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 th