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Education

Climbing the Real Mountain

Rebecca Glass on the importance of fables of ‘the really real world’.

John Dewey criticizes our desire for the transcendental and supernatural as inimical to growth and education. Yearning for an otherworldly reality is “vicious in the separation of desire and thought,” an “asylum from effort,” and thus also from development (Human Nature and Conduct). Nietzsche shares Dewey’s concern that belief in what we will call a ‘really real world’ (that is, a world beyond and contrasted with the somewhat less real world of what is before us) is pernicious to our ability to grow creatively. “Remain faithful to the earth,” says Nietzsche, “and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes!” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra).

An educator of philosophy who agrees with Dewey and Nietzsche would be uncomfortably confronted by how thoroughly the idea of the ‘really real world’ has saturated the history of philosophy s/he is supposed to teach.

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