ABSTRACT
This chapter serves to illustrate how the striving for an ethical life, for Spinoza, amounts to a better understanding of the nature of the world. Insofar as education concerns enhancing the understanding of the student, education is therefore always an ethical enterprise. For Spinoza, epistemology and ethics are clearly very closely related. This means that in order to see how to become ethical, we must investigate the premises for how we can understand things better, or as Spinoza puts it, how we can understand them adequately. A conclusion of this chapter is that education is concerned with gaining a better understanding of ourselves and the world. Gaining a better – as in more adequate – understanding of ourselves and the world, in turn, is ethical insofar as it will contribute to the empowerment and self-determination of the student. We have already seen that an increased degree of self-determination corresponds with an increased degree of reality. In this chapter I will suggest that it follows from this that to be educated, from a Spinozistic point of view, is to exist more.
