On the nature of the new education in general
Chapter 2, part 1 of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's "Addresses to the German Nation"
Dear readers,
Up next in Education, Serialized are two addresses from Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation: “On the Nature of the New Education in General” and “Description of the New Education - continued.” The addresses were published in 1806 and meant to revive Prussia after its fall to Napoleon. These two addresses are presented here because they were thought to have been instructive in the institution of compulsory public education in the United States.
Happy reading,
Samantha
My proposed means of preserving the German nation, to the clear perception of which these addresses might lead you, and along with you the entire nation, proceeds from the complexion of the age, as well as from the national characteristics of the Germans, and this means must in turn affect the age and the formation of these national characteristics. Consequently, this means will not be rendered perfectly clear and intelligible until it has been compared together with these and these with it, and both presented in complete interpenetration. This business requires a little time, and thus perfect clarity can be expected only at the conclusion of our addresses. Since we must begin with one of these individual elements, however, it will be most expedient to consider first of all that means itself, in isolation from its surroundings in time and space, by itself in its inner nature, and so today’s address and the one immediately following shall be devoted to this task.
The means indicated was an entirely new system of German national education, the like of which has never before existed in any other nation. In the foregoing address I described the distinction between this new education and the old thus: until now education at most only exhorted its pupils to good order and morality, but these exhortations bore no fruit in real life, which is constituted on the basis of principles that are quite different and wholly inaccessible to this education. By contrast, the new education must be able to cultivate and determine the real vital stirrings and motions of its pupils, according to rules that are certain and infallible.
And what if here someone had said, just as those who are in charge of the current education do indeed say almost without exception: what more could one expect of an education than to show the pupil what is right and exhort him faithfully to do it? Whether he wishes to follow these exhortations is his own affair; if he does not, then it is his own fault. He has free will, which no education can take from him. To this I would reply thus, so as to delineate my proposed new education more sharply: that precisely in this acknowledgement and in this reckoning on the pupil’s free will lies the first error of the existing education, and the clear admission of its impotence and futility. For in admitting that, despite its best efforts, the will is still free – that is, remains wavering between good and bad – this system admits that it neither can nor means nor at all desires to form the will or, since the will is the proper primary root of man himself, to form the human being, and that it holds this to be altogether impossible. By contrast, the new education would consist precisely in this, that, on the soil whose cultivation it takes over, it completely annihilates freedom of will, producing strict necessity in decisions and the impossibility of the opposite in the will, which can now be reckoned and relied on with confidence.
All education strives to bring forth a fixed, definite and permanent being [Sein], one that no longer becomes but is and can be nothing else but what it is. If it did not strive for such a being, then it would not be education but some frivolous game; if it had not brought forth such a being, then it would not yet be complete. Whoever must exhort himself and be exhorted to will the good, does not yet have a firm and ever-ready will [Wollen], but determines it in each situation that arises. Whoever has such a firm will wills what he wills for all eternity, and in no possible situation can he will differently than how he always wills; for his freedom of will has been annihilated and subsumed by necessity. The previous age has thereby shown that it had neither the right conception of the cultivation of humanity nor the power to realise this notion, that it wished to improve men through hortatory sermons and grew vexed and reproachful when these sermons bore no fruit. But how could they? The direction of the will is already fixed prior to and independently of the exhortation; if it accords with your exhortation, then the exhortation comes too late, and even without it the individual would have done exactly the same as you exhorted him to do; if the exhortation is in conflict with the direction of the will, then at most you may benumb him for a few moments; but when the opportunity comes he forgets himself and your exhortation and follows his natural inclination. If you wish to have influence over him, then you must do more than merely appeal to him; you must fashion him, fashion him such that he cannot will anything save what you want him to will. It is futile to say ‘fly!’ to one who has no wings, and for all your exhortations he will never lift himself more than two steps above the ground. But develop, if you can, his mental pinions, let him train and strengthen them, and, without any exhortations from you, he will want, or be able, to do nothing but fly.
