Chapter One- The
Modern Dialog
Introduction
No Child Left
Behind (NCLB) is an initiative of the
federal government put forth by the Bush administration to insure a high
quality of education in the
Because of the high expectations, and the increasing
pressure from the government and media on schools to perform, school leaders
are forced to adopt what I refer to as a techno-scientific approach to
education. By techno-scientific I mean
that they are using a paradigm that has its roots in the late sixteenth century
and has been consistently bolstered throughout the modern, scientific age. This age, in its maturity, is steeped in an
unwavering faith in the scientific method. It embraces technology as the sole
reliable means to accomplish an important task: to evaluate the performance of
a district, a school, an individual student, and for that matter the
performance of a particular teacher.
Many twentieth century thinkers have seen this as a crisis. Some have gone as far as labeling it a crisis
in metaphysics (Neil Postman), while others see it is an epistemological crisis
(Fritjof Capra). Perhaps it is an
intricate combination as emphasized by Huston Smith. In this case, a crisis in metaphysics – an
overdependence on materialist ideology at the expense of realization of the
immaterial world – eventually leads to the crisis in epistemology because it
fosters a theory of knowledge based solely on empirical observation. Such an approach to learning leaves out an
essential component of humanity and disconnects us from our roots.
The Renaissance thinkers in some sense invented the idea of
studying history in order to place oneself in the historical drama. Perhaps the
Renaissance is thus the perfect place to begin this study as well. Eugene Rice provides a great survey of the
period in The Foundations of Early Modern
Can the Renaissance search for
wisdom and attempt to restore the classical belief in human dignity help guide
us in a post-modern world? Mark Gilderhus, in his History and Historians: A Historiographical Introduction, reacts to
Henry Ford’s claim that history is “bunk” by asking:
Why
bother with the study of history? What possible connections exist between an
increasingly remote past and our own predicaments in the present? Can stories
about other peoples in other places and other times have any meaning in an age
of vaulting technology and traumatizing change? Is it reasonable to think that
anyone can benefit from the experiences of others in presumably unprecedented
and perilous times? (Gilderhus 1992, 1).
It is my
contention that the study of history from a humanities perspective is not only
a worthwhile endeavor but one that is necessary. A humanities approach to history could be
defined as a narrative of humanity’s ideas and intellectual movements that have
shaped and ultimately created the society in which we currently find
ourselves.
The New Learning: All Over Again
The techno-scientific paradigm creates a lopsided curriculum
by satisfying its materialist and sensationalist (empiricist) cravings with
quantifiable studies. But it raises the question: what is, in fact, left
behind? I argue that modern education
needs a balanced curriculum, a holistic one. Valuable lessons may be gleaned
from intellectual movements in history that have shaped who we are today. Defining a purely humanistic curriculum may
be impossible. In fact, one might argue
that humanism is responsible for the current situation because by the end of
the eighteenth century the word humanist itself had acquired a completely
different meaning, one that had been manipulated by the scientific age and
would come to be known as an atheistic approach having sole faith in the
progress of humanity. Modern intellectual
culture has forgotten the roots of Renaissance humanism. Its original motivation was to bring balance
and the role of the humanist was to seek the best the world has had to offer
and bring it back into the discussion. For the humanist like Erasmus “all of
what is best and vitally important to mankind can be found in the texts of
classical antiquity,” but in this world he would have few followers
(Foreword by Eugene Rice in Woodward 1963, xvi). At
the most literal level, Renaissance humanists based their curriculum on the
reading of classical literature in their original Greek and Latin. How valuable
or practical would that be in the modern sense?
Eugene Rice Jr. asks: since humanist education was based in
the classics, and denial of this would seem to undermine the tradition
completely, is there hope for the “new learning” in modern times? This question
is twofold. First, if we are able to see humanism in light of its historical
foundation, mainly on the social and cultural constructs it was designed to
meet, can we conclude that “it has become a historical curiosity,” and second,
“whether its traditional principles and ambitions can be given new meanings
appropriate to our own society and to our own sense of what a civilized man
should be” (Ibid. xvii)?
I offer him an answer.
Humanism cannot be bought in a can off the shelf. As an intellectual
movement, it may be placed in a particular time and context. Perhaps certain definitive tenets could be
applied as well, e.g., the admiration of classical literature. The energy that fuels the movement, however,
transcends space and time. It exists eternally, yet lies dormant until it is
called upon. What did the Renaissance
humanists seek in the work of Plato? Why
did a new interest in the mystery religions emerge? Why did 15th century scholars feel
the need to reexamine questions that had been answered in the 13th
century by Aquinas? Or even in the 5th century by Augustine? More importantly, why would they use ancient
literature? Raffaele’s
Whenever a
collective worldview is challenged, it appears that humans look back to the
basics. Humanity becomes faced with an
essential question: what does it mean to be human? When a paradigm becomes
burdensome and lopsided, humanity seeks to correct it by finding balance. There is much to say about equilibrium as
there is much to say about virtue in moderation. Yet the power of paradigm is overwhelming. My
research has shown that the humanities have always played an important role in
society, especially one in transition.
My project demonstrates that scholars in the humanities need to work for
curricula that seek to uncover core human values. It also calls for a reappraisal of what the
term humanism means in modern terms. The
ultimate role of the humanities is to determine what it means to be human in
the context of a particular place in time.
It relies on all the available sources and attempts to construct a
holistic paradigm that is balanced.
As I set out to answer the questions posed by both Rice and
Gilderhus it became obvious to me that I needed to look beyond the surface of
the Renaissance humanist movement. I needed to delve deeper than simply their
methodology and discover the philosophy behind it. Raffaele’s depiction of the eternal dialog
became a helpful guidepost and it became my task to apply this image to three
periods of history where intellectuals were engaged in some sort of
conversation regarding social crisis. I
tried to focus on crises with metaphysical and epistemological implications,
and on thinkers who saw education as a key factor in solving the crisis. My answers are discerned through an
analysis of humanist sentiment in three intellectual movements: The Italian
Renaissance, the Enlightenment – which I see as the major turning point of the
Scientific Revolution – and American Transcendentalism. I have found that in these times of crisis,
the classical humanist legacy has made its presence through the pedagogies of
intellectuals who were prominent in each crisis. The humanities approach is timeless and a
humanist curriculum that analyzes the world in a
holistic manner, incorporating the best the world has to offer, could help
enhance our understanding of what it means to be human in an age of advanced
technology. A fresh understanding of the
transcendent attributes that are inherent to humanity – ethics, metaphysics,
imagination, intuition, and aesthetics – would lead humans to a position of dignity,
responsibility, and compassion.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, these questions are especially relevant. It is helpful to consider the Zeitgeist of our current society. Scholars of the twenty-first century find themselves in the midst of a great dialog. This conversation revolves around the idea that our modern world is experiencing a kind of crisis. Scientists, philosophers, literary figures, and educators have all had a part in this discussion and it seems that many facets of society are affected by it. It would be foolish to tackle the discussion in its enormity, but it could be whittled down to a single discussion. Most aspects of the dialog, whether they are philosophical, political, or literary, describe a valid fear. The advancement of technology in the 20th century was stupefying and it has certainly contributed to a dramatic change in the worldview of the West. These cataclysmic changes in worldview inevitably beg timeless metaphysical questions. What will happen to the human condition? There has been a consistent concern that a techno-scientific world would produce a faceless population, a mass-produced society.
This discussion of the modern crisis places education as a pivotal factor in the fear. In some cases, education is described as the cause; in other cases it appears to be the victim. Yet in all cases, education seems to have the power to correct or somehow reverse the perceived crisis. The potential for correcting a social crisis seems to exist at all levels of academia. A person’s formation in the empirical sense happens in primary and secondary schools. In such a sense it seems plausible that a plan aimed at curbing the mass-production of humanity should be founded on the desire to balance modern techno-scientific paradigm in our schools. Yet when one considers the formation of teachers, it seems equally plausible that reforms should begin in the realm of higher education.
Before launching into a discussion of the historical crises of the past, it is important to set out the case studies in the proper context. The purpose of the first chapter is not to prove that the western world is currently in a state of crisis. It is simply to outline the works of intellectuals from several disciplines who are in fact arguing this point. The chapter will set up the suggested crisis, tracing the threads that contribute to the dialog. Key conversants in the modern discussion will be introduced in regard to the concept of scientism, a term used by these writers to refer to the metaphysical and epistemological imbalance. The fear of dehumanization will be addressed with special concern for social justice, the dignity of man, and man’s relationship with nature. The following three chapters consist of particular historical case studies. The first part of each chapter describes the zeitgeist, and technological and intellectual changes that ultimately contributed to a shift in worldview. The second part of these chapters focus on the pedagogical response to the change: what were the philosophers concerned with education saying? The last part of each stresses the action taken in each case and discusses some of the repercussions of those actions.
Chapter One- Part
One: A Techno-Scientific Society
The Background
The purpose of this brief section is to demonstrate, from a
very broad perspective, the legacy of ideas that has contributed to the modern
techno-scientific paradigm. One might
attribute the move toward a techno-scientific approach to the positivist movement
that followed the work of nineteenth century French thinker August Comte. Positivism spread rapidly throughout western
society and played an important role in the scientization of academic subjects,
and was especially instrumental in the creation of the social sciences. Ian Barbour, however, more astutely traces
the roots back further to the marriage of math and science, a time where a new
concept entered into the minds of the educated: that all matter is calculable
and the ultimate expression of this belief is the materialist culture that
clouds our modern systems of education and ultimately ethics. The key feature was “the combination of
mathematical reasoning and quantifiable observation.” (Barbour 1997, 9). Jacques Ellul’s The
Technological Society demonstrates this point. Copernicus devised the
mathematical reasoning to explain a geocentric theory but he needed the
technology to demonstrate it. Galileo had it. As soon as the telescope was used
as an instrument to demonstrate a mathematical concept, the marriage was
consummated and the techno-scientific approach was born. Others have placed
Galileo in this same pivotal position.
It is undeniable that his feet were in two separate worlds. He was a man
of the medieval world and he was certainly familiar with the Italian humanists
of this day. At the same time, however, he was paving the way for the modern
scientific world and helped create a new set of lenses through which life
itself would become an observed specimen.
According to Barbour, the next step
in the division involved the work of Isaac Newton. “Newtonian physics suggested an image of the
world as a machine following immutable laws, with every detail precisely
predictable” (Ibid. 18).
The Enlightenment’s scientization of
education had a significant influence on modern culture. The philosophes became
the apostles of
The industrial revolution, which followed the
Enlightenment, under the techno-scientific paradigm forced dramatic change upon
educational institutions. In many ways,
science and technology developed an intricate codependency. Educational
theorists N. Edwards and H. G. Richey claim that “science and invention,
translated into technology, were incredibly improving methods of production and
increasing the output of industry,” and further, that “it is clear that with
each passing year [during the American Industrial Revolution] the US was caught
more firmly in the grip of a technological revolution” (Edwards and
Richey 1963, 395).
Shortly after, “the percentage of the nation’s children and youth
attending school increased rapidly; the school term was lengthened and
attendance made more regular; and education was given more adequate financial
support” (Ibid. 497). Curriculum became an
important issue and schools became the perfect training ground for the young
industrialist society. “Leaders of each community included in the educational
program the content and the activities that seemed to them desirable”
(Ibid 530). These new motivations stemmed from the
revolution itself. Education was a tool
that created useful citizens. The term
“useful” in this case says nothing about balance, virtue, or any of the
Renaissance values. It came from a utilitarian mentality and from capitalism.
Education: A Question of Purpose
This discussion of modern pedagogy inevitably leads to a
question that educational leaders have to consider wholeheartedly: What is the
purpose of modern education? The
twentieth century Catholic philosopher of education, Jacques Maritain, said
“the education of man is a human awakening” (Maritain 1943, 9). As far as John
Dewey was concerned, “the instructor becomes a guide and motivator to the student”
(Ediger 1997, 6).
Both of these contain some elements of the Renaissance. Yet, despite these noble pronouncements, this
age of advanced technology has begun to take its toll on the way we teach.
In accepting the techno-scientific approach to education,
we must accept its means of assessment which is objective, reductionist and
standard. It is the child of technology
and it suffers from the limitation off attempting to measure the
immeasurable. One of the major concerns
for our leaders is the evaluation of tests as fair measurements. The objective world, in its techno-scientific
paradigm has reduced education to a universal matrix that dehumanizes students
by transforming them into data. This
matrix must be reduced further into a collection of objective – perhaps
multiple choice – questions that must serve as an accurate representation of
the educational big picture. It is
arguable then, that we have allowed this technology to dictate what we
teach. American education critic, Peter
Sacks, is adamant that “the American public has put its education system under
unprecedented pressure to remain accountable, and ensure that their children
know what they need to know to survive and thrive in this brave new economy”
(Sacks 1999, 33). But how do we determine what they need to
know? Indirectly, the tests define it.
Neil Postman proposes that some of the culpability is the
result of an American myth:
If you will pay attention in school, and do your homework, and score well on tests, and behave yourself, you will be rewarded with a well-paying job when you are done. Its driving idea is that the purpose of schooling is to prepare children for competent entry into the economic life of the community… any school activity not designed to further this end is seen as a frill or an ornament- which is to say, a waste of valuable time. (Postman 1996, 28)
Education
is once again seen as a means to an end: the end being a standardized worker
that will join the ranks of the anonymous working masses.
The classical idea of education has
been lost in favor of a quantifiable alternative. The
The main
purpose of standardized testing is to sort large numbers of students in as
efficient a manner as possible. This limited goal, quite naturally, gives rise
to short answer, multiple-choice questions.
When tests are constructed in this manner, active skills such as
writing, speaking, acting, drawing, constructing, repairing, or any of a number
of other skills that can and should be taught in schools are automatically
relegated to second-class status. (Bowers 1989)
Hence the
frequent lament of teachers that have had funding for the arts cut out of their
school’s budget.
Whereas Postman labels contemporary culture as technopoly
(adjusting itself to suit the needs of technology), Sacks calls it a
meritocracy (concerned entirely with the results of standard testing), which
seeks to put individuals into general academic categories that affect the
formation of each student, labeling each as a success or failure from an early
age. He continues: “Unfortunately, the public largely accepts the legitimacy of
this tool of the meritocracy, believing the exams are accurate predictors of
success for individuals and good measures of the quality of our schools”
(Sacks 1999, 2).
His research provides three conclusions.
First he claims that the “crooked yardstick” has “questionable ability
to predict one’s academic success.” Next
he concludes: “Standardized test scores tend to be highly correlated with
socioeconomic class.” He calls this “the Volvo effect” and cites the SAT as the
biggest offender. Thirdly, his research
has shown him that the tests “reward passive, superficial learning,” which in
turn will “drive instruction in undesirable directions and thwart meaningful
educational reform” (Ibid. 7-8).
In the original design, the standardized test in education
was used almost exclusively for student assessment, to determine aptitude,
ability, etc. The last two decades have witnessed an intensive upsurge in
high-stakes testing. Most of the
standardization reforms, according to Sacks, are driven by a governmentally
instilled fear. Two reports issued from
the White House on education alarmed the populace. A Nation at Risk, in
1983, and America 2000: An Education Strategy, in 1991, both made the
case that foreign countries (first
NCLB refers to its foundational five pillars as “common
sense” and the common sense that it denotes is “what works based on
scientific research” (USDOE Web Site “No Child
Left Behind FAQ”). Is this really common sense? Whose
common sense is it? The legislation does make school improvement sound simple
and it offers some hefty promises to parents, teachers, and principals. It claims that parents can expect to “know
their children's strengths and weaknesses and how well schools are performing; they
will have other options and resources for helping their children if their
schools are chronically in need of improvement”
(Ibid.).
Teachers are promised the “training and resources they need for teaching
effectively, using curricula that are grounded in scientifically based
research; annual testing lets them know areas in which students need extra
attention” (Ibid.). It promises that principals could expect to
have access to the “information they need to strengthen their schools'
weaknesses and to put into practice methods and strategies backed by sound,
scientific research” (Ibid.). Then, to keep
everyone on their toes, it promises that “superintendents will be able to see
which of their schools and principals are doing the best job and which need
help to improve” (Ibid.).
The troubling piece is not the fact that the government
wants to improve education nor that it wants to increase accountability for
failing schools. What is not clear is
the constant reference to “sound, scientific research,” and what it
implies. It may be necessary here to
note the definition devised by the Department of Education in order to see what
“sound, scientific research” is.
According to the NCLB document:
No Child Left Behind sets forth rigorous requirements to ensure that research is scientifically based. It moves the testing of educational practices toward the medical model used by scientists to assess the effectiveness of medications, therapies and the like. Studies that test random samples of the population and that involve a control group are scientifically controlled. To gain scientifically based research about a particular educational program or practice, it must be the subject of such a study. (Ibid.).
So far,
using their own assessment methodology, their science has been shown to be a
failure. Between 1975 and 2000 federal
spending on education more than tripled; yet reading scores on the standardized
tests dropped slightly.[3]
The question is: where will this research focus if the past twenty five years
have shown no improvement with increased spending? Secondly what happens to the things that may
be steadily improving in our schools but cannot be quantified?
Education in the Twentieth Century
The twentieth century has been a tumultuous time for
American educators. The country has
risen to the top of the world militarily, technologically, and
economically. With that rise has come an
enormous level of responsibility to which the American mind has yet to
adjust. One of the biggest problems of
the twentieth century is “man’s inhumanity to man” (Cobban 1960, 17). Ethics have taken a
backseat to personal gain, and rules for the acquisition of these achievements
seem to be fading. Stephen Covey noticed
a change in success literature written in the past century. He claims that older literature spoke of success
based on character, “things like integrity, humility, fidelity, temperance,
courage, justice, patience, industry, simplicity, modesty, and the Golden Rule”
(Covey 1989, 18).
He found that the more recent success literature was superficial and
focused on “social image consciousness” (Ibid.).
Part of the reason stems from the immense changes that the
world has recently undergone. The century saw two devastating world wars and
witnessed unimaginable destruction that has been intensified by rapidly advancing
technology. It saw man walk on the moon
and gasped at the advent of a nuclear age.
Organs have been transplanted; artificial ones have been implanted,
while modern medicine gives the impression of being headed toward the
acquisition of human immortality.
Advances in communication and travel have tremendously decreased the
size of the world. Has education kept up
with the flow of life? Have we attempted
to bring morality, the transcendent, and metaphysics back to our
classrooms? “
The techno-scientific paradigm appears to exclude the
transcendent function of education. W.J.
Battersby in his work on Jean Baptiste De LaSalle, discusses the problems of
modern secular education: “In nothing are we separated more completely from the
ideas and aims of our forefathers than in our modern practice of separating
religion from education” (Battersby 1949, 5).
He believes that the modern movement has been carried out radically and rather
than taking an objective approach to discussing the transcendent in public
schools, it has taken on a militant attitude that abhors its inclusion in
curriculum. Neil Postman reiterates this
belief in his evaluation of the modern interpretation of the First
Amendment. “This has been wisely
interpreted to mean that public institutions may not show any preference for
one religion over another. It has also
been taken to mean, not so wisely that public institutions should show no
interest in religion at all” (Postman 1999, 172). Bryan Appleyard refers to a new
religion, (Appleyard 1992) “scientism,” that
developed in 20th century schools and Huston Smith’s work, Why Religion Matters, discussing the
same term “scientism,” claims that schools are inclined to enforce atheism as a
religious alternative (Smith 2001).
The twentieth century Catholic monk, Thomas Merton,
expressed concern that in the educational system the means oftentimes gets
confused with the ends. He went further
to mention that self-discovery should be the number one outcome aspired for in
schooling (Del Prete 1990, 30). In this
philosophy, the teacher acts as a spiritual guide, leading a student into his
or her God-given vocation. Alfred North Whitehead, another twentieth-century
philosopher of education, formulated a similar theory. For him, “the aim of education is to help in
the production of a person, to secure for him a balanced growth of individuality. The self-production arises from an innate
passion which must be fed and satisfied” (Brumbaugh 1963, 180). This resembles the
ideas that came out of the Renaissance, yet an important component has been
stripped from the original version. The American Transcendentalists who will be
discussed in Chapter Four, came closest to the original claiming that a
particle of God existed in all of us.
These Transcendentalists, however, were considered to be “vague, visionary,
and fantastic” by many of their critics (Leighton 1968, 3). They were alluding to that transcendent leg of education,
the one that remains immeasurable and is thus deemed unimportant in the agenda
of the modern school. The humanists of
the fifteenth century maintained this dimension while humanists five centuries
later gave up on it.
Social and cultural constructs are forcing modern humanists
to look away from the transcendent to the point that our original intentions
and methods of pedagogy become nebulous even to ourselves. Society demands results and the government
has defined those results. The burden is
ours to produce those results, even if they are contrary to our own
beliefs. Our students have become raw
materials. In 1991 Lee Iacocca spoke to a conference hall full of
teachers. He said: “Your product needs a
lot of work, and in the end, it’s your job…your customers don’t want to hear
about your raw materials problem- they care about results” (qtd. in
Sacks 1999, 72). His approach is an unquestionable
reflection of the corporate American mentality.
In regard to this attitude Sacks comments: “Government or corporate leaders will often
argue that your neighborhood schools ought to function like any good business”
(Sacks 1999, 72).
The science and technology partnership took on a life of
its own and became the new paradigm for standard education in the twenty-first
century. The industrial revolution
helped make it happen as it urbanized the planet. For the first time in history the masses were
factored into the educational equation.
In one sense this helped bring about a great breakthrough in social
justice. But the techno-scientific,
objective reductionism cast a dark shadow and produced a sort of psychosis of
humanity deifying the material world. This techno-scientific god is described
by Postman in The End of Education:
To the
question, How did it all begin, science answers, Probably by an accident. To the question, How will it all end, science
answers, Probably by an accident. And to many people the accidental life is not
worth living. Moreover, regarding the question, What moral instruction do you
give us?, the science-god maintains a tight-lipped silence. (Postman
1996, 9)
“The
problem,” Postman continues, “is metaphysical in nature, not technical. And it
is sad that so many of our best minds in education do not acknowledge this”
(Ibid. 27).
From this new method sprang many new
applications for intelligence testing.
Some were quite radical. Charles Spearman, in his 1927 treatise The
Abilities of Man, admitted that “an accurate measurement of everyone’s intelligence would seem to herald the feasibility of selecting the
better endowed persons for admission into citizenship – and even for the right
of having offspring” (Spearman 1927, 8).
A standardized test is systematic and automated. It appears to make sense. In technological terms, it turns enormous
compilations of potential knowledge into ones and zeros, black and white, on
and off, yes and no, and any other categorized, objective answer. The progressive
philosopher John Dewey claimed that “our mechanical, industrialized
civilization is concerned with averages and percents. The mental habit which
reflects this social scene subordinates education and social arrangements based
on average gross inferiorities and superiorities” (qtd. Sacks 1999, 73). Postman agrees fears that we have become
subordinate: “The technology is here or will be; we must use it because it is
there; we will be the kind of people the technology requires us to be; and,
whether we like it or not, we will remake our institutions to accommodate the
technology” (Postman 1996, 39). Applying
this to education, we see that if it is averages and predictability that
technology prefers, we will remake our curricula and consequently ourselves to
fit into the “average” mold, fulfilling Postman’s prophecy.
Chapter One- Part Two: Views of the Crisis
20th Century Literature
Educational philosophers, sociologists and psychologists
are not the only critics of twentieth century education. Critics have come from other milieus as
well. Much of the fiction of the
twentieth century has shown a consistent concern for the state of the humanity
in the face of modern technology.
Literature can be seen as a snapshot of a particular place in time. When done well, it captures the Zeitgeist of
an age – its issues, concerns, mores, values, etc. – and transmits it to its
readers. For its contemporary readership
the purpose might be to inform, warn, or perhaps just awaken. For its later generations of readership, it
serves as a cultural recording, a tool to discern intellectual roots and to
glean valuable insights into the human condition.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931) has received tremendous acclaim from both the pop and science fiction worlds. Many have seen it as prophetic and perhaps apocalyptic as it attacks issues that have only begun to emerge at the beginning of the 21st century. His major concerns are reproductive technology, eugenics, and mind control. In the background, however, his voice is resounding as it addresses his fears of mind altering chemicals and the factory approach – the assembly line to be exact – applied to human life and the consequent dehumanization of mankind. His concerns are well stated and his points are well-taken, yet his work seems to be a caricature of the zeitgeist of his age.
He seemingly predicts some major events in biological and psychological engineering in humans. A couple of decades before the structure of DNA was discovered, Huxley was presenting a laboratory for reproductive technology. His lab connotes the modern idea of in-vitro fertilization, test-tube babies, cloning and sexless reproduction. His real fear it seems was the eugenics that was involved. One of the results of this reproductive engineering technology is the creation of a caste system that created leaders and workers for this dystopian society. This process and machination of humanity is intended to give order and structure to the world. All the parts are put in their proper places. These parts could be fixed as well. Mind control was practiced using different forms of media – things that had yet to be invented when the book was written.
His minor details are his most pungent points because they are all-pervasive. Mind control is more than just cultural brainwashing by the media. His use of a chemical called soma gave people a feeling of euphoria and made them believe themselves to be happy. Yet this euphoria is chemically induced and one might wonder if true happiness in fact existed, and if it did, could it be discovered by ordinary humans? This was artificial joy, created in a lab. Another permeating point which is not addressed directly is a disdain for the assembly line. The fact that years are measured in reference to Henry Ford provides a useful clue. The fear seems to be that this factory approach was to be the means for human production, perhaps not so much in a physical sense, but in the cultural sense.
Huxley appears to be a prophet of his times, especially since much of his detail seemed to lie in things that had not been developed yet. It is important, however, to remember that although Huxley, approached from a reader’s perspective in the 20th century, may appear to exist in a vacuum, the writer was a man of his time. The things he refers to may not have been part of the popular culture of the time but to certain circles of scholars they were not as far-fetched as they may appear. Eugenics was a common subject of conversation from the middle of the 19th century on. The effect of the assembly line approach and the machination of man was an issue that reverberated throughout the academic and philosophical world. This particular fear did actually make its way into popular culture through media like Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 movie, Modern Times. DNA was discovered years later, but the principles that precipitated and even warranted the discovery were certainly part of the scientific community.
Brave New World is a powerful portrayal of humanity gone bad. Too much reliance upon science, technology, and increasing government in the early to mid 20th century caused a major stir for many thinkers. Huxley did a fine job converting those fears, objections, and ethical questions into a powerful work of fiction. Brave New World went beyond mere fiction and presented a social commentary that would be sure to motivate one to action.
Orwell’s
novel 1984, almost three decades
later, picks up on some of the same concerns regarding the future of
humanity. Like its predecessor it
depicts a totalitarian state that uses deceptive means to control the
population. Both rely on technology as the chief vehicle for control. The aims of the technology differ in their
attempt to maintain power. For Huxley it was the pleasure principle; for Orwell
it was fear of punishment. But Orwell
also has much to say about the influence of modern education. He
sees that underlying the modern approach to academics is an inherent message of
docility, an attempt to keep the masses placated as to not throw sand into the
gears of the machine. Winston the main
character says: “But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious
of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise
up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies” (Orwell, 1981,
60). This leads the reader to wonder
how they could become conscious and to this Orwell presents a rather cryptic
postulate: “Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after
they have rebelled they cannot become conscious” (Ibid.). Mechanisms against this enlightenment are
inherent in the system. He feels that this rebellion could not take place
because the population was living in an illusory world in both planes of the
population. The proles were ignorant of
their condition. This is clear but why
did the higher plane not recognize the plight of the proles? He answers this too: “But simultaneously,
true to the Principles of doublethink, the Party taught that the proles were
natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the
application of a few simple rules” (Orwell 1981, 61).
The Party and the Capitalists decided what their constituents would think, know, and feel. They even used nationalism and patriotism as tools to accomplish their hidden agenda. The members of these higher echelons used the proles when they needed support but for the most part they left them to themselves in ghetto-like enclaves, as long as their ignorance was not disconcerting to the Party’s agenda. If it were, the matter would be dealt with. Furthermore, “when they [the proles] became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty, specific grievances” (Ibid. 62). The important issues “invariably escaped their notice” (62).
Huxley’s totalitarianism was accomplished by using technology to make the population content with their condition of servitude, thus subduing human nature’s inclination to revolt in order to achieve better living arrangements. They were unaware for the most part of the powers that seduced them because they were chemical and started at the moment of conception. The deception in 1984 is far more invasive. Orwell uses concepts like government sponsored lies, secret police, and surveillance to enforce his idea of totalitarianism. He says: “even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty” (Orwell 1981, 159). In this sense, if the technology can make it easier for the Party to stay in control on of its subjects, or at least to give the subjects the impression that they are being watched, that technology will then be fostered and exploited into the concept of Big Brother, which is “the guise in which the Party chooses to exhibit itself to the world” (171). Orwell’s technology controls the population using electronics and mass media to manipulate psychologically, whereas the populace in the Brave New World is manipulated chemically and physiologically by getting people addicted to artificially induced joy through eugenics, medication, and the endorphins that result from casual sex.
The reason why these have made it into the modern literature canon is obvious. They express real fears that are still pertinent and still open for discussion. They are perhaps sharper now that technology has carried the 21st century even closer to the dystopias that these authors prophesied. Sex is quickly becoming an official pastime of the 21st century. Doctors are relying upon drugs to help people feel happier. The government is increasing surveillance as threats of terrorism circulate in the minds of citizens. In addition, computer technologies have given the world’s “secret police” a passage into databases that can reveal almost anything about individuals. These phenomena are included here not as an attempt to prove the existence of a modern crisis but to demonstrate the power behind the literature that has been cited in this study. In Huxley’s story sex was completely separated from reproduction and perhaps from love as well. It was in a sense used as a means to keep people content – the modern day bread and circus. This is one of the reasons that his book is important in our discussion. In 1960, the “the pill” was introduced to, and immediately embraced by, the American public. “Since its introduction, it has been used by more than 60 million women worldwide. It has proved to be, in the opinion of many, the most socially significant medical advance of the century” (Snider 2001). Subsequently, modern culture – through its use of media such as TV, radio, internet, VHS, DVD, and print publications – has been consistently promoting casual sex as the norm of our culture. A study done by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 75% of prime time programs include sexual content, and even worse that 5.8 scenes per hour contain sex in some form – action, behavior, talk, etc. (Kunkel et al. 1999). A recent study showed that 75% of modern teens say that “TV shows and movies make it seem normal for teenagers to have sex.” (Peterson, et al. 1991). Perhaps as a result of this, a study in 1998 showed that 52% of high school boys and 48% of high school girls admitted to having had sex. (Moore et al. 1998). To add to the crisis, another recent survey showed that 42% of these students admitted having unprotected sex (Sonenstein 1998). These numbers are important for our discussion because it raises important questions that go beyond mere parallels between 20th century literature and twenty-first century education. One is left to wonder how a broken system, perhaps one that has even contributed to this social crisis, might help to rectify these problems.
Huxley’s
depiction of a feel-good pill that he called Soma has also found its ways into
the modern dialog of a perceived crisis.
The Internet is full of references to this modern dilemma. Antidepressant medication, developed in the
1950’s, has now “mushroomed from a modest market into a $12 billion industry”
(Goode 2002). Yet this is one area in which science has failed to keep up with
technology: “As much as scientists have learned about depression, they still do
not know enough to be able to aim chemical treatments precisely” (Ibid.). Antidepressants have become number two in the
sales of prescription drugs. In 2001, “according to NDCHealth, a company that
tracks drug sales, 7.1 million Americans took antidepressants, an increase of
700,000 over the year before” (Ibid.).
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a non-profit organization
that claims to be dedicated to investigating violations of human rights that
result from psychiatry, calls President Bush’s New Freedom Initiative, an act
for Americans with disabilities, “Psychiatry’s Brave New World” and that its
aim is for “totalitarian rule to diagnose at will” (CCHR website). The initiative is designed to aid Americans
with disabilities and sanctions the screening of children in order to catch
mental illness at an early age.
Perhaps
the most chilling reference to the dystopian literature of the past century is Michael
Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. While the movie itself will surely be
forgotten in the years to come, its claims demonstrate that an Orwellian
tradition is still alive in contemporary culture. Orwell claims that the Party didn’t want the
Proletariat to take a real interest in politics. “All that was required of them
was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary
to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations.” (Orwell 1981,
62). According to
The
veracity of these accusations – by political activists, movie directors seeking
shock value, or watchdog websites – is not important in this case. The point is that the words of A Brave New World and 1984, 72 and 55 years old respectively,
are reverberating in the society of 2006.
We are arguing and debating the sentiments of now passed science fiction
authors. Their snapshots were vivid and
in a sense their implications are timeless.
They present an impetus for serious inquiry about core human values. Indirectly, they are begging the question:
What does it mean to be human in an age of advanced technology? For this discussion, the poignant quote from
Orwell does not concern the purpose of war as a necessity to maintain fear and
thus social continuity as
In addition to the fear of
the dehumanization of mankind, twentieth century literature also exhibited a
genuine concern with man creating a science that would lead to his own
demise. This was spurred by the
development of nuclear power in the fifties.
Walter Miller’s 1959 science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, presented an apocalyptic vision that
reflects a cyclical view of history where man is driven to the brink of
extinction using nuclear power. Miller presents a shimmer of hope, however,
from a source both unexpected and uncommon in a work of science fiction – the
Roman Catholic Church. He masterfully
reproduces the Middle Ages after the fall of
What is Miller trying to
tell us? From an allegorical standpoint, perhaps a renewed moral sense has
become necessary. It seems that the
current zeitgeist is begging for it.
Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, while maintaining the
utmost respect for the sciences, stresses the role of the humanities – to
pursue issues of morality, which unfortunately do not get the same amount of
attention in the standardized tests and curricula. He states:
The biological
sciences tell us about the nature and processes of the living world and forces
governing physical objects; the more recently initiated social sciences inform
us about human nature, actions, motives, and possibilities. And- if less decisively than the scientific
disciplines- the humanistic and artistic disciplines also furnish information
and knowledge… they add
significantly to our understandings of the varieties of beauty and morality… (Gardner 2000, 32).
Other
works of twentieth century take a different view of American education. Evelyn
Waugh referred to his book, The Loved
One, as an Anglo-American tragedy.
The story revolves around a pet cemetery where the employees refer to
the dead animals as “loved ones.” The cemetery has all the allure of
When
Dennis Barlow met the Mortuary Hostess at Whispering Glades “He thought he had
seen her before everywhere…. She was the standard product” (Waugh
1977, 54). This is a clear criticism of
the perpetual sameness that our institutions are pumping out. The woman is referred to as a product,
showing that her construction was carried out by some standardized form.
Aimée
Thanatogenes is perhaps a better example of a broken educational system. Her studies stand as Waugh’s hyperbolic
symbol of shallowness. She studied beauty with a focus on oriental
studies and psychology. When asked to
describe exactly what she studied, she replied:
permanents, facials, wax – everything you
get in a Beauty Parlor. Only of course,
we went in for history and theory too. I
wrote my thesis on ‘Hairstyling
in the Orient.’ That was
why I took Chinese. I thought it would help, but it didn’t.
But I got my diploma with special mention for Psychology and Art (Waugh
1977, 91).
This is a direct statement about the
shallowness of American education. How
proficient could she have become in her studies? She essentially studied the science of beauty,
the art of the Orient and the social science of psychology. This is considered theory.
Joseph
Roth also portrayed a missing link in modern education in his 1956 book, Rebellion. The pathetic cripple named Andreas Pum lost
all that he had to believe in. As a brainwashed citizen he was content, but
after he tasted extreme misery he lost faith in his god and finally in the
state, a parallel with the crisis of modern humanity. Feeling completely betrayed by the system, he
laments: “Nature hasn’t blessed
me with sharp wits, and my feeble intellect was betrayed by my parents, my
school, my teachers, the sergeant major and the captain, and the newspapers I
was given to read” (Roth
1997, 116). Roth also makes a firm
statement about the existential life: “With every step, bitter and close to
tears, he sensed how insignificant he was” (Roth 1997, 56). “This God forsaken modern age!” Pum exclaims (Ibid.).
Perhaps
a more essential parallel between Andreas Pum and our present society is his
hurdy-gurdy. Pum was given a license to
play this barrel organ in the streets of his town.
Andreas carries his barrel organ on his
back with a couple of straps, like a kit-bag.
The left side of the instrument had no fewer than 8 screws. They are for the selection of the
melody. The barrel organ has eight
cylinders, among them the National Anthem and the “Lorelei.” (Roth 1997,
15)
In other words, his job was to choose
the appropriate song of the eight that were approved and consequently
provided. He also had to maintain the
tempo by cranking at the proper speed: “Depending on his mood, Andreas can
crank the handle so fast that the waltz comes out as brisk and martial as a
march” (Ibid. 16). For Pum, however,
this portable music became his instrument as he began to consider himself to be
a musician: “Things reached such a pass that his instrument ceased to be
mechanical to him, and he came to see virtuosity in his playing” (Ibid. 17).
Both
Roth and Waugh point to a crisis of technique in general as it leads to a decline
in the skills necessary in the arts and also the crafts and trades. This commentary is important to this
discussion because it relates to the perceived educational crisis on two
fronts. First it provides a critique of
technical education as a delusional mechanism for the students who receive a
false sense of accomplishment as with Pum and his “instrument.” On a deeper level, it can be seen as a
critique of teaching as well. As the
modern world struggles to define what the standard education should consist of
and as pedagogical philosophers strive to develop correct methodology, as if
teaching itself were a science with a very specific technique, we are falling
into the allegorical hurdy-gurdy. The
standardization of education and the scientization of the art of teaching are
putting a barrel organ of every teacher in the modern world. We approve and provide the material to be
taught and instruct the teachers to turn screws and choose the appropriate
tempo.
As
Roth demonstrates what becomes of man after receiving this prescribed technical
education, Sinclair Lewis describes the roots of the phenomenon. His satirical
character George Babbitt makes a statement about
He snatched from the back of his geometry book half a hundred advertisements of those home-study courses, which the energy and foresight of American commerce have contributed to the science of education. The first displayed the portrait of a young man with a pure brow, an iron jaw, silk socks, and hair like patent leather. Standing with one hand in his trousers-pocket and the other extended with chiding forefinger, he was bewitching an audience of men with gray beards, paunches, bald heads, and every other sign of wisdom and prosperity. Above the picture was an inspiring educational symbol--no antiquated lamp or torch or owl of Minerva, but a row of dollar signs.
(Lewis 1998, 86)
Getting degrees without wasting valuable
time at school seems like such a monumental innovation in a busy, technological
world and the dollar signs that serve as the “educational symbol” no doubt make
the idea seem more practical, business-like even. He goes on with his merriment:
I
can see what an influence these courses might have on the whole educational
works. Course I'd never admit it publicly--fellow like myself, a State U.
graduate, it's only decent and patriotic for him to blow his horn and boost the
Alma Mater--but s’matter of fact, there's a whole lot of valuable time lost
even at the U., studying poetry and French and subjects that never brought in
anybody a cent. I don't know but what maybe these correspondence courses might
prove to be one of the most important American inventions. (Ibid)
The Crisis from the Perspectives of Other Milieus
Fritjof Capra, a physicist, has also contributed to the
current dialog in recent years. His Turning
Point outlines a systems approach to life, focusing on the
interconnectedness of all facets of life. Capra describes the scientization
process that western culture has undergone in the past few centuries, and
further explains the roots and later development of Newtonian physics,
Cartesian reductionism, and eventually the failure of both. According to Capra, science and in a sense
society in general, is facing a crisis. In the world of science, old paradigms
– namely Newtonian physics and Cartesian reductionism – are failing to keep up
with new discoveries, a theory reiterated in another work from the history of
science, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions. Both claim
that society faces crises involving energy, health care, pollution, crime, and
environmental disasters. Capra’s thesis
is that “these are all different facets of one and the same crisis, and that
crisis is essentially a crisis in perception” (Capra 1983, 15). We are attempting to conform to
Cartesian-Newtonian science paradigm; however, we are in desperate need of a
new, holistic paradigm.
The Turning Point describes the crisis: “It is a striking sign of our time that
the people who are supposed to be experts in various fields can no longer deal
with the urgent problems that have arisen in their areas of expertise” (25).
Later he describes “the dramatic shift of basic concepts that has occurred in
modern physics,” and applies this paradigm to several areas of study: biology,
medicine, psychology, and economics (16).
