ANDRAGOGY

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

1. Theory and Practice

2. The School of Wisdom

3. Workers’ Council Schools

4. The School of Law

(a reprint from the “Archiv für Erwachsenenbildung”, 1925)

English translation by Raymond Huessy (1992) © 2019

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I. THEORY and PRACTICE

Schools exist primarily for children. Adult education takes place in life, not in school. School draws the next generation into the trodden paths of culture which their predecessors have worn down. An adult has to overcome this path and passion in himself, and not least the path and passion of school, in order to form his being as it ought to be finished and fulfilled, without the benefit of example or any consideration of succession or imitation. Youths are formed by school, adults are formed by life.

There is not much to object to in those dogmatic sentences. It seems these are, and must be, facts of nature, taken as they are from the “natural” ideals of man and culture. But if we compare these dogmas to actual contemporary events, this natural differentiation of education for youth and adult education turns out to be just as untrustworthy as most “natural” propositions tend to be.

That we have acquired schools for adults belongs to the most peculiar events of recent years; that implies that adults apparently do not learn so simply and effectively from life. And at the same time school reformers complain that our youth learn nothing of lasting value in the schools. It appears that at this point in time both school and adult life are wasting away and lack of formative power, so the need for complementary means makes its appearance. What life fails to deliver for adults, a school shall provide.

This need arises however for both parts of the adults’ world in the life of the nation, for practical as well as for theoretical people. I have two works before me, of which one describes an adult school arising out of free philosophy, the other a school rooted in the necessities of politics, both of which have emerged in the post-war era: Wilhelm Vollrath’s Count Keyserling and His School (Leipzig, 1923), and Richard Seidel’s Workers’ Council Schools (Berlin, 1924).

But before we turn to them, we must make ourselves aware of this opposition of politics and philosophy, practice and theory, and its role in modern life. That theory and practice are opposites is an axiom of modern times. Placing these two modes of life in opposition derives of course from Aristotle and saves the honor of the small-town Greek philosopher in the face of the overwhelming power of Philip of Macedon and his ilk. In accepting this ancient pair of twins, the modern age shows its character as an age of the rediscovery of antiquity. If the modern age stands on this axiom of the two styles of life, the practical and the theoretical, it does so because and insofar it is an age of renaissance and humanist classicism. So it is at least imaginable that as this era comes to a close, even the Aristotelian dogma might lose its naive, dogmatic validity.

Till now it has been so unshakably valid that most readers of this essay will probably ask indignantly how one can dare to question this conceptual pair. Concepts are not to be questioned; imagined pairs of opposites are indestructible in imagination. Definitions can’t be killed.

But reality can liberate itself from the dominion of certain concepts. We can step outside the forcefield of the dogmatic antithesis. For example, the tension between orthodox and heretical, Lutheran and Reformed is already so weak that it no longer leads to executions or war. The opposing poles of theory and practice, however, have determined the very construction of our cultural institutions; no area of higher life remained unsplit.

Even within the individual, practical and theoretical halves were divided against each other. Goethe as a minister of state and Goethe as artist and researcher in his first Weimar period represent this double personality in a great figure. It cannot be shown here that at the roots of his trip to Italy and the “Grecianizing” of which Tieck complained of in their famous conversation lie in this very division. If you seek the opposition in two separate persons, international intellectual history offers: Machiavelli and Descartes, Frederick the Great and Kant, Bismarck and Schopenhauer. Machiavelli lends his voice to the “principe”—the Cesare Borgia type—just as Hegel later lent his to the great Corsican. The way Descartes treats man, Man is not because he acts, but because he thinks.

The two great worlds of will and imagination were driven farther and farther apart, becoming more and more completely divided worlds, between 1500 and 1900. “German idealism” and “German Realpolitik” were a well-known pair of expressions for this gap between theory and practice in the so-called “small- German” empire. This opposition led to an outbreak of real tragedy with Bethmann-Hollweg and Ludendorff.

But this polarity of opposites is not restricted to the heights of life. More to the point, it describes a certain automatic reflex in the attitudes of humanistically educated Germans. Every day lawyers construct their opinion on theoretical foundations only to add: this solution is also the best in practice! Of course the practical considerations were clear to them and led them on throughout the theoretical exploration. But their theoretical conscience demands a separate satisfaction, strictly separated from the practical one.

In economic life you experience such things every day. A great practical man of business was asked to tell a university seminar about his experiences at his firm. He thereupon ordered his secretary to put together a pile of excerpts from all the theoretical literature and then composed a “pure”, “scientific” paper on industrial organization. Practice becomes speechless; when the practical man speaks, he speaks out of a straitjacket of theory. Theory has no hands; if the theoretician wants to act successfully and not as as “impractical idealist”, he throws all his principles overboard.

Now the two adult schools which we will now deal with each emerge from one of these two worlds. Count Keyserling’s in Darmstadt calls itself the “School of Wisdom” and is supported by a society for “free philosophy”. Here we are in the pure ether of classic humanism liberated from all practical purposes, of “free” surrender to the intellect without any less-than-ideal connections. The other type of school is the worker’s council school. Even in its name it shows its derivation from pure practice, from the constitution of modern labor. It was not free intellectual life which gave birth to it, but the necessities of the factory and its production processes. But it is precisely this obvious one-sidedness which makes them parallel after all.

In the following we will base our discussion of each on the handy orienting works of Vollrath and Seidel. For our purposes it is immaterial that in his arguments Vollrath seeks to break with the School of Wisdom and finish it off, while Seidel seeks to perform a service for the Workers’ Council Schools he describes.

We can justify our yoking these two apparently disparate structures together on the basis of two well-informed reporters, by the circumstance that in them the vita contemplativa and the vita activa of the old type, strictly divided into “Wisdom” and “Factory” (or to use scholastic terms, philosophy and politics) have both been simultaneously persuaded, in spite of their strict division and opposition, to open schools for adults.

