The Community Spirit in Rousseau, Fichte, Pestalozzi

Miguel Serrano collected works https://archive.org/details/miguel-serrano_202312

The Community Spirit in Rousseau, Fichte, Pestalozzi

Alfred Baeumler, Bildung und Gemeinschaft, 1943

The more one studies Pestalozzi’s practical effectiveness and teaching, the more

magnificent appears his breakthrough through individualism. With the blindness

of genius, out of his own soulfulness, the Swiss achieved something similar in his

field to the East Prussian Herder. Just as Herder freed us from the individualistic

thinking of the Enlightenment and taught us to feel and recognise culture as a

product of the folks, Pestalozzi taught us to feel and see education as an education

not only for but also through the community. In this sense, we can call Pestalozzi

the Herder of pedagogy.

Humanism and the Enlightenment are rightly called “pedagogical” movements.

Our present-day interest in schools, in learning and teaching, in instruction and

education stems essentially from these intellectual movements. However, the

narrowing of the pedagogical problem that makes the theory of education one of

the most unpleasant and unfruitful chapters in the humanities also stems from

these movements.

From its origins in humanism and the Enlightenment, the

theory of education suffers from a false approach. Erasmus and Vives, Comenius

and Ratke are certainly reformers of the school and bold innovators in didactics,

but they leave the essential questions untouched. Pestalozzi, on the other hand, is

not a mere reformer of the school, but a revolutionary of education. He frees

pedagogy from its overgrowth by didactics and places it on its own feet. His

discovery of community as the basis of all education signifies the detachment of

educational theory from the shackles of individualism and the gaining of the only

possible fruitful approach to educational science.

Of course, it is not Pestalozzi who enjoys the fame of this liberation to this day,

but Rousseau. In “Emil” one sees the foundation book of the newer pedagogical

science. Here one thinks one finds the thoughts that not only had a revolutionary

effect on their time, but also determined the approach to the pedagogical problem

right up to us. From Rousseau onwards, the education of the individual to become

a “human being” through the planned development of the physical and mental

powers that lie dormant in him until he is integrated into human society - this is

supposed to be the programme of all education and the key to pedagogical theory.

This has been repeated countless times, and countless times Pestalozzi’s genius

has been sinned against. For it is not Rousseau but Pestalozzi who is the real

revolutionary in the history of educational science. Rousseau only overcame one

side of the Enlightenment; precisely in the decisive point, the author of “Emil”

remains completely caught up in the Enlightenment. Pestalozzi penetrates to the

depths and destroys Enlightenment thinking in its approach.

Through Rousseau, education has been freed from the tutelage of the book; the

right of childhood and youth has been seen and affirmed by him; likewise the

right of the body and manual labour. These may be important discoveries in the

field of education. But we are concerned with the principle. Is Rousseau the

discoverer of the true realm of education, as liberal history has repeatedly

presented it to us, or does his pedagogy merely represent the culmination of the

individualism of the Enlightenment in its final phase brought about by him?

Rousseau’s historical importance is based on the fact that he put an end to the

rationalism of the Enlightenment. It is usually assumed that rationalism and

individualism are so closely connected that the end of one must also mean the end

of the other. This is not the case. There is a rationalistic and an irrationalistic

individualism. Rousseau does not abandon the individualistic thinking of the

Enlightenment when he substitutes feeling for reason.

What is thus achieved is

merely an individualism in a new, more dangerous form. Individualistic

rationalism is replaced by individualistic sentimentalism, the strict rule of reason

is replaced by the anarchy of the heart that feels only itself and impetuously

desires its happiness.

Reason still has its standards and its forms; but the

unleashed heart knows only itself and its formless arbitrariness. Rousseau’s

“liberation” does not lead to a new, deeper bond, but to dissolution. This is why

Rousseau was able to become the philosopher of the French Revolution, which

did not find the measure in itself, but had to be brought to a halt from outside by

General Bonaparte.

Rousseau’s philosophy is without binding principle - so how could his “Emil”

contain the right pedagogical approach? Rationalistic individualism is replaced

by irrationalistic individualism − and this is even more dangerous than the

former!

In “Emil”, three different types of education are distinguished. The individual is

educated by nature or by people or by things. The education of nature is not

dependent on us, that of things only in certain respects, and also that through man

is only conditionally in our hands. The real educator is the connection between

nature and things. The educator does not have to educate, but only to see to it that

nothing is done that could disturb the educational work of nature. When the word

“nature” is used, any idea of natural human community must be kept away.

