Sardello Writes

The impulse for learning originates in an alluring display of the beauty of the world, which evokes desire for intimate connection with the soul of the world. Things draw us to intimate knowledge as if they need us for their completion. The beauty of the world draws the soul out of an inclination toward self-enclosing mastery of the world through disen-gagement and into engagement with reality. This living desire to experience the world pulsing through the body wants to initiate in us a care for all things. When things are approached with the care of soul, their soul shines forth.

— Robert Sardello

Sardello is describing something the educational tradition has quietly displaced: that knowing begins not in the will to master but in being called. The draw comes first — from the thing, toward the learner. That inversion matters more than it first appears, because the dominant grammar of learning since at least the Enlightenment runs the other direction: the subject reaches out, acquires, controls, systematizes. Bacon's famous formula is only the explicit version of what eventually becomes the unexamined default. Desire, in that grammar, belongs to the learner and terminates on the thing as object. What Sardello names is older and stranger — the thing desiring to be known, needing the soul for its completion, pulling the learner out of self-enclosure not by moral argument but by beauty.

The word *alluring* carries the weight here. It belongs to the register of seduction, not curriculum. And seduction implies that the soul can be held elsewhere, shut in, attending to its own maintenance — which is precisely what Sardello calls "disengagement," the retreat into mastery as a protection against being moved. What breaks that retreat is not discipline or method but eros. The soul that can be drawn out is one that has not yet concluded, in its fear of the mess, that staying inside is safer.


Robert Sardello·Facing the World with Soul: The Reimagination of Modern Life·1992