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Title: The Reform of Education
Author: Giovanni Gentile
Translator: Dino Bigongiari
Release Date: July 17, 2011 [EBook #36762]
Language: English
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THE REFORM OF EDUCATION
BY GIOVANNI GENTILE
AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY DINO BIGONGIARI
With an Introduction by BENEDETTO CROCE
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
1922
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
RAHWAY, N.J.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Introduction vii
I. Education and Nationality 3
II. Education and Personality 18
III. The Fundamental Antinomy of Education 40
IV. Realism and Idealism in the Concept of Culture 63
V. The Spirituality of Culture 85
VI. The Attributes of Culture 110
VII. The Bias of Realism 139
VIII. The Unity of Education 166
IX. Character and Physical Education 192
X. The Ideal of Education 219
XI. Conclusion 246
NOTE
Shortly after Trieste fell into Italian hands, a series of lectures was
arranged for the school teachers of the city, in order to welcome them
to their new duties as citizens and officials of Italy. The task of
opening the series was assigned to Giovanni Gentile, Professor of
Philosophy in the University of Rome, who delivered the lectures which
constitute the present volume. At my request Signor Gentile has
rewritten the first chapter, eliminating some of the more local of the
allusions which the nature of the original occasion called forth, and
Senatore Croce has very generously contributed his illuminating
Introduction. The volume as it stands is more than a treatise on
education: it is at one and the same time an introduction to the thought
of one of the greatest of living philosophers, and an introduction to
the study of all philosophy. If the teachers of Trieste were able to
understand and to enjoy a philosophic discussion of their chosen work,
why should not the teachers of America?
J. E. S.
INTRODUCTION
The author of this book has been working in the same field with me for
over a quarter of a century, ever since the time when we undertook--he a
very young man, and I somewhat his senior--to shake Italy out of the
doze of naturalism and positivism back to idealistic philosophy; or, as
it would be better to say, to philosophy pure and simple, if indeed
philosophy is always idealism.
Together we founded a review, the _Critica_, and kept it going by our
contributions; together we edited collections of classical authors; and
together we engaged in many lively controversies. And it seems indeed as
though we really succeeded in laying hold of and again firmly
re-establishing in Italy the tradition of philosophical studies, thus
welding a chain which evidently has withstood the strain and destructive
fury of the war and its afterclaps.
By this I do not mean to imply that our gradual achievements were the
result of a definite preconcerted plan. Our work was the spontaneous
consequence of our spontaneous mental development and of the spontaneous
agreement of our minds. And therefore this common task, too, gradually
becoming differentiated in accordance with the peculiarities of our
temperaments, our tendencies, and our attitudes, resulted in a kind of
division of labour between us. So that whereas I by preference have
devoted my attention to the history of literature, Gentile has
dedicated himself more particularly to the history of philosophy and
especially of Italian philosophy, not only as a thinker but as a
scholar too, and as a philologist. He may be said to have covered the
entire field from the Middle Ages to the present time by his works on
Scholasticism in Italy, on Bruno, on Telesio, on Renaissance
philosophy, on Neapolitan philosophy from Genovesi to Galluppi, on
Rosmini, on Gioberti, and on the philosophical writers from 1850 to
1900. And though his comprehensive _History of Italian Philosophy_,
published in parts, is far from being finished, the several sections
of it have been elaborated and cast in the various monographs which I
have just mentioned.
In addition to this, Gentile has been devoting special attention to
religious problems. He took a very important part in the inquiry into
and criticism of "modernism," the hybrid nature of which he laid bare,
exposing both the inner contradictions and the scanty sincerity of the
movement. His handling of this question was shown to be effective by the
fact, among others, that the authors of the encyclical _Pascendi_, which
brought upon Modernism the condemnation of the Church, availed
themselves of the sharp edge of Gentile's logical arguments, prompted
by scientific loyalty and dictated by moral righteousness.
Finally, and in a more close connection with the present work, it will
be remembered that Gentile has done away with the chaotic pedagogy of
the positivistic school, and has also definitely criticised the
educational theory of Herbart. As far back as 1900 he published a
monograph of capital importance, in which he showed that pedagogy in so
far as it is philosophical resolves itself without residuum into the
philosophy of the spirit; for the science of the spirit's education can
not but be the science of the spirit's development,--of its dialectics,
of its necessity.
Indeed, we owe it to Gentile that Italian pedagogy has attained in the
present day a simplicity and a depth of concepts unknown elsewhere. In
Italy, not educational science alone, but the practice of it and its
political aspects have been thoroughly recast and amply developed. And
this, too, is due pre-eminently to the work of Gentile. His authority
therefore is powerfully felt in schools of all grades, for he has lived
intensely the life of the school and loves it dearly.
In addition to these differences arising from our division of labour,
others may of course be noticed, and they are to be found in the form
that philosophical doctrines have taken on in each of us. Identity is
impossible in this field, for philosophy, like art, is closely bound up
with the personality of the thinker, with his spiritual interests, and
with his experiences of life. There is never true identity except in the
so-called "philosophical school," which indicates the death of a
philosophy, in the same way that the poetical school proclaims death in
poetry.
And so it has come about that our general conception of philosophy as
simple philosophy of the spirit--of the subject, and never of nature, or
of the object--has developed a peculiar stress in Gentile, for whom
philosophy is above all that point in which every abstraction is
overcome and submerged in the concreteness of the act of Thought;
whereas for me philosophy is essentially methodology of the one real and
concrete Thinking--of historical Thinking. So that while he strongly
emphasises unity, I no less energetically insist on the distinction and
dialectics of the forms of the spirit as a necessary formation of the
methodology of historical judgment. But of this enough, especially since
the reader can only become interested in these differences after he has
acquired a more advanced knowledge of contemporary Italian philosophy.
I am convinced that the translation and popularisation of Gentile's work
will contribute to the toilsome formation of that consciousness, of that
system of convictions, of that moral and mental faith which is the
profound need of our times. For our age, eager and anxious for Faith, is
perhaps not yet completely resigned to look for the new creed of
humanity there where alone it may be found, where by firm resolve it
may be secured--in pure Thought. Clear-sighted observers have perhaps
not failed to notice that the World War, in addition to every thing
else, has been a strife of religions, a clash of conflicting conceptions
of life, a struggle of opposed philosophies. It is surely not the duty
of thinkers to settle economic and political contentions by ineffective
appeals to the universal brotherhood of man; but it is rather their duty
to compose mental differences and antagonisms, and thus form the new
faith of humanity--a new Christianity or a new Humanism, as we may wish
to call it. Such a faith will certainly not be spared the conflicts from
which ancient Christianity itself was not free; but it may reasonably be
hoped that it will rescue us from intellectual anarchy, from unbridled
individualism, from sensualism, from scepticism, from pessimism, from
every aberration which for a century and a half has been harassing the
soul of man and the society of mankind under the name of Romanticism.
BENEDETTO CROCE.
ROME, April, 1921.
CHAPTER I
EDUCATION AND NATIONALITY
Participation on the part of elementary school teachers in the work and
studies of the Universities has always seemed to me to constitute a real
need of culture and of primary education. For the elementary school, by
the very nature of the professional training of its teachers, is exposed
to a grave danger from which it must be rescued if we mean to keep it
alive.
The training of the elementary school teacher tends to be dogmatic. True
it is that vigilant individuality and passionate love for his
exquisitely spiritual calling impel the school teacher to an untiring
criticism of his methods, of his actual teaching, and of the life of the
school which he directs and promotes. But nevertheless in consequence of
those very studies by which he has prepared himself to be an elementary
instructor, he is led to look upon that learning which constitutes his
mental equipment and the foundation of all his future teaching, as
something quite finished, rounded out, enclosed in definite formulas,
rules, and laws, all of which have been ascertained once for all and are
no longer susceptible of ulterior revision. He looks upon this learning
not as a developing organism, but as something definitely moulded and
stereotyped. From this the conclusion is drawn that a certain kind of
knowledge may serve as a corner stone for the whole school edifice.
Since his discipline and his teaching consist mainly of elements which
because of their abstractness miss the renovating flow of spiritual
life, the teacher slowly but surely ends by shutting himself up in a
certain number of ideas, which are final as far as he is concerned. They
are never corrected or transformed; in their mechanical fixity they
cease to live; and the mind which cherishes and preserves them loses its
natural tendency to doubt. Yet what is doubt but dissatisfaction with
what is known and with the manner of knowing, and a spur to further
inquiry, to better and fuller learning, to self scrutiny, to an
examination of one's own sentiments, one's own character, and an
inducement to broadmindedness, to a welcoming receptiveness of all the
suggestions and all the teachings which life at all moments generously
showers on us?
The remedy against this natural tendency of the teacher's mind is to be
found in the University, where in theory, and so far as is possible, in
practice too, science is presented not as ready-made, definitely turned
out in final theories, enclosed in consecrated manuals; but as inquiry,
as research, as spiritual activity which does not rest satisfied with
its accomplishments, but for ever feels that it does not yet know or
does not know enough, aware of the difficulties which threaten every
attained position, and ready unrestingly to track them, to reveal them,
and meet them squarely. This life, which is perpetual criticism, and
unceasing progress in a learning which is never completed, which never
aspires to be complete, is the serious and fruitful purpose of the
University. Here we must come, to restore freshness to our spiritual
activities, which alone give value to knowledge, and wrest it from
deadening crystallisation, from mechanical rigidity. For this reason, it
seems to me, special provision should be made in the University to
satisfy the needs of school teachers. It is not a question of merely
furnishing them with additional information which they might just as
well get out of books. The University must act on their minds, shake
them, start them going, instil in them salutary doubt by criticism, and
develop a taste for true knowledge.
The following chapters contain a series of University lectures, in
accordance with these criteria, and delivered originally to the
elementary teachers of Trieste, now for the first time again an Italian
city. They constitute a course which aims not to increase the quantity
of culture, but to change its character. It is an attempt to introduce
the elementary teacher into those spiritual workshops which are the
halls of a University, to induce him to take part in the original
investigations which constantly contribute to the formation of our
national learning; which forever make and reshape our ideas and our
convictions as to what we should want Italian science to be, the Italian
concepts of life and literature; as to what constitute the heirloom of
our school, that sacred possession bequeathed to us by our forefathers
which makes us what we are, which gives us a name and endows us with a
personality, by which we are enabled to look forward to a future of
Italy which is not solely economic and political, but moral and
intellectual as well.
And thus, because of the time, the place, the audience, and the subject,
we are from the start brought face to face with a serious question,--a
question which has often been debated, and which in the last few years,
on account of the exasperation of national sentiment brought about by
the World War, has become the object of passionate controversies. For if
it has been frequently argued on one side that science is by nature and
ought to be national, there has been no lack of warning from the other
side as to the dangers of this position. For war, it was said, would,
sooner or later, come to an end and be a thing of the past; whereas
truth never sets, never becomes a thing of the past; it is error alone
that is destined to pass and disappear. We were reminded of the fact
that what is scientifically true and artistically beautiful is beautiful
and true beyond no less than within the national frontier; and that only
on this condition is it worthy of its name. This question therefore
presents itself as a preliminary to our investigation, and it is for us
to examine it. We shall do so in as brief a manner as the subject will
allow.
We shall first point out the inutility of distinguishing science from
culture, education from instruction. Those who insist on these
distinctions maintain that though a school is never national in virtue
of the content of its scientific teaching, it must nevertheless be
national in that it transforms science into culture, makes it over into
an instrument with which to shape consciousness and conscience, and uses
it as a tool for the making of men and for the training of citizens.
Thus we have as an integral part of science a form of action directed on
the character and the will of the young generations that are being
nurtured and raised in accordance with national traditions and in view
of the ends which the state wants to attain. Such distinctions however
complicate but do not resolve the controversy. They entangle it with
other questions which it were better to leave untouched at this
juncture. For it might be said of questions what Manzoni said of books:
one at a time is enough--if it isn't too much.
We shall therefore try to simplify matters, and begin by clarifying the
two concepts of nationality and of knowledge, in order to define the
concept of the "nationality of knowledge." What, then, is the nation? A
very intricate question, indeed, over which violent discussions are
raging, and all the more passionately because the premises and
conclusions of this controversy are never maintained in the peaceful
seclusion of abstract speculative theories, but are dragged at every
moment in the very midst of the concrete interests of the men themselves
who affirm or deny the value of nationalities. So that serious
difficulties are encountered every time an attempt is made to determine
the specific and concrete content of this concept of the nation, which
is ever present, and yet ever elusive. Proteus-like, it appears before
us, but as we try to grasp it, it changes semblance and breaks away. It
is visible to the immediate intuition of every national consciousness,
but it slips from thought as we strive to fix its essence.
Is it common territory that constitutes nationality? or is it common
language? or political life led in common? or the accumulation of
memories, of traditions, and of customs by which a people looks back to
_one_ past where it never fails to find itself? Or is it perhaps the
relationship which binds together all the individuals of a community
into a strong and compact structure, assigning a mission and an
apostolate to a people's faith? One or the other of these elements, or
all of them together, have in turn been proposed and rejected with
equally strong arguments. For in each case it may be true or it may be
false that the given element constitutes the essence of a people's
nationality, or of any historical association whatsoever. All these
elements, whether separately or jointly, may have two different
meanings, one of which makes them a mere accidental content of the
national consciousness, whereas the other establishes them as necessary,
essential, and unfailing constituents. For they may have a merely
natural value, or they may have a moral and spiritual one. Our
birth-land, which nourished us in our infancy, and now shelters the
bodies of our parents, the mountains and the shores that surround it and
individualise it, these are natural entities. They are not man-made; we
cannot claim them, nor can we fasten our existence to them. Even our
speech, our religion itself, which do indeed live in the human mind, may
yet be considered as natural facts similar to the geographical accidents
which give boundaries and elevation to the land of a people. We may,
abstractly, look upon our language as that one which was spoken before
we were born, by our departed ancestors who somehow produced this
spiritual patrimony of which we now have the use and enjoyment, very
much in the same way that we enjoy the sunlight showered upon us by
nature. In this same way a few, perhaps many, conceive of religion: they
look upon it as something bequeathed and inherited, and not therefore as
the fruit of our own untiring faith and the correlate of our actual
personality. All these elements in so far as they are natural are
evidently extraneous to our personality. We do dwell within this
peninsula cloistered by the Alps; we delight in this luminous sky, in
our charming shores smiled upon by the waters of the Mediterranean. But
if we emigrate from this lovely abode, if under the stress of economic
motives we traverse the ocean and gather, a number of us, somewhere
across the Atlantic; and there, united by the natural tie of common
origin, and fastened by the identity of speech, we maintain ourselves as
a special community, with common interests and peculiar moral
affinities, then, in spite of the severance from our native peninsula,
we have preserved our nationality: Italy has crossed the ocean in our
wake. Not only can we sunder ourselves from our land, but we may even
relinquish our customs, forget our language, abandon our religion; or we
may, within our own fatherland, be kept separate by peculiar historical
traditions, by differences of dialects or even of language, by religion,
by clashing interests, and yet respond with the same sentiment and the
same soul to the sound of one Name, to the colours of one flag, to the
summons of common hopes, to the alarm of common dangers.
And it is then that we feel ourselves to be a people; then are we a
nation. It is not what we put within this concept that gives consistency
and reality to the concept itself; it is the act of spiritual energy
whereby we cling to a certain element or elements in the consciousness
of that collective personality to which we feel we belong. Nationality
consists not in content which may vary, but in the form which a certain
content of human consciousness assumes when it is felt to constitute a
nation's character.
But this truth is still far from being recognised. Its existence is not
even suspected by those who utilise a materially constituted nationality
as a title, that is, an antecedent, and a support for political rights
claimed by more or less considerable ethnical aggregates that are more
or less developed and more or less prepared to take on the form of free
and independent states and to secure recognition of a _de facto_
political personality on the strength of an assumed _de jure_
existence.
This truth, however, was grasped by the profound intuition of Mazzini,
the apostle of nationalities, the man who roused our national energies,
and whose irresistible call awakened Italy and powerfully impelled her
to affirm her national being. Even from the first years of the _Giovine
Italia_ he insisted that Italy, when still merely an idea, prior to her
taking on a concrete and actual political reality, was not a people and
was not a nation. For a nation, he maintained, is not something existing
in nature; but a great spiritual reality. Therefore like all that is in
and for the spirit, it is never a fact ready to be ascertained, but
always a mission, a purpose, something that has to be realised--an
action.
The Italians to whom Mazzini spoke were not the people around him. He
was addressing that future people which the Italians themselves had to
create. And they would create it by fixing their souls on one idea--the
idea of a fatherland to be conquered--a sacred idea, so noble that
people would live and die for it, as for that sovereign and ultimate
Good for which all sacrifices are gladly borne, without which man can
not live, outside of which he finds nothing that satisfies him, nothing
that is conducive to a life's work. For Mazzini nationality is not
inherited wealth, but it is man's own conquest. A people can not
faint-heartedly claim from others recognition of their nation, but must
themselves demonstrate its existence, realise it by their willingness to
fight and die for its independence: independence which is freedom and
unity and constitutes the nation. It is not true that first comes the
nation and then follows the state; the nation is the state when it has
triumphed over the enemy, and has overcome the oppression, which till
then were hindering its formation. It is not therefore a vague
aspiration or a faint wish, but an active faith, an energetic volition
which creates, in the freed political Power, the reality of its own
moral personality and of its collective consciousness. Hence the lofty
aim of Mazzini in insisting that Italy should not be made with the help
of foreigners but should be a product of the revolution, that is, of its
own will.
And truly the nation is, substantially, as Mazzini saw and firmly
believed, the common will of a people which affirms itself and thus
secures self-realisation. A nation is a nation only when it wills to be
one. I said, when it really wills, not when it merely says it does. It
must therefore act in such a manner as to realise its own personality in
the form of the State beyond which there is no collective will, no
common personality of the people. And it must act seriously, sacrificing
the individual to the collective whole, and welcoming martyrdom, which
in every case is but the sacrifice of the individual to the universal,
the lavishing of our own self to the ideal for which we toil.
From this we are not, however, to infer that a nation can under no
circumstances exist prior to the formation of its State. For if this
formation means the formal proclamation or the recognition by other
States, it surely does pre-exist. But it does not if we consider that
the proclamation of sovereignty is a moment in a previously initiated
process, and the effect of pre-existing forces already at work; which
effect is never definite because a State, even after it has been
constituted, continues to develop in virtue of those very forces which
produced it; so that it is constantly renewing and continually
reconstituting itself. Hence a State is always a future. It is that
state which this very day we must set up, or rather at this very
instant, and with all our future efforts bent to that political ideal
which gleams before us, not only in the light of a beautiful thought,
but as the irresistible need of our own personality.
The nation therefore is as intimately pertinent and native to our own
being as the State, considered as Universal Will, is one with our
concrete and actual ethical personality. Italy for us is the fatherland
which lives in our souls as that complex and lofty moral idea which we
are realising. We realise it in every instant of our lives, by our
feelings, and by our thoughts, by our speech and by our imagination,
indeed, by our whole life which concretely flows into that Will which is
the State and which thus makes itself felt in the world. And this Will,
this State is Italy, which has fought and won; which has struggled for a
long time amid errors and sorrows, hopes and dejection, manifestations
of strength and confessions of weakness, but always with a secret
thought, with a deep-seated aspiration which sustained her throughout
her entire ordeal, now exalting her in the flush of action, now, in the
critical moment of resistance, confirming and fortifying her by the
undying faith in ultimate triumph. This nation, which we all wish to
raise to an ever loftier station of honour and of beauty, even though we
differ as to the means of attaining this end, is it not the substance of
our personality,--of that personality which we possess not as
individuals who drift with the current, but as men who have a powerful
self-consciousness and who look upward for their destiny?
If we thus understand the nation, it follows that not only every man
must bear the imprint of his nationality, but that also there is no true
science, no man's science, which is not national. The ancients believed,
in conformity with the teachings of the Greeks, that science soars
outside of the human life, above the vicissitudes of mortals, beyond the
current of history, which is troubled by the fatal conflicts of error,
by falterings and doubts, and by the unsatisfied thirst for knowledge.
Truth, lofty, pure, motionless, and unchangeable, was to them the fixed
goal toward which the human mind moved, but completely severed from it
and transcendent. This concept, after two thousand years of speculation,
was to reveal itself as abstract and therefore fallacious,--abstract
from the human mind, which at every given instance mirrors itself in
such an image of truth, ever gazing upon an eternal ideal but always
intent on reshaping it in a new and more adequate form. The modern
world, at first with dim consciousness, and guided rather by a fortunate
intuition than by a clear concept of its own real orientation, then with
an ever clearer, ever more critical conviction, has elaborated a concept
which is directly antithetical to the classical idea of a celestial
truth removed from the turmoil of earthly things. It has accordingly and
by many ways reached the conclusion that reality, lofty though it be,
and truth itself, which nourishes the mind and alone gives validity to
human thought, are in life itself, in the development of the mind, in
the growth of the human personality, and that this personality, though
ideally beyond our grasp, is yet in the concrete always historical and
actual, and realises itself in its immanent value. It therefore creates
its truth and its world. Modern philosophy and modern consciousness no
longer point to values which, transcending history, determine its
movement and its direction by external finalities: they show to man that
the lofty aim which is his law is within himself; that it is in his ever
unsatisfied personality as it unceasingly strains upward towards its own
ideal.
Science is no longer conceived to-day as the indifferent pure matter of
the intellect. It is an interest which invests the entire person, extols
it and with it moves onward in the eternal rhythm of an infinite
development. Science is not for us the abstract contemplation of yore;
it is self-consciousness that man acquires, and by means of which he
actuates his own humanity. And therefore science is no longer an
adornment or an equipment of the mind, considered as diverse to its
content; it is culture, and the formation of this very mind. So that
whenever science is as yet so abstract that it seems not to touch the
person and fails to form it or transform it, it is an indication that it
is not as yet true science.
So we conclude thus: he who distinguishes his person from his knowledge
is ignorant of the nature of knowledge. The modern teacher knows of no
science which is not an act of a personality. It knows no personality
which admits of being sequestered from its ideas, from its ways of
thinking and of feeling, from that greater life which is the nation.
Concrete personality then is nationality, and therefore neither the
school nor science possesses a learning which is not national.
And for this reason therefore our educational reforms which are inspired
by the teachings of modern idealistic philosophy demand that the school
be animated and vivified by the spiritual breath of the fatherland.
CHAPTER II
EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY
It is essential at the very outset to understand clearly what is meant
by _concrete personality_, and why the particular or empirical
personality, as we are usually accustomed to consider it, is nothing
more than an abstraction.
Ordinarily, relying on the most obvious data of experience, we are led
to believe that the sphere of our moral personality coincides exactly
with the sphere of our physical person, and is therefore limited and
contained by the surface of our material body. We consider this body in
itself as an indivisible whole, with such reciprocal correspondence and
interdependence of its parts as to become a veritable system. It seems
to us also that this system moves in space as a whole when the body is
displaced, continuing to remain united as long as it exists. We look
upon it as though it were separated from all other bodies, whether of
the same or of different kinds, in such a manner that it excludes others
from the place it occupies, and is itself in turn excluded by them. One
body then, one physical person, one moral personality--that moral
personality which each one of us recognises and affirms by the
consciousness of the ego.
And in fact when I walk I am not a different person from when I think.
My ego remains the same whether my body moves through space or whether
my mind inwardly meditates. Impenetrability, which is possessed by
matter, seems to be also a property of human individualism.
From my ego every other ego is apparently excluded. What I am no one
else can be, and I in turn cannot be confused with another person. Those
of my fellow beings that are most intimately, most closely related to me
seem yet as completely external to me, as thoroughly sundered from my
spirit, as their bodies are from mine. My father, my brother are dead.
They have vanished from this world in which I nevertheless continue to
exist; just as a stone remains in its place and is in no way affected
when another stone near by is removed; or as a mutilated pedestal may
still remain to remind the onlooker of the statue that was torn away.
Hundreds of individuals assemble to listen to the words of an orator.
But no necessary ties exist between the various persons; and when the
speaking is over, each one goes his way confident that he has lost no
part of himself and that he has maintained his individuality absolutely
unaltered.
Our elders lived on this planet when we had not yet arrived. After we
came, they gradually withdrew, one after the other. And just as they had
been able to exist without us, so shall we continue to live without
them, and away from them develop our personality. For each one of us,
according to this point of view, has his own being within himself, his
own particular destiny. Every man makes of himself the centre of his
world, of that universe which he has created with deeds and thoughts: a
universe of ideas, of images, of concepts, of systems, which are all in
his brain; a universe of values, of desirable goods and of abhorred
evils, all of which are rooted in his own individual will, in his
character, and originate from the peculiar manner in which he personally
colours this world and conceives the universe.
What is another man's sorrow to me? What part have I in his joys? And
how can the science of Aristotle or of Galileo be anything to me, since
I do not know them, since I cannot read their books, and am totally
unfamiliar with their teachings? And the unknown wayfarer who passes by,
wrapped in his thoughts, what does he care for my loftiest conceptions,
for the songs that well forth from the depths of my soul? The hero's
exploit brings no glory to us; the heinous deed of the criminal makes us
shudder indeed, but drives no pangs of remorse through our conscience.
For every one of us has his own body and his own particular soul. Every
one, in short, is himself independently of what others may be.
This conception, which we ordinarily form of our personality, and on
which we erect the system of our practical life in all our manifold
relations with other individuals, is an abstract concept. For when we
thus conceive our being, we see but a single side of it and that the
least important: we fail to grasp that part which reveals all that is
spiritual, and human, and truly and peculiarly ours. I shall not here
investigate how the human personality has two aspects so totally
different one from the other; and in what remote depths we must
search for the common root of these two contrasting and apparently
contradictory manifestations. Our task for the moment is to establish
within ourselves through reflection the firm conviction that we are
not lone individualities: that there is another and a better part of
us, an element which is the very antithesis of the particular, that
one, namely, which is the deep-seated source of our nature, by which
we cease, each one of us, to be in irreducible opposition to the rest of
humanity, and become instead what all the others are or what we want
them to be.
In order to fix our attention on this more profound aspect of our inner
life, I shall take as an example one of those elements which are
contained in the concept of nationality, Language. Language it must be
remembered does not belong _per se_ to nationality; it belongs to it in
virtue of an act by which a will, a personality, affirms itself with a
determined content. We must now point out the abstract character of
that concept by which language, which is a constituent element of our
personality, is usually ascribed to what is merely particular in it.
That language is a peculiar and constituent element of personality is
quite obvious. Through language we speak not to others only, but to
ourselves also. Speaking to ourselves means seeing within ourselves
our own ideas, our soul, our very self in short,--it means
self-consciousness, as the philosophers say, and therefore
self-control, clear vision of our acts, knowledge of what stirs within
us; it means, therefore, living not after the manner of dumb
animals, but as rational beings, as men. Man cannot think, have
consciousness of himself, reason, without first expressing all that to
himself. Man has been defined as a rational animal; he may also be
defined as the speaking animal. The remark is as old as Aristotle.
Man, however, this animal endowed with the faculty of speaking, is not
man in general who never was, but the real man, the historical man,
actually existing. And he does not speak a general language, but a
certain definite one.
When I speak before a public, I can but use my language, the Italian
language. And I exist, that is I affirm myself, I come into real being,
by thinking in conformity with my real personality, in so far as I
speak, and speak this language of mine. _My_ language, the _Italian_
language. Here lies the problem. Were I not to speak, or were I to
speak otherwise than I know how, I would not be myself. This manner of
expressing myself is then an intrinsic trait of my personality. But this
speech which makes me what I am, and which therefore intimately belongs
to me, could it possibly be mine, could I use it, mould it into my own
life-substance, if, mine though it be, it were yet enclosed within me in
the manner that every particle of my flesh is contained within my body,
having nothing in common with any other part of matter co-existing in
space? Could my language in short really be my language, if it belonged
exclusively to me, to what I have called my particular or empirical
personality?
A simple reflection will suffice to show that my language, like a beacon
of light, inwardly illumines my Thought, and renders visible to me every
movement and every sense, only because this language is not exclusively
my own. It is that same language through which I grasp the ancient
authors of Italy. I read about Francesca da Rimini and Count Ugolino,
and find them within me in the emotion of my throbbing soul. I read of
Petrarch's golden-haired Laura, of Ariosto's Angelica, fair love of
chivalrous men and the unhappy friend of youthful Medoro. I read of the
cunning art whereby the Florentine secretary, in his keen speculative
discourses, sought to establish the principalities and the state of
Italy. I read of the many loves, sorrows, discoveries and sublime
concepts which did not blossom forth from my spirit, but which, once
expressed by the great men of my country, have, because of their merits,
continued to exist in the imagination, in the intellect, in the hearts
of Italians, and have thus constituted a literature, a light-shedding
history which is the life of language, varied indeed and restless, but
ever the same. This is the language which I first heard from the dear
lips of my mother, which gradually and constantly I made my own by
studying and reflecting on the books and on the conversations of those
who for years, or days, or instants, were with me in my native town and
exchanged with me their thoughts and their sentiments; the language
which unites to me all those who, living or dead, together constitute
this which I call and feel to be my own people.
Yet I might want to break away with my speech from this glorious
communion. I might try to demonstrate to myself that my speech is
exclusively mine, and surely I would thus accomplish something. I would
produce an exception which in this case too would serve to confirm the
rule.
For surely a man may devise a cryptic language, a cipher, a jargon.
Secret codes and conventional cants are resorted to by individuals who
have some reason to conceal their meaning from others. Such individuals,
however, can form but very small groups, and because of the artificial
character of their communications never may constitute a nation. An
artificial jargon of this sort is however a language of some kind: it
must be, since art imitates nature. It complies with the law that is
immanent in the peculiar nature of language, namely, that there be
nothing secret or hidden in it, for speech and in general every form of
spiritual activity invests a community and aims at universality. The
jargon is possible only because of the key by which it may be translated
back into the common language. Give a ciphered document to the
cryptographer; by study and ingenuity--that is by the use of that very
intelligence which arbitrarily combined the cipher--he discovers the
key; thus he too breaks up the artificial form, and draws from it the
natural flow of a speech that is intelligible to all those who speak the
same national tongue. And again, words as they flow from the inspired
bosom of the poet, when they first appear in the freshness of the new
artistic creation, do have something that is cryptic. That language is
the poet's own; it never had been used by another; a jargon before it is
deciphered may be and is the language of a particular personality. But
if we look more attentively, we shall see that in both cases the
language is the language of the community. The inspired poet does indeed
speak to himself, but with the consciousness of a potential audience, he
utters a word to himself which must eventually be intelligible to others
because it is by its nature intelligible. In the conditions in which the
poet finds himself when speaking, he must use that word and no other,
and any other person in those same spiritual conditions would use, could
not help using, the same word. For his word is the Word, the one that is
required by the circumstances. And since he is a poet, a serious mind
uttering a word which needs no translation, it will be the word of his
own people first and then of humanity at large, in so far as its beauty
will inspire men of different nations and of diverse speech with the
desire of learning the poet's own intimate language.
All this is true because the spirit is universal activity, which, far
from separating men, unites them. It realises historically its
universality in the community of the family, of the city, of the
district, and of the nation, and in every form of intimate aggregation
and of fusion which history may call into being.
Language may or may not be in the formation of a man's nationality. What
however must be ever present is the Will by which man every moment of
his life renovates his own personality. Can the Will, by which each one
of us is what he is, be his own Will, exclusively his own? Or is the
Will itself, like language, not perhaps a national heirloom, but surely
a common act, a communion of life, in such a way that we live our own
life while living the life of the nation?
Of course, in the abstract, as I have explained above, my will is
particular. But we must be reminded that Will is one thing, and
faint wishing another. There is such a thing as real effective
volition, and there is something which strives to be such and fails;
this latter we might call "velleity." Real will does not rest
satisfied with intentions, designs, or sterile desires; it acts, and
by its effectiveness it reveals itself, and by its value shows its
reality. And our being results not from velleities but from the real
will. We are not what we might conditionally desire to be, but what we
actually will to be. A velleity we might say is the will directed to
an end which is either relatively or absolutely impossible; will is
that which becomes effective.
But, then, when is it that my will really is effective, really
_wills_? I am a citizen of a state which has power; this power, this
will of the state expresses itself to me in laws which I must obey. The
transgression of laws, if the state is in existence, bears with it the
inevitable punishment of the transgressor, that is, the application of
that law which the offender has refused to recognise. The state is
supported by the inviolability of laws, of those sacred laws of the
land which Socrates, as Plato tells us, taught his pupils to revere. I,
then, as a citizen of my country, am bound by its Law in such a
manner that to will its transgression is to aim at the impossible.
If I did so, I should be indulging in vain velleities, in which my
personality, far from realising itself, would on the contrary be
disintegrated and scattered. I then want what the law wants me to
will.
It makes no difference that, from a material and explicit point of view,
a system of positive law does not coincide throughout with the sphere of
my activity, and that therefore the major part of the standards of my
conduct must be determined by the inner dictates of my particular
conscience. For it is the Will of the State that determines the limits
between the moral and the juridical, between what is imposed by the law
of the land and what is demanded by the ethical conscience of the
individual. And there is no limit which pre-exists to the line by which
the constituent and legislative power of the State delimits the sphere
subject to its sanctions. So that positively or negatively, either by
command or by permission, our whole conduct is subject to that will by
which the State establishes its reality.