So apparently neither of them is satisfied with their schooling in intellectual or material “life”, but feel the necessity of a form of life! So they retreat for the time being into the protected space of a school, which is always somewhat removed from life. And now something happens, and it is not immediately possible to see what it means. In any case a third element suddenly emerges between politics and philosophy, the two former millstones of adult education. Since we are dealing with adults, we would be wrong to call it something “pedagogical”. Another word is available, which trenchantly defines its difference from the pedagogical in its name. It is something new and unheard-of for adults to be taught in school instead of by spiritual or natural “life”; yes, and it is something highly questionable, hard as it is to teach an old dog new tricks. Until now we have in an intellectual sense known only the conscious misleading of adults: demagogy. But now we attempt conscious intellectual leadership: “andragogy”!

So andragogy is the name under which we can group all school-bound teaching of adults. In any case the rise of andragogy as a renunciation of both mere pedagogy and demagogy is significant.

II. THE SCHOOL OF WISDOM

The first form which seems to contain andragogy arose in Darmstadt. An officer on active duty, a court lady, an engineer, a politician, or a rabbi can enter the home of free philosophy that has been erected there. Adults enter to become wise, that is to become their true selves, to become truly grown-up. This voluntary entry, free of any external purpose, of free, well-to-do people is characteristic of Keyserling’s School of Wisdom. The opposite of this arrangement, which one must hold up next to it to clearly understand this type of school, would be a bond of internal or external duty which forced those attending into the school, some communal duty or sense of belonging—either within or outside the school—which laid down attendance as a higher call, overwhelming their own will. We will recognize therein an important problem in andragogy, how to resolve this opposition of “free will” or “force” for those attending.

Vollrath’s descriptive report, which we have cited as a printed source for the reader, approaches the problem not through the school as an institution, but through its founder’s personality. So our portrayal may contain a loophole.

Vollrath, in powerful language not always free of biting sarcasm, at first sketches a portrait of the travelling philosopher, whom he compares with the equally well-travelled Herder. He shows that the treasures of “meaning” and “interpretation” which the Count finds in the East are not so much Eastern as eternal jewels, for which jaded Western European palates and ears had become dulled. At home every teacher teaches them and every preacher preaches them. And since we hear their teaching and preaching as a child, it seems impossible that it can be from “afar”. But it is meant to be from “afar” and so reason soon wants to move on beyond it.

What Vollrath sketches, and what Keyserling is, is a particularly striking victim of our education to-date. Boys and young men are so overfed with ideal-idetic, long-coined knowledge, that on his travels the man is suddenly overwhelmed by an old nursery rhyme, only because he believes it to derive from Confucius! Precisely because in Count Keyserling’s case it is not a question of any embarrassing or nit-picking grudge against schools, the whole picture can be taken in at a glance; on the whole he lacks what first turns any culture from a husk to a fruit: the assumed succession of the next generation in the paths of the old predecessors, in this case of the preceding millennium. Here is an heir of old culture who impudently breaks its bonds because it threatens to overtire him.

Keyserling interrupts European culture; he has drawn on it, absorbed it, or received it, it’s true, but he neither can nor wishes to propagate it or continue it. He strikes; he steps out of the line of translatio cathedrae. But he does so not, like Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, by denying himself a visible podium. And he certainly does not flee the world, like the sceptic whose powers of love have been consumed, renouncing all its forms of school and tradition. Instead what tears and gives way is only the chain of the school-type represented by our idealistic universities. Keyserling wants a school, he just doesn’t want schools of the old type. He wants the dominion the head of a school can have:

It is a matter of an institution of a never-before-existing quality which pursues the one goal of offering to personalities who receive the call, the chance to embody the deepest and most living principles of life itself, to care for them and lead them into the life of the whole.”

In elaborating on this quote form Keyserling, Vollrath accuses him of not understanding the living organism which is a university. “His critique of the university shows little understanding because his knowledge is either lacking or has been set aside.” Vollrath then shows—which can only be mentioned in passing here—that in the Count’s view the church fares even worse and that with this double murder of the soul of the church and the soul of the university, Keyserling is only trying to violently make room for his “School of Wisdom”. But it is precisely because he lays violent hands on church and university from self-will and self-love, that

the Count’s goodwill will sink back into the relativism and scepticism which gave it birth. . . That is a tragedy. . . it is also his own fault, for he willfully misunderstands his position, which is a serfdom without equal. Whoever thinks only of himself, and not of his brothers in need, whoever only wants to take care of his personal life without feeling the contempt and shame heaped on him, whoever lets himself feel he is a leader without ever having served, misunderstands the commandment of the hour: to become free and resist manfully. To go on talking of understanding or of inner freedom forever is idle and pointless. Freedom has a very real meaning and the word calls out for the deed . . . So he lacks the responsibility for reality, respect for substance and respect for things as well as faith in God. Only in bond with God would a wise man be stronger than fate, for faith means: not to dissemble, least of all about oneself.

Those are hard, stern, even crushing, words on the undertaking of the School of Wisdom. Nevertheless they have some cause in what Vollrath has rightly perceived. I am independent of Vollrath and long before reading what he has written had arrived at a similar general impression of the violence of Keyserling’s beginning. But “treat each according to his deserts, and who will ‘scape the blows?” Vollrath’s execution of Keyserling in no way removes the School of Wisdom from our world as a symptom of the state of our education. It escaped Vollrath—his work bears the features of revenge—that Keyserling is only belling the cat, when he finds the university soul-less and the church deadly to the life of the mind. Has Vollrath never heard of the New Barbarians, of atheism as the giant of our time, who consumes Europe’s soul and spirit, heard nothing of the death of “God above”? Does he really believe that except for Keyserling everything is in the best possible order and that the university’s “idealism”, for example, is guiltless in our serfdom?

Just to call poison poison and weeds weeds makes easy work of the critic’s office. Deadly nightshade and foxglove can be herbs of healing for some illnesses; a phenomenon as dangerously radiant per se as the School of Wisdom must at least be a symptom, to which we should pay attention rather than minimize. The life of the spirit is one; everything is circulated and exchanged as in connected pipes. The methods of Keyserling’s undertaking are not worthy of condemnation because they are new, but only if they don’t work! But Vollrath muddles this up. That Keyserling interrupts and rearranges the traditions of European intellectual life is exactly what lends him character. So we may not blame him for the courage with which he succumbed to the impression and impulse: “it can’t go on like this”, but only for the gross errors he has shown in his choice of means. But these errors root, amazingly enough, in just that spirit of the university and idealism which Vollrath defends.

