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Paradojas del individualismo (Paradoxes of Individualism)
VICTORIA CAMPS, 1993
Barcelona, Critica
201 pp., paperback, 2.400 pts, ISBN 84 7423 591 X
In Spain today there are many authors working on moral education. The recent growth of interest in this area is a reflection of the trend that can be observed internationally. This review covers four books that are representative of theoretical reflections about moral education within Spanish education in the last 4 years.
Let us begin with the book Paradoxes of Individualism of V. Camps, Professor of Ethics at the Universidad Autonoma, Barcelona, which looks at the philosophical background to the renewal of interest in ethics and moral education. She explains that it has now become a pressing need to speak of social habits, because the importance of the individual has tended to overshadow them in recent thinking. She provides a precise description of the key points in this approach, and examines the thinkers with whom it originated in modern philosophy. She presents the aspects which she believes to be positive, and also those which have led to severe problems of understanding what is meant by the "social" sphere: her book could equally well have been entitled "contradictions or exaggerations of individualism".
In short, Camps asserts that individualism is the product of modern philosophy and has the effect of imprisoning individuals in the private sphere, so that the public sphere is neglected. This kind of individualism could be considered illegitimate. However, it is possible to defend a legitimate individualism, that of the individual who makes his/her life into a creative project. That is, we can emphasise the value of individuality, and with it that of independence, without implying any isolation. Being an individualist, or being independent, is not synonymous with being selfish. The wrong kind of individualism arises out of an anthropological view that is afflicted with "selfish prejudice". This anthropology derives from a subjectivist epistemological position: the subject who is the centre of knowledge ends up as the subject who is the centre of the possession of reality and of itself. The paradox of modern philosophy is that it bases truth on doubt, on the fragility of the individual on his/her own, yet is oblivious of the limitations of any real individual in theoretical...