Education As The Therapy Of Desire:The Relationship Between Education And Desire In The Hellenistic Period

The questions on desire,the therapy of desire and the development of healthy desire are the pretty important topics as well as significant educational practice in the Hellenistic period.These theories and practices have important enlightenments for us to understand education and carry out modern educational practice.Desire,as a mental state,points to a specific object or action under the influence of multiple factors.Attitudes towards desire have experienced a trend from abstinence to indulgence to the attainment of rationality.As a kind of being,desire is not good or evil and it does not necessarily point to good or evil.Therefore we should treat desire from multiple dimensions and analyze the function of desire from multiple perspectives based on the definition and understanding above in order to show the performance of desire in the field of education in sharp contrast to the nature of desire.Thus,the reasonable view of desire should be held as follows:use reason to control excessive desire and bad desire;with a higher desire to dominate the lower desire;sort your desires in a reasonable order.The research on the relationship between desire and education of philosophers in the Hellenistic period is on the basis of the study of "the Masters’Age" in Ancient Greek,and their theoretical basis was mainly derived from the three philosophers of ancient Greece:Socrates,Plato and Aristotle."the Masters’ Age" shows the prelude to the Hellenistic period on the management and therapy of desire and education.The study of desire in "the Masters’ Age" can be divided into two stages.In Plato’s Academy,he proposed the management of desire by education,advocated the use of reason to dominate desire in order to restrain the harm of the subject from passion,and came up with theories about the sublimation of Eros and the utopia of desire.In the Lyceum of Aristotle,he is alienated Plato’s idealism to some extent,and viewed desire in the world of human beings,showing the prelude of desire self-management by means of"Golden Mean" and "Community Therapy".At the same time,he clarified a view of the nature of emotion,which laid a theoretical foundation for the thinkers in the Hellenistic period.The thinkers of the Hellenistic period both criticized and inherited the previous ideas.Their criticisms are as follows:neglection of the improvement of real life,trend of choosing elitist to teach and dependence on politics.The Hellenistic period embodies the important thought of the therapy of desire and reveals the relationship between education and desire.Although the ways of each school are different,they all point to the specific analysis of the good management and therapy of desire,referring to life aesthetics in Foucault’s sense at the same time.The main schools of philosophy include Epicureanism,Scepticism,Stoicism,Cynicism and so on in the Hellenistic period.There is detailed discussion on education and desire as well as the therapy of desire in their thoughts.For Epicureanism,the therapy of desire means to live a natural life,a belief-based life and a dogmatic life.Education should be in conformance with human nature,promote the development of healthy desires and instructs students to examine one’s own desires and follow the hedonistic abstinence.The Stoic school put forward the view of the restriction of morality on desire,taught students to practice the ideal of governing desire with morality in the porch school,and developed a series of effective methods for the therapy of desire,including negative imagination,control dichotomy/control trichotomy,community therapy and so on.By showing the relationship between education and desire in a self-rebellious way,the cynics broke the false"mirror" of the society through their own real practice,and developed a new thinking on the therapy of desire.Scepticism criticizes the Epicurean hypothetical nature,following phenomena with the skeptical capacity of suspending value,suspending judgment,and offers us an extreme cure of desire:eliminate all cognitive commitments and all beliefs from life,and live a modest life of inner apathy.Based on the research above,the Hellenistic thinkers on the management and therapy of desire and the relationship between education and desire provides a good reference and ideological power.Its main enlightenment lies in:take goodness as the basic health norm to establish an orderly thought world;develop a virtue through the abstinence of desire;cultivate the students’ attitude towards the flourishing life,and pursue the poetic,true and courageous life.In other words,education as a therapy of desire is embodied in the dual variation of possibility and necessary based on rationality,the complementarity and mutual governance between the reality and the ideal,and the integration of content and method in accordance with the principle of voluntary.