But the Will of the State does not manifest itself solely by the
enactments of positive legislation. It opens to private initiative such
courses of action as may presumably be carried on satisfactorily without
the impulse and the direct control of the sovereign power. But this
concession has a temporary character, and the State is ever ready to
intervene as soon as the private management ceases to be effective. So
that even in the exercise of what seems the untrammelled will of the
individual we discern the power of the State; and the individual is free
to will something only because the sovereign power wants him to. So
that in reality this apparently autonomous particular will is the will
of the state not expressed in terms of positive legislation, there being
no need of such an expression. But since the essence of law is not in
the expression of it, but in the will which dictates it, or observes it,
or enforces the observance of it, in the will, in short, that wills it,
it follows that the law exists even though unwritten.
In the way of conclusion, then, it may be said that I, as a citizen,
have indeed a will of my own; but that upon further investigation my
will is found to coincide exactly with the will of the State, and I want
anything only in so far as the State wants me to want it.
Could it possibly be otherwise? Such an hypothesis overwhelms me at the
very thought of it. For it would come to this,--that I exist and my
state does not:--the state in which I was born, which sustained and
protected me before I saw the light of day, which formed and guaranteed
to me this communion of life; the state in which I have always lived,
which has constituted this spiritual substance, this world in which I
support myself, and which I trust will never fail me even though it does
change constantly. I could, it is true, ignore this close bond by which
I am tied and united to that great will which is the will of my country.
I might balk and refuse to obey its laws. But acting thus, I would be
indulging in what I have called velleities. My personality, unable to
transform the will of the state, would be overcome and suppressed by
it.
Let us however assume for a moment that I might in the innermost depths
of my being segregate myself. Averse to the common will and to the law
of the land, I decide to proclaim over the boundless expanse of my
thought the proud independence of my ego, as a lone, inaccessible summit
rising out of the solitude. Up to a certain point this hypothesis is
verified constantly by the manner in which my personality freely becomes
actual. But even then I do not act as a particular being: it is the
universal power that acts through my personal will.
For when we effectively observe the law, with true moral adhesion and
in thorough sincerity, the law becomes part of ourselves, and our
actions are the direct results of our convictions,--of the necessity of
our convictions. For every time we act, inwardly we see that such must
be our course; we must have a clear intuition of this necessity. The
Saint who has no will but the will of God intuitively sees necessity in
his norm. So does the sinner in his own way: but his norm is erroneous
and therefore destined to fail. Every criminal in transgressing the
law obeys a precept of his own making which is in opposition to the
enactments of the state. And in so doing he creates almost a state
of his own, different from the one which historically exists and must
exist because of certain good reasons, the excellence of which the
criminal himself will subsequently realise. From the unfortunate point
of view which he has taken, the transgressor is justified in acting as
he does, and to such an extent that no one in his position, as he
thinks, could possibly take exception to it. His will is also
universal; if he were allowed to, if it were possible for him, he
would establish new laws in place of the old ones: he would set up
another state over the ruins of the one which he undermines. And what
else does the tyrant when he destroys the freedom of the land and
substitutes a new state for the crushed Commonwealth? In the same
manner the rebel does away with the despot, starts a revolution and
establishes liberty if he is successful; if not, he is overcome and must
again conform his will to the will of that state which he has not been
able to overthrow. So then, I exercise my true volition whenever the
will of my state acts in my personal will, or rather when my will is
the realisation of the will of a super-national group in which my state
co-exists with other states, acting upon them, and being re-acted upon
in reciprocal determinations. Or perhaps better still, when the
entire world wills in me. For my will, I shall say it once again, is
not individual but universal, and in the political community by which
individuals are united into a higher individuality, historically
distinct from other similar ones, we must see a form of universality.
For this reason, then, we are justified in saying that our personality
is particular when we consider it abstractly, but that concretely it
realises itself as a universal and therefore also as a national
personality. This conception is of fundamental importance for those of
us who live in the class-room and have made of teaching our life's
occupation, our ultimate end, and the real purpose of our existence. For
in this conception of human activities we find the solution of a problem
that has been present in the minds of thinking men ever since they began
to reflect on the subject of education, or, in other words, from time
immemorial. Education, we must remember, is not a fact, if by fact we
mean, as we should, something that has happened, or is wont to happen,
or must inevitably take place in virtue of the constancy of the law
which governs it. We teachers are all sincerely convinced that
education, as we speak of it, as it draws our interests, for which we
work, and which we strive to improve, is not now what it was before. For
there is no education that works out in conformity with natural laws. It
is a free act of ours, the vocation of our souls, our duty as men. By it
more nobly than by any other action man is enabled to actualise his
superior nature. Animals do not educate: even though they do raise their
young ones they yet form no family, no ethical organism with members
differentiated and reciprocally correlated. But we freely, by an act of
our conscience, recognise our children, as we do our parents and our
brothers; and we discern our fellow-beings in ourselves and ourselves in
others; and by the growth of our own we unconsciously develop the
personality of others; and therefore in the family, in the city, in any
community, we constitute one spirit, with common needs that are
satisfied by the operations of individual activity which is a social
activity.
Man has been called a political or a social animal. He might therefore
be considered also as an educating animal. For we do not merely educate
the young ones, our young ones. Education being spiritual action bearing
on the spirit, we really educate all those that are in any way and by
any relations whatsoever connected with us, whether or not they belong
to our family or to our school, as long as they concur with us in
constituting a complete social entity. And we not only train those of
minor age, who are as yet under tutelage, and still frequent the schools
and are busily intent upon developing and improving their skill, their
character, their culture. We also educate the adults, the grown-up men
and women, the aged; for there is no man alive who does not daily add to
his intellectual equipment, who does not derive some advantage from his
human associations, who could not appropriately repeat the statement of
the Roman emperor--_nulla dies sine linea_. Man always educates.
But here, as in every other manifestation of his spiritual activity, man
does not behave in sole conformity with instinct; he does not teach by
abandoning himself, so to speak, to the force of natural determinism. He
is fully aware of his own doings. He keeps his eyes open on his own
function, so that he may attain the end by the shortest course, that he
may without wasting his energies derive from them the best possible
results. For man reflects.
It is evident then that education is not a scheme which permits
pedagogues and pedants to interfere with their theories and lucubrations
in this sacred task of love, which binds the parents to the children,
brings old and young together, and keeps mankind united in its never
ceasing ascent. Before the word came into being, the thing, as is
usually the case, already existed. Before there was a science and an
incumbent for the chair, there existed something that was the life of
this science and therefore the justification of the chair. There was the
intent reflectiveness of man, who in compliance with the divine saying,
"Know thyself," was becoming conscious of his own work, and therefore,
unwilling to abandon his actions to external impulses, began to question
everything. What the lower animal does naturally and unerringly through
its infallible instinct, man achieves by the restless scrutiny of his
mind. Ever thoughtful, always yearning for the better, he searches and
explores, often stumbling in error, but ever rising out of it to a
higher station of learning and of art. Our education is human, because
it is an action and not a fact; because it is a problem that we always
solve and have to keep solving for ever.
This intuitive truth is demonstrated experimentally to us by the very
lives we live as educators. As long as the freshness of our vocation
lasts, as long as we can remain free from mechanical routine and from
the impositions of fixed habits; as long as we are able to consider
every new pupil with renewed interest, discover in him a different soul,
unlike that of any other that we have previously come in contact with,
and differing within itself from day to day; as long as it is still
possible for us to enter the class-room thrilled and throbbing in the
anticipation of new truths to reveal, of novel experiments to perform,
of unexpected difficulties to overcome, in the full consciousness of the
rapid motion of a life ever renewed in us and around us by the incoming
generations, that flow to us and ebb away unceasingly towards life and
death; so long shall we really live and love the teacher's life, so long
shall we demonstrate to ourselves and to others the truth I have already
affirmed.
We teachers should be constantly on our guard against the dangers of
routine, against the belief that we have but to repeat the same old
story in the same class-room, to the same kind of distant, blank faces,
staring at us in dreary uniformity from the same benches. We shall
continue to be educators only as long as we are able to feel that every
instant of our life's work is a new instant, and that education
therefore is a problem that insistently stimulates our ingenuity to an
ever renewed solution.
Now the most important of all tasks, ancient and modern, in the field of
education is this,--the task of the teacher to represent the Universal
to his pupils, the Universal, of course, as historically determined.
Scientific thought, customs, laws, religious beliefs are brought before
the pupil's mind, not as the science, the laws, the religion of the
teacher, but as those of humanity, of his country, of his period. And
the pupil is the particular individual who, having entered upon the
process of education, and being submitted, so to speak, to the yoke of
the school, ceases to enjoy his former liberty in the pursuit of a
spiritual endowment and in the formation of his character, and, in
consequence of this educational pressure, bends compliantly before the
common law. Hence the world-old opposition to the coercive power of the
school, and the outcry raised from time to time against the privilege
demanded by the educator, who on the strength of the assumedly higher
quality of his beliefs, his learning, his taste, or his moral
conscience, claims to interfere with the spontaneous development of a
personality in quest of itself.
On one side education undoubtedly assumes the task of developing
freedom, for the aim of education is to produce men; and man is worthy
of this name only when he is a master of himself, capable of initiating
his own acts, responsible for his deeds, able to discern and assimilate
the ideas which he accepts and professes, affirms and propagates, so
that whatever he says, thinks, or does, really comes from him. Our
children are said to be properly raised when they give evidence of being
able to take care of themselves without the help of our guidance and
advice. And we trust that we have accomplished our task as educators
when our pupils have made our language their own and are able to tell us
new things originally thought out by them. Freedom then must be the
result of education.
But on the other hand, teaching implies an action exercised on another
mind, and education cannot therefore result in the relinquishment and
abandonment of the pupil. The educator must awaken interests that
without him would for ever lie dormant. He must direct the learner
towards an end which he would be unable to estimate properly if left
alone, and must help him to overcome the otherwise unsurmountable
obstacles that beset his progress. He must, in short, transfuse into the
pupil something of himself, and out of his own spiritual substance
create elements of the pupil's character, mind, and will. But the acts
which the pupil performs in consequence of his training will, in a
certain measure, be those of his teacher; and education will therefore
have proved destructive of that very liberty with which the pupil was
originally endowed. Is it not true that people constantly attribute to
early family influences and to environment--that is, to education--the
good and the bad in the deeds of the mature man?
This is the form in which the problem usually presents itself. The mind
of the educator is therefore torn by two conflicting forces: the desire
zealously to watch and control the pupil's growth and direct his
evolution along the course that seems quickest and surest for his
complete development; and, on the other hand, the fear that he may kill
fertile seeds, stifle with presumptuous interference the spontaneous
life of the spirit in its personal impulses, and clothe the individual
with a garment that is not adapted for him,--crush him under the weight
of a leaden cape.
The solution of this problem must be sought in the concrete conception
of individual personality; and this will be the theme of the next
chapter. But I must at the very outset utter an emphatic word of
warning. My solution does not remove all difficulties; it cannot be used
as a key to open all doors. For as I have repeatedly stated, the value
of education consists in the persistence of the problems, ever solved
and yet ever clamouring for a new solution, so that we may never feel
released from the obligation of thinking.
My solution must be simply accepted as affording a guidance by which
different people may, along more or less converging lines, approach
their particular objectives. For the problem presents itself under
ever-changing forms, and demands a continuous development, and almost a
progressive interpretation of the concept which I am going to offer as
an aid to its solution. No effort of thinking, once completed, will ever
exonerate us from thinking, from thinking unceasingly, from thinking
more and more intensively.
CHAPTER III
THE FUNDAMENTAL ANTIMONY OF EDUCATION
A more precise determination must now be given to the problem, touched
upon in the preceding chapter, which might be called the _fundamental
antinomy of education_, understanding by "antinomy" the conflict of two
contradictory affirmations, either one of which appears to be true and
irrefutable.
The two contradictory affirmations are (1) that man as the object of
education is and must be free, and (2) that education denies man's
freedom. They might perhaps be better re-stated in this way: (1)
Education presupposes freedom in man and strives to increase it. (2)
Education treats man by ignoring the freedom he may originally be
endowed with, and acts in such a way as to strip him entirely of it.
Each of the two propositions must be taken, not as an approximate
affirmation, but as an exact enunciation of an irrefutable truth.
Therefore freedom here means full and absolute liberty; and when we
speak of the negation of freedom, we mean that education as such, and as
far as it is carried, destroys the freedom of the pupil.
Let us first see precisely what is meant by this _freedom_ which we
attribute to man. Each one of us firmly even though obscurely possesses
some conception of it. Every one of us, even though unfamiliar with the
controversies that have raged for centuries on the question of free
will, must have sometimes been compelled by the conditions of human life
to face the difficulties that beset the concept of man's freedom, and
must have been led to question, if not to deny outright, the proposition
that man is free. But on the other hand, every one of us has to admit
that the experience of life has confirmed the belief in our freedom
which for a moment had been shaken by doubt and perplexity; and that
faith, instinctive and incoercible, outlives every time the onslaughts
of negation.
By liberty we mean that power peculiar to man by which he moulds himself
into his actual being and originates the series of facts in which every
one of his actions becomes manifest. In nature, all facts, or, as they
are called, all phenomena appear to us to be so interrelated as to
constitute a universal system in which no phenomenon can ever be
considered as absolutely beginning, but can in each case be traced back
to a preceding phenomenon as its cause, or at any rate as the condition
of its intelligibility. The condensation of the aqueous vapour in the
cloud produces rain; but vapour would not condense without the action
of temperature, nor again would temperature be lowered without the
concurrence of certain meteorological facts which modify it, etc.
But we believe on the other hand that man derives from no one but
himself the principles and the causes of his actions. So that whenever
we see in his conduct the necessary effects of causes that have acted on
his character or momentarily on his will, we cease to consider such acts
as partaking of that moral value through which man's conduct is really
human and completely sundered from the instinctive impulses of the lower
animal, and even more so from the behaviour of the forces of inanimate
matter.
We may in certain moments deny a man's humanity, and see in his conduct
only brutal impulse, fierce cruelty, and unreasoning bestiality. In such
moments we cannot stop either to praise or to blame him. We do not even
strive to reason with him, for we feel that arguments would produce no
impression on his obdurate consciousness. Only through force can we
defend ourselves from his violence; against him we must use the same
weapon that we rely upon in our struggle with the wild beasts and the
blind forces of nature. We then become aware that our soul refuses to
recognise such an individual as a man. We esteem man to be such only
when we believe that we can influence him by words, by arguments that
are directed to reason, which is the birthright of man, and when we are
able to prevail upon those sentiments of his which, as peculiarly human,
appear to be almost the foundation and the understructure of rational
activity. This reason and these sentiments it must be remembered are the
peculiar constituents of human personality. They cannot be imparted to
man from the outside. They are in him from the very start even if only
as germs which he must himself cultivate, and which will, when
developed, enable him to act consciously, that is, with full knowledge
of his acts. This knowledge is twofold, for he knows what he is doing,
and he knows also how his actions must be judged. And so all the causes
that bear on him are practically of no weight in determining a course
which he will take, if he is a man, only after the approval of his own
judgment. What is more natural than to avenge an insult, and to harbour
hatred against an enemy? And yet from the viewpoint of morals, man is
worthy of this name only in so far as he is able to resist his
overpowering passions and to release himself from that force which
compels him to offset harm with more harm, and meet hatred with hatred.
He must pardon; he must love the enemy who harms him. Only when a man is
capable of understanding the beauty of this pardon and of such love,
only when, attracted by their beauty, he acts no longer in compliance
with the force of instinctive nature, does he cease to count as a purely
natural being, and lift himself to a higher level into that moral world
where he must progressively exhibit his human activities. Whether man is
equal to this task or not, we must demand that he satisfy this
requirement before we admit him into the society of mankind. He must
have in himself the strength to withstand the pressure of external
forces which may act on his will, on his personality, on that inner
centre from which his personality moves towards us, speaks to us, and
thus affirms its existence. We make these demands on him; and as we
extol him when by his deeds he shows sufficient capacity for his human
rôle, so we also blame him every time we find him through weakness
yielding to these forces. And the import of our blame is that he is
responsible for not having the power which he should have had.
It is of no importance that out of compassion, or through sympathy
for human frailty, we lighten or even entirely remove the burden of our
censure. Our disapproval of the deficiency, even though unexpressed,
remains within us side by side with the conviction that the delinquent
may do a great deal, nay, must, aided by us in the future, do
everything in his power to meet successfully the opposing forces of
evil. We surely cannot abandon the unfortunate wretch who through
moral impotence--whether it be the craven submissiveness of the
coward, or the undaunted violence of the overbearing brute--commits an
evil deed. We feel it our duty to watch over him and help him on
the road to redemption, because of our firm conviction that he will
eventually redeem himself; for he is after all a man like the rest of
us, and possesses therefore within himself the source and principle
of a life which will raise him from the slough in which he lies
immersed.
There is, however, a pseudo-science which, on the basis of superficial
and inaccurate observations, dogmatically asserts that certain forms of
criminality give evidence of original and irremediable moral depravity;
and that therefore persons tainted with it are fatally condemned never
to heed sufficiently the voice of duty and ever to yield to their
perverted instinct, which presses unrestrained from the depths of their
being at the slightest provocation and on the occasion of the most
insignificant clash with other human beings.
This is the doctrine of the modern school of criminal anthropology which
has spread throughout the world the fame of some Italian writers. Though
their influence is now on the wane, their observations on the
pathological nature of criminal acts have contributed to establish the
need of a more humane treatment of offenders,--more humane because
rational and effective.
Their doctrine falls in with a series of systems which at all times, and
always for materialistic motives,--materialistic even though disguised
under religious and theological robes,--have denied to man that power
which we call liberty, compelling him therefore to bend down under the
stress of universal determinism, and to behave as the drop that forever
moves with the motion of the boundless ocean, an insignificant particle
of the entire watery mass. What force intrinsic to this drop could ever
stop it on the crest of the wave which hurls it forward? Man, they say,
is no different from this drop: from the time of his birth to the
instant of his death, hemmed in by all the beings of nature, acted upon
by innumerable concurrent causes, he is pushed and dragged at every
moment by the irresistible current of all the forces of the entire mass
of the universe. At times he may delude himself into believing that he
has lifted his consciousness out of the huge flood, that it is within
his power to resist, to stop it as far as he is concerned, and to
control it; that, in short, it rests with him to fashion his own
destiny. But alas! this very belief, this illusion is the determined
result of the forces acting upon him: it is the inevitable effect of the
play of his representations,--representations which have not their
origin in him, but have been impressed upon him by outside forces. So
that the illusion of independence is but a mocking confirmation of the
impossibility of escaping the rush of fatal currents.
I shall not here give a critical presentation of the arguments by which
systems such as these have established the absence of freedom in man.
In our present need, a single remark will suffice, and will permit us,
I believe, to cut the discussion short. A great German philosopher,
who had conceived science and reality, which is the object of
science, in such a way as to preclude the possibility of finding in
reality a place for man's freedom, noticed that freedom, in spite of all
the difficulties which science encounters in accounting for it,
corresponds and answers to an invincible certitude in our soul,
invincible because a postulate of our moral conscience. That is to
say, that whatever our scientific theories and ideas, we have a
conscience which imposes a law upon us,--a law which, though not
promulgated and sustained by any external force, or rather because of
it, compels us in a manner which is absolute. This law is the moral
law. It requires no speculative demonstration. The scrutiny of
philosophers might not be helpful to it. It rises spontaneously and
naturally from the intimate recesses of our spirit; and it demands from
our will, from the will of the most uncouth man, an unconditional
respect. What sense would there be in the word duty, if man were able to
do only those things which his own nature, or worse still, nature in
general, compelled him to do? The existence of duty implies a power to
fulfil it. And the certitude of our moral obligations rests on the
conviction that we have within us the power to meet them. We can
answer the call of duty because we are free.
This consideration, important as it is, cannot however be considered as
sufficient. For this moral conscience, this certitude with which the
moral conscience affirms the existence of an unavoidable duty, might
also be an illusion determined in us by natural causes. Nothing hinders
us from thinking thus, and surely there is no contradiction implied in
this explanation, which in fact because of its possibilities is offered
by the philosophers of materialism.
But the need of liberty is not solely felt when we strive to conceive
our moral obligations; freedom is not only the ground for existence, the
_raison d'être_ of moral law, as Kant thought--for he is the philosopher
to whom I alluded above;--no! freedom is the condition of the entire
life of the spirit. And the materialist who, having destroyed liberty as
a condition of moral conduct, believes that he is still able to think,
that his intellectual activity can proceed undisturbed after his faith
in the objective value and in the reality of moral laws has been
abandoned, such a materialistic thinker is totally mistaken. For without
freedom, man not only is unable to speak of duty, but he cannot speak at
all,--not even of his materialistic views. This is the same as saying
that the negation of liberty is unthinkable.
A brief reflection will make this clearer. We speak to others or to
ourselves in so far as we think, or say something or make affirmations.
Let us suppose that ideas be present to our minds (as people have
sometimes imagined) without our looking at them, without our noticing
them. Such ideas would have offered themselves in vain, in the same way
that many material objects remain unseen before us, because we do not
turn our gaze toward them. Every object of the mind, that is, every
thought, can only be thought because in addition to it we too are in the
mind: our mental activity is there, the ego of the thinking man, the
subject which is ready to affirm the object. And thought proper consists
in this affirmation of the object by the subject. Now, the subject, that
is, man, must be as free in the affirmation of his thought, by which he
thinks something, as he must be free in every one of his actions in
order that his action be truly his, and really human. In fact, we demand
of man that he give an account of his thoughts as well as of his deeds.
We evaluate not only what he does, but also what he thinks; we praise
him or we disapprove of him because of his sayings, that is, his
thoughts, and we call upon him to correct those thoughts which he should
not entertain. In this way we indicate our conviction that the thought
of each one of us is not simply a logical consequence of its premises,
not an effect determined by a psychic mechanism set in motion by the
universal mechanism of which our individual psyche is a part; we are
convinced that thought depends upon man, upon his capacity, upon his
personality, which is not controlled by any mechanical forces, nor
subject to premises which he may no longer modify once he has accepted
them. We are the masters of our thinking; and if the vigour of the human
personality is indeed shown by the steadfast constancy whereby in
practical life we pursue a hard and toilsome course toward an arduous
goal, it is revealed just as much by the quickness, the readiness, the
assiduousness, the lack of prejudice, the love which we manifest in our
search after truth.
It has therefore been said that cognition in man has moral value, and
that on the other hand the will is operative in the act of the
intellect. Such distinctions are dangerous. But whether we call it will
or intellect, the activity which makes us what we are, by which we
actualise our personality, also by thinking, it is certain that it is a
conscious and discriminating activity, through no force of gravity
precipitating on its object, but approaching it with selective freedom
of determination. And in the manner that every action aims at the good,
because it seems good, and appears in contrast with evil, so every
cognition is the affirmation of what to us is or seems to be a truth in
opposition to error and falseness. Without the antithesis of good to
evil there would be no moral action: without the antithesis of the true
to the false there would be no cognition. But the existence of this
antithesis implies a choice and therefore the liberty of choosing.
Should we deny freedom, and consequently abandon man to the determinism
of the causes acting upon him, we should deny the possibility of
distinguishing between good and evil, between true and false. The
materialist, therefore, when he rejects freedom, is compelled to affirm
that the value which moral conscience attributes to goodness is devoid
of any real grounds, and what is worse, that his very statement is
thereby stripped of all the value of truth. For he must be inwardly
convinced that what he thinks has no reason to be thought and therefore
cannot be thought.
The negation of freedom leads to this _absurdum_, to this impossible
thought, which is the Thought that is being thought as such, and yet
does not admit of being thought. Man, in so far as he thinks, affirms
his faith in freedom, and every attempt on his part to uproot this faith
from his soul is but a glaring confirmation of its existence. This
observation, properly grasped, is sufficient to establish human freedom
on a solid ground.
Freedom, moreover, which man needs in order to be human, cannot be, as
some have supposed, a relative liberty, limited and restricted by
certain conditions, for conditional liberty does not differ from
slavery. Here indeed is the very crux of the problem. Every one would
readily admit the existence of a limited freedom, and the divergence
would then be reduced to a question of degree. But the fact is that
freedom must be absolute or not be at all. Matter, that is, every
material object, is not free for the very reason that it is limited;
whereas the spirit--every spiritual act--is free because it is infinite,
and as such not relative to any thing, and therefore absolute.
Any limitation of the spirit would annihilate its liberty. The slave is
such because his will is constrained within the bounds imposed upon it
by the master's volition. The human spirit is not free in the presence
of nature because nature envelops it and enfolds it within narrow
confines, which allow only a certain development; and this development
therefore cannot be looked upon as a grant of nature but rather as a
condemnation, in that it marks out boundaries which cannot be
trespassed. The lower animal is not free because even if its actions
seem to imply a rationality not very different from that of man, yet in
reality its acts, differently from the doings of man, follow the
straight line pre-established by instinct, which admits of no original
power and allows no individual creation. If there is a limit, there must
be something limiting and something limited; there must be a necessary
relationship of one to the other, so that the thing limited can in no
way free itself from the consequences of this relationship. These
consequences are summed up in the impossibility of _being all_, or in
other words in the necessity of remaining within limits, and to obey
therefore the untransgressable laws set by one's own nature. This
necessity which binds every natural being to the laws of its own nature,
this impossibility of being aught else than what is appointed by nature,
to be a wolf of necessity, and of necessity to be a lamb; this is the
hard lot of natural beings, this is the destiny from which man is
ransomed by the power of his freedom.
The sculptor in the fervour of his inspiration, which proceeds from the
image that lives in his phantasy, searches eagerly for the marble with
which, as though from the very bosom of nature, he may call to life the
phantom of his mind. He fails in his search, and his chisel remains,
must need remain, inactive. The artist then in the utmost intensity of
his creation is baffled by an external impediment, by an obstacle of
nature which therefore seems to have the power of limiting his creative
power. But when we consider what the artist has created in the statue
itself, in this living image of marble, we find nothing that is
material. The artist has transfused into the stone an idea, a sentiment,
a soul, which we, under the influence of the ravishing power of artistic
beauty, are able to seize to the exclusion of all material attributes;
as though we no longer possessed eyes for the whiteness of the marble
and were deprived of the muscle which gives us the impression of its
physical weight. When we are able thus to spiritualise the statue--and
we do so every time we get to know it as a work of art--then all
limitations that might be imposed on the creative power of the artist
disappear. For we see no longer the artist's phantasy, and then his arm,
and then his hand, his chisel, the block which he is carving; all we see
is the phantasy soaring untrammelled in the infinite world of the
artist, with his arm, his hand, his marble, his universe which is
totally different from the universe in which the men live who quarry the
marble and move it and sell it.
There is a point of view from which we see the spirit limited and
enslaved by the conditions in which its life is unfolded. But there is a
higher point of view to which we must ascend if we are bent on
discovering our freedom. If we say, as the psychologists do, this is a
soul and this is a body, here are sensations, there is motion, this is
thought within us and that is the world outside of us, then we are
obliged to consider the spirit as conditioned by physical happenings to
which in some manner our internal determinations correspond. It is not
possible to see without eyes and without the light that strikes them. It
is equally impossible not to see when we have eyes and are surrounded by
light, and according to the greater or lesser velocity of the luminous
waves, we shall of necessity discern now one colour and now another. And
the objects thus seen by us will determine our thoughts; and in turn our
volitions will depend upon these thoughts; and our characters will be
shaped accordingly, and we shall be this or that man in conformity with
the determination of circumstances. Man, according to this conception,
will be the result of time, of place, of environment, of everything
except of his own self.
But there is a higher point of view than the one I have just described,
and to it we must rise, if we mean to understand our nature,--this
marvellous human nature which was first disclosed to our consciousness
at the advent of Christianity and in the course of time made more and
more manifest, until it now loudly proclaims in us our human dignity
exalted above the forces of nature, and is empowered by its cognitive
faculty to dominate these forces, which must bend to man's purposes
without ever blocking or obstructing his progress. Whosoever says: here
is a body and there is a soul--two things, one outside of the
other--such a man does not consider that these two things are two terms
distinguished and differentiated by thought in the bosom of thought,
that is to say, of the soul: of that soul which is truer than the other
for the obvious reason that the latter thinks and therefore reveals its
soul-nature by its own acts, whereas the former is the object of
thinking, is a thing thought, and may therefore be a fallacious entity,
an idolon, and a simple _ens rationis_, like so many other things that
are thought and are subsequently found to have no kind of subsistence.
In speaking of sensation and of motion which generates or somehow
conditions sensation, we lose sight of the fact that sensation is truly
enough a determination of consciousness, but in the same manner as the
motion which is encountered in consciousness when the latter, in
thinking, among other things thinks the displacement of objects in
space.
For everything is within consciousness, and no way can be devised of
issuing forth from it. We say that the brain is external to
consciousness, and that the cranium encloses the brain, which in turn is
enveloped by space luminous and airy, space filled with beautiful plants
and beautiful animals; yet the fact remains that brain and skull and
everything else are the potential or actual object of our thinking
faculty, and cannot but remain therefore within that consciousness to
which for a moment we supposed them to be external. We may start
thinking, keeping in mind this indestructible substance of our thought;
and as we proceed from this centre in which we have placed ourselves as
subjects of thinking, and advance towards an ever-receding horizon, do
we ever come in sight of the point where we must pause and say: "Here my
thought ends; here something begins that is other than my thought"?
Thought halts only before mystery. But even then it thinks it as
mystery, and thinking it, transforms it, and then proceeds, and so never
really stops.
Such being the true life of the spirit, rightly have we called it
universal. At every throb it soars through the infinite, without ever
encountering aught else than its own spiritual actualisations. In this
life, such as we see it from the interior when we do not fantastically
materialise it with our imaginations, the spirit is free because it is
infinite.
Education then posits this liberty in the pupil, for it presupposes in
him a susceptibility of development,--educability, as we may call it.
The learner could not possibly be educable, that is, susceptible of
receiving instruction, unless he were able to think. But thinking, we
have already seen, signifies freedom. And not only is freedom
presupposed by the educator, but it is the very thing he is aiming at in
his work. As a result of his teaching, liberty must be developed in the
same manner that the capacity for thinking and all modes of spiritual
activity are developed. For the development of thought is a development
of reflection, a constant increase of control over our own ideas, over
the content of our consciousness, over our character, over our whole
being in relation to every other being. And this growth of power is what
we mean when we speak of the development of our freedom. It has been
said, in fact, that education consists in liberating the individual from
his instincts. Surely, education is the formation of man, and when we
say man we mean liberty.
Here we stumble upon our antinomy. How are we to reconcile this
presupposition and this aim of the educator with his interference in the
personality of the pupil? This interposition surely signifies that the
disciple must not be left to himself and to his own resources; that he
has to clash with something or somebody that is not his own personality.
Education implies a dualism of terms, the teacher and the learner; and
it is this dualism which destroys the freedom, which sets a limit, and
therefore annihilates infinity in which freedom consists. The disciple
who encounters a stronger mastering will, an intellect equipped with a
multitude of ideas, with an experience which forestalls his own powers
of observation, and his innate zeal for investigation, sees in this more
potent personality either a barrier obstructing his progress towards a
goal which he spontaneously would attain; or else a goad which hurries
him along the way which he would have indeed chosen of his own accord,
but along which he would have liked to advance freely, calmly, joyously,
as our Vittorino da Feltre would have it, and without any unwelcome
compulsion. This pupil then would want to be left alone in order that he
might be free, as free as God when as yet the world was not and he
created it out of nothing by his joyous _fiat_, symbol of the loftiest
spiritual liberty.
For these reasons we have come to believe that the most serious problem
of education is the agreement between the liberty of the pupil and the
authority of the teacher. Therefore great masters who meditated on the
subject of education, from Rousseau to Tolstoi, have exalted the rights
of liberty, but have fallen into the opposite extreme of denying the
duty to authority, and have pursued in their abstractions a vague and
unrealisable ideal of negative education.
But we must not cling to negatives. It should be our purpose to
construct, not to destroy. The school, this glorious inheritance of
human experiences, this ever-glowing hearth where the human spirit
kindles and sublimates life as an object of constant criticism and of
undying love, may be transformed, but cannot be destroyed. Let the
school live, and let us cling to the teacher and maintain his authority,
which limits the spontaneity and the liberty of the pupil. For this
limitation is only apparent.
Apparent, however, when we deal with true education. For the school has
for centuries been the victim of a grave injustice. People have been led
to consider the classroom as a place of confinement and of punishment,
and teachers have been cruelly lashed by the scourge of ridicule cracked
in the face of pedantry. Through this injustice, the school has been
burdened with faults that are not its own, and teachers, genuine
educators, have been confused with the pedantic drill-masters that are
the negation of intelligent education and of inspired ethical
discipline. In order to see whether education really limits the free
activity of the pupil, we must not consider abstractly any school, which
may not be after all a school. We must examine an institution at the
moment and in the act which realises its significance--when the
instructor teaches and the pupils are learning. Such a moment should at
least hypothetically be granted to exist.
Let us take a concrete example and consider a teacher in the act of
giving lessons in Italian. Where is this something which I have called
the Italian language? In the grammar, perchance? Or in the dictionary?
Yes, partly. Provided grammar can invest its rules with the life of the
individual examples that together constitute the expressive power of the
living language; and provided the dictionary does not wither up all
words in the arid abstraction of alphabetical classification; does not
hang each of them by itself as limbs torn from the living body of the
speech in which they had so often resounded and to which they will be
joined again in the fulness of life and expressiveness; but does instead
incorporate, as every good dictionary should, complete phrases, living
utterances of great authors or perhaps of that nameless many-souled
writer that somewhat confusedly is called the people.
