‘The Most Beautiful Harmony’ and Education as a Moral Equivalent of War: A Deweyan-Heraclitean Perspective

Starting from two Heraclitus fragments this paper investigates how community develops from an interplay of divergence and convergence and how, accordingly, any community is constitutively inhabited by the potentiality of strife, which can represent, however, a factor of growth. The question is how to prevent the ‘just’ strife from turning into a civil warfare which would endanger the existence of a community. Against this backdrop, it is shown how such an ‘Heraclitean’ theme (and its Platonic reappropriation) plays a major role in Dewey’s social psychology and educational thought and it is argued that to Dewey education is a moral equivalent of war.