In light of the interconnectedness of these disciplines, the urgency for
a holistic, systems based paradigm becomes evident. Capra’s major points can be
summed up in a simple statement: “As individuals, as a society, as a
civilization, and as a planetary ecosystem, we are reaching the turning point”
(33). He demonstrates this collapse of
the old system using several examples from modern science. His first major points outline the
Cartesian-Newtonian model. Its view of
life “as a mechanical system provided a ‘scientific’ sanction for the
manipulation and exploitation of nature…” (61). Furthermore it was atomistic which
provided the locus for future scientists to reduce the world into its lowest
terms. This reduction not only gives the
impression that the universe could be broken down but that a gap existed
between the material world and the immaterial world, and that being the
quantifiable component, the material world would come to be the main unit of
scientific exploration. One of the problems with the model, according to Capra,
is that the interrelationships between material components are lost.
The new physics undermined the foundations of the Cartesian-Newtonian
science. Quantum Mechanics, initiated by
Einstein in 1905, made reductionism useless because it showed that our smallest
particles contain yet smaller particles which made up a system that “has to pictured
as one indivisible, dynamic whole whose parts are essentially interrelated and
can be understood only as patterns of a cosmic process” (78). The reductionist concept became more nebulous
as ideas like the uncertainty principle and the notion of complementarity
entered the arena of the new physics.
These ideas show that “we cannot decompose the world into an
independently existing smallest unit” (81).
The idea of an interconnected web of relations becomes an essential
ingredient to the new physics and remains one of the biggest points purported
by Capra. The second theme is the
“realization that the cosmic web is intrinsically dynamic” (87).
Capra uncovers several problems in the modern sciences that
affect humanity on a regular basis.
Perhaps minor in regard to the grand purpose of his work, they provide
valuable insight by demonstrating the far-reaching implications of a
paradigmatic failure as such. In the
medical world our bodies are viewed as machines that are prone to break down. By focusing on smaller pieces of the body,
“modern medicine often loses sight of the patient as a human being, and by
reducing health to mechanical functioning, it is no longer able to deal with
the phenomenon of healing” (123). This
affects psychology as well.
Psychiatrists, with their degrees in medical science, attempt to
understand mental illness as a physical malady requiring medical
treatment. Psychologists, although their
ancient roots were in introspection, eventually adopted the Cartesian-Newtonian
model as well. The basic problem is that
neither group effectively adopted research that seeks knowledge about the
relationship between the two components: mind and body. According to Capra, Jung was the one who came
closest to closing the gap: “His basic concepts clearly transcended the
mechanistic models of classical psychology and brought his science much closer
to the conceptual framework of modern physics than any other psychological
school” (186-7).
Capra describes a modern crisis in science that permeates
all aspects of society. Modern knowledge
is built upon an old structural framework that no longer supports the
weight. It is imperative that a new
paradigm is adopted, but the transformation will not be easy. Modern scientific thought “comes very close
to the views of mystics and of many traditional cultures, in which knowledge of
the human mind and body and the practice of healing are integral parts of
natural philosophy and of spiritual discipline” (305). His points can be summed up as a wake up call. The new science is headed toward a radical
perspective that is based in holism.
This perspective is difficult to digest, especially by the traditional
scientific community. It tends to resemble mysticism, which falls out of line
with many of the sciences, especially those in the field of health.
Incredible technological growth is burdening life at the
moment. Stemming from the “emphasis on
reductionist science our culture has become progressively fragmented and has
developed technologies, institutions, and life styles that are profoundly unhealthy”
(234). The problems are “integral features of an economic system obsessed with
growth and expansion, continuing to intensify its high technology in an attempt
to increase productivity” (235). Based
on his observations that “[e]very organism - from the smallest bacterium
through the wide range of plants and animals to humans - is an integrated whole
and thus a living system” he comes to see the world from a systems view
(266). In sum: “Systems thinking is process
thinking; form becomes associated with process, interrelation with interaction,
and opposites are unified through oscillation” (267).
Capra uses several minor points that help to elucidate his
themes. His addition of economics to the
equation is hard hitting, especially as he refers to medications and
pharmaceutical companies that “saturate doctors not only with smooth sales talk
but also with briefcases full of drug samples, plus every imaginable
promotional ploy” like giving away expensive gifts to physicians prescribing
their brands. In addition to
recommending perhaps dangerous chemicals, the health care industry itself is
victim to the economic system “which has heavily invested in the technologies
that emerged from the reductionist view of illness” (261).
Capra lays the groundwork in the first part of The Turning Point by applying historical
methodology to trace the origins of modern science and by presenting examples
of how the Cartesian-Newtonian model is failing. The second builds on this by showing the
effects of technology on our ecology and discusses the economics associated
with that technology. Perhaps his most
salient point, and the one that makes his work relevant to this discussion, is
his reliance upon primary and secondary education to help disseminate this
worldview. Education is at a crossroads
and introducing holism will certainly be a beneficial step. This intention of
this education program “will be to make people understand how their behavior
and their environment affect their health, and to teach them how to cope with
stress in their daily lives” (333).
A Crisis of Metaphysics
Neil Postman seems justified in claiming that the problem
is metaphysical in nature if we evaluate the relationship between humanity and
technology. Specifically, the problem is
“productionist metaphysics conceived of making in terms of ‘actualizing’ or
‘effecting’ a thing, in the sense of
‘causing’ it to be present” (Zimmerman 1990, 223). This worldview in Heidegger’s eyes distorts
humanity’s knowledge of itself. According to William Lovitt’s evaluation of
Heidegger, “Man needs above all in our age to know himself as the one who is
claimed… So long as man does not know this, he cannot know himself; nor can he
know himself in relation to his world” (Lovitt, 1977, xxxiii). Without this metaphysical sense of being, man
runs the risk of becoming what Heidegger labels, “standing reserve” which
devalues the state of humanity to that of a commodity. In this extreme state, man is only worth what
he is able to produce. His being is
reduced to a raw material or worse, a machine. He proclaimed “that neither
intellect nor instinct would save modern man, who has been so ‘hexed by
machinations’ [machenshaften]” (Zimmerman, 1990, 106).
Heidegger noticed that the technological view of being – productionist
metaphysics – became exceptionally prevalent during the age of reason. Ideas of the movement’s originators, namely
Isaac Newton and René Descartes, were solidified by the Enlightenment figures
that successfully walled off metaphysics and placed rationalism on its
pedestal. Providing further damage to
modern academics was the strict compartmentalization of subject matter and the
loss of liberal education. According to Charles Van Doran in A History of Knowledge, this has been
happening at the higher echelons of academia since pre-Renaissance Europe, but
“after the war [World War II], the liberal curriculum was discarded almost
everywhere, and the departmental organization of the educational establishment
was installed at all levels below the university, even in many elementary
schools” (Van Doran 1991, 142). C.P.
Snow in The Two Cultures laments the
lack of communication that exists among these departments. They become separate worlds that remain
ignorant of and detached from each other.
From the perspective of the humanities, especially in an historical
context, it is impossible to separate ideas from one another no matter what
discipline each is rooted in. A faith in the techno-scientific approach, a
misconstrued relationship to technology, and compartmentalized education leads
to a mental imbalance, a psychosis in a sense, to the educated masses of the
post-modern era. Just as a healthy
person retains a balance between the mind, body, and spirit, a healthy
education should accomplish the same balance with an understanding of the
interconnectivity that exists between all knowledge.
Jung offers the hope that perhaps students of Heidegger will find useful. It is individuation. “Only by becoming conscious can a system of personality proceed to individuate. Presumably, this is, or should be, the ultimate goal of education, to make conscious that which is unconscious” (Hall and Nordby 1973, 83). Education should provide the key experiences in life that should cultivate the many facets of the human personality. In fact it is the essential role of education to do so. “Education, as the etymology of the word indicates, is a drawing out from the person of something that is already there in a nascent state, and not the filling up of an empty container with knowledge” (ibid).
A techno-scientific
education is not the answer. “Scientific
education is based in the main on statistical truths and abstract knowledge and
therefore imparts the unrealistic, rational picture of the world, in which the
individual, as a merely marginal phenomenon, plays no role” (Jung 1958,
20). Calculative thinking only forces
the development of lopsided personalities.
But a practitioner of education can offset the damage. “The more experiences we have, the greater
are the chances that the latent images[6]
will become manifested. That is why a
rich environment and opportunities for education and learning are necessary for
individuation in all aspects of the collective unconscious” (ibid 41).
Art in the curriculum could then “help make possible the
non-representational, non-calculative, meditative thinking which would usher in
the post-metaphysical age” (Zimmerman 1990, 113). Art is an essential
component, but the liberating art that is necessary must be free and clear from
the thralls of technology. Zimmerman
described the disparity well:
Heidegger analyzed the idea that great work of art is techné
in that it provides the gestalt that gives measure, limit, boundary, and
form to things. Modern technology is a
degenerate form of techné in that it imposes a highly constricting
measure upon things, so that they can show themselves only instrumentally.
(Zimmerman, 1990, 94)
But the true artist is powerful. “For Heidegger, the
thinker and the artists were ‘masks’ through which the being of entities could
manifest itself in its various stages” (ibid. 98). Thus the artist could in fact create a
clearing for being to reveal itself to the world. This true art, though, was not a
representation of reality as perhaps in the aesthetics of Plato. He rejected classical concepts of art as did
he object to the artistic movement of the Romantics, who claimed that art was
an expression of the soul. For him, “art
involves ontological disclosure” where the artist allows being itself to work
through him (Zimmerman 1990, 107).
To make the necessary changes will not be an easy task,
however. Because the study of pedagogy
itself is rooted in the scientific tradition. According to Phillip Jackson’s Handbook
of Research on Curriculum,
Curriculum studies can never successfully implement change
without addressing the fundamental problem within curriculum studies. This problem is that it has never extracted
itself from the mire of scientism – the mechanistic Newtonian world view which
finds its place in curriculum through the ideas of Dewey and Bobbit. (qtd. in
Nolan 1995, 1)
Judith Burton, Professor of Education at
Society is at a crucial point in development. A change is fast approaching and we need to
be ready when it arrives.
We are living in what the Greeks called the Kaupós- the
right time- for a ‘metamorphosis of the gods,’ i.e., of the fundamental
principles and symbols. This peculiarity
of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the
expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account
of this tremendous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through
the might of its own technology and science. (Jung 1958 page 123)
A change is inevitable.
Heidegger feels that the world becoming so technical is alarming, but
“far more uncanny is our being unprepared for this transformation, our
inability to confront meditatively what is really dawning in this age”
(Heidegger 1966, 52). If the world is truly moving in a rhythmic pattern and if
somewhere hiding in the shadow is a drive to reclaim human individuality, then
a well-rounded education may be the only viable way to draw it out.
The humanistic legacy as it has woven itself through
western civilization seems to be an apt specimen to be observed. Although the names and places have changed,
humanist ideology has persisted in the twenty-first century. This study traces that legacy, analyzes the
changes and modification that the movement has experienced, and labels the core
elements of its core philosophy. Most
importantly it demonstrates that the current crisis is part of a timeless
dialog, one that is depicted by one of the Renaissance humanists, Raffaele, in
his
Chapter Two- The First Case Study
The Triumph of “The New Learning”
Introduction
The book Humanism and the Renaissance complements Houghton Mifflin’s Problems in European Civilization series. Zachary Schiffman, the book’s editor, in the first line of his preface raises an important issue, thus highlighting the problem that the series seeks to address: “The Renaissance is such an inherently confusing period that debates about its nature have become the chief occasion for calling the whole enterprise of historical periodization into question” (Schiffman 2002, ix). The period referred to as the Renaissance seems more like a period of major transition. It fits neither the period that preceded it, nor the one that would follow. Yet it contains elements of each. The more one digs into the period the more apt one will be to find things that are very definitely medieval lying side by side with things that are very definitely modern. It may be helpful to see these centuries as a composting station. The more the mix is turned, the more it begins to blend together and what emerges is the fertilizer that will nourish the modern era. Four questions emerge here: What was thrown into the mix? What caused the pile to be turned and mixed together? How would the compost then be used to fertilize the next generations? What role does education play in this transition and what pedagogies were employed?
Part One will respond to the first two questions. It will describe what medieval elements were tossed into the composting pile. It will also address some of the causes, mainly in the fourteenth century, that served to shuffle the mix. Lastly, it will describe in detail the dissipation of the medieval worldview by analyzing the deterioration of institutions that are indubitably characteristic of the Middle Ages. This is the crisis that the Renaissance Humanists will focus on and Part Two of this case study will dissect their responses to demonstrate their desire to take the best that the world of their day had to offer and place it in direct dialog with those considered to be the best of what the ancient world had to offer. In sum, the chapter will show that these humanists sought to bring equilibrium to a system that they saw to be off kilter and that education was seen as the chief vehicle of for the attainment of this balance.
Chapter Two Part One: Chaos to Crisis
Fourteenth Century Chaos
Perhaps the most obvious supplier of fourteenth century chaos is the infamous Black Death; yet the bedlam stretches much deeper. In the foreword to her monumental work, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, Barbara Tuchman claims that her original intention was to determine “the effects on society of the most lethal disaster in recorded history,” referring to the plagues of 1348-1350 (Tuchman 1978, xiii). She found that the answers were elusive because the century bore the burden of so many strange and debilitating blows that “its disorders cannot be traced to any one cause; they were the hoof prints of more than the four horsemen of St. John’s vision, which had now become seven – plague, war, taxes, brigandage, bad government, insurrection, and schism in the Church” (Ibid.).
Tuchman next draws an interesting parallel to our current crisis, which has become a cornerstone in this particular study. Referencing James Westfall Thomson’s comparisons between the early twentieth century and the fourteenth century – citing “economic chaos, social unrest, high prices, profiteering, depraved morals, lack of production, industrial indolence, frenetic gaiety, wild expenditure, luxury, debauchery, social and religious hysteria, greed, avarice, maladministration, decay of manners” among the similarities – she makes a poignant declaration. She points out that “in a period of similar disarray … it is reassuring to know that the human species has lived through worse before” (Ibid. xiii-xiv). Thus the important question for this study is raised: How exactly has the species not only endured worse, but ultimately risen from the crisis and turned the situation around toward the betterment of society?
Another important factor in the fifteenth century chaos involved a massive shift in ideas. The fourteenth century suffered some devastating blows physically and spiritually; however these factors cannot be fairly weighed separate from the technological and ultimately the intellectual advances of the period.
Famine and Plague
The
fourteenth century got off to a bad start agriculturally. The
The
Black Plague struck the Sicilian seaport of Messina in October 1347 when a
Genoese trading ship returning from the Crimean city of Caffa loaded with dead
and dying sailors covered in black, oozing, egg-sized boils. They contracted two types of bubonic plague,
both carried by fleas that infested the fur of black rats. The first type was blood borne, caused
internal bleeding and buboes, and was spread by physical contact. The second type was pneumonic and was spread
through respiratory infection. “So
lethal was the disease that cases were known of persons going to bed well and
dying before they woke, of doctors catching the illness at bedside and dying
before the patient” (Tuchman 1982, 92).
By 1350 the plague stretched from
The
terror wrought during those few years was debilitating. As peasants lay dead in streets and fields,
survivors became isolated and grew apathetic, “leaving ripe wheat uncut and
livestock untended” (Tuchman 1982, 98). Although the peasant class suffered the
greatest loss in numbers, the aristocracy was undoubtedly affected. As described in Boccaccio’s Decameron, many rich families were able
to retreat to their rural estates where their chances of survival were
better. This was especially true of many
of the well-to-do merchant families in
The crisis that ensued during the plagues could not be satisfactorily explained in human terms. Naturally people sought supernatural answers to justify the devastation. Some blamed the disaster on the work of demons. For others the event was apocalyptic, measuring up to the biblical story of the flood. Up to 2000 penitents at a time – praying, carrying relics, and beating themselves – took to the streets seeking God’s mercy. “Beyond demons and superstition the final hand was God’s. The pope acknowledged it in a Bull of September 1348, speaking of ‘the pestilence with which God is afflicting the Christian people’” (Tuchman 1982, 104). The medieval mind set out to define the heinous sin that had brought upon such a divine chastisement. According to Tuchman, among the culprit sins were: greed, usury, avarice, worldliness, adultery, luxury, and irreligion (Ibid.).
War
Western
Europe was certainly no stranger to warfare before the fourteenth century;
however, the long, drawn-out battle between
The
Hundred Years War on the surface was a war between
In some ways, the Hundred Years War might be seen as the last medieval war and simultaneously as the first modern one. Lynn White Jr. places the 8th century invention of the stirrup as the pivotal point in the development of medieval warfare (White 1964, 28). A mounted cavalry became the key feature of the battlefield. It allowed men the stability and mobility required to fight off the back of a horse. The excessive cost and training involved in this new warfare created a niche that could only be filled by the nobility themselves. White claims that initial investment of equipment, not including maintenance, feed, outfitting and supporting a squire, etc, was about the cost of “twenty oxen, or the plough-teams of at least ten peasant families” (Ibid. 29). In effect this facilitated the evolution of the three-tiered purposeful system of living in a feudalistic society. Those who fought eventually moved from a makeshift peasant militia to an elite society of noble knights. “By about 1000, miles had ceased to be ‘soldier’ and had come to be ‘knight’” (Ibid. 30).
By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the technological tides were once again changing. Some historians have claimed that the key to Joan of Arc’s success as a military commander was in her inexperience as a knight. Others, who had been trained in traditional military tactics, were at a disadvantage because the new battlefield was unprecedented. Archers could set a barrage of arrows from 300 yards away at a rate of “ten to twelve arrows a minute in comparison to the crossbow’s two…” (Tuchman 1978, 70). Besides the English longbow, gunpowder made its mark on the European battlefield. Its emergence “added a small but potent new element of military and social change” (Gies 1987, 166). Knights were trained for hand-to hand combat which was becoming obsolete as the fourteenth century pressed on into the fifteenth. Armored knights were as vulnerable to the death wrought by gunpowder as other men in the field. Armor may have even served as a disadvantage for the knight. Eventually other hand-to-hand fighters, such as squires and men at arms, who were cheaper to outfit, gained a status that almost equaled that of a knight.
If
it was military technology that helped create the medieval knight and solidify
the feudalism of the Middle Ages, then it was military technology that led to
the destruction of the knight and thus contributed to the decline in the
feudalistic life. The Hundred Years War became the stage for this to
happen. As early as the 1250s reports
begin to show evidence of the use of explosives in war. In 1258, “what were probably true rockets are
mentioned at
According to technology historian Arnold Pacey, a Florentine document in 1326 “shows the city authorities were acquiring ‘metal cannon’ and iron shot as if they were already commonplace” (Pacey 2001, 49). In fact, he notes that the period in Italian history after the turn of the fourteenth century experienced an “arms race” (Ibid. 52). Regardless of the exact date of the first use of cannons, they were undeniably a factor in the Hundred Years War. In The Medieval Machine, Jean Gimpel asserts that the French Army “had been defeated by an English army with superior military equipment, including the first cannons…” (Gimpel 1976, 235).
By the fourteenth century the status of the knight had diminished and in the fifteenth kings like Charles VII (1445) began to organize professional standing armies composed of cavalry, archers, and foot soldiers (Gies 1987, 196). One of his knights, Jean de Bueil (1405-1478) reflects this in his autobiography which is paraphrased in Gies’ The Knight in History: “Modern war, said De Bueil, was a profession, not a sport.” He continues, “Knights who had spent their lives at court were not fitted for it, either in hardihood or skill” (Ibid. 197). Andrea Hopkins, in A Chronicle History of Knights, points to a curious phenomenon of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: “the refusal or reluctance of men who were by birth and fortune eligible for knighthood to take it up” (Hopkins 2004, 156). One factor may have been the constantly rising price of maintaining one’s role as a knight. Gunpowder raised the cost of a knight’s equipment because it required much stronger and increasingly resilient plate armor.
Other factors contributed, however, to the decline of the medieval knight. The honor of knighthood had been extended to non-nobles throughout the fourteenth century. “Knighthoods began to be given as rewards to successful burghers whose services had been financial rather than military and, at the other end of the scale, to professional soldiers of lowly birth [men-at-arms], who could be dubbed on the battlefield” (Ibid. 157). There had been no criteria in place regarding the dubbing of knights. Tradition only said that a knight could be dubbed by someone who was already knighted. Although for many centuries, the nobility had attempted to confine this dubbing to those soldiers who ranked among them, by the fifteenth century it was no longer universally assumed that noblemen, because of their social status would pursue the vocation of knighthood. Furthermore, knights were almost indistinguishable on the battlefield and monarchs began providing their standing armies with horses and armor and knights found themselves fighting side by side with common soldiers – squires, sergeants, and men-at-arms (Ibid.). These factors helped to set knighthood into serious decline.
Warfare,
especially the Hundred Years War, served as a major fourteenth century factor
that led to the crisis of the fifteenth century. Campaigns turned into useless power struggles
among the old noble families of
New Non-Military Technologies
Developing
technologies in other areas besides the battlefield contributed to the shift in
medieval identity in the fourteenth century.
Technologies that enhanced agriculture, navigation, and eventually
time-keeping came to adjust the way the three tiered medieval society looked
upon each other. Agricultural
advancement created a surplus that required less manual labor than it had in
previous generations. Navigational
technology made it possible for sailors to chart courses along longitudinal
lines as well the latitudinal lines (the latter being perfected centuries
earlier). Finally the clock gave man one
more constraint to be held accountable to.
The pragmatism of medieval life dissipated into a void of purpose. “Considering the generally slow tempo of
human history, this [thirteenth and fourteenth century] revolution in machine
design occurred with startling rapidity” (White 1964, 129). Arnold Pacey attributes this revolution to
the fall of
As a result of both astronomical
discoveries and experimentation with weight-driven machinery, “towards the
middle of the fourteenth century, the mechanical clock seized the imagination
of our ancestors” (White 1964, 124).
Canto X of Dante’s Inferno,
written between 1316 and 1321, contains the earliest literary mention of the
clock claiming that the machine “calleth up the spouse of God” (Gimpel 2003,
154). Pacey claims that “astronomical
observatories were the most characteristic institution for dissemination of
ideas about mathematics, clocks and some types of technical drawings
(especially scale maps)” (Pacey 1990, 96). By 1341, these clocks adorned the
cathedrals of most of
While contributing to man’s quest
to discover God, new technologies like the clock had an adverse effect on the
human condition. James Burke and Robert Ornstein claim that the clock was a
form of “control technology” which originated in the monasteries to help
assemble for daily prayers and then spread to other realms of society (1997,
109). Soon villages began installing
community clocks which “gave guilds and governments the means to regulate all
behavior” (110). To reinforce their
claim they cite an example from the town records of
Lewis Mumford takes this a step further by claiming that time-keeping is one of the key technologies that eventually led to the industrial revolution. He states: “the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours; but of synchronizing the actions of men….The bells of the clock tower almost defined urban existence” (Mumford 1963, 14). Two important developments occurred as a result of this new definition of the human experience: “Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions,” and secondly “it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences: the special world of science” (14-15). For the medieval mind, “the true order of space was Heaven…the true measure of time was Eternity” (20). After the fourteenth century this all began to change.
Jean Gimpel – an historian who
claims that after the invention of the mechanical clock the West faced a
technological decline – explores Mumford’s comment on the clock. He claims that
although Mumford’s theories on the Benedictine origins of the clock are today
disputed, “his views on the role of the clock in the evolution of
Taxes, Bad Government, and Insurrection
For
most of the Middle Ages taxes were imposed as “an established and perpetual
obligation…. without any part of them being directly appropriated for the
public interest” (Pirenne 1952, 207). In
many cases extensive taxation became the only means a king had to clean up the
mistakes that either he or his forbears had created and in a place where the
first two of the three estates were exempt from taxation, the burden fell on
the backs of the third estate. One
example, stemming from the Hundred Years War, comes from
While agreeing to support an army of 30,000 for one year, the Estates took a stand. Since the taxes behind this financial support came from the third estate, they would be the ones to administer it. A committee was formed to pay the troops directly without interference from the king’s administration. Eventually the tax burden was to be shared by all three estates and when that wasn’t enough taxes were increased by means of salt tax. “The new rates amounted to a tax of 4 percent on the incomes of the rich, 5 percent on the middle class, and 10 percent on the lowest taxable class” (Ibid. 142). This is pertinent to this discussion for another reason. It is one more element in the Renaissance transition that eventually contributes to the fertilization of the modern world[13].
The
result of the terrible tax burden was troublesome for the French. They suffered another debilitating military
defeat and to make matters worse, King Jean II was captured and held for ransom
in London, some of which was paid by the Estate, some by the sale of valuable
castles and fortresses, and some by the sale of Jean’s eleven year old daughter
Isabelle into marriage with the son of Italian tyrant Gian Galeazzo Visconti,
Duke of Milan. The third estate
meanwhile struggled for control of
According
to Michael Mallet, the calamities of the fourteenth century “mark a dividing
line between the Middle Ages and the modern world.” (Mallet 1997, 63). At the same time, however, “the Italian
Renaissance was firmly rooted in the
fourteenth century, the century of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, of Giotto,
Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and Simone Martini” (Ibid.). Political instability, the rise of despotism,
increased commerce and the development of big business were all contributing factors
to this change. As new forms of
government began to take root, new and more elaborate sources of revenue were
required. This, according to Mallet, was
one of the major issues leading to the “divided fifteenth century” as he
states: “the costs of government and the needs of the state were soon to
outrun, not so much the economic and fiscal resources of those states, as the
willingness of the economic elites to contribute on the scales required” (Ibid.
68). The real problem was that these
rapidly developing states lacked the political unity that was necessary to form
lasting systems of government. Leadership became nothing more than the
incessant bickering of the rival elite families in the major cities. In addition, the church added to the confusion
by supporting some despots over others and actually encouraging and bankrolling
several insurrections. One example is
Pope Sixtus IV’s support of the Pazzi conspiracy in
Schism in the Church
The
Great Schism added to the chaos and confusion of the fourteenth century and
although it was resolved early in the fifteenth, its shadow was cast over the
remainder of the century. According to
Tuchman, the schism is rooted in the days immediately following the plague but
it began to sprout a quarter of a century later. She claims that “war for control of the
Anti-papal
sentiment in the major Italian city-states was a direct result of such
misfortunes. The 12th century
battles between the Guelphs and Ghibellines[16],
as described in Dante’s Inferno, once
again raged.
Gregory,
who had been living in
One of the last legacies of the
medieval world, and one that by modern standards defined the medieval
worldview, was cracking at its foundation.
Since the beginning the papacy had stood for stability, unity, and
spiritual authority in
For
the common people, the authentic Church leadership was nebulous. Nobody was
sure who was pope, Clement or Urban. This was a rift that even death could not
heal. Boniface IX was elected in
A new council met in November of
1414 at
The Rise of Capitalism
Another
factor, perhaps one of the most significant, in the collapse of the medieval
worldview was the gradual yet persistent rise of a capitalistic culture. It not only created a sense of individualism
in its adherents; it also helped to create a void in moral philosophy and civil
ethics. The old standard was ill
equipped to handle the new issues that would inevitably arise out of an
entirely new social and economic system.
Many historians will argue that the rise of capitalism is an offshoot of
the calamities and crises that we have discussed here. In fact, Max Weber in his famed Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism claims that big business and a focus on individual
business-driven wealth did not exist in pre-Reformation days. His claim was that the crisis forced cultural
changes in
The
Middle Ages inherited their tastes in food and fineries from the glory days of
As
the Middle ages pressed on and the markets took root, a significant textile
trade gained momentum. Medieval
technology – a phrase that is sometimes seen as an oxymoron – played a key role
in this textile industry just as it had in the modern period. In the 12th and 13th
centuries, the spinning wheel was introduced, increasing production
three-fold. Another innovation was the
treadle-operated horizontal loom which was quickly followed by the horizontal
broadloom. A third great development of
the time was the water-driven fulling machine. According to Hunt and Murray
these three implements increased production to a “level that was not exceeded
until the late eighteenth century” (Ibid. 40).
Industrialization
in the cities led to an influx of migrants from the hinterlands providing the
opportunity for the “exchange of commodities between the middle class and the
rural population” (Pirenne 1952, 156).
The migrants served other purposes besides just an expanded
clientele. Hunt and Murray note that
Florence’s third set of city walls, built in the fourteenth century “enclosed
an area five times the area of its second set built in the late twelfth
century” (1999, 42). Jean Gimpel points
out that this new population became the urban proletariat that fueled the
expanding textile industry – a remarkably modern concept. In Florence, to make and finish a typical
piece of cloth “necessitated no less than twenty-six different operations, each
performed by a specialist,” a system that is not unlike the modern assembly
line approach (Gimpel, 1976, 104). He
claims further that “fourteenth-century Florentine industrialists were
perfectly prepared to introduce some of the more reprehensible practices later
adopted by nineteenth-century British industrialists” (Ibid. 105). One of these
was granting advances in money or over-valued products that would need to be
repaid in labor. This ensured the stability
of the relationship because of the workers’ dependency on the employer.
Another
effect of this medieval spirit of capitalism was its influence on the
educational system of the day. The
typical scholastic education of the day required mastery of Latin – reading,
writing, and speaking – and the study of theology, both of which were no value
to the typical merchant.
Merchants,
however, did not require mastery of a dead language or the subtleties of
dialectical argument, but rather the ability to read and write vernacular
languages and to grasp the basic elements of mathematical calculations. As a
result, in most European cities of the twelfth century, schools were
established to teach the basics of a merchant education – a movement that did
not go uncontested by the clergy, who felt their monopoly on education to be
threatened. (Hunt and Murray 1999, 50-51)
Hence
the roots of what we would now call vocational education, a phenomenon that is
also resurrected in the modern, post-industrial society. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
most members of the merchant class could read in the vernacular since business
records were generally kept in it.
Another capitalistic creation of
the High Middle Ages that contributed to the dissipation of the medieval
worldview was the development of systems of credit. These needed to be elaborate enough to
circumvent the Church’s prohibition on usury.
The key technique was the issuing of bills of exchange. Granting loans for interest was
considered usury, immoral and thus illegal under canon law. The Medici, a good illustration of this
technique, specialized in converting money[19]
and buying and selling foreign currency. One of the techniques that the Medici
mastered was the bill of exchange, which took the place of a loan. “It did not
consist in discounting as practiced today, but in the negotiation of bills
payable in another place and usually in another currency” (DeRoover 1963,
11). The Medici dealt with merchants
that did business throughout
During
this capitalistic development, it is important to note, businessmen “could not escape
the fact that in no European legal jurisdiction was there such a concept as
‘inalienable rights’: there were only legal privileges” which meant that “one’s
legal standing depended on either the customary privileges attached to one’s
legal status as a noble, peasant, or burgher” (Hunt and Murray 1999, 75). The old system of ethics provided no map for
appropriate actions. The issues
concerning fairness, justice, property, fraud, and dishonesty were new and a
new legal system was needed to address these concerns. St. Thomas Aquinas concluded in the third
article, object 1 of his Summa Theologiae
(written between 1266 and 1273) that man is governed by an eternal law that can
be discerned through reason. In this sense, “it would seem that the reason of any
person is competent to make laws” (Aquinas 1988, 15). Yet, a century earlier,
The University in Bologna had begun a serious approach to the study and
application of Roman law, especially as compiled by the emperor Justinian in
his attempt to reunite the East and West,
to Medieval society. By the
thirteenth century law was an important part of the University and legalism was
beginning to take root.
Hunt
and Murray demonstrate that by the fourteenth century,
One
of the best chronicled business news events of the Middle Ages was the sudden
crash of the super-companies in the 1340s.
The conventional reason for the collapse is that the super-companies
were victims of their own greed, suffering huge losses on their excessive loans
to finance Edward III of
Hunt
and Murray contend that others have blamed changes in the gold-silver
ratio. Whichever the case, the collapse
of big business in the fourteenth, combined with the calamities already
discussed certainly added to the chaotic atmosphere of the fifteenth century.
In two and a half years, every super-company disappeared. None reappeared (Ibid. 119).
Fifteenth Century Crisis
Old
socio-political systems began to erode and by the fifteenth century they posed
a serious threat to human dignity and purpose.
The century inherited a veritable mess.
Economically,
Beyond economic disintegration and the dissipation of the feudal way of life, the plague had also tapped into an “underground lake of guilt in the soul” for succeeding generations (Tuchman 1982, 105). What had they done to earn such punishment? How would they reform society to avoid more of God’s wrath? These were among the questions that comprised the legacy handed down to the fifteenth century mind. In addition, the schism had not only lowered the esteem of the church further but “the breaking-up of the old unity of the Faith and the rise of nationalism…were advanced by the schism” (Tuchman 1983, 520).
Although
the Council of Constance (1414-1418) officially ended the schism in the Church,
the lasting effects of the split were devastating. “By the second half of the
fifteenth century the papal monarchy had become an Italian principality” (Strayer
1982, 175). Maintaining temporal
authority grew increasingly important, especially after 1453 when
Constantinople, the spiritual sister-city to
The
misadministration and abuse of powers in light of the church’s fourteenth
century of lost esteem, influence, and credibility caused a new movement, one of
ecclesiastical reform. The precedent was
set that the pontiff could and sometimes should be judged which caused early
fifteenth century churchmen to seek alternative religious direction. The Franciscans reverted back to the
primitive life prescribed by their founder.
The Dominicans experienced a revival due to the disciples of both
Catherine of Siena and Antoninus – the Archbishop of Florence, a reformer, and
“one of the first of the specialized moral theologians” (Hughes 1954,
151). Thomas á Kempis published his Imitation of Christ which established a
new sense of piety. John Hus, in
The most striking aspect of Lollard doctrine …is its virulent anticlericalism. Lollards not only condemned the clergy for their wicked lives but also denied that they had special powers conferred upon them as a result of their ordination… [and] that priests were not able to effect any of the seven sacraments…. Lollards repudiated other elements of medieval Catholicism, such as fasting, pilgrimages, the adoration of saints and the keeping of holy days as inventions that had no basis in scripture. (McSheffrey 1995, 8)
The circulation of such ideas caused much stirring in the fifteenth century world. Who would guide the moral lives of man? Was religion a personal activity and not a communal one? Was there really no human representative of God on earth? Other reformers tried to make sense of it all.
Italian humanism, a movement that
had been forced into hibernation through the course of the cold fourteenth
century, would become revitalized in the fifteenth century and would begin to
address some of the issues that made up the fifteenth century crisis. An old paradigm, the medieval one, stood on
shaky ground yet a new one had not fully emerged yet. The age of Christendom was being threatened
by some modern tendencies and the humanists saw a holistic perspective, one
that sought balance as a viable means to resolve the crisis. To understand the humanist movement and its
relevance to this case study, it is important to be familiar with some of the
characters that provide the backdrop in fifteenth century
Chapter Two- Part Two: The Humanist
Response
Italian Humanism
By the last decade of the fifteenth century, the pieces of a broken worldview seemed hopelessly scattered and Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola found himself in a precarious position as he struggled to reform and preserve what was left. In some regard, his death might be considered the boundary line after which the modern period began. For one, he took a stand against the extravagance that abounded throughout the Italian peninsula, in the church and in the rising merchant class. He lashed out against the bankers who were fueling the materialism:
‘You have found many ways of making money, and many exchanges, which you call lawful but which are most unjust; and you have corrupted the offices and magistrates of the city. No one can persuade you that usury is sinful; you defend it at the peril of your souls. No one is ashamed of lending at usury; nay, those who do otherwise pass for fools… Your brow is that of a whore, and you will not blush. You say, a good and glad life lies in gain; and Christ says, blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall inherit heaven’ (Durant 1953, 146).
The
Renaissance has been seen as a rebirth of humanity. The rebirth can be
described as a holistic cultural awakening.
Technology, as we have seen, became a focal point for the Renaissance
mind. New techniques were developed for
art, music, and even government. Technology also enhanced scientific knowledge
by becoming an extension of man’s five natural, God-given senses, enabling
science to move beyond its roots in natural philosophy. At the same time, the humanist movement called
some religious dogma into question, sharpening man’s knowledge of his
metaphysical reality. Humanity, through
the interpolation of science, technology and metaphysics, was discovering
itself more fully than ever before.
Crises like the Black Death and the Schism brought the church into decline. In addition to contributing to the church
decline because of its inability to deal with the mass deaths, it also put the
so-called physicians on the stand because of their inefficiency. The decline of the knight and the addition of
a new mercantile class led to a mixed up legal system. Super businesses too began to decline by the
fifteenth century. Inevitably, these
changes led educators to question the traditional system in vocational
education: theology, law, medicine and business. Humanists looked at a new mix
of pedagogical ingredients. This mix was
beneficial insofar as it balanced humanity as an important, active entity in
God’s world.
Humanism thus became the “the new learning,” an approach that has been described as the quest for individuality on both a personal level, and a social one. Paul Johnson claims that “the Renaissance was the work of individuals, and in a sense it was about individualism” (Johnson 2002, 25). Out of this notion of individuality, and certainly with the aid of the printed vernacular word, a sense of community had begun to develop. The printing press ushered in a new era in human civilization. Burke and Ornstein say: “Printing broke up the Catholic Church and stimulated capitalism, modernizing a largely medieval society” (Burke and Ornstein 1997, 123). Local communities began to see themselves as individual entities. By 1500 there were ten million books in print, and the majority of these were printed in the vernacular, which increased the world’s sense of membership in a particular group (Boorstin 1985, 533).
These groups were based on the spoken language, which
led to an increased sense of nationalism and by making information available,
ethnic groups were able to come to know the history of their people, giving
them an even greater sense of belonging (Burke and Orinstein 1997, 132). As towns began to attain independence from the papacy, they
gained a new identity. In 1482 the town
of
Along
with the idea of individuality came a renewed interest in the classical world[22]. This neo-classical movement allowed several
things to occur. First, a renewal of
literacy in the classical Greek and Latin allowed ancient texts to be
reinterpreted. Second, as Italian merchants regained control of the
Mediterranean and Islamic dominance was weakened in
The “new learning” was one of the first attempts to construct a curriculum that was designed “to educate laymen rather than priests, to form citizens rather than monks or scholars, to produce free and civilized men, men of taste and judgment rather than professionally trained doctors, lawyers, merchants, philosophers, or theologians” (Rice 1958, 87).
“To each species” wrote Battista Guarino, “has been allotted a peculiar and instinctive gift. To horses galloping, to birds flying, comes naturally. To man only is given the desire to learn. Hence what the Greeks call πάίδείά [paideia] we call ‘studia humanitatis.’ For learning and training in Virtue are peculiar to man; therefore our forefathers called them Humanitas, the pursuits, the activities proper to mankind” (Eugene Rice’s “Foreward” in Woodward 1996, viii-ix).
In other words, the humanists recognized the need to educate holistically. They educated in mind, body, and soul, focused intently on man’s rational being, dug deep into theology and explored the soul’s connective energy to the ultimate source that was God.[23] They also realized that specialization was secondary to a well-rounded education founded on ethics, morals, and virtues. The individual needed first to perfect his sapientia (wisdom), doctrina (learning), and scientia moralis (virtue). At the same time, they encouraged a regular regimen of physical training, realizing that a healthy body was an integral part of a healthy mind and soul. The success of this curriculum, however, was entirely dependent upon the will of its patrons as there was no such thing as state sponsored public education.
Lorenzo
de'Medici in the second half of the fifteenth century was the most powerful man
in
Renaissance historian Lisa Jardine defines what it was to be “magnificent” in the Italian Renaissance:
To be magnificent was to be someone with the means to acquire all those coveted possessions which expanding trade made available, someone who proclaimed that purchasing power by the public ostentation of his or her apparel and furnishings. To be magnificent was also to be someone with a credit rating high enough to put together significant amounts of gold and silver, which enabled the purchase of expensive goods at will (Jardine 1996, 141).
Lorenzo certainly could acquire what he wanted, but even more importantly, he could allow others to do the same by providing them with sufficient funding.
Lorenzo
offered Savonarola large gifts to keep him but the
friar gave them away, replying in a sermon that “a faithful dog does not leave
off barking in his master’s defense because a bone has been thrown at him”
(Durant 1953, 147). For
Savonarola, opposing Lorenzo was “opposing the evil features of the
Renaissance, its unbridled egotism, its moral corruption in both the private
and the public worlds, the very features which rendered ineffective its
essential achievement- the awakening of an independent spirit” (Weinstein 1970,
5). Second and more than anything else,
however, he found himself in a struggle with the pedagogical movement that was
responding to the crisis that his beloved city of
The
Medici had both the desire and the means to fuel the humanistic fire in
fifteenth century
It
was the dream of Gemisthos Plethon, the founder of the Florentine Academy, to
reconcile in one harmonious whole the pagan and the Christian philosophical
systems, and by an ingenious process of subtraction and adaptation he
eventually evolved a compromise, in which Olympus and the Pagan gods figure
strangely side by side with the doctrine of redemption and the sacramental
mysteries (Horsburgh 1905, 207).