We can continue from Vollrath’s own booming final sentence: “for faith means not to dissemble, least of all about oneself.” First of all, of course, that is wrongly expressed. Faith requires much greater daring than mere self-knowledge. But what Vollrath probably meant to say is that only a person who has faith has the power not to dissemble about himself. It is very nice to take this sentence seriously, but I must beg you, not only as it applies to the victim of the latest battle. Who dissembles more about himself than today’s school knowledge and university scholarship? Who needs the “lie of life” more than the university? Today it still holds tight—as does Keyserling—to the fiction of the power of its own truthfulness. Keyserling wants “a school of awareness out of the spirit of the most extreme truthfulness.” What else does the university want? It too believes, but without the circumlocution, that it may ascribe to itself the power of operating without preconditions and out of truthfulness. It doesn’t know—and Keyserling doesn’t know—the danger in which every intellectual endeavor of a more than personal nature stands just because of its more than personal nature.

Universities, literature, art academies, research institutes, “legal persons”, the societés anonymes of intellectual life seem as such to be proof against the temptations and sins of “private” people. So one could easily think they were incapable as an entity of winding up in a state of untruth or prevarication, of infertility and rigidity. Keyserling and the wisdom of the university both believe that the natural power of the one who wants to be truthful is all he needs in order to become truthful and to achieve influence. The inside and the outside don’t agree. There are lies of circumstance! God is perverse to the perverse. It is often not even a question of the participants’ good will.

The whole framework of our study of law is mendacious to a particularly hazardous degree. And it is not the fault of those of us who are professors of jurisprudence. The better we do our job, the more we notice that completely foreign causes in the context of community life outside—the wildly exaggerated fear of exams and career and many other things—lame all our efforts and turn the healthy and spiritually powerful aspects of what we do—the lectures which should really be absorbed at leisure, for example—into their opposite.

This special example is too complicated to be elaborated on here. I don’t admit my own situation because it is particularly bad, but only to show that I by no means exclude myself from these entanglements. It is only devastating if you deny them and refuse to acknowledge them.

Whoever pretends to believe in the lack of preconditions in the social sciences exaggerates the weight of his little bit of personal morality and good behavior. It is nice, of course, not to lie consciously. But it is much worse for the mind, for truth, and for scholarship to lie without being aware of it. Conscious lies by individual subjects have very short legs and are therefore not expedient, because they are worse than crime; they are a mistake. But unconscious mendacity by corporate bodies of the intellect— — can bring states, empires, entire peoples to their doom.

So Keyserling is right to single out “truthfulness” in reacting to the diseased state of our intellectual life which all young people sense; he clearly finds a lack of truthfulness. But he also overlooks that all existing embodiments of the urge to truth had written “truthfulness” on their banner with exactly his naivete when they came into the world centuries ago, just as the word “truthfulness” still echoes through old Mommsen’s 1901 swan song (“Universität und Konfession” [University and Denomination”])[1], from beginning to end. Keyserling’s new approach has little prospect of ending anywhere different than where Plato’s, Marsilio Ficino’s, Richelieu’s, or Leibnitz’s academic life ended: in highest personal truthfulness, in institutional unreality and ambiguity!

And so Keyserling reacts to a crisis of the institutions of church and university by reintroducing their innermost principles and seeking to produce the individual, the personality, the wise man. Keyserling himself is mired in the same individualism whose poisonous effects he hopes to cure with his Eastern being-ness. He doesn’t think institutionally. He grapples bodily with the individual rather than grappling intellectually with the social forms of our time. But this is the lack of consideration for and detachment from the recipient, listener, and student, on which every idealistic school undertaking has come to grief. Education may not grapple bodily with its partner; it can only help to loose the bonds of constraining time. For the educator is himself caught up in them.

Keyserling does not differentiate between “his” truth for himself and responsible “teachable” truth for others. Without such a filter, without an intellectual self-purification from the fetters of individuality, one graduating class, one generation, can never connect to another. Unless we understand the enormous difference between truth and doctrine, we are left with the impure mixture of both, against whose inner mendacity today’s youth has rebelled. Scholasticism once sacrificed truth to doctrine; but modern scholarship sacrifices doctrine to truth. Both have had terrible results for the life of a people.

The problem of continuity, inheritance, transmission is the problem which causes our existing institutions to wither away. In plain language: the churches are empty. Economic life mocks every spiritual influence. Individuals wall themselves up each in their own worldviews. Some parents lack the courage, others the power to let their children inherit spiritual substance. Everywhere the framework of spiritual inheritance and tradition is cracking—just because or in spite of the fact that there has never in any time been so much talk about it as there is today.

And so the founder of the School of Wisdom pays tribute to the spirit of the times by trying to drive out the devil with Beelzebub, individualism with individualism, subjectivity with subjectivity, one-generational thinking with similarly flat thoughts which can at most fill half a life, the conscious second half of life.

If we ask what apparent differences in the choice of means could possibly blind him to his essential similarity with scholastic wisdom, I would point out his concern for distance. Keyserling obviously senses what we have discussed. But he replaces the distance to the listener that allows the listener’s word to ripen within him, with the distance to the teacher of wisdom that allows the teacher to be left in peace. He confuses the two types of distance—but because of a very characteristic instinct. And sociologically speaking, Keyserling is has an advantage over the university. He has adults, and the university has school-children who only appear to be adults.

In reality it is the university which first makes individuals out of youths. Keyserling can count on having already formed specimens of this species. He has in pure essence what the university can only strive to create. That is why the university increasingly remains mired in scholarship. Students neither are nor should be nor can be “personalities” while still at university. Today, when they are outwardly more self-assured than ever before, there is such an appalling lack of knowledge that one wishes they were at least being trained in a trade. That it is a trade school and at best teaches much that ought to be known, is not the fault of the university but of the youth of its students. Only with the years can knowledge become wisdom, schoolchildren become persons. Keyserling has the advantage that his students come to him with those years and in those years. So it is much easier for him to deal seriously with the structural ideals which have always supported academic life and still support it today. The School of Wisdom’s sociologically preferential position awards him a head-start, at a time in which the lack of centers for adult education is palpable. His achievement has been to urgently place once more before our eyes the old idea of personal truthfulness, the philosopher in purest essence. He sensed that the old types of school and education through life experience seem to have lost their power. But he blazes no new trails. Vollrath’s brusque indictment of Keyserling as “godless” only makes sense if one also stresses that he was right to listen to the “god of the hour”, which “charms and seduces us” into adult education.

