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