But more than in the grammar and more than in the dictionary, the word
is and exists in the writers themselves. The teacher should there point
it out, as he guides his pupils through the authors who were able to
express most powerfully our common thoughts. To his students who are
striving to learn the language--that is the writers--he reads for
example the poems of Leopardi. The poet's word, his soul hovers over
the classroom, as the master reads. It penetrates into the minds of the
pupils, hushes every other sentiment, removes every other thought, and
throbs within them, stirs them, arouses them. It becomes one with the
soul of each pupil, which speaks to itself a language of its own, using,
truly enough, the words of Leopardi, but of a Leopardi who is peculiar
to each of the listeners. Under this spell, the pupil who hears the
poet's word echoing in the depths of his being, will he stop to reflect
that this word is the echo of an echo? That he is under the influence of
something repeated after a first utterance? Our own experience answers:
No! But if any of the audience become absent-minded, if they should lose
the rapt delight of poetical exaltation communicated to their soul by
the teacher's voice, and should say that the word they hear is not their
own but the master's, or rather, the poet's, then they would commit a
serious blunder. For the word they intently listen to in their soul is
their own, exclusively their own. Leopardi does not impart any poesy to
him who, through his love, his study, and the intensity of his feelings,
is unable to live his own poetry. And Leopardi (or the teacher who reads
him) is not materially external to the enraptured listener; he is his
own Leopardi, such as he has been able to create for himself. The
master, as St. Augustine long ago warned us, is within us.
He is within us even if we see him in front of us, away from us seated
in his chair. For in so far as he is a real teacher, he is ever the
object of our consciousness, surrounded and uplifted in our spirit by
the reverence of our feelings and by our trustful affection. He is _our_
teacher, he is our very soul.
The dualism then is non-existent when we are educating. We do notice it
before, and we are thus brought to examine the antinomy; but the
difficulty is removed by the very act of education itself, by the first
word that comes to the pupils' ears from the lips of the teacher. The
dualism however cannot be resolved if the master's word fails to reach
the pupils' soul, but then under those circumstances there is no
education. But even in such cases, if the teacher is not sluggish, if he
displays a real spiritual power, the abiding existence of the barrier
between the two minds proves helpful to the spiritual growth of the
learner, who, because of his incoercible freedom, is impelled by the
insufficiency of the master to affirm his personality with increased
vigour. So that the school is a hearth of liberty, even in spite of the
intentions of the teacher. A school without freedom is a lifeless
institution.
CHAPTER IV
REALISM AND IDEALISM IN THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE
We found it necessary in the previous chapter to pass from the abstract
to the concrete in order to arrive at the truth. The universality of the
individual was made clear when for the empirical concept of the
individual, abstractly considered, we substituted the deeper and more
speculative one of the individual himself in the concreteness of his
relationships. In like manner, the fundamental antinomy of education was
resolved as soon as we replaced the abstract idea of the dualism of
teacher and pupil, by the idea of their intrinsic, profound, unseverable
unity as it gradually works out and is actualised in the process of
education. We were enabled therefore to conclude that the real teacher
is within the soul of the pupil, or, better still, the teacher is the
pupil himself in the dynamism of his development. So that, far from
limiting the autonomy of the disciple, the master, as the propulsive
element of the pupil's spontaneity, penetrates his personality, not to
suppress it, but to help its impulses and facilitate its infinite
development.
The same method of resorting to the concrete now leads us to the
determination of a third essential element in the process of education.
We have spoken of the master, and we have spoken of the pupil,--of the
latter as becoming actual as universal personality, of the former as
becoming identical with this same personality. We must now take up the
connecting link between the two, that is, culture. By culture we mean
the content of education, the presupposed heirloom which in the course
of time must pass from the teacher to the pupil. This spiritual content,
in being apprehended, appears under different aspects: as erudition and
information; as formation of personal capacities and training of
spiritual activities; as art and science; as experience of life and as
concept and ideal of existence; as simple cognition and as a norm of
conduct. It includes everything that comes within the scope of teaching,
and from whose value education derives its peculiar worth.
Culture, so defined, may be conceived of in two ways; and in as much as
their differences are highly significant in the sphere of education as
elsewhere, we must now somewhat carefully consider them.
These two ways correspond to two opposite conceptions of reality, and as
such they pertain to philosophy. But men in general constantly have
recourse to them, and so it happens that people frequently indulge in
philosophic speculations without knowing it; and much philosophising
goes on outside of the schools of the specialists, who are few compared
to the great number of those who in their own way handle genuine
concepts of philosophy.
Let us begin from the most obvious of these concepts, from the one which
is fundamental and original to the human mind. Our whole life, if we
consider the data of experience, seems to unfold itself on the
substratum of a natural world, which therefore, far from depending on
human life, represents the very condition of it. In order to live, to
act, to produce, or in any way to exercise an influence on the external
world, we must, first of all, be born. Our birth is the effect of a life
which is not our life, which step by step rises and grows and spreads
until it gathers all nature within itself. This nature existed before we
were born, it will continue to be after we are all dead. Men draw their
life from an organic and inorganic nature which had to exist in order
that they might come into being. When nature will cease to provide these
conditions, human life, according to this point of view, will come to an
end; but nature, transformed, chilled, darkened, dead, will yet continue
to be.
On this living trunk of nature our own life is grafted; animals come
into existence, and among animals the human species. Each of us, as he
comes into the world, finds this nature, developed, abundant,
diversified in millions of forms, traversed by innumerable forces,
organised up to the most highly developed structures, man included. We
find this nature, and we begin to study it. We examine its parts one by
one, their complexity, and the difference of their functioning. For each
one of them has its peculiar way of being and of acting; it has its
"laws." The aggregate of these laws, mutually corresponding, and
integrating one another, constitutes the natural world--reality--as it
stands before us. With this external reality we strive to become
acquainted; and in order that we may live in it we either adapt
ourselves to it, or adapt its conditions to ourselves. In this reality
too we acquire the knowledge of the needs of our organism and of the
means by which they may be satisfied,--the ratio, so to speak, between
natural desires and controlled resources.
We are also told that our organism is in constant change and hurries on
to its destination, to our death, which we abhor as passionately as we
cherish life, but which we accept because such is the law of human life,
fatal and inexorable; for reality is what it is, and we must adapt
ourselves to it.
But if reality appears as constituted before us, as therefore
conditioning our existence, and as existing independently of us; if it
is indifferent to reality whether we be in it or not; if we are truly
extraneous to it, the conclusion must then be drawn that we, from the
outside, presume to know reality and to move about it without being this
reality itself or any part of it. For all reality is thought by us as a
connected whole, though indeed vaguely; in its totality it is regarded
as an object known to us, but existing in utter independence of this
knowledge of ours. Its whole process is therefore complete in objective
nature, which conditions our spiritual life, and this in turn can mirror
reality but can never be a part of it.
This then is the primitive and fundamental concept that the human mind
forms of reality. In consequence of it man feels that he is enclosed
within himself: he knows he is producing the dreams and the fair images
of art; that he can construct inwardly abstract geometrical figures and
numbers; that he can generate ideas. But he also feels that between
these ideal creations of his own, and the solid, sound, real living
forms of nature, there is an abyss. He must, indeed, fall in with
nature, in the process of generating other living beings of flesh and
blood. He must avail himself of nature by first submitting to its
unfailing laws, if he intends to give body, that is, real existence, to
the ideal conceptions of his intelligence. On one side then we have
thought; on the opposite side reality,--that reality, Nature.
This conception at a certain moment is transformed but not substantially
changed. As we begin to reflect, we notice that this nature, as known to
us, is not the real external nature, the nature which is unfolded in
time and space, which we see before our eyes, an object perceptible by
our bodily senses. We conclude then, that nature as known to us is an
_idea_; that Nature is one thing and the idea of nature another. And if
we think this perceptible nature and have faith in its reality and in
the reality of its determinations, this nature in which reality is made
to consist is the nature which is within our thought,--the idea of
nature; or in other words, thought considered as the content of our
mind. This thought is the aim of all the inquiries by which we strive to
become thoroughly acquainted with nature, and which we finally discover
or at least ought to discover when we succeed in attaining true
knowledge. We say that we know nature only when we are able to recognise
an idea in nature: that is, an idea in each of its elements, and a
system of ideas in the whole of nature. So that what we know is not
really nature as it presents itself to our senses, still less nature as
it is, before it has impressed our senses; but nature as disclosed to us
by thought, as it exists in thought--i.e., the idea. And this idea must
be real, otherwise nature, which has its truth in the idea, could not be
real. Not only is it real, it is that reality itself which a moment ago
we were led to think of as consisting in external perceptible nature.
This reality makes the life of our thought possible, but it is not a
product of this life. It is a condition and a prerequisite of
thought, and as such it does not exist because we think it: but
rather we are able to think it because it exists. It is eternal
truth, at first unknown to man, then by him desired. In quest of it
he gradually lifts on all sides the veil which hides it from his eyes,
without however hoping that it will ever entirely disclose to him its
divine countenance.
According to this transformed point of view, then, reality, which in the
first instance appeared to be natural, that is physical or material, has
now become ideal. But even thus it remains extraneous to thought, and
unconcerned with the presence or the absence of it; transcending the
entire life of the human spirit, and incessantly subject to the danger
of error. Whereas the idea as a complexus of all ideas that can be
thought (but have not been thought, or rather have not all been thought)
is the beacon of light that guides the way of man in the ocean of life;
it is Truth pure and perfect.
This idea evidently must not be confused with the purely subjective
ideas which we spoke of above, and which as such are extraneous to
reality. This idea is reality itself idealised. It is to this idea, for
instance, that we all appeal when we affirm the existence of a justice
superior to that of which man is capable, of a justice in behalf of
which man is in duty bound to sacrifice his private interests, and even
his life. This idea we have in mind when we speak of a sacred and
inviolable right, whereas in daily practice there is perhaps no right
which is not more or less trampled upon. This idea is before us when we
consider truth in general: truth which is indeed real, even though it
may not be seen or felt, much more real than physical nature, for nature
comes to life and dies and constantly changes, while truth is
motionless, impassible, eternal. In its bosom then we must try to find
everything that we want to accept as not illusory.
But in substituting the conception of an ideal reality for the
conception of a material one, reality as a whole continues to be
something contradistinguished from us, an object indeed of our thoughts,
but one which cannot be conceived as it is in itself except by
abstracting it from our own thought.
We, then, who open our eager eyes in the endeavour to discover, to know,
to orient ourselves, to live in the midst of a known and familiar world;
we, thinking beings, and not simply things of nature, beings who as such
affirm our personality in the very act of saying _We_, we then are of
less account than the earthworms which crawl along until they die
unknown to the foot that crushes them. We are nothing because we do not
belong to reality; we deceive ourselves into believing that we are doing
something on our own account, but in truth we renounce every desire of
doing or creating something original, something we might really call
ours; and we abandon ourselves, we drift away confused with external
reality and submerged under the irresistible current of its laws.
This conception of life, which I have given only in its barest outline,
is a very common one. For thousands of years it has persisted in the
philosophical field, the nourishment and the torment of the greatest
intellects of humanity. But humanity could not rest satisfied with a
world conceived in such a manner; with a world which, whether we call it
nature or idea, is at bottom always nature. For by nature we understand
not only that reality which is in space and time, but also every reality
which is not the product of our will, nor the result in general of that
spiritual activity, which in a manner peculiar to all human acts reveals
a diversity of values, extending from the sublimity of heroism and of
genius to the lowest depths of cowardice and to the gloom of sloth. Nor
can it be considered as the product or result of a process; for it is
immediate reality, original and immutable. In a world which is Nature,
man is an intruder, a stranger without rights, without even real
existence. As a being, he is destined to be suppressed; nay, he does not
even exist. And his life, with all his aspirations, his needs, his
claims, is but a fallacious illusion which will sooner or later
collapse. Man cannot help succumbing in a world where there is no place
for him. Therefore a more or less cloudy gust of pessimism lowers over
the consciousness that has stopped at this conception of reality.
Leopardi is the most eloquent expression of the intense misery to which
man is condemned in such circumstances, or to which rather he condemns
himself. He condemns himself because he has it in his power to conceive
reality otherwise. For let him ponder seriously and he will succeed in
convincing himself that the naturalistic conception of reality is
absurd. Philosophy has so demonstrated this truth, that he who now
strives eagerly to attain a moral point of view in harmony with
established principles can no longer repeat that note of pessimism, can
no longer assert that the world is nature, or that it is the eternal
idea from which nature is derived and by which it is made intelligible.
Such views are no longer tenable.
The teacher who, because of his lofty mission, claims the right of
forming souls, of arousing those powerful moral energies which alone
empower man to live as a human being, may not, must not be ignorant of
the fact that the contention of naturalism, which makes of the world an
abstract reality, presupposed by the human spirit and therefore anterior
and indifferent to it, is a belief that has been superseded and
surpassed by modern thought. The teacher too can easily grasp this view,
for in gathering all the arguments by which, along different lines, the
new conception of reality has been attained, we find that the whole
matter reduces itself to a simple and very easy reflection. Very easy in
itself, though it may seem difficult to the greater part of us,--to the
superficial thinkers, to the absent-minded, to those who lack the
strength necessary to face the great responsibility imposed upon us by
the truth which is derived from this reflection.
For naturalism reduces itself to the affirmation that we think nature,
but do not ourselves exist; nature alone exists. We do not exist and yet
we think, and we think of nature as existing. We do not exist and yet
nature exists, of whose existence we have no other testimony than our
thoughts. And if thought is a shadow, what will reality then be? The
"dream of a shadow," in the words of the Greek poet. Is it possible for
us to stop at this conclusion? Is it possible for an inexistent thing to
vouch for the existence of something which we know only from its
attestations? Such is the absurd position we are forced into when we
assume that Thought, in equipoise with reality, remains outside of it
and leaves it out of its own self.
We give the name of realism to that manner of thinking which makes all
reality consist in an external existence, abstract and separate from
thought, and makes real knowledge consist in the conforming of our ideas
to external things. By idealism on the other hand we mean that higher
point of view from which we discover the impossibility of conceiving a
reality which is not the reality of thought itself. For it reality is
not the idea as a mere object of the mind, which therefore can exist
outside of the mind, and must exist there in order that the mind may
eventually have the means of thinking it. Reality is this very thought
itself by which we think all things, and which surely must be something
if by means of it we want somehow to affirm any reality whatsoever, and
must be a real activity if, in the act of thinking, it will not entangle
itself in the enchanted web of dreams, but will instead give us the life
of the real world. If it is not conceivable that such activity could
ever go forth from itself and penetrate the presumably existent world of
matter, then it means that it has no need of issuing from itself, in
order to come in contact with real existence; it means that the reality
which we call material and assume to be external to thought is in some
way illusory; and that the true reality is that which is being realised
by the activity of thought itself. For there is no way of thinking any
reality except by setting thought as the basis of it.
This is the conception, or, if you will, the faith, not only of modern
philosophy, but of consciousness itself in general, of that
consciousness which was gradually formed and moulded under the influence
of the deeply moral sentiment of life fostered by Christianity. For it
was Christ that first opposed to nature and to the flesh a truer
reality,--not the world in which man is born, but that world to which he
must uplift himself: that world in which he has to live, not because it
is anterior to him, but because he must create it by his will: and this
world is the kingdom of the spirit.
In accordance with this conception there is, properly speaking, no
reality: there is a spirit which creates reality, which therefore is
self-made and not the product of nature. The realist speaks of external
existence, of a world into which man is admitted and to which he must
adapt himself. But the idealist knows only what the spirit does, what
man acts. A nature, ever at work in the progress of the spirit, throbs
in the soul of man, who with his intellect and his will re-creates it by
its restless, unceasing motion. It is a world which is never created,
because the entire past flows and becomes actual in that form which is
peculiar to it and in which it exists, namely, the present,--history in
the incessant rhythm of its becoming, in the ever-living act of
self-production.
On what side of the controversy should the teacher stand who means to
absorb into his soul the life of the school? Will he with the realists
believe in a reality which must be observed and verified? Or will he as
an idealist trust that the only world is the one which is to be
constructed by him; that in all this task he can rely only on the
creative activity of the spirit that moves within us, ever unsatisfied
with what is, incessantly aspiring for what does not yet exist, for what
must come to be as being the only thing which deserves to exist and to
fulfil life?
There are then these two ways of conceiving culture, the realistic and
the idealistic. By the former we are led to imagine that man's spirit
is empty, and that no nourishment can come to it except from the outside
world, from those external elements which he can acquire because they
exist prior to the activity by which he assimilates them. The latter,
admitting only what is derived from the developing life of the spirit,
can conceive of culture solely as an immanent product of this very life,
and separable from it only by abstraction.
It is evident that the ordinarily accepted view of educators to-day is
realistic rather than otherwise. The ideal and therefore the historical
origin of the school itself is intimately connected with the realistic
presupposition. For the school begins when man for the first time
becomes aware of the existence of a store of accumulated culture which
should be protected from dispersion. Grammar, for instance, exists
before the notion of teaching it arises. Men already possess a language
when they make up their minds to teach it to their children. Self-taught
and inventive genius, by new observation and discoveries, gives rise to
new disciplines; and men, discovering the value of such disciplines,
determine to institute a school where they may be cultivated and handed
down to the coming generations. In general then, first comes knowledge;
then the school as a depository of it. It may be granted that the
progress of learning is made possible or at least accentuated by
educational institutions; but the fact remains that the school is
founded on pre-existing knowledge. Science, arts, customs must exist
before they can be taught to others, and they do exist, but not in the
spirit of the one who is to acquire them, who must appropriate them as
they are in themselves. The _Iliad_ exists: Homer sang: the poems
attributed to him were collected into an epic from which we learn of the
beliefs, of the aspirations, and of the memories that were dear to the
ancient Greeks, and every cultivated person to-day must derive from them
his own spiritual substance. The teacher shows to his pupils how best to
read, how to understand that epic which is a treasure of the past
bequeathed not only to the modern Greeks but to humanity in general. For
we all profit from this inherited spiritual wealth in the same manner
that every man that comes into the world enjoys the light and the heat
of the sun which he surely did not kindle in heaven.
The fact that culture, as the subject matter of education, exists before
the exercise of that spiritual activity which can be educated only
through its means, seems to the realist a condition without which the
school cannot arise. Only as culture develops and spreads does the
school grow and expand; and, in the progress of civilisation, as culture
becomes specialised, the school is correspondingly differentiated into
institutions of ever-growing specialisation. For the school can but
follow and reflect the advance of science, of letters, of art,--of
humanity in general in all it strives to perpetuate.
All this evidently can be maintained only from the point of view of the
realist. For him the school is concerned not with those that already
know and therefore have no need of it, but for those who are still
ignorant. For them it is instituted; it ministers to their needs, and is
therefore adjusted in the direction in which it believes their spirit
should be oriented. In the school of physicians, there is not medicine
but the learning of it, for if the art of healing were already mastered
as it seems to be in the case of the professors, there would be no need
of a medical school. There is indeed the professor in the lecture room;
but he is there only for the learners, and his rôle has no meaning
except in relation to their needs. He is the possessor of science, and
as such he teaches and does not learn. The school then is not the
possession of culture, but the development of a spiritual life aspiring
to this possession; and this aspiration is possible because of the
existence of the teacher who has already mastered it, who possesses it,
not as his own property, but as social wealth entrusted to him for the
use of everybody. He himself is only an instrument of communication.
Culture antedates him; it does so even when he is the author of it. For
it is not possible for him to impart it to others until he has first
elaborated it himself, and not until the merits of his contributions
have been in part at least recognised by the world.
The school to the realist presupposes the library. The teacher needs
books, plenty of books in order to increase his knowledge and thus
become better acquainted with that world through which he has to pilot
his pupils. In the books, then, in the long shelves, culture lives: in
the innumerable volumes that no one ever hopes to read; in the shelves
which contain a world of beautiful things, and so valuable that man, as
Horace says, should spend sleepless nights in order to acquire them,
should endure cold and heat, fatigue and sacrifice. For humanity, we are
told, lives in those volumes to which the teacher must somehow link
himself if he intends to advance properly, to live the life which our
forefathers have generously endowed for us, and to protect our spiritual
inheritance from dispersion. In this atmosphere he must live; he must
plunge in that spiritual sea which rolls limitless across the centuries.
The pupil looks out upon this ocean which allures every man who is born
to the life of culture. At first he clings to the shore, dreads the
water, and asks to be helped until he has at least become familiar with
the element. Who will encourage the beginner to leave the dry land and
plunge into the deep where he would meet sure destruction? He must first
be trained in some sheltered cove, where protected from the violence of
the tumultuous surf, from the might of the indivisible mass of the
ocean, he may gradually learn the ways of the deep.
The student must accordingly begin with a definite book; he must be
saved from the haunting power of the library, which draws the youthful
mind towards every volume, towards every subject. In the multitude of
books, not all of them read, not all of them readable, thought founders,
sees nothing, thinks nothing, is unable to rest in any of the things
which he imagines exist in the vast library shelves. He must choose. Let
him select, say, Dante. He reads the _Divine Comedy_, the poem written
by that great Italian who has been dead these six centuries and now
rests at Ravenna, no longer mindful of his Francesca, of his magnanimous
Farinata, of his kindly master Brunetto, or of Beatrice. Dante created
his miraculous world, he breathed life into his characters, wrote the
last line of his last canto, smiled in rapture at the divine beauty of
his creation, now complete and perfect, and died. His manuscript was
copied thousands of times; and after the discovery of printing, millions
of copies were made. In one of these we now are able to find it, this
divine poem, just as it was written,--for we want it exactly as it
flowed from his pen without the change of a letter, without the omission
of a comma. And this volume is an example of what exists in a
library,--of the culture that teachers strive to find there, and thence
communicate to their pupils!--something that belongs to the world,
something which is a part of reality, which men therefore can grasp, if
they want to, just as they can get to know the stars and the plants,
and all things of nature. The _Divine Comedy_ can be realistically
conceived in respect to us who open the volume and prepare to read it,
for the reason that it already exists and arouses our desire. If we had
left it on the shelf where it was resting, it would have had exactly the
same existence. What we find in the volume, as we read of that land of
the dead which is much more living than all the living beings who
surround us in our daily life, would all of it have been in that book,
would have continued to be there, even if we had never opened it.
But is it really so? If we reflect a while we shall see that this is not
the case. The book contains exactly what we find there, what we are
capable of finding there, nothing more, nothing less. Different persons
discover in it different things, but it is nevertheless obvious that for
each individual the book contains only what he finds in it; and in order
to be able to say that the book contains more than what a given reader
discovers in it, it is necessary that some other person should find that
something more; and that the text contains this additional beauty is
only true for him who discovered it and for those who seek it after
him.
Dante waited for centuries for De Sanctis[1] to appear and to
disclose the meaning of Francesca's words. Therefore it has been
said that to understand Dante is a sign of greatness. Abstractly
considered, of course, the poet is what he is, but only in the
abstract. In the concrete, Dante is the author whom we admire and
appreciate proportionately to our power. For as we read the poem in
accordance with our training, and the development of our personality,
Dante is grafted on a trunk which did not exist before us, which, on
the contrary, is our very life; and before this life is realised,
evidently none of those things can be found there which actually come
into being in the process of its realisation. So that if we had not
read the book, far from its being true that everything we found in it
would still continue to be there, nothing would remain of what we find
in it, absolutely nothing.
We have said nothing of "what _we_ find." But if we consider the matter
we shall see that what we find is everything; everything for me;
everything for everybody. Only that can come out of a book which the
reader with his soul and with his labours is capable of getting out of
it; and in consequence of these labours and in virtue of his soul he is
able to say that a certain book has a content. In fact, to return to our
example, the _Divine Comedy_ which we know, the only one which we can
know, the only one which exists, is the one which lives in our souls,
and which is a function of the criticism that interprets it, understands
it, and appreciates it. That _Divine Comedy_ therefore did not close
the circle of its life on the day when Dante wrote the last line of the
last canto; it continued to live, still continues to exist in the
history, in the life of the spirit. Its life never draws to a close. The
poem is never finished.
This is true of the poem of Dante; it is true of everything which we
conceive of as inherited from our great predecessors, from those who
built up the patrimony of human culture. Culture then is not before us,
a treasure ready to be excavated from the depths of the earth, awaiting
to be revealed to us. Culture is what we ourselves are making; it is the
life of our spirit.
Abstract culture, on the contrary, is merely as realistically conceived.
It slumbers in the libraries, in the sepulchres of those who lived, who
passed away and created it once for all. It belongs to the past, to the
things that have died. But the past, if we really mean to grasp it, if
we want to see it close by as something that is and not merely as an
abstraction, the past itself, becoming the present, made into that
actuality which we call living memory, is history,--history constructed
by us, meditated by us, re-created by us, in accordance with our
abilities;--and with our powers of evocation we awaken the past from its
slumber and breathe into it the life of the spiritual interests, of the
ideas, of the sentiments that are, after all, the living substance in
which the past really survives, in which it is real. In the same way the
only culture that can be bestowed upon the spirit, the only one that
admits of being concretely taught and learned, the only one that can be
sought, because it is the only one that really exists, is idealistic
culture. It is not in books, nor in the brains of others. It exists in
our own souls as it is gradually being formed there. It cannot therefore
be an antecedent to the activity of the spirit, since it consists in
this very activity.
This must be the faith of all those who cannot bring themselves to
believe that they are strangers in this world, and that they have come
here to exercise a function which is not their own. For the world in
general, and the sphere of culture in particular, is not completed when
we arrive upon the scene. This is why human life has a value, why
education is a mission.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Francesco de Sanctis, a great Italian critic, whose "History of
Italian Literature" is still unfortunately inaccessible in
English.
CHAPTER V
THE SPIRITUALITY OF CULTURE
The idealistic conception of culture enables us to get an initial
understanding of the spirituality of the school. This spirituality is
surely felt by all those who live within the class-room; but it should
be understood in the most rigorous and absolute manner by those who wish
to have a deeper consciousness of the extreme delicacy of the tasks
performed and the words uttered by those who enter it with the sincere
heart and the pure soul of the teacher.
The school is obviously not the hall which contains the teacher and the
pupils. These may have a hall, may even have the teacher, without yet
possessing the school, which consists in the communication of culture.
This culture, we have seen, is not really pre-existent to the act which
communicates it; it is not to be found in books, not to be looked for in
an ideal transcendent world, not to be demanded of the teacher. It is
only in the spirit of the person who is in the act of learning. It is
there in the manner in which it is possible for it to be there, not
comparable to any presumed form of pre-existing culture. The school
gains its existence entirely in the soul of the learner.
Knowledge is not to be found beyond the bounds of the human spirit. I
insist on this conception because I am well aware that the minds of many
rebel against this conclusion, no matter how irrefutable its grounds may
be. For they ask: what then is the learning which we ascribe to the
master minds of humanity, now indeed dead but still active in their
works? They also ask how we are able to think and account for that
learning which we feel we are not originating, which we know we are
re-acquiring for ourselves after it has many times been in the domain of
others.
Can we really consider as non-existent what we as yet do not know, may
perhaps never know, but which is none the less capable of being known?
When we are filled with reverence for the glory of men whose learning
surpasses our powers, are we the victims of an illusion? Are we
prevailed upon by ignorance and lack of reflection? And how then can we
justify the cult which every civilised man consecrates to the mighty
spirits--philosophers, poets, artists, and heroes--who added so much to
the moral fund of humanity? Was there not a Dante six centuries back,
who composed a lofty poem, which was admired by everybody, at a time
when we, who now read it and bring it to life in our souls, were still
so far removed from the entrance of this life?
The answer to all these questions is very simple, so simple that we must
be careful lest we miss its significance. All this lore of the past
which we strive to preserve surely does exist; it does contain all the
names which are sacred to the memory of humankind. The _Divine Comedy_
has been written and no longer awaits its Dante. But this lore of the
past, as we for brevity's sake call it, is nothing else than what _we
think_ as such. History, as it unfolds itself from century to century,
is never compressed within a past which because of its completeness
might be made to exist beyond the present and in opposition to it; but
it exists in a past which is in the present as a plant that grows or an
animal that lives, never adding anything new to the old, always
transforming the old into the new; at no time, therefore, having
anything but what is new, never being anything else but the new. In
history, thus comprehended, we to-day are but one person with the men
who thought before us, with the poets, the philosophers, the spiritual
creators of the past. With them we are a person that grows and develops,
ever acquiring, never losing; a single being that apprehends and recalls
and constantly makes all his past bear fruit in the present. Our
childhood has not completely passed away into nothing: it keeps
returning to the ever-busy phantasy that tenderly fondles it, cherishes
it, idealises it into poetry. If we consider this childhood as something
that once was, that existed in utter ignorance of this poetry that was
yet to be written, that could not then be written, surely this infancy
is quite dead; we should rather say that it never existed. But it does
live as the childhood which is a recollection, which arouses feelings,
and such feelings as are at a given moment the actual sentiment of the
adult. Once in the years long gone by a kindly word reached the depths
of my soul. We all have heard in the years long gone by some such kindly
words that in the mystery of our childish mind appeared as a revelation.
Such words as fall from the lips of a mother and inspired by her tender
affection have the secret power of appeasing us in a moment of rage, and
of making us feel the gentle sweetness of that goodness which is made of
love. We may since have forgotten that word, and the circumstances in
which it was uttered: but it is none the less true that on that day our
soul was modified and became endowed almost with a sixth sense. This
sense has enabled us subsequently to perceive so many things that are
beautiful in life, and it in turn grew stronger because of frequent use
and increasing exercise, until it finally became the most potent organ
of our moral personality. Here too our development has been a constant
acquiring with no losing: a preserving of the past by which it was
converted into the present, and therefore annulled as past pure and
simple.
Such is the moral development of man, who believes himself an
individual, but is in truth humanity considered momentarily in one of
its fragments. Such is history: the unfolding of the spirit in its
universality. It is not therefore difficult to determine what is the
past culture in which we desire to graft our present one. It is our own
actual culture in so far as it is not the patrimony, not the spiritual
life of the isolated individual, of a particular being; but is instead
the life of the spirit in its universality, the development of the human
personality taken in its effective, historical concreteness.
The past with its entire content is a projection of our actual
consciousness, i.e., of the present. But we must not give this
proposition a sceptical sense. As I have already pointed out, the
present neither in the particular individual nor in the universal
history of the spirit, is sundered from the past by that abyss which is
ordinarily seen from a materialistic point of view. The past is one and
the same thing with the present. The past _is_ the present in its inmost
substance; and the present is the past that has matured. The grain of
wheat which was buried in the furrow is now no longer to be found under
the glebe. It lives, multiplied in the ear of wheat. The seed as such
was decomposed and destroyed in the soil; it is there no more, it sprung
thence as a blade of grass, it grew, was transformed, still is, still
lasts, and will continue to endure in other forms. Where is it now? Why,
in whatever form it may now have assumed. It is the past in the present,
as the present.
So then, what is Dante the poet who towers over the centuries, the
object of our admiration, the master of all who speak and use the
Italian language? He is the lordly poet of the fourteenth century, not
because he then lived his own individual life, but because he survives
to-day in us who think him, who appreciate him even when we are not
fully acquainted with him. In this sense he lives in us, as the seed
does in the ear of corn.
I have just hinted at the possibility of appreciating something without
fully understanding it. I wanted to make clear how impossible it is to
separate, with a clean cut, knowledge from ignorance. It is far from
true that before taking up a certain science we know absolutely nothing
about it,--that the boy who goes to school for the first time is
completely devoid of all knowledge, or that he who is in quest of a book
which he has never read can in no way whatever speak about it.
For fair renown begets love for the unseen person, as the poet reminds
us and as experience often teaches. Frequently we know of the existence
and the beauty of a woman whom we have never seen, but who is not
therefore completely unknown to us. So also many of us desired to go to
school long before we had seen the inside of a classroom. What is dearer
than the joy foretasted at the first imaginings of school? We look
forward to that new life upon which we are about to enter in the company
of our bigger brothers and of our older playmates. They have told us so
many things about it. From their accounts and from the fond memories of
our parents we already know the school before we approach it, and its
pleasing aspects invite us into the classroom.
For the same reason we search for books we have never seen, and we are
drawn towards new studies and pursuits. There is no leaping from
ignorance to knowledge, as from pitch darkness to noon-tide brilliancy.
The transition is imperceptible, as when the dim morning twilight merges
into the first glimmerings of dawn, which in turn fade away under the
dazzling flashes of sunrise. And even from the midst of darkness we
yearn for a world which though unseen is somehow present to our
consciousness, already illumined by our thought, warmed by our
sentiments. Or, in other words, the culture which we do not yet possess,
and which we expect to get at school, is already implanted in our mind,
where it will sprout and grow and bear fruit, fused and confused with
the life of our spirit.
Having now reached this point, can we define culture? I am inclined for
a moment to assume the rôle of Don Ferrante in Manzoni's novel.[2] By
pedantic ratiocinations he proved that the plague could not be a
contagious disease: "for," he said, "in nature everything is either a
substance or an accident." Contagion, he then went on to prove, could
neither be the one nor the other; therefore the plague was but an influx
of the stars, and there could be no use in taking precautions; and
having proved this, he fell a victim to the epidemic, and died cursing
the stars like an operatic hero. Let us follow for a moment in the
footsteps of this pedant, whose method, ridiculous as it may seem, has
had nevertheless a glorious history, and one which Manzoni himself
admired.
I say: We can think only and we do think only two kinds of
reality,--person or thing. Every one of us is naturally drawn to this
distinction; and when we have formulated it, we feel more or less
vaguely, more or less clearly, that every possibility is comprised
within these two terms, that outside of them it is impossible to think
any reality whatsoever. The reason is this: if we think, if we act, if
we live, we inevitably place ourselves in a situation such that we on
one side are as centre, as beginning, or as subject of our activity; and
on the other side are the objects toward which our activity is directed
and by which it is terminated. _We_ therefore as subject of the entire
surrounding world; and _this world_ as the end of our thoughts and of
our scientific inquiries, end of our desires and of our practical
activity; the world which is represented in our consciousness, and which
we strive to dominate by our labours, and our reason. Can there be
anything else beside _us_ and what _we_ think?
