On Naturalism

Philosophy of Education: On Naturalism

Joshua Caesar O. Elegado, 3^rd Year Philosophy

University of Santo Tomas-Legazpi, Philippines

The Ancient One: You cannot beat a river into submission. You have to surrender to its current and use its power as your own.

Dr. Stephen Strange: I control it by surrendering control? That doesn’t make any sense.

The Ancient One: Not everything does. Not everything has to. Your intellect has taken you far in life, but it will take you no further. Surrender, Stephen. Silence your ego and your power will rise. Come with me.

- Doctor Strange. Film. United States: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2016.

Humans as we are, so great and so full of potentials, to such we can only achieve such greatness and potentialities if we can grasp, substantially, what nature is in the entirety. Naturalism, as a school of thought in Philosophy of Education, simply tells us about how Nature is crucial in the development of Humanity; in which we emphasize human interaction towards Nature in which Man can unlock their potentialities that will ultimately lead to progression and development with only the interaction between man and Nature. However, limited to the empirical or a posteriori level, progression is then limited, it can go far into senses, but it cannot go any further. That being said, we can agree that it is limited in some areas as empiricism, but if we are to talk about the reality in the contemporary, of where the progress of humanity did seem problematic because we challenge nature, we are left with being blinded with progression, and the only solution for that matter is that if we are going back into Nature to simply learn Nature and be part of it, only then we can find balance just as nature implies, to begin with. Nature is indeed there, it is just that we forget about its importance, we have been blinded by our ego and blinded by the progress that we have made in history, it is indeed satisfactory to achieve progressiveness, but with the expense of forgetting nature, we forget about life’s meaning in the entirety, it is not worth it; progressiveness can only take our lives far, but it cannot take us further; sometimes, we need to surrender to nature, silence our ego and only then we can attain peace and harmony.