Pedagogics as a System Part 6

--True politeness shows that it remains master of forms. It is very necessary to accustom children to courtesy and to bring them up in the etiquette of the prevailing social custom; but they must be prevented from falling into an absurd formality which makes the triumph of a polite behavior to consist in a blind following of the dictates of the last fashion-journal, and in the exact copying of the phraseology and directions of some book on manners. One can best teach and practise politeness when he does not merely copy the social technique, but comprehends its original idea.--

-- 144. (3) But to fully initiate the youth into the inst.i.tutions of civilization one must not only call out the feelings of his heart in the bosom of the family, not only give to him the formal refinement necessary to his intercourse with society; it must also perform to him the painful duty of making him acquainted with the mysteries of the ways of the world. This is a painful duty, for the child naturally feels an unlimited confidence in all men. This confidence must not be destroyed, but it must be tempered. The mystery of the way of the world is the deceit which springs from selfishness. We must provide against it by a proper degree of distrust. We must teach the youth that he may be imposed upon by deceit, dissimulation, and hypocrisy, and that therefore he must not give his confidence lightly and credulously. He himself must learn how he can, without deceit, gain his own ends in the midst of the throng of opposing interests.

--Kant in his Pedagogics calls that worldly-wise behavior by which the individual is to demean himself in opposition to others, Impenetrability. By its means man learns how to "manage men." In Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son, we have pointed out the true value of egotism in its relation to morals. All his words amount to this, that we are to consider every man to be an egotist, and to convert his very egotism into a means of finding out his weak side; i.e. to flatter him by exciting his vanity, and by means of such flattery to ascertain his limits. In common life, the expression "having had experiences" means about the same thing as having been deceived and betrayed.--

SECOND CHAPTER.

_Moral Culture._

-- 145. The truth of social culture lies in moral culture. Without this latter, every art of behavior remains worthless, and can never attain the clearness of Humility and Dignity which are possible to it in its unity with morality. For the better determination of this idea Pedagogics must refer to Ethics itself, and can here give the part of its content which relates to Education only in the form of educational maxims. The princ.i.p.al categories of Ethics in the domain of morality are the ideas of Duty, Virtue, and Conscience. Education must lay stress on the truth that nothing in the world has any absolute value except will guided by the right.

-- 146. Thence follows (1) the maxim relating to the idea of Duty, that we must accustom the pupil to unconditional obedience to it, so that he shall perform it for no other reason than that it is duty. It is true that the performance of a duty may bring with it externally a result agreeable or disagreeable, useful or harmful; but the consideration of such connection ought never to determine us. This moral demand, though it may appear to be excessive severity, is the absolute foundation of all genuine ethical practice. All "highest happiness theories," however finely spun they may be, when taken as a guide for life, lead at last to Sophistry, and this to contradictions which ruin the life.

-- 147. (2) Virtue must make actual what duty commands, or, rather, the actualizing of duty is Virtue. And here we must say next, then, that the princ.i.p.al things to be considered under Virtue are (_a_) the dialectic of particular virtues, (_b_) renunciation, and (_c_) character.

-- 148. (_a_) From the dialectic of particular virtues there follows the educational maxim that we must practise all virtues with equal faithfulness, for all together const.i.tute an ethical system complete in itself, in which no one is indifferent to another.

--Morality should recognize no distinction of superiority among the different virtues. They reciprocally determine each other. There is no such thing as one virtue which shines out above the others, and still less should we have any special gift for virtue. The pupil must be taught to recognize no great and no small in the virtues, for that one which may at first sight seem small is inseparably connected with that which is seemingly the greatest. Many virtues are attractive by reason of their external consequences, as e.g. industry because of success in business, worthy conduct because of the respect paid to it, charity because of the pleasure attending it; but man should not practise these virtues because he enjoys them: he must devote the same amount of self-sacrifice and of a.s.siduity to those virtues which (as Christ said) are to be performed in secret.--

--It is especially valuable, in an educational respect, to gain an insight, into the transition of which each virtue is empirically capable, into a negative as well as into a positive extreme. The differences between the extremes and the golden mean are differences in quality, although they arrive at this difference in quality by means of difference in quant.i.ty. Kant has, as is well known, attacked the Aristotelian doctrine of the ethical es?te?, since he was considering the qualitative difference of the mind as differentiating principle; this was correct for the subject with which he dealt, but in the objective development we do arrive on the other hand at the determination of a quant.i.tative limit; e.g. a man, with the most earnest intention of doing right, may be in doubt whether he has not, in any task, done more or less than was fitting for him.--

