HERBART, JOHANN FRIEDRICH. - Protestant philosopher and educationalist, b. at Oldenburg on 4 May 1776, d. at Göttingen on 14 Aug. 1841. A pupil, at the University of Jena, of Fichte, without however sharing his ideas, he was later a private tutor at Bern and Interlaken (1797-99), which gave him the opportunity to visit Pestalozzi's work at Burgdorf, returning from it full of admiration and enthusiasm. In the period 1802-1809 he was a Privatdozent, then professor of philosophy and pedagogy at Göttingen; in 1809 he succeeded Kant in the chair at Königsberg, and finally from 1833 to 1841 he taught again at Göttingen.
Herbart's name is linked to his pedagogical theories, received more or less integrally in Europe and America, and by him grounded in a philosophical system of his own, which, however, on account of its negative aspects and a certain deliberate obscurity, has left no appreciable trace.
His principal philosophical works are: Lehrbuch zur Einleitung in die Philosophie (1813; Italian trans. Bari 1908);
Lehrbuch zur Psychologie (1816); Psychologie als Wissenschaft, neu gegründet auf Erfahrung, Metaphysik und Mathematik (2 vols., 1824-25); Allgemeine Metaphysik nebst den Anfängen der philosophischen Naturlehre (2 vols., 1828-29). Pedagogy is developed principally in: Allgemeine Pädagogik aus dem Zweck der Erziehung abgeleitet (1806; Italian trans. Palermo 1915), Umriss pädagogische Vorlesungen (1835; Italian trans. ibid. 1913); Analitische Beleuchtung des Naturrechts und der Moral (1836).
For Herbart philosophy is the «elaboration of the concepts» supplied by experience; and this elaboration can proceed according to three methods: 1) to render the concepts clear and distinct (logic); 2) to eliminate the contradictions that emerge from them (metaphysics, divided, according to the object with which it deals, into psychology [the study of man], philosophy of nature [the study of the world], natural theology [the study of God and religion]); 3) to evaluate the concepts, prescinding from reality, but attending only to their value, that is, to the judgment of approval or disapproval that is formed of them (aesthetics). Aesthetics, in turn, applied to the various forms of activity, constitutes the practical sciences (music, architecture, poetry, etc.), which leave one free to occupy oneself with their objects, and ethics, which, on the contrary, imposes the duty of occupying oneself with them. Ethics, then, applied to the State, constitutes politics; applied to the individual it constitutes pedagogy.
Pedagogy is therefore founded on psychology and on ethics. The latter teaches the end that must be attained in education; the former sets out and explains the means for attaining it. In psychology Herbart, against subjective idealism, which denies all reality outside the spirit that creates it, affirms the existence of multiple real beings immutable in themselves and tending to their own conservation in the face of the others; against Kant, who admits innate forms and categories, he maintains that the soul, simple and immutable in its essence, when it begins to exist is deprived of every faculty, has no ideas, nor any activity. Coming however into contact with the real beings outside it, which tend to produce disturbances in the others, the soul is driven by the instinct of self-preservation to react and to produce acts of self-affirmation, which are the «representations». In other words, there are the perceptions that come from outside, which stimulate the soul, forcing it to form «representations»; the crowd of these maintains the same relations that the real beings, from which they derive, had before the perception; there thus arises in the soul, transformed into a battlefield, as it were a struggle, conducted according to a rigid mechanism, which can be expressed by mathematical formulae; from the struggle arise the various psychic processes that give rise to the different faculties and activities. Representations, in fact, of the same nature «fuse»; those of disparate nature draw together and form a «complex»; those of contrary nature drive one another out. Some, then, remain in the field of consciousness; others descend into the subconscious and take the form of impulses and tendencies, ready, when needed, to surface again. «Fusions» and «complexes» explain all intellectual facts: memory, imagination, abstraction, judgment, reasoning, volitions; sensibility itself is nothing but a mode of the intelligence; «desire», for example, is an idea or representation that crosses the threshold of consciousness again; «volition» is a stronger and more ardent desire, which is held to be realizable.
