윤리적 존재양식의 교육적 의의 : 아우구스티누스의 시간적 존재로서의 인간이해를 중심으로

Abstract

Augustinus holds that a true understanding of the nature of happy life is an essential prerequisite to the understanding of education. He claims that living happily is nothing other than having the eternal by knowing it. The eternal is the one thing of which we can rightly have the confidence that it cannot be taken away from those who love it. And it is also the very thing that we possess in no other way than by knowing it. The purpose of education is, therefore, to assist learner to develop a love of intellectual inquiry, through which man progressively enlarges his understanding of real existence, seeing the flux of the temporal world against a secure background of unchanging truth. We must look to something permanent and enduring that does not come and go according to the swings of fortune or the accidents of chance. Because temporal things cannot afford happiness. These things can be lost due to factors over which we cannot exercise full control through time and circumstance. The point is that, in relation to temporal states of affairs, we are always vulnerable and there is no way finally to eliminate or to protect against that vulnerability. Augustinus pursues the question of whether the happy life is defined in terms of 'inquiry into eternal truth'. In this context, Augustinus discriminates ‘cupiditas’, the love of transitory things and ‘caritas’, the love of eternal things. The consequence of 'cupiditas' is not only fear as a distinct emotion in its own right but also an emotional life tinged with apprehension at every point. But ‘caritas’ which is the antithesis of ‘cupiditas’ cannot be snatched away while love continues in the enjoyment of its object. And the former is the use of things for some further purpose that proves we do not love them for themselves. It reverses the enslavement of person to things that should be subject to him by reducing their status from objects of love to objects of use. But the latter is full of passionate intensity in enjoying its object. It is the love that is to be enjoyed or loved for its own sake. Nowadays, some persons subordinate themselves to things that ought to be subordinate to them. The fault lies in the bad use that occurs when people pursue things that are uncertain and changeable. Augustinus suggests that education must be an activity of enjoyment directed by love of what is intellectually satisfying. Education is not a tedious preparation for happy life. It is the happy life. For human happiness, we must learn what rightly-ordered love means and emphasis that the person who is happy is the person who loves the permanent and eternal.