--As no virtue can cease its demands for us, no one can permit any exceptions or any provisional circ.u.mstances to come in the way of his duties. Our moral culture will always certainly manifest itself in very unequal phases if we, out of narrowness and weakness, neglect entirely one virtue while we diligently cultivate another. If we are forced into such unequal action, we are not responsible for the result; but it is dangerous and deserves punishment if we voluntarily encourage it. The pupil must be warned against a certain moral negligence which consists in yielding to certain weaknesses, faults, or crimes, a little longer and a little longer, because he has fixed a certain time after which he intends to do better. Up to that time he allows himself to be a loiterer in ethics. Perhaps he will a.s.sert that his companions, his surroundings, his position, &c., must be changed before he can alter his internal conduct. Wherever education or temperament favors sentimentality, we shall find birth-days, new-year's day, confirmation day, &c., selected as these turning points. It is not to be denied that man proceeds in his internal life from epoch to epoch, and renews himself in his most internal nature, nor can we deny that moments like those mentioned are especially favorable in man to an effort towards self-transformation because they invite introspection; but it is not to be endured that the youth, while looking forward to such a moment, should consciously persist in his evil-doing. If he does, we shall have as consequences that when the solemn moment which he has set at last arrives, at the stirring of the first emotion he perceives with terror that he has changed nothing in himself, that the same temptations are present to him, the same weakness takes possession of him, &c. In our business, in our theoretical endeavors, &c., it may certainly happen that, on account of want of time, or means, or humor, we may put off some work to another time; but morality stands on a higher plane than these, because it, as the concrete absoluteness of the will, makes unceasing demand on the whole and undivided man. In morality there are no vacations, no interims. As we in ascending a flight of stairs take good care not to make a single mis-step, and give our conscious attention to every step, so we must not allow any exceptions in moral affairs, must not appoint given times for better conduct, but must await these last as natural crises, and must seek to live in time as in Eternity.--

-- 149. (_b_) From Renunciation springs the injunction of self-government. The action of education on the will to form habits in it, is discipline or training in a narrower sense. Renunciation teaches us to know the relation in which we in fact, as historical persons, stand to the idea of the Good. From our empirical knowledge of ourselves we derive the idea of our limits; from the absolute knowledge of ourselves on the other hand, which presents to us the nature of Freedom as our own actuality, we derive the conception of the resistless might of the genuine will for the good. But to actualize this conception we must have practice. This practice is the proper renunciation. Every man must devise for himself some special set of rules, which shall be determined by his peculiarities and his resulting temptations. These rules must have as their innermost essence the subduing of self, the vanquishing of his negative arbitrariness by means of the universality and necessity of the will.

--In order to make this easy, the youth may be practised in renouncing for himself even the arbitrariness which is permitted to him. One often speaks of renunciation as if it belonged especially to the middle ages and to Catholicism; but this is an error. Renunciation in its one-sided form as relying on works, and for the purpose of mortification, is asceticism, and belongs to them; but Renunciation in general is a necessary determination of morals. The keeping of a journal is said to a.s.sist in the practice of virtue, but its value depends on how it is kept. To one it may be a curse, to another a blessing. Fichte, Gothe, Byron, and others, have kept journals and have been a.s.sisted thereby; while others, as Lavater, have been thwarted by them. Vain people will every evening record with pen and ink their admiration of the correct course of life which they have led in the day devoted to their pleasure.--

-- 150. (_c_) The result of the practice in virtue, or, as it is commonly expressed, of the individual actualization of freedom, is the methodical determinateness of the individual will as Character. This conception of character is formal, for it contains only the ident.i.ty which is implied in the ruling of a will on its external side as constant. As there are good, strong and beautiful characters, so there are also bad, weak, and detestable ones. When in Pedagogics, therefore, we speak so much of the building up of a character, we mean the making permanent of a direction of the individual will towards the actualization of the Good. Freedom ought to be the character of character. Education must therefore observe closely the inter-action of the factors which go to form character, viz., (a) the temperament, as the natural character of the man; () external events, the historical element; (?) the energy of the Will, by which, in its limits of nature and history, it realizes the idea of the Good in and for itself as the proper ethical character. Temperament determines the Rhythm of our external manifestation of ourselves; the events in which we live a.s.sign to us the ethical problem, but the Will in its sovereignty stamps its seal on the form given by these potentialities. Pedagogics aims at accustoming the youth to freedom, so that he shall always measure his deed by the idea of the Good. It does not desire a formal independence, which may also be called character, but a real independence resting upon the conception of freedom as that which is absolutely necessary. The pedagogical maxim is then: Be independent, but be so through doing Good.

