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Integral Humanism and the Integrity of Education1
Anthony A. Akinwale
President and Professor of Thomistic Studies
Dominican Institute
Ibadan
Abstract
After an attempt to articulate an integral humanism, the paper makes use of what is articulated.
to describe what constitutes authentic development. By way of two submissions, it proposes a
notion of education of the whole human person, a holistic education that can lead to the
complete and positive transformation of the human person
In the history of the human family, development has almost always been conceived as the
eradication, or at least reduction, of material poverty. Development has always been seen as the
maximization of power for the sake of maximization of profit, and the maximization of profit for
the maximization of power. We are dealing here with a conception of development that flows
from the fact that agenda for development has almost exclusively been left in the hands of
economists, politicians and military strategists. Merchants in search of commodities alert and
enter into alliance with politicians who deploy the military strength and strategy at their disposal
to invade and conquer peoples in whose lands such commodities are found.
Going by this logic of development, Nigeria features on the list of under-developed
counties because, as is the case in many a third world country, her indices of economic poverty
are many and well-documented. The collapse and or absence of infrastructure, intelligent but
unemployed citizens, ignorance and disease in a land inhabited by citizens of unactualized
potentials, to mention but these, would make Nigeria eminently qualified to be in the league of
under-developed countries..
The gravity of poverty in our world makes it tempting for rich and poor nations, and for
many an expert on the economy to assume, often without sufficient scrutiny, that the economy
holds the key to authentic development, and maximization of material prosperity is the alpha and
omega of human fulfillment. Development so conceived is the availability of more money,
abundance and consumption of more and more goods, invention of machines and tools of
increasing sophistication and efficiency, infrastructure of breath-taking beauty, etc. And, since
the notion of development tends to influence, if not determine, philosophy of education,
education is itself reduced to science and technology, the acquisition of techniques of invention
of gadgets and strategies for making profit. But economic growth is only one aspect of human
existence, one set of operations among others sets of operations to be deployed for the attainment
1
Paper read at International Conferece on Education organized by the Council for Research in Values and
Philosophy, Washington, DC and the Universityof Lagos, April 19-22, 2010.
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of the best way to live. Our personal and collective fulfillment would be jeopardized if and when
development is conceptually and practically reduced to economic growth.
In a consumer society, unrestrained acquisitive instinct gives rise to an insatiable desire
for material goods, and, in an attempt to satisfy this insatiable appetite, the human person
degenerates into a power addict who spends his time, talents and energy scheming for greater
personal power and perpetual maximization of profit at the expense of other human persons.
Pope Paul VI, in his landmark Encyclical on the Development of Peoples, Populorum
Progressio, already counseled against this tendency when he proposed that authentic
development be seen as the orientation of the whole person to the Creator.2 “Just as the whole of
creation is ordered toward the Creator, so too the rational creature should of his own accord
direct his life to God, the first truth and the highest good” (Populorum Progressio, n.16).
These remarks inform the three moments in this intervention. Taking my cue from the
wisdom of Populorum Progressio, according to which authentic development is centred on the
human person orientated to God, I shall, in the first moment, attempt to articulate what makes us
human. In the second moment, I shall use this articulation of what makes us human to describe
what constitutes authentic development. And, in the third moment, I shall, by way of two
submissions, propose a notion of education of the whole human person, a holistic education that
can lead to the complete positive transformation of the human person.
Four Dimensions of Human Existence
Our humanity is to be recognized in four characteristics that belong to the human nature, traits
that distinguish the human person from lower creatures. Each of these characteristics represents
a fundamental orientation in the human person, that is, what the human person naturally desires
and what the human person has the potential to attain. Taking my inspiration from the Canadian
philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan, I shall identify these traits as the yearning for
truth, the yearning for good, the yearning for God, and the yearning for love.
First, to be human is to search for and to be able to know the truth. The intellective
power with which the Creator has endowed human beings is made for the acquisition of truth. A
sign of this is in the fact that even the one who tells lies does not like to be deceived by others.
Secondly, to be human is to yearn for and to attain the good. The Creator has given every
human being a will whose natural movement is to whatever is perceived to be good. The truth
and the good which human beings naturally desire and which human beings are able to attain are
beyond what is found in transient and finite realities. The restless human spirit has an infinite
desire for the infinite. No sooner is one desire satisfied than the human being desires more. The
finite seeks fulfillment in the infinite, oftentimes without acknowledging it.
2
Paul VI, Populorum Progressio. Encyclical Letter on the Development of Peoples (Vatican City: Libreria
Editrice Vaticana, March 26, 1967).