Ethics, according to Herbart, is entirely independent of metaphysics, therefore the law of «estimation» or of values «is autonomous». In fact ethics does not start from theoretical judgments, but from practical judgments, that is, from the evaluation of facts, which is expressed by approving or disapproving them; among these evaluations there are five, objective, universal, necessary, which impose themselves by their evidence: the idea of inner freedom (coherence between what one judges right and what one does); the idea of perfection (coordination of all efforts toward a supreme end); the idea of benevolence (disposition to conform to others); the idea of right (giving to each his own); the idea of equity (rewarding or punishing according to merit or demerit).
On these premises Herbart would wish to construct a complete system of pedagogy which in its broad schematic lines can be summarized thus: 1) The aim of every education is to form the individual considered in himself, who has as his end morality, that is, the conquest of a character that loves and follows the good, shuns evil and acts coherently with himself. 2) The indispensable means will be instruction. Character, in fact, is the fruit of volitional energy, and the will in turn is the work of representations and ideas; therefore, by increasing and organizing the representations, which is the proper office of instruction, one will cooperate in the development of the will and consequently in the formation of character. As can be seen, in the Herbartian system the protagonist of the educational work is no longer the child, but the teacher, who, following the norms supplied by Herbart, will unfailingly succeed in his intent.
Now, these norms are grouped into the three great offices of pedagogy: 1) government, which moderates and directs the multiform activity of the child with a set of occupations and prohibitions, accompanied by vigilance, authority and love. 2) Instruction, whose fundamental pivot is interest, that is, awakening in the child the desire to acquire ever new knowledge. It should be noted only that interest is of various kinds: empirical for the knowledge of sensible things and facts; speculative for the knowledge of the causes and laws that govern phenomena; aesthetic for the beautiful and the good; sympathetic for the joys and sorrows of others; social for the various societies: family, State, Church; religious for the Divinity. With the teacher he must not leave free rein to a single interest, which would degenerate into exclusivism (as would be, for example, a naturalist who attended only to plants or to one species of plant; an individual who loved only his own compatriots or the persons of his own family), but must render the pupil sensitive to all interests (many-sidedness of interesting knowledge). To avoid, however, a cumbersome accumulation of information, he must take care to compose variety in harmony; therefore to choose and order the material; to impart it to the pupil following the psychic laws (which make every doctrine and every science consist in adding new ideas to the old, so as to form an organic whole), first awakening attention to the new idea; then associating it with those already possessed, and finally deducing from it a law or a general principle; 3) moral culture, which is obtained by means of the constant use of the following means: preserving the child, accustoming him to master himself; impelling him to act, showing him the aim and the necessity of determinate actions; imprinting on his mind above all the idea of duty; keeping his soul in calm and serenity; making use of exhortation and correction, and, once the action is completed, of approval or blame.
As a crown and efficacy of these means, religious instruction is required, because it adds new force to human motives and develops the sentiment of one's own dependence on God.
EVALUATION
H. and his school have valid and stimulating pedagogical merits: having assigned to pedagogy a firm foundation in philosophy; having insisted on the psychological laws furnished by experience; invoking rational principles against all pedagogical empiricism; placing interest as the central point for the choice of subject matter and the manner of communicating it; assigning to pedagogy a most lofty aim, namely the moral formation of the pupil; the stimulus toward a broad and many-sided culture; confidence in the great power of education; enthusiasm for the vocation of teacher — these are so many claims to praise and approval. Yet there is no lack of highly contestable points: the soul, if it has no innate ideas, nevertheless has, in order to acquire ideas, the necessary powers, which therefore are not created by objects and by cognitions; the freedom of man disappears, because he is reduced simply to a machine that moves and acts according to representations originating from without, without having in himself any power to determine himself spontaneously; there is missing all the force and stimulus that can come from the supernatural side of Christianity, above all from the presence of Grace and from cooperation and the practice of the Sacraments.
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