--According to preconceived opinion, stubbornness and obstinacy claim that they are the foundation of character. But they may spring from weakness and indeterminateness, on which account one needs to be well on his guard. A gentle disposition, through enthusiasm for the Good, may attain to quite as great a firmness of will. Coa.r.s.eness and meanness are on no account to be tolerated.--

-- 151. (3) We pa.s.s from the consideration of the culture of character to that of conscience. This is the relation which the moral agent makes between himself as manifestation and himself as idea. It compares itself, in its past or future, with its nature, and judges itself accordingly as good or bad. This independence of the ethical judgment is the soul proper of all morality, the negation of all self-deception and of all deception through another. The pedagogical maxim is: Be conscientious. Be in the last instance dependent only upon the conception which thou thyself hast of the idea of the Good!

--The self-criticism prompted by conscience hovers over all our historical actuality, and is the ground of all our rational progress.

Fichte's stern words remain, therefore, eternally true: "He who has a bad character, must absolutely create for himself a better one."--

THIRD CHAPTER.

_Religious Culture._

-- 152. Social culture contains the formal phase, moral culture the real phase, of the practical mind. Conscience forms the transition to religious culture. In its apodeictic nature, it is the absoluteness of spirit. The individual discerns in the depths of its own consciousness the determinations of universality and of necessity to which it has to subject itself. They appear to it as the voice of G.o.d. Religion makes its appearance as soon as the individual distinguishes the Absolute from himself as personal, as a subject existing for itself and therefore for him. The atheist remains at the stage of insight into the absoluteness of the logical and physical, aesthetic and practical categories. He may, therefore, be perfectly moral. He lacks religion, though he loves to characterize his uprightness by this name, and to transfer the dogmatic determinations of positive religion into the ethical sphere. It belongs to the province of religion that I demean myself towards the Absolute not only as toward that which is my own substance, and that in relation to it not I alone am the subject, but that to me also the substance in itself is a personal subject for itself. If I look upon myself as the only absolute, I make myself devoid of spiritual essence. I am only absolute self-consciousness, for which, because it as idea relates only to itself, there remains only the impulse to a persistent conflict with every self-consciousness not identical with it. Were this the case, such a self-consciousness would be only theoretical irony. In religion I know the Absolute as essence, when I am known by him. Everything else, myself included, is finite and transitory, however significant it may be, however relatively and momentarily the Infinite may exist in it. As existence even, it is transitory. The Absolute, positing itself, distinguishing itself from itself in unity with itself, is always like to itself, and takes up all the unrest of the phenomenal world back again into its simple essence.

-- 153. This process of the individual spirit, in which it rises out of the multiplicity of all relations into union with the Absolute as the substantial subject, and in which nature and history are united, we may call, in a restricted sense, a change of heart [Gemuth]. In a wider sense of the word we give this name to a certain sentimental cheerfulness (light-heartedness), a sense of comfort--of little significance. The highest emotions of the heart culminate in religion, whose warmth is inspired by practical activity and conscientiousness.

-- 154. Education has to fit man for religion. (1) It gives him the conception of it; (2) it endeavors to have this conception actualized in him; (3) it subordinates the theoretical and practical process in fashioning him to a determinate stand-point of religious culture.

--In the _working out_ or detailed treatment of Pedagogics, the position which the conception of religion occupies is very uncertain.

Many writers on Education place it at the beginning, while others reserve it for the end. Others navely bring it forward in the midst of heterogeneous surroundings, but know how to say very little concerning it, and urge teachers to kindle the fire of religious feeling in their pupils by teaching them to fear G.o.d. Through all their writing, we hear the cry that in Education nothing is so important as Religion. Rightly understood, this saying is quite true. The religious spirit, the consciousness of the Absolute, and the reverence for it, should permeate all. Not unfrequently, however, we find that what is meant by religion is theology, or the church ceremonial, and these are only one-sided phases of the total religious process. The Anglican High-Church presents in the colleges and universities of England a sad example of this error.

