#title The False Principle of Our Education
#LISTtitle False Principle of Our Education
#subtitle Or — Humanism And Realism
#author Max Stirner
#cat kaleido
#lang en
#cover m-s-max-stirner-the-false-principle-of-our-educati-1.jpg
#notes In 1842 Das unwahre Prinzip unserer Erziehung (The False Principle of our Education) was published in Rheinische Zeitung
#teaser Written as a reaction to Otto Friedrich Theodor Heinsius’ treatise *Humanism vs. Realism,* Stirner explains that education in either the classical humanist method or the practical realist method still lacks true value. Education, therefore, is fulfilled in aiding the individual in becoming an individual.
Because our time is struggling toward the word with which it may
express its spirit, many names come to the fore and all make claim to
being the right name. On all sides our present time reveals the most
chaotic partisan tumult and the eagles of the moment gather around the
decaying legacy of the past. There is everywhere a great abundance of
political, social, ecclesiastical, scientific, artistic, moral and
other corpses, and until they are all consumed, the air will not be
clean and the breath of living beings will be oppressed.
Without our assistance, time will not bring the right word to light;
we must all work together on it. If, however, so much depends upon us,
we may reasonably ask what they have made of us and what they propose
to make of us; we ask about the education through which they seek to
enable us to become the creators of that word. Do they conscientiously
cultivate our predisposition to become creators or do they
treat us only as creatures whose nature simply permits training? The
question is as important as one of our social questions can ever be,
indeed, it is the most important one because those questions rest on
this ultimate basis. Be something excellent and you will bring about
something excellent: be “each one perfect in himself,” then your
society, your social life, will also be perfect.
Therefore we are concerned above all with what they make of us in the
time of our plasticity; the school question is a life question. They
can now be seen quite clearly; this area has been fought over for
years with an ardour and a frankness which far surpasses that in the
realm of politics because there it does not knock up against the
obstructions of arbitrary power.
A venerable veteran, Professor Theodor Heinsius,[1] who, like the late
Professor Krug[2] retained his strength and zeal into old age, has
recently sought to provoke interest for this cause by a little essay.
He calls it a “Concordat between school and life or mediation
of humanism and realism from a nationalistic point of view.” Two
parties struggle for victory and each wants to recommend his principle
of education as the best and truest for our needs: the humanists and
the realists. Not wanting to incur the displeasure of either, Heinsius
speaks in his booklet with that mildness and conciliation which means
to give both their due and thereby does the greatest injustice to the
cause itself since it can only be served by a sharp decisiveness. As
things stand, this sin against the spirit of the cause remains the
inseparable legacy of all faint-hearted mediators. “Concordats” offer
only a cowardly expedient.
Only frank like a man: for or against!
And the watchword: slave or free!
Even gods descended from Olympus,
And fought on the battlements of their ally.
Before arriving at his own proposals, Heinsius draws up a short sketch
of the course of history since the Reformation. The period between the
Reformation and the Revolution is which I will assert here without
support since I plan to show it in greater detail at another
opportunity that of the relationship between adults and minors,
between the reigning and the serving, the powerful and the powerless,
in short, the period of subjection. Apart from any other basis which
might justify a superiority, education, as a power, raised
him who possessed it over the weak, who lacked it, and the educated
man counted in his circle, however large or small it was, as the
mighty, the powerful, the imposing one: for he was an
authority. Not everyone could be called to this command and
authority; therefore, education was not for every one and universal
education contradicted that principle. Education creates superiority
and makes one a master: thus in that age of the master, it was a
means to power. But the Revolution broke through the
master-servant economy and the axiom came forth: everyone is his
own master. Connected with this was the necessary conclusion that
education, which indeed produces the master, must henceforth become
universal and the task of finding true universal education
now presented itself. The drive toward a universal education
accessible to everyone must advance to struggle against the
obstinately maintained exclusive education, and in the area also the
Revolution must draw the sword against the domination of the period of
the Reformation. The idea of universal education collided with the
idea of exclusive education, and the strife and struggle
moves through phases and under sundry names into the present. For the
contradictions of the opposing enemy camps, Heinsius chose the names
humanism and realism, and, inaccurate as they are, we will retain them
as the most commonly used.
