Non-self-sufficiency, Spirituality, Belonging: Three aspects of human nature in Comenius’s theory of education

It is a distinctive feature of the human being that he poses the question, “Who am I?” He seeks to grasp his own identity. In different eras of history human beings have come up with different answers - sometimes mutually complementary, sometimes contradictory. This study looks at this search for answers concerning human nature from the educative point of view, since it is the anthropological pre-understanding of “who I am” that determines (together with much else), the ethical-educational “who I ought to be”. Ontology precedes methodology. All cultures in history have had some conception of their “being”, so as then to form the identity of their members into the shape that “it should be”. It is well beyond the capacity of this article to exhaust the anthropological themes of human nature, still less to analyse the different historical attempts form it. The aim here is much more modest: to present Comenius’s struggle to answer the question, “who is the human being” and then to identify the educational implications of the answer. Comenius strives to form the kind of humanity whose nature it is to “know well, desire well and act well”, and to do so with the unique qualification, “even if no one is watching”. The article is an essay that sketches out the anthropological foundations of this ambition educational goal. Is a “natura humana” of this strong kind possible? An individual with such moral integrity that it makes no difference to his behaviour whether or not he is observed? I focus on three fundamental themes of Comenius’s rich anthropology: non-self-sufficiency (in Czech nesamosvojnost – a complex concept meaning not existing just for self and in self), spirituality and looking (in a specific sense that will be explained). All three themes are interconnected and give Comenius’s philosophy of education its specific character.