(Wong, 2016)
In his essay, “Higher Education Without Commodification, Mechanization, or Moralization,” Robert Hanna asks the question: what is the ultimate end of higher education? Giambattista Vico, echoing Socrates’s Delphic oracle, claimed that the ultimate end of all education is self-knowledge. Hanna fully agrees with Vico’s claim, but also wants radically to extend his idea about education, in accordance with contemporary and futuristic Kantianism (Hanna, 2024), and then apply it specifically to contemporary and near-future higher education. In 1784, Kant published an essay called “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?,” in which he argued that the fundamental thesis of “enlightenment” or Aufklärung is that all rational human animals are strictly obligated to think for themselves and to act freely, with resolution and courage, in accordance with sufficient respect for their own and everyone else’s human dignity. Taking together Vico’s Socratic idea about self-knowledge, with Kant’s idea about enlightenment, and then creatively revising-&-updating them both to fit the contemporary 21st century existential, moral, and sociopolitical predicament of humankind, then in Hanna’s view, the ultimate end of higher education is not only (i) self-knowledge, but also (ii) rational autonomy in thinking, caring, and acting, (iii) authentic human creativity, and (iv) sufficient respect for everyone’s human dignity. In turn, the four-part conjunction of these ultimate ends is what Hanna call radical enlightenment .Therefore, Hanna is saying that the ultimate end of higher education is radical enlightenment, and correspondingly, in the essay he spells out the basic elements of a radically enlightened higher education system.
REFERENCE
(Hanna, 2024). Hanna, R. “Kantian Futurism.” Journal of Philosophical Investigations 18, 47: 1-8. Available online at URL = <https://philosophy.tabrizu.ac.ir/article_18254.html?lang=en>.
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