The aim of our paper is the analysis and redefinition of the conditions of growth into a moral subject in an age characterized by the global ecological threats. Our analysis and redefinition will remain aware of the special significance of education as relatively autonomous in its relation to other human praxes. The relative autonomy of education is the condition for both creating one’s moral resources (individuation) and developing democratic society (socialization). Recognizing the radical changes in the moral sphere for citizenship, we focus mainly on describing the ideological shifts in the context on the nation state centered traditions of modernity.By these traditions we understand particularly the effects of German idealistic philosophy on the one hand, and Classical liberalism on the other, as the main ideological constituents of the modern Western nation states. Hegelian and Lockean political theories have influenced the construction of modern western conceptions of moral subjectivity in the form of communitarianism and liberalist individualism. These two main traditions are both challenged by the global context of late capitalism. Moreover, the need for rethinking occidental notions of subjectivity and politics is highlighted in the general concerns of ecological crises. The changes in political order render the national goals and meanings vague and uncertain in its inherent neoliberal ideology thereby increasing the need to reconceptualize the pedagogical framework.
The paper will consist of a critique of the goals of education within different moral horizons: the constitution of the subject under communitarian ethics, liberalism and neo-liberalist control. Maurice Merleau-Ponty´s philosophy will be utilized as one of the main sources in our re-interpretation of the ontological basis for ecologically based education. In his posthumously published work The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty has intended to go beyond the traditional philosophical concepts with their dualistic connotations. He introduces his fundamental ontological concept “flesh” which is both a metaphor of the whole being and, at the same time, the concrete description of the visible and tangible world. We find in his notion of flesh the ontological possibility of the “self”, the “world”, and the relations between them.
The ideological breaks from the state (Finland) as virtue-based totality to the post-war welfare society and, during the last two decades, to the market-driven situation form the socio-historic background of our analysis. Our core interest is to analyze the changed conditions of forming moral identity and life prospects in the context of globalized world. At the same time, we will defend education, teaching and teacher education against pure technological tendencies. On the first level of our paper we will use Husserl’s idea of regional ontology, and Dietrich Benner’s concept of human practices for defending the specific ontological and ethical quality of education against instrumental tendencies for making education plainly the means of utility, accountability and competitivity. On the second level, we argue for the new sense of ontology as the basis for re-thinking educational aims in constructing one’s ecologically rooted ethical action competence. Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of Flesh will be a source of our ontological re-thinking.
