Itinerários filosóficos sobre a educação na contemporaneidade: um diálogo com Henri Bergson

Abstract

This doctoral thesis is configured as a reflective itinerary on contemporary education. Rather than conceiving education as the mere transmission of content or as an adaptation to technical-instrumental models, the research traverses different paths for problematizing education as a living experience. Within this trajectory, the dialogue with the thought of Henri Bergson constitutes one possible path, among others, for thinking education as a living, sensitive, and creative formative process, attentive to the different times, rhythms, and experiences that traverse educational life. Grounded primarily in Bergson’s philosophy, in dialogue with contemporary authors who problematize life, time, and education, the study investigates: what conception(s) of human formation have been produced by contemporary education, and in what ways can Henri Bergson's thought contribute to rethinking them? The central objective of this work is to explicate the ontological, educational, ethical, political, and social foundations of a living education, understood as a process of the integral formation of the human being. The thesis is based on the hypothesis that the philosophy of duration offers conceptual and sensitive conditions for critically rethinking contemporary education, displacing it from a logic of control, efficiency, and standardization toward an understanding of learning as a qualitative, historical, critical, and creative experience. Methodologically, this is a theoretical study of a philosophical-interpretative nature, grounded in the conceptual analysis of Bergson’s major works in dialogue with other authors. The investigation articulates philosophy, education, and experience, rejecting prescriptive models and privileging critical reflection situated within lived time. In the first movement of the thesis, the Bergsonian concepts of duration, consciousness, memory, intelligence, and intuition are developed, highlighting how the spatialization of time impoverishes the understanding of learning and interferes with formative processes. Education, when conceived through the lens of duration, embraces nonlinearity and uncertainty in the construction of being and knowledge, refusing to reduce processes to accumulation and predictability, and instead coming to be understood as an event that qualitatively transforms consciousness. Subsequently, the research deepens the relationship between philosophy and science, emphasizing the limits of analytical knowledge and the necessity of intuition, understood as capable of accessing the inner movement of life. This critique grounds an educational reflection that questions excessively verbalist, content-centered, and utilitarian school practices, advocating instead for a form of education that integrates body, experience, creation, and attentiveness to reality. Finally, the thesis investigates the ethical, social, and political unfoldings of freedom in Bergsonian thought, articulating the notions of closed morality and open morality in relation to education and schooling. Freedom is understood as the creation of the self within duration, implying responsibility, living justice, and commitment to the common world. Education thus emerges as a privileged space for cultivating freedom, ethics, and democratic life, in opposition to educational policies that reinforce control, adaptation, and the emptying of formative experience. Through this study, the thesis seeks to contribute to the understanding that thinking contemporary education from the perspective of life implies repositioning lived time, creation, and freedom at the center of human formation, affirming education as an existential, ethical, political, and social practice committed to the preservation and affirmation of life.