Recovering a Passion for Being
525 BC. The philosopher Thales goes out to gaze at the stars, walking with his neck craned up. He does not see the ditch before him and falls in. A young Thracian woman passes by and mocks him for paying attention to the stars rather than what lies at his feet. Looking up past her, he responds that “at least I can see the stars.”
2026 AD. A young Thracian woman rushes out for a walk. Her eyes hold steady on an AI produced video on her phone. The video is of her flying amidst the stars. Not seeing the ditch, she falls to the bottom of it. She looks down at her phone to put a post on Instagram. A philosopher (who probably would not call himself that) is no longer able to see the stars because of light pollution. But he goes off on a stroll to at least see what lies at his feet. Looking about at the world, he sees the woman walking and staring at her phone. He sees her suddenly disappear. Filled with wonder and concern, he rushes over and looks down and sees her, a bit battered, but looking at her phone. He looks up briefly and sees one star shining brightly and then climbs down to help her out of the ditch.
In recent years, there has been a flourishing of classical and Catholic education. Catholic Studies, Humanities programs, and colleges dedicated to civic virtue are popping up and thriving, bringing renewal to sometimes moribund institutions. Parallel to this are independent institutes at universities—such Witherspoon at Princeton or Collegium at UPenn—which bring a robust commitment to traditional education to secular and professionalized institutions. Likewise, high school and K-8 schools are opening or being repurposed all over the country, offering a robust education amidst system-wide educational decline.
Amidst the dark clouds haunting education, there is a real flourishing of the light. What unites this flourishing is that these institutions commit themselves—usually explicitly but sometimes implicitly—to the transcendentals of the good, the true, and the beautiful. These structure the educational approach and goals of these institutions, and this is excellent. But there is something missing from these three, something that must come before them, especially in our era of smartphones, social media, and AI. What is missing from mottos celebrating bonum, verum, and pulchrum is the first transcendental: esse, being.
You might think that this is a rather specific philosophical quibble, but if you follow my reasoning a little bit, I think I will be able to show why our forgetting of being is a serious problem for education, especially in our time. To get to the urgency of being, we need to think through the transcendentals and grasp the primacy of being. If we can get there, I think we can see why restoring esse to our education and cultivating a passion for the real in ourselves is such a matter of urgent concern.
Running Through the Transcendentals
Many of us teaching at institutions that highlight the good, the true, and the beautiful do not necessarily spend a lot of time fleshing out the metaphysics. At Villanova Honors, we structure our learning cohorts around the transcendentals in a way that invites students to aim to become good, commit to truth, and delight in the beautiful. Our hope is to enable students to be shaped by the encounter with what all aim for (the good), the conformity of mind and reality (the true), and that which attracts and delights (the beautiful), such that they aim to become good, true, and beautiful in their own lives. But we do not necessarily spend too much time developing the metaphysics. But that metaphysics is behind what we, and other institutes, are doing. It is worth drawing out the metaphysics a little bit so we can see the need for a recovery of being.
So, what are these transcendentals? This cluster of concepts unites around the core sense of the word. They “run-through” everything. What is this “running-through”? There are contested lists of transcendentals such as: being, unity, thinghood, goodness, truth, otherness, and beauty. Consider identity and otherness, sameness and difference. Everything that is is marked by sameness and difference. I am the same as you as a human and I am different from you as being me. Even when we say of two things that they are “exactly the same” we still need difference. It is a bit like identical twins who need to be two (different) to be identical (same). The Latin res, or “thing,” is another good example. Everything that is is, well, a thing. You cannot be at all if you are not a thing. There are not somethings that are things and other things that are not things. Likewise, otherness expresses that everything that is is somehow different than everything else. Without otherness or difference, there would be no different things.