Until the Enlightenment began to spread its light in the Eighteenth
Century, so called higher education lay without protest in
the hands of the humanists and was based almost solely on the
understanding of the old classics. Another education went
along at the same time which likewise sought its example in antiquity
and mainly ended up with a considerable knowledge of the Bible. That
in both cases they selected the best education of the world of
antiquity for their exclusive subject matter proves sufficiently how
little of dignity our own life offered, and how far we still were from
being able to create the forms of beauty out of our own originality
and the content of truth out of our own reason. First we had to
learn form and content; we were apprentices. And as the world
of antiquity through classics and the Bible rule over us as a
mistress, so was which can be historically proven being a
lord and being a servant really the essence of all our activity, and
only from this characteristic of the era does it become plain why they
aspire so openly toward a “higher education” and were so intent upon
distinguishing themselves by that means before the common people. With
education, its possessor became a master of the uneducated. A popular
education would have opposed this because the people were supposed to
remain in the laity opposite the learned gentlemen, were only
supposed to gaze in astonishment at the strange splendor and venerate
it. Thus Romanism continued in learning and its supporters
are Latin and Greek. Furthermore, it was inevitable that this
education remained throughout a formal education, as much on
this account because of the antiquity long dead and buried, only the
forms, as it were, the schemes of literature and art were preserved,
as for the particular reason that domination over people will simply
be acquired and asserted through formal superiority; it requires only
a certain degree of intellectual agility to gain superiority over the
less agile people. So called higher education was therefore an
elegant education, a sensus omnis elegantiae, an
education of taste and a sense of forms which finally threatened to
sink completely into a grammatical education and perfumed the German
language itself with the smell of Latium so much that even today one
has an opportunity to admire the most beautiful Latin sentence
structures, for example, in the just published History of the
Brandenburg-Prussian States. A Book for Everyone.[3]
In the meantime, a spirit of opposition gradually arose out of the
Enlightenment against this formalism and the demand for an
all-encompassing, a truly human education allied itself with the
recognition of the secure and universal rights of man. The lack of
solid instruction which would interact with life was illuminated by
the manner in which the Humanists had proceeded up to that time and
generated the demand for a practical finishing education. Henceforth,
all knowledge was to be life, knowledge being lived; for only the
reality of knowledge is its perfection. If bringing the material of
life into the school succeeded in offering thereby something useful to
everyone, and for that very reason to win everyone over for this
preparation for life and to turn them towards school, then one would
not envy the learned gentlemen anymore for their
singular knowledge and the people would no longer remain of
the laity. To eliminate the priesthood of the scholars and the laity
of the people is the endeavour of realism and therefore it must surpass
humanism. Appropriating the classical forms of antiquity began to be
restrained and with it the sovereign-authority lost its
nimbus. The time struggled against the traditional respect
for scholarship as it generally rebels against any respect.
The essential advantage of scholars, universal
education, should be beneficial to everyone. However, one asks,
what is universal education other than the capacity, trivially
expressed, “to be able to talk about everything,” or more seriously
expressed, the capacity to master any material? School was seen to be
left behind by life since it not only withdrew from the people but
even neglected universal education with its students in favour of
exclusive education, and it failed to urge mastery in school of a
great deal of material which is thrust upon us by life. School, one
thought, indeed has to outline our reconciliation with everything life
offers and to care for it so that none of the things with which we
must some day concern ourselves will be completely alien to us and
beyond our power to master. Therefore familiarity with the things and
situations of the present was sought most vigorously and a pedagogy
was brought into fashion which must find application to everyone
because it satisfied the common need of everyone to find themselves in
their world and time. The basic principles of human rights in this way
gained life and reality in educational spheres: equality,
because that education embraced everyone, and freedom,
because one became conversant with one’s needs and consequently
independent and autonomous.
However, to grasp the past as humanism teaches and to seize the
present, which is the aim of realism, leads both only to power over
the transitory. Only the spirit which understands
itself is eternal. Therefore, equality and freedom
received only a subordinate existence. One could indeed become equal
to others and emancipated from their authority; from the equality
with oneself, from the equalization and reconciliation of our
transient and eternal man, from the transfiguration of our naturalness
to spirituality, in short, from the unity and supreme power of our
ego, which is enough for itself since it leaves nothing alien standing
outside of itself : Hardly any idea of it was to be recognized in that
principle. And freedom appeared indeed as independence from
authorities, however, it lacked self-determination and still produced
none of the acts of a man who is free-in-himself,
self-revelations of an inconsiderate[4] man, that
is, of one of those minds saved from the fluctuating of contemplation.