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This brings us to the identification of the third fundamental characteristic. Theologians
readily admit it, some philosophers readily deny it, that there is in the human person a natural
desire for God in the desire for and openness to the infinite. At the root of the human quest for
the true and the good is a more profound yearning, the yearning for God. God, whom Martin
Buber refers to as the Divine Thou, is encountered in the human Thou. A true encounter with the
human Thou is the medium for a real encounter with the divine Thou.3 In the natural desire for
friendship, in the natural desire to love and be loved.
This natural desire for love and friendship is the fourth fundamental characteristic of our
human nature. Therefore, upon reflection on what it is to be human, it becomes obvious that
there are, to the human person, intellectual, moral, technical and spiritual dimensions. How
these four dimensions help to shape a notion of authentic development is what I will now
explain.
Authentic Development
Authentic development is actualization of the potentials and fulfillment of the desires of the
human person in each of the four dimensions I have identified. In the intellectual dimension, the
human person desires to know the truth and has the potential to know the truth. Intellectual
development is therefore the fulfillment of the human desire to know the truth in the
actualization of the human potential to know the truth. In the moral dimension, the human
person is encountered as a being who desires goodness and who can be an agent of goodness to
himself and others. Here, moral development is the fulfillment of the natural desire for goodness
in the actualization of the human capacity to do good. In the technical dimension, the human
person manifests himself as a being who desires fulfillment in working and who can find
fulfillment in working. Here, technical development, or what we call today scientific and
technological development is the fulfillment of the human person in the actualization of his
capacity for work. And in the spiritual dimension of human existence, the human being shows
himself as a being who desires God and who is capable of knowing God. Here, spiritual
development is the fulfillment of the natural desire for God in the actualization of the human
capacity to know and love God.
It would amount to a monstrous misconception of the human person if these were simply
to be reduced to the good of the market in the achievement of science and technology. That is
the illusion of fulfillment in economic progress. Authentic development includes but is not
3
“Every particular Thou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou; by means of every particular Thou the
primary word addresses the eternal Thou. Through the mediation of the Thou of all beings fulfillment, and nonfulfillment, of relations comes to them: the inborn Thou is realized in each relation and consummated in none. It is
consummated only in the direct relation with the Thou that by its nature cannot become It [Martin Buber, I and Thou
(New York: Collier/Macmillan, 1958) 75].
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limited to economic, scientific and technological development. To avoid the abyss of science
without conscience, the development of the whole person must be seen as technical, moral,
intellectual and spiritual.
Economic, scientific and technological development must be founded in the fulfillment of
the natural yearning for the truth, that is, intellectual development; in the fulfillment of the
natural yearning for the good, that is, moral development; and in the fulfillment of the natural
yearning for God, that is, in spiritual development. The good is that which everyone desires.
Authentic development is about the attainment, not just of the good of the market, but the
attainment of the good of the moral order, the good of the intellectual order, and the good of the
spiritual order. Anything short of this leads to the formation of fragmented individuals, victims
of arrested development. And, since the good is that which everyone desires, it is the universal
desire for the good that drives the quest for development. But the highest good is God.
Therefore, development, understood theologically, is, in the final analysis, a desire for God. To
use the economy as the ultimate index of development is to ignore or deny the fact that human
nature is capax Dei. And the God that we are capable of knowing is met in our common life, in
our inter-personal relationships when they are marked with rectitude. For as Lonergan said:
There is still a further dimension to being human, and there we emerge as persons, meet
one another in a common concern for values, seek to abolish the organization of human
living on the basis of competing egoisms and to replace it by an organization on the basis
of man’s perceptiveness and intelligence, his reasonableness, and his responsible exercise
of freedom.4
This vision of authentic development is sustained by a philosophical and theological
anthropology, an understanding of human nature inspired by divine revelation intelligently
received, or rather, an account of human nature informed by faith and reason. This theological
understanding of what it means to be human is formed by the conviction contained in the
Biblical saying that no human being lives on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the
mouth of God (Mt 4:4). Inseparable from this is the anthropological conviction that the human
person counts more than economic prosperity. In concrete terms, what makes us human is not
just the fact that we desire and can procure what to eat and drink. Authentic human existence is
not just a matter of satisfaction, it is ultimately a matter of values.
When economic gains are prioritized over human dignity that is when the world is
ordered as if the human person existed for the economy and not the other way round. But the
human being is neither a tool in the hands of the businessman or woman seeking to maximize
profit, nor a tool in the hands of the politician who seeks to maximize power, nor a tool in the
hands of the hedonist who seeks to maximize pleasure. The search for authentic development
highlights the need for a new humanism, that is, for a new understanding of what it is to be
4
Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).