The new education must bring forth this firm and no longer wavering will according to a sure rule that is valid without exception; it must itself produce with the same necessity the necessity that it intends. Those who have hitherto become good have done so thanks to their natural disposition, which outweighed the influence of their bad surroundings; but on no account thanks to their education, for otherwise all who have received such an education were bound to become good. And just as little did those who sank into corruption do so owing to their education, for otherwise all who received it would have been corrupted; rather, they went bad by themselves and owing to their natural disposition; in this respect the influence of education was naught and not at all pernicious. The real formative agency was spiritual nature. The cultivation of humanity [Bildung zum Menschen] shall henceforth be taken out of the hands of this obscure and incalculable power and brought under the sway of a deliberate art that reliably achieves its aim without exception in everything entrusted to it; or, where it does not achieve its aim, at least knows that it was unsuccessful and that therefore the pupil’s education is not yet complete. The education that I propose shall be a sure and deliberate art to form a firm and infallibly good will in man, and this is its first attribute.
Further – man can only will what he loves. His love is at once the sole and infallible impulse of his willing and of all his vital stirrings and motions. The statecraft practised hitherto, as the education of man in society, assumed as a certain and universally valid rule that each loves and wills his own sensuous well-being; and to this natural love it artificially linked, by means of hope and fear, the good will that it desired, the interest in the commonwealth. Setting aside the fact that with this method of education he who has become outwardly a harmless or useful citizen remains inwardly a wicked person, for wickedness consists precisely in loving only one’s sensuous well-being and being motivated solely by hope and fear for that sensuous well-being, whether in the present or a future life – setting this fact aside, we have already seen that we can no longer apply this measure because hope and fear no longer work for us but against us, and sensuous self-love can in no way be turned to our advantage. Therefore, necessity, too, compels us to will the cultivation of men who are intrinsically and fundamentally good, for only in them can the German nation live on; wicked men, however, will necessarily cause it to merge with foreign peoples. We must therefore replace this self-love, which can no longer be connected with anything that is good for us, with another kind of love, one that aims directly at the good, simply as such and for its own sake, and plant it in the minds of all those whom we wish to reckon among our nation.
Love of the good simply as such, and not for the sake of its usefulness for us, takes, as we have already seen, the form of pleasure in the good: so profound a pleasure that one is driven thereby to represent it in one’s life. This profound pleasure, then, is what our new education ought to bring forth in the pupil, as his fixed and unalterable being; the necessary effect of which would be the formation in the pupil of an equally unalterable good will. A pleasure that drives us to bring about a certain state of affairs that does not yet exist in reality presupposes an image [Bild] of this state which, before it comes into being, is present to the mind and elicits the pleasure that drives us to realise it. Consequently, this pleasure presupposes, in the person who will be moved by it, the faculty [Vermo¨gen] of self-actively projecting images of this kind, images that are independent of reality and in no way copies [Nachbilder] but rather pre-figurations [Vorbilder] thereof. I must now speak of this faculty and I ask you not to forget during these deliberations that an image brought forth by this faculty can be pleasing simply as an image, as that in which we feel our formative power, without being taken as the pre-figuration of a reality and without being pleasing to the degree that drives us to realise it. Do not forget that the latter instance is something quite different, indeed it is our real purpose, and we shall not omit to speak of it later. The former constitutes merely the precondition for achieving the true final goal of education.
That faculty of self-actively projecting images that are by no means merely copies but rather potential pre-figurations of reality must be the starting-point for the cultivation of the race by the new education. To project self-actively, I said, such that the pupil produces these images by his own agency and is not merely able passively to apprehend the image imparted to him by education, to understand it adequately, and to reproduce it just as he received it, as if the mere existence of such an image was at issue. The reason for this insistence on the pupil’s own self-active formation of images is the following: only under this condition can the projected image elicit his active pleasure. For it is one thing simply to appreciate something and have nothing against it – such passive appreciation can arise at best from passive submission. But it is quite another thing to be so overwhelmed by pleasure that it becomes creative and stimulates all our imaginative power. I am not speaking here of the first kind of pleasure, which was always present in the older system of education too, but rather of the second kind. This second pleasure, however, is kindled only when the pupil’s self-activity is excited at the same time and becomes manifest to him in relation to the given object, so that this object is pleasing not only in itself but also as an object of the exercise of mental power, something that is immediately, necessarily and universally pleasurable.
