OPEN MORAL EDUCATION AND INTUITIVE MIND

Abstract

Open moral education is not a new idea (Ellen Key; Nadezhda Krupskaya), but it is only today, due to permissiveness of consumer society, that it is getting its practical foundation and clearer and clearer theoretical concepts. This permissiveness, pervading moral education as well, is not merely a fruit of the change of socio economic circumstances and a new ideological, neo-liberal establishment of consumer society emanating from it. For genuine changes in society, apart from strengthening production forces and changing production and social relations as a material foundation of any change, individual forces need to develop essentially, whose strengthening enables the change of focus of individual and collective consciousness by means of its redirecting towards permissive reconciliation, thus changing the nature of authority, resulting in the confrontation of individuality and sociality taking place at a higher level. New necessities give birth to new forces, and they emerge not according to someone’s wishes, in a mysterious way, but by means of making the arising reality aware of new forms of its objectivisations due to a novel fashion of virtualisation of reality, which is not based solely on rationality, as it might seem at first sight. In the simplest terms possible, for one to indulge in freedom and to spread it one must be capable of wishing for freedom, but for this wish to gain strength a foundation that is no longer merely rational-material but also spiritual is required. In that sense, strengthening of individual force is but strengthening self-consciousness about the possibility of freedom that is the single supporting strut in the process of founding a personality. For this self-consciousness to emerge, necessary are, as we have pointed out, new ways and new means of virtualisation of reality. In our age, it surfaces in the form of virtual reality and artificial intelligence, which nurture both anxiety and hope. The anxiety, since we fear the humankind might become outdated and, subsequently, redundant. Digitalisation, therefore, deepens the reasonable doubt of even deeper alienation. But the humans are paradoxical beings that find the escape in perilous situations (Heidegger). A new way of virtualisation of reality by means of virtual reality and artificial intelligence not only expands the space of rationality across the borders of human ratio, but it also, at the same time, turns us back to the mind. This turning back to the mind is based upon turning back to intuition, from which we started as a genus. The mind can only function in the capacity of being free, and for it to gain such capacity it must rely on intuition. The hope, therefore, lies in our wish for the mind to reopen the old yet unused potential of the genus in a new manner whose possibilities depend on each of us as a personality.