The world which we think and which we oppose to ourselves seems at first
to contain different kinds of objects. There seem to be both persons and
things; simple objects of cognition which we ordinarily call _things_
which can never become subjects; and persons who at first are
represented to us as objects of our knowing, of our love, and of our
hatred, as ends of our activity; but who under a closer scrutiny are
transformed before our eyes into knowing and acting subjects, who, in
other words, become just exactly what we are. But when we really get to
know these beings that surround us as subjects on an equal basis, then
we cease to consider them as objects of our cognition, and as solely
endowed with that material objectivity which at first put them in the
same category with the inanimate things, with plants and animals. We
then find them close to us, very close: fused with our own spiritual
substance. We feel them to be our fellow men, our kinsmen, with whom we
constitute that person of whose existence I am aware every time I say
_We_: the person we must take into account whenever we wish to affirm
our personality in a concrete manner, the only person, the one subject,
the true subject of human knowledge and of human activity. The subject
which knows and acts as a universal in the interests of all men, or
rather in behalf of the _one man_ in whom all single individuals are
united and with whom they are all identified.
Then if we give a rigorous and exact meaning to the expressions, "We and
what is before us," "We and the objects," "We and the World," we have a
correct classification of all thinkable reality differentiated into
persons and things, but with the understanding that all persons are in
reality one Person.
One _person_, and things innumerable! As we look about us, we find the
horizon peopled with thousands and millions and infinite quantities of
objects, which may one by one attract our attention, and may be gathered
up in the vast, unbounded picture surveyed by the eye as it moves on
from thing to thing, incessantly, without ever reaching the last. The
world which we first discover is the world of matter, of things which
strike our senses. This world rushes impetuously into our mind at the
beginning of our natural experience. And these material objects are many
not only _de facto_ but also _de jure_. They must be, they cannot but be
many if we are to consider them as material things. It is their peculiar
nature, it is their very essence to be an indefinite multitude.
A material thing means a thing occupying space. And space is made up of
elements, each one of which excludes all the others and is therefore
conceived independently of the others, must so be conceived. For it is
the very nature of space to be divisible. When it is narrowed down to a
point and cannot be further subdivided, then it ceases to be space. Its
divisibility signifies that space is nothing more than the sum of its
parts; that it contains nothing in addition to these parts; that it
therefore resolves itself into them without at all losing its being and
without any of the parts being deprived of anything which was theirs in
the whole. In fact, if anything were lost of the entire whole, this loss
could not but be felt in each single part. A book, considered as a
material thing, is composed of a certain number of printed leaves
stitched together; and if the leaves fall apart, they may be brought
together again so that they will compose the same book as before. An
iron rod weighs the same before and after it has been broken up into
parts.
Things cease to be exclusively and solely material when, though they may
be divisible in a certain respect, they are nevertheless indivisible in
another respect. Plants, animals, all living organisms, considered
simply as objects occupying space and as therefore having certain
dimensions, admit surely of being separated into parts. Trees are cut
into logs, sawed into boards; animals are slaughtered and quartered. But
considered from the point of view of its peculiar quality, of the
essential property which distinguishes it from all other bodies, an
organism is not divisible. If we do divide it, each component part
ceases to be what it previously was when conjoined with the others. Such
a part cannot be preserved; it withers, it decays, and is dispersed, so
that the whole can never be reconstituted. The various parts of an
organism, considered as such, are inseparable, because each of them is
and maintains itself on the strength of its relations to the others,
forming with them a true and essential unity. If we however try to find
out what this unity is by which all the limbs are indissolubly held
together, we shall discover nothing which can be observed and
represented spatially, nothing endowed with dimensions, however small,
after the manner of the several limbs which this unity fuses within
itself and vivifies.
If unity which is the life-giving principle of every organism could be
spatially represented, or in other words, if it were something material,
it would be one of those very limbs that have to be unified, and could
not then be the unifying principle itself. Hence the vanity of the
efforts on the part of materialistic physiologists who obstinately
strive to explain life by observing the parts which compose the organic
mass, by studying the concurrence of their processes, their chemical
relationships, and their mechanism. A material being, organically
constituted, is something more than a material thing pure and simple: it
announces already a higher principle; it presages the spirit.
But the things that we all agree to regard as spiritual defy absolutely
every attempt at division. A poem may be considered in a certain way as
material, and may accordingly be divided into various parts,--stanzas,
lines, words. But it is clear that such a separation cannot have the
value which we assign to the divisions of things material. For in their
case every part can stand by itself, and is in no way deprived of its
characteristic being; whereas every part of a poem, stanza, verse, word,
calls out and responds to every other part; and if isolated from them,
loses the meaning which it had in the context; or rather it loses every
meaning, and consequently perishes. It is true that by conjectures we
interpret even very small fragments of ancient poems. But we do so only
in so far as we claim the possibility of restoring approximately the
entire poem in which the given fragment may live, by which it may be
restored to life. Likewise all the words lined up in dictionaries are as
so many bleeding limbs of living discourses, to which they must somehow
or other be ideally reconnected, if we are to understand what they
really were and what functions they had. Multiplicity of parts in things
of the spirit is only apparent: it must be reduced to indivisible unity,
from which every element of the multiplicity derives its origin, its
substance, and its life, so that we may give to it a real meaning and a
foundation.
Nor is this the only unity possessed by the things that are assumed to
be spiritual. We have already considered the unity whereby, for example,
the words of a poem cannot be separated from the poem itself, in which
each of them acquires a particular accent, a particular expression, and
therefore a particular individuality. We shall now consider another
unity. He who really perceives a poem is not confronted by an observable
thing, compact if you will, unseverable and united, but none the less
independent of human personality. Poetry is only understood when in the
flowing unity of its verses and in the continuous rhythm of its words we
grasp a sentiment in its development, a soul's throb in a moment of its
life, a man, a personality. The poetry of Dante is very different from
that of Petrarch, because each is the expression of a powerfully
distinct personality. Any composition of these poets is understood and
enjoyed only when we feel in it the personal accent which distinguishes
one poetical personality from the other. A poet without individuality
has no significance whatsoever, and therefore no existence as a poet.
But the real artist leaves his imprint more or less markedly in all his
productions, so that in every given instance, over and beyond the
variety of the subject matter, we feel the living soul of the poet. A
poem then is the poet; it is a person and not a thing. And the same can
be said, as we can easily see, of all things that are commonly called
spiritual.
But in addition to things material, it seems that there are immaterial
ones which do not pertain as one's own to any particular person. The
ideas of which we had occasion to speak before,--immaterial entities,
not perceptible by the senses, but thinkable by the intellect, and
which severally correspond to all sorts or species of the various
material things,--were once conceived as things by philosophers, and
they are still so conceived to-day by the majority of men. It is
not requisite that one actually think them; it is sufficient that they
be in themselves thinkable. As a matter of fact, they may or may not
be thought, no differently therefore from any of the material objects
which are not created by our senses, but must already exist in order
that our senses may perceive them. These ideas are many, in a manner
corresponding to the material objects; and they are all different.
They mirror, so to speak, the multiplicity of material things in
whose semblance and likeness they were devised. There are horses in
nature, and there is the idea of the horse by which we are able to
recognise all the animals that belong to that species. There are
dogs, and there is the dog which we rediscover in every one of them.
And there are flowers and the flower; and pinks, roses, and lilies,
as well as the pink, the rose, and the lily; and likewise iron,
copper, silver, gold, lime, water, and so on, to infinity. It is
impossible to set a limit to ideas, because it is not possible ever to
stop dividing, distinguishing, subdividing that nature which unfolds
itself throughout space.
This boundless multitude of ideas, through which our mind can rove,
surely has no spatial extension. But because of the necessity of
conceiving any multitude as existing in some kind of space, it was
thought proper to posit an ideal space in addition to the physical one.
In other words, metaphorical dimensions were added to dimensions
properly so called. But whether spatially or not, we strive to conceive
ideas as many, each one of them existing by itself, and susceptible of
being thought independently of the others. In reality however we never
succeed in thinking them except as bound together and forming a system,
in such a way that no single one of them can be thought except by
thinking the others with it. Take man as an instance: each one of us has
intuitively the idea of man, but this idea is not possessed like a word
of which we may not even know the meaning. In thinking the idea we must
think something which is its content. If we know what man is, we must be
able to attribute a content to the idea of man. We may say, as the
ancients did, that man is the laughing animal, or the speaking animal,
because he is the only animal capable of expressing the emotions of his
soul by laughter or by the inflection of his voice; because, in other
words, he is the only animal who is conscious of what goes on within
him. Or perhaps we might say that man is the reasoning animal, and we
think this idea when we have thought the idea of _animal_ and the idea
of _reason_. But can the idea of animal be thought by itself alone? It,
as well as the idea of reason, must have a content; that is, each must
be connected with other ideas, without which it would be deprived of all
consistency.
And so the mind that begins to think one single idea is compelled,
almost dragged, to pass on to another, then to a third, and so on
indefinitely. It finds itself in the condition of the man who tried to
grasp a single link of a chain, just one, and found that he could not
have it except on condition of taking the whole chain. So it is with
ideas. We may not be capable of encompassing all of them in one single
thought; but whenever we try to fix any one of them in our mind, it
presents itself to us as a knot in which many other ideas are
interlaced, twisted, and entangled. They form an infinite chain, in
which it is not possible to think the first link or the last one,
because the beginning is welded to the end, and we turn and turn and
never reach the last. Is not this the nature of the ideas as we see
them, as they constitute the field from which we must harvest all our
possible thoughts?
Ideas are not, therefore, a true multiplicity, because they are not
things, either material or ideal, and because they do not occupy any
space whatsoever. Our imagination may present them to us as so many
lights of an ideal sky; but our intelligence warns us that they cannot
be separated one from the other and placed side by side. As I have
already said: when we think one, we think them all. Or in any event we
should, if we had mastered all that there is to be known. So that to our
thought ideas appear as constituting one unique whole, a unity, that
something which we call science, truth, knowledge. They are not a
multitude, for the simple reason that in multiplicity they would be
unthinkable. Their connection with and participation in an absolute
unity come from the fact that they are the object of thought, and are
therefore submitted to its activity, whereby they are ordered,
correlated, organised, unified. In order that we may say that one idea
contains another, or many others, we must analyse this first idea and
define it. This first idea must be distinguished from the others, and
they likewise among themselves. It is not therefore sufficient to say
that there are these ideas, motionless, inert, lifeless, as they
necessarily would be if they existed _per se_, as objects of mere
possible contemplation. There must also be some one to analyse them,
define them, and distinguish them. It is not enough to have the material
of thought, we need thought also to mould and fashion this material,
turn it effectively into thought stuff, reduce it to something
susceptible of being thought. Ideas as things would in no way be related
among themselves. But they do have that relationship which is generated
by thought as it thinks them. Thought generates this relationship not as
a fixed one, as would be the case if it were inherent in the things
themselves; but as a relationship which is being formed by degrees, and
which is continuously changing and developing. No ideal, abiding
science, existing only as the object of a vague phantasy, can therefore
result from this relationship. It constitutes instead a science which is
ever re-formed and is never formed; it gives to the ideas an ever
renewed aspect: it matures them, elaborates them, perfects them, by
concentrating on each one of them the constantly increasing light of the
system into which it closely binds them.
Ideas, then, as we really think them, are not a minutely fractioned and
scattered multiplicity. Nor are they a mass of concurrent elements. They
are Thought as it becomes articulate, and gains distinctness by these
many Limbs, by these ideas, which exist, all of them, in the process by
which they are gradually formed, developed, and complicated, and arrayed
in an order which is constantly being renewed and which is never
definitely perfected.
There are not then many ideas; there is one Idea, which is Thought. Only
in a metaphorical sense can we consider them as things; and, properly
speaking, they are the human person itself as actualised in thought,
which is busily occupied in the construction of knowledge. They are an
indivisible unity, in which each idea is found collaborating with every
other one so as to answer the questions which Thought constantly
propounds. They are the human person, not the persons; for we have
already concluded that only in an abstract sense is it possible to speak
of many persons; concretely there is but one universal Person which is
not multiplicable.
There are not, then, going back to our original division, persons and
things, material and spiritual. At the most there is one person, Man,
and there are the material things which constitute this nature, as it
occupies space, and in which we too believe we have a place, in as much
as we consider ourselves beings of nature. Nothing beyond this can be
conceived: on one side a sole immultiplicable reality, on the other a
manifold reality, indefinitely divisible.
Here we might perhaps stop considering the special interest that called
forth this inquiry. For no one could possibly suppose for a moment that
culture could be placed in the midst of material things rather than in
the spiritual reality which is a person. However, since the intimate
nature of this spiritual reality which we call culture is not yet
clearly revealed, we must continue our investigations, and give more
attention to this division which for a moment we thought might be final.
I mean the division of the world into persons and things: the equipoise
of spirit and matter.
Do we really _think_ this matter as we say we do, and which we believe
we are justified in opposing to the spirit, in as much as the spirit is
unity or universality, and matter, in its entirety, in every one of its
parts, in everything, is an indefinite multiplicity? Matter can in truth
be thought only on condition that it be possible to think multiplicity,
that pure multiplicity which is the characteristic quality of matter.
What then is the meaning of multiplicity? In absolute terms we call
multiple that which consists of elements each one of which is quite
independent of all the others, and absolutely devoid of any and every
relationship with them. The materialist conceived the world as an
aggregate of atoms, separated one from the other and having no
reciprocal relevance of any sort whatsoever. In the world of pure
quantity, which is the same as absolute multiplicity, mathematical
science claims the knowledge of units indifferent to their nexus, and
therefore susceptible of being united and separated, of being summed up
and divided, without any alteration taking place within the individual
unit itself. Numerical units are therefore pre-eminently irrelative.
But the concept itself of the multiplicity of irrelative elements is an
absurd one. In order that we may conceive many unrelated elements we
must, to start with, be able to conceive a couple of such elements. Let
us take A and B, absolutely unrelated, and such that the concept of one
will contain nothing of the other's, and will therefore exclude it from
itself. If A did not so exclude B, something of B would be found in A,
and we could no longer speak of the two elements as irrelative.
Irrelativity means reciprocal exclusion, a capacity by which each term
is opposed to the other, and prevents the other from having anything in
common with it. Without this reciprocal action whereby each term turns
to the other and excludes it from itself, establishing itself as a
negation of it, there would be no irrelativity. But this action by which
each term is referred to the other so as to deny it, what is it but a
relationship? Every effort therefore tending to break up reality into
parts completely repugnant amongst themselves, mutually excluding one
another, and therefore reciprocally indifferent, results in the very
opposite of what was intended, viz.: the relative in place of the
irrelative, unity instead of multiplicity.
Neither duality nor multiplicity is conceivable without that unity
whereby the two engender that whole in which the two units are
connected, even though they mutually exclude one another: without that
unity which fuses and unifies every multiplicity determined in a number,
which correlates among themselves the units which constitute the number.
We could strip multiplicity of all unity only by not thinking it. But
then in the gloom of what is not thought, multiplicity truly enough
would not be unity, but it would not even be multiplicity, because it
could not be anything at all. Or, if we prefer, it would be absolutely
unthinkable.
Thought then establishes relationships among the units of the multiple,
and thus constitutes them as the units of the manifold, and as forming
multiplicity. It adds and divides, composes and decomposes, and
variously distributes, materialising and dematerialising, so to speak,
the reality which it thinks. For it materialises the reality when it
conceives it as manifold: but it can conceive it as such only by
unifying it, and therefore by dematerialising it and reabsorbing it into
its own spiritual substance.
Matter is a manifold reality, without unity. What it is we already have
seen: a material reality, and as such divisible into parts, placed in
the world in the midst of a congeneric multitude. Now, since pure
multiplicity is not conceivable except on condition that we abstract
from that relationship to which the reciprocal exclusiveness of manifold
elements is reduced, it is evident that matter and things are abstract
entities. Thought stops to consider them, and regards them as existent,
only because it withdraws the attention from that part of itself which
it contributes to the making of the object represented. Thought
therefore prescinds from that unity which material things could not by
themselves contain, but from which it is impossible to prescind
absolutely unless we wish to be reduced to an absurd conception.
Objective things then, the world of matter itself which we are wont to
oppose in equipoise to the person, are in truth not separable from it.
For matter has its foundation in thought by which the personality is
actualised. Things are what we in our own thought counterpose to
ourselves who think them. Outside of our thought they are absolutely
nothing. Their material hardness itself has to be lent to them by us,
for it ultimately is to be resolved into multiplicity, and multiplicity
implies spiritual unity.
This then is the world: an infinity of things all of which have however
their root in us. Not in "us" as we are represented ordinarily in the
midst of things; not in the empirical and abstract "us" which feeds the
vanity of the empty-headed egoist, of him who has not the faintest
notion of what he really is, who can therefore think of himself only as
enclosed within the tight husk of his own flesh and of his particular
passions. No! they are rooted in that true "us" by which we think, and
agree in one same thought, while thinking all things, including
ourselves as opposed to things. And he who fails to reach this profound
source, this root from which all reality receives its vitalising sap,
may indeed get a blurred glimpse of a blind, inert, material mechanism,
but he cannot even fix and determine this mechanism. He cannot upon
further reflection stop at the conviction that it is in truth, as it
appears in semblance, something real, for it reveals itself to him as so
absurd as to become unthinkable. The world then is in us; it is our
world, and it lives in the spirit. It lives the very life of that person
which we strive to realise, sometimes satisfied with our work, but
oftener unsatisfied and restless. And there is the life of culture.
It is not possible to conceive knowledge otherwise than as living
knowledge, and as the extolment of our own personality. This is our
conclusion. We shall, later on, derive from it two corollaries that are
very important for teachers, in as much as they bear directly on the
problems of education.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] _I Promessi Sposi_ ("The Betrothed").
CHAPTER VI
THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE
From the concept of the spirituality of culture, we derive all the
fundamental propositions of pedagogy. But in as much as this conception
of culture coincides with that of personality, or of the spirit, it is
evident that all the fundamental propositions of the philosophy of the
spirit are also derived from it. In fact, we separate pedagogy from the
philosophy of the spirit only because of didactic convenience. To
determine, then, the attributes of culture, by which education becomes
actual, we have but to consider the nature of the spirit and endeavour
to define its attributes. This way we must follow if we are ever to
acquire a thorough comprehension of the principles of the several
theories of education, principles which are but the laws immanent to the
life of education itself in its effective development.
The assertion that "culture is the human spirit" means nothing unless we
first define this spirit and understand its attributes. We cannot
possess a concept which is not determined; and the determinations of a
concept are the constituent attributes of the reality which we strive to
conceive, and which is not thinkable if deprived of any of these
attributes. The following example, appropriate even though trite, will
make my meaning clearer. Physical bodies cannot be conceived without
also conceiving gravity. Gravity is then an attribute of the physical
body, and as such it determines the concept of it. In the same way, to
conceive the spirit is to embrace with thought the concepts which are
absolutely inseparable from the concept of the spirit.
This inquiry into the nature of the attributes of culture, though it
constantly progresses towards a satisfactory solution, yet seems at
times to be losing ground on account of the ever-increasing difficulties
that beset its advance. It is true, no doubt, that human thought, driven
by the irresistible desire to know itself, has made some headway towards
mastering the concept of itself. Philosophy has indeed progressed, and
the modern world can proudly point to truths unsuspected by the thinkers
of antiquity. But the assiduous and prolonged toil of thought engaged in
this task has at all moments disclosed new difficulties; it has ever
been busy sketching new concepts which subsequently prove immature and
in need of further elaboration, and has been pushing its investigations
to such depths as to make it difficult to follow its lead without
sometimes going astray, without frequently stopping in utter weariness
at the roadside.
Men talk learnedly nowadays of the human spirit, but with a doctrine
which is often insufficient or, as we say, not up to date. They have
stopped at one of those wayside concepts where thought no doubt passed
and temporarily halted, but from which it moved on towards a more
distant goal. For while this long history of the endeavours by which man
struggles onward towards the understanding of his own nature is the
basis on which modern philosophy builds its firm concept of the spirit,
yet for those who have not attained the vantage ground of this modern
philosophy, this history is unfortunately a very intricate maze; it is
the bewildering
"selva selvaggia ed aspra e forte"[3]
from which it is difficult ever to issue. And therefore it is much
easier, as Dante once remarked, to teach those who are completely
ignorant than those who have a smattering of philosophy. But to-day
culture is so intimately connected with philosophical speculation that
the greater part of educated men profess this or that system without
being aware of it. And when such men do take up the study of philosophy
_per se_, they no longer possess the mental ingenuousness, the
speculative candour, which would enable them to grasp the obvious,
evident, incontrovertible truth of the most profound philosophical
proposition.
This inquiry then is difficult. It demands either a long, methodic,
laborious study of the history of philosophy conducted with critical
vigour, or that unyielding tenacity of the mind which is the surest sign
of sound spiritual character; that steadfast firmness by which man, once
in possession of a clearly irrefutable, truly fundamental truth,
rigorously excludes from his soul all the allurements of prejudice, all
convictions formerly entertained, even though extremely plausible, if
they contradict his Truth. For he trusts that these perplexities, these
difficulties which he is not now in condition to explain, will be
removed in virtue of that very thought to which he has confidently
committed himself.
This unflinching resolve is the courage of the philosopher, who has
never feared to brave common sense, and single-handed to marshal against
the multitude the array of his seemingly absurd assertions, which
however, in the progress of their reciprocal integrations, have
subsequently contributed to redeem this very multitude from error,--from
that error which is intellectual misery, social wretchedness, economic,
political, and moral destitution. Because of this inflexible firmness
the philosopher has never dreaded that boundless solitude, that thin
atmosphere to which he is uplifted by thought, and where at first he has
the sensation of fainting away into the rarefied air.
We must then muster up courage and relinquish all the ideas which we
once accepted, even though they still tempt us with superficial
glitterings of truth, when once they have proved themselves to be in
contradiction with experience. For I too hold experience to be the
touchstone of all our thoughts, philosophy not excluded. But I insist
that we be careful lest we confound the mockery of the first puppet that
dupes our imagination with genuine experience; that in as much as every
man speaks of experience in exclusive accordance with whatever concept
he has been able to form of it, we too determine beforehand what our
conception of it is. Now I say that no concept of experience can be
validly entertained which does not take into account that truth which
presents itself to us as truly fundamental and therefore to be used as
an indispensable basis for all subsequent conceptual constructions.
Such fundamental truth we have previously attained when we established
that "We" are not what we seem to be in the dim empirical representation
of our personality, a thing among things. Our "Self" is the deeper one
by means of which we see all things in whose midst our other self too is
discernible. The reality of this, our deeper "self" which cannot be
conceived as a thing, without which nothing can be conceived, in the
same way that the trunk, the branches, and the boughs are not possible
without the root from which the tree issues, is a truth which we may
never grasp, but if we do, we shall forever be compelled to see in it
the source of all other possible truths, including the concept of
experience. For once we have securely mastered it, we will be convinced
that it is impossible to conceive whatever is considered and thought of
as constituting this world otherwise than as this world which _we_ see,
which _we_ touch, and which, in short, we look upon as the contents of
_our_ experience: and that it is also impossible to conceive this
experience without referring it to _us_ who have it not as an object of
possession but as an activity which we exercise. So that nothing,
absolutely nothing, can be thought when the relationship between things
and experience, and again the rapport between experience and ourselves
is obtained, without thinking the deep reality of this our "self." We
may again close our eyes to this reality or hold it in abeyance, but we
can do so only after we have effaced every notion of the two
relationships just mentioned, and when we again have immersed ourselves
in the mystery of things, in the gloom of their apparent independent
existence, of their ever self-defeating multiplicity.
Against this reality of the profound "us" which is the genuine spiritual
reality, there are innumerable and awe-inspiring difficulties. They are
difficulties that so violently oppress our minds and our hearts as to
dismay us, and almost force us to give up this concept of a reality on
which all other realities depend, and which cannot but be one alone, and
infinite, and really universal.[4] Alone, because in it all opposites
must coincide: the good and the evil, what is true and what is false,
life and death, peace and war, pleasure and pain, yours and mine,--all
things, in short, that we have been obliged to sunder and distinguish in
order to take our bearings and meet the exigencies of life. Formidable
difficulties indeed! And they are the problems of philosophy. It would
be childish and senseless to dispose of them by ignoring that concept
from which they derive. It is the philosopher's task, it is the strict
duty of human thought to face the problems as they rise out of the
positions which it has captured in its onward march. For to yield
ground, to turn the back to a truth which has been demonstrated to be
indispensable, that is impossible.
Those who wish to orient themselves in the world to-day must, before
all, cling to this: that the basis of every thinkable reality is our
spiritual reality, one, infinite, universal,--the reality which unites
us all in one sole spiritual life; the reality in which teacher and
pupils meet when by their reciprocal comprehensions they constitute a
real school.
What then is this one, infinite, universal reality? Is this question
truly unanswerable as it seems to be, as it has often in the past
been declared to be? For, it has been argued, in order to give an
answer, whether here or elsewhere, we must somehow think the reality
to which the answer is referred. We must think it and therefore
distinguish it from all the others, and so presuppose it as one
existing among many and as forming with them a multiplicity; and this is
the very opposite of that reality which we are striving to think.
Or, in other words, when we try to say what the subject is, we must,
somehow, set it as the object, and thus convert it into what is the
opposite of the subject. Or again: the subject cannot think itself,
because if it did, it would split into the duality of itself as
thinking and itself as thought, and what is thinking is not what is
thought. But all these objections together with many others of the
same force that are ordinarily raised against radical idealism have but
one single defect; which is such, however, as to make it hopeless for
the idealist ever to succeed in being understood by those that resort
to this kind of argument. These opponents, strangely enough, miss the
most elementary meaning of the terms with which they claim to be
familiar. They fail to see that when the idealist says "subject," he
cannot possibly mean by it one abstract term of the relationship
_subject-object_, which, because of this very abstractness, is
devoid of all consistency. The _ego_ is called "subject," because it
contains within itself an object which is not diverse but identical
with it. As a pure subject it is already a relationship; it is
self-affirmation and therefore affirmation of an object, but of an
object, be it remembered, in which the subject is not alienated from
itself; by which, rather, it truly returns to itself, embraces itself,
and thus originatively realises itself. In order to be _I_, I must
know myself, I must set my own self in front of myself. Only thus I am
I, a personality, and "subject," the centre of my world or of my
thought. For if I should not objectify myself to myself, if in the
endeavour to free myself completely from all objectivity, I were to
retreat into the first term,--a purely abstract one,--of this
relationship by which I posit myself, I should remain on the hither side
of this relationship, that is of that very reality in which I am to
realise myself. So then by this inner objectification the subject
does not at all depart from itself. It rather enters into its own
subjectivity, and constitutes it. Surely man may, Narcissus-like,
make an idol of his own self: he may worship himself in a fixed
semblance already determined and crystallised. But in so doing, he
materialises himself, makes his person into a thing, looks away from
his true spiritual life, misses self-consciousness, averts his thought
from his own intimate being. This self-conversion from person into
thing takes place, not when we think of ourselves, but rather when we
fail to do so.
Philosophy then, as the thinking of the Spirit in its absolute
subjectivity, is the Spirit's own life. For the spirit lives by
constituting itself as the ego, and it does this by thinking itself, by
acquiring consciousness of itself. And while philosophising then, we
cannot but ask what is this one infinite universal reality which is our
_Self_ and is called the spirit. We cannot dispense with this inquiry
into the attributes of the spirit, which is at the same time the inquiry
into the attributes of culture.
The examination of the possibility of this investigation has carried us,
without our being aware of it, into the very midst of the inquiry
itself. For what we considered as an elementary meaning of the word
"spirit," the _ego_, which is not something in unrelated immediacy, but
which constitutes itself, posits itself, realises itself in that it
thinks itself and becomes self-consciousness,--this is also the ultimate
characteristic which can be assigned to the spirit, or to man himself,
that is, to what in man is essentially human. If we examine all the
other differences that have been assigned or could be found by which the
spirit is distinguishable from things, we shall find, after due
reflection, that they all cease to have a real meaning as soon as we
neglect the most profound characteristic of spiritual reality, viz.,
that this reality is generated by virtue of consciousness. Every form of
reality other than spiritual, not only is presented to thought as not
conditioned by consciousness, but seems to afford no possibility of
being thought (in relation to consciousness) otherwise than as
conditioning this very consciousness. And when we say of the spiritual
being that it does not know what it is, that it is not acquainted with
itself, that it therefore remains concealed from itself, we conceive
then its spiritual being in a manner analogous to that by which we
conceive material or bodily being,--externally visible, but internally
unknown. And we say that the individual fails to grasp his own moral
nature, because in fact we make this moral being into something natural,
similar to that which is attributed to each one of the things that the
spirit sets in opposition to itself.
But the spirit has no nature of its own, no destiny to direct its
course, no predetermined inevitable lot. It has no fixed qualities, no
set mode of being, such as constitute, from the birth to the death of an
individual, the species to which it belongs, to whose law it is
compelled by nature to submit, whose tyrannical limits and bounds he can
never trespass. The spirit, we have seen, cannot but be conceived as
free, and its freedom is this privileged attitude to be what it wants
to,--angel or beast, as the ancients said; good or evil, true or false,
or, generally speaking, to be or not to be. To be or not to be
man,--the spirit, that which he is, and which he would not be if he did
not _become_.
Man is not man by virtue of natural laws. He _becomes_ man. By man I do
not mean an animal among animals, held to no accounting of his deeds,
who comes into the world, grows, lives, and dies, unaware. Man from the
time he considers himself such, and in so far as he considers himself
such, _becomes_ through his own efforts. He makes himself what he is the
first time he opens his eyes on his inner consciousness and says
"_I_,"--the "I" which never would have been uttered, had he not been
aroused from the sluggish torpor of natural beings (such as our phantasy
represents them) and had not started thinking under his own power and
through his own determination.
This freedom which is man's prerogative offers merely an external view,
has a very hazy consistency, and appears as something illusory, only
because we do not define it exclusively as autonomous becoming or
self-making. For in fact "becoming" is ordinarily understood in a way
which does not admit of being considered as man's prerogative. Does not
every living being _become_? The plant vegetates only because it too has
an inborn potency by which it is forced from one stage of development to
the next, from which in this process it acquires the mode of being which
is peculiarly its own, which it did not have before, which no other
being could from the outside have conferred upon it. And yet the plant
is not a person but a thing: it is not spirit, but a simple object, and
as such it is endowed with a definite nature and moved by a definite
law, which is the very antithesis of the freedom which is peculiar to
the spirit.
I might without further thought say that this conception of becoming,
referred to the plant as a plant, is improper, that in reality the plant
does not _become_ for the very reason that we deny it its freedom. But I
shall begin by stating that the becoming which we attribute to the
spiritual reality must be specified and determined with greater
accuracy, if we are to consider it as the characteristic of this
reality. When so specified and determined, it will be found to coincide
with the conception of freedom. Becoming, then, can be taken in two
ways, which for brevity's sake we shall call the _autonomous_ and the
_heteronomous_. That is, the being which becomes may have the law of its
becoming either in itself or outside of itself. Becoming covers such
cases as, for example, the filling of a vessel into which a liquid is
poured. But this becoming takes place in a manner which has its law in
the person that fills the vessel; and the filling therefore may be
considered not so much a becoming as the effect of a becoming, that is,
as the result of that act which is being performed by man. An
heteronomous becoming is to be traced back to the becoming of the cause
which produces it. The plant vegetates, and its vegetation is a
development, a becoming. But could it grow without the rays of the sun,
the moisture of the soil? The plant vegetates in consequence of its
nature, that nature which in accord with our ordinary way of considering
plant life it possessed from the time it was a green blade just
sprouting; nay, from the time it was a seed in the ground, or rather
when it was as yet in the plant that produced the seed, or better still
when it was in its infinitely remote origin. It is evident therefore
that we cannot think of the law of becoming as residing, so to speak,
within a given plant. Whether we call it nature or name it God, this law
transcends the becoming of the plant, its heteronomous becoming as we
called it, and is properly the becoming of something else. But the
becoming of man is autonomous. If he _becomes_ intelligent, that is, if
he understands, he does so through a principle which is intrinsically
his own; for no man can be made to comprehend what he himself will not
grasp. If he becomes good, his perfected will can in no manner
whatsoever be considered as determined by an outside cause, without at
the same time being thereby deprived of all that is characteristic of
goodness.
But in stating that man's becoming is autonomous (or true) we have
simply formulated a problem without giving it a solution. What does this
autonomous becoming consist in? Simply to notice its existence would
never help us to understand it. Every fact is intelligible only as an
effect of a cause. And a cause is a cause on condition that it be a
thing other than the effect. In order to understand the autonomous
becoming or freedom of the spirit, we must not consider it as a fact,
that is, as something done. A thing made presupposes the making; and
from the deed we must rise to the doing, but to a doing which shall not
itself be a thing done, a fact, and similar therefore to the doings
which we witness as mere spectators. The doing in which our autonomous
becoming is detected is that one of which _We_ are not spectators but
actors, we the spectators of every other doing, we as the thinking
Activity.
This then is the becoming which rigorously may be called autonomous: the
one which we know not as spectators but as actors, which comes forth as
that reality which is produced by the act of knowing, and therefore is
not known because it exists, but exists because it is known,--our
existence. It is the existence of us who know, for example, that a==b,
and who are such only in so far as we know and are conscious of knowing
that a==b,--of us who suffer or rejoice, and who cannot be in this or
that state except by knowing it, so that no cause could reduce us to
such a state, unless we were conscious of such a cause and felt its
valid application to us,--of us, above all, who are not ourselves unless
we apperceive ourselves, by reflecting upon ourselves, and thus
acquiring existence as a personality, as human self-consciousness, as
thought. Thought in opposition to nature, with which it is constantly
contrasted, is nothing but this self-reflection which establishes the
personality, and that reality which, absolutely, is not, but becomes.
