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Of love, I am made.
In my first article in this series dedicated to The Education We Want, I promised to talk about love in education one day. The truth is that I did not think that the challenge would come so soon; however, today, I am obliged to make at least a first attempt. I will explain why. In previous texts, I have proposed that the foundation of all human experience is the identity of the person, but now I realize that when I think of it (that identity), it completely slips out of my hands, just as we all escape our own image in the water (I am not the first to say it).
How can my identity (which defines me) escape me? There is something weird about saying “I am me” and being unable to say precisely what I mean. Perhaps it would be enough to surrender to the experience without trying to explain it, and yet I have a rock in my shoe that prevents me from doing so. This is something that I have also mentioned in previous texts, namely the recent appearance of scientific theories that say that our much-worn and brandished identity is nothing more than a side effect of brain processes (a practically useless side effect lacking its own decision, says the neuroscientist Joaquín N. Fuster in his book Neuroscience, the Cerebral Foundations of our Freedom). Coming into contact with these theories has shaken me deeply. It has led me (after great intellectual torment, I confess) to cling to the unmistakable feeling that I am more than a kind of excrescence of the mind, much more than a self that naively believes it can affect reality when all it does is testify, as a passive observer, about the environment that surrounds it and the acts that the brain executes.
The clear feeling
The word “love” has several peculiarities; it is one of the few that has remained intact from its Latin precursor, “Amor,” which comes from the Indo-European “Amma,” which means “mother” (a word that, as you can see, has not undergone many changes either). Neil deGrasse Tyson, the famous astrophysicist who succeeded Carl Sagan in the series Cosmos, explains that the evolutionary process generated the feeling of love when mammals appeared; that is, mothers arose when an animal suckled its young for the first time. (The truth is that, although the words themselves suggest it, I can’t help but think that chicks also feel love for their mother hen, a love that corresponds to the one she gives them when incubating the egg, like an exterior womb).
The word “Love” is also one of the most manipulated of the language, the most used and brandished. And so it should be. It is made for us to use it to the point of carelessness because, after all (as the reader knows), it has never lost and will never lose its essence. It is itself an essence, one more concrete than any matter.
However, it is also a word that those of us who try to reflect upon it more or less rationally (and who sometimes want to be “poetic”) resent using. It is very untheoretical and hardly “academic!” And as for its poetry, it often sounds cheesy.
Perhaps the problem with the word Love is that, in order not to mention it in vain, one must allude to that which gives it its essential value, so there is no avoiding mentioning also the most profound human tragedy.
The pain of being
Blessed is the barely sensitive tree,
and more the hard stone because it feels not at all,
for there is no greater pain than the pain of being alive…
Ruben Dario
When I was twenty, I set out to write a book of poems that would parody the very famous Elementary Odes of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Mine would be called Elementary Screw Its (pardon the word of such a fine lineage), and I would talk about everything that could afflict a young man like me daily. I remember that the first poem was entitled Screw It, Be Yourself and began by saying, in a frank tone of lament, “All the time, all the time, be nothing but yourself! Think what you want, say what you want, feel what you feel! Never be anyone else!” (The poem went on thus, groaning verses, while the book never forged and was only attempted).
That lament was nothing more than saying that sometimes “I cannot stand even myself,” which we all feel. However, if any reader were to sympathize with that young man who was me, listen now to that same idea corrected and magnified in beauty and pain in a phrase of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa in his Book of Unrest. It goes like this: “I envy everyone who is not me.”
We know that the unfathomable pain that these seven words express refers not only to the endless string of problems that an individual bears but also something more profound: the typically existential pain of being oneself, of being a self that lives as if it has been separated from something “essential,” as if it had become detached from a primordial soil and was now falling into a bottomless pit without being able to grab on to something that steadies him (or at least provides a break, like the wonderful Alice of Walt Disney, who, during her initial fall, sits down to rest for a moment in a rocking chair, which also falls).
Even in conditions not as extreme as those of Fernando Pessoa, human beings seek to resolve that feeling of infinitely useless search that sometimes overwhelms us (“feeling of completeness/incompleteness,” Erich Fromm calls it; we can also say that we are “a totality that lacks something,” in the words of Ortega y Gasset).
Being born again and again
We are not material beings learning to be spiritual
but spiritual beings learning to be material.
Attributed to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Maternal love rescues us from the first pain: The love of the mother, and of course, also of the father (the maternal love of the father: let’s call it that to explain, even if it is stereotyped). Maternal love, I say, rescues us from the first pain, allowing us to recover a little of the peaceful embrace we had before birth. That peace also put us for the first time in contact with the feeling that one day we would know as “trust.” Motherly love teaches us that we can trust ourselves. Simultaneously, the love we call “fatherly” (again stereotypically, because it is also in the hands of the mother) teaches us to trust the world.