Gemisto
changed his name to Plethon as a token of his reverence for Plato. He was able to convince Cosimo of the
importance of resurrecting the Academy in order to better understand the works
of his most venerated Plato. His neo-Platonism reflected his familiarity with
eastern mysticism, Islam, and Zoroastrianism, but mostly it reflected his
insistence that the philosophy of Plato was superior to that of his student
Aristotle. In Plato, Plethon and his
followers were able to find an intelligence governing the operations of nature
that was compatible with the Christian concept of an omnipotent God.
As a patron of humanism,
Lorenzo was a success and his library was
extensive. “Among the ‘moderns’ the
great writers of the fourteenth century-Dante and Boccaccio, with their
complete works, occupied the first place.
Then followed 25 select humanists, invariably with both their Latin and
Italian writings and with all the translations” (Burckhardt 2002, 134). Lorenzo
was so enamored with the classics that he even wrote poetry and song verses
that imitated their style. The following is from his song The Triumph of
Bacchus and Ariadne:
Quant’ é bella giovanezza
Che si fugge tuttavia!
Chi vuol essere lieta sia:
Di doman non c’é certezza.[24]
“Lorenzo’s
goal was nothing less than to make
Lorenzo had sounded all the depths of the platonic philosophy, and had uttered his conviction that without Plato it would be hard to be a good Christian or a good citizen. The famous band of scholars that surrounded Lorenzo was united together, and distinguished from all of the circles of the kind, by this passion for higher and idealistic philosophy (Burckhardt 2002, 151).
This was a major cause of Savonarola’s dissatisfaction
with Lorenzo and his circle of influence. Girolamo had himself received a
quality humanist education and then had gone on to medical school at the
Savonarola himself claimed: “It is not I who preach but God who speaks through me” (qtd. in Hibbert 1980, 180). Harold Acton, on the other hand, denounces him: “Under the influence of Savonarola there was a brief and bloodthirsty return to the middle ages” (Acton 1952, 133).
In 1491 he became the prior of his community in the
Convent of San Marco, which had been rebuilt by Cosimo de’Medici and was
supported by the special patronage of the Medici family. According to
His popularity was known throughout
According to Savonarola, “the revival of Platonism that had taken place under his aegis threatened to undermine the sound theological traditions of the church” (Ibid. 17). The friar claimed that the art of the humanists made “the Virgin Mary look like a harlot” and declared further that “only a return to the simplicity of the Christian Church could save them [Florence]. They must turn their back on Plato and Aristotle who are now rotting in hell” (Hibbert 1980, 181). In some ways humanism was seen as a contradiction to the church of the Middle Ages, the one that the friar wanted to resurrect. “‘The literature and art,’ said Savonarola, ‘are pagan; the humanists merely pretend to be Christians; those ancient authors whom they so sedulously exhume and edit and praise are strangers to Christ and the Christian virtues, and their art is an idolatry of heathen gods, or a shameless display of naked women and men’” (Durant 1943 156). In his own work, The Triumph of the Cross, Savonarola – in reference to the classical idea that the soul could function separate from the body which contradicts the Christian idea of resurrection of body and soul – begs the question: “What sane person then, should abandon Christianity, for the tenets of heathen philosophy….that the soul in the form [in a Platonic sense] of the body” (Savonarola 1901).
Savonarola was an enigmatic figure himself. Modern historians, as noted here, have painted a bleak picture of him, presenting him as a thorn in the side of modernity and an outright enemy of humanism. Yet not all historians have agreed with this interpretation. John Allard, Dominican scholar of Savonarola, claimed in a recent discussion[25] that his research revealed a different view of Savonarola. He found that Savonarola’s library was well-stocked with humanist literature and that he even allowed humanists to meet in the priory study for regular meetings. Another historian, Michael de la Bedoyere, claims that the friar was not as puritanical as history has made him out to be. He describes Savonarola as being characteristic of the typical Italian Renaissance figure and states that the friar’s “mission was not to deny the renaissance, but to Christianize it…. What Savonarola wanted was to see the philosophy of Aristotle and Plato, as Christianised [sic] by Aquinas” (Bedoyere 1958). Ironically this was the same claim that Lorenzo’s humanists were making. The struggle for these neo-Platonists
was not replacing Christianity with Platonic paganism. It was to blend the Christian with both the Platonic and the Aristotelian. Schevill refers to the paintings from this period as “semi-pagan,” and that the artists were continuing “the old medieval search for God” (Schevill 158). He claimed that Platonism added a new dimension to this search and in fact added stimulation. The idea of mystic love was “compounded of Platonism and Christianity” and consequently became “a prized possession of the day” (Ibid.).
Savonarola had serious reservations in regard to the vanity and materialism that surrounded Lorenzo and the humanists that were attached to him, but these were not accusations against humanism as an intellectual movement. One of the main philosophical areas that became an obstacle in the blend of Platonism with Christianity was doctrinal in nature. Savonarola, as we have mentioned, took issue with the Platonic concept of the afterlife. Plato believed that the physical body was a hindrance and that the soul desired freedom from its captivity in the body. Death then, was the release of the soul while the body was laid to waste. Christian doctrine teaches a full resurrection of the body and soul, which was more Aristotelian since Aristotle believed that the soul could not exist without the material body. Here he believed the humanists had crossed the line. In addition, it is important to recall here his reference to the artists in the Medici circle and their depictions of the Blessed Virgin as a “harlot.”
One Florentine painter is important for several reasons. First, he was employed mainly by the Medici. Second, he gained his earlier recognition through his Madonna paintings, and third, he is said to have undergone a major religious conversion after the death of Lorenzo. Ferdinand Schevill called the painter Alessandro Filipeppi, known as Botticelli “the most tender and tortured spirit of the age” (Schevill 1960, 19) Yet, despite the alleged torture, he “soon became the favorite painter of the so called Medici circle, those patricians, the literati, scholars, and poets surrounding Lorenzo the Magnificent” (Jansen 1982, 411). According to the British historian Harold Acton, Botticelli “reveals the taste and sentiment of the period more vividly than those whose visions he interpreted.” He goes on to describe some works: “His Birth of Venus, his Primavera, his Mars and Venus, breathe the same atmosphere as the poems of Lorenzo and Poliziano” (Acton 1952, 130).
In 1478, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, a cousin of il Magnifico,
commissioned Botticelli to paint Primavera to adorn his villa. In 1484 Botticelli completed the Birth
of Venus for the same patron; this became one of his most famous and
perhaps most recognizable works. Both
paintings were works of neo-classical humanism, incorporating the mythology of
the Greeks. In Primavera, “the
inspiration for the subject could have come from reading the Latin poet Ovid’s
‘Fasti.’” It is also possible and “more likely to have come from ‘Verses for
the Joust’, by the contemporary scholar, Agnolo Poliziano, in which he
described a meadow where grasses and plants grew, where winds blew, and where
‘Happy Spring was ever present’”(Ufizzi Website “Primavera”). Poliziano’s poem “is full of references to
neo-Platonic thought, a philosophy brought to
Another key background figure
in this story was Marsilio Ficino. He
was a physician and philosopher in the Medici court. His father had served under Cosimo and Piero,
and Marsilio continued his family’s service under Lorenzo. His first major project was the translation
of Plato from the Greek to the Latin. In 1439, when the Council of Florence
began bringing in Greek scholars, Ficino became ardently interested in the works
of Plato and soon became a teacher of neo-Platonism (and later President) at
In many ways, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is the antithesis to medieval art. According to Janson’s art history, in the Middle Ages:
[C]lassical form had become divorced from classical subject matter. Artists could only draw upon the ancient repertory of poses, gestures, expressions, etc., by changing the identity of their sources: philosophers became apostles, Orpheus turned into Adam, Hercules into Samson (Jansen 1982, 411).
Rather than Christianizing classical imagery, Botticelli classicized Christian imagery. Botticelli’s work, however, seemed to contradict in many ways what Savonarola preached. Yet they coincided well with Ficino’s thought, which was:
the very opposite of the orderly system of medieval scholasticism. He believed that the life of the universe, including that of man, was linked to God by a spiritual circuit continuously ascending and descending, so that all revelation, whether from Bible, Plato, or classical myths, were one. (Ibid. 412).
Beauty “draws the soul to God, and God is the source of beauty and as the most beautiful of all things, the final end of contemplation” (Gorringe 1999).
In this respect, the image itself is a mere representation of an eternal ideal. According to Neo-Platonism, the celestial Venus exists in the mind and it corresponds to an ideal metaphysical form. The Venus that we see is a representation of that form which may be described in a sense as human love. In fact the identical character that represents Venus in Birth of Venus, is depicted in several of his other paintings, including Primavera and Calumny of Apelles. In this sense, the Virgin Mary can be used interchangeably with Venus as a representation of the same ideal. The wind gods on the left look like angels and the Spring can be seen to represent John the Baptist welcoming Christ ashore during his baptism (Jansen 1982, 412). Fleming agrees with this interpretation but adds that the “composition of his picture is still that of the traditional Christian iconography of the Madonna surrounded by saints and angels” (Fleming 1992, 277).
According to Helen Gardner, The Birth of Venus could have been an altarpiece to the Neo-Platonic cult headed by Ficino:
Ficino believed that the soul could ascend toward a union with god through contemplation of beauty, which reveals and manifests the two supreme principles of the divine: love and light. This kind of mystical approach, so different from the earnest search of the fifteenth century to comprehend man and the natural world through a rational and empirical order, finds expression and Botticelli’s strange and beautiful style, which ignores – or seems to – all the scientific ground gained by experimental art. (Gardner 1980, 511)
Botticelli seems to subscribe to a Neo-Platonic theory, which may account for the “strangeness” of his work. “Through ancient philosophy, artists and writers would tap the esoteric wisdom thought to be concealed in the greatest ancient poetry and art” (Hankins 1997, 15). The technique was less important:
Neo-Platonism, like Platonic idealism itself, was the expression of a purely contemplative attitude to the world and, like every philosophy that falls back on pure ideas as the only authoritative principles, it implied a renunciation of the things of `common reality'. It left the fate of this reality to the actual holders of power; for the true philosopher strives, as Ficino thought, only to die to temporal reality and to live in the timeless world of ideas. (Gorringe 1999)
Despite the obvious philosophical
differences between Savonarola and the humanists, his resentment toward them
was not universally applicable to humanism.
The Archbishop of Florence, Antoninus, who was later canonized, was a
humanist. Pope Pius II (1458-1464) prior to his election was the famed humanist
Enea Silvio de' Piccolomini who wrote History
of Bohemia. Pope Nicholas V “happily patronized the translation of
Thucydides and other Greek writers into Latin” (Holmes 1997, 94). Also, as
mentioned earlier, a group of humanists used a room in San Marco for regular
meetings while the monastery was under the auspices of Savonarola. In addition,
Roberto Ridolfi, in his biography of Savonarola, refers to Pico della Mirandola
– the famed humanist and mutual friend of both Lorenzo and Botticelli – as
Savonarola’s “dearest friend” (Ridolfi, 1959).
Perhaps more significant is the friar’s decision to preserve the Medici
library. He made sure that the Medici Library
did not go to
The source of the problem that
Savonarola had with Lorenzo and his humanists is that they subscribed to the
same Florentine myth. But, whereas Lorenzo and his circle saw a new version of
classical
Instead
of celebrating with indulgence and intoxication, Florentines were advised to
bring their elaborate clothes, books, works of art[27],
and other worldly goods, to be burned in the piazza. He envisioned a new
theocracy that would lead to an eventual utopia that was built upon the
Florentine myth: “‘O Florence! Then wilt
thou be rich with the virtual and temporal wealth; thou wilt achieve the
reformation of
Ultimately,
despite any good that may have resulted from his work, Savonarola was
defeated. The defeat was itself
prophetic and the metaphor serves us well in this study. In the figure of this Dominican friar “was
the Middle Ages surviving into the Renaissance, and the Renaissance destroyed
him.” Durant continues to explain that he failed because of his “intellectual
limitations and a forgiving but irritating egotism; he exaggerated his
illumination and his capacity, and naïvely underestimated the task of opposing
at once the power of the papacy and the instincts of men” (Durant 1953,
161). His support of
Two
questions arise from this controversy: Why did it happen in
The extensive development of a bourgeois, mercantile society, a lay culture, and an ardent republicanism stimulated the Florentines to reflect on the meaning of their city’s history and destiny, and provided the myths by humanists, artists and prophets to a degree and in an intensity that appear to have been unique up to that time. (Weinstein 1970, 377)
The second question requires
some deeper explication. The end of the fifteenth century was a tumultuous
time. In 1492 alone, as James Hankins
points out,
So the task here is to not choose a side: the medieval church or the “new learning,” but to see the crisis in its totality. Each side was responding to the same questions but from very different perspectives. Truth can be discerned and lessons can be learned from each side. As old paradigms began to collapse, new inquiries into the human condition were necessary to achieve complete adjustment. Each was seeking the answer to one of the most fundamental question known to mankind: What does it mean to be human?
Pedagogy of the Early Humanists
Humanism took on the ancient Greek attitude toward learning. The Renaissance historian, Ferdinand Schevill in the introduction to a collection of Humanist letters, entitled The First Century of Italian Humanism, thoroughly sums up the attitude of early Humanism:
These early Italian humanists were all passionate champions of antiquity, at bottom for no other reason than that the classical authors by disclosing the highly developed secular civilization of Greece and Rome provided the novelty-seeking Italians not only with a point of reference and guidance but also – a very important matter in view of the overwhelming authority of the Church – with a moral and intellectual sanction for the independent course they steered…. The humanists became closely attentive to nature….they recognized scholasticism, ensconced in both the church and the universities, as the immediate enemy…. Though they bowed to the authority of the Church as an institution, and in the main continued to reverence Christianity, they became very critical of the ministers and servants of the Church, the clergy. (Schevil 1928, 6)
The purpose of life was to be happy and to attain happiness required wisdom, learning, and virtue. With a collapsing worldview, many people – not only the humanists – felt that the church was not adjusting to the times and thus not providing the proper guidance.
The problem with scholasticism was not its reliance upon Aristotle, materialism, logic, or science as its basis. One problem stemmed from the entrapment that it produced. It trained for vocations, thus limiting the exposure that a student received in order to shape him as one would a tool. He in turn, having been indoctrinated in the ideology, would become an advocate. Another problem was intellectual. The physics espoused created a sharp contrast to the metaphysics that was supposed to accompany it. William of Ockham and his nominalist disciples began to find fault in its dialectic. The doctrine of the Trinity posed a particular problem. Three persons with a unity of essence was seen as a contradiction of words. In addition, they criticized the fact that Jesus was begotten and yet proceeds from the Father. “How is generation to be distinguished from procession?” Paul Vignaux asks in his Philosophy in the Middle Ages: An Introduction (Vigneax 1962, 177). Critics of Aristotelian teaching concluded that in light of the scientific yet dialectic nature of its concepts and the “vanity of Aristotelian metaphysics and natural philosophy…it is established that Aristotle does not know what he affirms” (Ibid. 193). One might assume that the error did not lay in Aristotle but with the medieval approach to him. The humanists believed that scholasticism had created an unbalanced perspective in their strict adherence to the writings of Aristotle. This imbalance could not keep up with the pace of inquiry, especially in the realm of natural philosophy which was quickly burgeoning into what we now recognize as modern science. Shutting out the rest of the intellectual legacy of the classical age was only seeing part of the spectrum. This is what was most unacceptable to the promoters of the “new learning.” This cycle of interpretation, application, and disputation was another inescapable trap produced by the scholastic approach to education.
Petrarch
in the early fourteenth century set out to climb Ventosum, the highest mountain
in the region of
According to Vittorino da Feltre, one of the first to respond to the crisis and one of the foremost humanist educators of the fourteenth century, the curriculum was designed to perfect man and ultimately make him free. He “was perhaps the first to prove that humanism not only had made possible, but indeed demanded, a new ideal of a teacher of youth” (Woodward, 1996, 64-65). One of the key ingredients in this method was self discovery.[29] For Vittorino, history was attractive for its “moral and anecdotal interest” and furthermore, he “treated Ethics, not from the speculative side, but as a guide to the art of living” (Ibid. 59). Piccolomini saw the study of literature in the same light: Morality is “forwarded by the judicious use of Literature in education” (Piccolomini 1996, 150).
Although fifteenth century
Humanism became synonymous with the concepts of Neo-Platonism, it was not
always such. Much of this is a direct
result of the patronage of the Medici, especially Lorenzo. The humanism of the fourteenth century was
open to all classical wisdom and clung to none exclusively. In a letter to Maffeo Gambara of
For Vergerio, another humanist schoolmaster of the fourteenth century the humane studies were those:
by which we attain and practice virtue and wisdom; that education which calls forth, trains and develops those highest gifts of the body and of the mind, which ennoble men, and which are rightly judged to rank in dignity to virtue only (Vergerio 1996, 102).
Late in his letter he stresses a seemingly modern warning. Although individuality is to be encouraged in human development – ultimately leading toward self-discovery – the encouragement of such at too early an age is harmful. He laments:
Our youth of today, it is to be feared, is backward to learn; studies are accounted irksome. Boys hardly weaned begin to claim their own way, at a time when every art should be employed to bring them under control and attract them to [serious] grave studies. (Vergerio 1996, 102)
Just what did these serious studies entail? For Vergerio liberal studies consist of the following courses of study in order of importance: history, moral philosophy, eloquence, the art of letters – grammar, literature, rhetoric, logic, rhetoric, and disputation – poetry, music, both singing and playing, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy (Vergerio 1996, 106-108).
Vergerio warned, as did Aristotle, about vocational education. Although medicine, law, and theology are attractive to students, they should not be considered liberal studies. They do not liberate man in themselves because they are seen as the application of knowledge. Medicine is applied science. Law is a trade. Theology deals with the abstract world that escapes the senses. These professions should only be sought after the proper liberal foundation has been laid. Vergerio is also practical, admitting that mastery of all the liberal studies is impossible and that it would take a lifetime to master one. Mastery is to follow the proper exposure because each is connected to the other.
In a letter to Lady Baptista Malatesta regarding her humanist education, Leonardo Bruni recommends a similar approach to her studies although he adds a series of Christian writers to the standard classical repertoire – Lactantius, Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, Cyprian, Gregory of Nazianzen, John Crysostom, Basil. He also says that the subtleties of arithmetic and geometry, and astrology in general should be avoided. The main point that is stressed by Bruni is the two-fold nature of a liberal education:
Poet, Orator, Historian, and the rest, all must be studied, each must contribute a share. Our learning thus becomes full, ready, varied and elegant, available for action or for discourse in all subjects. But to enable us to make effectual use of what we know we must add to our knowledge the power of expression. (Bruni 2005)
True intelligence must attempt to attain both faculties: knowledge and expression.
The fact remains that these
early humanists never saw themselves as diverting the Christian spirit. Coluccio Salutati, in a letter to the
chancellor of
How do you happen, my dear colleague, to have this dread of Virgil? You say…because he did not, as you say, walk in the way of the Lord, he leads his readers from the straight path of the faith….Don’t imagine that I have ever so read Virgil as to be led to accept his fables about the heathen gods! What I enjoy is his style, hitherto unequalled in verse… (Ibid. 40)
In a later letter, in 1379, he defends Virgil again, this time to accusations that Christians should not waste their time with pagan authors. Salutati admits that “living in a world of transient things, that it is better to reach heaven by the straight way, through the study of the sacred writings than through the twistings and turnings of the poets” but adds that “in view of the fact that both roads properly followed lead to the same desired goal, though the former is to be preferred, the latter should not be neglected” (Ibid.). That both lead to the same place is a key to understanding humanism. Although concurring that Christian teaching is the ultimate key to salvation, Salutati is denying the Church’s exclusive authority in salvation.
Piccolomini, who later became Pius II, advised his young pupil that in addition to the classics he should learn his prayers, his devotion to the Blessed Mother, the way of salvation and the Gospel of St. John – ironically not one of the synoptics but perhaps the most theological of the four – and “the doctrine of the Life of the world to come” which he adds was “indeed taught by Socrates” (Piccolomini 1996, 141). He therefore assumes that there is an ultimate source of Divine Wisdom to which Socrates, himself a pagan, had some connection.
Lorenzo’s Brand of Humanism
Lorenzo de’Medici certainly did
not invent humanism, but in a sense he created a new generation of humanists. During his time in the second half of the
fifteenth century “the humanist movement reached a peak, due largely to Lorenzo
himself” (Schevil 1949, 153). His
participation in and patronizing of the Platonic Academy in
Several things can be stated about his form of humanism. First, it resembled the Christian mysticism that was already popular at the time. Second, according to Schevill, their neo-Platonist version of the love doctrine was hardly different from the “old medieval search of God” (Ibid. 158). The Florentines believed: “To every individual soul there comes the call to choose between the animal and the spiritual love, and as it chooses, it is lost or saved” (Ibid.). A criticism of Lorenzo’s brand of humanism is offered by Schevill:
Every present day university graduate who has occupied himself at all seriously with the movement of philosophy through the ages will quickly discover that what Ficino, Landino, and Pico Della Mirandola dished out in their time as Platonism was a completely unscholarly hodge-podge….what it offered as Platonism was not the doctrine of the Athenian sage of the fourth century B.C. but a capriciously distorted version thereof developed 400 years later at Alexandria in Egypt….this later and perverted form of Platonism was already so abundantly superstitious and darkly mystical that it falls completely apart under systematic rational attack. (Ibid. 157).
With this criticism in mind it becomes easy to see why Savonarola, while tolerating and even promoting to an extent some humanist teaching, despised and contested Lorenzo’s brand of it.
Final Thoughts on “The New Learning”
If one can find no value in the specific teachings of the Florentine humanists, their goals and methods can certainly be of utility in the modern world. The motive of the Humanists was not to create a new philosophy. They had a disdain for logic, as it was the language of the scholastics. They called themselves Christians but stayed out of the theological arena. In politics, they lacked a coherent view, each subscribing to systems in accordance with his own taste. Perhaps one of the few things they agreed on was that there was immeasurable value in the study of history, moral philosophy, and the art of letters. Until the days of Lorenzo and Ficino’s academy, even metaphysics was a subject left unexplored. So what, one might ask, was the goal of this new learning?
Perhaps the comment by Petrarch, sometimes called the father of humanism, sums it all up: to turn an inward eye upon oneself. The new learning was a program of study that relied on the Greek and Roman classics as primary sources. The goal was to educate individuals in a way that would free them from conformity imposed upon them by lopsided, one-directional systems of education. The new learning sought to understand core human values that they believed to be universal. They imagined a society of virtuous citizens that could think rationally for themselves and express themselves eloquently whenever the need might arise.
From their understanding of authors like Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, they realized several things. It became apparent that man had a divine purpose that had to be sought and pursued. This purpose could only be discerned through wisdom, virtue, and learning. History was a record of man’s actions from which lessons might be gleaned in order to provide guidance for what is to come. Moral Philosophy taught man how to live the good life, and ultimately, in the Greek sense, to attain happiness. Letters taught expression, the final puzzle piece for the student of the new learning – being able to not only know and understand right from wrong, but to be able to articulate and thus disseminate these truths to the greater society.
The conversations initiated by the ancients are timeless. Answers to their questions have yet to surface. In a sense they exist as the foundation of intellectual history. By the fifteenth century, this construction had fallen to pieces. As survivors of the medieval mind struggled to patch the holes and perhaps slow the process of dilapidation, the humanists decided to raze the structure and start afresh.
Aristotle established that to be happy is to be virtuous. He also provided a means of arriving there: the Doctrine of the Golden Mean. He claimed that each man contains a defined potential, which might be defined as the thing one is best suited for. He saw the aim of education as to lead a student toward the discernment of this potential. Aristotle believed that liberal education alone could free the mind from the anguish of ignorance. Consequently, he despised vocational education. He was “particularly derogatory about using education for any extrinsic or instrumental purposes” (Hobson 2001, 18). The medieval world did not focus on these Aristotelian attributes. Instead of his concepts on liberal education they used him to justify a system both vocational, and according to the humanists, oppressive. While his ideas of virtue ethics to encourage morality was helpful, they felt that scholasticism relied too much on his metaphysics to justify matters of faith. In the end, much of Aristotle’s ideas concerning human dignity and purpose, seemed to be less important, but his materialist leanings led him to become one of the founding fathers of modern science. The new learning of the humanists aimed to correct this.
Plato, in all his sublime wisdom, became the opponent of Aristotelianism for the scholastics. Augustine used Plato as a guide as he developed ideas concerning Christian doctrine. The medieval mind, in their excitement over the rediscovery of Aristotle in the thirteenth century, had turned their backs on Plato. The humanists wanted to go back to Plato, and although as pointed out by Ferdinand Schevill he was not utilized as wisely as possible, the humanists succeeded in reopening the Platonist conversation. These humanists tended to be more mystical than their Aristotelian counterparts but they added to the intellectual legacy that sought the restoration of human dignity. Aristotle gave man potential in a materialist sense in the same way an acorn has the potential of becoming a giant oak tree. Platonists like Pico della Mirandola used metaphysics to demonstrate the dignity of man. He added a new twist, however. Rather than seeing man as a depraved creature, he focuses on freedom to choose one’s own destiny: “On man when he came into life the Father conferred the seeds of all kinds and the germs of every way of life. Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow to maturity and bear in him their own fruit” (Mirandola 1948 225). According to Paul Kristeller and John Randall, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, “This [Platonist] influence can be traced down to the end of the eighteenth century and is still apparent in such thinkers as Berkeley and Coleridge” (8).
In sum, man has dignity, purpose, and freedom. The aim of education is to cultivate these values by encouraging a life of virtue. The German historian Hannelore Sachs claimed that humanism was the “starting point for the civilization of modern times” (Sachs 1971, 8). To justify this claim he adds that “by the 16th century, European education had been improved by fourteenth and fifteenth century humanism” (Ibid. 14). This remained true well into the seventeenth century, only to face major reconstruction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For Renaissance historian Eugene Rice Jr., “the humanist idea of education is among the permanently influential legacies of the Italian renaissance” (Rice in Woodward 1996, vii). These statements are crucial for this study in general because they allude to a humanistic thread that has navigated its way down through the centuries in the form of various educational philosophies.
The Scientific Revolution,
culminating in the Enlightenment, would not only modify the conception of
modern humanism but it would change Western intellect dramatically. Modern
Western ideology and the educational systems that support it would be
challenged in the centuries to come by humanists of the Renaissance
tradition. They would advocate a
holistic perspective that seeks balance and seeks to restore some of the dignity
and wonder to the human condition. The
first of theses challenges will arise in eighteenth century
Tracing the history of ideas that
flows from the Renaissance to the modern era, it seems that the Enlightenment
becomes a necessary stop. While the
Scientific Revolution might be seen as the next step in human thought, the
social crisis – the focal point of this discussion – appears to be no better
exemplified than in
It
becomes difficult to strip away revolutionary language in order to resurrect a
true humanist of the Renaissance tradition.
Part of the difficulty lies in the system against which the philosophes
had allied themselves. They were
educated in Catholic schools that adhered to a strict Jesuit tradition. According to Louis Dupré, Ignatius of Loyola
represented the Christian humanism that evolved out of the Renaissance. He claims that must shape themselves under the
guidance of God’s spirit” (Dupré 1993, 224). Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises teaches one to control his own life by shaping
his will-power in a way that suits his individual potential. In Dupré’s words, he “methodically direct[s]
nature’s potential toward a transcendent goal” (Ibid. 224-225). Most of the prominent thinkers of the time
are responding to this but it is possible to find one that does not make a
complete break.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been called the father of
educational psychology (Dobson 1969, 8).
“By the late-nineteenth century, for example, Rousseau's Émile
was considered a standard part of formal teacher training insofar as it was
deemed necessary to the historical study of pedagogical techniques” (Baker
2001, 24). He arrived
there by a circuitous route. He was a
delinquent father and lived a life of marked instability beginning his career
in education as an admittedly unsuccessful music tutor. He was a gifted writer, however. “He came to the philosophy of education by
way of social theory. Disgusted with the
artificiality of royal courts and the pursuit of luxuries in the city, he
regarded civilization as a departure from nature” (Brumbaugh 1963, 155). Departing from nature for Rousseau was the
biggest downfall of man, since in his opinion we were not only born good, but
we were born free. This is an important
link with the Renaissance humanists and serves as a point of departure from his
rationalist predecessor John Locke, the scholar most celebrated by Rousseau’s
peers, who argued that man was depraved as a result of his fall from
grace. Rousseau, picking up one piece of
the humanist thread claims that man is good and is morally perfectible, that
the imperfection and apparent lack of goodness is a result of human society. “Since civilization corrupts, education can’t
aim primarily at civilizing. Good
education trains the young to resist society and its evils” (Ibid).
Rousseau believed earnestly that
children needed to have a childhood, and that they would discover themselves
during it. It frustrated him that people
viewed children as small versions of adults.
It robbed them of their identity.
This, he felt, led to the problem of superficiality that was endemic in
the adulthood of his time. “The man of
this world almost always wears a mask.
He is scarcely ever himself and is almost a stranger to himself; he is
ill at ease when he is forced into his own company. Not what he is, but what he appears to be is
all he cares for” (Rousseau 1955, 11).
This concern for the internal person as opposed to the “mask” that is
shown to the rest of the world has earned him another title. He has been called
the “originator of romantic sensibility” because he broke away from the
traditional rationalism of his day (Cordasco 1976, 84). In his autobiography, Confessions, he
expressed a belief that rationalism proposes an argument against God and
immortality. He thought that feeling is in line with both. Having revealed the limits of reason, he
championed the “superiority of insight and intuition,” giving him yet one more
title: the father of “modern introspective literature” (Postman 1999, 13).
Rousseau had not completely
turned against the Jesuit pedagogy.
Whereas the hostility that his peers held for the Church was expanded to
encompass anything that was non-material, Rousseau avoided their lop-sided
metaphysics. He insisted on a
transcendent side or reality and had faith that humans had the capacity to
discover it when properly trained. If
Thomas Merton was right in saying that the basic purpose of education is
learning to live by "defining oneself authentically" (Del Prete 1990,
31), then Rousseau is perhaps the best place to start building the forms for a
new foundation. "Everything is good
that comes from the hands of the creator; everything degenerates in the hands
of man" (Rousseau in Dobson 1969, 87).
This was a tremendous weight on Rousseau’s shoulders. It demonstrated forcefully the difficulty
that he believed man faced in his struggle to retain goodness. For this reason, he stressed the importance
of keeping natural morality at the front of his philosophy. He felt that universal law was inherent in
all cultures, and that education could help decipher that law. He also thought that the role of a teacher
was to awaken the natural goodness in youth to ensure the evolution of a fully
developed, civilized society. This
society would be naturally drawn to a quasi-universal code of morality. A properly conducted education should awaken
the innate tendencies toward the goodness that God created in us.
"All teachers, whatever
their subject, carry great responsibility; as Jean Jacques Rousseau made clear,
the greatest responsibility is borne by those who teach religion or
history" (Dobson 1969, 121). Rousseau
was also counter-cultural in that he fit religion into his secondary
educational curriculum while most of his companions shunned its inclusion
completely. “To Rousseau the religious
outlook of the person would mean not what group or sect he professed to belong
to, but his whole outlook on mankind and the criteria by which the young man
would seek to regulate and judge his own actions” (ibid. 60). The Renaissance Italian Humanist Pietro Paolo
Vergerio, in his De Ingenuis Moribus, declared that Liberal Studies,
which consisted of ethics and history, were the “secret of true freedom;” one
taught how man should live and the other how he has lived (Schevill 1928, 65).
Rousseau thus carried some
of the Renaissance humanist threads into the Age of Reason. He felt that teaching was an indispensable
vocation and that a well rounded educational plan was something to be carefully
constructed. Also in line with the
humanists, he believed that education should begin in the home and that during
the early years of childhood, parents played an important part in child’s
education, insisting that parents take active roles. He was well versed in the classics and
certainly used them as counsel in his treatises. In fact, Plato, the muse for the writings of
most of the Renaissance humanists, serves to inspire Rousseau’s educational
philosophy as well. Yet more important than these, Rousseau’s belief in the
goodness of man, his insistence on a balanced curriculum, and his inclusion of
the transcendent in his epistemological equation make him the humanist
spokesman of his fellow philosophes in Enlightenment France. For these reasons he will be considered in
this study; however, to label Rousseau as a true humanist of the Renaissance
variety would be a dangerous claim to stake.
Rousseau has been an
enigmatic figure over the past couple centuries. His works have been loved, hated, dismissed
and respected. Many have found his works
to be terribly confusing and even contradictory. Aspects of his personal life are downright
despicable and it becomes difficult to appreciate Rousseau as a person. These things make it difficult to read
Rousseau objectively. Nevertheless, his
educational works “form an integrated whole” and the philosophy outlined in
them serves an important function: “Rousseau’s philosophy of education opposes
the establishment and calls for a return to nature because civilization is
corrupt” (Sahakian and Sahakian 1974, 28).
Yet, even when focusing on his pedagogy and identifying his motivation
as opposing “the establishment, both of which resemble humanist ideals, one is
still left with a problem. As
counter-cultural as Rousseau might appear, he is still a product of his
world.
The Zeitgeist of the
Enlightenment was for the most part unprecedented and it is impossible to
extract Rousseau completely from his surroundings. On a pedagogical level Rousseau disagrees and
rebels against Locke on several levels, yet his categorization of levels of
learning in childhood and his opposition to using books before children have
gained significant life experiences are a testament to an empirical
worldview. Renaissance humanists would
have found the exclusion of books for so long into childhood as an
aberration. On a religious level, and
perhaps a cultural one too, Rousseau is also very different from his humanist
predecessors. The humanists of the
Italian Renaissance were Catholic and intended to remain so. While there were on occasions fiery debates
between some of the humanists and orthodox Catholics (e.g. il Magnifico’s
circle and Savonarola), the groups were less factions than groups of mutual
adherents. Rousseau, although he
converted to Catholicism for a very short time, was definitely anti-Catholic,
clerically, and educationally. He was a
product of his time. But he was not
anti-transcendent, as were his philosophe peers.
Rather than studying
Rousseau as an image of the ideal Renaissance humanist, we will proceed to
analyze him as an Enlightenment philosophe, indoctrinated in Enlightenment
ideology, who attempted to balance the equation of reform with some humanistic
threads that he had picked up along the way in his own educational
journey. Yet before Rousseau can be
explored in this context, it is first crucial to understand exactly what this
Zeitgeist consisted of. The first part
of this chapter will trace cultural threads that emerge out of the Renaissance
and reach a climax in Rousseau’s
This case study must begin
with the history bridging our previous case study to this one. Only then might we understand the moral
issues that Rousseau was concerned with.
The work of the Italian Humanists was a response – as described earlier
in this study – to the lopsided curriculum of the Middle Ages. The old curriculum did not fairly represent
the values of education. Its vocational
nature did not fit in with the Latin word for education – educere – which meant to lead out from. Perhaps Francesco Petrarca’s famous journey
to the top of a local mountain is an apt metaphor to describe the purpose of
education in the Latin sense. When one
is standing in the forest, he can only see the trees around him. As he is led out of the forest, up the
mountain, the forest as a whole will become clearer as he ascends. These
humanist educators intended to balance the equation; they did not intend to
destroy the status quo, but to see it from a new perspective and then enhance
it with a new focus on human dignity. In the end, this new view would liberate
the scholar from the chains that society had placed upon him. The classics reemerged as a source for
inspiration and a springboard for the creation of l’uomo universale. As the
Renaissance spread north, thanks to the efforts of scholars like Desiderius
Erasmus, the humanist message began to affect education throughout the
continent and in many ways it defined European pedagogies.
There are several legacies
that pervade Western culture between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries
which are rooted directly in the Italian Renaissance. Each of these contributes to a crisis in
worldview at the tail end of the eighteenth century, especially in
We will see that the
Northern Renaissance becomes fully expressed in the Protestant Reformation
which leads to a new religious crusade and a battle for independence from the
reins of
While these cultural developments
certainly contribute to the crisis of the late eighteenth century, we will note
two others that helped close the coffin that contained the remains of an
old-world paradigm. The “new learning”
was quickly united with the scientific method and the “new science” was
born. This new approach to rational
inquiry rocked the foundation of Western ideology. As this scientific paradigm gained momentum,
it gained a new grasp on the human condition.
The Enlightenment became the pivotal moment of the Scientific Revolution
as it used methods originally intended to gain insight into the physical world
to understand the metaphysical.
The crisis that Rousseau is
responding to is complex. Over a century
earlier, René Descartes, the founder of French rationalism, maintained a
balance in quantitative, scientific inquiry and its application to
humanity. He divided the world into two
separate planes: the material world and the non-material world. Reason’s offspring, science, was deemed
applicable to the physical world only.
This satisfied both the Church and proponents of the new learning. Science and mathematics were highly effective
tools for investigation but their utility was restricted to that which is
tangible and thus quantifiable. Theology
and politics did not fall into this category.
The Enlightenment philosophes were no longer convinced a century
later. The “Enlightened Despots,” as
history refers to them, patronized the world’s best scientists and sought
literary figures that would justify their rule through reason. Royal academies embraced the new science as
the sole source of reliable intellectual dialog. By the end of the eighteenth
century, under strong pressure from the academies, French intellectuals had
given up on Descartes to exalt the ideas of Locke and
The crisis then is
twofold. On the surface it seems to be
one of intellectual perspectives, a crisis of ideology. Yet it seems appropriate to argue that this
serves mainly as a façade. Underlying this was a political crisis rooted in
economics. French salons were inundated
with intellectuals extracted from the ranks of the aristocracy and
bourgeoisie. These intellectuals, or
philosophes, were concerned largely with attaining a level of equality that
would remove the obstacles that stood in their way in regard to social
privileges. This intellectual current
produced a barrage of literature that was powerful enough to create an
atmosphere of animosity between this rising class of capitalists and the
Church, which was intimately linked with the French monarchy. Rousseau was part of the ideological dialog,
and while he was clearly a product of his times, he expressed dissatisfaction
with the attempts of his contemporaries to completely root out human
spirituality. He sought balance to another lopsided equation.
The Northern Renaissance
Erasmus carried the spirit of Italian Renaissance
Humanism northward and soon the rest of
Growing animosity between
the politics of the North and the religious grip from
As the Italians had sought
inspiration from the ancient Greeks and Romans, northern scholars sought it in
the early Christian texts. Chadwick thus
lays out the first transition in Renaissance humanism: “Italian humanism was
literary, artistic, and philosophical, whereas northern humanism was religious,
even theological” (Ibid. 30). Church
tradition was called into question and it seemed that a political shift could
be justified by scripture itself. As
reformers sought to restore the Church to what they perceived as its original
condition, powerful princes saw a lucrative opportunity. To invalidate claims that
Culture of the Baroque
The term baroque
has carried a mix of interpretive nuances.
It is sometimes difficult to determine exactly what constitutes baroqueness. It is most often used as a reference to an
exaggerated style of painting and architecture in the seventeenth century. If Raffaele’s School of Athens might be seen as the epitome of the Italian
Renaissance, then perhaps Louis XIV’s palace at
According to Peter Skrine, in The Baroque: Literature and Culture in Seventeenth-Century Europe, Protestant countries tend to regard the baroque as a Roman Catholic movement and it is sometimes lumped into the category of Counter-Reformation; however, he argues that “two significant phenomena were perhaps more responsible for the baroque’s emergence than any other factors” (Ibid. viii). These two developments were absolutism and the theater. The combination of these forces produced a hotbed for the transmission of baroque culture. He also notes that the Church remained mainly interested in and was the patron for visual art. For those that see the baroque as predominantly a visual movement, it is clear how it becomes intertwined with the Counter-Reformation. Using period literature, music, and theater as vibrant snapshots of the baroque Zeitgeist, Skrine exposes some important cultural threads that will contribute to the cultural tapestry of the Enlightenment.
