Eğitim Üzerine Birkaç Söz

(1) It may seem anachronistic to say that Xenophanes was the first philosophical
anthropologist, but if we consider that one of the basic tenets of this philosophical
discipline (regardless of various and/or conflicting theories) is to show the
worldly/humane essence of religious transcendence, then he may well be qualified as
the first daring spirit declaring that if oxen had gods, they would reflect them as oxen
(H. Diels, frg. B 15, B 16). This is a philosophical attitude to explain religious belief.
Xenophanes’ second contention was not in an explanatory tone; he proposed a single
god ( H. Diels, frg. B 23-26). We interpret this as an intellectual attempt to replace
plurality with singularity. Of the two fragments mentioned above, the second does not
follow the first; it is not a logical consequence. If we change the order of the fragments,
it is obvious that a logical sequence cannot again be found. However, a historical
consequence can be seen. Xenophanes is not saying something quite out of tune of the
Milesian world-view. His predecessors thought within the problematic of the ‘Many and
the One’. Naturally he did not mean that plurality of gods finds its origin in a single
god; he simply proposed that living under the aegis of one god having plural qualities or
powers may be more reasonable than living among many gods that sometimes
contradict each other. We think that his aproach to religious belief is secular and not
dogmatic. Secularity has an intellectual core: co-existence of various traditions of belief
in one society. It also involves the idea of a personal god with the important function of
representing individual conscience. This idea flourishes in a secular society and is
restricted and sometimes banned in a non-secular social organization. But individual
conscience cannot be conceived without a social existence; it is also socialized
conscience. This phenomenon is at the root of all secular socialization.
A Few Words on Education
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(2) Aristotle’s Politics is a thorough explanation of this central definition. His
other definition of man as zoon logon ehon (living being possessing speech) is wider but
a connection of the two definitions build up a whole: social order depends on orderly
speech and orderly speech depends on social order.
(3) I have no intention to trace Husserl’s phenomenology as far back as Plato’s
theory of forms. I merely intend to make a point on the transformation of a problem.
Trying to find the roots of a certain view may be part of certain types of research, but
undue insistence may end up by an anachronism.
(4) Kant devoted the first part of The Critique of Pure Reason (‘Transcendental
Aesthetic’) to the acquisition of knowledge by the combination of sensual perception,
forms of intuition and formation of concepts. The transcendental subject, the field of
objectivity which transcends empirical subjects and leads all minds to accept a priori
truths, “dictates its laws to nature”. This does not mean that ‘nature in itself’ does not
have laws. It only shows that without the employment of the elements of our faculty of
knowledge, we cannot know these laws. Therefore, the boundary of knowledge is
shown by nature and we must say ‘as we conceive it’, not as it is ‘in itself’. Above, we
tried to emphasize this epistemological distiction and ontological complementarity.