Baptiste Cornardeau

Despite its apparent clarity, the notion of a whole person is deeply polysemic, and covers somewhat contradictory conceptions of the specific purpose education should fulfil. Following Paul Standish, this article distinguishes five main models of wholeness (conformist, essentialist, engineered, peregrine, liberal-individualist), and examines how the idea of an education of the whole person could retain its original progressive value. Through a close reading of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997), wholeness as perfection is discussed in its various dimensions, and dismissed for its problematic consequences. Finally, wholeness as an end-in-view, aiming at sociality, is defended as a more desirable and viable alternative.

Absent in a technical sense in George H. Mead's early writings, the concept of perspective became prominent in the mid-1920s and was central to his late philosophy. It was instrumental in his rebuttal of absolutism, idealism, and all forms of dualism, especially between perception and action, body and mind, nature and consciousness. Mead managed to reconcile his social psychology with the most recent advances in the theory of relativity and devised a comprehensive framework in which time and space, but also conduct, society, and reality itself, were redefined around new categories such as sociality and the organization of perspectives. They allowed a renewed understanding of subjectivity and objectivity, emergence, and the perspectival value of objects and qualities, but were also useful, from a normative standpoint, in determining whether a society ensures a fruitful development of its individual members and may be conducive to a truly communal, peaceful, and shared experience.

Hybride et émergent, artéfactuel et culturel sans cesser d’être naturel, le monde humain tel que l’entend Joseph Margolis est aussi, en cela même, dans ses différentes dimensions, un monde fragile, instable et en perpétuelle reconstruction. Les enquêtes scientifiques et philosophiques ne peuvent en effet s’affranchir d’une condition d’impermanence où le flux l’emporte sur la fixité, ni s’émanciper d’un horizon de discours symbiotique ancré dans le langage ordinaire. Métisses et solidaires d’un monde médian conversationnel, les langues humaines répondent également, dans leur indétermination même, aux exigences de formes de vie partagées et changeantes. Les personnes humaines enfin, enculturées et enlangagées, restent inscrites dans un monde Intentionnel et historique, qu’elles s’incorporent et transforment.