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human that respects and promotes the dignity of the human person by the fact that it tells the
truth about the human person. And it tells the truth about the human person because it respects,
reflects and promotes the supernatural destiny of the same human person. By virtue of this
transcendental humanism, authentic development is the human response to the call to a higher
state of perfection, “a new fullness of life” which is beyond the mere satisfaction of material
wants and needs (Populorum Progressio, n. 16). Implicit in this theological anthropology is the
understanding that the human person is greater than what he produces, possesses, and consumes.
For a human being who is described solely in terms of production, possession and consumption
is nothing but a mobile bundle of sensations, a being whose life is exclusively dominated by
sensual desires and aversions.
Education and Authentic Development
The attainment of authentic development requires good education, and the role of formal
education is to lead the one being educated to respect and promote the values of authentic
humanism. It is to assist the human person to assume personal responsibility for authentic
development by cultivating aptitudes and abilities already present in an embryonic stage in the
human person at birth. Authentic education develops the human person along the dimensions I
have outlined, bearing in mind that a society is an aggregate of persons, and a truly developed
society is an aggregate of persons of fulfilled aspirations and actualized potentials in the four
dimensions of human existence. If development of the whole person must be seen, not just as
economic growth nourished by technological development, but also as intellectual, moral, and,
even more fundamentally, spiritual, an education that seeks a complete and positive
transformation of the human person must take these dimensions seriously.
In education so conceived, intellectual formation would be necessary but of itself
insufficient; moral or character formation would be necessary but of itself insufficient, technical
formation will be necessary but of itself insufficient, and spiritual formation would be necessary
but of itself insufficient. The type of education I have in mind stands on three legs: intellectual
formation or formation of the mind, moral formation or formation of the character, technical
formation or formation of the hands. It is a tripodal notion of education, and we must bear in
mind here that whatever is designed to stand on three legs will be tripped over if any one of the
legs is broken. Furthermore, these three legs of education must stand on the ground of spiritual
formation. In other words, without spiritual formation, education has no foundation. Agents of
formal education assist the individual to actualize potentials for self-fulfillment the attainment of
which is integral to authentic development.
Nigeria’s education policy does not hide its bias for technological education. It is seen in
the admission ratio of 60:40 in favour of science and technology, in the establishment of more
federal and state polytechnics across the length and breadth of Nigeria. In the 1970s, it was
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presumed that Nigeria would develop if technology advanced. But four decades later, neither
technological advancement nor authentic development can be attributed to Nigeria. The problem
being highlighted here is not the promotion of technological education but the presumption that
technological education held the key to economic growth, and that authentic development was
equal to economic growth. It has led to a marginalization of the humanities which is a violation
of the integrity of education, of university education in particular. For, as John Newman wrote, a
university is a universe of knowledge where no sphere of knowledge is subject to restriction or
marginalization.5 For him, to remove or marginalize religion and the humanities is to reduce
education to the acquisition of techniques of production. It is to remove the dimension of
meaning from human existence. For while science without religion can dehumanize, art without
religion can demoralize. It can, and must also be said that religion is superstitious, without
science, impersonal without art. Religion becomes sacralism, a public nuisance, when it is
separated from the sphere of the tedious task of tidy thinking.
The tragedy of under-development in Nigeria, our land of enormous but unfulfilled
potentials populated by men and women of innumerable and exquisite talents, is in fact the
tragedy of monstrous misconception of what it means to be human, of what development is, and
of what education is. It is the tragedy of a developmental anemia caused by anthropological
impoverishment (pauperisation anthropologique), to borrow the words of late Cameroonian
philosopher Englebert Mveng. Not knowing what it means to be human, which is what the
humanities teach us, we resort to the morality of the jungle manifest in a system of government
that dishonours and disables the people it ought to enable in the first instance. Ours is a land of
diversities—ethnic, religious, linguistic, etc. But we hardly dialogue because we are yet to take
the humanity of others seriously. And when we do not take our humanity seriously we resort to
acts of incivility. Our attitude of deceit, of command and control, our bullying and intimidating
conduct, these make due process unattractive. Why should I queue if I can push my way
through? It is the attitude and conduct found among the leaders and the led.
The marginalization of the humanities in our system of education violates the integrity of
education and has led to untold consequences for the human person and the society. History is
the memory of a people. Without it, they are like computers without memory. When the
teaching of history is considered less important in our schools that is when citizens are formed
who neither can enter into the network of relationships that human existence is, nor act
collaboratively and responsibly in the task of working for the common good. Neglect of the
study of literature breeds a generation of human beings who are violent and vulgar in their use of
language. The neglect of the arts has dulled our collective sense of beauty, and it is manifest in
pervasive urban decay in Nigeria, the continuous deterioration of our cities into unplanned and
over-populated junkyards. Beauty has deserted our cities because we have banished her by
marginalizing art. We do need more security. There is no doubt about that. But where there is
5
Read John Newman, The Idea of a University (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1960).