Every reality other than thought _becomes_ relatively; and its becoming
is intelligible simply as the effect of another becoming. Only thought,
only the Spirit, is absolute becoming, and its becoming is its liberty.
But whether it be called "freedom" or "becoming," the important thing is
to avoid the mistake, which was general in the past and is still very
common to-day, of separating this attribute of the spirit from the
spirit itself, thus failing to understand exactly what is properly
called the attribute. For example, we say that the triangle is a
three-sided plane figure, and we seem to be able to distinguish and
therefore to separate logically the idea of _triangle_ from the idea of
_three-sided plane figure_. But a little reflection will make it evident
that in thinking the idea of triangle, we think nothing unless we at
least think the plane trilateral figure. So that we do not really have
two ideas, which however closely connected may yet be separated to be
conjoined again: what we have is one single idea. And such is the
agreement of the becoming and of the spirit, and in general of every
attribute and of the reality to which it belongs. When we begin
inquiring whether the spirit is free or not, we set out on an erroneous
track which will take us into a blind alley with no possibility of exit.
All the unsurmountable difficulties encountered at all times by the
advocates of the doctrine of freedom arise in fact from the error of
first thinking the spirit (or whatsoever that reality may be for which
freedom is claimed) and of subsequently propounding the question of its
properties. For the spirit is _free_ in as much as it is nothing else
than _freedom_; and the spirit "becomes" in as much as it is nothing
else than "becoming," and this becoming cannot therefore be considered
as the husk enveloping the kernel--the spirit. There is no kernel to the
spirit: it is in no manner comparable to a moving body in which the body
itself could be distinguished from motion, and would admit therefore of
being thought as in a state of rest even though rest is considered
impossible. The spirit, continuing our simile and correcting it, is
motion without a mass,--a motion surely that cannot be represented to
our imagination, for the very reason that motion is peculiar to the body
and does not belong to the spirit; and imagination is the thought of
bodies, and not of the thought which thinks the bodies. This idea of
motion without a mass, baffling as it is to our imagination, is perhaps
the most effective warning that can be given to those who wish to fix in
their minds the exact concept of the nature of the spirit. In order to
avoid new terminology not sufficiently intelligible and therefore
unpractical, we may resort to material expressions, and speak of the
nature of the spirit as of a "thing" which becomes, and use such words
as "kernel" and "husk." But we must never lose sight of the fact that
this manner of speaking, which is appropriate for things, is not
suitable for the spirit, and can be resorted to only with the
understanding that the spirit is not a thing, and that therefore its
whole being consists solely in its becoming.
We are now in a position to understand the meaning of the spirituality
of culture, that is, of the reduction of culture to the human
personality obtained in the preceding chapter, as well as the
pedagogical interest of this reduction. Culture, as the entire content
of education, because it must be sought within the personality, and
because it resolves itself into the life of the spirit, is not a thing,
and does not admit of being conceived statically either in books or in
the mind: not before nor after it is apprehended. It does not exist in
libraries or in schools, or in us before we go to school, or while we
still remain within its walls, or after our nourished minds have taken
leave of it. It is in no place, at no time, in no person. Culture _is
not_, because if it _were_, it would have to be some "thing," whereas by
definition it is the negation of that which is capable of being anything
whatever. It is culture in so far as it _becomes_. Culture exists as it
develops, and in no other manner. It is always in the course of being
formed, it _lives_.
But to understand this _life_, and in order to grasp more firmly this
"idea" of culture which is a spiritual banner to rally educators, I
must again bring up a certain distinction. Culture, I said, lives
(that is, it is culture) when it is endowed with a life that is
entirely different from the life which biologically animates all
living beings, ourselves included. The difference can be stated as
follows: in the case of every other life, we can assert its existence
in so far as we have knowledge of it either directly or indirectly. It
is always, however, different from us and from our knowing it; so
much so that the possibilities of going astray are very great. But
for the life of culture, which is the life of our spirit, we have no
need of being informed by the experience of others, or even of
ourselves. We live it. It is our very thought,--this thought which
may indeed err in respect to what is different from itself, as not
tallying with it; but which cannot possibly deceive us in regard to
itself, since it is unable not to be itself. The life of culture is
not a spectacle but an activity. Nor is it activity for some and a
spectacle for others. Culture is never a show for any one. No person can
ever know for his fellow being. What, for me, Aristotle knows, is
what I know of Aristotle.
Culture,--this untiring activity which never for a moment turns into a
spectacle for any of us, which ever therefore demands effort and
toil,--could not avoid becoming a show and being made up into a
"thing," could not escape the danger of dying as culture by degenerating
into something anti-spiritual, fruitless, and material, if, while yet
being activity, it were not at the same time in some way a spectacle to
itself. This point demands careful consideration. It is not sufficient
to say that culture, that thought is life, and not the thought of life.
We will not attain the conception of culture by merely contrasting, as
we have done, our life, the life we lead as actors, with the life of
others which we behold as spectators, or by opposing the life of
ourselves as thinking beings to the life we possess as organic beings,
to the life of our senses by which we are on a par with the other
animals. The life of thought, in its peculiar inwardness and
subjectivity, is still conceived to-day by powerful thinkers, by analogy
with life in a biological sense, as irreflective and instinctive, or, as
they say, as simple intuition. But thought which though living is
irreflective becomes indeed an active performance, a drama without
spectators, but it also remains as a drama represented for spectators
who are absent, and who should be informed of those things which direct
experience had not placed before their eyes. And it is difficult to
surmise who would impart to them this information if the house were
empty.
In other words, I mean to say that this would-be intuitive life of
thought, fading away into the subconscious, melting into the naturality
of the unconscious, is, like every form of natural life effectually a
stranger to thought (that is _conceived_ as a stranger to thought), an
object and nothing more than an object of thought, and therefore
incapable of ever being a subject, of ever having value as subject, that
is, as thought itself. For that reason we can never effectively think
it; for never can we truly think any thing which is natural and thought
of as natural. Who can say what the life of the plant is? To posit
nature by thought is to posit something irreducible to thought and
therefore unthinkable. This perhaps would not necessarily be a serious
drawback for the life itself of thought if we lived it. For would it not
be sufficient to live it? Why insist on _thinking_ its life? Why demand
a head, so to speak, as a hood for the head? But there is a drawback,
and a serious one, as a result of the fact that this life itself of
thought does not now, never will in the future, come before us as that
irreflective life which it is claimed to be: it comes to us as a
philosophy which recommends it and advocates it as the only possible
life of thought. In fact, in order to be able to speak of this life, we
must first think it. But how could we think it, if the only possible
life was that one which we intend to think, and not the one with which
we think this irreflective life?
So then, in order that this life of ours (truly, intimately, spiritually
ours) may not be confounded with the life of natural things, with that
pseudo-life which is only an apparent becoming, an effect of another
becoming by which it is transcended, it is not sufficient, as I started
out to say, to call it a drama and not a spectacle. As a result of more
careful determinations we may now say that it is not another man's
spectacle, but our drama which is at the same time our spectacle too. In
it the actors play to themselves. It is self-conscious activity. It is
activity perpetually watching over itself.
And again: Just as the becoming of the spirit would cease to be that one
sole becoming which it actually is, were we to distinguish the spirit
from its becoming, so the consciousness of spiritual activity would also
become unintelligible if we were to distinguish, as philosophers
insistently do, between activity and awareness, between the performance
and the show. The distinction here too arises from referring to the
spirit, the mode of thinking which is suited for the thinking of things.
In the sphere of things, doing is one thing, watching the thing as it is
done is another. But to us the spirit's becoming has shown itself to be
the very negation of this distinction between actor and spectacle, so
that in saying that the actor is his own spectator we cannot introduce,
within the unity in which we had taken refuge, the dualism which is
excluded from the concept of the spirit. I have spoken of "motion
without mass," turning a deaf ear to the claims of our imagination. Now
I shall add something that clashes even more violently against the laws
which govern our image-making; and I shall do so in order to make it
very clear that the spirit does not live in the world of things which is
swept over by our imagination. I shall now call the spirit a gazing
motion. The spirit's acting--its eternal process, its immanent
becoming--is not an escort to thinking, but the very thinking itself,
which is neither cause nor effect: neither the antecedent nor the
consequent, nor yet the concomitant of the action by which the spirit
goes on constantly impersonating itself. _It is this very acting._
In accordance with the popular point of view which, as I have said, is
shared by great philosophers, a distinction is made between the spirit
considered as will and the spirit regarded as intellect, or as
consciousness, or as thought, or whatever term may be used to indicate
the becoming aware of this spiritual activity. But if the spirit in that
it wills did not also think, we should be thrust back to the position
which we have shown above to be untenable, and be forced to admit that
the irreflective life of the spirit cannot be fused with the reflective
life, and is therefore unaccountable and unthinkable. The will which
_qua_ will is not also thought, is in respect to thought which knows it
a simple object, a spectacle and not a drama. It is nature and not
spirit. And a thought which _qua_ thought is not will, is, in respect
to the will which integrates it, a spectator without a spectacle. If
there is to be a drama, and a drama which is the spirit, it is
inevitable that the will be the thought, and that the thought be the
will, over and beyond that distinction which serves if anything to
characterise the opposition between nature and spirit.
Should we, returning to our comparison, demand of that motion which is
spirit a moving mass; should we, grounded on the naïve and primitive
conception which identifies knowing with the seeing of external things,
demand within the sphere of the spiritual activity itself a doing in
which knowing should find its object all ready made, we should continue
to wander helplessly in the maze of things, and to grope in the mystery
of the multiplicity of things, which are many and yet are not many. We
would be turning our eyes away from the lode star which is the supreme
concept of the spirit, and thereby show ourselves incapable of rising to
that point of view which is the peculiar one of culture.
Culture, as the spirit's life, which is a drama and self-awareness, is
not simply effort and uneasy toil, it is not a tormenting restlessness
which we may sometimes shake off, from which we would gladly be rescued.
Nor is it a feverish excitement that consumes our life-blood and tosses
us restlessly on a sick-bed. The spirit's life is not vexation but
liberation from care. For the greatest of sorrows, Leopardi tells us,
is _ennui_, the inert tedious weariness of those who find nothing to do,
and pine away in a wasting repose which is the very antithesis of the
life of the spirit. The negation of this life,--the obstacles, the
hindrances, the halts it encounters,--that is the source of woe. But
life with its energy is joy; it is joy because it is activity, our
activity. Another man's activity as the negation of our own is
troublesome and exasperating. The music which we enjoy (and we are able
to enjoy it by being active) is our enjoyment. But the musical
entertainment in which we have no part disturbs us, interferes with our
work, irritates us. Our neighbour's joys in which for some reason we are
unable to participate awaken envy in us, gall us, bring some manner of
displeasure to our hearts.
Culture, then, as life of the spirit, is effort, and work, but never a
drudgery. It would be toilsome labour if the spirit had lived its life
before we began to work; if this life had blossomed forth, and had
realised itself without our efforts. But our effort, our work is this
very life of the spirit, its nature, in which culture develops. Work is
not a burdensome yoke on our will and on our personality. It is
liberation, freedom, the act by which liberty asserts its being. Work
may sometimes appear irksome because the freedom of its movement is
checked by certain resistances which have to be overcome and removed.
But in such cases it is not work which vexes us, but rather its
opposite, sloth, against which it must combat. It follows then that the
more intensely we occupy ourselves, the less heavily we are burdened by
pain. For as our efforts redouble and the resistance is proportionately
reduced, the spirit, which perishes in enthralment, is enabled to live a
richer life.
Culture then is the extolment of our being, the formation of our spirit,
or better, its liberation and its beatification. As the realisation of
the spirit's own nature, it is opposed to all suffering and is the
source of blissfulness. But it must not be regarded as the fated,
inevitable working out of an instinctive principle, or a natural law.
The building of a bird's nest, which is the necessary antecedent to
generation and reproduction, cannot be looked upon as work; and it is
fruitless to try to guess whether this act is a cause of pleasure to the
bird or a source of suffering. Instinct leads the individual to
self-sacrifice on behalf of the species. But not even this fact, vouched
for solely by external inferences, authorises us to conclude that the
fulfilment of an instinctive impulse is actually accompanied by pain. So
that it seems wiser to keep off this slippery surface of conjecture. It
will be sufficient to note here that an action prompted by instinct,
conceived as merely instinctive and thoroughly unconscious of the end to
which it is subservient, is in no way to be compared with man's work.
Human occupation is personality, will, consciousness. The animal does
not work. But culture we have said is work. For it is liberty,
self-formation, with no existence previous to the process; whereas the
laws which govern the development of natural being pre-exist before the
development itself. Culture exists only in so far as it is formed, and
it is constituted solely by being developed. And what is more, as we
shall see in the next chapter, culture does not even count on a
pre-existing external matter ready to receive its informing imprint.
To conclude then: culture _is_ (in its becoming) only to the extent that
the cultivated man feels its worth, desires it, and realises it. It is a
value, but not in the sense that man first appreciates it and
subsequently looks for it and strives to actualise it. The value which
man assigns to culture is that which he gradually goes on ascribing to
_his_ own culture, and whose development coincides with the development
of his own personality. What we ought to want is exactly what we do
want; but we want just that which we ought to. The ideal, not the
abstract, inadequate, and false one, but the true ideal of our
personality, is that one toward whose realisation we are actually
working. And the ideal of our culture is that self-same one towards
which our busy person remains turned in the actuality of its becoming.
But work implies a programme, and spirit means "ideal;" and when we
speak of culture we signify thereby the value of culture, of a culture
which as yet is not but which must be. Life is the life of the spirit as
a duty,--as a life which we live, feeling all along that it is our duty
to live it, and that it depends on us whether it exists or not. And
culture could not re-enter as it does in the life of the spirit, if it
too were not a duty, that is, if it were not this culture to whose
development our personality is pledged. So interpreted, culture, far
from being a destiny to which we are bound, is the progressive triumph
of our very freedom. On these terms only, culture is a growth, and the
spirit a becoming.
This attribute, which is an ethical one, is not added to the attribute
of Becoming any more than "becoming" was superadded to "freedom." For
just as Becoming develops the concept of freedom, so does the ethical
develop and accomplish the concept of becoming. Freedom is never true
liberty unless it is a process, an absolute Becoming; but Becoming can
only be absolute by being moral. And it is therefore impossible to speak
of learning which is not ethical.
It has often been repeated for thousands and thousands of years that
knowledge is neither good nor bad; that it is either true or false. But
is the True a different category from the Good? Are they not rather one
sole identical category? Truth could be maintained in a place quite
distinct from the grounds of morality, only so long as the world clung
to that conception of truth which was the agreement of the subject with
an assumed external object. But now by truth we understand the value of
thought in which the subject becomes an object to itself and thus
realises itself; and in clarifying this new conception of truth, we
discover that morality is identical with it. For knowing is acting, but
an acting which being untrammelled conforms with an ideal--Duty. And in
this manner we explain to ourselves why the mysterious and inspired
voice of conscience has at all times admonished man to worship Truth
with that same intense earnestness, with those same scruples, with that
identical personal energy, which we devote to every phase of our moral
mission. The cult of truth is in fact what we otherwise call and
understand to be morality, namely, the formation of our personality,
which can be ours only by belonging to all men, and which, whether or
not ours, is not immediate, not a given personality, but rather one
which is intent on self-realisation, on that sacred and eternal task
which is the Good.
If we now feel culture to be free, to be a process, and an ethical one
at that, we have succeeded in grasping its spirituality, and we are in a
position therefore to proceed with security on that way which opens
before the educator's eyes, as he intently goes about his work of
creation, or, if you so wish to call it, his task as a promoter of
culture.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] "Forest savage, rough, and stern."--Dante, _Inferno_, i. 5.
[4] Many speak of the universal and say that they conceive this
universal as concrete and immanent. Few, however, effectively fix
their thought on that universality which alone is such, which
alone can be such, which has nothing outside of itself, not even
the particular, and which is ideal on condition that the idea to
which it belongs be reality itself in all its determinateness. And
so in speaking of "universal" and of "individual" we must remember
that the latter cannot be anything without being the former, since
indeed the universal is not a merely abstract idea, but reality,
the reality of thought. Therefore I have here used the expression
"really universal".--G. G.
CHAPTER VII
THE BIAS OF REALISM
Educators of the modern school are bent on transforming its methods and
institutions on the basis of the conception set forth in the previous
chapters. The subtle discussions required to make this conception clear
must have convinced the reader that this work of educational reform
could only succeed if preceded by such philosophical doctrines as have
recently been evolved in Italy and are now becoming the accepted faith
of the newer generation. To this new belief the school must be
converted, if it is ever going to conquer that freedom which has been
its constant aspiration, and which seems to be an indispensable
condition for its further growth.
The faith of the modern man cleaves to a life conceived and directed
idealistically. He believes that life--true life--is man's free
creation; that in it, therefore, human aims should gain an ever fuller
realisation; and that these aims, these ends will not be attained unless
thought, which is man's specific force, extends its sway so as to
embrace nature, penetrate it, and resolve it into its own substance. He
believes that nature, thus turned into an instrument of thought, yields
readily to its will, not being _per se_ opposed or repugnant to the life
and activity of the spirit, but rather homogeneous and identical with
it. He believes, moreover, that this sway can only be obtained by
amplifying, strengthening, and constantly potentiating our human energy,
which means thinking, knowing, self-realising; and that self-realisation
is not possible unless it is free, unless it be rescued from the
prejudice of dependence upon external principles, and unless it affirms
itself as absolute infinite activity. This is the _Kingdom of Man_
prophesied at the dawn of modern thought. This is the work which
science, art, religion, not less than political revolutions and social
reforms, have gradually been accomplishing and perfecting in the last
three hundred years. This new spiritual orientation has to a certain
extent influenced teaching; and though without a general programme of
substantial reforms, the ideal of education has been transformed along
idealistic lines. This transformation, strange to say, has been effected
in part by means of institutions which have arisen as a result of the
recent development of industrial life and of the corresponding
complexity in economic and social relations. These schools, because of
their names, seem to be quite removed from the idealistic tendencies of
modern civilisations. Whether they be called technical, business, or
industrial schools, they seem to be and are in fact the result of a
realistic conception of life. But such realism, we must remember, is
far from being opposed to our idealism, and should not be compared with
the realism which we have objected to. We should rather consider it as
the most effective demonstration of the idealistic trend of our times.
For these institutions are founded on the theory that knowledge
increases man's power in the world by enabling him to overcome the
obstacles by which nature, if ignored and unknown, would hinder the free
development of civilisation in general, and of those individuals in
particular in whom and through whom civilisation becomes actual.
Realism, on the other hand, as the opposite of the idealistic conception
of life and culture, was shown to be based on a conception of reality
which exists totally outside of human thought and of the civilisation
which is produced by it,--of a reality existing _per se_ in such a way
that no end peculiar to man, no free human life, can be conceived which
will have the power of bending this reality toward itself, of resolving
it within itself. This realistic point of view is not different from the
outlook of the primitive man who, awed by the might of nature, kneels
submissively before its invisible power, which, he thinks, controls
these forces. It is the accepted belief of the naïve and dreamy
consciousness of child-like humanity; but it is none the less a
conception which is opposed to the course constantly followed by
civilisation. Its dangers must be made very clear and its menace removed
from the path of its triumphant enemy. To overcome this realistic point
of view in the field of education is the duty of teachers, who must be
in a position to recognise it, and to track it into whatever hiding
places it may lurk. I intend therefore in this chapter to point out some
of the most notable realistic prejudices which, though still tolerated
by contemporary thought, ought to be definitely stamped out, if we are
really convinced of the spiritual character of culture and of its
essential attributes.
I shall here bring up again a consideration which I touched upon in the
first chapter,--an idea which is the fundamental prejudice of the
realistic theory of education in its antagonism to the profound
exigencies of the free spiritual life which education should promote. I
mean the idea of Science (with a capital S),--that Science which is
imagined as towering over and above the men who toil and suffer, think
and struggle in quest of its light and of its force; that Science which
would be so beautiful, and majestic, and impressive, were it not for the
fact that it does not exist. This Science is looked upon as infallible,
without crises, without reverses, without vicissitudes of doctrines,
without parties, and without nationality,--without history in short; for
history is full of these baser occurrences; and men, without a single
exception, even the greatest of scientists, even the lofty geniuses that
have transformed or systematised knowledge, are all in some measure
prone to err. The exceptions which are adduced to contradict this
statement are so few, so limited by restrictions and by hair-splitting
distinctions, that we can hardly allow them; especially when we consider
that even granting the infallible oracular character of some men's
utterances, the fact remains that his listeners must undergo the process
of understanding him, and in so doing they may go astray. So that from
superhuman unfailing verities, we slip back instantly to human
fallibility. Infallible Science, then, is not known, cannot be known to
mankind; for the simple reason that we who constitute it are subject to
error, and being ourselves prone to fail, we expose science to the same
danger. If it does exist somewhere it surely is not in this world in
which we live, thinking, knowing, and--creating science.
This mythical science, unsullied and incorruptible, segregated from all
possible intercourse with thought, ever soaring in the pure air of
divine essences, is yet the mother of a numerous offspring, the parent
of countless daughters as virginal and as infallible as the mother
herself. These are the particular sciences, bearing various names, but
all of them equally worthy of the distinction of the capital S in the
eyes of their realistic worshippers.
This mythology is taught in the schools which too often are called, and
without any figurative meaning, the shrines of learning. Conceived as
divinely superlative, as something which, though revealed historically
by the successive discoveries of privileged minds, is none the less
sharply distinct from the history of humanity, science descends into the
school. There it manifests itself as human knowledge, and is
communicated to the youthful minds eager to ascend to the heaven of
truth. And so the school comes to be looked upon as a kind of temple, as
the Church where the inspired Word of the Sacred Books is read and
explained by those who have been chosen by the Divinity to act as its
interpreters, as preachers of the Faith. With this religious conception
of the school we connect the "mission" of the educator, whose task, when
not ridiculed and lampooned by the same scoffers who at all times have
jeered at the teachers of divinity, has been surrounded by a glamour of
religiosity. We see them encircled by that halo of distant respect which
we naturally connect with those who, acting as intermediaries between us
and the deity, are themselves transfigured and deified.
The school then is looked upon as a temple in which the pupil receives
his spiritual bread. But not so the home which the boy must leave, that
he may satisfy his mysteriously innate craving for knowledge. Not so the
street, where the small boys gather, drawn together by the irresistible
need of pastime, by the sweet desire of frolicsome companionship, by the
unconscious yearning after spiritual communion with the world which
there makes its way into the child's mind far off from the classroom,
and lavishes upon it its own light, its portion of thought, its share of
new experiences, and the joy of an ever renewed outpouring of
sympathetic spirituality.
The custodian of this temple, the schoolmaster, is regarded as a divine,
as the minister who imparts the consecrated elements of Science, who
leads the pupil to the "panem angelorum," as Dante calls it. But our
fathers and mothers are not so regarded,--they who were the first
custodians of a greater temple, the world, to whose marvels they
gradually initiated our growing minds; they who by the use of speech
taught us, without being aware of it, infinitely more than the best of
schools will ever be able to teach us in the future; not our elder
brothers to whom we always looked up in emulation, and from whom, even
more than from our parents, we learned the thoughts and the words suited
to our needs; not our grandmother, who long before our eager phantasy
might roam through the printed pages, gently led us into Fairyland, and
there, in the enchantments of a magic world, disclosed to us that
humanity which books and teachers later in life were to re-evoke for us.
No! There are no altars to Science except in the Schoolhouse, and none
but educators may minister to its cult.
This mythological lore is not merely a harmless form of imagery, against
which it might be pedantic to rebel. It is a real superstition, which
has its roots deep down in the personality of the educator; it adheres
parasitically to culture, climbs over its sturdy trunk, drains its sap,
weakens it, deadens it. For when we have stripped this conception of
education of its mythological exterior, there yet remains a clearly
religious and realistic thought, which is professed with firm adhesion
of the mind and complete devotion of the soul, as the inviolable norm of
the whole activity which pertains to the object of this norm itself. Let
us, for example, consider what is presupposed by the doctrine of
methods, the so-called methodology, which is an important part of
didactics, and a very considerable section in the whole field of
pedagogics. The doctrine of methods comprises a general treatment, which
corresponds to what we called the Mother-Science, and a particular
treatment for the individual sciences. There is methodology of learning
in general, and there are methodics for the several disciplines, or at
least for each group of disciplines, into which learning is divided and
subdivided in accordance with the logical processes adopted in any
particular case, or in accordance with the objects of these disciplines.
To each method of knowing, considered in itself, corresponds a teaching
method, so that there is one general didactic method, and many special
ones by which the general method is to be applied.
But what is the method of a science if not the logical scheme or the
form of a certain scientific knowledge? And, on the other hand,
what can be known as to the form of anything, unless we have the thing
itself before us in its form and with its contents? In order to define
the form of a science, and say, for example, that it is deductive in
mathematics and inductive in chemistry, we must first presuppose the
existence of these sciences themselves. But in them form is never
anything indifferent to content; it is the form of that content. This is
made clear if we consider the methodologies which logicians presume to
define in the abstract, and with no regard to the determined content of
the corresponding sciences. We notice that they are able to present a
successful exposition and formulation only by fixing the meaning of
each formula by the use of examples, thereby passing from the
abstract to the concrete, and showing the method to be within the
concrete knowing out of which logic presumes to extract it. In the same
way every philosophical system has its method; but whenever criticism
has endeavoured to fix abstractly the method of a system, in order
then to show how it has been applied in the construction of the
system itself, it has been forced in every case to admit that the
method already contained the system within itself, that it was the
system itself. So that it would have no value whatsoever, it could
not even be grasped by thought in its particular determinateness, if
it were not presented as the natural form of that precise thought.
No harmful results would follow, if this assumption merely implied the
accepting of science and methods as existing by themselves previous to
the learning of science by means of its respective method; if it
resulted merely in the failure to recognise the impossibility of
conceiving science and methods as existing outside of the human mind
where they actually do live and exist. If this were all, we should
merely take notice of it as a speculative error which affected only the
solution of the particular problem in which it appeared. But in the life
of thought, where everything is united and connected in an organic
system, every point of which is in relation to every other point, there
is no error limited to a single problem; its effects are felt in the
whole system, and they react on thought as a whole. And since thought is
activity itself,--life's drama, as we called it,--every error infects
the entire life. Let us then consider the consequences of this realistic
conception of methodology.
Science, we are told, in its abstract objectivity is one, immutable,
unaltered: it is removed from the danger of error and of human
fallibility, and protected from the alternate succession of ignorance
and discovery; incapable therefore of progressing and of developing
because it was complete from the very beginning, and is eternally
perfect. But such a Science is quite different from the one which
grows in the life of culture, and is the free formation of the human
personality. This one is ever changing, always admitting all
possible transformations, different from individual to individual, and
different also in the mind of the same person. It lives only on
condition that it never fix itself, that it never crystallise, that
it place no limits to its development; it continues to be in virtue
of its power to grow, to modify itself, to integrate itself and
incessantly to develop. Science as culture, as personality, is free,
perennially becoming, stirred by ethical impulses, multiple, varied.
If we fix the method, it indicates that we are dealing with science
realistically considered as pre-existing, and we can therefore have only
one sole, definite, immutable method,--one for everybody, and devoid of
freedom, not susceptible of development, refractory to all moral
evaluation. We should have then a rigid law of the spirit, as
compelling as the laws of nature. But by obedience to such a principle,
the spirit could not affirm itself: such compliance is surrender and
abdication, not the realisation of some good. The most that could be
said of it is that perhaps it prevents or annuls an evil which alienates
us from a primitive good which is not ours, and not being ours cannot
truly be good.
A fixed method forces the spirit into this hopeless dilemma: (1) Either
refuse to submit, and thus save life at the cost of all that makes life
worth living--_propter vitam vivendi perdere causas_ (which evidently
would be the case, if we consider that the spirit lives solely on
condition that it recognise no pre-established laws, that it be free
from the bondage of nature, that it create its own law, its own world,
freely; and that, on the other hand, the _cause_ of living, what
constitutes the worth of life, is that enhancement of the spirit's
reality which realises itself in science, and therefore in the method of
science).
(2) Or else submit, and kill life in the effort to save its
worth--_propter causas vivendi perdere vitam_ (which is absurd; for what
is the worth of life if there is no life?).
However that may be, the type of education that presupposes a certain
ideal of knowledge previously constituted and ready to be imparted by
the teacher to the pupil in conformity with some suitable method, must
follow a method, a unique one--the method of science, and therefore of
the teacher, and therefore also of the pupil, whether the latter is
capable of it or not. For it is tacitly assumed that science==method;
science==teacher; science==pupil. On the strength of these equations the
common term "science" should suffice to identify the first method, which
is the one of science in itself, with the last, which is the method of
science to be mastered by the pupil. But the above series of equations
is false, because, admitting the first, the one namely on the basis of
which we are now discussing, neither the second nor the third is
possible without passing from realistic to idealistic science,--two
very different things, as I have shown. Even if we leave the teacher out
of consideration, we shall have to remember that the pupil learns a
science by making it his own,--a fallible science, which he may
understand up to a certain point and no further. It will be one of the
many sciences which have no one given method, but many of them, and the
pupil can only avoid appropriating, individualising, subjectivising
science by following that way which is very broad, very easy, and, alas,
only too well beaten,--the royal road of non-learning, which is
diligently upkept by all the schools which have to teach precise,
well-defined science, and have a pre-established method by which to
teach it.
But, it might be objected, if science, realistically conceived, is a
fictitious entity in no way corresponding to reality, how is it possible
to have a method which by its uniqueness and definiteness effectively
corresponds to the unalterable unity of this non-existent science? And
what teacher would ever arbitrarily impose on his students such an
abstract and mechanical method? This is true enough; but man learns to
compromise with all deities, Science included. This divinity, in order
somehow to exist, must assume a few human traits without however
renouncing her divine prerogatives. The fact that Apollo held no
communion with the Pythian priestess did not remove the oracular
sanctity from the Delphic response. For man knows no deity other than
the one which he is capable of conceiving with his soul, just as he
knows no other red besides the one which he sees with his own eyes.
Science, which he considers as an object existing in itself, outside of
his and other human minds, and therefore endowed with absolute validity
in all its branches and in the articulations of these branches, is
nothing but the science which _he_ knows. And he knows it because he has
constructed it in the form in which he knows it: _fingit creditique_.
But this absence of consciousness from the constructing, and the
consequent faith in the realistic value of science, determine the
positions and the doctrines which produce the consequences I have
deplored. For he who establishes a school and enacts its regulations
takes as a model his own science, without at all being aware that it is
only his own. It becomes therefore the content of the institution and
determines its method. But a teacher who does not feel inclined to
teach that given science and to adopt that special method creates his
own ideal, which is but the projection of his personal culture; and
unable to account critically for the intrinsic connection existing
between his ideal and his personality, he too _fingit creditique_. He
believes that the school authority has erred, and that Science, as
he understands it, must be kept distinct from the official doctrines.
But in his mind his science is not his own. It is, he is confident,
that Sovereign Science which by his method and through his cult must
enlighten the school over which he rules. And so at the point of
arrival where the realistic conception of methods must work, it is found
to be effective notwithstanding the rebuffs of reality, and it works. It
works and it acts in the only way that it is possible for it to act,
namely, by going amiss. It fails and will always continue to fail, not
so much because every pupil has his own personality and will have his
own particular culture with its corresponding method, but especially
because whatever the number of the pupils in a school, the human mind
knows of no culture which is not also its own free development, its
autonomous ethical becoming. A science, which is supposed to exist
before the spirit, becomes a thing, and will never again be able to
trace its way back to the spirit. By presupposing science, teachers
materialise the culture in whose development education consists; and
this materiality of a culture known to teachers renders impossible
that other culture which is unknown to teachers, which is going to
be not theirs, but the pupils', for whom they work and in whose behalf
the school was instituted.
Methods, programmes, and manuals most conspicuously reveal the realistic
prejudices of school technique; and against these educators should
constantly be on their guard. For these prejudices have, as Vico would
put it, an eternal motive, which at times seems to be definitely
uprooted and completely done away with, only to reappear, alas! in a
different form and with an ever renewed lease of life. The motive is the
following: The school is created when people are conscious of a certain
amount of knowledge already attained, well defined, and recognised as
valuable. Likewise man's value socially is estimated on the work done,
and it is on the basis of this finished work that he is credited with
the acquisition of a certain personality. This is assuredly no longer a
becoming but a being; an existent thing, already realised, which, though
a contradiction in terms for those of us who have mastered the concept
of the attributes of the spirit, is not thereby condemned as accidental
and disposed of once for all. For it is also true that culture,
personality, science,--spiritual reality in short,--is a reality, and
true it is that when we know it, we know it as already realised. We may
indeed have a very keen and lively sentiment of the subjectivity, and
inwardness, and newness or originality of our culture, in which, for
example, Dante, Dante himself, is _our_ Dante, is "We." But yet this
"We" looms before us as a truth which transcends our particular "we." It
is truth; it is science. And before this divine Truth, before this
Science, we too fall on our knees, because it is no longer a mythology,
but--our experience, our life.