In literature and drama the Baroque might be seen as a continuation of the Italian Renaissance. It retained the keen interest in classical antiquity, especially Greek and Roman epic poetry as well as dramatic dialog, but the aims were less concerned with the restoration of original classical languages. In fact, in some regard it had the opposite effect. The obsession with the classics evolved into a nationalistic and linguistic goal to surpass their greatness.
It was a cultural ambition which all major
Western European countries put the finishing touch to the progress of their
respective languages – Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, Dutch,
German – towards literary maturity and national prestige, objectives which
often manifested themselves in the paradoxical yet compulsive desire to imitate
the ancients and even to outdo them (Skrine 1978, 5-6).
This competitive spirit
brought both civic pride and the feeling that one’s nation was the cultural
heir to their deified ancestors. But in
some regard this competition went further: “baroque imagination delighted above
all in the creation of an illusory reality more opulent and splendid than any
the ordinary world could offer, and chose audaciously to presume that man could
use his wealth and artistry to outshine his maker” (Ibid. 20).
The harmonious coexistence between the moderns and the
ancients had dissipated. Humanism began
to take on a new identity. Extreme individualism, excessive patronage, and
exaggerated magnificence caused the world to become a stage. Skrine argues this point: “Life is a constant
struggle for self-preservation against the malice and hostility of one’s
fellows, and self-assertion is the obvious way to achieve a position of
supremacy in others’ eyes and to maintain it” (Ibid. 22).
Church Decline in
“Do not annoy the pious. They will never forgive you”
(Skrine 1978, 33). Supposedly this
warning was given to Moliére by Louis XIV as the playwright spurred the anger
of a Catholic secret society – Company of the Holy Sacrament. Moliére did not heed the warning. In 1669 the final draft of his “most
effective of all comic exposures of self-seeking duplicity masquerading as
sanctimonious self-righteousness” was published and it was entitled Tartuffe: the Imposter (Ibid.). In the final act, Tartuffe the imposter leads
the king’s guard in to arrest Orgon, the man who had taken him in his house as
a distinguished guest. This aspect of
the baroque in
Tartuffe had presented
himself as a noble, holy man. He shouts
loudly to his servant so that those around him would hear about his corporal
mortification and piety: “Put back my scourge and hair shirt in their place,
Laurent and pray for heaven’s enlightening grace. If someone asks for me I can be found among
the prisoners giving alms all around” (Moliére 1981, 273). He tells those
around him about his vespers to further convince his hosts of his religious
zeal: “Sir it is half past-three: I have devotions at this time of day” (Ibid,
287). The last scene is a powerful
one. Tartuffe, accompanied by the guard,
shouts to Orgon, “Hold on… we arrest you now, in the King’s name” (Ibid,
309). To this Orgon replies: “Traitor,
you’ve brought me to this final shame! This is the stroke, scoundrel, that lays
me low and all your treachery is in this blow” (Ibid.). Tartuffe retorts self-righteously:
Your insults have no power to rouse my gall,
and for the sake of Heaven I’ll suffer all….You can not anger me with all your
spite; and all I want to do is what is right…. I know about your help and
everything but my first duty is to serve my King; the power of that sacred
obligation, annihilates my own appreciation…” (Ibid., 310).
In this last scene, Moliére’s
message is powerfully exposed. This
serves as more than a mere example of Baroque literary style; it exposes a deep
wound that would not only refuse to heal over the course of the next century,
but would become infected.
The passage reveals several sentiments that would
fester in the French worldview. First
and perhaps most obvious is the growing resentment toward the Church,
especially among the wealthier citizens. The intellectual culture of
The second sentiment is directly related to the first
and perhaps is the foundation for the first.
Tartuffe expresses a loyalty to the king symbolizing the intimacy of the
church and state. Louis XIV’s
signature phrase was “L’état c’est moi,” yet the phrase was
incomplete. It does not describe the
Church in state affairs. The disgust for
the Church expressed in the previous sentiment might be the direct result of
the Church’s relationship with the state and Louis’ direct control of the
Church in
A handful of malcontents steeped in a culture of
flamboyant art, religious reform, and growing nationalism was not enough,
however, to drive
The most significant thread that leads to the
metaphysical crisis of the eighteenth century also has its roots in the
Renaissance. It runs parallel with and
complementary to the movements that we have discussed. The Scientific Revolution gave thinkers of
the Enlightenment the tools that they needed to accomplish their intellectual
revolution. It will be helpful to
consider the roots and course of this movement.
The Scientific Revolution
To place exact dates on this revolution is a daunting
task. It seems that it is less a
particular moment in time than an ongoing series of movements that serve to
facilitate the progression of modern scientific thought. For this case study it is imperative to
designate some sense of a starting point.
The “scientific revolution” might then be understood as “a very real
process of fundamental change” (Henry 2001, 2).
Most historians place the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth
century, noting that the worldviews of the 1500s are noticeably incompatible
with worldviews of the 1700s. While it
is true that the birth of modern science had made tremendous contributions
toward this change, one must also concede that the revolution itself is a
product of the Zeitgeist in which it was born.
In The
Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science, John Henry states:
“If we want to seek out the causes of the Scientific Revolution, we must look
for them among the wider changes taking place in that sea-change of European
history known as the Renaissance,” and further that, “The Scientific Revolution
cannot be explained without reference to the Renaissance” (Ibid. 9). In 1930, George
Sarton gave a
lecture at
If we place the roots of science in the Renaissance,
and we recognize that these roots have pure, holistic, intellectual seeds, then
we must ask what causes the worldview of the 1500s to be incompatible with that
of the 1700s. One might first consider
the humanists’ attempt to dethrone medieval scholasticism which maintained
Aristotle as their official spokesman.
As ancient texts were rediscovered, alternatives were sought to Aristotle’s
teaching, especially those regarding natural philosophy. While “Aristotle downplayed the importance
of mathematics… Plato clearly saw it as an exemplary means of gaining
knowledge. Immediately mathematics began
to be taken more seriously” (Henry 2001, 11).
Astronomy was one of the first sciences to be affected by this. Astronomers like Copernicus and Galileo were
much in tune with their ancient Pythagorean predecessors who believed that the
rational quality of math would ultimately lead to a rational understanding of
the cosmos. Copernicus and Galileo were
able to make sense of a cosmological
model of the solar system which had been discounted as hypothetical by
the medievals because of its incompatibility with Aristotelianism.
Such intellectual movements led to an epistemological
conundrum. How is knowledge best
acquired and to what degree of certainty can we know? Whereas the Reformation had determined that
knowledge of God, the cosmos, and humanity could be gleaned through revelation
recorded in the pages of scripture[31],
the new scientists saw the story of these things written in the book of
nature. “It was commonplace in the
sixteenth century to speak of nature as ‘God’s other book’ …. One of the
features of the Scientific Revolution… was a new emphasis upon experience and
observation as a means of discovering truth” (Henry 2001, 12).
The Enlightenment: Science’s
Next Step
While the Scientific
Revolution is usually planted in the sixteenth and sometimes the seventeenth
centuries, it becomes difficult for an intellectual historian to draw a hard
line. Thomas Hankins, in Science and the Enlightenment, claims
that eighteenth century thinkers – namely Immanuel Kant and Jean Lerond d’Alembert
– “thought it was a revolution still in progress…one that was continuing its
course” (Hankins 1985, 1). Despite the overlap, the eighteenth century,
Rousseau’s century, has come to be most commonly known as the era of the
Enlightenment, but it seems plausible to propose that the eighteenth century in
many ways represents the universalization of the techniques embraced
by the new science. The Zeitgeist of the
Enlightenment can be characterized as rationalistic and in many ways these
thinkers were attempting to do the very same thing that their predecessors in
the Renaissance[32]
were attempting. Both periods rejected
traditional authorities. Both rejected medieval theology. Both sought new ways to interpret the world
and the cosmos. Yet the spirit of the
Enlightenment had a different twist.
Louis Snyder’s classic work The
Age of Reason sums up the difference: “In contrast both to Renaissance
humanism and the motivating ideas of the Reformation, the Age of Reason was an
intellectual, rational movement, which substituted for the medieval Age of
Faith an Age of Faith in Science” (Snyder 1955, 7).
The Enlightenment lacked the balance that the
Renaissance tried to maintain and this directly led to the crisis that Rousseau
perceived. The “new learning” of the
Renaissance encouraged mathematics as a viable method of ascertaining truth but
at the same time it encouraged metaphysics, especially Plato’s version. They
were in some cases mystics and in other cases those who believed in magic. Hermetic cults – tied to Hermes Trismegistus,
the ancient Egyptian priest – embraced the two.
The rationalists of the Enlightenment were different. Blind faith in an
invisible world was archaic. According
to Snyder, “advances in science and technology, resulting from a new spirit of
inquiry and encouraged by the opportunities of an expanding commerce, confirmed
the rationalists in their faith” (Snyder 1955, 7-8).
By the eighteenth century philosophers had a different
attitude toward religious tradition. In
the sixteenth century, Galileo made his famous statement regarding natural
philosophy in The Assayer:
“Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands
continually open to our gaze….It is written in the language of mathematics, and
its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures” (Galileo
1967, 126). He believed that the abstract world could be discovered through an
analysis of the rational, tangible world.
In the seventeenth century, John Locke “could enthusiastically claim
that ‘the works of Nature everywhere sufficiently evidence a Deity’” and Robert
Boyle “agreed that he had never seen any ‘inanimate production of nature, or of
chance, whose contrivance was comparable to that of the meanest limb of the
despicabilist [sic] animal’” (Hankins 1985, 3).
Yet by the eighteenth century God was on trial.
In 1784 Immanuel Kant addressed an important question
in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” He
declared that “enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage”
(Kant 1995, 1). By tutelage he is referring to “man’s inability to make use of
his understanding without direction from another” (Ibid.). This tutelage for
Kant is self-incurred because we lack the courage to think for ourselves. Because of this, he exclaims that “Sapere aude[33]!
… is the motto of enlightenment” (Ibid.).
Enlightenment in this sense can only be accomplished “after throwing off
the yoke of tutelage” (Ibid. 4). Among
the various yokes that weigh man down and distract him from free thought,
matters of religion seem to hold a prominent position. He claims that “religious incompetence is not
only the most harmful but also the most degrading of all” (Ibid. 6). Kant maintained that there was moral value to
religion but severely criticized some key elements of organized religion –
ritual, hierarchy, and superstition – and rejected the possibility of
theoretical proof of God’s existence.
Kant claims that it was David Hume that awoke him from
his “dogmatic slumber” and caused him to develop his critical philosophy. Hume “ridiculed revelation” and “attacked
natural Christianity” (Snyder 1955, 42).
His 1748 “Essay on Miracles” vehemently attacked Christian claims to
miracles and other supernatural events claiming that these are violations of
the laws of nature. The problem of evil
was another major issue in Hume’s commentaries on religion. Stout sees Hume as the third stage (of three)
in the development of eighteenth century deistic thought (Stout 1981, 112).
Hume stabs deeper into religion in his Essays
and Treatises on Several Subjects twenty years later:
The many instances of forged miracles, and
prophesies, and supernatural events, which, in all ages have either been
detected by contrary evidence, or which detect themselves by their absurdity,
prove sufficiently the strong propensity of mankind to the extraordinary and
the marvelous, and ought reasonably to beget a suspicion against all relations
of this kind (Hume 1995, 112).
This sentiment is one that
was shared among many of the eighteenth century philosophers. In fact removing superstition from society
was an important task that Enlightenment thinkers took on. Hume, like many of the others, had been
heavily influenced by the techniques of the “new science.”
The concept of a
priori knowledge, placed in our minds by our creator – as proposed by
Descartes and some of his contemporaries – was replaced by the belief that all
knowledge was gained a posteriori, after
experience. Also in the wake of Descartes, “the mathematical study of
probability had begun in 1664 in a correspondence between Pascal and Pierre de
Fermat” (Hankins1985, 179). John Locke,
a contemporary of Pascal and Fermat argued that “it is from probable knowledge
that he [man] must make all the numerous decisions of mundane life”
(Ibid.). He accepted that “how far
soever human industry may advance useful and experimental philosophy in
physical things, scientifical [knowledge] will still be out of our reach” (qtd.
Ibid.).
David Hume was born 7 years
after Locke died and he experienced the power of science in new ways. He was still convinced that a scientific
approach could be successfully applied to the study of human nature. Yet in the
end he found his brand of empiricism to come up short. Hume too was forced to
accept the unavoidable conclusion that man acts in accordance with probable
knowledge that results from experience. According to Hankins, the attempts made
by Locke and his successor, Hume, and the conclusions that they adopted, added
another component to the Enlightenment: “[that] the study of probability would
have to be an essential part of the science of man” (Ibid.).
Hume was not the only person affected by the work of
the previous generation. In his Letters
Concerning the English Nation, Francois-Marie Arouet – who later
renamed himself Voltaire – extols the
virtue of the “famous personages which
In reference to Locke, Voltaire
said: “perhaps no man ever had a more judicious or more methodical genius or
was a more acute logician than Mr. Locke” (Voltaire 2001, 127). Voltaire was most impressed with Locke’s work
regarding the soul as it opposed the “multitude of reasoners [that had] written
the romance of the soul” (Ibid. 128).
Voltaire takes particular aim at Descartes:
Our Descartes, born
not to discover the errors of antiquity, but to substitute his own in the room
of them, and hurried away by the systematic spirit which throws a cloud over
the minds of the greatest men ….He asserted that man thinks eternally, and that
the soul [which is the same thing as thought], on its coming into the body, is
informed with the whole series of metaphysical notions; knowing God, infinite space,
possessing all abstract ideas; in a word, completely endued with the most
sublime lights, which it unhappily forgets at its issuing from the womb…
(Voltaire 2001, 128).
The
empirical approach on the other hand, serves to correct the misconceptions of
the past because “Mr. Locke has displayed the human soul in the same manner as
an excellent anatomist explains the springs of the human body,” and further
that he “takes the light of physics for his Guide” (Ibid.).
This statement is important
because it reflects an ideology that Voltaire shares with his
contemporaries. The above proposition is
not presented in an argumentative manner. It is stated as a matter of fact
which is evidence that the new ideology had at last begun to take solid form
itself. This ideology represents a break
from the Renaissance forebears in two significant ways. First, his rejection of
the metaphysical world undermined the Renaissance’s claims regarding the
dignity of man, as he believed that humans were a pile of decaying matter
destined for misery, that God played no role in human affairs, and that nature
had nothing to teach humanity. Second,
as noted in the passage, Voltaire rejects the philosophy of the ancients,
calling
Voltaire refers to
Nature had indulged
Descartes a shining and strong imagination whence he became a very singular
person both in private life and in his manner of reasoning. This imagination could not conceal itself
even in his philosophical works, which are everywhere adorned with very
shining, and ingenious metaphors and figures. Nature had almost made him a
poet. (Ibid. 133)
It
seems that by the Age of Reason, imagination was reserved for the literary arts
and was not conducive to the philosophical vocation. Voltaire concludes that
“few people in
Another key factor that may be deduced
from Voltaire’s letter is that he doesn’t lay the blame on Descartes for his
imagination or his obscurity; his times reduced his genius. Voltaire explains
that “his [Descartes’] contemporaries were not knowing enough to improve and
enlighten his understanding, and were capable of little else than giving him
uneasiness” and the reason for this was that France was plagued and “persecuted
by the wretched philosophy of the Schools” which were controlled and operated
by Roman Catholic clergy (Ibid. 133). This
sentiment echoes loudly in Voltaire’s writing.
His letter, “On Mr. Locke,” exclaims that “the superstitious are the
same in society as cowards in the army” (Ibid 129).
Voltaire’s terminology raises several questions. He uses the word “superstitious” in many of his writings. In his Philosophical Dictionary he says: “the superstitious man is to the rogue what the slave is to the tyrant” (Voltaire 1924), but what exactly is meant by superstition? Locke, one of the thinkers that Voltaire looked up to, also used the term:
I think it would be better, if men generally rested in such an idea of God, without being too curious in their notions about a Being, which all must acknowledge incomprehensible; whereby many, who have not strength and clearness of thought to distinguish between what they can, and what they cannot know run themselves into superstition or atheism, making God like themselves, or (because they cannot comprehend anything else) none at all. (Locke, 2001, 89)
Locke’s use of the term seems to be different than Voltaire’s. Several lines further in his 1693 essay, “Some Thoughts Concerning Education,” Locke describes what he is trying to avoid in the mind of the youths: “preserve his tender mind from all impressions and notions of spirits and goblins, or any fearful apprehensions in the dark” (Ibid. 90). Locke’s version of the term superstitious does not include all matters of religion. For him, superstition is what results from premature exposure to the concepts that surround a belief in God. The mind needs to be prepared for this experience. He states: “Having laid the foundations of virtue in a true notion of a God, such as the creed wisely teaches, as far as his age is capable, and by accustoming him to pray to him” and furthermore that, “the next thing to be taken care of is to keep him exactly to speaking of truth and by all the ways imaginable inclining him to be good-natured” (Locke 2001, 90). Thus, Locke still holds religion as a viable means of instilling morality in youths and does not intend to disband the idea of God because it surpasses human comprehension.
On
the surface it seems that Voltaire is striking out against the church as an
organized institution: “The superstitious man is governed by the fanatic and
becomes fanatic. Superstition born in Paganism, adopted by Judaism, infested
the Christian Church from the earliest times” (Voltaire 1924). In most cases
his attack is focused on the Roman Church. He declares that a “Frenchman
traveling in
While Voltaire may have remained
vague on his definition of his formidable foe, superstition, his contemporaries
may shed some light on his connotation. Margaret Jacob describes a “mid-century
crisis” that struck
Voltaire’s use of the term
superstition is a product of Parisian society and provides a clue regarding
Rousseau’s character. French society was
composed of three estates, or social classes.
The first estate was the Church; the second was the nobility, and the third
consisted of everyone else. This
structure put the first two estates at odds with a large population, the most
influential portion being the bourgeoisie. Members of this class had been
steadily making their way to the top economically. By the end of the eighteenth
century these capitalists owned almost as much of
Immediately
beneath the royal family stood the Church. The Church’s position in this
society allowed for many coveted privileges both economic and social. It is estimated that she owned between ten
and fifteen percent of all the land in
In
historical terms, the Church, along with the nobility, represented a reviled
past that the rising bourgeoisie had been struggling to forget. Capitalism had changed the rules of a game
that had been long-played. Yet
The philosophes were intellectual historians and it was on this level that the Church became the enemy of progress. Intellectually in the eighteenth century, the Church remained the source of education, through its various levels of institutions, and wielded considerable authority on moral matters. Most of the literary figures of the French Enlightenment were, in their early years, trained in Jesuit schools; however, midway through their lives, the Church became their enemy. They recalled the troubles faced by their predecessors when they went up against the church intellectually: “Descartes was injuriously accused of being an atheist, the last refuge of religious scandal; and he who had employed all the sagacity and penetration of his genius in searching for new proofs of the existence of a God was suspected to believe there was no such Being” (Voltaire 2001, 133).
In addition to the historical examples of clashes between the Church and Reason, Voltaire saw contemporary examples. J.H. Brumfitt claims that Denis Diderot “embodies the rich variety of the enlightenment spirit[36] more than any other man;” however, he notes that “his only rival is surely Voltaire” (Brumfitt 1979, 162). Whether Voltaire saw himself as Diderot’s rival or not, he found it necessary to support Diderot and “champion his cause” during Diderot’s Parisian imprisonment (Jacob 2001, 53). Diderot was an eclectic philosopher relying on knowledge he gained from the ancients and the moderns alike. Eventually he became caught up in the scientific method and embraced materialism as his metaphysics platform. By the 1740s “he migrated from an anticlerical deism to atheism and materialism,” believing that the soul was “a superfluous hypothesis, that matter had existed for all eternity, and that it may even display the capacity for thought and feeling” (Ibid.). Eventually Diderot published tracts that put him at odds with church and state. In 1746 he published Philosophic Thoughts which called God into question and eventually was condemned. In addition, in 1748 he published the pornographic novel The Indiscreet Jewels. These and other controversial pieces landed him in prison by July of 1749.
According to Brumfitt, in his lecture to the Royal Institute of Philosophy, “Diderot: Man and Society,” Diderot is given less attention than Voltaire and Rousseau by “philosophers proper” while “historians of ideas” pay him as much homage (Brumfitt 1979, 164). His influence must be acknowledged since both Voltaire and Rousseau visited him in prison and the three seemed to be in literary dialog on several key issues. Brumfitt points out that in a letter to Voltaire in 1765 Diderot claims that the idea of God “was philosophically both unnecessary and confusing, and that it had proved an endless source of conflict among men” (Ibid. 165). His Philosophic Thoughts is intended to free humanity from the burden of God and the age of science becomes the vehicle of this freedom. The main character, a blind man named Saunderson, declares that it would be impossible for him to believe in God unless he could touch him. Empiricism had taken the final leap in this character. Outside of the senses, nothing exists and thus man is freed from the burden of God.
Another issue, political philosophy, puts Diderot in conversation with Rousseau. Brumfitt proposes that Diderot’s inclusion of political articles in The Encyclopedia may have been a response to Rousseau’s projected work, Institutions Politiques – a work that was eventually absorbed into his Social Contract (Brumfitt 1979, 167). Brumfitt asserts that Diderot’s concept of the social contract was more consistent than Rousseau’s and that Diderot coined the phrase “general will” well before it was popularized by Rousseau (167-169). In addition, a chapter of Rousseau’s Social Contract, “De la société générale du genre humain” “was clearly aimed at refuting Diderot” because, while both accepted that the general will can be discerned by man as the highest form of human will, and Rousseau “could not accept a theory in which universal human rationality precedes, both temporally and morally, the establishments of specific societies” (Ibid. 169).
Eventually the French government pulled the license for Diderot’s Encyclopedia. His article, “Autorité politique,” certainly did not help his cause: “It opened with a powerfully phrased assertion that no man had the divine right of commanding other.” Furthermore, in regard to the French, “it rejected the idea of the paternal origin of monarchy, and it insisted that the king belonged to the state and not the other way around” (Ibid.). While this criticism was poignant it was far from new. Diderot’s imprisonment undoubtedly added some fuel to the anti-clerical fire that was brewing among the French bourgeoisie. To the philosophes this could be seen as verification of what they saw as the Church’s unjustified attempt to control the morality of the French people. They believed that this action infringed on human rights such as liberty. Writers like Diderot and Voltaire were surely finding wisdom and ammunition in Locke’s words regarding church and state:
First, because the care of souls is not committed to the civil magistrate, any more than to other men. It is not committed unto him, I say, by God; because it appears not that God has ever given any such authority to one man over another, as to compel any one to his religion. Nor can any such power be vested in the magistrate by the consent of the people; because no man can so far abandon the care of his own salvation as blindly to leave it to the choice of any other, whether prince or subject, to prescribe to him what faith or worship he shall embrace. For no man can, if he would, conform his faith to the dictates of another. All the life and power of true religion consists in the inward and full persuasion of the mind; and faith is not faith without believing. Whatever profession we make, to whatever outward worship we conform, if we are not fully satisfied in our own mind that the one is true, and the other well-pleasing unto God, such profession and such practice, far from being any furtherance, are indeed great obstacles to our salvation. (Locke 1995, 83)
In his Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke urges a separation of church and state, declaring that no civil authority could ever be put in place by God himself, and therefore be His earthly representative. This was superstitious. The French philosophes sought to adopt the perspectives of the English writers and adapt them to the atmosphere of social reform that these French intellects were creating.
The Triumph of Materialism
Our
discussion has shown that the Enlightenment can be characterized as the next
step in the Scientific Revolution and perhaps it is appropriate to regard the
crisis that Rousseau was responding to as the triumph of materialism. By the end of the eighteenth century, the
Church seemed to have run its course in
In
1761 Newton’s discoveries were brought down to a child’s level as a fictitious
character named Tom Telescope instructed them in a book thought to be written
by John Newbury called The Newtonian System of Philosophy, Adapted
to the Capacities of Young Gentlemen and Ladies. Published first in English, it quickly
rose in popularity, went through many editions and was translated into several
languages.
By
the end of the eighteenth century,
The Crisis of the Eighteenth Century
The bourgeois rebels posed
themselves as a liberal group that was putting up a defense against an order
that stood in the way of progress. This is illogical in that the bourgeois
proponents of the revolution were in fact the insurgent class and therefore
their move must be considered as an offensive.
They had an agenda but sensed that their success was inhibited by an
ancient and perhaps obsolete establishment. Their attack on the church, and
eventually metaphysics itself, was an offensive maneuver for the sole purpose
of removing a perceived obstacle in their way.
The modern movement was the cultural manifestation of ideas that have
preceded it. It embraced three cultural threads and each served as fuel for the
other. Capitalism brought about a taste of economic freedom that gave an
emerging class the material resources to challenge the cultural hegemony.
Science provided an incontrovertible method for disqualifying that which cannot
be proven outside of its own doctrine.
Finally, anticlericalism in
The three threads together
created an environment of hostility that surpassed previous religious reform
movements. The Church became the major
target. In order to depose it, one had to first discredit it. Once its
authority was discredited, religion was put on trial. The Italian
capitalists of the fifteenth century did not hold the same kind of animosity
toward the Church and did not share the anticlerical sentiments. They were able to cohabitate and even
cooperate with it. The events that occur
between the fifteenth century and eighteenth century in
The eighteenth century crisis then had several levels. The revolutionary tension which demanded social and political reform was the most prevalent level of crisis and it was in this crisis that Rousseau stood, with both feet, in union with his contemporaries. However, the crisis, as we have seen, stretched into intellectual and spiritual levels as well. It was in these realms that Rousseau made his stand. Humanism underwent a major overhaul in the three centuries of history that we have looked at. By Rousseau’s day, the dignity of the human individual had been converted to an obsessive faith in human reason. Furthermore, faith in God had been replaced by faith in science. In metaphysics materialism replaced interest in the transcendent and in epistemology, Locke’s empiricism seemed to be the only feasible approach. It is here that Rousseau would part company with his companions. They saw all of these strands as part of the modern movement; he saw reforms at such levels as having crossed the line.
Chapter Three- Part Two: The Romantic Response
The Birth of Romanticism
Jean-Jacques Rousseau enters the pedagogical scene at
a crucial moment. According to R.L.
Archer in the introduction to his translation of Émile, Julie and Other Writings he “appeared at a time of
educational stagnation” and brought back a renewed sense of optimism among
pedagogues (Archer [ed. of Rousseau] 1964, 3).
Up until the French Revolution education was still mainly in the hands
of the Church. In fact most of the
philosophes themselves – certainly Voltaire and Diderot – were in fact educated
by the Jesuits. Archer identifies three
strands of influence that shaped the education of the day: “Renaissance humanism which made Latin and
Greek literature the foundation of education, remnants of scholasticism in the
form of logic and ethics which was retained by the Jesuits, and the more recent
addition of seventeenth century scientific discoveries” (Ibid. 2). Educational philosophers Mabel and William
Sahakian also comment on the schools of Rousseau’s
The stagnation for the moment did not signify the
possibility of preserving the status quo in French education, however. The opposite was true. By the end of the eighteenth century, salons
were flooded with propaganda from libertarian educators like René de la
Chalotais, who wrote Essay on National
Education in 1763. Such literature
promoted nationalistic programs of instruction that fostered citizenship. The world of pedagogy was finally swept up
into the crisis; but Rousseau had the foresight to anticipate the forthcoming
danger to education. His initial entry
into the world of educational philosophy took place in 1750 with the
publication of his essay, Discourse on
the Sciences and the Arts. His next
contribution was one of his major works, Julie,
or the New Heloise, published in 1761.
A year later, his most influential work in education, Émile, was published. Rousseau responded to the climate of the
modern movement and asks the question: Should a society train the man or the
citizen? Rousseau points to a serious
contradiction: “we cannot be both” (Rousseau 1964, 58). The result would be confusion: “Ever
contradicting himself, ever wavering between duty and inclination, he will be
neither man nor citizen…. He will be the
modern man, the Englishman, a Frenchman, a bourgeois; he will be – nothing” (Ibid. 60). As the modern revolution held
Rousseau’s proposed reforms, and the passion with
which he articulated his views set him at odds with most of his
contemporaries. Many of his earlier
friendships were destroyed. In fact
Matthew Josephson’s work, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, claims that following Rousseau’s death, a book of memoirs was
published which promulgated a caricature “of a jealous, bitter, treacherous
Rousseau,” and that it was “a fabrication, presented as a true chronicle for
posterity by Diderot, Grimm and Madame d’Epinay” (Josephson 1931, 533). Nonetheless, Rousseau “made the French public
into such a mob, and the contagious influence did not die away in education
till it had affected the whole of the civilized Western world” (Archer [ed. of
Rousseau] 1964, 5).
In many respects Rousseau’s theory of education can be
seen as a humanist agenda. As we have
noted, he believed that man was genuinely good and that it was society that
corrupted him. He also believed that
society could become the vehicle for salvation.
According to Peter Gay, editor of Ernst Cassirer’s The Question of Rousseau, this humanistic tendency of Rousseau
“affirms not only that reform is desirable but, more important, that it is
possible” (Gay [ed. of Cassirer] 1963, 27).
The idea that mankind has the possibility to improve itself is an
essentially humanistic trait. Rousseau
may have gleaned this idea from his own humanistic background. His mastery of the classics pervades all
aspects of his theory. His own early
years were spent reading the classics.
He says, “Tedium drove me at an early age to books. At six I happened to
light upon Plutarch; at eight I knew him by heart” (Rousseau 1964, 21). In regard to pedagogy itself, he again
conjures up the classics, praising Plato: “To form an idea of public education,
read Plato’s Republic. It is not a
system of politics, as imagined by those who judge of books only by their
titles; it is the finest treatise on education ever written” (Rousseau 1964,
60).
Rousseau describes the epiphany that he had on his way
to visit Diderot in prison at
Also in the tradition of the
Renaissance humanists, and perhaps of the ancients that provided the model, he
claims that education should proceed from a personal relationship between a
teacher and his students. In this
situation the teacher becomes a combination of a mentor and educational
guide. In order to maintain such a
relationship three things are required: time, undivided attention, and parental
involvement. Rousseau believed that the
tutor-pupil relationship should endure “from infancy to manhood” (Rousseau
1964, 24). In a 1740 letter to M.
D’Eybens he expresses one of his fears: “What troubles me most is the fear that
the number of pupils may spoil my work….I should not be obliged to divide my
attention between so many” (Ibid. 25). The key for Rousseau was “close co-operation
between the child’s father and the teacher in order to achieve effective
educational results” (Sahakian and Sahakian 1972, 49). This is part of his balanced approach to
education. The role of the parent was
important in that it served to reinforce the lessons of the teacher. The Sahakians also make a valid point
regarding the mutual nature of this parent/teacher relationship in stating that
“education left [solely] to parents is subject to parental ignorance and prejudice”
(43).
Human reason is an area of
concern for Rousseau as well. He
responds to the cult of reason that had permeated his culture and began to
apply limitations upon its utility. He
first makes a distinction between children and adults. Amidst the jubilation for reason he came to
“realize that the earliest and most important education is precisely that which
is universally neglected; it is to put a child in a position to be educated”
(Rousseau 1964, 27). Rousseau pointed
out an important fact that has been corroborated by modern research. He claimed that approaching children as small
versions of adults with adult capacities is to neglect the core meaning of
education: “A general mistake amongst parents who pride themselves on being
intellectual is to imagine that children are rational beings from their birth
and to talk to them as if they were grown up, even before they can talk.”
(Ibid.). He continues in his discussion
of reason:
Reason is regarded as an instrument to
instruct them….Reason is of all the human powers the latest and the most
difficult to train. In speaking to them
so early in a language which they do not understand, we accustom them to be
satisfied with words, to pay others in the same coin, to cavil at everything
which is said to them, to think themselves as wise as their masters, and to
become argumentative and captious. (Ibid. 28-29)
Rousseau’s romantic
sentiments are expressed in this dialog as he begins to look at nature as an
epistemological source. Without the
proper foundation, elucidated by nature itself, rational knowledge becomes
empty, transparent, and vain. His
fictitious character Julie, in his 1761 work Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, argues, “Nature… means children to be children before
they become men. If we deviate from this order, we produce a forced fruit,
without taste, maturity, or power of lasting; we make young philosophers and
old children” (Ibid. 28).
Rousseau’s comments on the superficiality of reason
without substance might be seen as a reaction to L'âge de
raison. He sensed a metaphysical crisis
on the horizon and sought to correct it by giving young students the proper
foundation so that they could not only embrace reason when they were ready, but
embrace it from a position of poise and thus acquire a sense of reason that is
authentic and in line with nature. At a
time when the epistemological dispute burned between empiricism (a posteriori)
and rationalism (a priori), Rousseau was adding a third ingredient that had
been lost since the Renaissance – the power of intuition. Natural inclinations are not to be repressed;
they are to be nurtured. In fact, as the
Renaissance theorists had proclaimed, the cosmos are harmonious and man must be
sure to fit into the harmony, e.g. a single musical instrument taking its place
in a symphony orchestra. He said:
“Everything tends to the common good in the general scheme. Every man has his
special place in the ideal order of the universe; it is a question of finding
out his place, not of changing the universe” (Ibid. 29). To further discuss the proper role of
education as a means of extracting and developing a particular vocation, he
draws an analogy to Plato and to modern science: “Did not your master Plato maintain that all
human knowledge and all philosophy could not extract from a human soul anything
which nature had not placed in it, just as all the operations of chemistry can
never obtain from an alloy more gold than it contains?” (Ibid. 32)
The
reference to Plato reflects his thoughts recorded in the Republic and might be misconstrued to be justification for a class
society based on innate intelligence and perhaps even a disproportionate
distribution of goods and services to the population. At first glance this seems to fit in with the
bourgeois project that Rousseau’s contemporaries are promoting; however,
Rousseau’s use of these Platonic terms seems to be intended to discover human
dignity in all human activity. In the
conclusion to Julie, he claims that “Nature is justified and everything serves to
convince me that the faults of which we accuse her are not hers but our own”
(Ibid. 53). The evil associated with
inequality then is a matter of social perception. His most significant educational work, Émile, begins with the following passage:
Everything is good as it comes from the hands
of the Creator; everything degenerates in the hands of man. He compels one soil to nourish the products
of another and one tree to bear the fruits of another; he mingles and confounds
elements, climates, and seasons; he mutilates his horses, dogs, and slaves; he
defaces everything, he reverses everything; he delights in deformity and in
monsters. He is not content with
anything as Nature made it, not even his fellow-man. Even his offspring must be
trained up for him like a horse in his stable, and must grow after his fancy
like a tree in his garden. (Rousseau 1964, 55).
If a particular role in life is
devalued or considered unworthy, it is thusly appropriated by man himself and
never is ordained to a lowly position by nature. His view is holistic and reminiscent of a
twentieth century ecological concept, that which Fritjof Capra calls a systems
view.
The value of man in a civilized
state is weighed in terms of usefulness.
The dignity of man is found in his contribution to his society. No matter how small the part, each person
plays one. It would be better for one to
be a good street sweeper than a bad lawyer.
The natural man has a value in
his own right; he is a numerical unit, an absolute integer, and has no relation
but to himself and to his fellow-man. Civilized man is only a relative unit,
the numerator of a fraction, that depends on its denominator, and whose value
consists in its relation to the integral body of society. (Rousseau 1964, 59)
The sentiment is perhaps better
expressed as the antecedent to a warning which seems to be directed at his
contemporaries: “a man should be useful to those among whom he lives”
(Ibid.). Since it is impossible for man
to live in a natural state, it becomes important for him to be both dignified
in his nature and to contribute, in a Ciceronian sense, to the overall good of
his society. The warning follows several
lines later: “Always distrust those cosmopolitans who preach obligations to
mankind and neglect to practice them towards their neighbours. Such a philosopher loves the Tartars as an
excuse for not loving his own people” (Ibid.).
This might be seen as a direct attack on his “philosopher” contemporary
Voltaire who spoke positively about the Turks and Tartars often in his writings
and letters.[37]
At another point, in a letter to the Abbé Conti, Voltaire exclaims:
These people are not as
unpolished as we represent them. ‘Tis true their magnificence is of a very
different taste from ours, and perhaps of a better. I am almost of opinion they
have the right notion of life. (Voltaire in Jacob 2001, 155)
This must have been enough to
drive the classically educated Rousseau into rage – to assert that the culture
and lifestyle of the Arabs had surpassed that of European society. Voltaire
sings a similar praise in a letter to Alexander Pope: “I am so much pleased
with them, I really believe I should learn to read Arabic if I was to stay here
a few months” (Voltaire in Jacob 2001, 148). For Rousseau, part of living the
good life was contributing to your own community. This is significant because it shows
Rousseau’s attempt to discredit the work of his fellow philosophes signaling an
ideological break from the Zeitgeist of his day.
Rousseau and Metaphysics
Another
key factor to consider in an analysis of Rousseau as a humanist reformer who is
seeking balance during a period of metaphysical crisis is his view on
religion. His contemporaries sought to completely
crush the religious spirit and most of the renowned intellectuals of his time
and place were crossing the fine line between a stripped down theology and
atheism. Rousseau tried to maintain a
middle position that seemed to satisfy the extremes. Like his peers, Rousseau sees a problem with
the Catholic domination of education in
Rousseau may seem harsh in his
characterization of Roman Catholic education but in many ways he is reiterating
the humanist ideal that denounced scholasticism as being overly vocational and
methodical. Also like the humanists, he
is not attempting to completely remove metaphysics from the intellectual
milieu. He acknowledged that religion
was important; he also acknowledged that there was a problem in the way it was
professed in his day. The problem
existed at two levels. The first level
is ideological and lies in accord with the ideas of his contemporaries; preserving
a catechetical pedagogy seemed incongruous to their political agenda.
Therefore, his educational tracts needed to be somewhat consistent with the
philosophy laid out in his political works which hinge on a liberal notion of
nationalism. Catholic education was seen
to muffle that. The second reason is
epistemological. Rousseau felt that
teaching abstract ideas, such as God and eternity, to minds that are incapable
of understanding is a bigger detriment than never mentioning the concepts at
all. He said in Émile: “It were better to have no idea of God than to entertain
mean, fantastic, injurious and unworthy ideas; it is a smaller evil to be
ignorant of Him than to insult Him” (Rousseau 1964, 203).
In regard to children learning
prayers and the catechism, Julie says: “As regards prayers, every night and
morning, I say mine in my children’s room…they learn them without any
compulsion; as for the catechism, they never heard of it” (Rousseau 1964, 51).
When prodded as to what she expected the result of this to be she replied “I
wish my children someday to be Christians” (Ibid. 52). To this the narrator of the story exclaims
emphatically, “Ah!... you do not wish that their belief should consist merely
of words; you wish them not only to know their religion but to believe it; and
you hold rightly that a man cannot believe what he does not understand”
(Ibid.). It seems that we are naturally
inclined to develop a religious consciousness.
In the conclusion to Julie Rousseau says: “Thus, given up to the inclinations of their
own hearts without disguise or alteration, our children are not cast in an
internal or artificial mould, but preserve the exact form of their original
disposition” (Ibid. 53).
In retrospect the aged Rousseau “was convinced that he
had been born into a family noteworthy for its ‘piety and morals’ and that a
‘sound’ and ‘reasonable’ education had merely served to develop the ethical and
religious principles of his early environment” (Grimsley, 1968,1). The renowned Rousseau scholar Ronald Grimsley
doubts the veracity of this belief, but the significance is no less
important. Whether an older Rousseau was
romanticizing a disenchanting past or not matters little. The key factor here is that Rousseau the
philosopher believed in three essential threads. First, Rousseau believes that childhood is a
crucial age, during which a sound foundation must be established. It shows secondly that an education,
stimulating a student’s sense of reason, should reinforce the values that were
laid during the formative years. Third,
and perhaps less obtrusive, is the notion of religious expression. In a de-Catholicized[38]
Thomistic sense, he is declaring that reason would not conflict with religious
thought, but rather reinforce it.
Grimsley raises several important
points regarding Rousseau and religion that demonstrate Rousseau’s humanistic
tendencies, his revolutionary spirit, and his search for balance. Rousseau in
many ways agreed with the intellectuals of his day but he determined early on
in his career that they were heading too far down a road that would prove to be
fatal to the human condition. Much of
his writing focused on the fate of humanity.
He felt that many of the philosophers that he was familiar with were
superficial, and concerned with personal vanities. He believed that there was a fundamental flaw
in modern thought, “which had mistaken man’s intellectual side for his whole
being, thus developing reason to the exclusion of morality” (Grimsley 1968,
x). In this sense, man had become a slave
to reason as opposed to his passion.
