’est pas pertinent d’un point de vue pédagogique ressemble beaucoup au modèle promu par la tradition néo-aristotélicienne, à savoir une personne digne d’admiration. Dans cette tradition, l’admiration est censée être déclenchée par des individus au comportement vertueux. Ces modèles sont perçus comme suprêmement admirablesparce que moralement infaillibles. Chez Spinoza, ce premier type de modèle est introduit sous la forme de « modèle de la nature humaine » (à savoir, de l’homme libre / homo liber) dans la Quatrième Partie de l’Éthique (de la proposition 66 à la proposition 72). L’autre type de modèle est faillible mais applicable en pratique en ce qu’il est affectivement en phase avec l’imagination des personnes auxquelles il s’adresse. Ce deuxième type apparaît dans le Traité Théologico-Politique, sous la forme de la dualité des« Prophètes » et des « Docteurs ». Dans cet exposé, mon objectif sera cependant de laisser de côté cettedeuxième conception du modèle pour tenter d’étudier ce qui est pédagogiquement intéressant dans les modèles et dans l’exemplarité elle-même, pour ce qui concerne l’adaptation des récits collectifs, la dynamique entre l’imagination et la raison, et l’importance pédagogique d’être en phase avec les dispositions affectives, c’est-à-dire avec l’ingenium de celui à qui l’on s’adresse.

In this paper Johan Dahlbeck sets out to propose a pedagogy of “as if,” seeking to address the educational paradox of how students can be influenced to approximate a life guided by reason without assuming that they are already sufficiently rational to adhere to dictates of practical reason. He does so by outlining a fictionalist account, drawing primarily on Hans Vaihinger's systematic treatment of heuristic fictions and on Spinoza's ideas about how passive affects can be made to strengthen reason. Dahlbeck suggests that such an account can help us overcome the problem of assuming that reason needs to be enlisted as an instrument in the educational endeavor to live according to the guidance of reason. The reason this is so is that fictions can use passive affects that are prosocial and that thereby strengthen the sense of community necessary for laying a cooperative foundation for successful joint striving. Dahlbeck suggests further that exemplary teachers are crucial to this endeavor insofar as they can offer educational fictions as imaginative and temporary placeholders for the truth, allowing students to act “as if” they were already guided by reason.

There is a social and political dimension to Spinoza’s theory of affects that is important to highlight for educational purposes. Because all people are always in part passionate (i.e., determined to act by causes that are external to them), it makes no sense to assume that empowerment is ever an entirely individual affair. On the contrary, Spinoza contends that if people want to become more active and more empowered, they need to join with others who are striving for the same thing. Accordingly, ‘the good which everyone who seeks virtue wants for himself, he also desires for other men’ (E4p27d). There are two upshots to this idea that can be addressed in terms of practical (educational) questions. First, it demands that we find out more about how people can be influenced to want the same thing. Second, it means that we need to look closer at how passivity can help bring about activity. Because different people have different ingenium (i.e., affective constitution) it is not a straightforward thing to assume that we would all naturally strive for something similar. At bottom, we all want to become more empowered, but what we take to be empowering may differ widely depending on our past experiences and our culturally encoded patterns of association. The educational concern at the heart of this matter is therefore bound up with the question of how different people can be made to strive for the same thing so as to help them flourish, individually as well as collectively. 

Fictionalism confronts the dual epistemological nature of education. In this book, Johan Dahlbeck argues that all education, at bottom, concerns a striving for truth initiated through fictions. This foundational aporia is then interrogated and made sense of via Hans Vaihinger’s philosophy of ‘as if’ and Spinoza’s peculiar form of exemplarism. Using a variety of fictional examples, Dahlbeck investigates the different dimensions of educational fictionalism, from teacher exemplarism to the basic educational fictions necessary for getting started in education in the first place. Fictionalism will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in the philosophical foundations of education.

In this essay, we argue that Rousseau’s lawgiver is best thought of as a pedagogical fiction. It is fictional as it reflects an idea that is entertained despite its contradictory nature, and it is contradictory in the sense that it describes “an undertaking beyond human strength and, to execute it, an authority that amounts to nothing” (II.7; 192). Rousseau conceives of the social contract as a necessary device for enabling the transferal of individual power to the body politic, for subsuming individual wills under the general will, and for aligning the good of the individual with the common good. For the social contract to be valid, however, it needs to be preceded by a desire to belong to a moral community that can induce people to join willingly, and that will grant legitimacy to the laws established. If the social contract is the machinery that makes the body politic function, the lawgiver is “the mechanic who invents the machine” (II.7; 191). In this paper we will look closer at the pedagogical functions of Rousseau’s mythical lawgiver by first examining the relationship between the social contract, the general will and the lawgiver. Then, we aim to flesh out a pedagogical understanding of the figure of the lawgiver by way of the two educational dimensions of accommodation and transformation. Finally, we will argue for the importance of understanding Rousseau’s lawgiver as a fictional device allowing for the fundamental and enduring educational task of balancing between the preservation and renewal of society.