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no virtue there is no security. Technical education must coexist with ethical education. But
techniques do not teach virtue because they do not teach morality. Technology teaches the
student how to accomplish what is possible, not how to differentiate what is right from what is
wrong. That is what education has become in Nigeria. That is the result of over-regulation of
the education sector by government in this country. Recent experiences point to the sad fact that
things have not changed. Government and its agencies still pretend to monopolize knowledge on
how schools are to be run.
Our policy makers have prioritized education in science and technology to the detriment
of studies in humanities because we are in a hurry to meet up with the rest of the world when it
comes to technology. The problem, however, is that technique without virtue is another name
for science without conscience. It breeds individuals who can operate machines but who cannot
relate with others. Such is the consequence when what ought to be a joint effort of all who are
concerned becomes the prerogative of technocrats who install a gigantic bureaucracy that stifles
initiatives. Policies are meant to serve the people. The people are not to be subservient to
policies. But that is the dream of living in a free country, not in an empire that masquerades
itself as a federal republic. Nigeria de-emphasizes the study of philosophy, history, arts,
theology, because she wants to catch up with leaders of the computer age and race. She ends up
breeding Yahoo boys and girls and cultists on campuses.
In Nigeria, we are locked up in our homes, in our cities, because of fear of armed robbers.
In fact, to protect ourselves from robbers we live behind bars. We all are locked up in a land
bedeviled by lifelong insecurity because our system of education—at the service of a reductionist
notion of development—is more concerned with machines (science and technology) than with
the human beings who are to be served by the machines (humanities).
With these considerations, I affirm, by way of a first submission, that: for the complete
transformation of the human person, we need a philosophy of education that stands on three
legs—intellectual formation, character or moral formation and technical formation, and this
tripod must be rooted in spiritual formation. But there is a second submission I need to make.
It borders on the need to give metaphysics its rightful place in our philosophy of education if the
very ground on which education ought to stand would not undergo an erosion.
The denial of the spiritual dimension of the human person is the erosion of the ground on
which education ought to stand. It makes for an inadequate account of what it is to be human,
that is, an inadequate philosophical vision of human existence. Such inadequate philosophical
anthropology gives rise to an inadequate philosophy of education. If we do not know what it is
to be human we cannot know what type of education befits the human person, and, an inadequate
philosophy of education, even when devotedly implemented, cannot facilitate authentic
development.
Authentic development is centred on the human person. An adequate
understanding of what it is to be human is a necessary prerequisite for a philosophy of education
capable of fostering authentic development.
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The well publicized advance, the many laudable achievements and impressive inventions
of science and technology have inspired some to marginalize metaphysics and any religion that
lays any claim to the metaphysical. Yet, the African mindset has refused to ignore the
metaphysical, and even many African products of western education continue to believe in the
metaphysical. Our enterprise in the field of education would be ill-served by any attitude that
dismisses or marginalizes religion. The African always manages to find his or her way back to
metaphysics. This calls for a rethinking of what metaphysics is. Bernard Lonergan would speak
of metaphysics as “the department of knowledge that underlies, penetrates, transforms, and
unifies all other departments.”6
According to Lonergan, metaphysics underlies all other departments of knowledge for
two reasons. First, because its principles are “the detached and disinterested drive of the pure
desire to know” that is in every human being. Secondly, because it manifests this drive of pure
desire to know in “its unfolding in the empirical, intellectual, and rational consciousness of the
self-affirming subject”. It penetrates all other departments because the constitutive principles of
other departments are the same principles as metaphysics. It transforms all other departments
because human consciousness is polymorphic and because it corrects the bias of common sense
from which even science is not insulated.7 Metaphysics unifies all other departments of
knowledge because, whereas other departments address particular ranges of questions,
metaphysics addresses the question at the origin of all questions, that is, the question of being,
which is the total question. It seeks the total answer by “transforming and putting together all
other answers”. This makes metaphysics “the whole in knowledge but not the whole of
knowledge”.8
The human being has a pure desire to know which unfolds in the empirical, intellectual,
and rational self consciousness of the self-affirming subject. An anti-metaphysical philosophy of
education, in its attendant affirmation of the empirical as sole criterion of knowledge, as
paradigm of authentic cognition, is a restriction of this pure desire, an incarceration of the
knowing subject with sensation operating as prison walls. Contrary to the propagated conception
and popularized practice of religion as that which imprisons the mind, it is actually religion
6
Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, no.