Rousseau was not implying however that reason was bad but simply that it
had a proper place in the ordered human person.
According to Grimsley, he agreed on religion with Voltaire: “Nobody
ought to acquiesce passively in another’s ideas, however excellent or
convincing these might seem to be” (Ibid. xi).
In Platonic – and perhaps even Kantian – terms, Rousseau sought to
educate autonomous moral agents; these should employ a balance of reason,
experience, intuition, and natural instinct.
The Pedagogy of Rousseau
As described, Rousseau’s relationship with his contemporaries had degenerated by the time his philosophy developed into the pedagogy that we see in Julie (1761) and Émile (1762). By then he had a less than honorable reputation with the vast majority of his contemporaries. Perhaps his thinking strayed too far from the standard line of thought which focused on reason. To Voltaire he was a “monster of vanity and vileness;” David Hume once admired Rousseau but then accused him of being an “egotistical monster;” even Diderot, often likened to him, charged that he was “deceitful, cruel and hypocritical” (Qtd. in Postman 1999, 31). Characterized by these unkind descriptions, one might wonder why anyone would waste their time studying such a beast. It is equally important to note that some reputable scholars thought highly of him. One of the chief proponents of the German Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant said that Rousseau's “sensibility of the soul was perfect;” Percy Shelley assumed him to have “sublime genius,” and Friedrich von Schiller considered him to be “Christ-like” (Ibid.).
Peter Gay discusses this paradox in some detail. He admits that Rousseau’s influence left an indelible mark “on the most diverse spirits and movements” and that his “disciples contradicted each other as vigorously as his opponents did” (Gay 1964, 4-5). While the politics expressed in his Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract have drawn the most criticism, other aspects of his theories have suffered similar consequence. His philosophy was seen by some as rationalistic and by others irrationalist; his theology was condemned as being Deist by some, Catholic by some, and Protestant by others; his economics was used to justify communism and at the same time private ownership (Ibid.). It is my contention that some of this controversy can be attributed to his humanistic approach. By seeking balance in his ideology, he identifies a middle ground, one that in many ways may be amenable to two opposing camps.
Only a short discussion of Rousseau’s political theories is necessary to understand the foundation for his pedagogy. He thought very highly of both patriotism and public education to nurture it, but did not think that his contemporaries were capable of the latter. He believed that his approach to teaching and learning would usher in an age where a proper public education would be possible. His major educational tracts, Émile and Julie, certainly opened up discussions in the realm of educational philosophy. The amount of publicity he received, both good and bad, is evidence of his impact. In fact his influence stretched far into modern educational philosophy. “Rousseau gained fame in his lifetime not because of imagination and skill but because he expressed the fears, hopes, and yearnings of a great many of his contemporaries” (Chisick 1981, 203). The Social Contract expressed the view – one that is essential for the understanding of his pedagogy – that man could never be more valuable as an individual than the worth of the society as a whole. In other words, the value of the numerator is always relative to its denominator. In this situation he envisioned a society in which citizens were dependent upon one another, where each man had a unique purpose.
A second key factor can be discerned in his political writing. He had incredible respect for the early church and recognized a true brotherhood of man in its beginnings; but as with all other things, divine institutions will atrophy in our hands. In The Social Contract he laments what he saw as the disintegration of Christian society: “What the pagans had feared had come to pass. The humble Christians had altered their tone, and soon this pretended kingdom of the other world became, under a visible chief, the most violent despotism in the world” (Rousseau 1967, 18). He may have been harsh but this was surely a reflection of the tremendous animus between the French minds and the Church’s role in French government. Such sentiments, as we have seen, place him in line intellectually on one level with his fellow intellectuals.
His criticism here, however, was aimed to strike at the heart of human society, not at divine revelation (Rousseau 1964, 55). “Everything is good that comes from the hands of the creator; everything degenerates in the hands of man” (Ibid. 20). This was a tremendous weight on his shoulders. For this reason he struggled to keep a natural morality at the front of his philosophy. The philosophe did not condemn Christianity. He simply wanted freedom, a Greek sense of freedom that, in Aristotelian terms, could be discovered in a critical analysis of the polis. He felt that universal law was inherent in all cultures and that education could help decipher that law. The role of a teacher was to awaken the natural goodness in youth to insure the development of a fully developed, civilized society. This society would be naturally drawn to a universal code of morality. A properly conducted education should in effect eliminate the need for religious education in the elementary school. He felt that his system would awaken the innate tendencies toward the goodness that God created in us.
Some modern scholars are perplexed by his concept of the noble savage that is illuminated in some of his writing and thus find it difficult to tolerate his educational theory; however, in Émile he tried to further elucidate his intentions. While many interpret his premise of the savage as a call to return to the nomadic life of our primordial ancestors, in light of his educational treatise his theory seems to argue the contrary and in fact seems quite in line with the Renaissance idea of educere – leading one out from. He says:
Remember, in the first place, that when I want to train a natural man, I do not want to make him a savage and to send him back to the woods, but that living in the whirl of social life it is enough that he should not let himself be carried away by the passions and prejudices of men; let him see with his eyes and feel with his heart, let him own no sway but that of reason (Rousseau 1974, 217).
Training the savage, to Rousseau, was taking a step back in order to see the big picture. Society walls us in and hands over its own set of values, ideas, and directions. In being led out from these walls, one is able to experience truths for oneself and cast judgments accordingly. Furthermore, since education should help an individual discern his or her particular purpose in the order of things, and that one must execute this purpose without trying to exact change in the universe, his system was both civic and individualistic, or more specifically for the discussion at hand, both idealistic and materialistic. A gap was bridged by Rousseau. Education not only trained students to be good, active citizens but it also excited people toward their natural disposition rather than simply pouring them into the centuries-old mold as is arguably going on in our present educational setting.
To combat the standard education of his time he wrote Julie and Émile. According to the Sahakians, Émile expressed the ideas already stated in Julie, but “in a more systematic form,” and that even though Émile’s story represented an ideal situation that was unlikely to occur, “the methods of instruction delineated for Émile would effectively elucidate his philosophy of education” (Sahakian and Sahakian 1974, 79). In these works he presented his Recapitulation Theory of Education. This expressed his disapproval for the treatment of children as smaller versions of adults. It formatted four stages of intellectual development. The first, infancy, was the animal stage, which spanned from birth to age two. In this stage a child is closest to his nature and should be allowed to act instinctively. The next stage, childhood, spans from age five to twelve. This is the savage stage where a child developed a self-consciousness that evolves eventually into a personality. The third stage, which lasted from the age of twelve to fifteen, was labeled preadolescence. This period, for Rousseau, is a crucial time because it builds a foundation of character that will be built upon for the rest of the student’s life (Dobson 1969, 112). Adolescence, Rousseau’s fourth stage, stretches from age fifteen to twenty. During this period, according to the Sahakians, the student “exhibits a soul, that is a conscience, social outlook, sex interests, and the personalization of values of truth, beauty, and goodness” (Ibid. 80). The last stage spans the remainder of adult life of the student and represents the practical application of his education in life. For Rousseau, living was learning.
In the first two stages, infancy and childhood, Rousseau is most concerned with the physical being. His hope was that children would develop strong, vigorous bodies that would grow accustomed to the natural world. He said: “A feeble body makes a feeble mind” (Rousseau 1974, 21). More importantly he desired to fine tune the senses. Locke’s sensationalist epistemology had, by the eighteenth century, superseded Descartes’ concept of innate ideas. While Rousseau does not completely abandon the idea of innate knowledge, his insistence on this natural development of the senses in the early years demonstrates his adoption of empiricism to some extent. He will reserve a place for the a priori, in the form of intuition, for later childhood development. This serves as another example of Rousseau’s attempt to find a middle ground in his pedagogy. His epistemological approach here represents a system of checks and balances. Reason and intuition work in conjunction with one another and both are held in check by experience, man’s most basic level of intellectual activity.
The very beginning of Émile reveals the importance that Rousseau places on early childhood as he compares the young child to a sapling. He says: “Tender, anxious mother, I appeal to you. You can remove this young tree from the highway and shield it from the crushing force of social conventions. Tend and water it ere it dies. One day its fruit will reward your care” (Rousseau 1974, 5). Rousseau adds in a footnote that this early care, infancy, is to be entrusted to the mother: “If the author of nature had meant to assign it to men he would have given them milk to feed the child” (Ibid.).[39] Book I of Émile also spends a considerable amount of time discussing an infant’s patterns of speech. He warns: “The child who is trying to speak should hear nothing but words he can understand, nor should he say words he cannot articulate,” and later that “children who are forced to speak too soon have no time to learn either to pronounce correctly or to understand what they are made to say” (Rousseau 1974, 39).
As the infant moves into childhood, the responsibility of his education moves to the shoulders of his father. Rousseau says that begetting children constitutes only one third of a father’s responsibility. In addition he “owes men to humanity” and “citizens to the state” (Rousseau 1974, 17). These debts are paid through the education of his children. If he cannot educate his children himself, he must see that a suitable tutor – whom Rousseau calls a “mercenary man” – takes his place. According to Rousseau, a man “has no right to be a father if he cannot fulfill a father’s duties” (Ibid.).[40] One of the essential qualities that must be mastered by the young child is understanding his place in his society, and much of Rousseau’s prescription for this level of learning focuses on this. He said: “The wise man can keep his own place; but the child who does not know what his place is, is unable to keep it” (Rousseau 1974, 48). A significant part of this lesson is the realization that man is one of many. It is dangerous for him to see himself as master of slaves; it is equally so for him to see himself as slave to a master.
Rousseau takes the opportunity to criticize Locke’s “chief maxim” which was “at the height of fashion” at the time (Rousseau 1974, 53). Locke says to “reason with children” but Rousseau responds: “I hardly think it is justified by its results; those children who have been constantly reasoned with strike me as exceedingly silly” (Ibid.). His basic argument is that reason is the desired outcome of an education and as such it cannot logically be present in childhood. He said that when you try to teach a child by using reason, “you start at the wrong end, you make the end the means” (Ibid.). In the end, according to Rousseau, we will have produced “fruit which will be rotten before it is ripe” (Ibid. 54). Yet, despite the child’s lack of reasoning ability, it must be recognized that “the most dangerous period in human life lies between birth and the age of twelve” (Ibid. 57). Perhaps this idea springs from his most fundamental belief regarding human goodness: “there is no original sin in the human heart; the how and why of the entrance of every vice can be traced” (Ibid. 56).
The education that he is outlining for the first twelve years is known as negative education. It is concerned more with preserving goodness than with teaching virtue. In addition the teacher must use this time to discover the “child’s individual bent” and help keep that undisturbed as well (Ibid. 58). Understanding individuality is not only important to the child, it is essential to the teacher as well. He must be aware of the constitution of the student before he can move to the next level. “The wise physician does not hastily give prescriptions at first sight, but he studies the constitution of the sick man before he prescribes anything” (Ibid. 58). In order for the teacher to gain a clear and accurate picture of the individual makeup of his student, it is imperative that his approach be negative. Otherwise the student will gain a false sense of identity and perhaps exhibit an outward personality that is not a pure reflection of himself. According to Rousseau, the only rule “which is suited for a child – the most important lesson for every time of life – is this: ‘Never hurt anybody’” (Ibid. 69).[41]
The majority of Rousseau’s pedagogy is purely idealistic. It describes perfect conditions, expected outcomes, and abstract philosophies. Bits and pieces of practical educational methods, however, can be gleaned in Émile. Rousseau commented on several aspects of the standard elementary education of his day. He said: “I reckon the study of languages among the useless lumber of [elementary] education” (Ibid. 73). He continues: “It is still a more ridiculous error to set them to study history, which is considered to be within their grasp because it is merely a collection of facts” (Ibid. 74). Recalling mere facts is not learning for Rousseau and the child’s mind is not ready to understand historical facts in their proper context. He goes a step further and removes books from a child’s education claiming that “reading is the curse of childhood” (Ibid. 80). Rousseau thought that the student’s natural curiosity will cause him to learn to read everyday things like notes, invitations, and signs. He said: “I am pretty sure Émile will learn to read and write before he is ten” (Ibid. 81).
Much of Rousseau’s prescription for childhood education is hands on. A tactful teacher must arrange, or perhaps manipulate, the environment in a way that is conducive to the learning process. As the student encounters new things, the teacher must ignite the child’s curiosity and use each experience as an opportunity to instill an important lesson. This holds true for geometry as well. When the subject is taught in the traditional manner – a teacher dictating proofs and theorems – “geometry is beyond the child’s reach” because it demands higher level thinking (Ibid 109). Drawing pictures and shapes should be the gateway into discovering geometric concepts. “Draw accurate figures, combine them together, put them one upon another, examine their relations and you will discover the whole of elementary geometry in passing from one observation to another, without a word of definitions, problems, or any other form of demonstration but super-position” (Ibid. 110).
Book III of Émile is dedicated to preadolescence. During this middle school age the student reaches a rational plane of thought. It is in this third stage that he begins to reason. Yet, Rousseau is still careful about what he teaches. Subject matter is still student-guided at this point; Émile chooses his lessons based on his own curiosity. The method however becomes more positive than negative. Science can be introduced practically. Despite his distaste for textbooks, he encouraged teachers to rely on works like Robinson Crusoe for their glorification of resourcefulness and enterprise. “Let him think he is Robinson himself” (Rousseau 1964, 163). This pragmatic introduction to the physical sciences establishes a transition into the industrial arts. For Rousseau, working with one’s own hands was a worthy vocation. It was the point at which art and science coalesce, the apex of intellect, where human hands create what the mind had fathomed. This stage, if properly executed, should help alleviate the worst feature of society, "forced precocity" (Brumbaugh 1963, 78). This sentiment expresses several aspects of his pedagogy: self-reliance, the dignity of work, and the Platonic aspect of vocation. In addition to practical knowledge, Rousseau takes care to begin cultivating his student’s moral and aesthetic faculties.
Science, like geometry, must be discovered rather than taught. He said: “Let him know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learnt it for himself” and continues to warn that, “if ever you substitute authority for reason he will cease to reason; he will be a mere plaything of other people’s thoughts” (Rousseau 1974, 131). In many ways this type of thinking is directly in line with his contemporaries, as discussed in Stout’s The Flight from Authority, yet Rousseau is not attempting to shift authority (from superstition to science). He believed that authority lies within the human person. “The splendour of nature lives in man’s heart; to be seen, it must be felt” (Ibid.). The study of science must be approached loosely: “It is not your business to teach him the various sciences, but to give him a taste for them and methods of learning them when this taste is more mature” (Ibid. 135). Among the methods that he describes as common to the sciences is deductive reasoning. Setting up basic experiments and noting observations is another. He also stressed the importance of keeping these experiments simple. Scientific instruments should be kept to a minimum because the student “is distracted by their appearance” and furthermore that experiments should be “connected by some chain of reasoning” because “purely theoretical science is hardly suitable for children” (Ibid. 139-140).
Rousseau was very concerned with instilling a sense of cooperation among men in his student. To aid this process he leans on the industrial arts, “which call for the cooperation of many hands” (Rousseau 1974, 148). These arts “make man useful to one another” (Ibid.). Although Rousseau was called egotistical by his peers, he put much care into keeping his fictitious[42] students levelheaded. His hope was that as the pupil entered the stage of learning which passed from age fifteen to twenty, his previous exposure to manual arts would curb the tendency toward intellectual snobbery. Émile makes clear that usefulness should be man's top motivation and not the pretentiousness and allure of scholastic notoriety and false dignity. True dignity lay in the hands of the man that engages in work complementary to his fellow citizens. "The essential point is that a man should be made useful to those among whom he lives" (Rousseau 1964, 59).
Rousseau felt that some artists produced works “that are valued directly according to their uselessness” while artisans are looked down upon (Ibid. 149). He claimed: “The rich think so much of these things not because they are useful, but because they are beyond the reach of the poor” and he asked “What will become of your pupils if you let them acquire this foolish prejudice? (Ibid.). Before he attempts to address such an issue with his student, Rousseau allows Émile to be exposed to various arts beginning with agriculture which he calls “the earliest and most honourable” and continuing to metal work and then carpentry (Ibid. 151). He demands that Émile learn a trade before he is able to continue with his education. The trade must be an “honest” one that “does not develop detestable qualities in the mind, qualities incompatible with humanity” (Ibid. 160). His young student chose carpentry and Rousseau was pleased with this decision because it is “clean and useful… [and] calls for skill and industry” (Ibid. 163).
While
this approval of seemingly vocational education seems to be in conflict with
the humanists of the Italian Renaissance, several issues must be considered.
Most importantly, Rousseau is writing during a cultural, intellectual, and
political revolution that was quite different than the crisis of the fifteenth
century. It may be helpful to
investigate these issues by analyzing the differences and similarities in
conjunction with one another. Both
Renaissance humanists and Rousseau believed that man had dignity and with that
came a responsibility to be a useful, contributing member of society. Both viewed the education of man holistically
and each sought balance. The humanists,
although they recognized the importance of egalitarian education, would not
have condoned the practice of instilling skills that would not, in the
long-run, be useful to the student. This
is evident in Leonardo Bruni’s decision to dissuade his female students from
wasting their time studying rhetoric. It
seems fair to conclude that he would have made the same distinction in regard
to the industrial arts and the sons of noblemen. These are skills that women and noblemen,
respectfully, would never use because Renaissance society, although taking the
first steps toward modernity, was still caught within a medieval, class-oriented
paradigm. Rousseau did not see the same barriers[43]
because
Why have kings no pity on their people? Because they never expect to be ordinary men. Why are the rich so hard on the poor? Because they have no fear of becoming poor. Why do the nobles look down upon the people? Because a nobleman will never be on of the lower classes…. So do not train your pupil to look down from the height of his glory upon the sufferings of the unfortunate, the labours of the wretched, and do not hope to teach him to pity them while he considers them as far removed from himself…. Teach him to put no trust in birth, health, or riches; show him all the changes of fortune (Rousseau 1974, 185).
In light of the progress of thought and modernization that occurred between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries (as described in part one of this chapter), it seems plausible to draw parallels between Rousseau’s humanism and that of his predecessors.
At the age of fifteen, Rousseau’s pedagogy takes on a new look and begins to resemble Renaissance humanism a bit more. By this age, Rousseau felt that his student was ready to progress to the next level of learning. He said of the student: “His body is healthy, his limbs are supple, his mind is accurate and unprejudiced, his heart is free and untroubled by passion” (Ibid. 171). In a sense the student has learned that he is an inseparable piece of a whole that has an important role to play. It is a brotherhood of humanity, and is endowed with various responsibilities by the creator. It becomes the next phase of education that will break the student out of his shell in order to discover what his actual, and appropriate, role is. Adolescence is where reason comes to fruition through the exploration of the humanities – history, philosophy, art and religion, as is applicable to one's time and place. Students should learn how to self-analyze in a Socratic sense; it is a period of self-individuation as Carl Jung would later call it or self-actualization, as described by Maslow. One of the first lessons for an adolescent, and one that makes self discovery possible, is learning to dig beneath the mask that humanity wears. “The man of the world,” Rousseau explains, “almost always wears a mask. He is scarcely ever himself and is almost a stranger to himself” (Ibid. 191). The humanities, for Rousseau, can help by bringing students face to face with core human values.
The Role of the Humanities in Education
Perhaps it would be helpful at this point to reiterate an earlier quote: “All teachers, whatever their subject, carry great responsibility; as Jean Jacques Rousseau made clear, the greatest responsibility is borne by those who teach religion or history” (Dobson 1969, 121). This is the call to the humanists. At the primary level students are incapable, according to Rousseau, of fully comprehending history because they have not yet attained the level of consciousness required to formulate cause and effect relationships between historical facts. The result would be an indefinable conglomerate of memorized particles of a whole. History must be understood in its context. Events must be woven into the fabric of life. As a red piece of thread is seemingly insignificant to the most beautiful oriental tapestry so is an historical fact. It is not until the whole tapestry is viewed that the perceiver can appreciate uninhibitedly the splendor of the creation.
For younger children, perhaps at the middle school level, Rousseau suggests the use of stories, which contain morals or lessons. Stories can sometimes reinforce learned experiences if chosen carefully by the teacher. He is careful to point out, however, that this should not be done earlier as a means of getting children to understand morality: “How can we be so blind as to think fables as moral training, without reflecting that the moral, while amusing, only deceives them, and that, charmed by the fiction, they miss the underlying truth” (Rousseau 1964, 115)? Even if they could understand the fables, “the case would still be worse; for the moral is so complicated and so far above their capacities that it would rather incline them to vice than to virtue” (Ibid.). Ultimately his complaint about relying solely on a child’s reading of fables is related to that of the young student reading history: “the words of fables are no more fables than the words of history books are history” (Ibid.).
Presenting students with too much information at too early an age gives them the illusion that they are capable of understanding the eider perspective and are able to cast judgment. The students must be presented with historical context only when they have developed their sense of reason; at this point they might be left alone to cast judgment using their newly acquired reasoning skills. Secondary school is the only time that this should be attempted. According to the Sahakians’ interpretation of Rousseau, while “negative education dominates the second stage” and “Nature study and science constitute the main program in the third,” the fourth must consist of “the study of history and religion (at eighteen years of age), and social relationships learned from social contacts, great literature, and the theater” (Sahakian and Sahakian 1974, 80). It appears that, for Rousseau, the humanities constitute the highest form of learning and should be reserved, by standards of the modern institution, until the first two years of higher education.
By later adolescence, however, students are ready to tackle humanistic studies. History, like fables must not be taught by imposing impractical memorization. Like morals in a fable, historical facts out of context are more damaging than useful. “The worst historians for a youth” Rousseau says “are those who give their own opinions. Facts! Facts! And let him decide for himself; this is how he will learn to know mankind” (Rousseau 1974, 201). He is weary of modern historians because they are “wholly taken up with effect, [and] think of nothing but highly coloured portraits, which often represent nothing” (Ibid.). Rousseau uses Thucydides[44] as an example of the ideal historian because he evaluates the Greek as having a total lack of bias in his presentation (Ibid.). Modern historians do not do this according to Rousseau, and for a reason, he points to what he calls a “system.” The word is actually strikingly similar to the word paradigm, which we have been using in this study. He says: “The rage for systems has got possession of all alike, no one seeks to see things as they are, but only as they agree with his system” (Ibid. 202). For Rousseau, the “study of the human heart” in historical inquiry is preferable and he recommends that this be done by studying “the character of the individual man” in history as opposed to various wars and other actions attributed to nations or masses (Ibid.).
The proper study of history in Rousseau’s pedagogy is actually a more effective means of acquiring philosophical knowledge than the study of philosophy proper. The problem is again attributed to the question of paradigm. A true humanist should make every effort to transcend the paradigm, or system, within which he is writing. He says that “it is not philosophers who know most about men; they only view them through the preconceived ideas of philosophy, and I know no one so prejudiced as philosophers” (Ibid. 205). He describes what is necessary for the genuine study of humanity: “A great wish to know men, great impartiality of judgment, a heart sufficiently sensitive to understand every human passion, and calm enough to be free from passion” (Ibid. 206). This proposition is an important one and it demonstrates in an indirect way the disdain he held for his peer philosophes. Without denouncing the ideas of the liberal movement, he warns that passion cannot be the motivating force. “We are led astray by those passions which we share; we are disgusted by those that militate against our own interests; and with a want of logic due to these very passions, we blame in others what we feign would imitate” (Ibid.). He begs that reformers transcend their own paradigms in order to see the whole picture more clearly. This is undoubtedly the task of the humanists.
Rousseau was also counter-cultural in that he included religion in his curriculum while most of his companions shunned it completely. Teaching religion, however, before it is time is a danger for many reasons. Some of our most common teaching strategies are the most perilous to Rousseau. Many God-fearing adults are still crippled because of the deficient methods of religious instruction that they experienced as children. John 4:24 says that God is spirit and so he must be worshipped in spirit. In teaching religion before a student is ready we create an anthropomorphism that, once established in the mind, may never be rectified. Perhaps it would have been more efficacious to use one of the more traditional hagiographies to relay the message of God. How many adults today cannot get over the idea that God is a Santa Claus-like man in the sky who watches what we do? Rousseau wanted to avoid this impediment to the learning process.
Some modern readers may be put off by his insistence against teaching religion to children and perhaps this may be seen as being spawned from anti-Christian sentiments. But it must be considered in the proper context. As with the study of the humanities in general, religion has a place and time in the curriculum. Of the Christian educators of his day, he says “If I had to depict the most heart-breaking stupidity, I would paint a pedant teaching children the catechism” (Rousseau 1974, 220). It is imperative that religion in the theological sense be avoided until reason has emerged and the adequate level of development would not occur until at least the age of eighteen. He says that the “only difference” between the Catholic educators of his day and him is that they “profess that children of seven years old are able to do this [perceive the Godhead]” (Ibid. 221). He believed that “it would be better to have no idea at all of the Divinity than to have mean, grotesque, harmful and unworthy ideas” (Ibid.). For Rousseau, “the religious outlook of the person would mean not what group or sect he professed to belong to, but his whole outlook on mankind and the criteria by which the young man would seek to regulate and judge his own actions” (Dobson 1969, 60). He believed, as did many idealists, especially the Transcendentalists, that God revealed himself through nature. By this late adolescent stage in development a pupil has already come to know God through empirical means. He may require the assistance now of an informed teacher and guide to make the revelation known and the humanities might offer sufficient stimulus.
Rousseau
laid out his religious views in “The Creed of a Savoyard Priest,” a chapter in Émile, wherein an Italian priest divulges his theology. This is quite revealing in regard to
Rousseau’s own religious view. In
Rousseau’s autobiography, Confessions,
one finds that Rousseau, a born Calvinist, moved to a Catholic hostel and was
for a while converted to Catholicism. In
Émile a boy undergoes the same
conversion and he became disillusioned and angry with what he discovered. Rousseau said of the boy: “Tears of anger
flowed from his eyes, he was wild with rage; he prayed to heaven and to man,
and his prayers were unheard; he spoke to every one and no one listened”
(Rousseau 1974, 223). Ironically, he
says that the boy “would have been ruined had not a worthy priest visited the
hostel” (Ibid.). The priest is described
as being witty and well-read and it was said that he fell out of favor with his
bishop “by some youthful fault” and was thus moving across the
The priest describes the danger of dogmatic[45] religious training: “My perplexity was increased by the fact that I had been brought up in a church which decides everything and permits no doubts, so that having rejected one article of faith I was forced to reject the rest; as I could not accept absurd decisions, I was deprived of those which were not absurd” (Rousseau 1974, 230). While rigid interpretation of religious sentiment is dangerous, the priest makes it clear that philosophy – perhaps as practiced by Rousseau’s contemporaries – is not a harmless alternative. He says:
When I was told to believe everything, I could believe nothing… I consulted the philosophers, I searched their books and examined their various theories; I found them all alike, proud, assertive dogmatic, professing, even in their so-called scepticism [sic.], to know everything, proving nothing, scoffing at each other…. Braggarts in attack, they are weaklings in defence [sic.]. Weigh their arguments, they are all destructive; count their voices, every one speaks for himself; they are only agreed in arguing with each other. I could find no way out of my uncertainty by listening to them. (Ibid.)
Also responding to his contemporaries, he accuses them of the fallacy of ignorance: “Every system has its insoluble problems, for the finite mind of man is too small to deal with them; these difficulties are therefore no final arguments, against any system” (Ibid. 231). He again is warning about the danger of paradigms. Rousseau, also realizing the short-comings of reason – which his opposition is unwilling to concede – chooses intuition as his means of clearer understanding: “So I chose another guide and said, ‘Let me follow the Inner Light; it will not lead me so far astray as others have done, or if it does it will be my own fault, and I shall not go so far wrong if I follow my own illusions as if I trusted to their deceits’” (Ibid.).
This places a tremendous burden on the shoulders of the humanist teacher. It is important for the teacher to provide the opportunity to experience the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical without showing a bias and without leaning in a particular direction. The priest says: “The disputes of the idealists and the realists have no meaning for me; their distinctions between the appearance and the reality of bodies are wholly fanciful” (Ibid. 232). These opportunities need not be complex for Rousseau: “the inner voice makes this [external, first] cause so apparent to me that I cannot watch the course of the sun without imagining a force which drives it, and when the earth revolves I think I see the hand that sets it in motion” (Ibid. 235). He continues in this line of reasoning and concludes the natural inclination to believe in a cause is to believe in a will and the confirmation of a will points to a natural order initiated by an intelligence. When the teacher loses sight of this and leans to either side of the pedagogical equation, prejudices arise:
Let us compare the special ends, the means, the ordered relations of every kind, then let us listen to the inner voice of feeling, what healthy mind can reject its evidence? Unless the eyes are blinded by prejudices, can they fail to see that the visible order of the universe proclaims a supreme intelligence? (Ibid. 237)
This perhaps steps away from the original Greek humanists who sought to understand the cosmos through reason but some things to Rousseau are not within our intellectual grasp.
Rousseau refers to human pride several times in “The Creed” as a hindrance to human understanding. A shining example of this sentiment is his reaction to the Dutch doctor (1654-1718) who wrote a book entitled The Existence of God Demonstrated by the Wonders of Nature:
I was surprised and almost shocked when I read Neuwentit. How could this man desire to make a book out of the wonders of nature, wonders which show the wisdom of the Author of nature? His book would have been as large as the world itself before he had exhausted his subject, and as soon as we attempt to give details, that greatest wonder of all, the concord and harmony of the whole, escapes us. (Ibid. 238)
It seems that materialism in general may be one of the biggest pieces of evidence that points to hubris. He says that he “would regard [a pure materialist] as a dishonest sophist, who prefers to say that stones have feeling rather than that men have souls” (Rousseau 1974, 242). Such an attitude assumes that man is the central object of perception and therefore if something cannot be sensed by human means, it cannot exist. He compares this to a deaf man who “denies the existence of sounds because he has never heard them” (Ibid.).
Between Rousseau’s warning about subscribing to a particular “system,” his criticism of widespread adoption of Locke’s epistemology, and his comparison of materialism to a deaf man denying sound, one may conclude that his philosophy is urging a balanced, holistic perspective. Like the Renaissance humanists, he is trying to step outside of the Zeitgeist and gather tenets from different systems, which he views as the best the world has to offer. When Rousseau advocated Descartes – itself a contradiction to the spirit of his age – he did not recommend a wholesale commitment. He advises that one system inform the other:
With
the help of dice Descartes made heaven and earth; but he could not set his dice
in motion, nor start the action of his centrifugal force without the help of
rotation.
Rousseau thus attempts to tie together Cartesian reasoning with Newtonian physics using Aristotelian logic.
Another concept that is difficult for the unseasoned mind to grasp is the dichotomy of man, but it is the Renaissance concept of balance in the cosmos that helps Rousseau to understand and finally believe in the immortality of the soul as a separate entity from the body[46]. Being a slave to his senses and of his passions, man can sometimes separate himself from God knowingly. In “The Creed” he almost reiterates Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 7:19[47]. “I feel myself at once a slave and a free man; I perceive what is right; I love what is right and I do what is wrong” (Rousseau 1974, 241). This kind of contradiction in thought and action contradicts an ordered universe. Taking this a step further, he notes that the wicked “triumph” in this world while the righteous suffer “oppression” (Ibid. 245). Thinking this to be “so appalling a discord in the universal harmony” he concludes that “all is not over with life, everything finds its place at death” (Ibid. 245-246). His sentiments then become Ficinoesque: “Alas! My vices make me only too well aware that man is but half alive during this life; the life of the soul only begins with the death of the body” (Ibid. 246).
Education takes on an additional responsibility when Rousseau takes the leap into the realm of immortality. To form good citizens who discern and pursue their particular purpose in the world is part of the task. But immortality of the soul adds another component. The idea of an ordered universe is part of it: “I only assume that the laws of order are constant and that God is true to himself” (Ibid. 247). Besides man being in harmony with the universe, he must also be in harmony with humankind: “man finds his happiness in the welfare of his kind, God’s happiness consists in the love of order; for it is through order that he maintains what is, and unites each part with the whole” (Ibid. 248). In this we see that man has two levels of happiness. One is here on earth while the other is in the eternal world of the soul. Attention must be paid to both. “Man’s justice consists in giving to each his due; God’s justice consists in demanding from each of us an account of that which he has given us” (Ibid.). We then have a responsibility to God and to man and the key to understanding this lies not in the usual avenues: “I do not derive these rules from the principles of the higher philosophy” (Ibid. 249). Education needs to train something beyond mere reason because “too often does reason deceive us; we have only too good a right to doubt her” (Ibid.).
Rousseau then is arguing, from a humanistic perspective, that man should strive for happiness on both levels. In an Aristotelian sense, man can find happiness through his harmony within the polis. This requires that he live a just life with an emphasis on social justice and a focus on his interactions with fellow man. The other level, however, might be seen as Platonic in that it is concerned with the welfare of the soul and requires that man maintain harmony with the cosmos and with God. The secret to blending the two “systems” of thought goes back to Pico and the Renaissance humanists. Within each individual person lies a special connection to the wisdom of God. It is the very thing that makes us dignified, gives us the capacity to improve ourselves and is that which separates us from the animals. Yet it is not reason as Aristotle had theorized, although it works in conjunction with it. Rousseau said that he finds guidance “in the debts of my heart, traced by nature in characters which nothing can efface” (Rousseau 1974, 249). He continues that “conscience never deceives us; she is the true guide of man; it is to the soul what instinct is to the body” (Ibid.). Later he gives a concise definition of conscience:
“There is therefore at the bottom of our hearts an innate principle of justice and virtue, by which, in spite of our maxims, we judge our own actions or those of others to be good or evil; and it is this principle that I call conscience” (Ibid. 252).
This level of learning is reserved for early adulthood, after all the necessary faculties have been developed. The age he prescribes, eighteen to twenty, roughly coincides with students in their first two years of college by modern standards and the curriculum that he advocates might be summed up as a humanities-based core curriculum. He claims that “it is not enough to be aware that there exists such a guide; we must know her and follow her” (Ibid. 254). Learning to do this is the trickiest part of the education process. The question of authority must first be tackled as he determines that morality does not lie not in dogmatic religion, customs, or social constructs but in “natural religion” which can only be found in the individual heart. The Italian priest gives the following advice: “Return to your own country, go back to the religion of your fathers, and follow it in sincerity of heart, and never forsake it” (Ibid. 275). But this advice is followed up with a warning against imbalance: “A haughty philosophy leads to atheism just as blind devotion leads to fanaticism. Avoid these extremes; keep steadfastly to the path of truth, or what seems to you truth, in simplicity of heart, and never let yourself be turned aside by pride or weakness” (Ibid. 277). This is yet one more attempt to instill balance and to avoid the allure of hubris, but even more difficult is his call to action. The priest declares that the young man should “dare to confess God to the philosophers; dare to preach humanity to the intolerant,” even if it means standing alone (Ibid.).
The curriculum that would lead a student to be able to accomplish this begins with the introduction of the student to the things that had been hidden from him through the course of his studies. Rousseau says that the teacher must “remember that to guide a grown man you must reverse all that you did to guide the child” (Ibid. 283). It becomes necessary to “speak to him of those dangerous mysteries which you have so carefully concealed from him hitherto” (Ibid.). The process should begin in a traditional liberal arts sense – “by rousing his imagination” (Ibid. 288). Once his appetite has been whetted, it becomes time for the next step which is exposure to classical literature. According to Rousseau, “Emile will have more taste for the books of the ancients than for our own, just because they were the first, and therefore the ancients are nearer to nature and their genius is more distinct” (Ibid. 309). After exposure to the “pure literature” Rousseau would introduce him to the “reservoirs of modern compilers; journals, translations, dictionaries,” and “he shall cast a glance at them and leave them all forever” (Ibid.). From literature Rousseau would move on to theater and finally poetry which should drive him to “study the languages of the poets, Greek, Latin, and Italian!” (Ibid.).
The Renaissance Revisited
The main character in
Rousseau’s “Creed of a Savoyard Priest” represents the humanism of the Italian Renaissance,
especially, as we have seen, its neo-Platonism: “Man is but half alive during
this life; the life of the soul only begins with the death of the body”
(Rousseau 1974, 246). This is the very
same sentiment that Marsilio Ficino preached to his humanist disciples in
fifteenth century
Lifelong learning, another major theme in Rousseau’s writing, is also reminiscent of the elusiveness of wisdom that one finds in Plato. Our French philosophe sees education as a lifelong process: “True education lies less in knowing than in doing. We begin to learn when we begin to live” (Rousseau 1964, 63). In a sense, his humanism is emerging in such statements. Like his Renaissance forefathers and their ancient Greek predecessors, real dignity lies in human life itself. Homer’s epics espoused heroic values that demanded nobility of thought and action. Rousseau is thinking along these lines and here he seeks balance between the physical and the metaphysical. In Émile he says:
To live is not merely to breathe; it is to act; to make use of…all parts of our being which contribute to our consciousness of life. He has not had most life, who has had most years, but he who has felt life the most. A man may be buried at a hundred years old and have died in his cradle. (Rousseau 1964, 64)
Perhaps this is an appropriate foreshadowing of what is to become of Rousseau’s romanticism in the next century as it related to Henry David Thoreau’s timeless quote from the introduction to his Walden: “Live deep and suck out all of the marrow of life.” The question becomes: how does one accomplish this?
It seems that the answer lies in nature itself. Nature seeks equilibrium. Humanists seek the same.
It must consist therefore in lessening the disproportion between our capacities and our desires, in reducing our inclinations and our powers to a perfect equilibrium…. It is thus in nature, which always acts for the best…. It is only in this primitive state that there is equilibrium between desires and capacities and that man is not unhappy. (Rousseau 1964, 90)
Rousseau is invoking Aristotelian ideas, but with a bit of a twist. He is acknowledging the relationship and role of passion and reason but is not stressing the complete subordination of passion to the faculty of reason as Aristotle does. He falls more in line with the Renaissance humanists in regard to a balanced equation. He leans even further toward the Italians in regard to imagination:
As soon as his potentialities are raised to action, Imagination, the most active of them all awakes and outstrips the others. It is Imagination which extends the horizon of our possibilities, both for good and ill; this is the power which excites and nourishes our desires with the hope of satisfying them. (Rousseau 1964, 90).
Rousseau’s Legacy
In
fact, many have found inspiration in his words.
The Pestalozzi Method of the early nineteenth century takes Rousseau’s
pedagogy to the next level. It is well
documented that Zurich-born educator Johann
Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827) and his disciple Friedrick Froebel trace
their roots to Rousseau[48]. In fact, he was so caught up in Rousseau’s
pedagogy that he named his first born son Jean-Jacques in his honor.[49]
Pestalozzi was one of the pioneers in holistic education: teaching the mind,
body, and spirit. He also had a sharp focus on social justice especially among
the peasants of his day. In one sense he
moved beyond Rousseau by taking education from a tutor for the aristocracy to a
classroom for all. According to Southern
Adventist University’s School of Education website, “Pestalozzi's pedagogical
doctrines stressed that instructions should proceed from the familiar to the
new, incorporate the performance of concrete arts and the experience of actual
emotional responses, and be paced to follow the gradual unfolding of the
child's development” (Egbert and Green 2000).
This pedagogy reflected and was in fact “modeled after Jean-Jacques
Rousseau's plan in Émile” which “focused on such participatory activities as
drawing, writing, singing, physical exercise, model making, collecting, map
making, and field trips” (Ibid.).
Rousseau’s ideas, as incorporated by Pestalozzi, did not stop in
Rousseau,
because he is seen as an enemy of the Catholic Church as a result of his
political philosophies which strongly advocated the separation of church and
state in revolutionary
Rousseau’s
influence traveled far beyond the borders of eighteenth century
Introduction
At the same time, the crises that
these movements addressed exhibit much dissimilarity. The key areas in which
these differences might be most noticeable are in American government,
religion, and its intellectual legacy.
Rousseau found himself in the middle of a bitter feud between a rising
bourgeoisie and an obsolete form of government which retained its absolutist tendencies. This relationship was further complicated by
the government’s intimate relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, a
relationship that put the Church in a position which made it equally at odds
with the revolution. Third, Rousseau’s
The
idea of wilderness itself would add a new element to American life. This idea has been studied by Roderick Nash
who claimed that for Europeans wilderness “was instinctively understood as
something alien to man – an insecure and uncomfortable environment against
which civilization had waged an increasing struggle” (Nash 1982 8). Nash
further points out that Rousseau’s “primitivism” in Émile and Julie “generated
a generation of artists and writers to adopt the Romantic mode” and furthermore
that “the
The core of Transcendentalism was the belief that a correspondence or parallelism existed between the higher realm of spiritual truth and the lower one of material objects. For this reason natural objects assumed importance because, if rightly seen, they reflected universal spiritual truths (Ibid. 85).