The slogan “school” deserves his enthusiasm. The slogan “wisdom” represents his error, for it is on precisely the free philosophy that is meant by the word that modern education has foundered. Let me explain this from another point of view. The striving for personality is the leading characteristic of the modern age. You only have to have taken a look at the hundreds of volumes of “eulogies” printed in Protestant Germany since the 16th century, with their absurd songs of praise—this intellectual kindergarten of idealism’s school of intellectual “personality”—to recognize how deep this cult of the personality, heroic biographies, and monuments to every hero’s fame could eat away at the life of the people. And it is this, what has saturated and worked in everything in the centuries since the heyday of humanism, and with such dreadful consequences, that Keyserling now offers us as the new wonder drug.

It is true; we suffer from the lack of real personalities today. But it really cannot be for any lack of striving for them, in fact it is probably everyone’s striving for personality that is to blame. Personality can only exist in a world that has the time, joy, and inclination to bear with personalities and serve as their nourishing soil and contrasting background. If everyone is consumed by the urge to become a personality, this free space, this topsoil will gradually disappear. The nurture of personality is then transformed into its opposite. Personalities find no earth to root in and willingly bear them. As a result of four centuries of ever expanding, increasingly desperate striving for personality, which now grips even the last holdouts among the workers, Germany today has only individuals all of whom lack the soil they need to become personalities!

Seen from this point of view the evil which sets off Keyserling’s reaction is not a failure of men, but a failure of their environment! It appears here as the question of nourishing soil. Earlier it had been put as a question of institutions. “Objective” powers and situations are what appear crazy and unhealthy. Not the ego—as Keyserling holds—seems to need healing, but the object. So it comes as no surprise that at the same time that Keyserling, in a peculiar misunderstanding of the situation, undertook to heighten individualism in the social strata that already pursued it— nobility, grande bourgeoisie, and intellectuals—by turning them inward on themselves, that in the part of the population which had remained “material”, “soil”, and “object”, there was an opposite movement toward purely technical adult education. This is just the development that Seidel’s wonderful essay describes, and we will now turn to it. We will of course not be able to leave it at that, but will try, after separately observing the two types of school, to return to a unified statement of the problem we started with. For the question: “may there, or should there, be such a thing as andragogy?” is and can only be a unified one.

Keyserling puts the question of personality, and because of the failure of the institutions which had till now been dedicated to the development of personality, he renews an institution of personal development, without thinking that it is a last attempt, with a tool that has already become all but useless. If we assume that the old social strata, which seem to be the only ones to respond to Keyserling, can no longer be shifted out of their ancient rut of increasingly extreme individuality, at least his attempt to purify this unavoidable educational path of dross and secondary purposes profits the little world of his own students. The “Blueblood’s Community College”, as the School of Wisdom has perhaps been called, cannot achieve more than such a simplification, self-purification and clarification of its own substance, because in spite of all differences in particular, in general it deals with the aging unified layer of educated Europeans, which cannot be reshaped without destroying them. The outcome of this is a first law of all andragogy.

Wherever members of a homogenous social group whose inner attitudes are well-known and well- established, makes use of educational institutions as adults, any attempt to effect essential change in the group must end in failure. The gravitational pull that results through the reciprocal attraction of the participants in a course of study or a class, when they are already bound by a common class-situation, is enormous. For what approaches us from the outside world once we are adults does so only under the motto: Whoever is not against me, is for me. A man wants to be confirmed or combatted; he identifies with himself everything that might vaguely be construed as agreement. All party activity rests on this avalanche-like power of self-confirmation which we allow ourselves. That is also why all party activity is immune to improvement. And that is why any homogeneity among students sets narrow limits on the teacher’s art. This homogeneity—which is unmistakably characteristic of the School of Wisdom—also rules the modern type of workers’ school: the workers’ council school. But in contrast to the School of Wisdom, the workers’ council school is very clearly aware of the situation. It neither can nor tries to give “education toward personality”.

III. THE WORKERS’ COUNCIL SCHOOL

The workers’ council school is essentially concerned with educating “the” worker, not to form so-and-so-many personalities out of so-and-so-many men who are coincidentally workers. The destiny of being and having become a worker is far too serious for it to be forgotten or neglected even for a moment. These workers are the human raw material which the market, free activity and the free spirit of unfettered individuals have had at their economic disposal. The workers are the soil in which personalities set their ideas, their entrepreneurial attitudes, their gifts of invention and their speculation to work. Any attempt to educate the soil, this raw material of the proletariat, must start from the assumption of a minimum boundary, crossing which is man’s first step into intellectual self-reliance.

Wisdom is one of the last fruits of the individual’s final release from the yoke of matter. Worker education cannot attempt to offer wisdom, but only that which represents the first lifting of an erect- walking man’s head: the knowledge of law. The law by which I find my permanent place within society, the social order which stamps me as a supporter of rights and duties, awakes in me the feeling of responsibility. On the other hand where responsibility is given, the need to recognize rights also arises.The Prussian schoolmaster who supposedly won the battle of Sadowa, taught his children a great deal of religion and arithmetic. But there was and still is no mention of law in grammar schools—in any grade or level.

What European school systems understood under “intellectual” life was never more than a concern with general intellectual treasures: the Bible, the reader and Schiller’s poems in grammar school; Homer, Tasso and world history in the high schools. But this idealistic and concept-based education system had no interest whatsoever in the connections or application of the mind or better yet, in the ways the mind faced life’s events and entered into them. The Prussian constitution—had nothing at all to do with school. Even the process by which the justice or injustice of a peasant’s inheritance was established was not a matter with which anyone thought it proper to bother childish natures. In short, the school system bridled the horse at the tail end, or better, attempted to forcibly distill a Pegasus out of every work horse, out of the workman bound up in law and social order. And no pedagogue ever crossed that first boundary where the mind awakens, the threshold which leads from serfdom to freedom, through the humble understanding of law which is our birthright.