The formally educated man certainly was not to stand out
above the mirror of the ocean of universal education anymore, and he
transformed himself from a “highly educated man” into a “one-sided
educated man” (as such he naturally maintains his uncontested worth,
since all universal education is intended to radiate into the most
varied single-mindednesses of special education); but the man educated
in the sense of realism did not surpass the equality with others and
the freedom from others, neither did he come out ahead of the
so-called practical man. Certainly the empty elegance of the
humanist, of the dandy, could not help but decline; but the victor
glistened with the verdigris of materiality and was nothing better
than a tasteless materialist.[5] Dandyism and
materialism struggle for the prize of the dear boys and girls
and often seductively exchange armour in that the Dandy appears in
coarse cynicism and the materialist appears in white linen. To be
sure, the living wood of the materialist clubs will smash the dry
staff of the marrowless Dandy; but living, or dead, wood remains wood,
and if the flame of the spirit is to burn, the wood must go up in
fire.
Why, in the meantime, must realism also, if (not denying it the
capacity) it assimilates the good aspects of humanism, nevertheless
perish?
Certainly it can assimilate the inalienable and true of humanism,
formal education, and this assimilation is made ever easier through
the scientific method which has become possible and through the
sensible treatment of all objects of instruction (I draw attention by
way of example only to Becker’s[6] rendering of German Grammar) and
can through this refinement push its opponent from its strong
position. Since realism as well as humanism proceeds from the idea
that the aim of education is to produce versatility for man
and since both agree, for example, that one must be accustomed to
every turn of idiomatic expression, must mathematically
enjoin the turn of the proof, etc., so that one has to
struggle towards mastery in handling the material, towards its
mastery: thus it will certainly not fail that even realism will
finally recognize the formation of taste as the final goal
and put the act of forming in first place, as is already
partly the case. For in education, all of the material given has value
only in so far as children learn to do something with it, to
use it. Certainly only the practical and the useful should be
stressed, as the realists desire; but the benefit is really only to be
sought in forming, in generalizing, in presenting, and one will not be
able to reject this humanistic claim. The humanists are right in that
it depends above all on formal education — they are wrong, in that
they do not find this in the mastery of every subject; the realists
demand the right thing in that every subject must be begun in school,
they demand the wrong thing then when they do not want to look upon
formal education as the principal goal. If it exercises real
self-abnegation and does not give itself over to materialistic
enticements, realism can come to this victory over its adversary and
at the same time come to a reconciliation with him. Why do we
nevertheless now show enmity to it?
Does it then really throw off the husk of the old principle and does
it stand on the ramparts of the time? In that respect everything must
be judged, whether it admits the idea which time has achieved as its
most valuable or whether it takes a stationary place behind it. That
indelible fear which causes the realists to shrink back in horror from
abstractions and speculations must surprise and I will therefore now
set down here a few selections from Heinsius who yields nothing to the
unbending realists upon this point and saves me quotations from them
which would be easy to cite. On page 9 it says:
“In the higher institutions of learning one hears about philosophical
systems of the Greeks, of Aristotle and Plato, also, no doubt, of the
moderns, of Kant, that he has put away the ideas of God, freedom,
immortality, as unprovable; of Fichte, that he has set moral world
order in place of the personal God; of Schelling,[7] Hegel,
Herbart,[8] Krause,[9] and whomsoever may be called discoverers and
heralds of supernatural wisdom. What, they say, should we, should the
German nation set about to do with idealistic enthusiasms which
belongs to neither the empirical and positive sciences nor to
practical life and which do not benefit the state which, with an
obscure perception which only confuses the spirit of the time, leads
to disbelief and atheism, divides the minds, chases the students
themselves away from the professorial chairs of the apostles, and even
obscures our national tongue in that it transforms the clearest
conceptions of common sense into mystical enigmas? Is that the wisdom
that should educate our youth to be moral, good people, thinking,
reasonable beings, true citizens, useful and able workers in their
professions, loving spouses and provident fathers for the
establishment of domestic well-being?”