3 Eds. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: Lonergan Research Institute of Regis College, 1992),
415.
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“Common sense is subject to a dramatic bias, an egotistic bias, a group bias, and a general bias that
disregards the complex theoretical issues in which it becomes involved and their long-term consequences from
which it blindly suffers. Scientists are not just scientists but also men of common sense; they share its bias insofar
as their specialty does not correct it; and insofar as their specialty runs counter to the bias of common sense, they
find themselves divided and at a loss for a coherent view of the world. Metaphysics springs from the pure desire to
know; it is free from the restrictions of particular viewpoints; it distinguishes positions from counterpositions in the
whole of knowledge; it is a transforming principle that urges positions to fuller developments and, by reversing
counterpositions, liberates discoveries from the shackls in which at first they were formulated” (Bernard Lonergan,
Insight, 415).
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“A whole is not without its parts, nor independent of them, nor identical with them. So it is that while the
principle of metaphysics are prior to all other knowledge, still the attainment of metaphysics is the keystone that
rests upon the other parts and presses them together in the unity of the whole” (Bernard Lonergan, Insight, 416).
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rightly conceived and rightly practiced within the framework of a well-understood metaphysics
that liberates us and allows us to actualize our transcendentality, that is, our infinite desire for the
infinite. The pure desire to know is this infinite openness to the infinite in the human quest for
what is true, for what is good, for fullness of life in the experience of loving and being loved.
Any talk of metaphysics no doubt raises the question of the possibility of knowing what
lies beyond human experience. Lonergan addresses this question by clarifying what metaphysics
is. And this clarification comes by way of introducing the notion of proportionate being. By
proportionate being he means “whatever is to be known by intelligent grasp and reasonable
affirmation”. Proportionate being is “whatever is to be known by human experience, intelligent
grasp, and reasonable affirmation”.
This prepares the way for him to speak of explicit
metaphysics as “the conception, affirmation, and implementation of the integral heuristic
structure of proportionate being”.9
According to Lonergan,
Prior to the understanding that issues in answers, there are the questions that anticipate
answers…..such anticipation may be employed systematically in the determination of
answers that as yet are unknown; for while the content of future cognitional act is
unknown, the general characteristics of the act itself not only can be known but also can
supply a premise that leads to the act. A heuristic notion, then, is the notion of an
unknown, and it is determined by anticipating the type of act through which the unknown
would become known. A heuristic structure is an ordered set of heuristic notions.
Finally, an integral heuristic structure is the ordered set of all heuristic notions.10
The issue then is not what empiricism denies, that is, the possibility of knowing what lies beyond
human experience, but how the human person knows whatever is to be known by human
experience, intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation. There is metaphysics because, in the
pure desire to know found in every human being, questions are raised; questions anticipate
answers that as yet are unknown; and an ordered set of notions of unknown constitute a heuristic
structure. Metaphysics is the integral heuristic structure of whatever is to be known by human
experience, intelligent grasp, and reasonable affirmation.
Education today is seen as transference of or direction to knowledge, and knowledge is
defined, using the paradigm of mathematical sciences, as that which is quantitative and tangible.
Consequently, there appears to be no place for metaphysics in such an agenda, because
metaphysics is seen to be unrelated to the quantitative and tangible. But this needs not be so.
For, in fact, as Lonergan explains, metaphysics and mathematics are not strange bedfellows.
They are corollaries.
9
Bernard Lonergan, Insight, 416.
Bernard Lonergan, Insight, 417.
10
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if metaphysics cannot reproduce the sensed as sensed, it can uphold sensible quality only
by assigning some corresponding intelligibility. But mathematical science already offers
a corresponding intelligibility, and though the materials of mathematical intelligibility are
quantitative or, more accurately, ordinable, mathematical intelligibility is not itself
quantitative.11
Metaphysics so conceived organizes knowledge by providing laws that guide the cognitional
process.
The detached and disinterested desire to know and its unfolding in inquiry and reflection
not only constitute a notion of being but also impose a normative structure upon man’s
cognitional acts.12
This brings me to my second and final submission in this paper. It is this: instead of the
suspicion of metaphysics that characterizes philosophy of education in our time, safeguarding the
integrity of education for the sake of the whole person makes it imperative to, at least, take
metaphysics seriously as that which imposes a structure on our cognitional acts. This will ensure
that our education stands on three legs and that the legs are firmly rooted in the transcendentality
that characterizes our humanity, that is, in our infinite openness to the infinite.
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12
Bernard Lonergan, Insight, 420.
Bernard Lonergan, Insight, 420