Educar para la inmortalidad : espinosa y la pedagogía de la existencia gradual

In this paper it is argued that, from a Spinozan perspective, to live is not an either/or kind of business. Rather, it is something that inevitably comes in degrees. The idea is that through good education and proper training a person can learn to increase his or her degree of existence by acquiring more adequate (as opposed to confused) ideas about his or her body. This gradual qualitative enhancement of existence is an operationalization of Spinoza’s quest for immortality of the mind. While Spinoza’s idea of immortality differs from the traditional Christian account of the immortality of the soul in some key respects it nevertheless concerns a form of immortality of the mind albeit grasped from a strictly naturalistic standpoint. And as such it is clear that we are faced with not only a philosophical and metaphysical problem of some magnitude but that we have come up against an educational problem that is rarely being addressed. The educational problem, emanating from this, concerns the tension between Spinoza’s necessitarianism and the overall goal of education. Why educate people at all if their lives are already predetermined? In addressing these problems, this essay marks an attempt to present a pedagogization of the degrees of existence in Spinoza. To this end, it is argued that (1) the imitation of affects is key for understanding Spinoza in an educational setting and; (2) that teaching, in a Spinozistic context, hinges on the act of offering the right amount of resistance