Seeing with the Heart; The Little Prince and a Meaningful Life

Project summary

The purpose of the project was to present a paper at the conference "Reasons of the Heart: Myth, meaning and education", jointly sponsored by the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and the VU Amsterdam in September 2004. Later on I was also invited to write an article in a textbook witch Ragna Aadlandsvik is the editor of. The book will be published in March 2005. The project springs out of this dilemma: The opportunities we have in our culture of self-fulfilment are apparently fairly good; many things seems to be arranged so that we can accomplish a meaningful “life-project”. Still many – in the entire western world, also young people – seem to be struggling to find a good direction for their lives. The project focuses on fundamental aspects of our way-of-life, in order to examine whether there are some mutual, culturally determined reasons for this. The aim is to obtain insight into problems related to forming a meaningful life. It is hardly likely that this insight can be converted into some sort of teaching- or education method. But it may promote attention to this problem and a deeper understanding of it. Main source and foundation for the study is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s fable The Little Prince. Through pictures and words in the fable, I examine whether it is possible in our culture to lead a meaningful life. There is criticism of culture in the fable. In the first part, for example, where the prince visits the archetypes of our culture, where they live in solitude each on his lonely planet. The archetypes can be seen as metaphors for essential aspects of our culture, and by studying the little prince’s visit to each of them, we can try to understand what “goes wrong”. When we learn the secret the Fox reveals to the little prince, about matters of genuine importance being invisible to the eye, we may begin to understand how it is possible to improve our situation. I see the fable in relation to other poetry, philosophy and scientific literature. My work is based on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutic and Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of method. The project is based on my thesis for my degree in philosophy of education (“Forutsetninger for livsmening i vår kultur”. Veving av et bilde med Saint-Exupérys fabel Den lille prinsen som forbilde (Frislid 2003, NLA School of Religion and Education).)