In
this manner, the American Transcendentalists saw a crisis that differed from
Another factor, and one that newly arriving immigrants – many of whom were Roman Catholics – would contribute to was industrialization. Industrialized cities, especially in the north began to attract large flocks of European immigrants which helped to polarize the country changing the American social and political life. A greater supply of cheap labor reduced the need for slave labor in northern states. Subsequently, the demands that northern manufacturers placed on southern agriculturalists for raw materials increased the need for slavery in the south in order to keep up a sufficient supply. This issue would serve as fuel for the New England Transcendentalists who would adopt the abolitionist movement as one of their most active causes.
Yet American industrialization changed more than the politics and social justice issues of the country. The metaphysical crisis with its emphasis on the material world combined with the pragmatism of the industrial revolution created a national mindset that was hands-on; it was preoccupied with production and practicality, or “things” as Emerson would describe them in his Ode Inscribed to William H. Channing[55]:
'Tis the day of the chattel,
Web to weave, and corn to grind,
Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.
Such a collective mentality seemed to have produced noticeable effects in the nation’s priorities. It seemed to mute out the desire to attain higher truths. Regarding the intellectual legacy of American culture, the oft quoted line from Alexis de Tocqueville may be aptly applied here:
I think that in no country in the civilized world is less
attention paid to philosophy than in the
Tocqueville
began his American journey in
Young American society was developing a sense of cultural awareness that grappled with several issues: political and ethical, and at the same time, religious and metaphysical. The American philosophical tradition was not identified with academics and might be seen as the practical application of philosophical concepts (Kurtz 1966, 16). In many ways the early American republic shares developmental characteristics with the early days of the Roman republic. The Greco-Roman world saw the practical application of Greek philosophy. The Roman republic absorbed ideas and applied them as circumstances dictated. American philosophy at the time of Tocqueville’s critique resembled this. In lieu of its participation in the dialog of academic philosophy (philosophy proper), American creative thought may be seen as a response to practical interests. In this sense, European ideas were “transformed in light of American needs” (Ibid. 15). The Transcendentalist Charles Ellis sums up the crisis of his day in 1842:
To each race in each age is given a problem. Ours solved one when they got the charter from John; another when they got the habeas corpus act passed; one when they came to America; one at the revolution; so too the world in every epoch. The one now before it seems to be this: What is the true foundation of governments, and religion, and right? (Ellis 1954, 31).
Amos Bronson Alcott adds a humanistic facet to the dilemma in his 1836 work The Doctrine and Discipline of Human Culture: “Encumbered by the gluts of the appetites, sunk in the corporeal sense, men know not the divine life that stirs within them, yet hidden and enchained” (Alcott 1960, 40). Theodore Parker lays the blame on a specific school of thought when he says that a metaphysical school of philosophy “soon becomes a school in physics, in politics, ethics, religion. The sensational school [italics mine] has been long enough in existence to assert itself in each of the four great forms of human action” (Parker 1973, 53).
The following two sections will
show the evolution of the crisis of nineteenth century
Chapter Four- Part One: Nineteenth Century
American Crisis
The nineteenth century was a
unique period in history because it marked a new beginning for Western
Civilization. By the early 1800s the
American project seemed complete. Full
independence from the
Seventeenth
century colonial America found itself preoccupied with establishing permanent
settlements in a vast and largely uninhabited (by European standards)
territory. This preoccupation in addition to their desire to purify humanity
from its “popish practices” and build the new
During
the eighteenth century “intellectual, philosophic, and scientific interests
were more directly nourished” (Kurtz 19). Whereas the previous generation of
young Americans had been influenced largely by the Northern Renaissance, the
eighteenth century Americans were moved by
The [American] materialists had strong interests in science and they attempted to extend what they considered to be the legitimate aims of science to other areas of the cosmos including man. Thus, they consistently attempted to apply physical and mechanistic explanations to mind and morality. (Kurtz 1966, 21)
In
this respect, Rousseau would have felt quite at home with the Age of Reason as
it had carried itself across the
Kurtz points out further that the American Enlightenment took on three forms: materialism and deism, secularistic and naturalistic morality, and republicanism. These forms are important to consider in order for us to understand the crisis of the nineteenth century. Being swept by the current of revolution, the third form will absorb key elements of the first two and thus take precedence, holding the main focus of the late eighteenth century. It is only when the smoke clears and the nation is able to rise from the disarray that American intellectuals will be able to comprehend the repercussions of this movement. The time for this would be the early nineteenth century.
The
first form of American enlightenment took the form of materialism and
culminated in deism[57].
Newtonian materialism germinates later in
This inevitably led to the secularism of
morality which Kurtz sees as the second form of Enlightenment in
Natural laws would show themselves in a different
way. As the revolutionary tides reached
their highest levels, the American Enlightenment would take on its third
form. It has been said that “if
Rousseau
struggled to keep Locke’s empiricism at bay, acknowledging the validity of
modern science yet encouraging a more balanced relationship between science and
man. In several ways the New England
Transcendentalists of the nineteenth century were doing the same thing. While American intellectuals were caught up
in the aftermath of the revolution, European romanticism was establishing
itself as a powerful literary force. By
the mid-nineteenth century, that literature began to flow across the
Rollins
College English Professor Alan Nordstrom recently wrote a verse dialog to
express his own disparate emotions regarding two distinct schools of thought:
“the skeptical secular humanist and the mystical transcendentalist” (Nordstrom
2003, 481). His dialog is apt for
several reasons. While it is set to
describe a current conversation, one that continuously clouds his own thinking,
the dialog also reiterates the perennial dialog depicted in
We dance around in a ring and suppose
But the secret sits in the middle and knows (qtd. Ibid.).
Frost’s stanza is important for several reasons. First it sums up the quest that Professor Nordstrom describes: to find out whether there is “more to the universe in the way of intention, purpose, and meaning than the secular scientific cosmology (or scientism) acknowledges” (Ibid.). Second, it explains the reason why he and most other Humanists in the Renaissance tradition would be attracted to the conversation. The answer lies in the middle. This has been the battle cry for humanists from the fifteenth century on. In fact Frost’s quote is perhaps most significant because it demonstrates the reason why, when he started to write the dialog, “Emerson” for Nordstrom, “was in the ascendant and took the lead part in the debate” (Ibid.). According to Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People Emerson was “in some ways the archetypal American of the eighteenth century” (Johnson 1997, 405). He represented the collective ideology of the New England Transcendentalists, a group of Romantic writers that sought to balance the materialist school of thought that was beginning to prevail.
Several strands of European
thought influenced New England Transcendentalism. German Philosophy (Kant),
German Romanticism (Goethe), French Philosophy (Cousin), English poetry
(Coleridge), and classic Greco-Roman literature all found their way into the literature
of the movement. At the same time, a
theological backdrop pervaded it and thus affected its absorption of any one of
the aforementioned influences that helped shape it. Prior to investigating these intellectuals,
it may be helpful to briefly mention the theology that the
William Ellery Channing
(1780-1842), a native of
Channing’s goal was to synthesize strands of Enlightenment thought with religion in order to create a rational religion. Kurtz argues that, although Channing was not a philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker were both moved by his sermons and thus “he paved the way for transcendentalism” (Kurtz 1966, 261). The Unitarian theological perspective that Channing pronounced was conducive to the philosophical tenets of the New England Transcendentalist school. This theology agreed with the deists of the Enlightenment that reason would lead man to a better understanding of religion; however, they disagreed on the kind of relationship that God maintained with his people. The deists claimed that God was totally aloof, refraining from any interaction with man especially in the form of revelations, supernatural actions, or miracles. Channing admitted these, and in his 1821 The Evidences of Revealed Religions he argues against David Hume, Thomas Paine, and Ethan Allen on the possibility of miracles, and the validity of the Bible as revealed word.
Although he argued against the deists on some of their major dogmatic points, he must not be seen as a defender of traditional American Protestantism. The Second Great Awakening was gaining momentum. According to “Evangelicalism, Revivalism, and the Second Great Awakening” an essay by Queen’s College, SUNY professor Donald Scott, “By the l820s evangelicalism had become one of the most dynamic and important cultural forces in American life” (Scott 2000, “Evangelicalism, Revivalism”). Their Calvinism contained a new twist: “For all they preached hellfire and damnation, they nonetheless harbored an unshakable practical belief in the capacity of humans for moral action, in the ability of humans to turn away from sinful behavior and embrace moral action” (Ibid.).
Scott’s follow-up essay – in a
series put out for humanities teachers by the
Americans embraced this new society as unprecedentedly
democratic, a land of vast opportunity in which the individual (so long as he
was male and white) was free to rise to whatever position his talent and effort
took him. But if American society held out unprecedented opportunity for
"rise," "betterment," and "improvement," it was
also a site of uncertainty, isolation, frustration, and anxiety. (Scott 2000,
“Evangelicalism”)
This
analysis not only provides reason for the great momentum of the religious
movements of nineteenth century
Channing was also responding to this crisis but he was far less inclined to embrace Calvinism. In his 1820 treatise The Moral Argument against Calvinism, he argued against the depravity of man and the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. He proposed that “every item of theology must be judged not only by reason but by moral sense… [he] defended the moral perfection of God and of man… [and proposed that] there was no distinction between saint and sinner” (Kurtz 1966, 261). Man was dignified, capable of moral improvement and Christian virtue by his own power.
Channing is a good transitional figure for several reasons. He straddled the American Age of Reason and the evangelical movement that followed it. He carries some Renaissance humanist threads in his teaching. For instance, he accentuated human dignity and the moral perfectibility of man, and sought to balance an equation without leaning too far toward Enlightenment rationalism or staunch American Protestantism. The third reason is outlined by Kurtz: “Although Channing consistently defended reason, there was still a perceptible romantic thread running through his work, especially in his attitude toward nature” (Kurtz 1966, 262). He continues to conclude that Channing was a humanitarian because social reform was at the center of his ideology, and that Channing “was sympathetic to the social and political ideals of Godwin[58] and Rousseau” (Ibid.). According to The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, during his first few years out of Harvard, “he became acquainted with the works of Rousseau, Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and from that time on the kinship of many of his ideas with those of French Revolutionary origin can be clearly traced” (Ward & Trent 2000, v. XV, book II, ch. VIII, section 4, paragraph 13).
The Transcendentalist Response
New England was the right place
for this literary movement to develop, as
Anthony Harding also comments on
the significance of these two works. Of The American Scholar he says that it marks “a joyful affirmation of each
individual’s right to drink in the universal sources of inspiration” and
furthermore it expresses Emerson’s belief that “the American people will be the
first true nation on earth” when each citizen comes to realize that he is
inspired by the Divine Soul (Harding 1985, 26).
Harding mentions Nature, claiming
that “Emerson attempts to hold physical actuality and divine power in balance
by stressing that Nature is constantly shaped and permeated by Spirit” (Ibid.
27). This perhaps sums up Emerson’s
response to the social crisis. Freedom
from the European intellectual legacy and from its religious dogma might
advance the fledgling country into its prophesied position of greatness. It may
be this underlying thesis that makes Transcendentalism, for many literary
historians, “the distinctive development in American letters of the nineteenth
century” (Kurtz 1966, 25). It has also
been noted that the movement “attempted to establish
On the religious level, the movement converted the pessimism of the Calvinism that they had inherited into optimism. That God was loving and just, and man was capable of virtue and goodness, breaks not only from their Calvinist ancestors, but from the deists of the immediately preceding generation. On the intellectual level they also broke with their predecessors. Their reaction to the deists led them to revolt against the mechanistic concept of nature that supported such an image of God. For the Transcendentalist, “Nature manifested divine purpose, and man might know and appreciate its full beauty…. man must transcend ordinary understanding of experience and his soul must have direct contact with divinity” (Kurtz 1966, 26).
While the impetus for the transcendentalist may have come from the Unitarian movement, in its intellectual reforms it begins to pull away by incorporating the ideals of several philosophical schools of thought – both current and ancient. “Influenced by the romantic idealists, Coleridge, Kant, Schelling, Cousin, by Platonism, and by Indian mysticism, they attempted to expand the categories of the enlightenment” (Kurtz 1966, 26). They believed that a transcendent world existed beyond the phenomena of physical appearances and sought to reconcile the physical world with its eternal oversoul. These scholars were responding to a metaphysical crisis by exposing the limitations of one that was overly relied upon, the Lockian concept of empiricism.
Transcendentalists did not seek rational proofs or scientific methodology. They believed in the power of intuition as a means of transcending the world of appearances. They reopened Plato’s discussion of Forms and added an optimistic view of human nature that made it seem plausible. They identified two realms: Plato’s world of shadows which consists of our sensual experiences and is the object of science, and the unseen world which becomes the object of poetry, literature, art, and philosophy.
The
focus on this invisible world however, does not render the transcendentalist
movement impracticable. Rather, their
humanistic tendencies made transcendentalism practical for the material world. They concerned themselves with morality and
virtue, and stressed the importance of discerning how one should live. An
example is Emerson’s The Conduct of Life. Perhaps the best example of this practice in
action is Thoreau’s famous Civil Disobedience which reiterates Christ’s
mandate in the Sermon on the Mount recorded in Matthew 5:10: “Blessed are those
who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven” (NIV). The members of this
Metaphysics Return in Transcendentalism
Ralph Waldo Emerson is perhaps
the most notable New England Transcendentalist.
He purports strongly that his movement was the answer to society's woes. “Do not cumber yourself with fruitless pains
to mend and remedy remote effects; let the soul be erect, and all things will
go well” (Emerson 1999, 94). While
Emerson’s works have been widely read and discussed in modern classrooms, it is
also helpful to look at some of the work of lesser known Transcendentalists
who, in a sense worked in the shadow of Emerson[59]. Theodore Parker, another orator of the time,
shared many ideas with Emerson, as did Charles Ellis, who anonymously published
an essay on Transcendentalism during the height of its prominence. For pedagogy, Amos Bronson Alcott – the
founder of several schools and superintendent of the
American Transcendentalism was an enhanced form of Romantic
idealism. William Channing said that the
movement’s dogma was "to trust in individual reason as correlative to
Supreme Wisdom, which had been grafted in German idealism” (Leighton 1968,
16). But there was more to it. The Transcendental quarterly, The Dial,
became the official communicator of the movement. In January 1843, an anonymously written essay[61]
describing the movement appeared in The
Dial[62]. The pamphlet was reviewed by
Charles Mayo Ellis is a relatively obscure figure. He
was born in
The introduction of the essay cleverly begins with a
metaphor regarding ancient geographic maps:
They drew only the few countries they knew and set down all else as
Terra Incognita…in the spiritual world they call all beyond the regions unknown
Transcendentalism. Every new doctrine in
philosophy, every new dogma in theology, is transcendental; and so is every
plan for improving man’s religious institutions, or the organization of the
social system (Ellis 1954, 8).
The terra incognita that Ellis is referring to is the
vast world of knowledge that exists outside of the scope of materialism. Also significant to our discussion is the
fact that he adds a dimension of reform: improving the organization of religion
and society. So it carries a message of
social awareness, justice, and making a positive contribution to one’s
community.
In
addition to laying out his idea of what the movement represents, he also
conjures up the ancients, especially Plato and Aristotle, to resume the eternal
dialog. He says: “Man has a body,
wherein he is allied with the beasts; reason, which is his peculiar endowment;
a soul, which connects him with Deity” (Ellis 1954, 10). This trinitarian view
of the human person reflects Aristotelian reason, Platonic metaphysics, and the
romantic faith in intuition as a means of connecting with the deity. He argues that man is more than the animal
that the materialists reduce him to. He is also more than the animal with
reason that Aristotle had projected.
“His nature is triple – animal, rational, spiritual; and it is to those
systems, on whatever subject, which contemplate him as a spiritual being, that we
apply the term transcendental” (Ibid.).
The
first line of his chapter called “Principles” seems to be aimed at spoken to
the materialists: “The history of man is not told by the account of the
particles of matter of which his body is formed.” He continues the conversation in the next
paragraph but broadens his attack claiming that “any theory which seeks to show
that man is a mere ‘conformation of material particles,’ or ‘of these
immaterial ideas the whole of which form the universe,’ leads to the conclusion
that man does not exist” (Ellis 1954, 15).
Such a statement is aimed at the materialists and the idealists at
once. In true humanist style, Ellis is
begging for balance, one that connotes the dignity of man as the result of the
perfect mix: “But besides matter and mind there is also man” (Ibid. 16). Man in
this regard has a special need. Having
mind, body and spirit, his “affections [are] bodily, mental, religious” (Ibid.
17). Religion is to the spirit as appetite is to the body and understanding is
to the mind; it serves to “answer the wants of the spiritual part of his
nature” (Ibid.).
The
chapter concludes with an important principle regarding pedagogy. Man’s morality, sense of duty, religiosity,
and sense of aesthetics are “not dependent on education, custom, command, or
anything beyond man himself” (Ellis 1954, 19).
Education cannot eradicate the law within man and only serves to “add
new motives for obedience to that which he feels to be of imperative
obligation” (Ibid. 19-20). This idea
resembles Rousseau’s in that it is a reaction to both materialism and the
empiricists who developed out of it, those who promote the idea of a “tabula
rasa – a blank sheet, on which these ideas of ours are afterwards written by
the outward world” (Ibid. 21). While
Ellis’s statement is a reaction against the dogmatic tendencies of religious
schools, it is more ardently speaking against the materialist pedagogy that he
calls the “sensationalist school” which
deriving all ideas from sensation, leads to atheism, to a religion
which is but self-interest – an ethical code which makes right synonymous with
indulgence of appetite, justice one with expediency, and reduces our love of
what is good, beautiful, true and divine, to habit, association or interest. (Ellis
1954, 23)
He refers to this as the old philosophy and presents
his as the “new philosophy” which in many ways is analogous to the Renaissance
humanists’ “new learning.” Besides
embracing the ideology of artes liberales
– the freeing of the mind from society’s constructs in order to discover
oneself – it also contains elements of Pico’s oration on the dignity of man:
The new [philosophy] asserts the continual presence of God in all his
works, spirit as well as matter; makes religion the natural impulse of every
breast; the moral law, God’s voice in every heart, independent in interest,
expediency or appetite, which enables us to resist these; an universal, eternal
standard of truth, beauty, goodness, holiness, to which every man can turn and
follow, if he will (Ellis 1954, 24).
Where Ellis is asserting that God is present in his
works and that he is available to anyone that will seek him out of it, Pico
took it a step further by asserting that man was actually created for the very
purpose of seeking out the wisdom of God through his vast works. Pico said in The Oration:
God the Father, the supreme Architect, had already built
this cosmic home we behold, the most sacred temple of His godhead, by the laws
of His mysterious wisdom…. But, when the work was finished, the Craftsman kept
wishing that there were someone to ponder the plan of so great a work, to love
its beauty, and to wonder at its vastness.[63]
The new learning of the Renaissance
humanists was designed to help man discover this wisdom.
The “new philosophy” described in the essay is
certainly not part of philosophy proper and in fact speaks against the
practices of philosophers: “The world at large seldom turn their attention to
anything beyond what they can see, feel, and taste; and philosophy, even, has
not infrequently been limited to an attempt to classify these and the
impressions which they produce” (Ellis 1954, 28). This is important for two
reasons. The Renaissance humanists in
many ways were also criticizing the academic philosophy of their day – the one
that was branded scholasticism – in a manner that was very similar. Recall the comment in Janson’s art history
regarding Botticelli and Renaissance humanism. He said that Botticelli’s work
coincided with Ficino’s thought, which was:
the very opposite of the orderly system of medieval
scholasticism. He believed that the life of the universe, including that
of man, was linked to God by a spiritual circuit continuously ascending and
descending, so that all revelation, whether from Bible, Plato, or classical
myths, were one (Janson 1982 412).
Ellis states that “in the midst of the heathen world
we find men who saw the light” (Ellis 1954, 30). Among these he mentions Plato and Jesus. It seems that they are speaking from within
the same circuit. The second point to
note relates to Thomas Kuhn’s idea of a paradigm shift where he claims that a
shift within a discipline is usually induced by someone who is either new to
the field or who is from outside of it.
Ellis’
chapter “Progress and Obstacles” discusses some of the things that humanity had
accomplished recently, citing the French Revolution as evidence of “the hand of
God in all” (Ibid. 34). Yet despite the
progress, more changes are necessary: “There are yet many traces of barbarian
hands; men are not rid of the influence under which they grew” and in a manner
reminiscent of some of the Renaissance humanists he adds “religion has not yet
parted with superstition and intolerance. Now the system says, the law of your
being is to love God and man….What does not conform to this law is wrong and
ought to be reformed” (Ibid. 35-36). It
is also clear that he sees education as a viable tool to overcome these
obstacles. In fact, for a democratic
society to work, universal education was imperative. He said: “Instead of one man born to wealth
and education, and ten thousand, his serfs, to ignorance and beggary, the
distinctions of rank are fading away, and each is educated, and has a chance in
the scramble of life” (Ellis 1954, 37).
In
some respects, the improvements that Ellis cites might be attributed to the
work of the Renaissance humanists. He
admits that “the tone of society and literature have changed” and that more of
it “is moral and addressed to man as man” and it also is in some ways
“elevating and ennobling” (Ibid. 38).
His tone is positive and reflects a hopefulness that the currents of
reform which he feels in
Where much of Ellis’ tract on the essence of
Transcendentalism is akin to the work of the Renaissance humanists, the final
line of his chapter “Progress and Obstacles” is perhaps the most glowing
example: “The work can never end, for men can never be so good that they may
not see wherein they may be better, and they can never cease to strive while
there is room for improvement” (Ellis 1954, 38). The Greek notion of areté – reaching your highest potential –
resurrected once in the Italian Renaissance where men like il Magnifico and
Ficino saw themselves living in the new
In some ways, however, he was urging educators to go
beyond the Renaissance humanists. He
says that we should not be obsessed with meeting the standards set by the
earlier generations. In order to prove
oneself to the critics, an orator “could not read an oration without stopping
to see how every part compared with one of Cicero’s,” while a builder “must go,
rule in hand, and measure the Parthenon” (Ellis 1954, 45). He continues: “None strove for any thing new,
all was made to conform with the old” (Ibid. 46). Ellis is in line with Emerson in relation to
the young nation’s identity crisis: “Thus all were blind worshippers of the
past; the exertions of men were limited to trials to equal what they ought to
excel” (Ibid.). The “new learning” recovered the classics and brought them to
the world’s attention. The “new
philosophy” demanded that educators surpass them.
Chapter Four- Part Two: Transcendentalist Pedagogy
Charles Ellis’ description of Transcendentalism makes several things clear. The movement must be seen as a response to a crisis. The crisis involves metaphysics (the debate between the idealists and materialists); it involves religion; it involves morality; it involves technological advancement; it involves government and economics. In addition it adds the American identity crisis to the mix where a newly settled nation needed to gain cultural, intellectual, and religious independence from its European ancestry. Another thing that is clear is that education should play a crucial role for reform that will move this world beyond the parameters imposed by this crisis. In trying to discern practical applications of the “new philosophy” we find that much is left unclear and that it requires a close reading of the transcendentalist writings to answer the simple question: what is the pedagogy of this “new philosophy?”
Ellis has left some hints in
regard to art, civics, religion, and morality, but true praxis seems to be
missing. Theodore Parker will provide
some other interesting clues through his powerful essays and sermons. Amos Bronson Alcott, although largely
unsuccessful, attempted to put the transcendentalist pedagogy to use in his
At a very general level, it
may be helpful to consider Ellis’ essay for insight into the
Transcendentalists’ approach to education.
Later it seems appropriate to include some material from Theodore
Parker’s essay, similarly titled, Transcendentalism.
Parker, a lesser known member of the
movement, has left an impressive body of writings that also contribute to our
knowledge of Transcendental pedagogy. In
fact, Robert E. Collins’ work, Theodore
Parker: American Transcendentalist, claims that Parker “deserves to take at
least equal rank with Emerson” (Collins 1973, 1). Parker saw
For Charles Ellis, the arts
are of utmost importance in education: “the pursuits of art are ennobling. Man is made better by them. He is cultivated, as he never could be by
other teachers” (Ellis 1954, 51). He
further goes into a Platonic approach in his description of the value of art as
a means of being educated: “Well does Plato describe the process…by which from
beauty in its lowest forms, man gradually ascends, and is at last enabled to
contemplate the beauty in itself” (Ellis 1954, 51). He believed that the study of art and the
practice of engaging in art would naturally bring the mind to a higher step of
consciousness, similar to the manner expressed in Plato’s Divided Line. Once educated as a “true artist,” one will
display more than mere skill or technique, art requires “genius, the perception
of higher beauty, nobler thoughts, holier aspirations, than those commonly
felt” (Ibid. 53).
In
regard to government, society, and law, Ellis is skeptical about the pedagogies
commonly associated with history and philosophy. He says that “men have justified tyranny or
anarchy,” and further that “on one answer empires have been built; another has
overthrown them” (Ibid. 57). He wonders
how this paradox had come about and asks rhetorically, “By history,
philosophical theories, or by reason?” (Ibid. 58). Of history he says it “only
gives a rule to make man degenerate” and of philosophy he says that it
“presupposes in us a knowledge of the result desired, and so infers the means
of attaining it; or…obeys them, regardless of consequences” (Ibid.). He associates history with “tyrants” and
philosophers with “traders” while the “rational system …contains elements of
truth” (Ibid. 59). Reason “can lead to
nothing higher than expediency” (Ibid. 58).
It is the motivating force that drives us to embrace that which we believe
ourselves to have discerned by either, or both, of the first two methods. It is this combination that created the ideas
of political philosophers like Hobbes who claim that in the natural state, men
“obey no law but his own will, wander like a beast over the earth, taking
without asking, at war with all” (Ibid. 61).
Ellis
details the state of nature that the transcendentalists seek: “[it] is not the
wild liberty of beasts, but the state in which wrong and injustice shall be
done to no man, in which the law of God shall not be violated” (Ellis 1954,
62). Again it may be noted that his
prescriptions warn against what need be avoided yet it provides little
practical advice on how this kind of education should be laid out. In one sense he sheds a bit of hope: “men do
not relinquish the pursuit of truth because they cannot attain all knowledge;
they do not turn away from beauty because all loveliness is not theirs, and
injustice is not to be upheld, because perfect right cannot be done” (Ellis
1954, 63-64). Ellis’ comment here reveals his desire for a balanced approach to
education. Because materialists have not
found all the answers in the physical world does not mean that they should give
up, nor should the metaphysicians and ethicists give up. A well-rounded approach to learning that
incorporates all of these schools of thought is the best way to move closer to
true knowledge. To illuminate this he
claims: “the chief obstacle to overcome is prejudice. The only danger to be
feared, that doctrines shall be extended beyond their legitimate sphere” (Ibid.
67). For Ellis, education – “physical, mental, and moral” – is the most
powerful tool for reform and furthermore, to accomplish change, “bloody
revolutions are not requisite, nor charters, petitions, nor declarations”
(Ibid. 67-68).
In
addition to teaching the arts and sciences in a balanced manner, and avoiding
the tendency to use history and philosophy as a means to promote a particular
worldview, Ellis has much to say about religion as a means of attaining a sense
of moral obligation. He makes it clear that his use of religion, and
consequently its intended purpose in pedagogy, is not to be doctrinal, nor is
it to conflict essentially with materialism or empiricism. Religion is an essential tool for Ellis but
he describes religion in a different way than one might in the twenty first
century. For him, it is:
[the] inborn capacity to perceive truth and right, so that moral and
religious truths can be proved to him with the same degree of certainty that
attends mathematical demonstration; and for the same reason, because they can
be shown to conform to certain fundamental truths, axioms, which we all know,
none can prove or deny, beyond which we cannot go….it relates nothing that is
any wise connected with biblical criticism or theology….He who can hear the
word, believe and obey, is religious. (Ellis 1954, 71-72).
While we all have the ability to discover truth, and
this ability is both innate and lies outside of our senses, the role of
experience is still an important one.
They help us “gain knowledge of what is not part of ourselves” (Ibid.
73). In a sense it helps us make sense
of things by allowing us to put ourselves into some sort of context. For Ellis,
the role of education, in a Rousseauian vein, is to provide a balanced
perspective on religion. To fully
understand religion one must be “free from the prejudices of early education,
the principles of the popular philosophy, the influences of the old theology”
(Ibid. 78). Ultimately the role of the
“new philosophy” is to find the truth in religion: “It forms no creeds, adopts
no rules of faith or practice, organizes no body which shall compel men to
receive or reject it” (Ibid.).
Ethics is the highest level of
human knowledge for the Transcendentalists.
Individual morality leads to the Greek concept of eudaimonia. “Right and justice are to be observed by man, because
this will promote his happiness” (Ellis 1954, 94). Eventually individual moral decisions extend
beyond the individual and affect the community at large. Human character then becomes the hallmark of
a people. What, then, ought man do? Ellis says that “right is that which the
voice within approves, wrong what it condemns” (Ibid. 97). How does education play a role in this? Again, he makes no positive, directive
statement. He merely says what education
should not do: “Education cannot eradicate this moral sense without depriving
one of an attribute of humanity” (Ibid.).
This too points to the earlier pedagogy of Rousseau. Education should not negate what an individual
has naturally within himself. It should
help flesh out the intuitive knowledge that resides within. “Man knows them [the principles of right]
from his nature, because he is man” (Ellis 1954, 98). Ellis’ closing words reiterate the purpose of
the “new philosophy” in a way that resembles the words of the Renaissance. The simple explanation also hints toward the
reason why the school of thought may have been seen as visionary and perhaps
too idealistic. “The end proposed is almost too sublime for human conception,
the perfection of humanity” (Ibid. 102).
Theodore
Parker is a bit more strident and perhaps more practical than the highly
idealistic Ellis. He has much to say
about education and is quite hopeful that it may cure the ills of his
society. In describing the American
government, he praises the “gigantic strength of educated intellect” and
describes it as a people that “triumphed over Theocracy, Monarchy, Aristocracy,
Despotocracy, and have got a Democracy – a government of all, for all, and by
all – a Church without a bishop, a State without a king, a community without a
lord, and a family without a slave” (qtd. in Collins 1973, 4). In a democracy, education is the key to its
success. In his 1848 essay Education of the People he claims that
American democracy “can never be realized except on the condition that the
people, the whole people, are well educated, in the large sense of that word”
(Ibid 10). Besides acknowledging that
everyone has a right to an education, Parker also urges the
Some men are born with a genius for teaching; many with a talent for
it. Offer a sufficient pay and they will
come, and the results will appear in the character of the next generation…. It
is easy to be penny-wise and pound-foolish, and it seems to us that the system
of small salaries for schoolmasters hitherto pursued, even in
There
are two parallels here that are important to this study because they reflect
the modern dialog as well. This
demonstrates the timelessness of the conversation. While Parker demanded higher wages in order
to attract better teachers, his society worked against him. Modern teachers face the same battle. Another issue that is perhaps more closely
aligned with the modern crisis is his critique of the popular view of education
of his day: “education is valued, as it helps to make men able to serve as
tools in the great workshop of society” (Ibid. 11). His essay on education claims that “we think
the end of man is to live for this: wealth, fame, social rank. Genius, wisdom, power of mind, of heart and
soul, are counted as only means to such an end…. Never till education is valued
for itself, can we have a wide, generous culture, even among the wealthiest
class” (Ibid.).
Parker
and Ellis are good people to begin with because they agree on many issues. One of the biggest issues that they agree
upon is their idea of a balanced education.
Parker seems to be mature in his application of transcendentalist
ideals. He warns against an over reliance upon transcendental philosophy and
mentions some of the positive qualities of science. He gives practical examples and paints a
holistic picture of the transcendent, the sensual, and the material.
In
regard to science, Parker feels that given the limited capacity of human
senses, and the limited evidence that might be drawn from them, science loses
its universality. Conclusions that are
potentially universal extend beyond the limits of human sensibility and
therefore reason. “As a result, human
science, including even mathematics, loses its scientific character and becomes
instead a kind of elegant farmers’ almanac” (Collins 1973, 17). The problem for Parker is not in science or
empiricism themselves; it is in their misappropriation. When science moves beyond the subjects which
are observable and quantifiable, it enters dangerous waters. Theology is one of the areas he cites: “They
tell us that God is not knowable; the existence of God is not a certainty to
us” and furthermore that God “is a probability, a credibility, a possibility, a
certainty to none” (Parker 1973, 62).
Parker’s argument is that the “sensationalist” cannot see outside of the
paradigm that he is bound up in. For
Parker such matters can be known for certain through other human
epistemological faculties, namely intuition.
Parker holds the Enlightenment responsible for this and points to David
Hume by name:
‘Man is a body, with blood, brains, nerves – nothing more; the
organization gone, all is gone.’ Now that is sound, logical, consistent; that
was the conclusion of Hume, of many of the English Deists, and of many of the
French philosophers in the last century; they looked the fact in the face. But mortality, annihilation, is rather an
ugly fact to look fairly in the face; but Mr. Hume and others have done it, and
died brave with the sensational philosophy. (Parker 1973, 62).
The problem for Parker is that when science is applied
inappropriately, “[i]t leads to boundless uncertainty” (Ibid. 63). In the end all is thrown into question:
society (originating in divinity), social contracts, justice, rights, etc.. Out
of this social nihilism comes various schools of political thought which claim
that might makes right or that the greater good for the greatest number makes
right (Ibid. 63-64).
Transcendentalism plays a role in science as well as
sensationalism. Parker claims that
physics “starts with the maxim that the senses acquaint us actually with body,
and therefore the mind gives us the idea of substance, answering to an objective
reality;” he then boldly claims that “the whole matter of geometry is
transcendental” because it is the result of deduction from first truths which
are self-evident (Ibid. 65). It is
important to understand that Parker talks of balance between the transcendental
approach and the scientific approach, citing also the negative aspects of pure
transcendentalism in the case of physics: “Evils from the transcendental method
in physics; men have scorned observation, have taken but a few facts from which
to learn universal laws, and so failed of getting what is universal, even
general” (Ibid.). He argues further that
“the generalizations of the transcendental naturalists have been often hasty;
they attempt to determine what nature shall be, not to learn what nature is”
(Parker 1973, 65). He directly
criticizes Schelling for his overzealous transcendentalism. Schelling “said there are only seven primary
planets in the solar system, and from the nature of things, a priori known, it
is impossible there should be more” and
furthermore that “many of the statements of Schelling in physics are of this
same character” (Ibid. 66).
Parker
advocated limits on transcendentalism as much as he acknowledged those of the
sciences. Relying too much on the
transcendental brings out a perilous situation in politics as well: “the
transcendental politician may seek to ignore the past, and scorn its lessons;
may take his own personal whims for oracles of human nature” (Parker 1973, 68).
Transcendentalism used properly, however, could be the mortar that holds knowledge
together in one complete epistemological mosaic. “Transcendentalism has work to do” he admits,
“to show that physics, politics, ethics, religion rest on facts of necessity,
facts of intuition, facts of demonstration, and have their witness and confirmation
in facts of observation” (Ibid. 74). He
expects much from the Transcendentalist movement:
It is the work of transcendentalism to give us politics which represent
God’s thought of a state, -- the whole world, each man free; to give us morals
which leave the man a complete individual, no chord rent from the human harp,
-- yet complete in his social character, no string discordant in the social
choir; to give us religion worthy of God and man (Ibid.).
Creating the grand symphony that he describes is the
task of transcendentalism, and while it seems wholly idealistic it is certainly
reminiscent of the ratios of Brunelleschi’s dome as mentioned in part two.
Parker was hopeful that man would be in tune with the cosmos: “That is the
human dream of the transcendental philosophy. Shall it ever become a fact?
History says, No; human nature says, Yes” (Ibid.).
The
brunt of this burden falls upon the shoulders of the scholar and thus it lies
in the hands of education. Parker claims
that “a change in ideas makes all the difference” and further that “all things
are first an idea in the mind, then a fact out of the mind….as the thought is,
the thing becomes” (Parker 1973, 49).
These ideas, the seeds that will eventually grow and bear fruit[66],
must be planted within the corridors of our institutions of education. The triumph of the American scholar, a
sentiment shared by both Parker and Emerson, depends on the cultivation of
these seeds. Parker calls scholars –
both male and female – to action:
Oh, ingenuous young maid or man, if such you are, -- if not, then let
me dream you such, --seek you this beauty, complete perfection of a man, and
having this, go hold the purse, the office, or the pen, as suits you best; but
out of that life, writing, voting, acting, living in all forms, you shall pay
men back for your culture, and in the scholar’s noble kind, and represent the
higher facts of human thought (Parker, The
American Scholar 1973, 138).
The scholar, for Parker, has the capacity and duty to
correct the “licentiousness of the American press,” and to help stamp out the
“vulgarity of the American church,” which he calls “the poor prostitute of
every wealthy sin” (Ibid.).
The
church is not the only institution that Parker criticizes for its
prostitution. Academia deserves blame as
well. The rich will “tell the
professor…that he must teach ‘such doctrines as the merchants approve,’ or they
will not give money to the college” (Parker Am.
Sch. 1973, 119). He asks who the
benefactors of a college are. His reply
is simple: “it is the purse, not the pen that is the symbol of honour”
(Ibid.). Wealth is a formidable force
that needs to be dealt with in the development of a true humanistic education.
He says that money is “the only power which continually impedes the progress of
mankind” (Ibid. 112). Most of his
frustration is aimed at the clergy and writers of his day who were afraid to
annoy the rich, slave-owning population but he sensed that other areas of
academia were being caught in the trap as well.
He says that “blind money would put out the heavenly eyes of science,
and lead her also into his own ditch” (Parker Am. Sch. 1973, 119). Even
the artists were guilty: “[he] prostitutes his pencil and his skill, and takes
his law of beauty from the fat clown, whose barns and pigs, and wife, he paints
for daily bread” (Parker Am. Sch.
1973, 131). This is a serious issue in
the modern dialog as well and it parallels some of the pedagogical conversation
of the twenty first century.
The
idea that educated Americans, who have been exposed to the eternal truths and
to beauty would turn their backs on wisdom in exchange for the relentless
pursuit of “the purse” is appalling to Parker.
There was tremendous power in education and he expressed a confidence in
the scholar. He saw a country full of
promise, one which had “no class [royal, patrician, or aristocratic] organized,
accredited, and confided in, to resist a new idea” (Parker Am. Sch. 1973, 111).
The
potential for spreading ideas and the less significant level of resistance
faced by the American scholars create the duty of the scholar. He spends “a long time at school and college;
not earning, but learning; living therefore at the cost of mankind, with an
obligation and an implied promise to pay back when he comes of age and takes
possession of his educated faculties” (Ibid. 103). In addition to history and religion, which
seem to be common threads in most of the transcendentalist writing, we can
conclude that Parker sees a need for science and literature in his pedagogical
system. The literature should contain
two elements: “[the first is] human and universal” and “the other is of the
tribe in special, and of the writer in particular” (Ibid 124). This description
resembles aspects of the pedagogy of Rousseau, and clearly represents the
Renaissance humanist ideal. The scholar
must seek out core human values and create a literature that does not merely
imitate the work of the ancients or of the older generations, but funnels the
ancient truths into a modern vessel. He
says: “the universal human substance accepts the author’s form, and the public
wine of mankind runs into the private bottle of the author” (Ibid.).
Regarding
American science Parker claims “[it] is something of which we may be proud”
(Ibid. 121). Yet there are some
dangers. He says that scientists are
getting caught up in the financial aspect of their craft: “A man’s
respectability would be in danger, in
As
we have seen, a general understanding of the Transcendental pedagogy can be
gleaned from the writing of Charles Ellis and Theodore Parker. Both see the American society of their day as
facing a crisis and both see a “new philosophy” as the means to save the nation
from its impending doom. They cite
metaphysical materialism, extreme empiricism, and extreme capitalism
(materialism in the monetary sense) as both causes and sustainers of the
crisis. In addition they add rapid
expansion and the growing pains of the new nation to the mix. Also for both
writers, education is seen as the chief hope for the coming generations. Both believe that education should avoid
Lockian theories and focus on the individual’s innate talents and
strengths. They also add intuition as a
vital a priori source of knowledge. They
advocate curricula that integrate religion, philosophy, and history with both
art and science. For both transcendental
philosophers balance is a central idea and the essence of School of Athens is again revealed.