And on page 45:
“Let us look at philosophy and theology, which, as sciences of
thinking and faith are put in first place for the welfare of the
world; what have they become through their mutual friction since
Leibniz broke the path to them? The dualism, materialism, idealism,
supernaturalism, rationalism, mysticism, and whatever all the
abtruse-isms of exaggerated speculations and feelings may be called:
what kind of blessings have they brought the state, the church, the
arts, the national culture? Thought and knowledge have certainly
expanded in their sphere; however, has the former become clearer and
the latter more certain? Religion, as a dogma, is purer, but
subjective belief is more confused, weakened, lacking supporters,
shaken by criticism and interpretation, or transformed into fanaticism
and a hypocritical appearance of holiness, and the church? oh, its
life is schism or death. It it not so?”
For what reason then do the realists show themselves so unfriendly
toward philosophy? Because they misunderstand their own calling and
with all their might want to remain restricted instead of becoming
unrestricted! Why do they hate abstractions? Because they themselves
are abstract since they abstract from the perfection of themselves,
from the elevation to redeeming truth!
Do we want to put pedagogy into the hands of the philosophers? Nothing
less than that! They would behave themselves awkwardly enough. It
shall be entrusted only to those who are more than philosophers, who
in that respect are infinitely more even than humanists or realists.
The latter are on the right scent in that even the resurrection will
follow their decline: they abstract from philosophy in order to reach
their heaven full of purpose without it, they leap over it, and fall
in the abyss of their own emptiness; they are, like the eternal Jew,
immortal, not eternal.
Only the philosophers can die and find in death their true self; with
them the period of reformation, the era of knowledge dies. Yes, so
it is that knowledge itself must die in order to blossom forth again
in death as will; the freedom of thought, belief, and conscience,
these wonderful flowers of three centuries will sink back into the lap
of mother earth so that a new freedom, the freedom of will, will be
nourished with its most noble juices. Knowledge and its freedom were
the ideal of that time which has finally been reached on the heights
of philosophy: here the hero will build himself a pyre and will rescue
his eternal part in Mount Olympus. With philosophy, our past closes
and the philosophers are the Raphaels of the era of thought with which
the old principle perfects itself in a bright splendour of colours and
through rejuvenation is changed from transient to eternal. Henceforth,
whoever wants to preserve knowledge will lose it; he, however, who
gives it up will gain it.[Compare with Matt. 10;39 and Luke
17;33] The philosophers alone are called to this giving-up and to
this gain: they stand in front of the flaming fire and, like the dying
hero, must burn their mortal body if the immortal spirit is to be
free.
As much as possible it must be more intelligibly stated. Therein
indeed lies the ever recurring mistake of our day, that knowledge is
not brought to completion and perspicuity, that it remains a material
and formal, a positive thing, without rising to the absolute, that it
loads us down like a burden. Like the ancients, one must wish for
forgetfulness, must drink from the blessed Lethe: otherwise one does
not come to ones senses. Everything great must know how to die and
transfigure itself through its death; only the miserable accumulates
like the frozen-limbed supreme court,[10] heaps documents upon
documents, and plays for the millenia in delicate porcelain figures,
like the immortal childishness of the Chinese. Proper knowledge
perfects itself when it stops being knowledge and becomes a simple
human drive once again, the will. So, for example, he who has
deliberated for many years about his “calling as a human being,” will
sink all care and pilgrimage of seeking in one moment in the Lethe of
a simple feeling, of a drive which from that hour in which he has
found the former gradually leads him. The “calling of man” which he
was tracking down on a thousand paths and byways of research bursts as
soon as it has been recognized into the flame of ethical will and
inflames the breast of the person who is not distracted any longer
with seeking but has again become fresh and natural.
