The Phenomenon of Education: The Existential Order of Being

Abstract

The fundamental ontology of the phenomenon of education remains an insufficiently developed scientific problem. However, it serves as the foundation for the science of education, enabling it to transcend its purely applied and quotidian nature and finally attain the genuine status of a science. Fundamental ontology provides the support and substantiation for the concepts developed by science for its own purposes. This is precisely what characterizes science as science. Previously, I developed a part of the fundamental ontology of education, which I termed the instituting ontology. It includes such basic structural forms as ontological essence and relation to truth, primary constituents (universals), and non-Kuhnian paradigms, which comprise three dimensions: justificatory, universal, and paradigmatic. In the present work, the subject of my research is the anthropo-positing ontology of the phenomenon of education, in which two dimensions are distinguished: the existential-transcendental and the human-world dimensions. This article briefly examines the first dimension, which characterizes the educational movement of humans toward their essence, designated as the path to oneself. The starting point is the question of choosing authentic methods of scientific-cognitive activity for various groups of students. It is demonstrated how an individual’s problem-cognitive program illuminates the path to oneself in the sense of seeking and constructing the human foundation. Explanations are provided for the essence of the concepts “problem-cognitive program” and “non-Kuhnian paradigms,” which are necessary for understanding the presented ontological conception. The article outlines the fundamental categories of the existential-transcendental dimension of the phenomenon of education, which are defined as self-knowledge, self-expression, the spiritual, and the moral. In the category of self-knowledge, the opposition between individualization and individuation is presented, while in the category of self-expression, the opposition between reproductive and productive cognition is explored. The category of the spiritual characterizes the essence of the sphere of the spiritual in the individual and the sphere of the spiritual in the nation. It is shown that the spiritual represents the constitutive principle of personality, but not of the human being as such. The highest essential principle of the human being as such is the moral, which plays a unifying role in the quaternary of the existential-transcendental dimension of the fundamental ontology of education.