The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century
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In his plan for the University of Berlin Fichte suggested that in modernity the unity of knowledge that was available to the Greeks—paideia—was no longer possible. Therefore, universities could no longer claim paideia as their foundational principle. Moreover, since the emergence of print culture, universities have lost their monopoly as centers for dissemination of knowledge. To acquire knowledge, one might as well simply read books. What, then, should be the function of the modern university? Fichte gives an interesting answer to this question. Echoing Kant’s essay “The Contest of the Faculties,” he argues that philosophy should become the leading discipline in a modern university, because the main function of the university is to teach students how to engage in a self-guided pursuit of wisdom. He compares a university professor to an “artist of knowledge.”22 The ideal university as envisioned by Fichte is a kind of platonic academy where preliminary memorization of questions and answers is not allowed and only a live debate can take place. This liberal scenario envisions the university as a podium where philosopher-artists perform before a group of initiates, demonstrating to them what it means to think sharply and beautifully at the same time. In order to secure such intellectual vigor and preserve the university’s independence from the state with its pragmatic interests the university should not limit its faculty to full-time or ordinary professors. Instead it should allow all qualified scholars and scientists to serve as extraordinary professors as long as they can attract students. Those who proved themselves most capable, including both Prussian scholars and subjects of other German states, would be considered as candidates for full-time professorial appointments.23
Schleiermacher’s plan appeared in 1808.24 If Fichte was the leading philosopher of the day, Schleiermacher was the most productive and influential theologian of the early Romantic movement. Through his original interpretation of Plato Schleiermacher was able to arrive at an innovative approach to Christian theology, which he called “philosophical theology.”25 Plato also looms large in Schleiermacher’s pedagogical writings. Thus, for example, Schleiermacher believed that the rulers and functionaries of the state should not only respect the academy, but also maintain an intellectual relationship with the academic community. The spirit of philosophical inquiry reigning in the academy would consequently extend to the practical realm.26 He also insisted that teaching at the university level should be based primarily on dialogue between teachers and students.27
The academic community as conceived by Schleiermacher included Gymnasia, universities, and academies. As a place where the youths spent their most important formative years, the university was the central and most important link in this chain. Therefore, the university had to be granted certain privileges, including complete intellectual freedom and administrative independence. Importantly, according to Schleiermacher’s plan, the rector of the university of Berlin was to be elected by the faculty instead of being appointed by the king. Furthermore, like Fichte, Schleiermacher believed that the university faculty should not be limited to ordinary professors, but should also include Privatdozenten. Through keeping its doors open to independent academics the university would reaffirm its intellectual independence from the state.28
Following Fichte, Schleiermacher also believed that the academic community should conceive of itself as a national (German) body. Therefore, it should allow subjects of all German principalities to compete for teaching positions and enroll as students.29 Schleiermacher also shared Fichte’s and early Romantics’ egalitarian ideals and insisted that universities should be open to members of all estates.30
At the University of Berlin Schleiermacher served as the dean of the theological faculty four times (1810–11, 1813–14, 1817–18, and 1819–20). He also served as rector to the university in 1815–16.31
Humboldt drafted his project for the new university in 1809.32 By this time he had already written quite extensively on both Bildung and public education.33 Humboldt envisioned a university as a place where each student could embark on an independent intellectual quest, realizing his unique potentialities. He wanted to divorce the university from the idea of vocational and professional training and make Bildung the proper goal of higher education. Consequently, the University of Berlin was conceived as a structure where learning and scholarly research would blend into each other. In practical terms, this meant that the newly created university and the already existing Berlin Academy would merge into a single academic organism.34 Fichte and Schleiermacher had already hinted at the desirability of such a merger, but only Humboldt thought through its practical ramifications. For example, given that the academic appointments were made through internal elections, such a merger would once and for all free the new university from both ideological and bureaucratic control by the state. Humboldt also strove to make the academy-cum-university financially independent from the crown by means of a land grant.35
Like Fichte and Schleiermacher, Humboldt favored a more dialogic approach to education. Once the University of Berlin was founded, seminars and practicums came to replace lectures in a number of disciplines, including especially classical and comparative philology (the two disciplines that Humboldt himself practiced throughout his career) and natural sciences (which took a new shape under the leadership of Alexander von Humboldt).
23.4 SCHOOL REFORMS
The reform of the Prussian educational system accomplished during Humboldt’s tenure as a minister also included a reorganization of the secondary schools and Gymnasia. Humboldt and his collaborators, including F. A. Wolf, Johannes Schulze, and Johann Wilhelm Süvern, sought to reform Gymnasia in such a way as to put greater emphasis on classical languages and literatures. A new curriculum for the Gymnasium was drawn up by Süvern. Although the ongoing War of Liberation prevented this document from being published, it was circulated among many school superintendents and came to serve as the blueprint for the modern German Gymnasium. The disciplines that received the largest amount of hours, according to this plan, were Latin, Greek, and mathematics. In addition, 30 hours per month were devoted to history and geography and 20 hours each to religious instruction and natural science.36 The progressive tendency of this plan can be appreciated by comparison with the standard curriculum of the old grammar school, where the principal subject was Latin composition.