Up, bathe, pupil unweariedly,
Your earthly breast in the redness of dawn.[11]
That is the end and at the same time the immortality, the eternity of
knowledge: knowledge, which has become once again simple and direct,
sets and reveals itself anew as will in a new form and in
every action. The will is not fundamentally right, as the
practical ones would like very much to assure us; one may not pass
over the desire for knowledge in order to stand immediately in the
will, but knowledge perfects itself to will when it desensualizes
itself and creates itself as a spirit “which builds its own
body.” Therefore adhere to any education which does not terminate
in this death and this ascension of knowledge to heaven, the frailty
of this earthly life, formality and materiality, dandyism, and
materialism. A knowledge which does not refine and concentrate itself
so that it is carried away by will, or, in other words, a knowledge
which only burdens me as a belonging and possession, instead of having
gone along with me completely so that the free-moving ego, not
encumbered by any dragging possessions, passes through the world with
a fresh spirit, such a knowledge then, which has not become
personal, furnishes a poor preparation for life. One does not
want to let it come to the abstraction in which the true consecration
of all concrete knowledge is first imparted: for through it, the
material will really be killed and transformed into spirit; however,
to man is given the actual and last liberation. Only in
abstraction is freedom: the free man is only he who has won
over the bestowal and has taken together again into the unity of his
ego that which has been questioningly enticed from himself.
If it is the drive of our time, after freedom of thought is
won, to pursue it to that perfection through which it changes to
freedom of the will in order to realize the latter as the
principle of a new era, then the final goal of education can no longer
be knowledge, but the will born out of knowledge, and the
spoken expression of that for which it has to strive is: the personal
or free man. Truth itself consists in nothing other than
man’s revelation of himself, and thereto belongs the discovery of
himself, the liberation from all that is alien, the uttermost
abstraction or release from all authority, the re-won naturalness.
Such thoroughly true men are not supplied by school; if they are
nevertheless there, they are there in spite of school. This indeed
makes us masters of things at the most, also, masters of our nature;
it does not make us into free natures. No knowledge, however thorough
and extensive, no brilliance and perspicuity, no dialectic
sophistication, will preserve us from the commonness of thought and
will. It is truly not the merit of the school if we do not come out
selfish. Each sort of corresponding pride and every wind of
covetousness, eagerness for office, mechanical and servile
officiousness, hypocrisy, etc., is bound as much with extensive
knowledge as with elegant, classical education, and since this whole
instruction exercises no influence of any sort on our ethical
behaviour, it thus frequently falls to the fate of being forgotten in
the same measure as it is not used: one shakes off the dust
of the school.
And all of this because education is sought only in its formal or
material aspects, at the most, in both; not in truth, in the education
of the true man. The realists do indeed make progress when
they demand that the student should find and understand that which be
learns: Diesterweg,[12] for example, knows how to talk a great deal
about the “Principle of experience”; but the object is not the truth,
even here, but rather some sort of positive thing (as which religion
must also be considered), to which the student is led to bring into
agreement and coherence with the sum of his other positive knowledge
without raising it at all above the crude state of experience and
contemplation, and without any incentive to work further with the
mind which he has gained by contemplation and out of it to
produce, that is, to be speculative, which from a practical standpoint
implies as much as to be moral and to behave morally. On the contrary,
to educate rational people, that should be sufficient; it is not
really intended for sensible people; to understand things and
conditions, there the matter is ended, to understand oneself
does not seem to be everyman’s concern. Thus sense is promoted for the
positive whether it be according to its formal side or at the same
time according to its material side, and teaches: to reconcile oneself
to the positive. In the pedagogical as in certain other spheres
freedom is not allowed to erupt, the power of the opposition
is not allowed to put a word in edgewise: they want
submissiveness. Only a formal and material training is being
aimed at and only scholars come out of the menageries of the
humanists, only “useful citizens” out of those of the realists, both
of whom are indeed nothing but subservient people.
Our good background of recalcitrancy gets strongly suppressed and with
it the development of knowledge to free will. The result of school
life then is philistinism. Just as we found our way into and permeated
everything with which we were confronted during our childhood, so we
discover and conduct ourselves in later years, resign ourselves to the
times, become its servants and so-called good citizens. Where then
will a spirit of opposition be strengthened in place of the
subservience which has been cultivated until now, where will a
creative person be educated instead of a learning one, where does the
teacher turn into a fellow worker, where does he recognize knowledge
as turning into will, where does the free man count as a goal and not
the merely educated one? Unfortunately, only in a few places yet. The
insight must become more universal, not so that education,
civilization, the highest task of man is decided, but rather
self-application. Will education be neglected for that reason? Just as
little as we are disposed to suffer loss of freedom of thought while
we change it into freedom of will and glorify it. If man puts his
honour first in relying upon himself, knowing himself and applying
himself, thus in self-reliance, self-assertion, and freedom, he then
strives to rid himself of the ignorance which makes out of the strange
impenetrable object a barrier and hindrance to his self-knowledge. If
one awakens in men the idea of freedom then the free men will
incessantly go on to free themselves; if, on the contrary, one only
educates them, then they will at all times accommodate
themselves to circumstances in the most highly educated and
elegant manner and degenerate into subservient cringing souls.