Thus we think; thus, spiritually, we live. I meditate and inquire into
the mystery of the universe unceasingly; but in the background of my
inquiry, from time to time a solution appears, a discovery which urges
my exploring mind onward. Mystery itself is not mystery unless it be
known as such, and then it becomes knowledge. Inquiry is therefore at
once a research and a discovery. And this untiring activity, which knows
neither sleep nor rest, is mirrored before its own eyes and lives in the
fond contemplation of its reflected image, which image in its
objectivity appears to it as fixed as it, the activity, is mobile. And
no man ever felt so keenly the humility and meanness of his powers, no
one ever presumed so little of himself, that he could not yet be drawn
by his own nature to idolise himself, to see himself before himself,
exactly as he is, as what he cannot but be. And on the other hand we
cannot but affirm our immortal faith in the absolute truth of the ideals
which impose upon us sentiments of humility.
The error which we must victoriously contend against is not this
ingenuous and unconquered faith in the objectivity of thought (which is
also the objectivity of all things). What we must fight against is
mental torpor and the sloth of the heart, which induce us to stop in
front of the object as soon as we get it. A deplorable failing indeed,
since the object is lost in the very act by which we grasp it, and we
must again resume our work and toil some more in order to attain it
again. For the object, in short, does exist, but in the subject; and in
order to be a living and real object it must live on the life itself of
the subject.
A textbook is a textbook: when it was written, and if its author was
capable of thinking and of living in his thought, it too was a living
thing; and a living thing, that is, _spirit_, it will continue to be for
the instructor who does not through indolence allow himself to believe
that all the thinking demanded by the subject was done once for all by
the author of the manual. For the manual, as a book intended for the
teacher, meant to be constantly awakened by teachers to an ever
quickened life, the life of the spirit, can only be what the instructor
makes it. He, therefore, must have culture enough to read it as _his_
book; he must be able to restore it to life, to re-create it by the
living process of his personal thought. This done, he will have done but
one-half of the work needed to transform himself from a reader into a
teacher. For his reading must lead up to the reading of the pupils; and
they ought not to be confronted with the finished product of a culture
turned out, all ready-made by the mechanism of the handbook. So that we
should now complete our previous statement, and say that the teacher
re-creates the book when he revives it in the mind of the one for whom
the book was written; when author, teacher, and pupil constitute but one
single spirit, whose life animates and inwardly vivifies the manual,
which therefore ought not to be called, as it is, a _hand_-book, but a
spiritual guide for the _mind_. Unfortunately the oft-deplored indolence
which freezes and stiffens spiritual life fastens the books to the hands
of the teacher first, and then to those of the pupils.
Teachers should carefully watch themselves. If the book begins to feel
heavy in their hands, it is a sign that it is becoming a burden on the
pupils' minds. It will end by stifling their mental life, unless its
oppressive dulness is dispelled by the reawakened consciousness of the
instructor. Teachers should never for an instant become remiss in their
loving solicitude for their school. When their book, the book they
selected for their pupils, as the means of imparting the culture for
which the school stands, ceases to be the pupils' book, cherished by
them as a thing of their own, intimately bound up with their persons,
then it is high time to throw it away. For the moment a book loses its
power to attract it instantly begins to repel. It then becomes an
instrument of torture and a menace for the life of the youthful minds
entrusted to the teachers' care.
Dictionaries and grammars go side by side with handbooks,--instruments
of culture that are only too often converted into engines of torture.
The abuse of these books, especially noticeable in the secondary
schools, is not limited to them, but is infecting primary instruction
too, and teachers should know what such books are, and be enlightened as
to their limitations. Otherwise the dictionary becomes the cemetery of
speech, and grammar the annexed dissecting room. A lexicon is a burial
ground for the mortal remains of those living beings which we call human
words, each one of which always lives in a context, not because it is
there in bodily company, in the society of other words, but because in
every context it has a special signification, being the form of a
precise thought or state of mind, as we may wish to call it. A word need
not be joined to other words to form that complex which grammarians call
a sentence. It may stand alone, all by itself, and constitute a
discourse, and express a thought, even a very great thought. The
"_fiat_" of the book of Genesis is an example. What is requisite is that
the word, whether by itself or with others, should adhere to the
personality, to the spiritual situation, and be the actual expression of
a soul. When joined to the soul a word, which materially is identical
with countless other words uttered by other souls, and with the peculiar
accents of the respective personalities, reveals its particular
expression, is a particular word not to be ever compared with any of
those countless ones materially identical with it. The biblical
"_fiat_," repeated by men who feel within them the almighty Word of the
Creator, is constantly taking on new shades of meaning, is always
reinforced by richer tones, and will always continue to do so, as a
result of the numerous ways that men have of picturing to themselves the
deity, and in accordance with the variety of doctrines, phantasies, and
sentiments, or whatever other forms of activity may converge into the
expression of a person's spiritual life. So that if, abstractly
considered, it is the word that we read, always the same, in the sublime
passage of Genesis, in reality it lives in an infinite number of forms,
as though an infinite number of words.
But in dictionaries, words are sundered from the minds, detached from
the context, soulless and dead. A good lexicon--and those that are
put in the hands of pupils are seldom satisfactory--should always in
some way restore the word to the natural context, enchase it, so to
speak, in the jewel from which it was torn. It should never presume
to give meanings of abstracted words, but ought to point them out as
they exist historically in the authors who are deemed worthy
representatives of the language or of the literature. Dictionaries so
compiled do away partly with the objectionable abstractness, but are yet
unable to conjure the dead from their tombs. Their weakness and
insufficiency lie first of all in the fact that the true context of a
word, in which it lives concretely, and from which therefore it draws
its meaning, is in reality not the brief phrase, which is all that
historical dictionaries can quote, but rather the entire work of the
author from which the quoted phrase derives whatever colours it may
possess and its own peculiar shade. And the whole work in turn can be
understood only in connection with the boundless historical
environments out of which it emerges, in which it lives, and where
its thoughts receive their peculiar colouring and their special
significance. The insufficiency of the dictionary comes out even more
clearly from another and more important consideration. An historical
dictionary of the Italian language will, for example, tell us how
Machiavelli used the word "virtue" (_virtù_), and by the examples
adduced we should see or perhaps surmise the meaning of that word,
the knowledge of which is not just mere erudition, in as much as in the
mind of the cultured reader the thought of Machiavelli is restored to
life, and with it the concept which he was wont to express by the term
"virtue." But idealistically speaking, is this word Machiavelli's or is
it ours,--a word belonging to us who are inquiring into his thoughts?
It is ours, by all means, and for the reason that it belongs to _our_
Machiavelli. Unless we have then within us this our Machiavelli, it is
useless for us to search for the meaning of the word in the dictionary.
In it surely we may find it, but as a dead body to be resurrected only
by remembering that its life is not in the printed page but in _us_, and
only in us. In our life everything will have to be resuscitated that is
to become part of our culture.
And the same applies to grammars. As people conceive them and use them,
what are they if not a schematic arrangement of the forms by which
words are joined so as to constitute speech? And how can we cut the
discourse to the quick and extract these schemes, without at the same
time destroying its life? The scheme is a "part of speech," and it is a
rule. Grammar is a series of rules regarding the parts of speech,
considered singly and collectively. But the grammatical scheme--part of
speech or rule--abstracts a generic form from the particular expression
in such a way that the paradigm of a conjugation, for example, shall be
the conjugation of many verbs but not of any determined one. The rule
governing the use of the conditional is in the same way referred to
every verb which expresses a conditional act or occurrence, but to no
one verb in a peculiar manner. But since no speech contains a verb which
might present to us a verbal form which is not also the form of a
determined verb, nor a conditional which does not point with precision
to the action or occurrence subordinated to a condition, it is evident
that the scheme places before us, not the living and concrete body of
the speech, but a dissected and dead part of this body.
I shall not here recall the controversies occasioned by the difficulties
inherent in the normative character ordinarily attributed to grammatical
schemes. I shall simply note that a scheme becomes intelligible only if
the example accompanies it; and the example always turns out to be a
living discourse, within which therefore we meet again the scheme, but
liberated from the presumed abstractness to which it had been confined
by the grammarian. And I shall merely add that the grammatical norm,
which in the realistic conception of grammar is presented as a rule,
anteceding actual speech both in time and ideally, has in reality no
validity whatsoever excepting as a law internal to the speaking itself,
which brings out its normative force only in the act itself of speaking.
In spite of this, however, the majority of people consider grammar as an
antecedent to speech and to thought, and therefore to the life of the
spirit. It appears to them as a reef on which the freedom of the
personality must be driven in the course of its becoming, bearing down
as it does on a past which is believed to exist beneath the horizon of
actuality and beyond the present life of the spirit. To them grammar is
legislation passed by former writers and speakers, prescribing norms for
those who intend to use the same language in the future. Against this
myth, and the consequent idol of grammar worshipped as a thing which has
not only the right, but the means also, of controlling and oppressing
the creative spontaneity of speech, teachers should be constantly on
their guard, if they feel bound to respect and protect the spirituality
of culture.
Neither grammar then, nor rhetoric, nor any kind of misguided preceptive
teaching should be allowed to introduce into the school the menace of
realism which lurks naturally in the shadow of all prescriptive
systems. A precept is a mere historical indication, a sign which points
to something that was done as to something that had to be done then and
is to be done now. It was done and it was thought that it had to be
done. But what was done cannot be done over again, and what was thought
cannot again be thought. Life knows no past other than the one which it
contains within its living present. The precept has no value excepting
as that precept which we in every single instance intuit, and which we
must intuit, being spiritually alive and free, as the peculiar form of
_our_ thought, of our speaking, of our doing, of our being, in short,
which is our becoming. If we look upon a precept as transcending this
becoming, and as an antecedent to it, we misapprehend and therefore
imperil our indwelling freedom, which for us now ought to mean not
simply the failure to foster the growth of the spirit, but a deliberate
attempt to hinder and thwart its development and to blight the function
of culture.
One more prejudice of those imputed to realistic instruction must still
be pointed out, and it will be the last. It is one of those time-worn
devices whose history, extending over a thousand years, reflects the
entire life of the school--the composition. Teachers expect and demand
that a predetermined and definite theme, as a nucleus of a thought
organism, as _leit-motif_, so to speak, of a work of art, as a ruling
principle for moral or speculative reflections, be developed by pupils
who may yet have never given the topic a single thought, who may
possibly be not at all attuned to that definite spiritual vibration, who
may in short be quite removed from the line along which the theme should
be developed. In the lower grades the line itself is marked, the entire
contour is given, and the pupil's mind is arbitrarily encompassed within
this fixed outline. These methods are now fortunately applied with
diminished rigour and less crudely than before. But the fact remains
that in all classes the teacher either assigns a theme at random,
picking a topic from a casual reading or from among the whims of his
rambling fancy, or else he conscientiously and carefully studies the
possibilities of a subject, and develops it to a certain extent before
he assigns it; so that he naturally expects the pupil's treatment to
conform to his own delineation; and he values the composition in
proportion as it approaches the rough draft which he had previously
sketched in his mind.
Here too, as elsewhere, we encounter the difficulty of a thought which
is presupposed to thinking, which therefore binds it, strains it and
racks it out of its healthy and fruitful growth; for thought cannot live
without freedom. The dangers are many that beset us in the practice of
theme-composition, and not all of them of a merely intellectual
character. There is no intellectual deficiency which is not also at the
same time a moral blemish; and a course of exercises, such as we have
considered, not only jeopardises the formation of the intelligence by
urging it along a line of false and empty artificiality to the postiche
and the appliqué, but it also, and far more seriously, threatens the
moral character of the pupils in that it beguiles them into a sinful
familiarity with insincerity, which might perhaps become downright
cheating.
Composition however in itself is not taboo for the idealist. Like
grammar and every other instrument of the teaching profession it must be
converted from the abstract to the concrete. We should never demand of
the pupil an inventiveness beyond his powers, never unfairly expect of
his mind what it cannot yet give. The boy must not be given a subject
drawn from a world with which he is unfamiliar. But when the subject
springs naturally from the pupil's own soul, in the atmosphere of the
school, and as a part of the spiritual life which unites him to his
teacher and to his classmates, then composition, like every other
element of a freely developing culture, is a creation and an unfailing
progress. For whatever has been frozen by the chill of realism, and has
been consequently made unfit for the life of the spirit, may again be
revived in the warmth of the living intelligence of the concrete, and be
thence idealistically fused with the spontaneous and vigorous current of
spiritual reality.
CHAPTER VIII
THE UNITY OF EDUCATION
Having exemplified the prejudices of realism in the phases that are most
harmful to education, I shall now proceed to discuss the fundamental
corollary of the idealistic thesis as an effective remedy against the
ravages of realism. For, as I have already shown, the realistic
conception of life and culture is by no means a minor error which could
be corrected as soon as discovered. Originating in a primitive tendency
which impels the human spirit on through a realistic phase before it can
freely emerge into the loftier consciousness of self and power (which is
the conquest of idealism), this error again and again crops out of even
the most convinced anti-realistic consciousness. So that if at any
moment our higher reflection slackens its vigilance, the error creeps
back into the midst of our ideas, gains control of our intelligence, and
resumes its former sway over thought. It is not sufficient then to
become aware of the faults of realism and of the prejudices in which it
is mirrored; we must, in addition to all this, strengthen in our minds
the intuition of the spirituality of culture, render it more subtle,
more accurate, more certain, and bring to it the energy of a faith
which, after taking possession of our souls, shall become our life's
character.
We must therefore look intently at the significance of that principle
which identifies culture with man's personality, notice its most
important consequences, and set these up as the laws of education,
since by education we mean the creation of a living culture which
shall be the life of the human mind. The first and foremost of these
consequences, the direct corollary of our proposition, is the
concept of the _Unity of Education_. Though often referred to, it has
not yet been attained by pedagogical doctrines, nor has it been the aim
of the work of teachers. Neither theory nor practice--more intimately
connected than is ordinarily supposed--shows as yet that this concept
is understood and adequately appreciated. It is opposed with full
force by the realistic conception which, keeping man distinct from
his culture, and materialising this culture, naturally attributes to
it, and to education in which it is reflected, that multiplicity and
fragmentariness which is the characteristic of things material.
This scrappiness of culture and of education is the error on which all
the prejudices of realistic pedagogy are grounded. It is the enemy that
must be vanquished in the course of the crusade that has been preached
by idealism in its endeavour to liberate instruction from the deadly
oppression of mechanism. But in order to combat this foe we must first
know it: and we must gain a clear understanding of that unity of
education which it antagonises with uncompromising opposition.
If we open a treatise on pedagogy or examine a schedule of courses,
if we look through a programme or stop to consider our every-day
technical terminology, we cannot help noticing that education is
broken up by divisions and subdivisions _ad infinitum_, exactly as
though it were a material object, which because material possesses
infinite divisibility. Textbooks tell us that education is (1)
physical, (2) intellectual, (3) moral. Then narrowing the subject
down to one section, the intellectual, which for good reasons has
been treated more carefully and sympathetically by traditional
pedagogy, we find some such subdivisions: artistic, scientific,
literary, philosophical, religious, etc. Again, artistic education will
be split up into as many sections as there are arts, and scientific
instruction in the same way; for pedagogy assigns to each branch of
the classification its corresponding method of teaching. It goes without
saying that the sciences of any given branch are different among
themselves, and the study of botany, for example, is not the study
of zoology. And there are as many forms of culture to be promoted by
education as there are sciences; which is clearly shown by school
announcements assigning to certain years, and for definite days and
hours, the several courses of the curriculum, that is, the several
educations.
It is taken for granted that Education, properly so called, will
result from the ensemble of these particular educations--physical,
intellectual, moral, etc.,--each one of which contributes its share to
the final result, and is therefore a part of the entire education. And
each field produces certain peculiar results which it would be idle
to demand of another section, just as we never expect an olive grove
to yield a crop of peaches. Every part, self-contained and quite
distinct from the rest, absolutely excludes all other parts from
itself. Therefore the subjects taught in a school are numerous, and
there must accordingly be specialised teachers. And again each
instructor must be careful not to mix up the several parts which
compose his subject. The teacher of history, for example, when he takes
up the French Revolution, must forget the unification of Italy, and
treat each event in order and in turn; and the instructor of Italian
will take up the history of literature on a certain day of the week,
and devote some other hour to the study of the individual works
themselves.
So also we never fail to distinguish and carefully separate the two
parts of the teacher's work, his ability as a disciplinarian and his
skill in imparting information, for it is an accepted commonplace of
school technique that ability to teach is one thing, and the power to
maintain discipline is another. It is one thing to be able to keep the
class attentive to the discussion of a given subject, and quite another
to treat this subject suitably for the needs and attainments of the
pupils. Discipline is considered thus as a mere threshold; the real
teaching comes after. For, it is argued, discipline has no cultural
content; it is nothing more than the spiritual disposition and
adaptation which should precede the acquisition, or if we so wish to
call it, the development of real culture,--a disposition which is
obtained when respect for the authority of the teacher is ensured.
The recognition of that authority simply means the establishment of a
necessary condition; as for the real work of education, that is yet to
come. And if we should stop at what we have called the threshold, we
should have no school at all. There are teachers, in fact, who keep good
discipline, but who are yet unable to teach, either through lack of
culture or because they are deficient in methods.
All these are commonplaces to which we often resort without stopping to
consider their validity. And, in truth, it is because of this lack of
consideration that we are able to use them without noticing their
absurdities and without therefore feeling the necessity of emending our
ways. This lack of reflection resolves itself into a lack of precision
in the handling of these concepts. They are formulated without much
rigour with a great deal of elasticity, and in the spirit of
compromising with that truth against which they would otherwise too
jarringly clash.
First of all, no one has ever conceived the possibility of separating
discipline from education. What is often done is to distinguish
discipline from that part of education which is called instruction, and
to consider the two as integrating the total concept of education.
Mention is often made of the educational value of discipline. But this
kind of co-ordination of the two forms of education--discipline and
instruction--and their subordination to the generic concept of education
are more easily formulated than comprehended. For if we should
distinguish them simply on the grounds that one is the necessary
antecedent of the other, we should have a relationship similar to that
which connects any part of instruction with the part which must be
presupposed before it as an antecedent moment in the same process of
development. But the relationship which exists between any two parts of
instruction cannot serve to distinguish from instruction a thing which
is different from it.
We might wish, perhaps, to consider as characteristic of this absolute
antecedence the establishment of the authority without which teaching,
properly so called, cannot begin. But the objection to this would be
that every moment of the teaching process presupposes a new authority,
which can never be considered as definitely acquired, which is
constantly being imposed anew, and which must proceed at every given
instance from the effective spiritual action exercised by the teacher
upon the pupil. In other words, I mean to say that no teacher is able
independently of the merits of his teaching to maintain discipline
simply and solely on the strength of his personal prestige, of his force
of character, or any other suitable qualification. For whoever he may
be, and whatever the power by which at the start he is able to attract
the attention of his pupils and to keep it riveted on his words, the
teacher as he begins to impart information ceases to be what he was
immediately before, and becomes to the eyes of his pupils an ever
changing individual,--bigger or smaller, stronger or weaker, and
therefore more or less worthy of that attention and that respect of
which boys are capable in their expectance of spiritual light and joy.
The initial presentation is nothing more than a promise and an
anticipation. In the course of teaching this anticipation must not be
disappointed, this promise must be constantly fulfilled and more than
fulfilled by the subsequent developments. The teacher's personality as
revealed at the beginning must be borne out by all that he does in the
course of the lesson. Experience confirms this view, and the reason of
it is to be found in the doctrine now familiar to us of the spirit that
never _is_ definitely, but is always constituting itself, always
_becoming_. And every man is esteemed and appreciated on the strength
of what he shows himself to be at any given moment, and in virtue of the
experience which we continue to have of his being,--a being which is the
development in which he realises himself.
So, then, discipline is never enforced definitely and in such a way that
the teacher may proceed to build on it as on a firm basis without any
further concern. And it is therefore difficult to see how we could
possibly sever with a clean cut the task of keeping discipline from the
duty of imparting instruction.
Nor is it any more plausible to maintain that discipline, though it may
not chronologically precede instruction, is its logical antecedent, in
the sense that there are at every instant of the life of the school both
discipline and instruction, the former as a condition of the latter. The
difficulty here is that if we assumed this, we ought to be able to
indicate the difference between the condition and the conditioned; which
difference, unless we rest content with vague words, is not forthcoming,
and cannot be found. I maintain that were it possible for the teacher
definitely to enthrone, so to speak, discipline in his school, all his
work were done. He would have fulfilled his entire duty, acquitted his
obligation, and achieved the results of his mission, whether we look
upon this mission in the complex of its development, or whether we
consider it ideally in the instant of its determined act, which is yet
a process and therefore a development. For what, in fact, is discipline?
Is it established authority? But this authority is the whole of
education. For authority cannot be, as I have explained before, a mere
claim: it must become actual in the effective action performed by the
educating personality, and this action _is_ education. And when this
education consists, for example, in the imparting of a rule of syntax,
education becomes actual when the pupil really apprehends that rule from
his instructor exactly as it is taught to him, and thus appropriates the
teacher's manner of thinking and his intellectual behaviour on that
special subject, and acts and does as the teacher wants him to. And from
the point of view of discipline, this is all we want at that moment.
If in the course of education, considered as a whole or at any
particular moment of it, we should separate discipline from instruction,
now turning our attention to the one and now to the other, we know from
experience that we should never get anywhere. As a matter of fact, the
distinction thrusts itself to the fore only when the problem of
discipline is erroneously formulated by treating it abstractly. For who
is it that worries over discipline as such, and as though it were a
thing different from teaching? Who is it that looks upon this problem as
an insoluble one? Only the teacher who, unable to maintain discipline,
frets over it and failing to discover it where it is naturally to be
found, desperately looks for it where it is not, where it could not
possibly be. And so he is helplessly perturbed, like the man who,
feeling upon himself the concentrated gaze of all the guests seated in a
parlour, is no longer able to walk across the floor; it is the same
difficulty and impediment we encounter every time we try to watch and
study our movements. In the same way the spontaneous outburst of
eloquent sentiments that flow from the fulness of our hearts is checked
by the endeavour to analyse them, to study the words--to substitute art
for nature.
The real teacher, the naturally gifted teacher, never bothers about
these puzzling questions of pedagogical discipline. He teaches with such
devotion; he is so close spiritually to his pupils, so sympathetic with
their views; his work is so serious, so sincere, so eager, so full of
life, that he is never compelled to face a recalcitrant, rebellious
personality that could only be reduced by resorting to the peculiar
means of discipline. The docility of the pupils in the eyes of the able
teacher is neither an antecedent nor a consequent of his teachings; it
is an aspect of it. It originates with the very act by which he begins
to teach, and ceases with the end of his teaching. Concretely, the
discipline which good teachers enforce in the classroom is the natural
behaviour of the spirit which adheres to itself in the seriousness and
inwardness of its own work. Discipline, authority, and respect for
authority are absent whenever it is impossible to establish that unique
superior personality, in which the spiritual life of the pupils and of
the teachers are together fused and united. Whenever the students fail
to find their ideal in the teacher; when they are disappointed by his
aspect, his gaze, his words, in the complex concreteness of his
spiritual personality, which does not rise to the ideal which at every
moment is present in their expectations, then the order of discipline is
lacking. But when this actual unity obtains--this unity which is the
task of the teacher, and the aim of all education--then discipline,
authority, and respect are present as never failing elements.
This pedagogical problem of discipline would never have arisen if
immature reflection had not distinguished two empirically different
aspects of human personality, the practical and the theoretical, whereby
it would appear that man, when he does things, should not be considered
in the same light as when he thinks and understands, knows and learns.
From this point of view, discipline of deportment is to be referred to
the pupil as practical spiritual activity, while teaching aims at his
theoretic activity. The former should guide the pupil, regulate his
conduct as a member of that special community which we call the school,
and facilitate the fulfilment of the obligations which he has toward the
institution, toward his fellow-pupils, and toward himself. The latter,
on the other hand, assuming the completion of this practical
edification, proceeds to the mental formation of the personality,
considered as progressive acquirement of culture. Discipline in this
system appears to be the morals of the school. I use the word morals in
a very broad sense--just as morality might be considered as the
discipline of society and of life in general. For everybody, it is
argued, distinguishes between the character of man and his intelligence,
between his conduct and his knowledge. The two terms may indeed be drawn
together, but they also exist quite apart. So that a man devoid of
character, or possessed with an indomitable will for evil, may
nevertheless be extremely learned and shrewd, or as subtle as the
serpent; whereas a moral man, through lack of understanding, may become
the sport of rogues, and remain illiterate, devoid of all, even of the
slightest accomplishments. For will is one thing, they say, and the
intellect is another.
The question of the abstractness of discipline impels us now to examine
the legitimacy of this broader distinction, which does not simply
concern the problems of the school, but extends to the fundamental
principles of the philosophy of the spirit. Under its influence,
contemporary thought attacks all the surviving forms of this ancient
distinction between will and intellect, which rested on a frankly
realistic intuition of the world. The philosopher who crystallised this
distinction, and fastened it so hard that it could not be broken up
completely in the course of all subsequent speculation, was Aristotle. A
thoroughgoing realist, like all Greek philosophers, he conceived reality
as something external and antecedent to the mind which thinks it and
strives to know it. When thought, whose function is the knowing of
reality, is thus placed outside of this reality, it is evident that the
knowledge to which it aspired never could have been an activity which
produces reality. It was accordingly maintained that knowledge could not
be more than a mere survey, a view of reality (intuition, theory),
almost like a reflected image, totally extrinsic to the essence of the
real. But since it was evident that man as spiritual activity does
produce a world of his own, for which he is praised if it is deemed
good, but blamed if it is judged bad, it had to follow that there were
two distinct aspects in human life: one by which man contemplates
reality, the other by which he creates his own world,--a world, however,
which is but a transformation of the true and original reality. These
two aspects are the will and the intellect.
It should not now be necessary to criticise this concept of a reality
assumed to exist, in antecedence to the activity of the spirit, and
which is the sole support of this distinction between will and
intellect. We might say perhaps that though everything does indeed
depend from the spirit, and though all is spirit, yet this completely
spiritual reality is on one hand what is produced, the realisation of
new realities (will), but on the other hand it is but the knowledge of
its own reality, and by this knowledge gives no increment to its being.
However, if we adopted this view, we would slip back to the position we
abandoned as untenable, since a thought which propounds the problem of
its essence and of the essence of the reality which it cognises can be
but mere knowing. For it is again faced by a reality--even though it has
in this case been arbitrarily presumed identical with it--a reality
which is as an antecedent to it, and leaves to it only the task of
looking on. So we must conclude that the life of the spirit is never
mere contemplation. What seems to be contemplation--that consciousness
which the spirit acquires of itself, and, acquiring which, realises
itself--is a creation: a creation not of things but of its own self. For
what are things but the spirit as it is looked at abstractly in the
multiplicity of its manifestations?
We shall more easily understand that our knowing and our doing are
indiscernible, if we recall that our doing is not what is also perceived
externally, a motion in space caused by us. This external manifestation
is quite subordinate and adventitious. The essential character of our
doing is the internal will, which does not, properly speaking, modify
things, but does modify us, by bringing out in us a personality which
otherwise would not have been. This is the substance of the will, which
we cannot deny to thought, if thought is, as I have shown, development,
and therefore continuous self-creation of the personality.
If intellect then and will are one and the same thing, to such an extent
that there is no intellect which in its development is not development
of personality, formation of character, realisation of a spiritual
reality, we shall be able to understand that the ideas of two distinct
spiritual activities, as the basis of the ordinary distinction between
moral and intellectual training, are mere abstractions that tend to lead
us away from the comprehension of the living reality of the spirit. This
distinction appears to me exceedingly harmful, nothing being more
deplorable, from the moral point of view, than to consider any part of
the life we have to live as morally indifferent; and nothing being more
harmful to the school than the conviction that the moral formation of
man is not the entire purpose of education, but only a part of its
content. It is indispensable, I maintain, that the educator have the
reverent consciousness of the extremely delicate moral value of every
single word which he addresses to his pupils and of the profoundly
ethical essence of the instruction which he imparts to them. For the
school which gives instruction with no moral training in reality gives
no instruction at all. All the objections voiced on this score against
education, which we try to meet by adding on to instruction all that
ought to integrate the truly educational function, are the result of
this abstract way of looking upon instruction solely as the culture of
an intellect which in some way differs from the will, from character,
and from moral personality.
I wish here to call attention to one of the most controverted questions
connected with popular education, because it brings out very clearly the
impossibility of keeping moral education distinct from intellectual
instruction. It is constantly asserted that the instruction of the
common people, that real education which is the main purpose of the
modern state, is not a question of mere reading and spelling; that
these do not constitute culture, but are as means to an end, and
ought never to be allowed to take the place of the end to which they
are subservient. The school therefore, if it cannot shape men, should
at least rough-hew them and give them a conscience, whereas now, it
teaches but often does not educate: it gives to the learner the means of
culture, and then abandons him to his own resources. The optimism of
educators in the eighteenth century, their promise that marvels would
come out of elementary instruction propagated and spread by popular
schools devised for this purpose, was constantly met in the course
of the last century by an ever-growing mistrust of instruction generally
restricted to the notion of mere instrumentality. For in addition to
other shortcomings it was felt that this instrument might be put to a
very bad use; that elementary learning might be a dangerous thing if
it were not accompanied by something that instruction pure and simple
cannot give, namely, soundness of heart, strength of mind, and
conscience strong enough to uphold intelligence by the vigorous and
uncompromising principles of moral rectitude. The hopefulness of that
past optimism is fast yielding ground to the pessimistic denunciation
of the insufficiency of mere instruction for the moral ends of life.
There is a serious error in this frequent indictment brought against
mere instruction as a means of attaining what is called culture. It
proceeds from the attempt to separate something that was not meant to be
separated. "What God hath united together, man shall not put asunder."
And, in any event, a separation as illegitimate as this is not possible.
Superficially we may distinguish and apparently sunder instruction from
moral training, cut off the means from the end, and separate the ability
to read and write from what we are thereby enabled to read and write. In
fact the letters of the alphabet are taught without teaching the
syllables which they compose, and without the words that are made up of
these syllables, and the thoughts that are expressed by these words, and
man's life which becomes manifest and real in these thoughts. The
elementary school is in fact, as it is in name, the teaching of the
elements. Reading, writing, arithmetic, all subjects called for by the
school programme are taken up as mere elements with which the pupil is
expected, later on, to compose his Book of Life, complete in all its
sections. But in the meantime it is thought unwise to burden his
youthful mind with the weighty and complicated problems that can be
solved only by the experience of a more mature life. Of course after he
has gone forth from the school into the outer world the young man will
look upon this elementary knowledge as the raw material of his future
mentality. As he carves out his path to this or that goal, in accordance
with his spiritual interests and in compliance with the contingencies of
life, he will avail himself of this initial instruction, use it to
further his progress towards this or that end, good or evil as the case
may be. For intellectual instruction, it is argued, can be made
subservient either to noble impulses or to base motives.
Careful consideration, however, will show that the responsibility of a
school for what is called moral insufficiency, but is in reality
educational defectiveness, cannot be removed by this kind of
considerations. The alphabet begins to be such when it ceases to be a
series of physical marks corresponding to the sounds into which all the
words of a language may be decomposed. The alphabetic symbol is
effectively such when it is a sound, and it is sound when it is an
image, or rather a concrete form of an internal vibration of the mind.
The child begins to see the alphabet when he reads with it. Up to that
time he simply draws images or inwardly gazes at the semblance of
the picture he intends to draw, but he does not read. As soon as the
symbol is read, it becomes a word. That is why every spelling book
presents the letters in the syllables and the syllables in the words. In
this way they cease to be mere scrawls drawn on the paper, and become
thoughts. They may be dim, vague, and mysterious; they may be sharply
defined or they may blend and fuse into a suggestive haze; but they are
in every given instance thoughts that are being awakened in the mind
of the child. These thoughts have in them the power to develop, to
organise themselves and become a discourse. From the simple sentences
and the nursery rhymes of the primer, they grow into an ever-richer
significance. From the sowing to the harvesting, from the green stalk to
the sturdy trunk, it is _one_ life and one sole process. The mind that
will soar over the dizzy heights of thought begins its flight in the
humble lowlands. And it first becomes conscious of its power to rise,
when the life of thought is awakened by the words of the spelling book.
The moment the child begins reading, he must of necessity read
_something_. There is no mere instrument without the material to which
it is to be applied. The infant who opens his eyes and strives to look
cannot but see something. The "picture," insignificant for the teacher,
has its own special colouring for the child's mind. He fixes his gaze on
it; he draws it within himself, cherishes it, and fosters it with his
fancies. Such is the law of the spirit! It may be violated, but the
consequences of transgression are commensurate with the majesty of this
law.
Grammars too, like spelling primers and rhetorics and logic and every
kind of preceptive teaching, may be assumed as a form separated from its
contents, as something empty and abstract. The child is taught for
instance that the letter _m_ in _mamma_ does not belong to that word (we
call it a "word," and forget that to him at least it is not a word but
his own mother). That letter _m_, we tell him, is found in other words,
_mat_, _meat_, etc. We show him that it is in all of them, and yet in
none of them. We therefore can and must abstract it from all concrete
connections, isolate and fix it as that something which it is in
itself--the letter _m_. In the same manner we abstract the rule of
grammar from a number of individual examples. We exalt it over them, and
give it an existence which is higher, and independent of theirs. And so
for rhetoric, and so for logic.