“Nature” only means the context of forces and events in which man is placed; the

result of education should be that he ultimately finds himself in a correct

relationship to nature.

Rousseau’s “nature” is a completely impersonal educator; the connection of

nature and things, through the repercussions of which he comes to realise his own

strength and weakness, is an inhuman one. Human community is not contained

in any form in Rousseau’s approach. Emil is an orphan, he stands outside all

relationships and ties. The only human relationship in which he is shown from

the beginning, that to his educator, remains completely undefined, shapeless and

cool. This educator stands next to the actual events, he only supports and explains

what happens by itself.

Neither the family nor the men’s association have an

effect on Emil. The other person only becomes significant for him at the moment

when his sexuality awakens. He encounters them in the form of his lover. The

detailed description of puberty therefore marks the decisive turn in the structure

of the whole. Of course, the appearance of Sophie does not change anything

fundamental. The upbringing is complete. Emil, who has been formed into a

“human being” without humans, becomes a husband and father and thus a citizen.

Emil grew up not only in outer solitude and silence, but also in complete inner

solitude, in a socially empty space, as it were.

If he nevertheless ends up as a

citizen in accordance with the demands of Rousseau’s main political work (“The

Social Contract”), this is not a contradiction from a purely intellectual point of

view, for life in human society is and remains for Rousseau the goal of education.

His Emil is educated away from the human community, but still for life in the

community. This is precisely the peculiar paradox of Rousseau’s approach to the

philosophy of education: only outside the community (of today) can one educate

for the community (of tomorrow). Education for the true, future community is to

be made possible through separation from the corrupt, present community.

What remains unanswered here is the question of whether it is at all possible to

educate a person for the community outside of community life. How is a person

who has never had the experience of community supposed to grow into the

community? The isolated egoist can become a family egoist through marriage,

but not a person in the community all at once. Without the experience of

community from a young age, education for community is not possible.

Rousseau’s system is the system of consummate egoism. All his appeals to the

compassionate heart cannot conceal the fact that individualism reaches its peak

here and leads itself ad absurdum. The complement to this extreme individualism

is an equally extreme collectivism, as we find in Rousseau’s concept of the state.

Fichte draws a completely different pedagogical conclusion from the same

historical-philosophical premise: that the present is completely corrupt. He also

separates the generation to be educated in the spirit of a new age from the older

generation, but he still lets the children grow up under the care of their teachers

in an institutional community.

But Fichte’s significance for theoretical pedagogy is not to be found in his

conquest of the concept of community for educational science. Fichte approaches

the problem of education from the point of view of the ideal task set for the new

generation. In this way, he finds and shapes the concept of the nation as a

historical community of descent that is at the same time a community of pure

spirits, whereby Fichte is essentially concerned with proving the spiritual

character of this community, but not with proving the independent significance

of a concrete community as such. And there is no mention of an educational

effectiveness of the community. Finally, education in Fichte is more an education

for the spiritual community than an education through the community. Not one

of the two concrete forms of community (family and male alliance or clan and

following) appears in Fichte’s system of education. In their place is the purely

rational construction of an educational institution that unites children of both

sexes under the supervision of teachers.

Originally and before all education, Fichte believes, lies in the human being that

which makes education possible in the first place. Morality cannot be brought

into the child if it is not already in the child. The purest form of this morality,

however, is the instinct for respect. For Fichte, the basis of all moral education is

not sensual love of children and parents, as Pestalozzi assumes, but the drive for

mutual respect.

According to this, the human being does not develop into a full human being in

life within the community through mutual taking and giving, but living together

with others is only the consequence of a ready-made, as it were preformed

morality. The instinct for respect has no actual development; its content is always

the same. It changes in appearance, but not in essence.

Thus, although Fichte accepts the relationship between man and man as the basis

of all moral education, he does not understand man as a being developing morally

within the community. As a result, the community as the prerequisite for moral

development recedes completely into the background in pedagogical theory. The

concept of the nation is not derived by Fichte from the concept of the community,

as strange as this may sound to us today. Fichte knows nothing of the fact that

man only grows into a real human being in the community. Mutual respect is

something great, but the human relationships of a living community are by no

means exhausted in mutual respect. Much more elementary processes than that

of mutual respect make up the basic layer of the life of the community. Because

Fichte ignores all these processes, he cannot build up his concept of the nation

from below, but must construct it from above.