What are our gifted and educated subjects for the most part? Scornful,
smiling slave-owners and themselves slaves.
The realists may glory in their advantage that they do not simply
educate scholars, but rational and useful citizens: indeed, their
basic principle: “one teaches everything in relation to practical
life,” could even be valid as the motto of our time if they only would
not interpret the true practice in a common sense. The true practice
is not that of making one’s way through life, and knowledge is worth
more than that one might use it up and thereby secure one’s practical
goals. Moreover, the highest practice is that a free man reveal
himself, and knowledge that knows to die is the freedom which offers
life. “The practical life!” With that, one thinks one has said a great
deal, and, still, even the animals lead a thoroughly practical life
and as soon as the mother has finished her theoretical weaning period,
they either seek their food in field and forest as they please or they
are harnessed up with a yoke for service. Scheitlin[13] with his
science of animal souls would take the comparison even much further,
into religion, as is clear from his Science of Animal Souls,
a book which for just that reason is very instructive because it
places the animal so close to civilized man and civilized
man so close to the animal. That intention “to educate for
practical life” only brings forth people of principles who
act and think according to maxims, but no principled
men; legal minds, not free ones. Quite another thing
are people whose totality of thought and action swings in continuous
movement and rejuvenation and quite another thing are such people who
are true to their convictions: the convictions themselves
remain unshaken, do not pulse as continually renewed arterial blood
through the heart, but freeze, as it were, as solid bodies and even if
won and not hammered into the head are certainly something positive
and what is more, count as something holy.
A realistic education, therefore, may well produce strong, diligent
and healthy individuals, unshakable men, true hearts; and that is
indeed a priceless gain for our fair sex; but the eternal
characters in whom constance only consists in the unremitting floods
of their hourly self-creation and who are therefore eternal because
they form themselves each moment, because they set the temporal
concerns of their actual appearance out of the never-withering or
aging freshness and creative activity of their eternal spirit they do
not result from that education. The so-called sound character is even
in the best instance only a rigid one. If it is to be a perfect one
then it must become at the same time a suffering one,
quivering and trembling in the blessed passion of an
unceasing rejuvenation and rebirth.
Thus the radii of all education run together into one centre which is
called personality. Knowledge, as scholarly and profound or
as wide and comprehensible as it may be, remains indeed only a
possession and belonging so long as it has not vanished in the
invisible point of the ego, from there to break forth all-powerfully
as will, as supersensual and incomprehensible spirit. Knowledge
experiences this transformation then, when it ceases clinging only to
objects, when it has become knowledge itself or, in case this seems
clearer, when it has become knowledge of the idea, a self-awareness of
the mind. Then it turns itself, so to speak, into the drive, the
instinct of the mind, into a subconscious knowledge which
everyone can at least imagine if he compares it with how so many and
comprehensive experiences of his own self become sublimated into the
simple feeling which one calls tact: everything of diffuse
knowledge which is pulled out of those experiences is concentrated
into immediate knowledge whereby he determines his actions in
an instant. Knowledge, however, must penetrate through to this
immateriality while it sacrifices its mortal parts and, as immortal
becomes will.
The difficulty in our education up till now lies, for the most part,
in the fact that knowledge did not refine itself into will, to
application of itself, to pure practice. The realists felt the need
and supplied it, though in a most miserable way, by cultivating
idea-less and fettered “practical men.” Most college students are
living examples of this sad turn of events. Trained in the most
excellent manner, they go on training; drilled, they continue
drilling. Every education, however, must be personal and
stemming from knowledge, it must continuously keep the essence of
knowledge in mind, namely this, that it must never be a possession,
but rather the ego itself. In a word, it is not knowledge that should
be taught, rather, the individual should come to self-development;
pedagogy should not proceed any further towards civilizing, but toward
the development of free men, sovereign characters; and therefore, the
will which up to this time has been so strongly suppressed, may no
longer be weakened. Do they not indeed weaken the will to knowledge,
then why weaken the will to will? After all, we do not hinder man’s
quest for knowledge; why should we intimidate his free will? If we
nurture the former, we should nurture the latter as well.