This activity of forming mental images to be unfolded in the pupil is without doubt an activity according to rules, rules which become known to the pupil to the degree that he perceives from his own immediate experience that they alone are possible. Therefore, this activity produces knowledge, namely knowledge of general and universally valid laws. Even in the free and further development of images [Fortbilden] which commences from this point on, anything undertaken in conflict with the law is impossible, and no action results until the law is observed. For that reason, even if this free and further development of images initially started from blind experimentation, it would still end with an expanded knowledge of the law. This education is therefore in its final consequence the cultivation of the pupil’s faculty of cognition, and on no account an historical schooling in the permanent qualities of things, but the higher and philosophical schooling in the laws according to which such a permanent quality of things becomes necessary. The pupil learns.
Let me add: the pupil learns willingly and with pleasure, and, for as long as this power is exerted, there is nothing he would rather do than learn, for when he learns he is self-active, and this gives him directly the greatest possible pleasure. Here we have found an outward mark of the true education, at once evident and unmistakable. And it is this, that regardless of the variety of natural dispositions, and without a single exception, each pupil who receives this education learns with pleasure and with love, simply for the sake of learning and for no other reason. We have discovered the means of kindling this pure love of learning, of stimulating this, the immediate self-activity of the pupil, and of making it the foundation of all knowledge, such that what he learns is learned through it.
Just to stimulate the pupil’s own activity in relation to some point known to us is the first objective of the art of education. Once this has been accomplished, it is henceforth only a matter of giving fresh life to the activity thus stimulated, which is only possible through regular progress and where every error made by education reveals itself on the spot by the failure of what was intended. We have thus also found the indissoluble bond between the intended result and the procedure we have indicated: the eternal and universal fundamental law governing man’s spiritual nature, namely that he aims immediately at mental activity.
Should someone, misled by the common experience of our days, even harbour doubts about the existence of such a fundamental law, then for his benefit we shall remark superfluously that man is by nature sensuous and selfish only as long as he is driven by immediate necessity and the sensuous needs of the present moment, that he will not allow himself to be held back from satisfying these by any spiritual need or tender feeling of consideration; that after these merely sensuous needs are satisfied, however, he has little inclination to work up the painful image thereof in his fancy and to keep it present to his mind, but would far rather direct his unshackled thought to the free contemplation of that which arouses the attention of his senses, indeed that he does not at all disdain a poetic excursion to ideal worlds, because he is by nature endowed with a light sense of the temporal, so that his sense of the eternal may have some scope for development. This last point is borne out by the history of all ancient peoples, and the various observations and discoveries of them that have been transmitted to us; it is borne out in our own day by the observation of those peoples who still remain in a state of savagery (as long as the climate does not treat them too much like a stepmother) and of our own children; it is even borne out by the frank admission of our zealots against ideals, who complain that it is a far more vexing business to learn names and dates than to soar up into what seems to them a barren field of ideas, which they themselves would only be too glad to do, it seems, if only they would permit themselves. That this natural freedom from care is replaced by anxiety, where tomorrow’s hunger and every possible future state of hunger appears in procession before even him who is sated, as the only thing that fills his soul, and goads and drives him on continuously – in our age this is wrought deliberately, in the boy by disciplining his native carelessness, in the adult by the striving to be regarded as a prudent man, which glory is bestowed only on him who never for one moment loses sight of that point of view. Therefore it is by no means nature on which we must reckon here but a corruption1 imposed with effort upon a recalcitrant nature, a corruption that falls away as soon as that effort is no longer applied.
Education, Serialized, a section of EduThirdSpace: The Newsletter, features retellings of how education has been viewed over the course of history from books, reports, letters, and so forth. The posts in this section are the words of the authors and not editorialized by me, Samantha, or anyone else. However, interpretation or commentary on the texts may be published in other sections of EduThirdSpace.
Verderben; GA suggests the alternative reading of Verhalten (conduct).