What can be more deadening to the spirit, more foreign to religion, than the morning and evening prayers as they are carried on at Oxford and Cambridge with machine-like regularity! But also to England belongs the credit of the sad fact, that, according to Kohl's report, there live in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, and London, thousands of men who have never enjoyed any teaching in religion, have never been baptized, who live absolutely without religion in brutal stupidity. Religion must form the culminating point of Education. It takes up into itself the didactical and practical elements, and rises through the force of its content to universality.--

I. _The Theoretical Process of Religious Culture._

-- 155. Religion, in common with every content of the spirit, must pa.s.s through three stages of feeling, conception, and comprehension. Whatever may be the special character of any religion it cannot avoid this psychological necessity, either in its general history or in the history of the individual consciousness. The teacher must understand this process, partly in order that he may make it easier to the youth, partly that he may guard against the malformation of the religious feeling which may arise through the fact of the youth's remaining in one stage after he is ready for another and needs it. Pedagogics must therefore lay out beforehand the philosophy of religion, on which alone can be found the complete discussion of this idea.

-- 156. (1) Religion exists first as religious feeling. The person is still immediately identical with the Divine, does not yet distinguish himself from the absoluteness of his being, and is in so far determined by it. In so far as he feels the divine, he is a mystery to himself.

This beginning is necessary. Religion cannot be produced in men from the external side; its genesis belongs rather to the primitive depths in which G.o.d himself and the individual soul are essentially one.

--The educator must not allow himself to suppose that he is able to make a religion. Religion dwells originally in every individual soul, for every one is born of G.o.d. Education can only aid the religious feeling in its development. As far as regards the psychological form, it was quite correct for Schleiermacher and his followers to characterize the absoluteness of the religious feeling as the feeling of dependence, for feeling is determined by that which it feels; it depends upon its content. But in so far as G.o.d const.i.tutes the content of the feeling, there appears the opposite of all dependence or absolute emanc.i.p.ation. I maintain this in opposition to Schleiermacher. Religion lifts man above the finite, temporal and transitory, and frees him from the control of the phenomenal world. Even the lowest form of religion does this; and when it is said that Schleiermacher has been unjustly criticized for this expression of dependence, this distinction is overlooked.--

-- 157. But religious feeling as such rises into something higher when the spirit distinguishes the content of this religious feeling from any other content which it also feels, represents it clearly to itself, and places itself over against it formally as a free individual.

--But we must not understand that the religious feeling is destroyed in this process; in rising to the form of distinct representation, it remains at the same time as a necessary form of the Intelligence.--

-- 158. If the spirit is held back and prevented from pa.s.sing out of the simplicity of feeling into the act of distinguishing the perception from what it becomes, the conception--if its efforts towards the forming of this conception are continually re-dissolved into feeling, then feeling, which was as the first step perfectly healthy and correct, will become morbid and degenerate into a wretched mysticism. Education must, therefore, make sure that this feeling is not destroyed by the progress of its content into perception and conception on the side of psychological form, but rather that it attains truth thereby.

-- 159. (2) Conception as the ideally transformed perception dissects the religious content on its different sides, and follows each of these to its consequence. Imagination controls the individual conceptions, but by no means with that absoluteness which is often supposed; for each picture has in itself its logical consequence to which imagination must yield; e.g. if a religion represents G.o.d as an animal, or as half animal and half man, or as man, each of these conceptions has in its development its consequences for the imagination.

-- 160. We rise out of the stage of Conception when the spirit tries to determine the universality of its content according to its necessity, i.e. when it begins to think. The necessity of its pictures is a mere presupposition for the imagination. The thinking activity, however, recognizes not only the contradiction which exists between the sensuous, limited form of the individual conception, and the absolute nature of its content, but also the contradiction in which the conceptions find themselves with respect to each other.

-- 161. If the spirit is prevented from pa.s.sing out of the varied pictures of conception to the supersensuous clearness and simplicity of the thinking activity--if the content which it already begins to seize as idea is again dissolved into the confusion of the picture-world, then the religion of imagination, which was a perfectly proper form as the second step, becomes perverted into some form of idolatry, either coa.r.s.e or refined. Education must therefore not oppose the thinking activity if the latter undertakes to criticize religious conceptions; on the contrary, it must guide this so that the discovery of the contradictions which unavoidably adhere to sensuous form shall not mislead the youth into the folly of throwing away, with the relative untruth of the form, also the religious content in general.