Childlike obstinacy and intractability have as much right as childlike
curiosity. The latter is being stimulated; so one shall also call
forth the natural strength of the will, opposition. If a
child does not learn self-awareness, then he plainly does not learn
that which is most important. They do not suppress his pride or his
frankness. My own freedom is safe from his wild spirits. If pride
turns into spite, then the child approaches me with violence; I do not
have to endure this since I am just as free as the child. Must I
however defend myself against him by using the convenient rampart of
authority? No, I oppose him with the strength of my own freedom; thus
the spite of the child will break up by itself. Whoever is a complete
person does not need to be an authority. And if frankness breaks out
into insolence, then this loses its vigour in the tender strength of a
true wife in her motherliness or in the firmness of the husband; he is
very weak who must call to authority for help and he does wrong if he
thinks to improve the impudent as soon as he makes him fearful. To
promote fear and respect; those are things that belong with the period
of the dead rococo.
What do we complain about then when we take a look at the shortcomings
of our school education of today? About the fact that our schools
still stand on the old principle, that of will-less
knowledge. The new principle is that of the will as glorification
of knowledge. Therefore no “Concordat between school and life,” but
rather school is to be life and there, as outside of it, the
self-revelation of the individual is to be the task. The universal
education of school is to be an education for freedom, not for
subservience: to be free, that is true life. The insight into
the lifelessness of humanism should have forced realism to this
knowledge. Meanwhile, one became aware in humanistic education only of
the lack of any capacity for so-called practical (bourgeois not
personal) life and turned in opposition against that simply formal
education to a material education, in the belief that by communicating
that material which is useful in social intercourse one would not only
surpass formalism, but would even satisfy the highest requirement. But
even practical education still stands far behind the personal and
free, and gives the former the skill to fight through life, thus the
latter provides the strength to strike the spark of life out of
oneself; if the former prepares to find oneself at home in a given
world, so the latter teaches to be at home with oneself. We are not
yet everything when we move as useful members of society; we are much
more able to perfect this only if we are free people, self-creating
(creating ourselves) people.
Now if the idea and impulse of modern times is free will,
then pedagogy must hover in front as the beginning and the aim of the
education of the free personality. Humanists, like realists,
still limit themselves to knowledge, and at most, they look to free
thought and make us into free thinkers by theoretical
liberation. Through knowledge, however, we become only
internally free, (a freedom moreover, that is never again to
be given up); outwardly, with all freedom of conscience and freedom of
thought, we can remain slaves and remain in subjection. And indeed,
external freedom is for knowledge just that which the inner
and true, the moral freedom, is for the will.
In this universal education, therefore, because the lowest and highest
meet together in it, we come upon the true equality of all for the
first time, the equality of free people: only freedom is
equality.
One can, if one wants a name, place the moralists above the
humanists and realists since their final goal is moral education.
Then, to be sure, the protest comes immediately that again they will
want to educate us to adhere to positive laws of morality and
basically, that this has already taken place up to the present time.
Because it has already happened up to now, therefore I am not of that
opinion, and that I want the strength of opposition to be awakened and
the self-will not to be broken, but rather to be transformed, that
could clarify the difference sufficiently. In order still to
differentiate the claim which is set forth here from the best efforts
of the realists, such a one, for example, as is expressed in the
recently published program of Diesterweg on page 36: “In the lack of
education for character lies the weakness of our schools, like the
weakness of our overall education. We do not inculcate any
convictions,” I rather say, we need from now on a personal education
(not the impressing of convictions). If one wants to call again those
who follow this principle -ists, then, in my opinion, one may call
them personalists.
Therefore, to go back to Heinsius once again, the “vigorous desire of
the nation, that the school might be more closely allied with life”
will only be fulfilled if one finds real life in full personality,
independence and freedom, since whoever strives toward this goal
relinquishes nothing of the good of humanism nor of realism, but
rather raises them both infinitely higher and ennobles them. Even the
national point of view which Heinsius takes still cannot be
praised as the right one, since that is only the personal
one. Only the free and personal man is a good citizen (realist), and
even with the lack of particular (scholarly, artistic, etc) culture, a
tasteful judge (humanist).