The transcendentals run-through everything in that they each express in a different way being itself. Everything we speak of must have or be being. It is not a category that some things have, and some things do not. To not have it is not to be something at all. Everything that is, well, is. Being is the primary transcendental, the transcendental that fundamentally runs through all things that are. It is thus first in the order of being but also in our order of knowing. As Jacques Maritain writes, “Being is the formal object of the intellect, that is to say, the object which it apprehends primarily and in itself and in function of which it apprehends everything else.” In other words, before we can say what a thing is, or understand anything about it, it must be, and we must know that it is. The good is not good for much if it is not. The truth is untrue without being true of something that is. The only beauty lies in what is. We encounter the transcendentals first in the act of being because the act of being is first.[1]
Cultivating a Passion for the Real
Why does this matter? Why should we care about being when we are considering education? My students get it. When we sit down to talk about what the good is, they are inclined to argue that it does not really exist. Everyone they often tell me has his or her own definition of the good. The truth barely exists as disconnected perspectivalism. Beauty is not real either as it just depends on our different tastes. They have given up on the being of the good, the true, and the beautiful. What the students get is that the question of being is primary. These transcendentals must be, or they will not matter.
My students are incredibly bright but are often poorly formed by their past education. What we aim to recover together with the essential questions and great thinkers is the being of the good, true, and beautiful. And we can do this because the students have—under their preconceived notions imposed by the culture—a deep intuition and desire that goodness, truth, and beauty be. The texts we read and the questions we ask give them a chance to articulate why those desires are the rights ones and why those transcendentals are really real and thus are worth giving their lives to.
The urgency of their realness is, in part, why we need to recover a sense of the primacy of being. The other transcendentals fall apart without it. In fact, our whole education depends on it. Maritain writes that “what counts is to take the leap, to release, in one authentic intuition, the sense of being, the sense of the value of the implication that lies in the act of existing.” To really enter a subject requires the prior intuition that it is real. To really engage with goodness or truth or beauty requires that movement into their reality and so into being. It is an “opening of the mind to an infinite supra-observable field—in a word, the primary and super-intelligible source of intelligibility.” Everything we understand, and thus everything we learn or teach, depends on it being at all.
The art of education is drawing out this leap into being, into reality. Fundamentally, this means drawing them into wonder. Wonder, as Plato taught, is the principle and pathos of the search for knowledge. As contemporary philosopher William Desmond puts it, we experience “wonder at the strangeness of anything existing at all.” Wonder is our response to the being of things, the that-they-are-at-all. It is spurred by the astonishing encounter with reality which moves us towards reality.
While education does include knowledge transmission, it more fundamentally involves two moves: enkindling the desire to know the real and cultivating the reasoned articulation and knowledge of the real. You must want to know what is if you are ever going to pursue knowing it. Lose this passion for the real and you will lose your movement towards transcendentals and thus towards wisdom itself. We need the passionate leap into being at the heart of our education.
Losing the Real and Recovering the Real
Cultivating the passion for being is foundational for any education enterprise. We should add esse to our bonum, verum, et pulchrum. But that general pedagogical urgency is a radical exigency today because we are losing contact with the real. The average twenty-something spends nearly six hours a day on their phone (and more watching on other screens) and will spend approximately 25 years scrolling on the device. At Villanova there are 1.5 million sessions on ChatGPT a week with students using it to brainstorm ideas (rather than think of them themselves) and summarize texts (rather than read them) but also to stream videos of cats shooting lasers on roller skates. ChatGPT’s new streaming service Sora allows you to enter a written prompt, and it will create videos based on that. If you allow them to enter your face, you can be a part of the said video. The site, as infinitely streaming, allows you to watch videos of yourself shooting lasers at cats on roller skates.
There have been numerous articles reflecting on our being a post-literate society and considering the manifold harms of our addictions to a device in our pocket and to endlessly streaming whatever. But at the root of the problem is that we are losing touch with the real, with the encounter with being itself. As a recent story noted on Today Explained, AI now means that more people are watching AI produced videos of AI puppies than videos of actual puppies. We are moving from real interactions with a dog to endless videos of real dogs, to endless fake videos of unreal dogs.
The work of education must be either preventing this collapse into unreality or drawing students back from the unreal to the real. My children attend Regina Angelorum where they are blessed to have a Wait Until 8th policy where we collectively keep our kids away from phones, tablets, etc. Through Catechesis of the Good Shepherd’s emphasis on tangibility to their memorization and recitation of poetry, they are being introduced to the real and protected from the fake. Our vigilance against those who would consume their attention into the various caves of unreality must be unrelenting.