But in this process of progressive abstraction, in this practice of
considering the abstract as something substantial, and of reducing
the concrete and the particular to the subordinate position of the
accessory, life recedes and ebbs away. The differences between this and
that word, between two images, two thoughts, two modes of thinking, of
expressing, of behaving, at first become slight, then negligible,
then quite inexistent, and the soul becomes accustomed to the generic,
to the empty, to the indifferent. It knows no longer how to fix the
peculiarities of things, how to notice the different traits of men's
characters, their interests, their diverse values, until finally it
becomes indifferent and sceptical. Words lose their meaning; they no
longer smack of what they used to; their value is gone. Things lose
their individuality, and men their physiognomies. This scepticism
robs man of his own faith, of his character and personality. The
fundamental aim of education ceases to exist. Abstract education is
no education at all. It is not even instruction. For it does not teach
the alphabet as it really exists, as something inseparable from the
sound, and from the word, and from the human soul! All it gives is a new
materialised and detached abstraction.
The alphabet is real and concrete, not abstract; it is not a means
but an end; it is not mere form but also content. It is not a weapon
which man may wield indifferently either for good purposes or for
evil motives. It is man himself. It is the human soul, which should
already flash in the very first word that is spelled, if it is read
intelligently. And it ought to be a good word, worthy of the child and
of the future man, a word in which the youthful pupil ought already to
be able to discover himself,--not himself in general, but that better
self which the school gradually and progressively will teach him to
find within himself. So considered, the alphabet is a powerful
instrument of human formation and of moral shaping. It is education.
For this reason the school must have a library, and should adopt all
possible means to encourage the habit and develop the taste of reading,
since the word which truly expresses the soul of man is not _that_ one
word, nor the word of _that_ one book. A word or a book will always be a
mere fragment of life, and many of them therefore will be needed. Many,
very many books, to satisfy the ever-growing needs of the child's mind!
Books that will spur his thought constantly towards more distant goals,
and his heart and imagination with it. Thus the child grows to be a
man.
Instruction then which is not education is not even instruction. It
is a denuded abstraction, violently thrust like other abstractions
into the life of the spirit where it generates that monstrosity
which we have described as material culture, mechanical and devoid of
spiritual vitality. That culture, being material, has no unity, is
fragmentary, inorganic, capable of growing indefinitely without in any
way transforming the recipient mind or becoming assimilated to the
process of the personality to which it simply adheres extrinsically.
This mechanical teaching is commensurate with things, and grows
proportionately with them; but it has no intimate relation with the
spirit. He who knows one hundred things has not a greater nor a
different intellectual value from him who knows ten, since the hundred
and the ten are locked up in both in exactly the same way that two
different sums of money are deposited in two different vaults. What
merit is there in the safe which contains the greater sum? The merit
would belong to the man who had accumulated the greater amount by a
greater sum of labour, for it would then be commensurate with work,
which is the developing process itself and the life of the human
personality to which we must always have recourse when we endeavour
to establish values. For as we have seen, nothing is, properly
speaking, thinkable except in relation to the human spirit.
Whether one reads a single book or an entire library, the result is the
same, if what is read fails to become the life of the reader--his
feelings and his thoughts, his passions and his meditation, his
experience and the extolment of his personality. The poet Giusti has
said: "Writing a book is worse than useless, unless it is going to
change people." Reading a book with no effect is infinitely worse. Of
course the people that have to be transformed, both for the writer and
for the reader (who are not two very different persons after all), are
not the others, but first of all the author himself. The mere reading of
a page or even a word inwardly reconstitutes us, if it does consist in a
new throb of our personality, which continuously renews itself through
the incessant vibrations of its becoming. This then is the all-important
solution,--that the book or the word of a teacher arouse our souls and
set them in motion; that it transform itself into our inner life; that
it cease to be a thing, special and determinate, one of the many, and
become transfused into our personality. And our personality in its act,
in the act, I say, and not in the abstract concept which we may somehow
form of it,--is absolute unity: that moving unity to which education can
in no wise be referred, unless it is made identical with its movement,
and therefore entirely conformant to its unity.
The man whose culture is limited, or, rather, entirely estranged from
the understanding of life, is called _homo unius libri_. We might just
as well call him _homo omnium librorum_. For he who would read all books
need have a leaking brain like the perforated vessel of the daughters of
Danaus,--a leak through which all ideas, all joys, all sorrows, and all
hopes, everything that man may find in books, would have to flow
unceasingly, without leaving any traces of their passage, without ever
forming that personality which, having acquired a certain form or
physiognomy, reacts and becomes selective, picks what it wants out of
the congeries, and chooses, out of all possible experiences, only what
it requires for the life that is suited to it. We should never add books
upon books _ad infinitum_! It is not a question of quantity. What we
need is the ability to discover our world in books,--that sum total of
interests which respond to all the vibrations of our spirit, which
assuredly, as Herbart claimed, has a multiplicity of interests, but all
of them radiating from a vital centre. And everything is in the centre,
since everything originates there.
Education which strives to get at the centre of the personality, the
sole spot whence it is possible to derive the spiritual value of a
living culture, is essentially moral, and may never be hemmed in within
the restricted bounds of an abstract intellectual training. There is in
truth a kind of instruction which is not education; not because it is in
no way educative, but because it gives a bad education and trains for
evil. This realistic education, which is substantially materialistic,
extinguishes the sentiment of freedom in man, debases his personality,
and stifles in him the living consciousness of the spirituality of the
world, and consequently of man's responsibility.
The antithesis between instruction and education is the antithesis
between realistic and idealistic culture, or again, that existing
between a material and a spiritual conception of life. If the school
means conquest of freedom, we must learn to loathe the scrappiness of
education, the fractioning tendency which presumes to cut off one part
from the rest of the body, as if education, that is, personality, could
have many parts. We must learn to react against a system of education
which, conceiving its rôle to be merely intellectualistic, and such as
to make of the human spirit a clear mirror of things, proceeds to an
infinite subdivision to match the infinite multiplicity of things. Unity
ought to be our constant aim. We should never look away from the living,
that is, the person, the pupil into whose soul our loving solicitude
should strive to gain access in order to help him create his own
world.
CHAPTER IX
CHARACTER AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION
The principle of educational unity which I have briefly tried to
illustrate demands a further development in connection with the claims
of physical culture. For after we have unified moral and intellectual
discipline in the one concrete concept of the education of the spirit,
whose activity cannot be cognitive without also being practical, and
cannot realise any moral values except through cognition, it might yet
seem that a complete and perfect system of education should aim at the
physical development as well as at the spiritual. For the pupil is not
solely mind. He has a body also; and these two terms, body and spirit,
must be conceived in such close connection and in such intimate
conjunction that the health of the one be dependent on the soundness of
the other.
Before elucidating this argument, we must voice our appreciation of the
pedagogical principle by virtue of which the ancient Greeks developed
their athletic education, and which since the Renaissance has for a
different motive been reintroduced into the theory of physical
culture,--a theory which I do not at all oppose, but rather intend to
reaffirm on the grounds of educational unity. This pedagogical
principle evidently originated in the mode of considering the function
of the bodily organism in respect to the human mind, since every time we
scrutinise the interest that has always guided men in the field of
education, we find that at all times the aim of education has been the
development of the mind. Nor could it have been otherwise; for whether
or not in possession of a clear understanding of his spiritual essence,
man spontaneously presents himself and is valued as a personality, which
affirms itself, speaks even though dumb, and says "I." Education begins
as a relation between master and slave, between parent and children. The
slave and the son are not supported and cared for--educated--as simple
brutes, but as beings endowed with the same attributes as the master or
the parent, beings who are therefore able to receive orders or
instructions and build their will out of these,--the will which those in
authority wish to be identical with their own. The superior commands and
therefore demands; the inferior obeys by replying, and he replies in so
far as he is a spiritual subject; and this reply will become gradually
better in proportion as he more fully actualises that spiritual nature
which the master wishes to be closely corresponding to his own.
Philosophy, as well as naïve and primitive mentality, considers man to
be such in so far as he is conscious of what he does, of what he says,
of what he thinks; and also in that he is able to present himself to
others, because he has first been present to himself.
Man is man in that he is self-consciousness. Even the despicable tyrant
who brutally domineers over the wretch who is forced to submit to his
overbearing arrogance, even he wants his slave to be intelligent,
capable of guessing his thoughts, and refuses to consider him as an
unconscious tool of his whims. The mother who tenderly nurses her sick
child is indeed anxious for the health of the body over which she
worries, and she would like to see it vigorous and strong. But that body
is so endeared to her, because by means of it the child is enabled to
live happily with her; through it his fond soul can requite maternal
love by filial devotion; or in it he may develop a powerful and
beautiful personality worthy to be adored as the ideal creature of
maternal affection. If in the bloom of physical health he were to reveal
himself stupid and insensate, endowed with mere instinctive sensuality
and bestial appetites, this son would cease to be the object of his
mother's fondness, nay, he would arouse in her a feeling of loathing and
revulsion. It is this sense of loathing that we feel towards the brutes,
to the extent that we never can be sympathetically drawn to them, and
that we also feel for the human corpse from which life has departed; for
life is the basis of every psychological relation, and therefore of
every possible sympathy.
Education is union, communion, inter-individual unification; and unity
is possible only because men spiritually convene. Matter, we have seen,
nature, things, the non-spirit is multiplicity. As soon as the
multiplicity of natural elements begins to be organised, already in
their organism spiritual activity shines forth. In the spirit is the
root and possibility of every unification. It is spirit that unites men.
Education therefore cannot be a social relationship and a link between
men except by being a spiritual tie among human minds. Therefore it is
now, and has at all times been, what it naturally ought to be, education
of the spirit.
But as we aim at the education of the spirit, we may or we may not take
care of the body; or again we may take care of it in this or that way.
It all depends on what conception we have of the spirit. The ancients
made a great deal of physical culture, and the Greek philosophers of
antiquity considered gymnastics to be the essential complement of music,
including in music all forms of spiritual cultivation. The ancients
never divided the spirit from the physical reality of man: man as a
whole (body and psychic activity) was conceived by them as a natural
being subject to the mechanism which regulates and controls nature. When
Greek psychology fell under the influence of that mystic outlook which
is peculiar to religious belief, the soul, which was opposed to the
body, and which was looked upon as chained and emprisoned in the body,
was sharply distinguished from another soul. That other soul was kept
in contact with the materiality of all natural things, and together with
them was governed by the law of mechanical becoming, that is, of the
transformations caused by motion by which all the parts of matter are
bestirred. This natural soul, susceptible of development, and capable of
gradually rising to the height of the other, of the pure bodiless mind
whose act is the contemplation of truth; this soul imbedded in the body,
which does not therefore give to man a supernatural being, but like all
things of nature comes into the world, grows and dies, incessantly
passing from one mode of being to another, this soul is the one that can
and ought to be educated. The soul which results from the organic
process of the physical body, and which in its development proceeds side
by side with the transformations of the latter, could not be educated
except in connection with the development and improvement of the body.
Human thought, which then had not yet secured the consciousness of its
own irreducible opposition to nature,--the consciousness, in other
words, of its own essential freedom,--seeing itself immersed even as
spiritual substance in the indistinctness of nature, could not look upon
education as upon a problem of freedom which can not admit of nature as
limiting spiritual activity. It was accordingly reduced to conceive this
activity, displayed in dealing with man, as being on the same plane with
the other forms of activity which propose to deal with things of
nature. In a pedagogical naturalism of this sort, the mind could not be
the mind without also being body, and therefore had to include physical
development in its own process.
But with the advent of Christianity the spirit was sharply dissociated
from nature. The original dualism of law of the spirit and law of the
flesh, of grace and nature, rescued man at the very beginning from the
tyranny of merely natural things, and announced a kingdom of the spirit
which "is not of this world." And it is not in fact "of this world," if
by world we mean what the word ordinarily implies,--the world which
confronts us, and which we can point out to ourselves and to others; the
world which, being the object of our experience, is the direct
antithesis of what we are, subject of experience, free personality,
spirit, Christian humanity. Man, in this Christian conception, in this
opposition to nature and to the experimental world, overcomes what
within his own self still belongs to nature, subdues that part of him
which because natural appears as the enemy of freedom and of the
finality of the spirit; as the seducer and the source of guilty wiles
which clip the wing of man's loftier aspirations and weigh him down into
a beast-like subjection to instinct. He therefore tends to underrate
physical education, and sacrifices it to the demands of the spirit. He
does not completely neglect the question of the behaviour of man
towards physical nature; he could not, since his very dualism is
possible only on condition that he correlate the two terms of the
opposition. But finding that his attempt to attain freedom and realise
his spiritual destiny is thwarted by the natural impulses of the senses,
in which the life of the body is made manifest, he decides to remove
these hindrances and to clear the way which leads to spiritual
salvation. He does then take the body into consideration, but simply to
check its instincts and control its sensuous appetites. By the
discipline of self-mortification, under the guidance of an unbending
will, he subdues the flesh, and subjects it to the exigencies of the
spirit.
Evidently this subduing discipline is still physical exercise, but in
its own way. The haircloth of St. Francis corresponds in fact to the
club of Hercules, and serves the same purpose. The monsters which are
knocked down by the weapon which Hercules alone could wield torment the
saint of Assisi also; only, they are within him. He even tames the wolf,
but without club or chains, by the mere exercise of his gentle meekness.
These internal monsters are not, properly speaking, in the material
body. If they were, the Saint would not need to worry about them any
more than about the earth under his feet or the sack on his shoulder.
But they are in that body which he feels; they are in that soul which,
with the violence of its desires, the din of its harsh and fiercely
discordant voices, distracts him from the ideal where his life is. They
are in that soul which thrusts so many claims on him, that were he to
satisfy them he would have to part company with his Lady Poverty, and
become once more the slave of things which are not in his power,--of
wealth, which heaps up and blows away; of Fortune, which comes as a
friend and departs as an enemy. He would, in other words, return to a
materialistic conception of life. His Lernæan hydra is in the depths of
his heart, where hundred-headed instinct, with its hundred mouths, tears
the roots of his holy and magnanimous will, eager to resemble the
Saviour in love and self-sacrifice.
This monster is strangled with the haircloth, when the body is hardened
and trained to self-denial, to suffering, to the repression of all
animal passions which would keep man away from his goal. This
discipline, far from debilitating the body, gives it a new strength, an
endurance which enables man to live on a higher plane than he would if
he followed natural impulses. For this more difficult manner of living,
a robustness and a hardihood are requisite which are beyond the natural
means of the body. The system of physical culture which gives this
stupendous endurance is called asceticism.
But this system is an abstract one. Man's life is not poverty, since it
is work and therefore wealth. And the mind with its freedom cannot be
conceived of as antagonistic to nature. For as body and as sense, in so
far as we exist and know of our existence, we belong to this nature.
Antagonism and duality import the limitation of each of the opposed
terms and exclude freedom which is not to be found within fixed limits;
for freedom, as we have said, means infinitude.
The spirit is free only if infinite. It cannot have any obstructing
barrier in its path. It can be conceived as freedom only after it has
overcome dualism, and when in nature itself and in the body we see the
effect of the activity of the spirit. It has no need therefore of walls
within which it might feel the necessity of cloistering itself in the
effort to renounce the outer world. This is not the way to conquer
freedom. A liberty won under such conditions would always be insecure,
constantly threatened, always beleaguered, and therefore a mere shadow
of freedom. The spirit, if it is free, that is, if it is spirit, must be
conterminous with thought, it must extend its sway as far as there is
any sign of life to the last point where a vestige of being can be
revealed to it. Nothing thinkable can be external to it. Whatever
presents itself to it, whether in the garb of an enemy or under the
cloak of friendship, can only be one of its creatures, which it has
placed at its own side, or in front of itself, or against itself.
This new pedagogical and philosophical view, first disclosed to
Humanism, then enlightened by the genius of the Italian Renaissance,
appears now to us in the full light of modern thought. Superficially it
might seem identical with the classical and naturalistic outlook. In
reality, however, it has made its way back to it only in order to
confirm and integrate the concept of Christian spiritualism and to bring
out its truth. Greek athletics is the training of the body as an end in
itself: it surely serves the cause of the spirit, but only in so far as
the spirit is grafted on the trunk of the physical personality, and to
the extent that it is able to absorb all its vital sap, thereby
subjecting itself to generation and decay, the common destiny of all
natural beings. The physical culture of the ancients is spiritual
discipline, only to the extent that for them the mind too is essentially
body. Modern physical education, at least from the time of Vittorino da
Feltre, is spiritual formation of the body: it is bodily training for
the benefit of the spirit, just as the mediæval ascetic would have it;
but of a spirit which does not intend to bury itself in abstract
self-seclusion away from the existential world, of a spirit which
passing beyond the cloister walls soars over the realm of nature,
induing it and subduing it instrumentally to its ends and as a mirror of
its will. So that for moderns, too, physical culture is spiritual
education, but for the reason that to us the body itself is spirit. Our
science is not merely a speculation of ultra-mundane truths, but rather
a science of man and of man in the Universe, and therefore also of this
nature which is dominated and spiritualised by becoming known, in the
same way that every book that is read is spiritualised.
This concrete notion of a spirit which excludes nothing from itself
gives concreteness to the Christian conception of physical discipline.
For it aims to turn the body into an obedient tool of the will, not
however of that will which renounces the world, but of that will which
turns to the world as to the field where its battles are fought and won;
to the world which it transforms by its work, constantly re-creating it,
now modifying one part and now another, but always acting on the entire
system, and renewing it as a whole in the intimate organic connection
and interdependence of these parts; to the world which forever confronts
it in a rebellious and challenging attitude, and which it laboriously
subdues and turns into a mirror of its own becoming.
Modern idealism and ancient naturalism both emphasise, though for
opposite motives, the importance of a positive education in distinction
to the negative discipline inculcated by mediæval asceticism. We said
that to-day we develop the body because the body is spirit. This
proposition runs counter to common sense. But common sense as such
cannot be respected by the thinker unless he first transforms its
content. Our body, we must remember, is not one body out of many. If it
were actually mixed with and lost in the multitude of material things
which surround it, we could no longer speak of any bodies. For all
bodies, as psychologists say, are perceived in so far as they modify
ours and are somehow related to it. Or to put it in a different and
perhaps better way, all other bodies, which we possess as contents of
our experience, form a system, a circle, which has its centre; and this
centre is our body. These first of all occupy space, but a space which
no one of us can think of or intuit otherwise than as a radiating
infinity, the centre of which we occupy with our body. So that before we
can speak of bodies, we must first cognise our own. It is the foundation
and groundwork of all bodies. Justly, therefore, the immanent sense,
profound and continuous, which we have of our body, and whose
modifications constitute all our particular sensations, was called the
_fundamental sentiment_ by our Italian philosopher Rosmini. For our body
is ours only in so far as we feel it; and we feel it, at first,
confusedly or rather indistinctly, without discerning any differentiated
part. We feel it as the limit, the other, the opposite, the object of
our consciousness, which, were it not conscious of something (of itself
as of something), would not be consciousness, would not realise itself.
And it realises itself, in the first place, as consciousness of this
object which is the body. Accurately, therefore, was the body defined
by Spinoza as _objectum mentis_, as object of consciousness. Objectless
consciousness is not consciousness; and it is likewise obvious that the
object of consciousness cannot be such without consciousness.
The two terms are inseparable, for the reason that they are produced
simultaneously by one and the same act, from which they cannot be
detached and this act is the free becoming of the spirit.
Our body, this first object of consciousness, as yet indistinct and
therefore one and infinite, is not really in space, the realm of the
distinct, of the multiple, of the finite. It is within our own
consciousness. And it is only by recalling this inwardness that we are
able to understand how it happens that we ("We"--spiritual activity) act
upon our body, animating it, sustaining it, endowing it with our
vigorous and buoyant vitality; constantly transforming it, in very much
the same way that we act on what we easily conceive to be our moral
personality. As we direct our thoughts, and bringing them out of the
dark into the luminous setting of our consciousness, submit them to
scrutiny and correction, to elimination and selection; when we stifle or
feed the fire of our passions; when we cherish ideals, nourish them with
our own life's blood, and sustain them with our unbending resolve; and
again when we quench them in the fickleness of our whims, are we not
constantly creating and variously reshaping our spiritual life, making
it good or bad, that is, eagerly and scrupulously intent on the quest of
Truth or slothfully plunged in ignorance and forgetfulness?
But our body, this inseparable companion, which is our own self, is no
particular limb, which as such might be removed from us. We remain what
we are, even though mutilated. Each part of our organism is ours, in
that it is fused in the sole and indistinguishable totality of our
living being,--our heart and our brain, as well as the phalanx of a
finger, if perchance we should be unable to live without it, and it
therefore effectively constituted our being. The distinction between
organs that are vital and organs that are not is an empirical one, and
relative to an observation which is true within the limits of ordinary
occurrence.
If our body is the body which we perceive as ours, it is this one or
that one in accordance with our perception; and this perception
certainly is not arbitrary, but our own, subjective, to the point that,
in an abnormal way, one may cease to be in possession of his body and
thus to be no longer able to live in consequence of the loss of a
finger, or even of a hair. This hair then is a vital part, not because
it is a hair, but because it has been, insanely if you will, assumed and
absorbed in the distinct unity of our body.
I shall try to make my thought clearer by the use of an example. The
organ of organs, as a great writer once said, is the hand, and we can
look at it from two quite distinct points of view. We may place our hand
on a table by the side of other hands, the hands of persons sitting
around us. We see its shape, its colour, its size, etc.; we compare it
with the others, and we almost forget it is ours, because then we do
not, in act, distinguish it from the remaining ones. In these
circumstances, it is evident that our hand is in our consciousness as a
material object, separated from every essential relationship with
us--with us as we are in the act of looking and comparing. This is the
external point from which we may view our hand. But there is another
one: the hand that picks up the pen as we are about to write is truly
our hand, the instrument of which we avail ourselves in order to ply
another tool which is needed for our work. In these circumstances our
right hand, instead of being for us one in the midst of many, as it was
in the case previously considered, is ours, the only one which we can
possibly use, as we endeavour to carry out our intention of writing,
which intention is our will to realise our personality in that
determined way, since doing a thing always means realising that
personality of ours which does that thing. Our hand in this case
coalesces so completely with our being that without it--the hand already
trained to write--we could not be ourselves. Abstractly, to be sure, we
should be ourselves. But it is the same story over again. What exists is
not the abstract but the concrete. And in the concrete, we, who are
about to write, are this determined personality, in which our will flows
into the hand; and just as we could not in truth distinguish our Self
from our will (we being nothing more and nothing less than this will of
ours), in the same way it would be impossible to distinguish between
"us" and our hand, between our will and our hand. Since the hand now
wields the pen, having perfected its instrumentality by means of this
latter, our will no longer leans upon and terminates in the hand, but it
flows on and presses into the point of the pen itself, through which, if
neither ink nor paper offers resistance, it empties into the stream of
writing. This writing which is read is Thought, whereby the writer finds
himself at the end in front of his own thinking, that is, in front of
himself; that self, which, considering the act materially, he seemed to
be leaving further and further behind, whereas in reality he was
penetrating into it more and more deeply. But in such a case and by the
act itself, can we effectively distinguish between thought, arm, hand,
writing material, the written page, that same page when read, and the
new thought? It is a circle made up of contiguous points, without gaps
or interruptions. It is one sole process, wherein in consequence of a
particular organisation of our personality, we place ourselves in front
of ourselves, and thus realise ourselves. The hand is ours because it is
not distinguished from us, nor, consequently, from the remaining limbs
of our body nor from its material surroundings.
This, our hand, knows how to write because we have learned how to write:
in exactly the same way that our heart knows how to love, to dare and
renounce, by striving earnestly to see ourselves in others, to repress
the instinctive timidity of excessive prudence, and to break the force
of desire prompted by natural egoism. We are then what we want to be;
not merely in our passions and ideas, but in our limbs too, to the
extent that their being depends from their functions, and their
functions can be regulated by hygiene and exercise, which are our action
and our will.
There is, of course, a natural datum which we cannot modify, which we
have to accept as a basis for further construction. But this limitation,
imposed on the truths I mentioned above, must be accepted without in any
way renouncing the truth itself, and should be understood by virtue of
both its scientific and moral values. This warning is not merely helpful
in connection with the question now before us, but will always prove
useful on account of its bearing on the many problems which arise from a
spiritualistic conception of life and cause shiftless philosophasters to
shy and balk. It is true that there is a body which we did not give to
ourselves, which therefore is not a product of our spirit, nor part of
its life and substance, but only if we think of the body of the
individual, empirically considered as such. In this sense I am not
self-produced. The son can ascribe to his parents the imperfection that
mars his whole existence, whatever kind of life he may decide to lead.
The man who was born blind may blame his affliction upon cruel nature.
But the child who calls his parents to account, and the man who
complains of nature, is man as a particular; he is one of many men, one
of the animals, one of the beings, one of the infinite things wielded by
_Man_ (that man to whom we must always refer, when we wish to recall
that even if the world is not all spirit, there is at least a little
corner therein set aside for it); he is one of the infinite things which
Man gathers and unifies in his own thought because he is thought. The
particular man is man as he is being _thought_, who refers us to the
_thinking_ man as to the true man. This true man is also an individual,
not as a part but as the whole, and comprehends all within itself. And
in this man, parents and children are the same man. In it men and nature
are, likewise, one and the same, man or spirit in its universality. We
(each one of us) are one and the other of these men; but we are one of
them, the smaller one, only in that we are the other one, the larger
one, and we ought not to expect the small to take the place of the large
and to act in his stead. All our errors and all our sins are caused by
substituting one in place of the other.
And what is more, the large, the all embracing, the infinite, is
present in the small with all his infinitude. Personality as such, in
its actuality, does not shrink and restrict itself to the singular and
particular man. Within those boundaries which are only visible from
the outside, it internally expatiates to infinity, absorbing in
itself and surmounting all limitations. The man born blind does not
know the marvels and the wondrous beauties of nature which gladden the
eyes and the soul of the seeing man. But his soul pours out none the
less over the infinity of harmonies and of thought. And the blind man
who once saw, in the consciousness of his sightlessness, cherishes the
boundless image of the world once seen, and magnifies it indefinitely
by the aid of the imagination. He even heals the wounds and soothes
the pain of blindness by making it objective through reflection; and
the personality, at any event, always victoriously breaks out of the
narrow cell in which it might seem to be confined. So that in the
depths of even the gloomiest dungeon a ray of light always peers
through, to lighten and comfort the soul of man in misery, and to
restore to him the entire and therefore infinite liberty of creating
for himself a world of his own.
We can therefore say that man, he that lives--not the one which is seen
from the outside, but the thinking and the willing man, who is a
personality in the act--never submits to a nature which is not his own.
He shapes his own nature, beginning with his body, and gradually from
it magnifying the effect of his power, and crowding the environing
space, which is his, with the creatures he gives life to. We must not
consider the smaller man whom we see confined to a few square feet and
at the mercy of the passing instant. We must intently look upon that
other one who has done and still continues to do all the beautiful
things on which we thrive, on that one who is humanity, the spirit. We
must consider his power, which is thought and work (work, that is, as
thought); and ponder over this material world in which we live, all
blocked out, as it is, measured, and traversed by forces which we
bridle, accumulate and release, at pleasure,--this world which has been
altered from its former state, and has been made as we now see it fit
for human habitation, which has been joined to us, assimilated to our
life, spiritualised. When we have done all this we shall see how
impossible it is to disconnect nature from the spirit, and to think the
former without the latter. Nature may be dissociated from the natural
man, that is, one of its parts may be isolated from the remainder. But
such man of nature is not the one who rules over nature: he is not Volta
who clutches the electric current and transforms the earth; he is not
Michel Angelo who transfigures marble and creates the Moses.
Physical education, then, is not superadded to the education of the
spirit, but is itself education of the spirit. It is the fundamental
part of this education, in as much as the body is, in the sense we have
used the words, the seat of our spiritual personality. Living means
constructing one's own body, because living is thinking, and thinking is
self-consciousness; but this consciousness is possible only if we make
it objective, and the object as such is the body (our body). For as
consciousness is, so is the body. There is no thinking which is not also
doing. Thinking not only builds up the brain, but the rest of the body
besides. We may call it will, but then there is not one single act of
thought which is not the mental activity indicated by this word "will."
Without will we should have no bodily substance, in as much as the body
is always and primarily life, and living is impossible without willing.
What are called involuntary movements are not really such; they differ
from the so-called voluntary in that they are constant, immanent, so
much so that we can after all interrupt them. Without the exercise of
our will we could never hold ourselves erect and keep our feet, but
would forever be stumbling and falling; unless we willed it, the power
which keeps every organ in its place, and maintains all the organs in
the circle of life, would be annihilated. Therefore _morale_, as they
say, is a very considerable aid in curing the diseases of the body. It
is on this account that societies and religious sects have arisen which
make of moral faith an instrument of physical well-being. For the same
reason, also, it is impossible for the psychiatrists to draw a line
separating mental troubles from bodily ailments. The force of the will,
the vigour of the personality, the impulse of the spirit in its
becoming, this is the wondrous power which galvanises matter and
organically quickens it; which sustains life, equips it, and fits it for
its march towards ever renewed, ever improved finalities. It is not
temperament which is the basis of character, but character which is the
basis of temperament. If we reverse this proposition, every moral
conception of life becomes absurd, and every spiritual value appears
ineffectual. Don Abbondio then ceases to be wrong, and Cardinal Federico
Borromeo is no longer right.
Character too is an empirical concept, and like all such concepts, it
has a truthfulness which is not clearly discernible, but dimly visible.
Character signifies rational personality, using the term rationality to
mean, not the movement or the becoming which belongs peculiarly to
reason as the form of spiritual activity, but the coherence of the
object on which this activity is fixed, which coherence in turn consists
in the harmony whereby it is possible to think all the parts of
objective thought as forming a single whole, in that there is no
conflict or contradiction among them, and in as much as the object
remains always the same throughout all these particulars. If in the
course of reasoning we introduce conflicting statements which cannot
possibly be referred to the same thing, we cannot be said to reason.
Rationality is the permanence of the being of which we think: it is
firmness of conception, stability of a law which we apply to all
particulars that come under its sway. For the object of consciousness is
characterised, in respect to the act which constitutes it, by this
stability and immutability. What we think is _that_ and no other,
whereas thought, by which we think it, is a becoming and a continuous
change.
But the character of man is in the object, in the contents of his
thought, in what he gradually builds himself up to, in the determined
personality which he constitutes by thinking, or, in other words, _in
his body_. But body, be it remembered, in an idealistic sense, body as a
system, forming, with its law and its configuration, the solid basis of
every ulterior development. This truth, vaguely accepted by common
sense, which looks upon a strong constitution as a preliminary to a
sound character, will appear in its full light only after it has been
stripped of the fantastic and material attributes which it receives from
a realistically vulgar way of conceiving the body materially. For it is
evident that a feeble and sickly man may yet have a steel-like
character. Farinata, who stands "erect with breast and brow," as though
he held Hell in contempt: Giordano Bruno, who amidst the flames that
already consume his flesh disdainfully turns his eyes from the symbol of
the religion which had thrust him on the stake, are evident examples of
a strength of mind with no relation to their physical powers, which were
already destroyed or about to be scattered by an irresistible might.
Leopardi is right when he scornfully protests that his ill health is not
the cause of that sad pessimism which in his mind solemnly challenges
"the unseemly hidden Power."
Character is physical robustness to the extent that this latter is
spiritual haleness, and in so far as it is compact, firm, steadfast
thought. Thought in this respect appears externally as body, not subject
to the hostile forces that perpetually beset it from without and from
within; and on account of the intrinsic spirituality of its substance,
it is a law rather than a fact, and a process or a tendency rather than
a fixed and established manner of being. For organic endurance, which is
really what we mean by health, does not consist in muscular development
or in the bloom of an exuberant constitution, but rather in an
indwelling power, in dynamically persistent and tenacious struggle and
adaptation, in the capacity of self-preservation, of self-affirmation,
which is the specific essence of spiritual being.
This body, in which thought organises and consolidates itself; this
body, by means of which thought is enabled to press on its vigorous
development, reabsorbing in its actual present the past accomplishment,
and to proceed on its ascent, scaling the height step by step, never
sliding downward, because every grade it builds remains as a firm
support of the next one;--this is man's character, which is not an
attribute of the will considered as practical activity in
contra-distinction to theoretic activity. Character is an attribute of
the spirit _qua_ spirit, without any adjectives. We may, if we will,
distinguish the practical from the theoretical man, the soundness of the
will from intellectual originality. But just as it is not possible to
conceive of a really fruitful and constructive practical activity
without that coherence of design and self-supporting volitional
continuity which constitute character, in the same way intelligence and
ingenuity will not become manifest without firmness of purpose, without
persevering reflection and study of the object, and without stability of
this object of intellectual activity, which again constitute character.
If character is set as the basis of morality, then every science and
every form of culture, even those which aim at evil, considered in
themselves, as the life of the intelligence must have a moral value,
must be governed by an inviolable law. By spiritual steadfastness, which
is the condition of spiritual productivity, man sacrifices himself to an
ideal and constitutes his moral personality, whether he die for his
country or whether he labour to bring light amid his thoughts. Life in
all its phases is the untiring fulfilment of duty.
To conclude then, physical education must be encouraged, but as
spiritual training and as formation of character. Gymnastic exercise,
therefore, far from being the only way to this end, may even lead in the
opposite direction; and it will do so as long as it is considered apart
from the remainder of education, with a particular scope of its own, and
with heterogeneous contents in respect to spiritual education properly
so-called. The teacher of physical education must always bear in mind
that he is not dealing with _bodies_, bodies to be moved around, to be
lined up, or rushed around a track. He too is training souls, and
collaborates with all the other teachers in the moral preparation and
advancement of mankind. If, in addition to his special qualifications,
he does not possess culture enough to enable him to discern the spirit
beyond the body, and to understand therefore the moral value of order,
of precision, of gracefulness, of agility, by which man externally
realises his personality, he will no doubt fulfil the ordinary demands
of physical culture, but he will just as certainly antagonise and
disgust those of his pupils who are most highly gifted and otherwise
better trained, and he can therefore lay no claim to the title of
educator.