--It is an error for educators to desire to keep the imagination apart from religious feeling, but it is also an error to detain the mind, which is on its formal side the activity of knowing, in the stage of imagination, and to desire to condemn it thence into the service of canonical allegories. The more, in opposition to this, it is possessed with the charm of thinking, the more is it in danger of condemning the content of religion itself as a mere fict.i.tious conception. As a transition-stage the religion of imagination is perfectly normal, and it does not in the least impair freedom if, for example, one has personified evil as a living Devil. The error does not lie in this, but in the making absolute these determinate, aesthetic forms of religion.

The reaction of the thinking activity against such aesthetic absolutism then undertakes in its negative absolutism to despise the content also, as if it were a mere conception.--

-- 162. (3) In the thinking activity the spirit attains that form of the religious content which is identical with that of its simple consciousness, and above which there is no other for the intelligence as theoretical. But we distinguish three varieties in this thinking activity: the abstract, the reflective, and the speculative. The Abstract gives us the religious content of consciousness in the form of abstractions or dogmas, i.e. propositions which set up a definition as a universal, and add to it another as the reason for its necessity. The Reflective stage busies itself with the relation of dogmas to each other, and with the search for the grounds on which their necessity must rest. It is essentially critical, and hence skeptical. The explanation of the dogmas, which is carried on in this process of reasoning and skeptical investigation, is completed alone in speculative thinking, which recognizes the free unity of the content and its form as its own proper self-determination of the content, creating its own differences.

Education must know this stage of the intelligence, partly that it may in advance preserve, in the midst of its changes, that repose which it brings into the consciousness; partly that it may be able to lead to the process of change itself, in accordance with the organic connection of its phases. We should prevent the criticism of the abstract understanding by the reflective stage as little as we should that of the imagination by the thinking activity. But the stage of reflection is not the last possibility of the thinking activity, although, in the variety of its skepticism it often takes itself for such, and, with the emptiness of mere negation to which it holds, often brings itself forward into undesirable prominence. It becomes evident, in this view, how very necessary for man, with respect to religion, is a genuine philosophical culture, so that he may not lose the certainty of the existence of the Absolute in the midst of the obstinacy of dogmas and the changes of opinions.

-- 163. Education must then not fear the descent into dogmatic abstraction, since this is an indispensable means for theoretical culture in its totality, and the consciousness cannot dispense with it in its history. But Education has, in the concrete, carefully to discern in which of these stages of culture any particular consciousness may be.

For if for mankind as a race the fostering of philosophy is absolutely necessary, it by no means follows that this necessity exists for each individual. To children, to women, e.g. for all kinds of simple and limited lives, the form of the religion of the imagination is well suited, and the form of comprehension can come only relatively to them.

Education must not, then, desire powerfully and prematurely to develop the thinking activity before the intelligence is really fully grown.

--The superficial thinking which many teachers demand in the sphere of religion is no less impractical than the want of all guidance into rightly ordered meditations on religious subjects. It is natural that the lower form of intelligence should, in contrast with the higher, appear to be frivolous, because it has no need of change of form as the higher has, and on this account it looks upon the destruction of the form of a picture or a dogma as the destruction of religion itself. In our time the idea is very prevalent that the content itself must change with the changing of the psychological form, and that therefore a religion in the stage of feeling, of conception, and of comprehension, can no longer be the same in its essence. These suppositions, which are so popular, and are considered to be high philosophy, spring from the superficiality of psychological inquiry.--

-- 164. The theoretical culture of the religious feeling endeavors therefore with the freedom of philosophical criticism to elevate the presupposition of Reason in the religious content to self-a.s.sured insight by means of the proof of the necessity of its determinations.

This is the only reasonable pedagogical way not only to prevent the degeneration of the religious consciousness into a miserable mysticism or into frivolity, but also to remove these if they are already existent.

--External seclusion avails nothing. The crises of the world-historical changes in the religious consciousness find their way through the thickest cloister walls; the philosopher Reinhold was a pupil of the Jesuits, the philosopher Schad of the Benedictines.--

II. _The Practical Process of Religious Culture._

-- 165. The theoretical culture is truly practical, for it gives man definite conceptions and thoughts of the Divine and his relation to him.

But in a narrower sense that culture is practical which relates to the Will as such. Education has in this respect to distinguish (1) consecration--religious feeling in general,--(2) the induction of the youth into the forms of a positive religion, and (3) his reconciliation with his lot.