This
general platform would be built upon by several other well-known
Transcendentalists. The backdrop for this philosophy is the hope that education
in a democratic society was intended to promote social reform, justice, and
human values. One of the central
concerns for most, if not all, of the Transcendental writers was the issue of
slavery as they all stood on the abolitionist side of the debate, but each of
the following focused on some area within these broad categories and thus
created their own brand of Transcendentalism and consequently, their own
pedagogical variations. Amos Bronson Alcott
forged ahead in an educational career that led him to open a school in
Amos Bronson Alcott
Amos
Bronson Alcott attempted this Transcendental, or idealist conception of
education in
Alcott’s educational method was far more
radical than his supporters had realized.
It was based on a belief that children were the purest of all human
beings, having come so recently from God.
It was the priestly duty of the schoolmaster, Alcott believed, to
encourage this spark of divinity by allowing children to express themselves
freely, and so classes were conducted by a conversational method, and no topic
was banned. (Blanchard 1978, 105-106)
Of Amos, Emerson said, "Alcott declares that a teacher is one who can assist the child in obeying his own mind, and can remove all unfavorable circumstances” (Leighton 1968, 77).
According to Walter Harding, in his introduction to Alcott’s Essays on Education, “the
schools [Alcott] conducted as a young man were among the most frequently
discussed of their time” and furthermore that his “influence on the educational
theories of his fellow transcendentalists – men such as Emerson and Thoreau –
was marked” (Harding 1960, vii). Alcott’s
Doctrine and Discipline of Human Culture (1836)
and Conversations with Children on the
Gospels (1837) resulted from his work at the
Like his fellow Transcendentalists, Alcott saw education as the hope of society: “At this day, men need some revelation of Genius, to arouse them to a sense of their nature; for the Divine Idea of a Man seems to have died out of our consciousness.” Hindered “by the gluts of appetites, sunk in the corporeal senses, men know not the divine life that stirs within them, yet hidden and enchained” (Alcott Doc. and Disc. 1960, 40). His desire for reform and his call to educators to carry man out of this crisis is reminiscent of the Humanism of the Italian Renaissance:
The faded image of Humanity is to be restored, and man reappear in his original brightness. It is to mould anew our Institutions, Our Manners, our Men. It is to restore Nature to its rightful use; purify Life; hallow the functions of the Human Body, and regenerate Philosophy, Literature, Art, Society. The Divine Idea of a man is to be formed in the common consciousness of this age, and genius mould all its products in accordance with it (Alcott Doc. and Disc. 1960, 35).
He is pleading for man to rediscover his dignity and reassert himself as a divine entity capable of perfecting himself. “Human culture” to Alcott “is the art of revealing to a man the true Idea of his Being – his endowments – his possessions – and of fitting him to use these for the growth, renewal, and perfection of his Spirit;” an education is “the art of completing man” (Ibid. 32).
Plato’s presence in the
Alcott uses Jesus Christ as an image of the perfected individual. He claims that Christ was the first to reveal man’s true identity and thus destiny. “[Jesus] set no limits to the growth of our nature. ‘Be ye perfect as my Father in Heaven is perfect,’ was the high aim which he placed before his disciples” (Alcott 1962, 33). This perspective of Christ eventually got Alcott into trouble with some of his original supporters. According to Walter Harding, when this image was expounded upon in his Conversations with Children on the Gospels (1837) it was “pronounced as both blasphemous and obscene… [and] most of the parents withdrew their children from his school” (Harding 1960, ix). This view claimed that all men were God-like and that Christ’s “achievements are a glimpse of the Apotheosis of Humanity” and that “they are a glorious unfolding of the God-like in man” (Alcott Doc. and Disc. 1960, 33).
As the image of the perfected human, Jesus then becomes a pedagogical model for Alcott: “Jesus was a Teacher; he sought to renovate humanity” (Ibid. 36). Jesus’ method did not reflect “formal and austere means” but instead relied “chiefly on the living word” (Ibid 37). Conversation is the key to Christ’s methodology and Alcott embraces this in his own pedagogy. The schools of his day embraced methods that demanded memorization and rote learning while Alcott began his lessons with dialog. He said that Jesus’ preference for conversation as “the fittest organ of utterance, is a striking proof of his comprehensive Idea of Education” (Ibid. 38). Alcott also cites Socrates and “the divine Plato” as employing similar methodology. Of these Greeks he says: “They rank next in finish and beauty, to the specimens of Jesus as recorded by his own beloved John” (Alcott Doc. and Disc. 1960, 39). Among other proponents of conversation in pedagogy he cites “the masters” Plutarch, Pythagoras and although not naming Rousseau himself, he named Pestalozzi[68] his disciple claiming that “conversation is the mind’s mouthpiece” and that “good teaching makes the child an eye witness, he seeing, then telling what is seen” (Alcott Superintendent’s Report of the Concord Schools- 1860-61 1960, 157). He says finally that everyone “deserving the name of teacher employs a conversational method of instruction” (Ibid.).
Conversation stimulates the spirit, and an awakened spirit for Alcott leads to a “Whole Man.” This spirit is innate in all humans and “it is the province of education to wake it, and discipline it into the perfection which is its end, and for which it ever thirsts” (Ibid. 42). Conversation was a means for the spirit to uncover the ideas that lie beneath the text. He said: “Books were thoughts first, their contents the result of thinking, they should be baits for thought and study” (Alcott SRCS- 1860-1 1960, 158). In a similar vein as Rousseau, Alcott claims that a child’s life “is too precious to be wasted in committing words to the memory from books they never learn the use of” and furthermore that “next to thinking for themselves, the best service any teacher can render to his scholars is to show them how to use books” (Ibid.). He did not see this happening in the classrooms of his day. He said: “there is little genius in our schoolrooms” (Ibid. 43). Society eats away at the integrity of the soul and it eventually becomes muted in the background: “The soul is split out in lust; buried in appetite; or wasted in vulgar toils; and retreats, at last ignobly from the scene of life’s temptations; despoiled of its innocence; bereft of its hopes, and sets in the dark night of disquietude, lost to the race” (Ibid.). If educational institutions and methodologies are tools of society, then they are not living up to the humanist ideal of artes liberales and are serving to perpetuate the corrupted system, “the race” as Alcott described it. One of the reasons for this loss is a result of eighteenth century philosophy: “It springs from our low estimate of human nature and consequent want of reverence and regard for it” and in the end “the young repeat the vices and reproduce the opinions of parents” (Ibid. 44).
Education is the best means available to combat this influence. Alcott’s writings outline three significant roles in American education. The first is the role of the state, the second is the role of teacher, and the third is the role of the parents. He says that the “object of a free people is the preservation of their liberty,” so then the main task of the state is to “assume the training of all the children in the principles of right, knowledge and virtue, as the only safeguard of their liberties” (Alcott SRCS- 1860-1 1960, 187). He concludes the matter of state responsibility in education in a humanistic light: “The simplest humanities are also the least costly and the nearest home….A virtuous education is the greatest alms it can bestow on any of its children” (Ibid.).
The second role in education is the role of the teacher. He refers to the good ones as “the chosen ones, the masters, the mistresses of the art” (Alcott SRCS- 1859-60 1960, 98). The position in Alcott’s terms becomes literally a spiritual vocation. As Parker demanded better pay and more respect for teachers, Alcott demanded better teachers. Teachers could not be created or formed; they are called. Nature is their guide and teaching is their art. He says that “teaching is the instinct of the heart” and that a teacher must act according to her heart because “mind refuses to be driven by mechanism, it moves by magnetism. It hates routine, dislikes more rote and repetition[69]” (Alcott SRCS- 1860-1 1960, 154). A teacher can not be judged on credentials because it “is a personal influence” and it operates “as a spirit unsuspected at the moment” (Alcott SRCS- 1860-1 1960, 153). Certifications are meaningless to Alcott, who claims that we should not “hazard our children with every candidate who shows credentials from learned faculties, or school committees…none can teach anything who does not love it and find his reward in it” (Alcott SRCS- 1859-60 1960, 97). He says that processes and methodologies are not important because only results demonstrate whether the teacher is “worthy of the vocation” (Alcott SRCS- 1859-60 1960, 99). In regard to what good teaching is, he asks: “Does the teacher awaken thought, strengthen the mind, kindle the affections, call the conscience, the common sense, into lively and controlling activity, so promoting the love of study, the practice of virtues; habits that shall accompany the children outwards into life” (Alcott SRCS- 1860-1 1960, 153-4)? The faithful application of learned methodologies in teacher formation detracts from the art of teaching that the genuine teacher carries naturally in her heart, turning the classroom into an assembly line: “The heart must inspire the head and so sway the will, or the place is but a factory, the tasked and task-mistress meeting day by day to fulfill the unwilling engagements” (Alcott SRCS- 1859-60 1960, 98).
Parents also play an important role in Alcott’s schools. In his report for the 1859-60 school year he expresses disappointment: “I am sorry to find by the register so few credits for visits to the schools by parents” (Alcott SRCS- 1850-60 1960, 91). In the report concluding his second term as superintendent, his disappointment turns into an outright plea to parents and a diatribe stressing the importance of their participation:
The school stands nearest the family of all our institutions, - is indeed an extension and image of it, and claims its fostering interest and sympathy. It should enlist the parents’ affection, and some of their freshest hours. Its teachers deserve to be taken into their hearts as friends, the friends of their children, and their assistants in the work of training them in the ways of learning and virtue. (Alcott SRCS- 1860-1 1960, 185).
He cannot understand why parents are unwilling to take part in the process. He says: “A visit cannot fail to benefit all and parents most if they enter as parents should” (Ibid.). For Alcott the home-school connection was of vital importance because the two need not work against each other but should work in conjunction with one another to reinforce values and virtue. He says “the school is an index to that family, the key to home influences; it is the readiest reading of the town’s population” and furthermore refers back to the Greeks: “Socrates comprised all objects of his search ‘what e’er of good or ill can man befall in his own house, - his homestead, sole,’ rightly perceiving this to be the seminary of the virtues, and the foundation of states” (Alcott SRCS- 1860-1 1960, 183). To aid the process by which families, faculties, and administrators might work together, Alcott held Sunday evening meetings at the school houses. They were open to all members of the community including the children themselves. Alcott took pride in these meetings and said: “I can conceive of no better disposition of an evening than the meeting together of parents and children to converse or hear discussions on the family relations, the duties of neighborhood, the spirit of childhood, and the laws of life and of the virtues” (Alcott SRCS- 1859-60 1960, 181).[70]
Alcott’s Superintendent reports are significant for
other reasons too. Their intended
audience is the general population of
After his first year as superintendent, he remarked that methods of teaching math were exemplary because they were using the Pestalozzi method of instruction, which he refers to as “an example of pure teaching” (Alcott SRCS- 1859-60 1960, 90). He has no recommendations for improvements and concludes that “Arithmetic is the only thing yet taught at all as a master would teach, and it is taught perfectly” (Ibid.). His want of recommended improvements, however, should certainly not be taken as an indication of his impression that math is less important than other subjects. He believed that math was essential to understanding natural science and called geometry, algebra, and arithmetic, the “science which are the alphabet and prime symbols of natural things” (Alcott SRCS- 1860-61 1960, 173). He also alludes constantly to Pythagoras whom he refers to as the “Great Master,” and makes the strong point that there is no “book better deserving the study of teachers and parents than this Life of Pythagoras, from which my extracts are taken” (Alcott SRCS- 1860-1 1960, 192-3). In one of his journals he exclaimed: “Of the greatest educators of antiquity, I esteem Pythagoras the most eminent and successful” and further that “everything of his doctrine and discipline comes commended by its elegance and humanity” (Alcott 1962, 88).
Alcott’s reports also acknowledge the importance of the natural sciences although his advocacy also includes a warning. While studies of physiology are important, “studies in anatomy are best deferred…. The ends of science are sometimes served at the cost of the innocence and of humanity” (Alcott SRCS- 1860-1 1960, 168). He is recommending a balanced approach to science. The high school teacher who introduced the subject of chemistry into the curriculum is praised by Alcott: “Mr. Allen’s methods are scholastic and pains-taking” (Alcott SRCS- 1859-60 1960, 109). In addition, Alcott’s 1861-2 school year report contains a list of recommended books for the teachers to use in class. Of the nineteen books in English (there is a separate list for classical and French books) recommended for the high school classes, seven are science related (five are math, two are geography, one is history and the rest are English language related). The list contains the following science books[71]: Olmstead’s Astronomy, Well’s Natural Philosophy, Well’s Chemistry, Tenney’s Geology, Smellie’s Natural History, and a Manual of Agriculture (Alcott SRCS- 1861-2 1960, 242). His list for teachers in the year preceding had in addition Jarvis’ Physiology and Gray’s Elementary Botany (Alcott SRCS- 1860-1 1960, 161).
The primary focus in history for Alcott seems to be in
Like his Italian Renaissance humanist predecessors, Alcott required knowledge in the classical languages and provided an intense reading list to reinforce the necessary skills. He said that “in our hurrying and practical country [the classic authors] are apt to be much neglected” (Alcott SRCS- 1859-60 1960, 84). In his first school report he gives high school teacher Mr. Allen credit for the students’ performance in the classical languages. He says that Allen “has wished to emancipate the memory from the dead letter of the text and to make his teaching less formal and literal” (Alcott SRCS- 1859-60 1960, 109). The result of his non-traditional methods (which are not described in detail) was that the students showed “good knowledge of the [Greek] grammar and the principles of construction,” and that “Latin translations were good” (Ibid.).
His second report gives a hint of what he thought to be adequate for these high school students. For most of the high school students, he feels that they should understand the rudiments of the language and be able to sift easily through the excerpts found in the textbooks. But the “studious few” should go well beyond and for them he recommends they read Cæsar, Virgil, Cicero, Sallust, portions of Livy, Tacitus’ prose, Horace, half of Catullus, and all of Lucretius (Alcott SRCS- 1860-1 1960, 202). If time permits, he would add Pliny’s letters, portions of Seneca, Ovid, Juvenal, Persius, Lucan, and Martial (Alcott SRCS- 1860-1 1960, 202). In Greek his recommendations are equally rigorous: Xenophon, Homer, Herodotus, parts of Plutarch, Æschylus, Sophocles, Hesiod, Pindar, Orphics, Aristophanes, Plato, Thucydides, and Aristotle (Ibid. 202-209). In addition to these, “the Euchiridion of Epictetus and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius should be read by all who would know the sweetness of the Stoic philosophy” (Ibid. 203). Many of these are in fact histories and students assuredly must gain an historical awareness by reading them. For the others, an historical context must surely be provided as part of the method of instruction.
Also in the humanistic tradition, Alcott makes a sharp point regarding the significance of the arts. In regard to drawing he laments: “This pleasing and really useful art has been hitherto much neglected in the schools” (Alcott SRCS- 1860-1 1960, 167). He suggests to the instructor adding the “Greek Pantheon as a gallery of forms for illustrating the first metaphysics in an attractive style to the senses” (Ibid.). This is helpful in two ways. First it provides an image to help develop the technical skills of the art. Second “of all the forms, the human form is most marvelous and the modest reverence for its shadings intimates the proper mode of studying it rightly and religiously” (Ibid.). In this sense he believes that it will help students develop a sense of piety in relation to the human body.
Also within the realm of the arts he places a tremendous emphasis on music. He believes that “it softens the manners, cultivates the voice, and purifies the taste of children” (Alcott SRCS- 1859-60 1960, 89). Furthermore, he says that singing “is a proper qualification of a teacher, and a cordial gift, indispensable in our primary, and desirable in all our schools; since making melody in the heart soonest brightens the wits and kindles the desire for excellence” (Alcott SRCS- 1859-60 1960, 89). To enforce the position of music in the curriculum, he required that all of the schools in the district participate in an annual “School Exhibition” which was attended by the general public. During this production, each of the three primary schools, the six elementary schools, the intermediate school, and the high school performed several songs and recitations for the audience.
Another area that reflects the visions of Renaissance educator Vittorino da’Feltre is Alcott’s insistence on physical education in the curriculum. The physical body is an essential piece of the trinitarian model (mind, body, spirit). He says that “Body and mind are yokefellows and love to draw together in these life tasks and pleasures of ours” (Alcott SRCS- 1860-61 1960, 169). He later claims that “a sound mind proves itself best by keeping its body sound and swift to serve its turns; its senses keen, its limbs strong and agile for the movement” (Ibid.). This is reflective of the philosophy he puts forth in The Doctrine and Discipline of Human Culture where he claims: “Man’s mission is…to hold his dominion over his own Body… [to be used] for the growth, renewal, and perfection of his Being” (Alcott Doc. and Disc. 1960, 51).
Margaret Fuller
Margaret Fuller was one of the
teachers at Bronson Alcott’s famed
Fuller was well respected by
her contemporaries for her efforts in education but more importantly for her
efforts in the cause of women. Upon the
posthumous publication of Fuller’s writing by Horace Greeley, Alcott said in
his journal: “The sex has had no abler advocate…. That she wrote books was the
least of her merits. She was the greatest when she dropped her pen” (Alcott
1962, 77). Her eloquence impressed him
and he claimed that she “spoke what others essayed to say,” and continued by
comparing her to his classical hero: “She seemed to have divined the significance
of women, dared where her sex has hesitated hitherto, was gifted to untie
social knots which the genius of a Plato even failed to disentangle” (Ibid.
88).
Fuller laments the fact that
her father pushed her as hard as he did when she was a child. She claims, “He made one great mistake…. He
thought to gain time by bringing forward the intellect as early as possible”
(Fuller 1965, 106). In addition she
concluded that the tasks he had given her were “on subjects beyond [her] age”
(Ibid.). Finally she admits: “I look
back on these glooms and terrors, wherein I was enveloped, and perceive that I
had no natural childhood” (Ibid. 108).
These memories of her childhood education helped shape the way she would
eventually respond to the call to teach. Fuller resented having to teach, but because
she needed to alleviate some financial constraints,[73]
she took on the task. After a year
teaching at Alcott’s
She found the students to be severely lacking intellectually and she began to see herself as having a vital role to play in their lives. Thus her mission began to take shape. She describes the state of education in her day:
The gulf is vast, wider than I could have conceived
possible, between me and my pupils; but the sight of such deplorable ignorance,
such absolute burial of the best powers, as I find in some instances, makes me
comprehend, better than before, how such a man as Mr. Alcott could devote his
life to renovate elementary education. I have pleasant feelings when I see that
a new world has already been opened to them. (Fuller 1965, 109)
While her experience at
The satisfaction she gained in enlightening her
students and the emotion that she felt in departing from her elder girls gave
her a new sense of mission. From 1839 to
1844 she conducted a new kind of education in
Fuller’s approach to the
conversations was balanced and highly humanistic. She argues that men are constantly called to
use what they learn: “Their college exercises, their political duties, their
professional studies, the first actions of life in any direction, call on them
to put to use what they have learned. But women learn without any attempt to
reproduce” (Fuller 1965, 117). Her
method was to introduce a subject in a general sense and to give some thoughts
on it. An example of such a subject that
she gives is: “the history of a nation to be studied in – its religious and
civil institutions; its literature and arts, the characters of its great men”
(Ibid. 115). After discussing the topics
she would have her students write their thoughts on it and the result would
spur another dialog, as she would anonymously read the responses aloud to the
class. It appears that her classes were
successful. She says: “My class is
prosperous…. All seem in a glow and quite receptive as I wish” (Fuller 1965,
116). She continues: “I assure you,
there is more Greek than Bostonian spoken at the meetings; and we may have pure
honey of
In some ways her methods were not original. Some aspects of her style could be labeled Socratic. In other ways she resembled the fifth century bishop, Augustine of Hippo. He too knew that learning does not come from the teacher, and that the revelation of true knowledge is discovered within the student. Her use of analogies was similar to Jesus’ parables. The concerns of Jean Baptiste De LaSalle were also her concerns. In the thirty-third entry of his Meditations, he states that “to know their pupils and to discern the right way to lead them, is one of the principal duties of those entrusted with the instruction of youth” (Battersby 1949, 81). In fact, this seems to be the common thread that runs through all of the great teachers we have seen.
Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau graduated from Harvard in
1837 and began teaching in the
Thoreau
is perhaps the best example of general praxis within the
Thoreau’s famous Civil Disobedience is a hallmark for the case of social justice and many see it as an example of praxis within an idealistic philosophy. However, the ideals espoused in the essay and the kinds of justice issues addressed – slavery and unjust war – are concerns that all members of the movement shared. Therefore I have focused on some of his lesser known journal entries in order to see another side of Thoreau. I used Thoreau’s “Lost Journals,” a collection compiled by Perry Miller in the 1950s. In these journals Thoreau adds another element to his brand of transcendentalism, one that would both set him apart from his peers and distinguish him as a pioneer thinker among late twentieth and early twenty-first century readers. Alcott’s journal records: “Nature, poetry, life. – not politics, not strict science, not society as it is, - were his preferred themes,” and that he believed that “the world was holy, the things seen symbolizing the things unseen, and thus worthy of worship, calling men out-of-doors and under the firmament for health and wholesomeness to be insinuated into their souls, not as idolaters, but as idealists” (Alcott 1962, 15). His philosophy was Platonic yet pantheistic. His belief that the physical world was a mere representation of eternal things is akin to Alcott’s own philosophy expressed in his dialog about shadows with his young student as recorded by Elizabeth Peabody, his assistant at the Temple School. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Alcott was so drawn to Thoreau’s intellect. But it seems to be the other side of Thoreau that was most intriguing. Alcott says: “More primitive and Homeric than any American, his style of thinking was robust, racy, as if Nature herself had built his sentences and seasoned the sense of his paragraphs with her own vigor and salubrity” (Alcott 1962, 16). Thoreau’s naturalism set him apart.
Thoreau stressed the divinity in man and believed that nature was the appropriate avenue to discern this divinity and from it develop wisdom. Of divinity he said in his August 1, 1840 journal: “The divinity in man is the vestal fire of the temple, which is never permitted to go out, but burns as steadily, and with as pure a flame, on the obscure provincial altar, as in Numa’s temple at Rome” (Thoreau 1958, 139). This is certainly in line with the philosophies of his contemporaries, but Thoreau insisted, more than any of the others, on nature being a means to awaken the inner spirit. Thoreau separates genius from art. He claims that the artist is the one who “detects & applies for himself the true laws from observation of the works of Genius. – He is the artisan who merely applies the rules which others have detected” (Thoreau 1958, 151). The passage continues to claim that there is no man who is complete genius, yet there is no man who completely lacks it. Nature is the means to discover the genius. He says: “When the accents of wisdom and eloquence have died away – I discover that the chirp of the crickets is still clear in advance” (Ibid. 152). Knowing nature was knowing God for Thoreau, who believed that “God’s order is nature” (Thoreau 1958, 161). In the same entry, he quotes the Greek “matter philosopher” Thales: “’It is hard, but good, to know oneself; virtue consists in leading a life conformable to nature’” (Ibid), and a few days later concludes that “Virtue will be known…. When man is in harmony with nature” (Ibid. 163).
Thoreau’s concern for nature raises questions about the study of science. At first glance it seems (especially in his quoting of materialist philosophers) that Thoreau is bordering on a materialist philosophy and is proclaiming a faith in natural science; however, this is not the case. The following quote in Thoreau’s journal was taken from a book of comparative philosophy[75] that was popular among Thoreau and his contemporaries. The last entry for Saturday, September 26, 1840 says: “’Plato gives science sublime counsels, directs her toward the region of the ideal; Aristotle gives her positive and severe laws, and directs her toward a practical end.’ Degerando” (Thoreau 1958, 163). Herein lies the ancient dialog – the focal point of Raffaele’s painting. Plato and Aristotle are two sides to the same equation and both are required to maintain a balanced approach to epistemology. He says that the scientist will be “the healthiest man” but the kind of science that he is talking about is different than his eighteenth century predecessors would have described (Thoreau 1958, 171). He says that the “true man of science will have a rare Indian wisdom – and will know nature better by his finer organization” (Ibid.). Learning, for Thoreau, does not come from “inference and deduction, and the application of mathematics to philosophy but by direct intercourse” (Ibid.). He takes this a step further when he writes: “It is not with science as with ethics – we cannot know truth by method and contrivance – the Baconian is as false as any other method” (Ibid.). Finally, he concludes October 11, 1840 with one last statement about science: “In a lifetime you can hardly expect to convince a man of an error – but must content yourself with the reflection that the progress of science is slow” (Thoreau 1958, 172).
Science and the humanities, Aristotle and Plato, the material in light of the immaterial. These are the concerns of Thoreau in many of his journal entries. To see the material world as a reflection of the metaphysical is to understand it more fully. Science for Thoreau is a noble art: “The eye that can appreciate that naked and absolute beauty of a scientific truth, is far rarer than that which discerns moral beauty” (Thoreau 1958, 182). Nature “preaches not abstract but practical truth…. Unlike the man of science she teaches that skeletons are only good to wear the flesh, and make fast the sinews to – that better is the man than his bones” (Thoreau 1958, 191). This is a call away from the modern scientific perspective. Is one sense he is attempting to restore the scientific curiosity of Galileo and the original movers of the Scientific Revolution. His statement about the bones is significant and it is important that it followed his praises of science. In a sense it is a warning to avoid scientism, before scientism, as a term, existed. He is saying: Understand science for its whole picture – that which is seen in light of that which is unseen. He more importantly is trying to dissuade scientists from their reductionistic tendencies. If we reduce man to his smallest parts, we have lost track of our essence, the very thing that makes us human.
The Transcendentalist Legacy
On a theological level the Transcendentalists may have made some progress; however, Perry Miller says of the movement: “little or nothing ever came from it” (Miller 1950, 13). He argues that “American society went on its way undisturbed” and that by the 1850s “it had virtually ceased to be” (Ibid.). He suggests a reason why this might have happened:
One reason – possibly a sufficient reason – for the disappearance of the movement was simply that it won its point, or at any rate most of its points….younger ministers tinged with Emersonianism, took over the pulpits, and strife between the church and the “new school” ceased…. The channelizing of reforming energies in to the antislavery crusade also helped make Transcendentalism respectable. And finally, in America of the late nineteenth century, when religion became less of a battleground and anxieties were centered upon the economic problem, Transcendentalism – or what little was left of it – seemed no more than a harmless exhortation to self-reliance and optimism. (Ibid.)
Still, some of the battles may have been won on the theological and even social level, one may not feasibly conclude that the war as a whole was won.
Miller
argues that some of the Transcendental school was absorbed into the American
cultural fabric (e.g. the antislavery movement and the spiritual awakening) but
other aspects of it were, to paraphrase, ran their course and eventually lost
momentum. Fuller, while experiencing
some early success in her education and advocacy for women, in the end lost her
battle. Society was not ready for her
and the “American Scholars” of her day[76]
were not strong enough to carry out her mission. She fled to
Besides
the small victories in theology and society, it could be argued that some were
also gained in the realm of education. Alcott may be one of the few members of
the circle that hung on. Miller says
that he “alone endured to the end as the irreducible and indestructible
Transcendentalist” but adds that he “lived a life of meditative leisure
shamelessly parasitic on the labors of his wife and daughters” (Ibid.). His idealistic philosophies of education
were explored in his early ventures like the
Paul Boller’s 1974 work, American Transcendentalism, 1830-1860: an Intellectual Movement, is more optimistic than Miller’s anthology. In education and theology alike the transcendentalists made a serious impact on American culture. He says: “The Transcendentalists broadened the outlook of educated Americans; they encouraged them to look beyond the horizon of English and classical art and literature” (Boller 1974, 203). He claimed further that they “made permanent contributions to American and to world literature, and their influence here and abroad has been persistent” (Ibid. 204). This intellectual historian argues that the “appeal of the Transcendentalists has rested largely on their impassioned quest for noble ways of using the great gifts of life” and that although it reached all levels of the American intellect, “it remained essentially religious in its quest for meaning and purpose” (Ibid. 205). The book skillfully concludes with a quote from Emerson that describes the purpose of the movement: “Emerson advised: ‘be an opener of doors to those who come after us.’ ... So were all the Transcendentalists” (Ibid 210).
Conclusion
A study of the Transcendentalist pedagogy as a response to social crisis is important. It not only uncovers a nineteenth century philosophy of education, it shows the thread of humanist ideals weaving through a modern worldview, one that is not far removed from our own. Perry Miller, in the introduction to his Transcendentalist anthology claims that,
however few or confused or faltering were the so-called Transcendentalists, they were, often despite themselves, caught up in a crisis of the spirit and of the nation, a crisis that carries immense implications for the American predicament not only in their time but also in ours (Miller 1950 7).
What can be gleaned from these idealistic philosophies, many of which might be considered to have failed?
We must first consider the crisis as they described it. They saw the American Enlightenment and its utter reliance upon reason as a threat to American spirituality and consequently its morality. They also saw the momentum of the Second Great Awakening’s evangelical Christianity as an equally unbalanced alternative. Most of them noted the dangers of excessive capitalistic principles, especially as they affected education, science, technology, and the human condition. These thinkers wanted to forge a new path in American intellectual life and saw themselves as standing at a monumental moment in the nation’s history. Reflecting this moment in history, they believed that a true republican nation required that its populace be educated. Yet education for them went beyond the shaping of model citizens as had been proposed by others in the past (Rousseau and Jefferson[79]). The Transcendentalist saw education as a means of salvation. It was liberation first for the soul and then for the man as a whole.
The Transcendentalists were
humanists in the Italian Renaissance tradition. By the twentieth century,
humanists came to mean those who relied on the human person and his sense of
reason and who had abandoned their faith in the metaphysical which had shackled
mankind in previous ages; it had become secular. These nineteenth century humanists resembled
the Italian model more closely. They strove for moral progress. They sought wisdom in the words of the
classics, which are regarded by many as the original humanists (See Perry and
“Greek Humanism”). They believed in
human dignity and the perfectibility of man who is made in God’s image and
likeness. The Transcendentalists
resurrected the Greek idea of excellence and social justice, but most
importantly believed that the source of correction for society’s evils lie in
education. The Italian humanists wanted
to balance a pedagogical equation. The
liberal arts needed to free man from the system imposed on him by his
surroundings and this would be accomplished by reopening the eternal
dialog. The image of Raffaele’s School of Athens is equally an image of
nineteenth century
Chapter 5- Wisdom for Our Times
Introduction
Jonathan Glover’s[80] Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century begins with a powerful title for his first chapter: “Never Such Innocence Again.” He says that when the twentieth century began “most people accepted the authority of morality. They thought there was a moral law, which was self-evidently to be obeyed” (Glover 1999, 1). Yet things were much different by the end of the century, about which he claims, “It is hard to be confident either about the moral law or about moral progress” (Ibid.). He acknowledges that morality’s major challenge is intellectual in nature. In the modern dialog one must prove first that a moral law exists and second that it holds sway over us. He also admits that this dialog is nothing new and cites Plato as one of the precursors of the discussion. He then identifies several reasons why the crisis has intensified in the twentieth century. He says: “the collapse of the authority of religion and decline in belief in God are reasons for it now being a problem for many who are not philosophers” (Ibid.). Another factor that Glover considers is the role of technology in the modern age. He says that barbarism is not a twentieth century phenomenon but adds that “technology has made a difference,” citing that “the decisions of a few people can mean horror and death for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of other people” (Ibid. 3).
Technology for Glover is a key element in the modern crisis. As he outlines the century’s extensive list of human atrocities one is left to ponder the devastating effects that techno-scientific progress has had upon our culture. He claims that the atrocities outlined in the books serve to demonstrate “how naturally inhumanity combines with technology,” and that “it is hard to see that there was much chance to escape some variant of the bloody twentieth century we know” (Ibid 414). Technology has in a sense removed us from the devastation making us blind to it. He says:
Technology has created forms of cold violence which should disturb us far more than the beast of rage in man. The great military atrocities now use bombs or missiles. The decisions are taken coldly, far away…At the start of the twentieth century, massacres by soldiers were seen as aberrations…. Mass killing of civilians at a distance, having been made easier by technology, is now central to modern war. (Ibid. 64).
This mentality, however, is consistent with human nature according to Glover. He says that “our species won a dominant position on earth partly by using intelligence to devise methods of killing at a distance. And the packs of hunters who survived were often those who were best at killing other humans who were members of rival packs” (Ibid. 41).
This view is important to our
discussion for several reasons. First it
expresses a Hobbesian view of human nature.
Second it reflects the influence of the nineteenth century philosophy of
social Darwinism. Both ideas have been
cited by humanists as detrimental to the human condition and were seen as
concepts that must be thwarted by education.
In a sense Glover is doing the same thing. The twentieth century has
given us the power to kill larger numbers of people at a time and from a
distance; it has also given us the ability to see what is going on in the world
at a global level. Glover retains a
Hobbesian view of human nature but sees Kant as providing the solution. In a later article, regarding the war on
Glover claims: “One feature of our time is the fading of the moral law” and that “the idea of a moral law external to us may never have had secure foundations, but, partly because of the decline of religion in the Western world, awareness of this is now widespread” (Glover 1999, 405). Glover seems to be in an ideological crisis himself at this point. He is not in favor of religious morality yet he knows that there is some value in it. He says: “Those of us who do not believe in a religious moral law should still be troubled by its fading” (Ibid.). He continues to explain this sentiment, starting off with a disclaimer: “The evils of religious intolerance, religious prosecution and religious wars are well known, but it is striking how many protests against and acts of resistance to atrocity have also come from principled religious commitment” and finally admits that “the decline of this moral commitment would be a huge loss” (Ibid.).
So the question arises: If parts of the system are broken, yet dispensing with the system would be “a huge loss,” then why not fix what we have? Glover’s response is humanist but not in Renaissance terms. His humanism is the one proclaimed by the Enlightenment, the one that isolates humanity from its divinity and from its larger context by relying squarely on the human intellect and its faculties of reason. It is an adulterated version of what the Renaissance humanists believed. Glover wants to restore the “optimism, coming from the Enlightenment, that the spread of a humane and scientific outlook would lead to the fading away, not only of war, but also of other forms of cruelty and barbarism” (Glover 1999, 6). Another aim of the book is to “defend the Enlightenment hope of a world that is more peaceful and more humane, … by understanding more about ourselves we can do something to create a world with less misery” (Ibid. 7). At a later point he says that another goal is to “construct a more empirical form of ethics” (Ibid. 43). These are the things that Rousseau, and later the Transcendentalists were responding to.
The response of an historian of ideas is simple: Haven’t we tried this before? One of the initial questions in this dissertation came from a book on historical methodology which asked: “Can stories about other peoples in other places and other times have any meaning in an age of vaulting technology and traumatizing change?” (Gilderhus 1992, 1) My answer is yes, and yet one is left to wonder: If we have been down this road before, and in many regards the present crisis is a result of traveling this road, why would we be willing to start it over again? Glover is not alone. Many scholars find themselves in this paradox because the world of academia is stuck in an intellectual paradigm, a paradigm that germinated in the Enlightenment and was fertilized by nineteenth century positivists and early twentieth century “social scientists.” Glover ends his first chapter with an important line. He says “we need to look hard and clearly at some monsters inside us. But this is part of the project of caging and taming them” (Glover 1999, 7). I agree with this but I extend this to academia itself. It is time to look at some of our own monsters.
The twentieth century is laden with references to crisis from literature and academia in general. Many of these writings express a fear that humanity is somehow being lost in a shuffle. The shuffle appears to be the result of a techno-scientific tangle that is commonly referred to as scientism. The crisis outlined by the works discussed in the first chapter has several distinguishing characteristics. First, a faith in science has created an academic culture that is materialist, reductionist and empirical. Second, these qualities have contributed to the problem in such a way that, the crisis in many respects might be seen as being metaphysical in nature. Third, there exists a general fear that the human condition is suffering – morally, spiritually, etc. – as a result of these first two qualities. Fourth, education is seen as having the potential to avert disaster and restore human dignity by instituting one that is balanced and holistic. This kind of learning will help uncover core human values.
Our case studies have shown us that this crisis is not unique to our time. Similar crises has come and gone in history and education has responded in very specific ways. In some cases, these educational reforms made valuable contributions to the world at large; in other cases these pedagogical movements were absorbed into the Zeitgeist and lost in the momentum of social, cultural, and political currents. In any case, each movement contains certain clues about the role of education in a society and expresses the sheer importance of the teaching profession. Those who are called to the vocation have a serious responsibility in their charge. It is imperative in the twenty-first century – a time which may be seen as the mature stage of the scientific revolution – that educators take notice of pedagogies of the past and begin to glean wisdom from what history has to offer.
The first part of this chapter will investigate the modern crisis from a purely educational standpoint in light of the three previous crises. Then it will discuss the lessons that each of the three case studies has to offer and finally discuss some twentieth century educational philosophers that have picked up the humanist thread. Part Two will look at some of the innovative movements of the twentieth century and suggest ways to expand and integrate them into the twenty-first century. Then it will use contemporary examples in order to develop a firm schema that demonstrates what the humanist philosophy of the present century should consist of.
Chapter Five- Part One:
The Modern Crisis from an Educational
Perspective
To
establish
Seemann
is referring to the research facilities at
This is reflective of the nation’s obsession that: “our economic success depends on our ability to build an innovation economy driven by excellence and technology” (Seeman 2005, A8). This myth has been propagated for a while now. Over a decade ago, a concerned high school English teacher, Nancy King, asked the question: “Can the humanities survive technology?” (King, 1992). She felt that technology was sweeping the curriculum and that the humanities were the areas that were suffering the wrath of this stampede. She refers to the myth that American schools are falling behind other countries and claims that the reason may be quite different than the ones commonly cited. She claims that the schools are “serving so many masters [that] they seem to serve none of them well” (Ibid.). She asks the reader for a moment to “not consider the sciences and the humanities as rivals competing at the expense of one another” but to think of them instead “as two of the basic building blocks that complement each other in turning out well-rounded educated human beings” (Ibid.). She cites other reasons why education is in decline. For one, “the attitude that the quick dollar is our most desirable and the most plausible justification for education” and adds that this attitude “cannot help but to filter down to the lowest grades in elementary schools” (Ibid.). Education, in light of her argument is not valued outside of its practical (monetary) function. It is not appreciated as an end in itself. Teaching students moral values is a problem that “few people recognize when they speak of the failure of American schools to keep up with those in other parts of the world” (Ibid.). She claims further that “one of the most crucial issues in U.S. education is teaching students to stop fighting, scrapping, calling each other names, destroying property, and stealing from one another” and that with such an “immediate and so human a need, technology and global education hardly seem applicable” (Ibid.).
The problem is that not everyone
agrees on what an educated person should be.
Modern capitalists are complaining about the same issues. Franklin Schargel, in his 1996 article “Why we need total quality management in
education,” claims in productionist fashion:
US's public school graduates fall far
short of those in the rest of the industrialized world.
Standardized examinations, a technological
innovation designed to streamline student assessment, seems to be the barometer
to determine learning outcomes. The
article concludes with an indirect warning, especially to policy makers: “If
the educational system fails to deliver qualified graduates as workers, then
the business community will have three choices: to educate the new workers at a
cost of billions of dollars, to accept the shoddy results or to remove all
industrial production from the nation” (Ibid. 217).
Nine
years later the same threats are repeated and our politicians are
responding. Initiatives like those of
Lessons from the Past
Perhaps the greatest lesson to be learned from the humanists of the Italian Renaissance can be summed up in the words of one of its greatest legacies. In his Oration on the Dignity of Man he describes man’s purpose for living: “But upon man, at the moment of his creation, God bestowed seeds pregnant with all possibilities, the germs of every form of life. Whichever of these a man shall cultivate, the same will mature and bear fruit in him” (Mirandola 1994). Man’s purpose is to freely raise himself up and live out his potential. This is expressed by Pico in the words he places in the mouth of God:
We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgment and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature. I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine. (Ibid.).
It is man’s decision where he would take his life, yet he is endowed by his creator with tremendous possibilities. Humanism understood in this sense is a faith in the ability of man to achieve tremendous things. Yet this ability for the Renaissance man is not independent of God; it is rather dependent upon God’s freely given gift.