Since the middle ages the entire legal tradition has only managed to survive in the people far from and in spite of the school system. Every expansion the school system has made into society has led to a voiding of popular legal tradition. The introduction of general compulsory education in the 19th century finally wiped out the last traditions of the old peasant folkways: the forest and market gatherings, marriage contracts and old-age contracts, and the solemn annual walking of boundaries, by which, along with hair-pulling and face-slapping, young people were taught respect for the legal runes, the holy boundaries drawn into the commons. It was precisely Europe’s legal scholarship that made the members of the judicial community, versed in law, into the silent “practitioner” of the “political” unit, the state; for this practitioner, his own word no longer becomes the right word, the right word a verdict, or the legal verdict finally a legal concept, as it used to for those peasants of Welbuck [?] who only admitted the bailiff if he promised not to bring the law, but to find it among them.

With the triumph of the Enlightenment in the 19th century, the life of law and its intellectual content reached the “people” only in the idealistic “gaseous” form of politics. Law is existing order, politics the order we demand. Law is what we accept, politics is what we want. The same peasant or worker who had and has a tremendous deficit in legal knowledge compared to his grandfather, exceeded him in a political vocabulary of ideals, principles, guidelines, program points and axioms. He has become an activist, a fighter who knows his goals, where he had been a passivist, a peasant well-versed in law. So it seemed that popular education would have to provide political schooling to replace legal knowledge. And “civic education” is the concept which resulted from the pedagogues’ agreement that, since school had driven all legal tradition out of the people, it now was their duty to create a replacement for it in the form of political education for schoolchildren.

In that moment—1918—when the schools and idealism had finally struggled through to this insight, it had already become obsolete and secondary. For at that moment, the fate of the German people overtook any political interest in forms of constitution, campaign platforms and party principles: the people sentenced to forced labor for the world awakes to a deeper need. “Politics today is filth” a businessman wrote recently. He meant that idealistic political thinking which stares fixedly at Berlin, equating politics with government policy, law with state regulation, public life with the life of the State.

The workers’ councils entered every German commercial enterprise—externally viewed, mandated by law in 1920, but in reality part of the flood which washed over all European countries after the Russian revolution—and created space in which the worker daily emerged into manly responsibility, no matter how modest. As mentioned, until now this worker had been the object of legislation, human matter in the army and a labor force in the factory, and without assistance would never have been able to find a way out of this condition of silent neuter-ality into legal responsibility. The first bridge came by way of his former education, that is, in politics. The political struggle was the school of freedom, in which the neutered labor-force had maintained his intellectual uprightness as a class-conscious worker. So from 1920-22 the workers’ councils were thoroughly politically oriented.

It could not be otherwise. The proletariat had no other link to freedom and responsibility, either through its education or its life experience. However, it quickly became apparent that the political bridge was insufficient. The notions of their economic-organizational future tasks with which the workers’ councils had showered them quickly evaporated in the cold-storage chamber of daily confrontation with those above and below them. The workers’ councils turned more and more exclusively to the other side of their activity as organs of adjudication in the plant. It is understandable that in spite of this change the political backdrop of collaboration and counsel in the process of production is usually still left standing for honor’s sake. But a silent abandonment of their authority in this area had already begun in 1921. For example the legally required publication of the quarterly balance sheet to the workers’ councils was taken as a mere formality, and if it was mentioned at all, it was in half a sentence over the telephone.

It is true that Seidel still mentions the fantasy of the regional economic council (on pp. 12 and 55, for example) as it was dreamed up in that purest creation of German idealism, the Weimar constitution. But even Seidel seeks to anchor his book’s content in the workers’ councils’ other activity, in its position as an organ of labor law. Workers’ council schools proved necessary—since school and politics had not prepared people—to equip the workers’ council for its organic position. They offered the only way for the unions to achieve rapid and meaningful contact with the workers’ councils. The fate of the workers’ council schools in the last few years, their subsidies, lack of subsidies, and statistics—these are all very peculiar, and to some degree not very encouraging, things. Seidel’s essay contains nothing about all that. It researches on the other hand the principle task: What should a workers’ council school achieve? How can it achieve it? Seidel answers both questions with exceptional prudence and clarity; in every case he places the responsibility of the council members, that is, of those to be educated, in the foreground. And so his essay restricts itself completely to one problem alone: andragogy.

The immediate result is—in distinction to all usual “popular education” of “purely intellectual” type, quite surprisingly—a “certain obligation to attend classes”; the students are sent off (p. 18)! This results in “the goal of achieving the capability to pass judgement and take a position, not the finished verdict itself.” So the concrete arrangement of the material results from the learning subject himself (pp. 45 ff.) For the worker asks, “What can we do to help in this crisis?” And that sets the tone for the teaching method. The well-made academic lecture is avoided as much as possible (p. 33), and the curriculum protected from the dangers of fantasy by the underlying practical concerns (p. 31), but on the other hand it is explicitly stressed that it must always be possible to change the curriculum to address the needs of the listeners (p. 65).

The riveting heart of Seidel’s essay are two examples he gives from classes: One is an outline of a lecture on “The law of the workers’ council”. The other is a protocol of a course of study on “the development of the union movement since 1918”; as Seidel describes it, the trial lesson actually deals with the law of wage contracts.

Without attempting to smuggle something into Seidel’s sober description which is alien to its purpose, it may well be said that in the final analysis the legal problem dominates Seidel’s curriculum. National economy, sociology, management—that’s all there for honor’s sake. But all these branches of knowledge receive light, importance, meaning and value for today’s workers’ councils only insofar as they throw light on its rights and on labor law.

In practice, the workers’ council school generally seems to uncover a ravenous hunger on the part of workers to know their rights and how to defend them. They want to be equipped to prosecute a lawsuit, they want to be miniature lawyers. The awakening to responsibility happens only as an interest in the paths of adjudication, in lawsuits. Arbitration processes with all their finesse are extremely interesting to workers.

Our law students know well that material law is everything, the trial more and more an appendix to the legal system. Reality looks different: it arises with the power that must develop in a man to “tackle” or “dare” a trial. Jurisprudence takes little note of the fact that a trial is a test of strength, an investment of nerves and daring; but to the workers’ councils it is utterly immediate, just as in the oldest law of all peoples the trial and its legal forms are the most important and noteworthy things to know. You need to know about them as thoroughly as fighting with a physical weapon. In ancient times trials were spiritual battles. And the workers’ council perceives them as battles as well. The man who achieves freedom wants to preserve that freedom in battle. In every man there is a bit of the plaintiff and judge and advocate. The experiences in the workers’ council system provide an overwhelming proof: what his critiques and judgments and apercus are to an “intellectual” person, complaint and verdict are to the more sensually living person.

