(CZ) Ontologický smysl výchovy
(EN) The Ontological Meaning of Education

Filosofická studie o významu výchovy pojaté v duchu sokratovské péče o duši; text vychází a explikuje Patočkovu fenomenologii výchovy.

Education (paideia) is not just an inter-personal (i.e. an anthropological) matter but relates to being as such (i.e. it is an ontological matter). What makes man human, that is, is that he explicitly seeks to understand the reality of the world and his distinctive humanity. He is a being that is deficient in the sense that he does not take existence for granted like other living creatures. This means that he needs education in order to fulfil his nature as human. He is always consciously engaged and concerned with the problem of being, whether positively or negativesly. He is aplace of manifestation as brightness, the illumination of reality, to which education is supposed to bring him. He is always disposed to go beyond, and constantly go beyond everything that stands before him: this is human transcendence. Thus every human action becomes partial because it is fatefully submerged in the ever receding horizon of all horizons. It is in this direction that every education (e-ducare - leading out) leads. This emergence of something „in front“ into transience, ended by death, s the movement of individuation. To take good care of one‘s human essence means to render account of this care, to care for humanity and the world in general. If someone does not take care of himself and even rejects all help from those who already have experience with cultivation of humanity, offering it by the method that Plato calls paideia, he gives himself up to the indeterminacy and boundlessness of anonymous greed and whims. Man consequently has a cosmic task: he is destined to confer animation on the universe. What is not good enters the world as human fault.
The imagination helps us to go beyond the limitation of space and time, it is the coping stone of human finitude with infinity, it constant makes reality new and real, discerning a living undeadened reality that is no longer separated into the caprice of the subject and a heterogeneous objectivity (references to philosophical tradition: Plato, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schiller, Horderlin). Once again what is coming foward is a narrativity full of imagination as testimony about reality, for which abstract reflection cannot be substituted. Education by its care for the essential character and mission of man and the world is a care to ensure that the world is that which enables being to be in a way that is not closed, that enables it to be manifest and ever manifest anew. This being „for“, this being brought up and out, has an essentially ontological dimension. Education, which is care for humanity as care for our (right) ordering, i.e. good being in the world, is care of the world, that it should be well, in other words that it should be at all.