Something of great interest in an educational fact is that while birth and childhood are stages in which one begins to know pain and admits it, adolescence gives way to the first exploration of how to face it and find a solution. Adolescence is the stage of the journey in which one becomes fully aware that they are falling and can learn to create groups of friends that fall together … or one might panic and try to run away.
The escape takes many forms. We know drugs, money, fame, power, sex, food… But also, we are obsessed with good grades, information, and knowledge. Yes, even knowledge, information, and all kinds of rational processes can be forms of flight, not far removed from what we call addiction, which in Latin means adhering to someone or something with an understood background of slavery. I believe that the vice that takes hold of our reason can be summed up as a craving for truth or, more precisely, a craving for certainty. The archetype of this human fault is Dr. Faust, who sells his soul to the devil so that he will reveal to him the mysteries of the universe.
Yes, knowledge, reason, and science can awaken in us a voracity like any good sweet bread. In our anxious hands, that laudable process called Learning for Life can become a placebo full of certainties, which we have to be endlessly renewing, voraciously, or we risk remaining in a vacuum worse than we felt in the beginning.
The parachute
Thus, learning can be a love of wisdom or addiction. I think the difference is that with the first, we truly learn to fall, let go, and abandon the illusion that a branch of knowledge will suddenly appear that we can grasp. As in the case of maternal love, teaching awakens trust.
When someone lovingly teaches us physics, chemistry, biology, or any other science or knowledge, it opens us to an experience where we can feel the world’s sympathy. Perhaps that was the meaning in Madame Curie’s words when she said, “In life, one does not have to fear anything, only understand it.”
There are many good things in this world, but they all begin by accepting our mystery. Once you reach that point, you stop fleeing and let yourself fall. Then you can discover the parachute you are wearing. Talking here about “the parachute of love” can show how cheesy I am (I have always said that more than an intellectual, I am a sentimentalist), so I better mention a great poem that describes the same thing. In Altazor: the Voyage in Parachute by Vicente Huidobro, the central character has lost his “first serenity” but discovers that he can descend by falling “from dream to dream,” rocking to the rhythm of bells/swallows (Golón… golón… Drina, golón… trina), before the still light of the lovers (the male and female mountain with its male and female moon), and recognizing the beloved woman (Would you be blind that God gave you those hands? Would you be silent that God gave you those eyes?).
Opening the parachute of love is an indispensable requirement for reality to appear.
An end that does not end
Knowing is the same as loving when it allows us to see ourselves and others as an end, not a means to something. Yes, no one is a way to get to anything (I am never “a means, “not even to get to my own future).
But how is it possible that we are an end in itself if an end is just a conclusion, something that after a long race has become quiet, and we (as I have said) are falling (with or without a parachute)?
If, after all these dissertations, there are still readers who follow me, they will surely abandon this text when they hear my answer: because human beings are an end that never ends (this is, in my view, the fundamental part of our inexplicable being).
Our identity (that “someone” and not “something” that we are) is as real as it is unfathomable. It doesn’t belong to that manageable and demonstrable type of thing (not even the kind that science is betting “to prove someday”). Being a “me” while simultaneously unable to understand myself is one of the great mysteries that spirituality tries to solve. For the Judeo-Christian I usually am, it all goes back to losing an initial paradisiacal state, i.e., to a fall. For those of us who feel this way (although we think differently), the fall did not begin in this world, and it is not with explanations of this world that we can understand it.
There’s no way: I know I am getting into theology, but at this stage of the game, it is impossible not to. And by “this stage of the game,” I mean the desolation into which many of us have fallen for having banished transcendent love from our theories (whether cheesy or playful) and trying to explain the human mystery with arid dissertations, among which the most “human” recognize that we are islands of certainty in oceans of uncertainty. Yet, we still try to rescue ourselves with complex explanations (see complexity theory by Edgar Morin). Another dissertation proposes that everyone owns his truth, which gives us meaning (see postmodern philosophy, in which case the explanations are not complex but multiple and impervious to each other). There are also frankly inhumane ideas, such as those I have mentioned, which claim that we are only side effects of brain processes.
Love and knowledge
The possibility of gathering love and knowledge makes the fall vital and transcendent. In other words, the possibility of “going beyond reason without losing reason” (as the philosopher Karl Jaspers says) allows us to fall into peace in the fullness of mystery and replace the desire for certainty with another type of experience that Albert Einstein describes in his response to a literary critic who could not believe that the discoverer of relativity was religious: “Yes, you can say that I am. Try to penetrate with our limited means into the secrets of nature, and you will find that behind all the discernible laws and connections remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. The veneration of this force that surpasses all we can comprehend is my religion. In that sense, I am religious.”
With all of the above, I hope to have shown – at least a little – how love participates in the education I want. I will continue to expound on this in subsequent texts, not because I believe that with my words, I can touch the wings of love (we had been alluding to it as a parachute, right?) but because, if something is clear to me, it is that talking about education without talking about love is impossible.
Translation by Daniel Wetta
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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