At first we sometimes get the impression that hair-splitting, nit-picking and legal quibbles were the unhappy fruit of the new order. And here is the point at which we can clearly discern the intellectual position of the workers’ council school in all its weakness and its dependence on an intellectual life totally unsuited for its support. What great hopes may one place in the fact that the sense for law awakes anew and is nurtured in 100,000 cells, if it is happening at the very moment that the body as a whole which until now had nurtured and supported law, the state, is powerless and torn by injustice. (Let there be no mistake—inflation is the most complete destruction of state-established law that has happened in Germany since the interregnum.)

But we lawyers, whether we establish labor law or teach it, must lower the expectation which we might otherwise rightly have of the workers’ council school. For the way we teach, the only way we can, the way we must teach, according to our own education, destroys and crushes the workers’ sense of justice all too easily. We learned that ordinary legal procedure is only open to private rights. All public rights are divorced from the ordinary judge and judicial system and since life required a replacement, the battle for public rights was shunted off into politics (campaigns, parties, and parliaments). We can only do modern political life justice if we recognize it as a threatened people’s substitute for the impoverishment of ordinary legal procedure. (Because most German jurists fail to recognize this, they mostly take a negative view of modern constitutional forms.)

Jurists of private law as we are—even if we are called “public” jurists—we thoroughly overestimate the logical character of legal principles and so the passionless manner of our deductions pushes the instincts of the layman we teach out into the desert places of pure mathematical logic. The bail lawyer who knows how to break cartel contracts and nuptial agreements down into the proper clauses, sets the tone for legal teaching today—and rightly so, under the current conditions. So the worker’s question: “What can we do to help in this crisis?” which is the real question, is neither addressed nor answered in our teaching of law.

The social responsibility which lies in every entry into the legal system, the social forces which produce every use, but particularly the too frequent and frivolous use of legal procedure, the law of the unavoidable worsening of certain legal positions when other legal positions based on opposite principles are strengthened (the relationship of government protection of workers and autonomous labor law, for example, fall under this law), all these spiritual and moral aspects of every legal activity are to some extent unrecognized, and to some extent are considered unteachable. Specialized knowledge of all kinds has rarely been as narrow as it is now, because specialization requires us to believe we should treat its individual object fundamentally as a powerless thing forcibly removed from the demonic competition of powers. Whatever we treat specially is practically removed from the dangers it faces. Even Sinzheimer’s modest attempt at sociological labor law characteristically evoked violent contradiction from the experts.

This would be relatively unimportant, if the workers’ council schools for their part had an intellectual foothold anywhere else, from which they could close the remaining loopholes. In the meantime, as far as I can tell, the workers in every European country including Russia have made a complete intellectual capitulation to the thinking and work habits of bourgeois intellectual life—just as they have to the fashions, in dress and in pleasures, of bourgeois society.

Even the homogeneity of the workers’ council school expresses itself as an accelerating momentum toward mere assimilation to the older social strata. intellectually, in particular, “the” workers as a collective personality hardly resists the spirit of bourgeois specialist knowledge, even if it is one of the reasons that his soul remains undeveloped. So the workers’ council school threatens to perpetuate even in the worker the dualism of head and heart, threatens to leave the heart empty since the sustenance which the mind is offered must be ordered from a heartless scientific kitchen. Do not underestimate the danger of this situation! It is the last bit of “soil” in society which is being consumed. It is of course also true that this “soil”, this “matter” which is the workforce has long since undergone a corresponding intellectual poisoning, a similar division of spirit and soul, through its treatment in political theory; so to some degree one can doubt that the evil has only arisen with the new workers’ council school. And we should also limit ourselves to saying that they are only fighting it to a very limited extent.

True teaching is and must be lacking, because it is borrowed, and borrowed from a world divided into theories and practices. The incest of these schools, that in them workers are only among themselves, we can only take for the second impediment to the schools’ coming to intellectual independence. But this impediment has a greater importance now than ever before. Because in our fundamentally weakened people, each individual group is incapable of regenerating the intellectual life even of its own environment. The parties, the denominations, the economic conditions, even the middle class itself and the fourth estate itself can’t manage it, let alone then the weakened whole. In spite of which, as everyone knows and anyone can see, societies, parties and churches have been exhausting themselves for the last five years, each on its own, to solve the problem of community.

Basically the law schools for the workforce and Count Keyserling’s School of Wisdom are sublimated exaggerations; here the old, there the new social strata seek their place to form men. And it is entirely characteristic of the split between “theory” and “practice” that the teacher formed the Darmstadt school centralistically, at only one place and presupposing only a few leading individuals among its students, while the workers’ council schools, on the other hand, developed out of the students’ longing and covered the land like mushrooms after the flood of national collapse.

How can we come to a clear understanding of the prospects for these law- and wisdom-schools? And what should we wish or hope for?

IV. THE SCHOOL OF LAW

Everything we have considered so far is simplified if we only place the fact of the lost war in the foreground. After a war the school system is always revised. In 1810 the War Academy was founded in Berlin—and became more important for Prussia than the Universtiy of Berlin founded at the same time. And in Paris in 1871 the famous Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques was founded.

I know that this school found an outward imitation in the German School for Policy in Berlin, but it is a question of simple imitation. We are certainly in a completely new situation after the World War, as France was in 1871, and it is just as certain that the challenge for us is a much deeper one, and much closer to the root of things, than what Hippolyte Taine describes in his advertisement of the school in Paris:

A man, who had given power of attorney to another, suddenly finds himself entangled in unholy business through the fault of his agent, and is soon half-ruined, bankrupt. The cash-box is empty, the bailiff in the house; he takes the best agent there is, far and wide, to steer him clear of the worst evils, to pay the debts, to release the seal on his door. But it is not enough. For if he isn’t a fool or a moron, he will want to profit from his experience. He will manage his own affairs in future, have his budget in his head, pursue his own law-suits, and equip himself to counsel his agents, study the Code, keep his books and read the forms himself. (Essais de Critique et d’ Histoire 134, originally “Journal des Debats”, October 17th, 1871)

Here Taine sees before him “the” Frenchman as a collective unit: the Frenchman shall learn to watch over his country’s politics from now on. He thinks strictly centralistically based on the state and in terms of the state. And there the matter rested in this school because of the division of labor in the idealistic principle of passing on knowledge. The student body presents no problem at the Ecole Libre. Taine is interested only in objective transmission of knowledge, so even the problem of teacher selection does not exist. This is where the national, liberal “nation state” was in 1871.