Education then is either one or not effective. The assumption that there
are many kinds of education leads to very disastrous results. Education
is one; and as a whole it appears unchanged in each one of the parts
that we ordinarily distinguish in it, according as we approach the human
spirit now from one side and now from the other.
CHAPTER X
THE IDEAL OF EDUCATION
ART AND RELIGION
We have shown in the previous chapters the necessity of rigorously
maintaining the unity of education, of resisting every attempt at
separation, of opposing all systems which treat the various parts of
education as though they could be kept distinct in practice and theory.
There still remains a question which naturally arises at this juncture,
and which we must try to answer. For true it is, some one might say,
that moral and intellectual education are one and the same thing, and
true it may be that education of the mind and culture of the body work
for the same results; and it may also be admitted that education being
formation, or development, that is, the becoming of the spirit, and the
spirit consisting in its becoming or rather in becoming pure and simple,
it follows that education means spirit and nothing more. But granting
all this, was it really worth while? When we have attained this notion
of the unity which is always the same, no matter under how many aspects
it may present itself, what have we gained? Have we here anything more
than a word? One says "spirit," another might say "God," or "nature,"
or "matter," or some such thing, and there would not be much difference.
It might well be that in the course of the inquiry into the attributes
of the spirit, a way was found to invest our word with quite a different
meaning; but still, after we have defined and distinguished the concept
of the spirit from all the others, we have not progressed much. We may
have the satisfaction of continuing to see before us this concept, with
no possibility of ever ridding ourselves of its presence, but how much
will we know of the contents that this spirit is supposed to have? What
are the principles that should govern this education, which has been
clearly stated to be not a natural fact, but a free action, and
therefore a selection enlightened by consciousness, by reflection, and
by reason?
This suggested objection is not a purely imaginary one. Very often
superficial critics, forgetting that pedagogical problems pertain to
philosophy and are therefore problems of the spirit, awkwardly try to
solve them by the insufficient light of common sense. In so doing they
warn us that in idealistic pedagogics all particular and definite
concepts vanish, and what remains is a vague confused indistinctness of
no practical utility to the teacher.
And truly, if the only result obtained by idealistic pedagogics were the
demonstration that many concepts, ordinarily considered to be
substantially different, are in reality identical, we should not
hesitate to call such philosophical knowledge useless and ridiculous.
But in the first place we must notice that this assumed deficiency
charged against us has partially been shown to be non-existent by the
exposition of our doctrine, which reduces education to free spiritual
becoming, and resolves the apparent multiplicity of educational forms in
the immultiplicable unity of this becoming, outside of which nothing is
truly conceivable.
For the defect of our system was assumed in connection with an exigency
which divides itself into two parts, respectively corresponding to the
form and to the matter of education. For many of the pedagogical errors
which we have pointed out were seen to be imputable, not to the choice
of an unsuitable content of education, but to the criterion adopted in
treating this content. I have already spoken of my disinclination to
accomplish a mere negative task; and in the last chapter, while
denouncing the materialistic conception of physical education, I
certainly did not spare the ascetic view which knows of no body other
than the one which harasses the spirit and hinders its progress toward
the ultimate good; and thereupon I tried to show that physical culture
is spiritual education endowed with that self-same nature which belongs
to education when considered as formation of the will and of the
intellect. But this does not mean that our thesis reduces itself to a
mere theoretic transvaluation or to a new abstract interpretation of
our present educative system, which however in practice could not be
affected by this purely theoretical difference of interpretation. I
tried to make it clear that our conception is not devoid of practical
import, and that it does lead to a reform in education and to a new
orientation of the school. This was especially brought out in connection
with physical culture in the preceding chapter, when I insisted on the
necessity that physical instructors be trained in such a way that their
mental equipment shall not be limited to notions that refer exclusively
to the body in its physical limitations: but that in addition to
physiology, anatomy, and hygiene, they be made familiar also with those
studies and disciplines that are more intimately connected with
character, with the soul, and with the mind.
But besides this, our entire investigation dealing with the reasons for
an absolutely spiritualistic conception of education should have made it
very clear that it is not possible to entertain these new conceptions
without introducing in the school a new spirit, which will not yield to
the realistic vogue and to the materialistic, pedantic, old-fashioned
education,--a spirit which will bring before us a new duty in every
instant of our teaching life and in every word we utter, and which will
impress us with the necessity of acting differently from what has been
taught by the followers of traditional pedagogical routine. Whatever
the subject may be, the form of education has to be in accord with
something that should by now be the common possession of us all, namely,
the consciousness of the intimate spirituality and of the sacred freedom
of our work, which operates not in the material schools but within the
souls of our pupils. There it gives rise not to incidents that are
unessential to that greater world which is the aim of our religiously,
serious outlook on life, but to a process in which All is involved. The
speculative side then of this form of education is not a useless and
abstract theory, but a necessary moment of the moral improvement, of the
spiritual enhancement, and of the general regeneration of teaching.
Indifference to this reform, and the belief that men may continue to
educate without bothering with the subtle problems of philosophy, mean a
failure to understand the precise nature of education.
But the question of the content of education is a different one. Having
identified education with spiritual reality itself, it follows that the
two determinations of the content of the latter belong to the content of
the former. One of these determinations is historical in character; it
advances as the history of the human mind progresses, assuming now this
and now that aspect in accordance with the prevailing spiritual
interests. We who have censured the conception of pre-established
programmes, as being most dangerous prejudices of pedagogical realism,
could not very well presume to determine here in the abstract, the
content of every possible form of education for all places and all
times. The school, like every other form of education, develops; and as
it grows, it constantly changes its content, which again is nothing else
than the content that the spirit gives to itself at every moment of its
concrete development.
It would be just as irrational to expect a school to map out with
precision the limits and the scope of a pupil's culture. Of all the
culture carved out for him at school, a boy will absorb only that much
which is taken up by the autonomous growth of his personality. This will
be supplemented and integrated by the culture which he gets outside of
the classroom, in all possible walks of life, and will be so personal
and of such a character as to admit of no prevision or pre-determination
even on the part of the learner himself. Away with pre-established
programmes then of any description! Spiritual activity works only in the
plenitude of freedom. Horace asks: _Currente rota cur urceus exit?_ We
answer: Whether an _urceus_ or not, what always comes from the _rota_ is
something which cannot be foreseen, for the very simple reason that what
is foreseen is not the future but the past, which we (as in the case of
experimental sciences) project into the future, whereas the spirit is a
creation which occurs not in time but in a never-setting present.
So every abstract discussion of the possible content of education in
general, or of any given particular school, must appear crude and
absurd, if we recall that education reflects the historical development
of the spirit. What we need to do is to wait, observe, and have faith.
For God will reveal himself to us; and God is the very Spirit of ours
which at every moment prescribes its law to itself and thus determines
its own content.
The other of the two determinations mentioned above is the _ideal_, or,
as we perhaps might more precisely call it, the _transcendental_. It
pertains to that spiritual content which never changes as it passes
through the various historical determinations, and which might therefore
be styled the "determiner of the intrinsic and absolute essence of the
spirit." This content upon careful consideration reveals itself as form,
and more precisely as the form of the historically determined content of
the spirit; or again as the concreteness of that form which has been
attributed to the spirit considered in itself, which is a becoming. But
_qua_ becoming, and irrespective of all special aspects with which it
historically configures itself, the spirit has already a content of its
own, which cannot be absent from any of its historical configurations.
In them this content will manifest itself over and over again, but
constantly modified by the changes that are being historically produced.
Under these varying modes and presentations it permanently abides as
the indefectible substance of the spirit. This substance, this ideal
spirit which becomes actual in history, cannot be ignored by any kind of
pedagogics which aspires to a thorough knowledge of the essence of
education.
Having thus formulated the problem, and clinging firmly to the principle
of educational unity, we may distinguish the forms of education which
proceed from the ideal content of the spirit. But we must always
keep in mind that, as these forms are only distinguishable ideally,
they can in no way be effectively separated, and must be found in
every concrete educative act. So that their synthesis and their
complete immanence is the concreteness of educational unity in its
opposition to what I have called fragmentary education. Our distinction
then will turn out to be an exact logical analysis, which analyses only
the terms of a synthesis and cannot therefore be dissociated from the
synthesis. By analysing and by synthesising, by determining the
spiritual unity without disconnecting or in any way dissociating its
intrinsic ideal determinations, we strive to represent the ideal of
education.
In making a rapid survey of this analysis, I must refer back to what was
said of the attributes of the spirit,--that the spirit _is_ in that it
_becomes_, that it becomes in so far as it acquires self-consciousness,
that its being therefore is consciousness in the act of being acquired.
This act is surely self-consciousness, and it does mean cognition, but
a cognition which differs from all others in that it has for its object
that very one who cognises. And this is the meaning of "I," identity of
subject and object,--an identity, however, that because of its curious
nature needs to be carefully examined. It was shown in a preceding
chapter that two things, to be thought as two, must yet be thought as
one by virtue of the unique relationship which makes their duality
possible. Here we observe the inverse: identity of subject and object
means that in addition to the subject there is--nothing; it means
therefore unity. And yet this unity would in no manner be intelligible
if it were not also a duality, if, in other words, the identity of
subject and object were not also the difference between them.
To distinguish A from B, an initial, elementary minimum difference is
required. It is the difference, called _otherness_, by which B is other
than A. Without this otherness there would not be A and B, but either A
alone or B alone. The subject as it knows itself is certainly not
another from the subject alone. But if it did not become _other_ to
itself, if it were not object also, as well as subject, it would never
know itself. To be object as well as subject implies the necessity of
distinguishing these two terms, and shows that there is otherness
between them. If it sounds harsh to speak of something that first is
"_one_" and then is "_two_," we might state the situation in a
different and perhaps simpler way. We might say that the subject would
not know itself, if remaining always that one and self-same subject, it
were not both subject and object to itself.
Consciousness implies this self-alteration of the subject, which by
placing itself as an object in front of itself realises itself, it being
real only as self-consciousness. This is the import of the identity of
the two terms, subject and object; or of the difference intrinsic to the
one, which is but another way of stating it. We may insist as much as we
want on the identity of the "I," but it will always be true that this
"I" is real only in virtue of its intrinsic difference. And conversely
we may insist, as it is more often done, on the difference between the
subjective moment of the "I," whereby the "I" is set in opposition to
all its objects, and the objective moment in which the ego vanishes. But
behind the difference, identity is always to be found. Man, the more he
thinks, the more he alters himself, the more objective that reality
becomes which he realises by self-consciousness, the more fully he sees
the variation, the development, the growth, the enhancement of the
object--the world he knows.
The spirit's being is its alteration. The more it _is_,--that is, the
more it becomes, the more it lives,--the more difficult it is for it to
recognise itself in the object. It might therefore be said that he who
increases his knowledge also increases his ignorance, if he is unable
to trace this knowledge back to its origin, and if the spirit's rally
does not induce him to rediscover himself at the bottom of the object,
which has been allowed to alter and alienate itself more and more from
the secret source of its own becoming. Thus it happens, as was said of
old, that "He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." All human
sorrow proceeds from our incapacity to recognise ourselves in the
object, and consequently to feel our own infinite liberty.
Subject then and object, and in their synthesis, in their living unity,
the spirit, which therefore is neither a subject standing against an
object, nor its opposite. The two terms, each one for itself, isolated,
are equivalent. But every time human thought has isolated them, whether
striving to conceive itself, its own spiritual substance, objectively
(God), or as a simple subject (a particular man), it has ever reached
most desperate conclusions, now totally blocking its way to the
comprehension and justification of its own subjectivity, and now
secluding itself in an abstract subjectivity, removed from _all_ which
man theoretically and practically needs in order to live. The reality of
the spirit is not in the subject as opposed to the object, but in the
subject that has in itself the object as its actuality.
It is on account of this inseverable unity, by which the subject presses
to itself the object and becomes actual therein, that the progressive
alteration of the object is also the progressive alteration of the
subject. At every given moment, the subject, altered as it is, made into
the "other" or determined, is yet pure subject, and nothing else than
the subject which becomes conscious of itself, and therefore actual by
determining itself as subject of its object, in such a way that the
subject as well as the object is always new and always different. Not
because it is now one subject and now another, in which case succession
and enumeration would import multiplicity, and would therefore reduce
the spirit to a thing; but because it appears and cannot but appear
thus, if observed from the point of view which distinguishes one
individual from another, and in the same individual one instant from the
next, although from a rigorously idealistic point of view the spirit is
one, and its determinateness does not detract from its absolute
originality.
This dialectic in which the spiritual becoming unfolds itself (subject,
object, and unity of subject and object), this self-objectifying or
self-estrangement aiming at self-attainment,--this is the eternal life
of the spirit, which creates its immortal forms, and determines the
ideal contents of culture and education. The spirit's self-realisation
is the realisation of the subject, of the object, and of their
relationship. If of these three terms (the third being the synthesis of
the first and second) any one should fail, the spiritual reality would
cease to be.
This threefold realisation admits empirically of a separation that makes
it possible to have one without the others. On the strength of this
triple division we speak of art, of religion, and of philosophy, as
though each one of them could subsist by itself. So that commonly people
believe that it is possible to be a poet without in any way burdening
one's mind with religion or philosophy,--especially philosophy, which
appears to be the bugbear of most poets. In the same way many
philosophers, and among them one of the very greatest, held art to be
the negation of philosophy, to the point that it should be banished from
the kingdom where the latter was expected to reign. And how often has
religion taken up arms, now against poetry, and now against speculation!
All of these occurrences were possible because the three terms were
looked upon as separable, as though they were three material things,
each one of which could be what it was only on condition that it
excluded the others.
A superficial understanding of the differences intervening between these
three terms is the reason why they are often looked upon as separable.
But in reality they are so indissolubly conjoined, that separation would
destroy their spiritual character, and put in its place mechanism, which
is the property of all that is not spirit.
Art is the self-realisation of the spirit as subject. Man becomes
enfolded in his subjectivity, and hears but the voice of love or other
inward summons. Living without communication with the world, he refrains
from affirming and denying what exists and what does not exist. He
simply spreads out over his own abstract interior world, and dreams; and
as he dreams, he escapes from the outer bustle into the seclusion of his
enchanted realm, which is true in itself until he issues from it and
discovers it to be a figment of his phantasy. This man is the artist,
who, we might say, neither cognises nor acts, but sings.
His subjectivity appears empirically to us always as a determined
subjectivity, the determination of which proceeds from the object in
which the spirit, theoretically and practically, has previously
objectified itself. But this priority of the act, by which the artist is
considered a man of this objective world before he withdraws into
his dreams, is a mere empirical appearance. If we relied on it, we
could not preserve to the spirit in its artistic life that originality
and autonomy, that absolute spontaneity and freedom, which is the
essential character or, as we called it, the attribute of spiritual
activity. To become objective, the spirit must first be subject; and in
front of the object in which it objectifies itself, it again inevitably
becomes subject,--an ever determined one indeed, but nothing else than
a subject. That is why the contemporary theory of aesthetics holds that
form in art absorbs in itself the content, with no residuum. It
absorbs it _qua_ subjectivity; for whatever the object be which this
subjectivity, empirically considered, has enwrapped, it draws it
entirely over to itself, reassumes it, and as pure subjectivity it
cannot return to its object without passing through the moment of its
opposition to the object,--the moment in which the subject is
nothing else than subject, and finds in itself infinite gratification.
This is the realm of art, a realm from which the spirit, in consequence
of the very function of the subject, is compelled to issue; since
the subject is subject in that it issues from itself, becomes
self-conscious, objectifies itself. So the poet as he dreams breathes
life into the personages of his dreams, builds them up, and gives
them reality. What is his own abstract subjectivity he chooses as a
world in which he himself may live absolutely; and the ideas which
mature in that fantastic world of his--which is nothing more, as I
have said, than his abstract subjectivity--are affirmed by him without
any reserves, and are opposed to the ideas of philosophers and of
men who prefer concrete reality to phantasy.
This lyrical bent, peculiar to the artist who enhances himself by
exalting his own abstract individuality, is in direct contrast with the
tendency of the Saint, who crushes and annihilates this same
individuality in the face of his God,--that God who infinitely occupies
his consciousness as the "other" in absolute alterity to him, so that
the subject is hurled into the object in a total self-abstraction. It
sinks in the contemplation of its own self in its objective "otherness,"
of itself become the other, in which it no longer recognises itself. So
he deifies this other self, places it on the altar, and kneels before
it. Thus the saint's personality is nullified; or rather, it is
actualised and realised in this self-annulment, which is the theoretical
and practical characteristic of mysticism and the specific act of
religion.
It is not possible to tear art from the spirit's life, in as much as it
could not be the synthesis it actually is without being subjectivity. It
is equally impossible for the spirit to be completely devoid of
religiosity. The mystic flower of faith grows out of the bosom of
art,--a faith in an object which draws the soul to itself and conquers
it. The life of the spirit is an eternal crossing from art to religion,
from the subject to the object. It is impossible for the artist to
realise his art in unalloyed purity, since his world, the world he has
created for himself, is nevertheless the bigger world, out of which,
empirically speaking, he is driven only by the needs of practical life,
which awaken him and remind him of the existence of a wider world. In
the same way it is impossible to realise a pure religion in which the
subject completely and effectually might annihilate itself. For in the
measure that faith increases in intensity, and the sentiment of one's
own nothingness grows deeper, and the idea that the object is all
becomes more obsessing, in that same measure the energy of the spirit
increases, of the spirit as the subject that has been powerful enough to
create this situation. Altars must be built in order that people may
kneel in front of them. The concept of God, it, too, has a history. And
from this history no word can be taken away on the assumption that it
was immediately _revealed_. For there is no word which pre-exists as
such before the act of him who cognises it. And to fix a dogma, that is,
to rescue it from the flow of evolution, we should have to withdraw from
the course of evolution the men themselves who are to accept it.
Nothing therefore is more impious than the history of religion, in the
course of which man, now dragging his God down to the depths of his
apparent misery, now lifting him to the heights of his real greatness,
progresses from station to station along the unending way of sorrows and
joys. The process of mental development shows unwittingly, by the very
acts of man's innocent piety, that God is _his_ God, that the life of
the object is the same as the life of the subject.
The nature then both of art and of religion implies a flagrant
contradiction which comes to this,--that the subject to be subject is
object, and the object to be object is subject. Hence the torments of
the poet and the spasms of the mystic. A perfect art and a perfect
religion, that is, art which is not religion, and religion which is not
art, are two impossibilities. This does not mean that either art or
religion can ever be superseded and left behind as two illusions,
ancient and constant, if we will, but none the less devoid of all value.
The very contrary of this is true. Just because there is no pure art,
religion is eternal; and art is eternal, because religion cannot be
attained in its absolute purity.
The concrete spirit is neither subject nor object. It is a
self-objectifying subject, and an object which becomes the subject in
virtue of the subjectivity that alights on it as it realises it. The
spirit is therefore a becoming. It is the synthesis, the unity of these
two opposites, ever in conflict and yet always intimately joined. And
the spirit, as this unity, is the concreteness both of art (reality of
the abstract subject) and of religion (reality of the abstract object).
It is philosophy. Many definitions have been given of philosophy, and
all of them true, because directly or indirectly they may, on the
strength of what is expressed or what is understood, be reduced to the
following definition: that philosophy is the spirit. If we say that it
is the science of the spirit, we indulge in a useless pleonasm. For
science, unless we distinguish in an absolute manner (which is
impossible) one grade of determinateness from the other, is the same as
consciousness; and spirit is, as we have seen, self-consciousness. If we
say that philosophy is the science of reality in its universality, we
lose sight of the fact that reality, for those who do not stray off into
the maze of abstractness, _is_ the spirit. A definition which has never
lost its value is that one which makes philosophy consist in the
elaboration of concepts, that is, in the unification of all the concepts
(those we possess, of course) into a coherent concept. This is an
excellent definition, and it warns us that philosophy is not obtained by
stopping before abstractions, no matter what these abstractions may be.
All particular things are abstractions, each one of which yields a
concept, and all of them give a number of concepts, which must be
brought together and unified, if we ever intend to think all things that
are thought, and thus philosophise. The subject without the object as
the artist wants it is an abstraction; and similarly abstract is the
object which religion looks up to.
We are accustomed, not without reason, to distinguish the life of the
spirit from philosophy. But the reason, instead of destroying, confirms
the identity between spirit and philosophy, and for the following cause.
The spirit never being what it ought to be, we live acquiring
consciousness of ourselves. But when we pause to ask ourselves if we
have really obtained this consciousness, and turn to our life as to the
subject-matter of this problem, which is the problem of philosophy, we
discover that we cannot answer in the affirmative. For answering is
spiritual living, a living, therefore, which consists not in having
self-consciousness but in acquiring it. So that philosophy does not
arise from the need of understanding the life already lived, for the
past is the realm of death; but rather from the much keener desire of
living, of leading a better life, a true life, and of finally realising
this spiritual reality which is our ideal. But when?
Can we believe that there is ever going to be a philosophy which will
definitely fulfil the ideal? It is obvious that a pursuit of such
philosophy would lead the spirit into a race to death; whereas on the
contrary the spirit is life; it is an impulse to ever more intense
living.
This philosophy, it is evident, is not the exclusive, esoteric classroom
discipline, the professional privilege of a few specialists. It is
rather the source from which this professional speculation derives its
right to address all men who have an exalted sentiment of their human
dignity, who hearken to the deeper utterances of their souls, who are
able to see how much of their own self there is in this vast world which
is being disclosed to their eyes; who, even though vaguely and timidly,
are conscious of the divine power that resides in every human heart; who
feel that this human heart, prone though it be to all baseness, is also
capable of lifting itself to the most sublime heights, and of enjoying
the pure and lofty satisfactions which human phantasy ordinarily
relegates to heaven. In the depths of every mind there is a philosophy:
the mind itself is untiring speculation, which more or less successfully
scales the height, but which is always turned upward to the summit
whitened by the rising sun. Life is made human by the rays of this
philosophy. Man is really man when he recognises an object which is the
world, reality, law, and when he recalls that nothing absolves him from
the duty of being in this world; of seriously being in it, which means
working and coöperating towards reality by knowing reality and
fulfilling the law. For in his freedom and power he can never divest
himself of his own responsibility; he must therefore develop his
capacity to the utmost value, and to that end work and work, think, and
act as the centre of his world. This philosophy does not allow him
either to withdraw into the abstract retirement of his egoistic self, or
to deny and sacrifice this self to an imaginary reality. This philosophy
is never finished, never completed, for it is his own spirit, his very
self, which to live must grow, and which must constitute itself as it
develops. And therefore this philosophy cannot help being man's ideal,
which is always being realised and which is never fulfilled.
So, then, education, which aims at that concrete and truly real unity
which is the life of the spirit, must always be moral, always spiritual,
always philosophic. An invidious word, perhaps, for those who have had
the misfortune to fall into the mean and vulgar habit of grinning and
scoffing in retaliation for the unsparing censure inflicted by the ideal
on sloth, presumption, and cowardice. We might perhaps replace this word
by "integral," excepting that this adjective is generic and therefore
inappropriate.
I must add, however, that in speaking of philosophic education, I do not
mean any special course in philosophy. Though I believe that special
philosophical training has an essential function in the curriculum of
secondary schools which aim to prepare and direct towards higher studies
a matured mentality, scientifically trained and humanly inspired, I yet
hold that this special philosophical training can be effectual only if
all education, from its very beginning, wherever that may be, has been
philosophic. We must reflect that just as it is impossible for a man to
be moral only at certain hours of the day, and in certain particular
places, morality being the atmosphere without which the spirit cannot
live, so that ethical teaching is distorted and deflected as soon as it
is relegated to certain definite books, to be studied in connection with
certain definite courses; in the same way this philosophy which is for
us the ideal content of education, and therefore its ideal, cannot but
be present in every real educative act, cannot help reflecting itself in
every throb it gives to the soul of the pupil. This general philosophic
education naturally includes art and religion, which cannot be limited
subject-matters of special courses of instruction, co-ordinated or
subordinated to the other elements of the curriculum.
Only the particular sciences, that is, the sciences properly so called,
may be freely moved in a student's schedule; they may be added or taken
away, they may be grouped this or that way, and be variously distributed
in accordance with the needs of the moment and the particular exigencies
of the student or of man in general. For these sciences reflect in
themselves the fragmentary multiplicity of things which have been
abstractly cut off from the centre of the spirit, to which however they
too refer. And because they do refer to it, the teaching of them should
be spiritualised, moralised, humanised; it ought to acquire the
concreteness of philosophy, and therefore never ignore the exigencies of
art and of religion. For otherwise it will be merely material
instruction, "informative education," which in reality is no education
at all.
During the Revival of Learning education was humanistic. Its ideal was
art. The historical life which corresponded to this ideal was the
individualism of our Italian Renaissance. After the Counter Reformation,
art, which is individuality in abstract subjectivity, was abandoned to
itself, and inevitably decayed in the cult of lifeless form; it became
barren in the imitations of classical art considered as final
perfection, to which the individual might raise himself but beyond which
he could not possibly proceed. Art became thus the negation of
originality, and of that subjective autonomy of which it naturally
should be the most enhancing expression. So that classicism up to the
Romantic Revolt remained the cultural form of a society submissive to
the principle of authority and religiously oriented. These conditions
favoured the study of the science of nature, which to the extent that it
is governed by the naturalistic principle is a manifestation of
religiosity. The devotee of natural science speaks in fact of his Nature
with an agnostic reverence similar to that professed by the saint in the
worship of God. Nature, which alone he knows, becomes the object before
which the subject, Man, disappears. But as science progresses, the need
of shaking the principle of authority makes itself felt; the accepted
truths of nature are subjected to criticism; the power of doubting is
reintroduced, and the subject again reasserts itself. So the advancement
of natural science has gradually turned humanity away from the shrines
of naturalistic science. When naturalism opposed the claims of religion,
it ceased to be the science of nature, and became philosophy. This
influenced the scientific spirit in its clash with religious dogmas, and
restored to it the consciousness of the moment of subjectivity which had
been forgotten. The ideal of culture, which prevailed in the nineteenth
century with the triumph of positivism, was science, naturalism, and
therefore religion. It is now high time that the two opposed elements
be joined and united, and that the school be neither abstractly
humanistic in the pursuit of Art nor abstractly religious and
scientific, but that it be made what it is ideally, and what it is also
in practice when it efficaciously educates--the philosophic school.
* * * * *
As each one has a different path to follow in this world, each one will
accordingly have his own education. But all paths converge to one point,
where we all gather to lead in common that universal life which alone
makes us men. And as we meet at this centre, we must understand each
other, and should be able therefore to speak the same language, the
language of the spirit. We are compelled by an irresistible need to live
this common life, and together to constitute one sole spirit. But this
end we shall never attain if man, who ought to be entire and complete,
acts as a mere fragment,--such fragment, for example, as the æsthete, or
the superstitious worshipper, or the star gazer, always unaware of the
pit under his feet. If we continue in this state, in which one man
clings to the superstition of mathematics, another idolises entomology,
a third worships physics, and so on indefinitely, if man insists on
fencing off his little piece of this "thrashing-floor that makes us
cruel," knowing no other man but himself, feeling no needs other than
his own, then war will break out. Not a disciplined war, governed by a
law, by an idea, by reason, of which it is the life; but a war of every
man against his brother,--the anarchistic uprising, the disintegration
of the spirit, and the stern suffering which is true misery.
The dislike for the _purus mathematicus_[5] is traditional. But whether
he be a mathematician, or a priest, or an economist, or a dentist, or a
poet, or a street cleaner, man as a fragment of humanity is a nuisance.
We want mathematics, but we want it _in_ the man. And the same for
religion, economics, poetry, and all the rest. Otherwise we suffocate,
and die stifled. For all these are things, but there is no life; and
things oppress us and kill us. Therefore let us spiritualise things by
reviving the spirit. Let us release it, that it may freely move in the
organic unity of nature. Let us train it so that its strength, agility,
balance, and all around development shall be able to control all its
dependent functions, which can be successfully carried on only on
condition that they agree, and collaborate toward common life. And this
is what I call philosophy.
Or we may call it humanity, if the word philosophy suggests strangeness
and difficulty of attainment. For our demand for an educational reform,
in accordance with our renewed consciousness, is prompted by the old
but never ancient desire which put the lantern in the hand of the Greek
philosopher. Education is truly human when it has for its contents that
ideal which I have briefly touched upon in this chapter, the ideal of
the spirit, philosophy.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Referring to the old phrase, _purus mathematicus, purus asinus_.
CHAPTER XI
CONCLUSION
We may look upon the preceding chapters as a kind of general examination
to which we submitted our consciences, by reflecting on the way we have
always performed our duty as teachers, by considering our purposes, and
by scrutinising the internal logic of our task. And our investigation
has been eminently human, since indeed man's essence, we have now come
to understand, is to acquire self-consciousness.
The patriotic character of the event which was the immediate cause of
this work induced me to show that the common spirit which brought us
together was not a mere political sentiment, of which we should rid
ourselves in crossing the threshold of the school. For we could not but
bring into the classroom our own humanity and our living personality, in
which the content of our teaching and of all education must live. This
personality, however it may be considered, from whatever point of view
it may be regarded, has no particular substance which is not also at the
same time universal,--domestic as the case may be, or social, political,
or whatever may be the phase in which it is determined in its historical
development. And since, in this historical development of our universal
personality, there is Italy with her memories perpetuated by our
immanent sentiment, by our immanent consciousness and by our immanent
will, we could not possibly be ourselves were we not at the same time
Italian educators.
And looking attentively at this universal foundation on which our own
human value is supported--call it language, logic, law,--we were led to
study the relationship existing between individuality, which is the aim
of all forms of education, and this universal spirit which here
intervenes as it does in every moment of the human life. It intervenes
in education, as the science and the conscience and the entire
personality of the teacher. This personality seems to be violently
imposed upon the pupil in such a way as to check or hinder his
spontaneous development; but we saw that the immediate logical
opposition between teacher and learner gradually resolves itself into
the unity of the spiritual process in which education becomes actual.
Education therefore appeared to us, not as a fact which is empirically
observable, and which may be fixed and looked upon as subject to natural
laws, but rather as a mystical formation of a super-individual
spirituality, which is the only real, concrete personality actualised by
the individual. In order to understand it, we had to liberate it from
every kind of contact with culture in its materialistic acceptance; and
we therefore insisted on the speculative inquiry into what we called the
realistic point of view. We endeavoured to explain how and why culture
is the very process of education, and the very process of the
personality in which education takes place. This conception would have
lacked the necessary support, had we not carried our investigation
further, and shown that this culture in which the spirit unfolds itself
is not the attribute of a mind existing amidst other minds and face to
face with surrounding nature, but is instead the most genuine
signification of All. For it is the life of the spirit in which
everything gathers to find its support and become thinkable. Man, as he
is educated, is man rigorously considered as spirit,--spirit which is
free, because infinite and truly universal in every one of its moments
and attitudes. This the educator must intently consider if he wants to
conceive adequately his task and its enormous responsibilities, which
become evident when he reflects how in the monad of the individual, in
the simple soul of the child entrusted to his creative care, the
infinite vibrates, and a life is born at every instant, which thence
throbs over the boundless expanse of space, of time, and of all
reality.
This adequate conception need not be elaborated into a complete system
of philosophy. The educator must sense and grasp this infinite over
which every word of his is carried, every glance of his, every gesture.
As he enters the classroom, as he approaches the child, to whom not only
_magna reverentia_ is due, but the very cult which is shown to things
divine, he cannot but feel himself exalted; he cannot but be fully
conscious of the difficulties of his lofty station, and of the duty of
overcoming them. He must therefore dismiss from within himself all that
is petty in his particular personality, all his preoccupations and
passions, all his commonplace everyday thoughts. He must shake off the
depressing burden of the flesh, which pulls him downward; and he will
then open his soul to fortifying Faith, to the ruling and inspiring
Deity. The man who is not capable of feeling in the School the sanctity
of the place and of his work is not fit to be an educator.
The spirituality of education becomes however an empty formula, and a
motif for rhetorical variations, if on the one hand we do not possess
the concept of the essence or of the attributes of the spirit, and if on
the other we do not sharply expose those realistic prejudices of
pedagogy which have been maintained in the field of education by the
materialistic conception of man and by a tradition which is both
unreflecting and alien to all radical criticism. I tried to satisfy both
these exigencies rather by arousing the reflection and impelling it on
its way than by escorting it on a journey which must be undertaken with
due preparation.
And finally, in the effort to provide ourselves with a motto, so to
speak, and a rallying banner, I set forth the doctrine of educational
unity--of the education which is always at all moments education of the
spirit. For even physical culture is conceivable only as formation of
the mind, and more properly of character. Education, we saw, may be made
actual in a thousand different ways, only always on condition that we
observe the law which proceeds from its innermost essence and
constitutes its immanent ideal. Every education is good, provided it is
education--philosophical, human, mind-stirring education; provided it
does not bring atrophy to any necessary function of the spirit, does not
crush the spirit under the weight either of things or of the divinity,
nor excessively exalt it in the consciousness of its own personal power;
provided it neither hurls it into the free abstract world of dreams nor
fetters it in the iron chains of an inhuman reality; and provided it
does not shatter it and scatter its fragments by the multiple
investigations of things innumerable, the knowledge of which can never
bring satisfaction. For it is the function of education to enable the
centralising unity of the reflective spirit to become articulate and
varied through the multiplicity of life and of experience, which is the
actuality of the spirit itself. Opposition to all abstractions, in
behalf of the concrete spirit and of liberty--that is our educational
ideal.
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