In an age like the present, which is choking on the virtually exclusive valorisation of technology, what (and how) should students be taught, or putting it differently, what should they learn? Just consider the proliferating crises affecting the entire world population – the ongoing war in Ukraine, the fluctuating Iran war and its broadening ripple effect on energy prices (which is already affecting, not only availability of oil and petrol, but food supplies as well), and the social and political strife connected with ‘illegal immigrants’ in the US, Britain, and Europe, to mention only some – then it seems a daunting task to answer this question.  

There are many – too many – intellectual sources, contemporary as well as throughout the history of the world, from which I could draw to answer it in a very provisional manner, so I’ll have to be selective, but here goes. My perspective is mainly Western. 

From the ancient Greek thinker, Plato – who had assimilated the insights of his predecessors, from Thales through Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and others to Heraclitus and Parmenides, and, of course, his teacher, Socrates, who claimed that he had learned from a woman named Diotima – we learned that Being and Becoming are the two poles constituting the tension field in which things appear in the material world of the senses and of particular things, on the one hand, and the intelligible world of the universal Forms, on the other. 

Aristotle, Plato’s Macedonian pupil (who taught Alexander, destined to become The Great), argued that the universal Forms are not outside of particular things, but their intelligible part instead. Together, they comprise what he called an entelechy. Moreover, Aristotle gave us an encompassing conceptualisation of causality as a sort of ‘fourfold’ (a concept that later returns in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, denoting the touchstone for a truly human mode of living), which is far richer and more fecund in explanatory terms than its modern reduction to only one of these. The four Aristotelian causes are the material, formal, working, and final causes, respectively. 

A tree, for instance, has a material embodiment, or matter (the trunk, branches, leaves, and so on). It also has an intelligible form – not its shape, but its comprehensible essence, and a working cause, which accounts for its change, or growth. Its final cause, or telos, is perhaps the most important, insofar as it explains why the tree develops in the way that it does. 

Obviously, for a human being this schema is more complex, although easily comprehensible. We have bodies (material cause), a formal, intelligible essence which makes us what we are, as distinct from other things, a working cause which explains changes in the course of our growth, and a final cause or human telos, which instantiates that towards which we ‘grow’ or what we strive for, both as a species and as individuals. For every individual the telos or final cause is different; some work towards the ideal writer they want to become, others strive for excellence in cooking, or singing, and so on. In this sense, our future(s) is a crucial factor for understanding what we do at present.

From the above it is already apparent that learning in what Bernard Stiegler calls a ‘transindividual’ manner – where knowledge is transferred from one individual to another, or others – always involves an incremental complexification. In this way, Plato, for instance, synthesised the accumulated knowledge of his predecessors, and Aristotle took this process further, giving us a synthesis that was even more comprehensive than Plato’s. 

Furthermore, while Plato was more mathematically oriented than Aristotle – as shown in his ‘creation myth’ (recounted in his dialogue, the Timaeus), where numbers, and not only Forms, are posited as essential mediators between God and individual things – Aristotle did justice to the empirical world of experience through observation. 

He can be credited with laying the basis, more than 2,000 years ago, for the empirical sciences. This pattern of the progression of knowledge should tell us something important about teaching and learning – particularly at present, when Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming a substitute for people’s (including students’) memory, against which Stiegler has warned.   

In modern times (around the 17th century), this complex schema was reduced to only one, namely what was understood as the ‘mechanical cause,’ which, in the present era, has been replaced by causality articulated in terms of genetics (something going back to the 19th century), electronics, and digitality. Needless to emphasise, this does not come anywhere near accounting for the complexity of human beings; Aristotle’s causal quartet is a far richer schema for that purpose. I’ll return to this.

I mentioned the ancient Greek thinker, Empedocles, earlier. He explained the world by means of four elements – air, water, fire, and earth – which are combined and separated by love (philia) and hatred (neikos), respectively. In the 19th century Sigmund Freud drew on this when he argued that civilisation is continually pulled in opposite directions between what he called Eros (love) and Thanatos (the death drive), respectively. With regard to love, we should not forget the profound civilisational role of Jesus of Nazareth, the crucial figure in Christianity, however, whose teachings on love are today more significant than ever. Love plays an important role in other religions, too, of course, and this constitutes a possible point of convergence and conciliation between different religious beliefs.  

The Christian Middle Ages can be grasped through the teachings of Saint Augustine(who interpreted Christianity through Plato’s philosophy, although he also displayed a keen insight into the human psyche, on which even Freud drew), and of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who did the same thing via the thought of Aristotle, when the latter – after centuries of being inaccessible to Western thinkers – was rediscovered through contact between Eastern (Muslim) and Western (Christian) cultures. 

Ironically, the Crusades played an important role in this. Here an opportunity presents itself to teach students that, and how, learning never occurs in an historical vacuum – there is a very real connection between the hallowed halls of academia and concrete historical events (something that the 19th-century German thinker, Georg W.F. Hegel emphasised in his dialectical philosophy; he was writing his magnum opus when Napoleon’s conquering armies were entering the city where he lived).    

Rather than elaborate on the above thinkers, I want to point to the paradigmatic significance of the educational schema employed in medieval times, namely the so-called Trivium and Quadrivium, comprising the seven ‘liberal arts.’ The former consisted of the three disciplines – grammar, logic (or dialectic), and rhetoric – which prepared students for the four that made up the Quadrivium, namely arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, considered the mathematical arts. 

Consider that all of these four disciplines are based on numerical and geometric relations; even astronomy was understood in terms of musical proportions. Shakespeare reveals his knowledge of this where, in The Merchant of Venice, Act 5, Scene 1, the ‘music of the spheres’ is referenced, when Lorenzo remarks to Jessica – a propos of the celestial harmony created by the motion of the stars and planets, that: ‘There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st / But in his motion like an angel sings…’ Here one witnesses the synthesis of ancient Greek thinking and its Christian appropriation – another........

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