In our case things have progressed by a full step in the sequence of man’s ages. It is not a question of preserving our state, but of the barbarization of Europe. It is not only a question of inspecting politics in the capital, but of ordering life in all parts and places of the country. It is not a question of teaching a homogeneous student body, but of bringing a disparate population together. We too like Taine will have to openly proceed from the assumption of the lost war—and more openly than Keyserling or the workers’ council school do, since even Vollrath and Seidel neglect this viewpoint.

All adult education, if it is to achieve anything original, anything that shapes men, anything that arises from the depths of time, will have to proceed from the suffering which the lost war has brought each one of us personally and economically, from the dangers with which it threatens the Empire and people, and from the catastrophe it means for Europe.

By starting with the negative of suffering, with the disorder and openly confessed danger, such a school system would have a real magic wand to

1. unite the most deeply divided social classes in one educational undertaking.

2. move the most deeply divided specialized fields under one common aegis.

3. to take into account in the same manner the educational needs of individuals and the groups they represent and the need for selection on behalf of the people as a whole.

4. to melt down the isolated specialized teachers into one teaching community.

Schools for men, which do not give the country men, would be a luxury. Schools for men, which did not give them to the whole country, would be a danger. The school of suffering and disaster may not—like Darmstadt—give each individual the right to enter, but only those who have already found their way home into the historic circle of that suffering. It is no Ecole Libre for any “individual”. It is a School of Events, and a school for those who have undergone those events. The mere man of knowledge, the dogmatician, the professional man, the philosopher, the rationalist, all those who neither can nor will let their knowledge be changed by events, have no place in andragogy. The priest and the Levite pass by; only the Samaritan is ready to think and act afresh!

A man awakes anew to intellectual life—for the second time, so to speak, after the years of intellectual awakening as a youth—in the face of threatened dangers and suffering undergone. If the school for men wants to claim intellectual descent and educate with practically useful results—and not idealistically exaggerated ones—the school must be bound up with suffering and need. Here alone is its Patmos. What was unnatural about German idealism was that it was ashamed of its origin in the death-hour of the old Roman Empire of the German Nation (1789-1806), and instead of proceeding honestly from death and collapse, stubbornly philosophized from the life and reason of what had become historical in its restoration, and so built up our school system on the shallow optimism that “everything that is reasonable, is real”. Hegel’s excitement over the collapse of the old Empire existed, but his sketches on it stayed in his desk.

But if the worker today seeks the law and in it acquires his first adult educational property, it is because he has personal cause for complaint. And if the leading intellectual strata seek order, it is because they have cause to bewail the passing of the old order. The sufferer must now consider justice and necessity; he can no longer just learn as in the Ecole Libre. Because no teacher knows “more” than his students. He can only prepare a solution in patient meditation together with others, make the knowledge that solution requires his own, and receive the impulse to act.

And so we close the circle of our observation. For we now hold in our hands what differentiates adult education, andragogy, from the education of children on the one hand and demagogy on the other. And so we come to a unified framework of the school and educational system for youth as well as adults. The political school of contemplation we require sees its chief objective in preparing the leisure in which a man may meet a fellow-citizen of a different sort and both may find themselves compelled in the face of common danger to enter, reflect, and exchange opinions. German adult education which links itself with the collapse must reckon with time-spaces and growth-times instead of lessons and examination dates. In this it resembles life, which is always unpredictable. And so it remains as always, that school can only hope to shape adults when it becomes a part of life.

Now how is our adult education distinguished from child education? There must be a mighty difference indeed. But the difference can no longer lie, as it did in the idealistic school, in the material and “areas” of study: literature for children, politics for men. (As far as material is concerned, we will have to remove most of the Goethe and Schiller from our children’s curriculum as well, so that we do not make the poets poison to our children, and will instead through generous instruction immunize them against the press and politics.) The difference is not to be sought in the material; That was precisely the damaging and demented principle of the old school type which taught the free themes in school but left the “practical” themes, that is, the processes which change our spirits, to “life”. Now the difference is different.

It is a difference that life itself makes clear. Between the child and the man lies the dividing wall of the so-called “entry into life”, in other words, the man’s becoming a historical being, his entry into the ring of events. A child is only someone who has remained “without a destiny” like a “slumbering babe”. The so-called “historical personality” on the other hand, is the pure picture of a matured man. The individual’s or a social class’s entry into history is at the same time an entry into the chain of guilt and entanglement, of misery and suffering. These things are far removed from the child. And no school may bring them to the child prematurely; it may not anticipate his nature. All nature depends on life and the life force. A children’s school is a nature school insofar is it devoutly trusts Mother Nature and her healing power, when it can assume the child’s good nature, count on the unfolding of his good inclinations without suspicion, and without fear give the child a chance and leave him his joys.

Adult education awakes as a healing medicine after the first—inner or outer—defeat of the man or a people. It is an overcoming of oneself; it goes against nature. Schools for adults must build on the graveyard of dreams and of withered blossoms, if they mean to rescue what can be rescued. The spirit comes to them as a comforter, when the straightforward, natural, instinctual path has failed. Their educational principle is therefore the opposite. The School of Events begins—and therein it is nothing more than the renewed origin of all law—with the complaint over the loss of life with the experience of death. That is why it holds fast to what is most needed and what will meet the need. Once we have understood the spirit as “unnatural” or “supernatural”, representing as it does the reversal of natural processes, we can define youth education as natural education and adult education as intellectual education. But we must also note, that even a part of our spiritual life proceeds purely naturally, that is our natural inclinations, our national characteristics, our naive remarks and customs—all this is to be counted among our unsuffering, and so uncritical, innate substance that thrives and grows in joy.