For the humanists of the Renaissance reaching human potential meant taking in all that was available. They did not seek to overthrow religion or even deny its authority. The humanists sought to balance the equation; they wanted to improve their religion and justify it by studying the great philosophies of the world and aligning them. This is the same question that I ask of modern thinkers who lament the loss of religious morality but would rather reproduce Enlightenment ideals than fix the broken system. Huston Smith’s concept of wisdom tradition reflects Renaissance sentiment as it seeks out the essence of various religions as a means of better understanding our human identity. The wisdom tradition avoids the trappings of specific doctrines or dogma. It begins with the premise that a transcendent world exists outside of the scope of the quantitative sciences. Building on this idea, it adds that many of the mysteries of this transcendence can be discerned through the study of world religions and mythologies. This study is complex and requires a high level of intellectual dialog. Huston Smith argues that these traditions offer a sense of hope and overall balance in our lives. In an interview at The California Institute of Integral Studies Smith responded to a question of the most important theme in his book Why Religion Matters:
That we have this wonderful heritage in the wisdom tradition, but we have through a small but fatal slip in logic assumed that the scientific worldview retires that other worldview. But the scientific worldview includes nothing in the way of fact or evidence that on this deepest level of the conceptual spine that the traditional worldview is mistaken. That is the message I would hope would come through so people would take the traditional/wisdom/religious world in its deepest import seriously again. I think it holds a greater potential and a greater safeguard against pessimism and despair and cynicism of which there is a great deal in our culture today. (Smith 2001)[82]
With religion, philosophy, and the classics cut out of our education we neglect this balance and our reliance upon scientific quantification remains unchallenged and uninformed. Students get a one sided perspective of life. Yet, we will see in the next section that Religious Studies departments and humanities-based programs that incorporate the wisdom traditions have been dwindling in twenty-first century institutions.
Pico, in the tradition of Renaissance humanism, argued his case for the liberal arts as an alternative to the one-track pedagogies (Law, Medicine, Theology, and Business) of his day. Advocating the study of classical literature, philosophy, and theology, he said: “I come now to those matters which I have drawn from the ancient mysteries of the Hebrews and here adduce in confirmation of the inviolable Catholic faith” (Mirandola 1994). He describes himself as a devoted student who is “eager in the pursuit of the good arts” (Ibid.). His use of the term good arts can be seen as the liberal arts as he further describes his approach to philosophical inquiry:
All those who attach themselves to one or another of the philosophers, to Thomas, for instance or Scotus, who at present enjoy the widest following, can indeed test their doctrine in a discussion of a few questions. By contrast, I have so trained myself that, committed to the teachings of no one man, I have ranged through all the masters of philosophy, examined all their works, become acquainted with all schools. (Ibid).
This is the humanism that Raffaele painted. Pico is calling for balance. Besides Christian and Hebraic literature, including the cabala, Pico uses classical literature Seneca, Boethius, John the Grammarian, the Neo-Platonists (Plotinus and Porphyry), the Pythagoreans, the Chaldeans, Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Averroës, Avicenna (an 11th century Arab physician that blended Aristotelian and Neo-Platonist philosophies), and many others to justify his humanistic treatise. Balance is the key that seems to be missing in the humanists of recent generations. In all his faith in humanity, he claims that something of divinity or transcendence “which is the special mark of the Platonists, always shines out” (Ibid.). Divinity and transcendence are key elements.
Pico’s Oration reveals one other important element which can be seen in much of the Renaissance literature. That was the power of individual conscience. He says: “Philosophy has taught me to rely on my own convictions rather than on the judgments of others” (Mirandola 1994). This is an important element. In learning to think for oneself, it becomes probable that the individual may find himself at odds with those around him and then he has an added responsibility. Pico describes it like this: “to concern myself less with whether I am well thought of than whether what I do or say is evil” (Ibid.). Discourse will further serve to balance this. Good conversation will seek out the truth by either convincing others of the truth within your own conviction or by pointing to the error in your conviction and allowing that conviction to be informed and reformulated by the truths that oppose it. In order to accomplish any of this, the “new learning” focused on communication skills as the main vehicle of learning.
Italian Humanism spread northward and its essence began to change. Its first metamorphosis – late sixteenth through the seventeenth – was toward a method of instruction that focused on Christian literature. From there its philosophical purview became more sharply focused. Its goal was to realign the Christian church with Christianity itself. By the eighteenth century humanism had taken on a new appearance. Its confidence in human reason sought to separate man from his dependence upon a metaphysical world. It opened the door to the application of science to humanity which reduced man to a material specimen under the scope of empirical methodology. Ironically the Enlightenment brand of humanism was diametrically opposed to its Renaissance predecessor.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau in many ways stood up for the original humanist values. While he remained a man of his Enlightenment times, especially exemplified by his disdain for the Catholic Church, he also tried to halt the Enlightenment agenda of completely removing the metaphysical from humanity. He felt that the philosophes of his day had gone too far in their atheistic diatribes. He attempted to restore Pico’s ideology on several levels. For one he agreed that God had created man in his image, and that man had been given special faculties which would help him navigate his way through life on earth. He attempted to restore man’s sense of purpose and encouraged him to look for meaning in life. Also in the tradition of the Italian Humanists, he encouraged reliance upon intuition as an epistemological means of reaching truth. Lastly, he encouraged a well-rounded education that fostered communication skills, the tools necessary to be a good citizen.
Unfortunately Rousseau’s
philosophies have been mutilated over the last two centuries. This is a result of several factors. First, his works are consistent within
themselves but in sum they are laden with contradictions. Rousseau’s philosophy seems to develop as he
writes and there is much disparity between his earlier works and his later
works, despite his attempts to correct them along the way. Another problem with Rousseau is that despite
his Christian view of morality and his relatively conservative (compared to
others like Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, etc.) views regarding God, his ideas on
civil religion, as proclaimed in The
Social Contract seem to fall out of his radical line and appear to fit
nicely with what the other deists of his time were preaching. Lastly, his political writings have been
adopted by leaders that did not strengthen his cause. Robespierre and Napoleon both claimed to
embrace Rousseauian ideology. Napoleon
even used Rousseau’s educational philosophies when he designed the national
education system for
Despite Rousseau’s inconsistencies and the misappropriation of some of his ideas, he remains an important figure in the dialog. His pedagogy has been applied successfully by many movements in modern education. Rousseau stood between two writers that influenced his world: Hobbes and Locke. He agreed with Hobbes on one level; he saw self preservation as the main motivating force in human action. His accord stopped there however. Hobbes believed that morality did not exist until laws were put in place to determine right from wrong, hence his concept of the leviathan. Rousseau argued that self –love was good because it was part of God’s natural plan. The key was to balance selfishness with reason on one hand and conscience or intuition on the other. Conscience is older than reason but requires reason to transform it from sentiment to virtue. This represents his break with Locke[83] and it is also what led his contemporaries to call him irrational (Sahakian and Sahakian 1974, 32).
This is the key that brings Rousseau’s ideal of man’s natural state to light. What may not work in his political writing takes form in his educational works. He said in book 4 of Emile “When I want to train a natural man, I do not want to make him a savage and send him back to the woods.” An educated person, for Rousseau, is one whose intuitive sentiments are not repressed by reason but rather filtered through it. In this manner he retains his natural undistorted state. Rousseau’s famous line – “Man is born free but is everywhere else in chains” – begins to make sense in this context. According to the Sahakians’ book, Rousseau as Educator, Rousseau has a Platonic approach to education which consists of “bringing to consciousness what lies dormant in the unconscious” (Ibid. 33). Education had failed civilization. This was the claim that Rousseau made in his Discourses on the Sciences and the Arts, and it is further reflection of his idea of a proper education. Rather than emphasizing the Greek notion of the good life, or areté, the education of Rousseau’s time stressed wealth, conveniences, and human pride.
Despite the problems that arise
in Rousseau’s philosophy, especially after the encounter between his political
writings and his educational works, some of his disciples were able to make the
most of what he had to offer. Johann
Heinrich Pestalozzi’s 1801 book, How Gertrude Teaches Her Children, sets up a practical method of instruction
for children. He took a holistic
approach of which intellectual development was only a portion. His goal was to find balance between the
heart, the head, and the hands and his methodology was informal. Yet despite the informality of instruction it
quickly became recognized as a methodology and became part of teacher formation
in higher education. According to the Catholic
Encyclopedia, which refers to Pestalozzi as “one of the greatest pioneers
of education,” his ideas were carried into the
Frederick
Froebel absorbed Pestalozzi’s method and applied it to early childhood education. Seeking to holistically develop young
children and at the same time bring them closer to God by allowing them to
develop by nature, he saw himself as a gardener of the young. In 1836 he developed the idea of a
kindergarten for children age three to six.
In the same line of thought, Maria Montessori, the first woman to
qualify as a physician in
The Transcendentalists provide
another example of a modern pedagogy that is based in the humanistic
perspective of the Renaissance. These
nineteenth century intellectuals stood at a crossroads in
The Transcendentalists have taught us much about the important role of education in the modern world. The Renaissance humanists were faced with a dilemma that the Transcendentalists had avoided. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, women and peasant students were at odds with their society. Their educations did not help them as much in their careers as it did for the aristocracy. The modern age is marked by a change in that status. In a sense Rousseau was standing on the cusp of that change, which may explain some of the disparity in his writing. By the time we arrive at the nineteenth century, almost everyone had a say in government, and those who were marginalized – blacks and women – became part of the Transcendentalist agenda. This is reflective of their conviction that social justice and human rights are of the utmost importance and that education was the perfect tool to convey this message upon the world. In addition it was the means by which democracy would prevail.
In addition to demonstrating the importance of a good education, the Transcendentalists also identified the responsibilities of the scholar. The scholar has some hefty duties which are set forth by these nineteenth century intellectuals. He is to be the voice of reason, of balance, and of justice. He is to stand up for the sake of righteousness and make his petitions heard. The scholar for these thinkers is the salvation of man in a civilized world. Scholars are representatives of wisdom and thus become civil servants in an intellectual sense.
The
scholar’s calling a sacred vocation. In
a world where teachers are constantly criticized in local newspapers, positions
are getting cut, schools and libraries are closing up, and important courses of
instruction are getting stripped out of the curriculum, this is a message that
must be shouted from rooftops. In
As more schools adopt the methods proposed by these pedagogies of the past, the seeds will be planted and we will have invested in the future of our civilization. A balanced curriculum with a focus on core human values must be part of every level of learning, but we must begin with higher education. If these values are instilled during the first couple of years in the formation of the modern scholar, the project will be initiated. More students will recognize their call to the teaching vocation and our schools will hopefully attract begin true teachers. Other scholars who pursue other livelihoods will have gained the necessary respect for the institution and will share in the love of education. This will surely trickle down to their children. This is a crucial starting point for pedagogical change[85]. Perhaps then teachers in our elementary and secondary schools will bring with them a passion for teaching and the children will come into the classroom with the passion for learning that was instilled by their parents.
This leads to another idea that has come down to us through the Transcendentalist legacy. Parents are a child’s first and most effective teachers. As long as we have parents saying things like “education isn’t for everybody,” we will have students who are justified in their own distaste for school. In Alcott’s day, his disappointment with the lack of parental involvement was justified, yet the attitudes of those parents was perhaps more understandable than those in our current generation. In those days most were poorly educated and some were not educated at all. The initiative to educate everyone was in its early stages. Our generation has no excuse. Everyone receives an education. The question is: How do we make it a good one?
Twentieth Century Humanist Contributions:
Adler, Dawson, and Schwehn
Despite the hardships and disappointments that the twentieth century has brought, several things have been done in the direction of humanistic education. The century opened with a major push toward the scientization of education. Positivism and the social science movement relegated the liberal arts to inferior roles. Disciplines like history struggled to maintain their respectability by joining the scientific crusade. In fact, the final exam question from a course that I took in historical methodology almost a decade ago confused me: Is history an art or a science? Now it makes all the sense in the world. If history is a science, then it is the kind of history that our humanist pedagogues have warned us to stay away from.
By the middle of the century many scholars began to speak up and by the end of the twentieth century, some changes were beginning to be made. In 1952 Mortimer Adler’s first “Great Books” collection was completed and published through Encyclopedia Britannica. At around the same time, Christopher Dawson was writing some of his monumental works regarding history and education. Toward the end of the century, several programs of higher education had heard the call and began to facilitate quality humanities-based learning. Furthermore, Mark Schwehn’s study on the academic vocation, Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America, was published in 1993 after a decade of research.
When Mortimer Adler set out to answer the question, “Can anything be done about American Education?,” he began by analyzing the Greek term paideia, which is roughly “the equivalent of the Latin humanitas” (Adler 1988, xii). Geraldine Van Doran, the editor of Adler’s 1988 work defined paideia as “what we need to know and know how to do in order to enable us to earn a living, to perform the duties of citizenship, to live decent lives, and to improve ourselves and our lives” (Ibid.). Also, according to Van Doran, his dedication to educational reform was the result of a lifelong “brutal struggle against the forces of utilitarianism, elitism, scientism, specialism, and any other dogma infesting American education” (Ibid. xv). In his 1962 essay, “Liberal Schooling in the Twentieth Century,” Adler defines what the humanities approach to education should consist of:
When I say that the course of study in a liberal arts college should be exclusively humanistic, I do not mean to exclude the study of mathematics or of the natural sciences. When these subjects are approached in a certain way, they are as much a part of the humanities as are philosophy, history, and the social sciences, or the fine arts of poetry, music, painting, and sculpture. (Adler 1988, 147).
This concept fits in beautifully with the humanist pedagogues of the past, especially the Transcendentalists like Alcott and Thoreau. The key for Adler is finding the “permanence” in the field and applying it to human needs. The permanence is explained as looking “for the universal and abiding principles, the fundamental ideas and insights, the controlling canons of procedure or method, all of which are determined by the faculties of man as inquirer or learner” (Ibid.).
His answer to the problem was the “Great Books Program.” Ironically he claimed that these works were not to be read by college students for the “nourishment which they provide but for the exercise they afford” (Adler 1988, 147). In other words, he does not expect his student to fully embrace the meaning of the great works of literature. It is the role of the teacher to help draw these meanings out. It is also the role of the teacher to facilitate in the absorption of what he calls the “liberal skills” (Ibid.). These skills are of major concern to Adler. He claims that “graduates of our high schools, as they are currently operated, do not enter college with sufficient training in the liberal arts or a sufficient appreciation for the humanities” (Ibid. 148). Furthermore, “they are neither well read nor are they able to read well” (Ibid.).
Undergraduate schools have to focus on remedial skills before they can deal with professional training. Consequently, he argues, “the Bachelor of Arts degree, which should certify that a young man or woman has the liberal skills prerequisite to specialized study, no longer certifies anything of the sort” (Ibid. 148-9). Ultimately, given the crisis, he believes that specialized training should not begin until graduate school. Colleges, for Adler, need to “provide the remedy for the deficiencies of our high schools” (Ibid. 149). He believes that all four years should be dedicated to this task but admits that this would not be feasible and suggests at least the first two years dedicated to it. If colleges cannot accomplish this, it “would be a disaster – a measureless personal and social disaster – which we should do everything in our power to avoid” (Ibid.).
Several schools have adopted the model over the course of the twentieth century. Some have embraced it as an entire curriculum consisting of four years intensive study of the books in the Great Books index[86]. Other schools have modified the approach and created a core curriculum that is centered on Adler’s program. In some cases these core curricula are mandatory for all students. In others they are optional. Clearly, however, some of the nation’s premier institutions have at least given the idea some consideration, but two questions emerge. First, is his approach practical and is it reasonable for twenty-first century college students to embrace a four-year degree program that may not prepare them for any particular career path, whether that is the work force or graduate and professional schools? Second, does it fully embrace the model set up by the Renaissance humanists of the fifteenth century?
Mortimer
Adler expanded ideas that were filtering through the
Adler’s advocacy of the Great Books program is significant for two reasons. First is the idea of helping students in the acquisition of liberal arts skills. The second reason is its reflection of Adler’s idea of effective teaching. He embraces the Socratic Method and believes that conversation is the basis for a good education. In his 1941 lecture to the American Catholic Philosophical Association, “The Order of Learning,” he claims that it is “the only way to avoid the substitution of verbal memory for the intellectual habit,” and it further “puts questions before answers” (Adler 1988, 190). He tries to avoid what he calls “parrotlike speech” which is indicative of rote memory. To converse is to embrace ideas, and not to memorize the things taught. The books represent the only works of value to the good teacher. A teacher must only use books that are “the very greatest books, on a given subject that have ever been written,” because “only such books will be above both himself and his students; only such books will stimulate him to inquire and thus to lead his students in inquiry; only such books will pose both teacher and students problems rather than give them simply codified, and readily memorizable, answers” (Ibid.).
Adler’s methodology reflects most of the humanists that we have discussed; however his ideas regarding religion in the humanities curriculum are scarce. In his lecture to the American Catholic Philosophical Association he declared that he would “neglect religious education entirely” in the discussion (Ibid. 177). He justifies his statement with the disclaimer that he is leaving it out “not because it is negligible – far from it, it is the least negligible part of education – but for two reasons” (Adler 1988, 177). His reasons are his lack of competency in the subject and the fact that it falls outside of the scope of “philosophical discussion.” The only hint we get from that lecture is his criticism of Catholic educators that put the ends before the means. He says that he is “deeply disturbed by seeing the miscarriage of education in Catholic institutions” but he again ends with a disclaimer: “precisely because I know their ends are right” (Ibid. 179). His argument is that the liberal arts are human rather than Catholic and the means should reflect that. Catholicism should be taught through the scope of the liberal arts and not vice versa.
Christopher
Dawson, the eminent English intellectual historian, was the first recipient of
the prestigious Chauncey Stillman Chair of Roman Catholic Studies at
From
my perspective, the fact that the humanists were good Christians is what sets
them apart from later generations who claim the title of Humanist. The former sought to balance, or inform their
Christian identity through a careful study of the classics. To reiterate, they were taking the best that
civilization had to offer and putting it into dialog. I believe that the Italian humanists ignored
medieval literature because they were already familiar with it. It was the older, classical literature that
needed to be reconciled to it. It was
later humanists, Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment ones, that sought to
eliminate medieval literature for different reasons. For them, the medievals represented the
Church, and it was this they desired to eliminate.
Mark
Schwehn, Professor of the Humanities at
The academic vocation, according to Schwehn is a delicate balance of three elements: “making knowledge, transmitting knowledge and skills, and helping students learn how to lead more ethical, fulfilling lives” (Ibid.). This is a powerful statement and is reflective of the humanism that we have encountered in the present study. It is the kind of teaching that will trickle down to our students and help them to place a high value on education as means of attaining the good life. The teachers in the programs that we have discussed are doing that and their efforts will certainly be absorbed by those that encounter their influence, but there is still much work to be done. Schwehn claims that a big part of the problem is the myth created in graduate schools: “There students learn, regardless of their field of study, that research and publication constitute their tasks and that all other activities…somehow just go with the territory” (Schwehn 1993, 5). This myth is hard to work through because, he says, “to expect a recent Ph.D. to think otherwise would be the same as expecting a recent law school graduate to think like an engineer” (Ibid.).
The next section will analyze the state of present day education in terms of the case studies we have examined and draw some conclusions based on this review. It will look at some of the educational reforms that fall in line with the ideas of Adler, Dawson, and Schwehn and are thus consistent with the Renaissance legacy and it will evaluate some of the trends in modern higher education that veer off this course. Finally, it will provide a definition of humanism for the twenty-first century and answer Eugene Rice’s question of hope for the new learning in the modern world.
Chapter Five- Part Two: Conclusions
Schwehn
largely agrees with Christopher Dawson in reference to the role of religion in
education. In his concluding chapter he
claims that the kind of teaching he is promoting “insists both that religion
needs Enlightenment and that Enlightenment needs religion” (Schwehn 1993,
136). This is balance. This is the
eternal dialog in Raffaele’s painting.
While some colleges have embraced this idea and incorporated it into a
holistic study of Western Civilization, other schools have sought to eliminate
the religious influence. Ronald Nash’s
1991 article “The Myth of a Value-Free Education” argues, perhaps in a more
strident voice that Huston Smith, that the claims of higher education to
promote curricula that are free from “coerced exposure to the values of anyone”
(Nash 1991) do not hold up. He argues
further that “traditional religious and moral values are under assault at every
level of public and higher education,” and that “our educational system is
engaged in a systematic undermining of these values” (Ibid.). As we have seen,
Adler’s
reforms may have been an easier sell because they avoided the controversial
placement of religion. There are several
schools that have outwardly adopted the Great Books model either as a full,
four year program, a liberal arts option, or as a complement to their core
curricula. These programs seem to be
running strong at present and the official website of the Center for the Study
of the Great Ideas, founded by Adler and Max Weisman, keeps track of the
progress of these schools[87]
(see figure 5-1). Tracking
A
survey of the liberal arts programs outlined in
Fifteen
of the top twenty liberal arts colleges had a clearly delineated core of
general education requirements. Of the
fifteen, only one (Colgate) required a course in Western Civilization – the
course that Dawson thought essential to every curriculum – and it only required
one semester of it. Five others offered
anywhere between one and four semesters of Western Civilization courses as
options within the core curriculum yet gave no stipulations making any
mandatory classes. Among the six public
schools that made it into the rankings of liberal arts colleges, five established
some sort of core curriculum and Western Civilization gained a little more
prominence in these. Two did not require
any, while one offered two semesters of it as a possible option to satisfy one
of the distribution requirements. One
school required 2 semesters and another required only part 2 of Western
Civilization, which is modern Western history, completely eliminating the
crucial portion that
Philosophy
and religion courses in the required curriculum can tell much about a school’s
humanist climate. Jacob Needleman, in
his The Heart of Philosophy argues
that these subjects[92] “orient men and women toward the path
that leads to becoming fully human” (Needlemen 1982, xi). Inclusion of these courses in a core
curriculum says that the school is interested in what these disciplines have to
say. Yet it is astonishing to find that many of the top liberal arts colleges
and most of the Ivy League schools are not requiring these courses at any
level. In the top twenty liberal arts
schools only two require a course in philosophy (Davidson and Pomona) and one
(Middlebury) says either a course in philosophy or one in religion is
required. Eight say that philosophy is
one of the courses that can be taken to satisfy distribution requirements, but
it is possible to opt out of philosophy in favor of something else. Of the six state liberal arts colleges none
require it and one (St Mary’s of
One
finds similar results regarding religion in the core curriculum. Of the top twenty, only
While
humanities courses in the core curriculum help paint a picture of the culture of
a school, I began to wonder how many of these schools offered actual programs
in the humanities. Of the top twenty,
two (Colgate and Davidson) offered a degree program in the humanities while
nine offered interdisciplinary programs[93]
that rested on courses taught by humanities faculty. Of the state schools, New College of Florida
offered a major in the humanities and UNC Asheville offered a minor. The other four did not offer any
programs. In the Ivy League schools,
ironically, half offered degrees in the humanities and two offered degrees in
an interdisciplinary area that rested upon the humanities. The
Another
factor that I thought would be revealing about the humanistic climate of these
institutions would be the kinds of departments they had. I looked at each school to determine if they
had a humanities department, a classics department (separate form literature or
something related), and a religious studies department (separate from
philosophy). A humanities department was
by far the least common. Of all the schools only two existed:
Evaluating core curricula, and humanities programs or departments shed much light on the state of humanistic training in our nation’s top liberal arts schools, but I decided to take one more step that reveals an additional clue. The discipline of history can be approached from two very distinct perspectives, and how an institution answers the question – Is history an art or a science? – tells much about their persuasion. I noticed as I sorted through many of the distribution requirement lists that in some cases history met a social science requirement while in other cases it satisfied one in the humanities or liberal arts. Where an institution places history in this schema determines whether they weigh it as a largely qualitative or quantitative discipline. In most cases determining an institution’s position was easy because it was clearly stated. For instance, does the history department fall under the social science division of the school or the humanities division? The other determining factor that I used has already been mentioned: what type of distribution requirement does it fulfill? Within the top twenty liberal arts schools I was able to determine that history was considered to be one of the social sciences in ten of them and part of the humanities in six. In the remaining four I was unable to determine history’s position using the information available on the school’s website. At the state schools, four considered it to be in the social sciences and two (UNC Asheville and Richard Stockton) called it humanities. With the Ivy League schools, I was unable to conclude anything at half of them. Within the other half, three saw it as a social science and one (Yale) as humanities. In total, of the twenty six schools that gave me enough information to determine the institution’s position, only nine saw history as a discipline that falls under the umbrella of the humanities.
This
brief survey was important for several reasons.
It brings to light some of the schools that are doing a fine job with
the humanities.
Higher Education on the Local Level
On
the state level,
It
is disconcerting that the state schools seem to be nurturing academic
environments that are not conducive to humanistic studies. It is equally
disappointing, and perhaps more relevant to this study, that teachers’ training
does not cultivate an ethos of humanism either.
Humans of all races and cultures strive to understand the meaning of life. This is, certainly, one of the most obvious ways in which history is relevant to each of us. In studying the past, we can examine how other peoples have confronted this problem. In the ancient world, for instance, cultures often developed myths to help them explain the world (http://www.ric.edu/history/syllabusAncient.htm#Ancient1).
Among
the mythmakers listed are the Hebrews, the Christians, the Greeks, and the
Moslems (Ibid.). The next mention of the
Church is in the late middle ages. The
topics are: Corruption in the Church, Gregory VII and the Investiture
Controversy, Innocent III and the
The next reference is during the Reformation. The introduction to this period claims:
As the institution of the Catholic Church became more politically involved and grew increasingly remote from its flock, various individuals within the church cried out for reform. The church initially ignored these people. Excommunicated from the Roman church, Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation, which adhered to a more basic Christianity than that currently practiced. (http://www.ric.edu/history/syllabusMedieval.htm#medieval4).
Finally the course enters the modern ages which is marked by the following description:
While scientists and Enlightenment philosophers saw the world, and even God, as operating like a clock, mechanically and on its own without direct guidance from God, others continued to believe that God could intervene in the world at any time, and that the ultimate reality lay in the spiritual, not the material, world. (http://www.ric.edu/history/syllabusEarlyModern.htm#europe3).
Dawson
suggests that one should not be surprised about such a program because “a
secularized society must inevitably be unfavorable to the study of Christian
culture, since its own way of life and its beliefs and ideals are totally
alien” (Dawson 1968, 4). Two fundamental
questions emerge from this discussion. Is this value-free education? What message does this send out to future
teachers? It does not reflect the holism
or the balance that the humanists in our discussion have been urging. It is reflective of the crisis and warrants
our attention. Huston Smith has already
made this clear. In Why Religion Matters he claims that relegating religion to the
position of pre-scientific mythology and seeing the metaphysical world as
superstitious is the equivalent of directly teaching atheism. He says that “courts rightly assume that
theism is a religious position, while wrongly assuming that atheism is not.” He
adds that “if God is omitted from accounts of human origins, students will take
that absence as implying that God has no place in the picture” (Smith 2001,
132).
Model Humanities Programs for the Twenty-first Century
It
is not my intention to expose inadequacies in the curriculum in local
institutions but rather to demonstrate the trend in American education to
construct curricula that conform to the techno-scientific paradigm. It is also not my intention to hyperbolize
the crisis that critics have outlined.
The situation may not be as bleak on the local level as it seems. Some strides have been made in the name of
humanistic studies in the state of
The
Yet limited time and severe budget constraints have not stamped out the humanist flame. Several members of the liberal arts team, under the direction of the deans, have pooled their resources and begun developing learning communities. These LCs are team taught and interdisciplinary. They focus on content while facilitating the development of skills pertinent to the program. One of the most significant LCs was created by faculty from the English and foreign language departments. The course was called “Man and the Machine” and is described as “an interdisciplinary WebCT-based approach to the study of the Humanities” (CCRI Web Page[95]). In this innovative program, “an individual work of literature becomes the prism through which students examine historic, cultural, and other contemporary issues” (Ibid.). In addition to the humanities side of the program, essential technical skills are addressed. Because it is not the traditional 3 credit course, faculty can incorporate the development of various computer skills, adeptness in Web research, and communication skills. Another LC at CCRI, “Man and the Environment,” is offered through the social science department but incorporates Biology and Chemistry as well. They use various technologies to “jointly examine, discuss, formulate, and debate positions based on case studies of pressing sustainability issues concerning the environment and food systems” (Ibid.). According to the NEASC accreditation study, “this pedagogical approach has received national recognition and funding from the Community College Humanities Association and the Rhode Island Board of Governors for Higher Education” (Ibid.).
The Development of Western Civilization program instituted at Providence College in 1971 is perhaps the finest example of a humanities-based education in action in that it employs the methods suggested by both Adler (requiring a large portion of his Great Books list) and more importantly Dawson (paying particular attention to Western Christendom). All students are required to take a four semester course in Western Civilization. The twenty credit course is interdisciplinary and team taught. Meeting five times per week, it covers all aspects of an historical epoch: literature, philosophy, theology, and fine arts. History is both the foundation of the program and the mortar that binds this interdisciplinary structure together.
The
approach, which has been “hailed by educators as one of the finest and most
academically ambitious programs in the country,”[96]
is truly humanistic in its mission. In a
manner similar to the one recommended by Adler, it provides all students,
whether majors in the arts or sciences, with an integrated liberal arts
foundation. The approach serves several
of the purposes that we have encountered in our historical case studies in this
project. First, it brings students to
understand the emergence of the twentieth century world from the ideas and
cultures of the past. This is
significant because it traces the legacies of people, ideas, and identities in
a way that establishes a relationship with the past, thus opening up a living
dialog with our civilization’s forebears.
Second, it helps students to get beyond the compartmentalization of
disciplines that they had experienced in the past and move into a holistic mode
of learning. This helps students to
bring the connection of human knowledge and human civilization to the next
level. Third, it enforces the arts skills
that Adler speaks about. Fourth, it brings the humanistic quest to all areas of
scholarship because it “has become an intellectual rite of passage” (Ibid).
Last, it meets
The
work that is being done by these institutions falls in line with the conception
of teaching that Mark Schwehn is pursuing in Exiles from
The New Intellectualism:
Defining Humanism for the Twenty-First Century
In tracing the threads of Italian Humanism through modern educational movements we find that it becomes necessary to redefine humanism in twenty-first century terms. Over the years the term has been used by many educators to refer to many diverse applications of educational methods. Frederick Edwords, former president of the American Humanist Association says: “The word ‘humanism’ has a number of meanings, and because authors and speakers often don't clarify which meaning they intend, those trying to explain humanism can easily become a source of confusion” (Edwords 1989). He then outlines several variations of humanism that have evolved over the centuries. Renaissance humanism is marked by the “revival of classical letters and a renewed confidence in the ability of human beings to determine for themselves truth and falsehood” (Edwords 1989). In addition to reading the classics and having faith in the human capacity to discern truth, there was a Christian element to it. Edwords adds the following: “Christian Humanism is defined by Webster's Third New International Dictionary as ‘a philosophy advocating the self-fulfillment of man within the framework of Christian principles.’ This more human-oriented faith is largely a product of the Renaissance and is a part of what made up Renaissance humanism” (Ibid.). What becomes muddled in modern dialog is what Edwords calls “Modern Humanism” which “is defined by one of its leading proponents, Corliss Lamont, as ‘a naturalistic philosophy that rejects all supernaturalism and relies primarily upon reason and science, democracy and human compassion’” (Ibid.). This brand of humanism has come to us through the works of the Enlightenment thinkers who considered themselves to be secular humanists.
So where does that leave the Renaissance humanist in the twenty-first century? The AHA lists what it claims to be “the basic ideas held in common by both Religious and Secular Humanists” (Ibid.). Some are irrefutable. For instance, man is capable of thinking for himself. In addition Edwords says that humanism is based on human compassion and realistic in its attempt to correct pressing needs in the human condition. Another important tenet is number ten in Edwords’ list:
Humanism is in tune with new technological developments. Humanists are willing to take part in emerging scientific and technological discoveries in order to exercise their moral influence on these revolutions as they come about, especially in the interest of protecting the environment. (Ibid.).
This is significant because it reflects the responsibility associated with humanism and is reminiscent of Pico as quoted above. The humanist must stand up in the face of adversity in order to come closer to truth.
Despite the admirable descriptions of what a humanist should be, some of the criteria fall short of the humanism that we have investigated in this study. Edwords claims that “Humanism is in tune with the science of today” which is still consistent with our discussion but continues to conclude illogically that “Humanists therefore recognize that we live in a natural universe of great size and age, that we evolved on this planet over a long period of time, that there is no compelling evidence for a separable ‘soul’” (Edwords 1989). This is a clear break from the humanists of the Italian Renaissance who were indoctrinated with Neo-Platonism. In fact, one of the arguments that Girolamo Savonarola had with the Florentine humanists was that their belief in the immortality of the soul separate form the body was heretical because it denied the necessity of bodily resurrection. As a further break from the roots Edwords says that “Humanists make no claims to possess or have access to supposed transcendent knowledge” (Ibid.). The Enlightenment said this; the Renaissance Humanists did not.
The humanist of the twenty-first
century, who considers himself to be part of the legacy of the Italian
Renaissance, is in a precarious position. In many ways, he is not welcome in
humanist circles. Yet feeling at odds
with those who have staked a claim on his namesake is part of his legacy as a
humanist. One of the things that is not
mentioned in the AHA website is a key factor in this discussion and it comes
from one of the major players in the Italian humanist movement. Raffaele’s
Our voices represent those that have come before ours and our mission is to restore balance. While Plato, pointing to the sky holding his Timæus, discusses the origin of the universe with his student Aristotle, who points to the ground and holds his Ethics, others look on and contribute to the grand dialog. Among the onlookers are Averroës, Euclid, Socrates, Pythagoras, Ptolemy, Zoroaster, Epicurus, Zeno, Zenophon, Parmenides, Diogenes, Heraclitus, and many others. This image represents the humanist’s responsibility to represent the best that the world has had to offer.
The College of Arts and Sciences of George Mason University’s webpage claims that “it would be impossible to give in a website a full and accurate description of the College of Arts and Sciences or of the notion of the liberal arts” so they decided instead “to use a tradition dear to the liberal arts and replace a description with a metaphor” (GMU’s College of Arts and Sciences Home Page)[100]. They chose Raffaele’s painting because it represents a legacy:
Knowledge is a dialog …. When we learn, when we study, when we produce new knowledge, we are engaging in a dialogue which transcends time and space. This dialogue is not just with our contemporaries, but with our precursors as well as with the scholars of centuries to come (Ibid.).
They
cite a reason very similar to the one presented here for the appropriateness of
the painting: “We, too, are students in the
As members then of this eternal order of scholars, it may be helpful to lay out an official statement of tenets for the order. The call to education is a high vocation, and members of the humanist school must treat it as such. Next to the concept of teaching as a vocation stands the commitment to balance, a commitment that requires us to bring to the discussion table the best that the world has to offer – classic, medieval, modern and contemporary – and welcome open dialog. Members of this school must believe in the dignity of the human person, in mind, body, and spirit, and have faith in the moral improvement of man. Believing in such one must have confidence in the studia humanitatis and the artes liberales as valid means of encouraging free thinking that will liberate man from the social constructs that bind him. This confidence must also foster a sense of commitment to social justice and a willingness to stand up for what one believes. The pinnacle of the humanist agenda is to create the Greek idea of areté – excellence and nobility in thought and action.
To accomplish this task several modifications must be made in our approach to education. Our study has shown that the arts have played a vital role in humanist pedagogical movements of the past. The arts encourage imagination, cultivate intuition, and help bring an individual closer to the transcendent forms. In addition to the arts, math and science are to be treated in a practical, yet open-minded approach which does not stifle creativity and qualitative discourse. The hinge pin that holds this curriculum together and helps balance the equation is the liberal arts program of studies. For the humanists, literature and history cannot be taught independently of each other. Humanists argue that history has been taught in the past as a means of justifying a political agenda and that it is often tainted with individual biases. This is certainly nothing new in pedagogical discussions. The key then is to put history lessons in direct dialog with the other disciplines, especially those in the liberal arts. History needs to bring the learner a little closer to understanding who he is and where his society has come from. While literature is the perfect complement to history in accomplishing this because it provides real snap shots of particular Zeitgeists that have motivated historical movements, other disciplines help bring the whole picture into sharper focus.
Religion and philosophy must accompany studies in the arts and sciences and in a sense drive the curriculum. Such infusion balances education; it also connects students to a world larger than themselves and gives them the confidence to effect change in their world. The humanist education seeks to avoid prejudice, attain a sense of moral obligation, provide a thirst for rights and justice, and encourage human development in the Greek sense of excellence. In addition the humanist curriculum, and its inherent sense of teaching as a vocation, extends two very important responsibilities: one is the duty of the scholar to connect man to the higher planes of thought, and second to stand up in the face of adversity for the sake of righteousness.
All
of this must be driven by the journey toward the higher mind alone, with less
concern for corporate sponsorship, workforce preparation, or any other
non-academic consideration. The
Final Thoughts
Early on in my project I sought to answer several important questions regarding the history of ideas. My first question related to a quote from Mark Gilderhus, in his History and Historians: A Historiographical Introduction. He asks:
Why bother with the study of history? What possible connections exist between an increasingly remote past and our own predicaments in the present? Can stories about other peoples in other places and other times have any meaning in an age of vaulting technology and traumatizing change? Is it reasonable to think that anyone can benefit from the experiences of others in presumably unprecedented and perilous times? (Gilderhus 1992, 1)
In
collecting my concluding thoughts it appears to me that the possible connection
that Gilderhus is questioning is made by the ideas themselves. In the case studies that I have investigated,
I have come to find that the discussion has retained a certain continuity
through three historical periods, though because of the expanding technology
and the advancement of scientific thought, it has become increasingly difficult
to maintain balance in the discussion. In addition, as Jonathan Glover has
pointed out in Humanity, the stakes
have grown significantly higher. I have
also seen that this discussion is much older than the modern age and it seems
that the early sixteenth century Italian painter, Raffaele Sanzio, was pointing
it out to us in his
I also discovered the work of Renaissance historian Eugene Rice. He said that for humanists like Erasmus “all of what is best and vitally important to mankind can be found in the texts of classical antiquity,” but in this world he would have few followers (Foreword by Eugene Rice in Woodward 1963, xvi). In the most literal sense, Renaissance humanists based their curriculum on the reading of classical literature in their original Greek and Latin. Their goal was to go back to the basics, free from the filters and interpretation of medieval culture and cultivate the skill of the liberal arts. Rice asks another intriguing question: since humanist education was based in the classics, and denial of this would seem to undermine the tradition completely, is there hope for the “new learning” in modern times? In tracing the threads of humanism through the three case studies, I must conclude that the tradition continues to have a vital lifeline and recent movements in the direction of the humanist approach show tremendous hope. He then asked if humanism’s “traditional principles and ambitions … be given new meanings appropriate to our own society and to our own sense of what a civilized man should be” (Ibid. xvii)? I believe that this question has already been answered by the key players in the case studies we have already reviewed but perhaps the most definitive answer to this question can be answered in the works of Christopher Dawson who did exactly what Rice is asking.
The Italian humanists sought a balanced, purposeful, and holistic educational methodology. The educational crisis in the twenty-first century seems again to be a serious imbalance in academics. Our society (political rhetoric, economists, state boards of education, etc.) seem to be fixated on expanding math, science, and technology at the expense of the liberal arts. The idea of the educated person has shifted from its classical sense of l'uomo universale to a simple equation based on the person's value in the workforce. This tendency is worsened by the movement toward compartmentalization of academic disciplines that has been occurring for the past century.
The humanities have several tasks to accomplish in order to help rectify this disorder. First it has to provide students with a firm liberal arts curriculum that serves to "liberate" their minds from social, cultural, and intellectual paradigms that have been placed upon them. Second, it should establish tangible relationships between the disciplines so that the student gains a holistic perspective of attained knowledge. Third, it must carry those relationships outside of humanistic disciplines and establish relevance with disciplines in the sciences and technology. When these three levels are established, the educated person becomes the person who understands the connectedness of human knowledge and can tie this knowledge - whether the training had been classical, vocational, or scientific - back to the core values that are inherent in the human condition.
Ultimately,
this study has shown that it is the responsibility of the twenty-first century
humanists to do what their predecessors have done in discussions of crisis in
past societies. It is their duty to
reintroduce the world to the eternal dialog.
It is their task to take measures to ensure that each classroom becomes
a
Chapter Five Charts
Figure 5-1
Schools that have adopted Great Books
|
School |
Public or Private |
Duration of program (as described by the schools) |
Great books is part of core requirements |
Core is mandatory or optional |
Offers Great Books related major, minor, or
certificate |