An analtysis of educational themes Hegel’s Philosophical Outlines of Justice

Abstract

This thesis aims to show that Hegel’s Philosophical Outlines of Justice implicitly presents the structure, principles and key aspects of a systematic philosophy of education. The main argument will be based on the idea that Hegel’s entire philosophical project and his Outlines in particular provides an educational structure that explicates the transformation of a human being from pure condition in the sense of not yet educated youngster to an autonomous thus self-determining moral subject. This is because education allegorically speaking is the blood supply that sustains the proper and reasonable emergence, progress, and guidance in human activities from birth to and throughout adulthood that Hegel insists on to achieve self-sufficing, critical, and independent reason. Hegel’s conception of reason culminates through micro developments within personal, social, political, and historical processes which are mutually integrated elements of education, individual agency and of individuals’ social context of action. Hegel’s underlying idea is to describe a subject who is complete unto itself. This ideal in principle could not be achieved without education. In this regard, Hegel would systematize his views on philosophy of education as a science of development in a triadic understanding involving elements moral, social, and institutional education. Along these lines, I shall formulate Hegel’s understanding of education so as to encompass different passages of human consciousness from particular to universal in order to be capable, as Hegel says, of ‘being with oneself in another’.