More challenging is drawing people back to the primacy of reality. People are faced by the prospect of spending a huge chunk of their existence looking at a screen and forgetting the taste of their own cooking, the smell of rain on a sidewalk, the sight of the light reflecting off windows, the sound of live music, or the touch of grass. To recover this will mean putting them into a place of wonder and trying to relight their passion for being.
Part of what this entails is reminding our students that being is a verb. Esse is the activity of being. What the screens do to us in sucking us into fabrication is that they suck us away from activity, whether that activity be moving our bodies or moving our minds. An education centered on being must lead our students into that activity, whether that activity is learning how to build something with your hands, thinking through a geometric proof on your own, or articulating a reasoned argument in your own words. Substituting ChatGPT for your own work is not just deceptive, it is robbing yourself of your own real contribution to our shared understanding of the real.
Of course, the real is hard and challenging. As Charlie Warzel writes, AI slop eliminates creative labor because it is “the removal all friction, all agency, and in turn all humanity.” Watching an AI video of yourself hiking Everest is easier than hiking a nearby hill. So too is it easier to flirt with a chatbot than to say hi to that cute girl at the coffee shop. And yet the hill and the girl are worth more than anything on your screen because they are real.
This does not mean story and film cannot lead you into reality. Read The Death of Ivan Ilyich and watch On the Waterfront and you will encounter a lot of reality even in the fiction. The point is ensuring art draws us into rather than away from the real. Part of what differentiates these from AI videos of unicorns doing the tango is that Tolstoy and Elia Kazan summon you into active engagement with their art and in turn help us to actively engage our lives. As Flannery O’Connor wrote, “I’m always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality.” When we engage in art, literature, and drama the question is, does it plunge us into reality?
The transcendentals are some heady metaphysics, and yet they are what we live from and for. We want to know the truth, live good lives, and surround ourselves with beauty. But we want to be and to encounter the real and we want goodness, truth, and beauty themselves to be real, not just products of a screen. To engage the real is always a via to God. The transcendentals do not just run-through, they surpass. They are, as Desmond would put it, hyperbolic in that they are immanent to things, but they also overleap themselves. Being themselves they point beyond themselves in themselves. If we want to encounter God, and want our students to as well, then leading them into being and away from its simulacra is a way of leading them to the God who says “I am who am.” Stanley Hauerwas has powerfully written that if in a hundred years “Christians are known as a strange group of people who don’t kill their children and don’t kill the elderly, we will have done a great thing.” I think we can say, in a way deeply connected to this ethical sentiment, that if in a hundred years Christians are the strange people who still live in the real world and off the avatar world, then we will have done a great thing. In our educational missions, we need to commit to this.
Conclusion
Huge tech companies want to replace our friends with avatars, our lovers with chatbots, and our own thoughts with their AI thoughts. Warzel writes that to “live through this moment is to feel that some essential component of our shared humanity is being slowly leached out of the world.” That component, I contend, is the real, is our encounter with being, which is so essential to us from the moment we were little and asked “what is this?” or “is Santa real?” We are the existential being concerned not only with getting what we need but with being. That deep desire for the real in the story of Thales actually united both Thales and the Thracian girl. She looked to the earth for the real and he to the stars. But our contemporary distinction in our lives will end up being between those who pay attention to, engage with, and enact being and those who drift into their devices.
Of course, the latter will not really drift; they are sucked in by corporations with no interest in real human flourishing. If we as educators believe in character formation, we will have to resist the pull of the fakeness purveyed by corporations and help our students see the real world at their feet and in the heavens. Our task as educators is to cultivate that intuition for being into a love for being, which is to say the deep desire to know what is. The purveyors of AI slop and social avatars want to take that from us. We should resist and throw ourselves and our students back into being. If we can do so, we will get the good, true, and beautiful thrown in with the deal.
[1] In all of this, I am setting aside compelling arguments for the primacy of other transcendentals especially the good or the even more primary primacy of Love. Whether being is the first of the transcendentals or the best name for God or not, it is certainly at the heart of creation. If we do not plunge into it, we will lose anything good or lovable in the process.
