ABSTRACT
It is no news that all human beings carry a degree of egoism within them. Such egoism is partly functional, as it helps with the survival of the individual, to put it mildly. But establishing an ego, becoming a self, is not just a matter of survival but also key to what makes human existence human, that is, that we exist as selves, have an awareness of this and are able to actively engage with our being a self. One point where egoism becomes problematic – and this has probably given egoism a bad name – is when the interest in the self threatens the existence of other selves and, on a grander scale, threatens the ecological conditions under which human beings can exist in the first place. Should we blame individuals and their egoism for this? Not entirely. In his book The Impulse Society, the American author Paul Roberts makes the interesting claim that egoism – trying to get what we want without asking whether what we want is what we should be wanting – has become the organising principle of modern societies, first and foremost through the way in which modern economies has developed. In my contribution, I will focus on this analysis showing on the one hand what this does to the possibilities for the self to exist well, with others, on a vulnerable plant and, showing on the other hand how contemporary education has been affected by the logic of the impulse society as well. The latter raises the important question whether, to what extent and under which kind of conditions education can still protect human beings from their egoism or not – a question, as I will suggest, that is also central to the argument put forward in Rousseau’s Émile.