However, “spirit” in the pregnant sense, that is, spirit at its source and spirit renewed at that source is always, consciously or unconsciously, the thought born of suffering or the resolution of a man who by that resolution becomes historical. The nations as such have no history, no more than children do, for they follow their nature and that always remains the same. But history calls men to decisions which rescue the merely national; and there we are never dealing with a naive laissez-faire attitude to a people’s natural growth, but with the often painful steps which must be taken against the unhealthy flourishing of nationalism or naturalism. The two present levels of the European world—workers and bourgeoisie—have avoided entry into maturity insofar as the latter have fallen prey to nationalism and the former to naturalism.

Nationalism frees the citizen of his social responsibility in economic life; naturalism spares the worker political responsibility in government. The frivolity with which nationalists call for war corresponds to their infatuation with the past of their people’s history. For it enables them to put a history-substitute in place of their own becoming historical in relation to the workers! The comfort which the workers feel in studying primitive people or Haeckels “natural creation story” spares them the entry into the political community of their people. F (for example, pacifism, anti-semitism, etc.). And this too confirms how “natural life” is the enemy of adult education. Adult education can only reach its goal if it means an honest entry into history and a reversal of this comfortable relaxation into their own “naturalness” on the part of both classes, bourgeoisie and workers. But this goal is: recognition of the laws of historical life, reading in the book of life, as the psalmist meant when he said: He is like a tree planted by a stream, who has his pleasure in the law of the Lord, and speaks of His law day and night...

There is much yet to be done, before the School of Law can take its place beside the philosophical school-type for youth, the idealistic university, as the central organ of all andragogy.

And yet everything depends on whether we Germans have the power to draw the conclusions commensurate with this unheard-of event which alone are capable of healing the intellectual wounds we have suffered. The philosophers still rule the roost. In the exceptional special issue of Württemberg’s community education journal, for example, the contribution by the professor of philosophy Haering is the only one which is thought out in a hopelessly idealistic and specialist manner. Haering must be named here because he claims, as the quintessence of all our experiences in the last five years, that the new tasks of adult education have not changed any of the materials or methods of knowledge. He doesn’t complain about it, he glories in it. That is to say, he condemns adult education to remain a popularizing outlet of the university.

This thesis is obviously very congenial to the old university philosophy of its own eventlessness and the eternal character of its insights; I have already attempted to refute it many times in scientific monographs: first in the reckoning with Spengler, “Der Selbstmord Europas” [“The Suicide of Europe”]; then several times in “Die Arbeitsgemeinschaft” [“The Working Community”]; and recently in the programmatic translation of it, which pleads the cause of andragogy under the title “Angewandte Seelenkunde” [“Applied Psychology”][2] (Bucher der deutschen Wirklichkeit [Books of German Reality], Darmstadt 1924). I mention them only because newly organized material in opposition to Haering is to be found in them.

For if Haering were right, the old division into Macchiavelli and Descartes, into state and intellectual life, would in fact be an eternal one. Practice and theory then have nothing to learn from each other. The death of a mighty Empire, as defined by the 9th of November, would have nothing of importance to offer scholarship. The philosopher, and with him the scientist, would then sit outside the world, thinking about it, they quite superfluous to it, and it to them. True philosophy admits that it is the death of peoples and individuals which awakens it to the spirit. Andragogy is the spiritual will matured in the school of death. The words “nature” and “spirit” no longer suffice for this opposition. For pedagogy is enlivened by all unbroken life-spirits of natural thinking, of naive feeling and national culture. Pedagogy is nevertheless a school of life and gives shapes to the unbroken life-will. Andragogy is gripped by that spirit alone which arises out of catastrophes, from beyond the grave, as the fruit of suffering which men have survived. Today we may no longer speak of “supermen” or “the supernatural”. We are dealing with something simple: with the spirit that “survives”, because it is death’s wisdom, an education in survival, so to speak.

Until now we have let our children read Sophocles and the Gospel of St. John, but have settled for newspapers ourselves. What does that mean? It means that we load our youth down with confirmation and the German essay and require of them intellectual decisions which only an adult tested in suffering should or may make. Protestantism as a church is in decline not the least because of this rape of childish nature in the confirmation creed. Children should not be cast out into darkness and confusion—woe to the orders that do it. But the hypocrisy of adults—as if they are proof against darkness and confusion, as if they were above all intellectual decisions thanks to their ideals, axioms and principles—brings on less woe over a people.

Between pedagogy and demagogy andragogy arises.

In andragogy, theory becomes practical deed, in the responsible word; in the crucible of necessity, however, practical deeds become the stuff of theory. And so the division between Aristotle and Philip, or Machiavelli and Descartes, breaks down. Even in its own time it was only an apparent division. Philip’s son Alexander did what Aristotle had taught him: that already expresses better the truth of the relation of theory and practice. But the redemption from the hell of “pure” politics and “pure” philosophy, from the hygienic dissection of the good life into correct theory and natural life, shines brightest in the church. Paul is the philosopher of the cross that Jesus lived; he himself lives what Jesus taught.

Here the School of Events is shown even more clearly in the paths of history’s laws—the school into which a higher power has thrown our people, on no initiative of its own. The decision whether we want to continue in the old division of pedagogy and demagogy is no longer ours to make. For our childish dreams are played out, and the demagogy’s seductive arts no longer serve. Dreams and arts have been smashed by a ghastly reality. We can either do nothing, which is to say, remain dead, or we can say “yes” to the School of Law and speak as men from the grave of our hopes, and so come to life once more.

Only under the new conditions of such a school can the fate which has struck our generation become historical doctrine. And without that doctrine, everything that has happened to us will all have happened in vain, for it is only doctrine that forces the generations to continue in relation to each other. Today the old doctrine shatters against the mutiny of youth, which feels that is worlds removed from its elders. Only in a school which assumes the separation of the worlds in which our different generations live, which bases its teaching on recognizing the separation of worlds which is our fate, can a doctrine develop with the power to bind old and young together again, and so reforge once more the ring of our people through the times.

1 Now in Reden und Aufsätze (1905), p. 432 ff.

2. RH: Translated into English as Practical Knowledge of the Soul (Wipf and Stock, 2015).