If my conclusion is to express in a few words which goal our time has
to steer toward, then the necessary decline of non-voluntary learning
and rise of the self-assured will which perfects itself in the
glorious sunlight of the free person may be expressed somewhat as
follows: knowledge must die and rise again as will
and create itself anew each day as a free person.
[1] Otto Friedrich Theodor Heinsius (1770–1849), philologist,
professor, and later director of the Couvent-Gris in Berlin, author of
several highly regarded grammars and dictionaries, histories of German
literature. The book cited by Stirner is Konkordat zwischen Schule
und Leben, oder Vermittelung des Humanismus und Realismus, aus
nationalistische Standpunkt betrachtet, published by Schultze in
Berlin in 1842. Also useful is his Zeitgemäße Pädagogik der
Schule: historisch und kritisch aufgefaßt für das gesammte
Schulpublikum, published in Berlin in 1844.
[2] Wilhelm-Traugott Krug (1770–1842), famous German liberal
philosopher and literary figure, successor to Immanuel Kant to the
chair of logic and metaphysics at Königsberg in 1805, and from 1809 to
1834 professor of philosophy at Leipzig. Krug suspended his academic
career to fight against Napoleon in 1813, and was subsequently
president of the Tugendbund. He was author of more than a score of
works, several of them in series of two to five volumes.
[3] Geschichte des brandenburgisch-preussischen Staates. Ein Buch
für Jedermann was published in 1842. The author, A. Zimmermann,
is a very elusive figure, and virtually nothing is known of him even
today. At one time he was confused erroneously with Wilhelm Zimmermann
(1807–1878), a prolific writer of popularly written histories, many of
which appeared in the decades of the 1840s and 1850s.
[4] Cf. Ger. rücksichtslosen, used in a special sense here,
as the opposite of contemplative, not boorish or thoughtless.
[5] Cf. Ger. Industrieller. From the context there is no
evidence that Stirner’s critique is being directed to what we would
call industrialists or manufacturers today. Perhaps the closest we can
come to his thinking here would be the term of Albert Jay Nock,
“economism”, as a description of a life devoted almost exclusively to
the production and consumption of goods for the sake of producing and
consuming, instead of for their discriminating enjoyment.
[6] Karl Ferdinand Becker (1775–1849), famous German grammarian,
student of the logic of German speech, innovator in fields of syntax
and style. His Deutsche Grammatik was published in 1829, his
Organismus der deutschen Sprache was in a second edition in
1841.
[7] Friedrich Wilhelm Josef von Schelling (1775–1854), a major figure
in German philosophy, but also a philologist of substance.
[8] Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), German philosopher and
critic of philosophers and philosophy, a disciple of Wolf and Kant and
later a critic of Kant and Hegel. At one time a professor at Jena and
later at Königsberg and Göttingen, his books, which included several
works on pedagogy and educational theory, were well known in Germany.
[9] Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781–1832), prolific writer in
the field of philosophy, and especially on the subject of theories of
learning. He was the author of nearly twenty-five books and many
smaller pieces, a number of which were published posthumously.
[10] A reference to the old supreme court of the Second German Empire,
which by Stirner’s time had been, for all practical purposes defunct
for more than a century, but which continued its formal existence
through lacking any means for enforcing its verdicts.
[11] From Goethe’s Faust, a quotation which has been
exceedingly familiar to generations of German students.
[12] Friedrich Adolf Wilhelm Diesterweg (1790–1863), formidable German
philologist and educational critic, director of the teachers college
in Berlin in 1832. He staged a fierce attack on control of education
by State and Church, and as a supporter of a program for centring
education around the child he was widely referred to as an emulator
and continuator of the Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich
Pestalozzi (1746–1827). Diesterweg, the editor of two educational
journals of considerable importance, was forced to retire in 1850
after years of bitter attacks. As in the case of Professor Krug, he
was highly regarded in France.
[13] Versuch einer vollständigen Thierseelenkunde by Peter
Scheitlin was published in Stuttgart and Tübingen in 1840.