Pestalozzi, on the other hand, does not know the concept of nation in the Fichtean

sense. His concept of the folk is merely a social one. For Pestalozzi, “folk” means

quite vaguely the “lower” folk that must be helped, not the political folk, the

closed nation. Pestalozzi’s path to pedagogy does not lead through the philosophy

of history and the historical appearance of the nation, but through the experience

of educating youth. And for him that means: through the experience of a living

community.

It is the close community of the home, of the family, of parental and child love

that Pestalozzi has exclusively in mind. His concept of community never departed

from this narrow starting point. The temporal nature of this peaceful, idyllic

concept of community is easy to recognise, and its critique can be given without

difficulty in the age of the great nation states. For pedagogical theory, however,

it is not decisive from which sub-district of the community Pestalozzi started, but

rather the fact that he started at all with the real community of the family - that

was a real revolution - and secondly, in which way he conceived his approach.

In the consciousness of posterity, Pestalozzi lives on as the creator of the method

of elementary education, i.e. as a didactician. A tragic misunderstanding! It was

precisely that which lay before all didactics that was important to Pestalozzi, both

as a practitioner and as a theorist. It became difficult for him to give adequate

expression to his greatest and most important thought, and perhaps it is only today

that we can fully understand how simple and correct the approach of Pestalozzi’s

pedagogy is.

It was a very simple insight that Pestalozzi wanted to express. All teaching, no

matter how successful, is without value and meaning if it does not take place

within the framework of a living community. Training of the intellect and the will

leads to nothing but a thousand empty skills if the human being does not at the

same time develop morally. But this he does only under the breath of love. “The

error was great and the deception immeasurable,” says Pestalozzi, “that one

believed that I seek the formation of the human nature through one-sided head

education, I seek it through the one-sidedness of arithmetic and mathematics; no,

I seek it through the all-sidedness of love.”

The life of the heart precedes all

correct knowledge and ability, and without the development of the powers of the

heart all development of the spiritual faculties is of no use. Therefore the child

can be morally educated only in the circle of home life. “The child loves and

believes before it thinks and acts, and the influence of home life stimulates and

elevates it to the inner essence of the moral forces which presuppose all human

thought and action...”

The point at which Pestalozzi begins is therefore that layer of elementary

experiences and experiences which link the child with mother, father and siblings.

Love” - the word Pestalozzi uses to describe all these experiences - is not a one off early state of experience, but something that is permanently essential to the

human being, something that actually makes him a human being. It is the task of

the educator never to detach the methodically guided teaching from such

situations that call upon the child’s power of love. Only in a continuous exchange

of loving give and take is the child able to develop as a moral being. Nothing

would be more disastrous than a didactic approach that undertook to educate the

human being without this elementary education through love (which we can call

an emotional education). It would result in a mechanical puppet, not a living

human being. “Faith and love are the be-all and end-all of natural, and therefore

elementary, education in humanity. Spiritual education and art education are only

subordinate means of education and only in this subordination are they able to

contribute to the harmony of our powers and to the balance of them among

themselves.

Pestalozzi is the first pedagogue who understood the human being not as an

isolated, finished person, but as one who first develops in the community. He is

the first to consider a real life-circle, a community reality, as the first and most

important thing in all education and teaching. He approached the questions of

didactics with true passion, and in doing so he got lost in the strangest trains of

thought. He has never underestimated the importance of teaching methods. At the

same time, however, he has always assigned teaching the place where it alone can

have its beneficial effect. Education must always be built into a living community

− this is Pestalozzi’s decisive insight, the teaching he left to the generations of

teachers after him. Only when the “basic forces” that make it possible for people

to live together in the family are alive and active can intellect and will develop

without harm.

Pestalozzi’s pedagogy therefore distinguishes the means of development of the

basic human powers from the means of training and instruction in knowledge and

skills. The means of development of the basic forces are always the same and

proceed from eternal laws; the means of training and instruction are as different

as the objects of the world to whose knowledge and use our forces are applied.

These are subordinate and subordinate to them. This means not only the primacy

of the irrational over the rational, of the heart over the mind, but it means the

primacy of the reality of life over all teaching and over all knowledge and ability

of the individual.

The deepest meaning of the priority of the reality of life over

the method, however, is the priority of the community over the individual.

This priority is not to be understood as if community and individual were

separable from each other and as if the latter had to be valued more highly than

the former. That would be an external, mechanistic way of thinking. Community

and individual belong together and form a whole. Priority of the community

means (in Pestalozzi’s language) priority of love, and that means: priority of the

forces that establish the immediate life of the community over all abilities and

achievements of other kinds, even those that constitute the pride of the individual