Another objective pursued by the reformers was to provide students with an adequate preparation in classical and modern languages (including German, French, and Italian), which Humboldt and his colleagues saw as the key to all historical and philosophical knowledge, as well as in mathematics, which was considered the gateway to natural sciences. The revised curriculum also included physical training and training in some practical crafts. Importantly, regulations were issued concerning the education of the teachers and a special examination—pro facultate docendi—was introduced by a designated edict of July 12, 1810.37 This new examination raised the calling of the secondary school teacher to the rank of a profession. No appointment was to be granted henceforth to anyone who had not passed this examination.
Prussian education suffered from a period of reaction under the rule of Frederick William IV (1840–61), who tried to cut back on Humboldt’s reforms and instead reintroduce a heavy dose of dogmatic religious instruction. However, the only subject that was in fact seriously curtailed was natural science as it was particularly suspect from the religious standpoint.38 Throughout this period some humanists continued to struggle to restore the classical Gymnasium created by Humboldt, while others believed it to be out of step with the age of industrial expansion and promoted the new “semi-classical” or “Real” Gymnasium and “semi-classical” secondary schools or Realschulen. During the Bismarckian era the push to disseminate the rudiments of culture as well as basic technical and scientific knowledge among the broader masses of the population provoked lively debates on the future of German education.39
It was in this context that the young Friedrich Nietzsche argued, in his 1872 lectures On the Future of Our Educational
Institutions, that the state’s growing need for basically educated people had led to the vulgarization of culture and the emergence of the so-called “cultural philistines” whom Nietzsche compared to new barbarians.40 Without wishing to denigrate the Realschule, whose useful role in society he was willing to acknowledge, Nietzsche pointed out that the true way to resolve the deepening culture crisis was by giving more attention to the classical Gymnasium, the traditional antechamber to the university (still seen as the domain of free intellectual inquiry and self-creation where one enters sufficiently prepared by prior schooling). According to Nietzsche, the slackening of standards in the Gymnasium went hand-in-hand with the loss of spiritual fortitude—the fortitude that had been attained through forging a spiritual connection between Germans and Ancient Greeks, which had once revived German culture.41 Nietzsche lamented the decay of the once so powerful philological tradition and urged his readers to strengthen it.
23.5 THE RISE OF PSYCHOLOGY: FROEBEL AND HERBART
Modern interest in the inner life and individual psychological development of individuals from early childhood through adolescence and to adulthood can be traced back to the late seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries. A major breakthrough in this field was accomplished by Rousseau, whose novelized treatise Émile, or On Education(1762) forcefully attacked the French Enlightenment view of instruction as a mechanism of inculcating rational principles and moral norms in the mind of a child viewed as a “little barbarian.”42 However, it was only after Herder and the early Romantics began to explore the interrelationships between the child’s psychological and linguistic development—a process where a crucial role belonged to mothers and nannies—that the disciplines of psychology and pedagogy in their modern sense began to take shape.43
It is hardly surprising that the pioneer of early education and modern psychologically grounded pedagogical theory, Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852), studied philosophy under Fichte at the University of Jena precisely at the time when early Romanticism took shape as a movement.44 Froebel was a great believer in the Pestalozzian principle of self-activity, which in his interpretation fit together with the Fichtean philosophy of the subject. Thus Fichte taught that both the theoretical and ethical selves should be seen as “spontaneities.” The activity of the practical “I” was the key to the notion of the “I” in practical reason. In other words, the subject came to be understood as a self-generating “deed-action” (Tathandlung) rather than a determinate entity.
