Humanistic Critique of Education. Группа авторов
with profound tribal conscientiousness overgrown by a wilderness of superficial abstract law.
We can never sufficiently emphasize, however, that we are thinking of education as a tentative, preparatory stage in life, not as a final one. It is final only in the sense that it possesses its own kind of completeness and thus, ideally, should be recoverable at all stages in one’s life. For it develops to perfection one stage in the confronting of a problem, the stage where one steps aside as thoroughly as possible and attempts, in the spirit of absolute linguistic skepticism, to meditate upon the tangle of symbolism in which all men are by their very nature caught.
The corresponding methods of interpreting man’s entanglements have been sloganized by us elsewhere as the “socioanagogic,” since a primary aim here is to discover in what respects the objects of this world are enigmatic emblems of man’s relation to the social order (that is, in what respects they may possess for man a “symbolic” character, over and above their nature as sheer things). Since language, however manipulated by the individual user, is essentially a collective or social product, the powers of the social order will inevitably be manifested in it, quite as these powers can only be developed by the use of linguistic resources. A social philosophy, as so conceived, would be built about four orders: the verbal or linguistic; the sociopolitical; the natural; the supernatural. And we shall end this section by briefly indicating the relation we think they bear to one another.
The verbal pyramid is most clearly revealed in the design of Platonist and Neo-Platonist dialectic, the upward way from particulars to higher and higher orders of abstraction, matched by a corresponding downward way from the one to the many which are imbued with the substance of its oneness. Such resources become interwoven with whatever social order happens to prevail, or to have prevailed when the symbolic traditions were taking form. Such order has its more or less clearly defined pyramidal structure, with criteria for distinguishing the direction socially up from the direction socially down. Here we would look for the situations which gave form to the terminology for familial relationships, and to the great persecutional words that grandly sum up the principle of negativity inherent in the nature of property.
Third, there is the natural order, whether conceived along Aristotelian lines (as in the medieval concern with the “great chain of being,”) or along Darwinian lines, charting an evolutionary “descent” from “lower” kinds of entities to “higher” kinds. This is the order that, in the dramatistic terminology, is most fittingly discussed in terms of motion.
And finally, there are terms for a supernatural order, a terminology constructed after the analogy of the other three, since there can be no empirically literal vocabulary for the description of a realm that by definition transcends the conditionality of human language and human experience. That is, if the ultimate scene, or “ground of all possibility” is called a “lord,” a supernatural relationship is being named metaphorically, in terms of what is, so far as our institutions are concerned, an obsolete social relationship. And the description of God as “simple” is in accordance with certain dialectical resources that permit of progress toward an over-all “term of terms” that will sum up complexity much as the title of a novel could be said to simplify the myriad details by one word that stood for the single spirit infusing them all. And terms referring to God as a body would be borrowed from the natural order.
But there is a paradox upon which a dramatist philosophy of social motivations lays great emphasis: Whereas we are by the nature of the case compelled to see the part that the other three orders of terms play in the terminology of the supernatural order, and whereas we are familiar with the transcendentalist dialectic of a writer, say, like Emerson, who contrives to interpret the many agencies of the everyday world as all variously embodying a single supernatural purpose, it is much harder to detect the ways in which the linguistic and social orders affect our ideas of the natural order. And this is the enigma, above all others, with which dramatism, as a social philosophy, is engrossed.
By the socioanagogic emphasis in linguistic criticism, we refer to a concern with the ways in which the structure of the social and linguistic orders affects the metaphors men use for the supernatural order and colors the “empirical reality” which men think they perceive in the natural order. We believe that the natural order is profoundly infused with symbolism, “mystery,” and “divinity” of a purely secular and social sort, however transcendent its gleam may sometimes seem to be. Here, we believe, is a major source of man’s exorbitant goads and false exaltations. We believe it to be a major source of the scramble so incessantly plaguing great nations that most persons seem to take it as “the norm,” sometimes assuring us that man is “naturally predatory,” and sometimes in unconscious sacrilege interpreting such worldly struggle as an evidence of man’s “divine discontent.”
An educational policy constructed in accordance with this principle would ground its techniques in a social philosophy that looked upon such inquiry as the ultimate end of secular study. But one could not know what the actual “alignments” in such a project would be, what social forces would be for it and what against it, unless it were actually attempted on a considerable scale.
The School and the Individual
But our zeal for the negative or admonitory in education should not seem to prevail over its counterpart, the lore of “positive” appreciation. With regard to the three major aims of education as so conceived, training in skills, moral admonition, and aesthetic appreciation (note that they are secular or technical analogues of the trinitarian three: “power,” “wisdom,” and “love”): Here would be an excellent point at which to remember the claims of the third.
Skills, we might say, are like the metal of a coin. On its reverse side is stamped the negativistic, admonitory social or moral philosophy of language. But on its obverse there are markings of a wholly different sort, to signalize the realm of aesthetic delight.
In so far as the suffering of man’s hierarchal burdens is to be as growing old, the aesthetic affirming of the resources natural to such conditions is like being born anew, as with the “equations” of Goethe’s Faust. (And perhaps if we accept a pedagogically “mortifying” device that makes us theoretically old while we are still physically young, we may get “as a bonus” a compensatory device that can keep us theoretically young when we are physically old.)
When we are under the sign of appreciation, the very same things that we had considered “droopingly” can now be viewed with almost the expectant air of a young puppy, that seems always brightly ready for some astounding thing to happen. Here is our chance for an Emersonian recovery, an aesthetic “compensation.”
The negatives we would impose upon the individual (or rather, the negatives we would have him recognize as having already been imposed upon him by the combination of the social and linguistic orders, as re-enforced by the mechanical necessities of the natural order) are “collective,” bearing upon his obligations to the tribe, and to himself as member of the tribe. Here would be a secular variant of “original sin.”
But in contrast, his positive, aesthetic enjoyments can be received by him as an individual (though the public nature of the symbolic medium, through which he aesthetically receives, makes it unlikely that individual delights of this sort can be merely “solipsistic”), and the zeal with which we tell others of our enjoyments indicates how eager we are to “socialize” everything, a tendency which the social nature of language would help impose upon us, but which cannot overweigh the fact that when you enjoy the taste of a particular orange, it is being enjoyed by you and none other.
So, although the tribal negatives are uniquely translated into the decisions of each individual “conscience,” and although aesthetic enjoyment, too, has its “tribal” aspects (as with the distinctive exaltations that can affect public gatherings), we would treat the aesthetically positive under the head of “the school and the individual,” whereas the moralistically negative seems to have fitted best under the head of “school and society.”
As regards this relation between moralistic admonition and aesthetic appreciation, once you “get the idea” of the pattern, you see how readily all ethical misgivings can become transformed into aesthetic promises, thus:
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