Upon his graduation from Jena, Froebel visited Pestalozzi’s school at Yverdun where he had an opportunity to acquire first-hand experience of the Pestalozzian method.45 But while Pestalozzi’s system embraced all levels of education, Froebel limited his own focus to the earliest stages of child development. In Froebel’s experimental preschools, called “kindergartens,” toddlers were viewed and treated as potential agents and were encouraged to express their individuality through a variety of media, including drawing, telling stories, creating skits, and games. In fact, Froebel was the first pedagogue to insist on the educational value of play at a time when most educational theorists were still hesitant to assign it such value.46 The kindergarten movement founded by Froebel took off and quickly spread beyond the borders of Germany. It was particularly successful in Britain and North America, where it gained many wealthy and enthusiastic supporters.47
Another Jena graduate who went on to transform the field of pedagogy was Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841). A co-founder (with Fries and Beneke) of the neo-Kantian movement, Herbart was one of the first philosophers to approach epistemology from the standpoint of experimental psychology. One of the consequences of this psychological turn was an intensified interest in pedagogical theory, which Herbart sought to provide with a scientific ground. He began articulating his pedagogical theory in Pestalozzi’s Idea of an ABC of Sense Perception (1802) and Systematic Pedagogy (1806), where he laid out his main pedagogical principles and the famous method (which is commonly known as the Herbartian method).48 Following in the footsteps of the Enlightenment and early Romantic theorists of Bildung, Herbart believed that the ultimate goal of education and instruction is the formation of a child’s personality. Thus he laid special emphasis on the training of the child’s will, which he saw not as a special faculty of the mind, but rather as an intellectual-cum-psychological force produced by “representations” [Vorstellungen] implanted and developed through instruction. The famous Herbartian teaching methodology consisted of the following five steps:
(1)preparation, a process of relating new material to be learnt to the materials the pupils have already learnt in order to arouse their interest;
(2)presentation, that is, presenting new material through showing concrete objects or discussing relevant experience;
(3)association, assimilation of new ideas to the ideas the students had already developed and discussed, implantation of the new ideas in the mind;
(4)generalization, a procedure designed to develop the mind beyond the level of the concrete; and
(5)application, or using the knowledge acquired during a lesson in such a way that it becomes a vital part of one’s mind.49
In the Herbartian curriculum mathematics, natural science, history, geography, and languages (classical and modern) were all equally important. The teaching of languages, however, was not limited to grammar and composition, but also included literature, which Herbart saw as an especially powerful vehicle of moral instruction.
In 1808 Herbart was called to the chair in philosophy at Königsberg, which had been previously occupied by Herbart’s intellectual hero Kant. Herbart remained in Königsberg until 1833, when he decided to move to Göttingen. This decision was evidently prompted by Herbart’s distress over the conservative turn of Prussia’s government. However, the years he had spent in Prussia were the most productive time in Herbart’s career. Throughout his tenure there he conducted a seminar on pedagogy and published one of his most significant works, Psychology as a Science Newly Founded on Experience, Metaphysics, and Mathematics (1824–5). Herbart’s influence continued to grow throughout the 1840s and 1850s, as his pedagogical method gained Europe-wide recognition.
23.6 MODERN PHILOLOGY AND WELTLITERATUR IN THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY
Among intellectual fields that emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century modern or “new” philology (as opposed to the classical one) deserves special attention. Tracing the development of this quintessentially Romantic discipline and its sister fields, such as historical linguistics and comparative literature, allows us to appreciate the political dimension of the intellectual breakthroughs that began to occur in Prussia during the first decade of the nineteenth century and quickly spread out to the rest of Germany and many other European countries.
It was Herder’s pioneering studies of comparative literature and folklore that paved the way for the revolution in philology, which gained full speed at the time of the Humboldtian educational reforms.50 Wilhelm von Humboldt himself as well as a number of like-minded intellectuals and scholars, including especially Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, served as the prime movers of this epistemic and disciplinary revolution, which granted the study of modern languages and literatures the status of a respectable academic field. It would be incorrect, however, to give full credit for this coup to Herder and the Romantics alone, for the intellectual breadth and versatility that distinguished these thinkers were rooted in the European and German Enlightenment. Indeed, Herder’s and early Romantics’ enthusiasm for various modern and ancient, European and non-European, languages and cultures bespoke the exploratory and encyclopedic drive which they inherited from such predecessors as Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alambert, and other French philosophes, as well as from Winckelmann, Wieland, Lessing, and Mendelssohn.
It is noteworthy, however, that the concept of Weltliteratur emerged in eighteenth-century Germany.51 Indeed, while Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau were among the first modern thinkers to conceptuali
ze cultural difference and examine French culture from the point of view of the “Other,” their approaches were still marked by a strong center vs. periphery bias. Furthermore, as Galin Tihanov reminds us, in French culture the term “cosmopolitanism,” which signified a lack of a fixed abode, for a long time carried pejorative connotations. It began to be viewed in positive terms only toward the beginning of the nineteenth century—in part as a result of the intensified cross-literary contacts between France and Germany.52
In Germany, as opposed to France, “cosmopolitanism,” especially in the cultural sense, entered the intellectual vocabulary already as a positive concept. For Kant, Herder, Goethe, and the Jena Romantics exposure to other cultures and worldviews was an important—and for some of them even a sine qua non—aspect of individual development. In particular, Herder (whose work on folklore from all over the world was clearly one of the main inspirations for Goethe’s conception of Weltliteratur), Goethe, and some of the Romantics gave the cosmopolitan ideal a very concrete significance by connecting it with such practical tasks as the study of languages, translation, and the meticulous philological and critical analyses of texts. To be sure, the term Weltliteratur as used by Goethe still echoes to some extent the aristocratic idea of “worldliness” (the notion to which Wieland had subscribed).53 However, Goethe’s “world” is neither limited to the confines of a salon not tied to a specific world capital or center. Instead Weltliteratur projects a worldwide democratic community or network of writers, translators, critics, publishers, and readers.54 As Goethe pointed out in one of his conversations with Eckermann, every writer should see himself as part of this emerging community, lest he grows narrow-minded and provincial.55