HERBART, JOHANN FRIEDRICH. — Protestant philosopher and educator, born in Oldenburg on 4 May 1776, died in Göttingen on 14 August 1841. A student of Fichte at the University of Jena, although he did not share his ideas, he later served as a private tutor in Bern and Interlaken (1797–99), which gave him the opportunity to visit Pestalozzi’s work at Burgdorf; he returned from there full of admiration and enthusiasm. From 1802 to 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, taught once again at Göttingen.
H.’s name is linked to his pedagogical theories, which were accepted more or less integrally in Europe and America, and which he based on his own philosophical system. That system, however, because of its negative aspects and a certain deliberate obscurity, left no significant mark.
His principal philosophical works are: Lehrbuch zur Einleitung in die Philosophie (1813; Italian translation, 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). His pedagogy is developed chiefly in: Allgemeine Pädagogik aus dem Zweck der Erziehung abgeleitet (1806; Italian translation, Palermo 1915), Umriss pädagogische Vorlesungen (1835; Italian translation, ibid. 1913); Analitische Beleuchtung des Naturrechts und der Moral (1836).
For H., philosophy is the “elaboration of concepts” supplied by experience; and this elaboration may proceed according to three methods: 1) making concepts clear and distinct (logic); 2) eliminating 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], and natural theology [the study of God and religion]); 3) evaluating concepts, setting aside reality but attending only to their value, that is, to the judgment of approval or disapproval formed concerning them (aesthetics). Aesthetics, in turn, when applied to the various forms of activity, constitutes the practical sciences (music, architecture, poetry, etc.), which leave one free to concern oneself with their objects, and ethics, which instead requires one to concern oneself with them. Ethics, moreover, when applied to the State, constitutes politics; when applied to the individual, it constitutes pedagogy.
Pedagogy is therefore founded on psychology and ethics. The latter teaches the end to be attained in education; the former sets forth and explains the means of attaining II. In psychology H., opposing subjective idealism, which denies any reality outside the spirit that creates it, affirms the existence of multiple real beings, immutable in themselves and tending to preserve themselves in relation to others; opposing Kant, who admits innate forms and categories, he maintains that the soul, simple and immutable in its essence, is devoid of every faculty when it begins to exist, and possesses neither ideas nor any activity. Upon coming into contact, however, with real beings outside itself, which tend to produce disturbances in others, the soul is driven by the instinct of self-preservation to react and produce acts of self-assertion, which are “representations.” In other words, there are perceptions that come from outside and stimulate the soul, forcing it to form “representations”; the multitude of these maintains the same relations as the real beings from which they derive had before perception. There thus arises in the soul, transformed into a battlefield, something like a struggle, conducted according to a rigid mechanism that can be expressed by mathematical formulas; from this struggle arise the various psychic processes that give rise to the different faculties and activities. Representations of the same nature, in fact, “fuse”; those of disparate natures join together and form a “complex”; those of contrary natures drive one another out. Some, moreover, remain within the field of consciousness; others descend into the subconscious and take the form of impulses and tendencies, ready, when necessary, to rise again to the surface. “Fusions” and “complexes” explain all intellectual phenomena: memory, imagination, abstraction, judgment, reasoning, and volitions; sensibility itself is merely a mode of intelligence; “desire,” for example, is an idea or representation that crosses the threshold of consciousness; “volition” is a stronger and more ardent desire that is regarded as capable of being realized.
According to H., ethics is entirely independent of metaphysics; hence the law of “estimation,” or of values, “is autonomous.” Indeed, ethics does not begin from theoretical judgments, but from practical judgments, that is, from the evaluation of facts, expressed by approving or disapproving them; among these evaluations there are five that are objective, universal, and necessary, and that impose themselves through their evidence: the idea of inner freedom (consistency 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 (the disposition to conform oneself to others); the idea of right (giving each person what is his or hers); and the idea of equity (rewarding or punishing according to merit or demerit).
On these premises H. wished to construct a complete system of pedagogy which, in its broad schematic outlines, may be summarized as follows: 1) The purpose of all education is to form the individual considered in himself, whose end is morality—that is, the acquisition of a character that loves and follows the good, avoids evil, and acts consistently with itself. 2) The indispensable means will be instruction. Character, in fact, is the product of volitional energy, and the will, in turn, is the work of representations and ideas; therefore, by increasing and organizing representations, which is the proper function of instruction, one will contribute to the development of the will and consequently to the formation of character. As can be seen, in the Herbartian system the protagonist of the educational process is no longer the child but the teacher, who, by following the rules provided by H., will unfailingly achieve his purpose.
These rules, then, are grouped under the three great functions of pedagogy: 1) government, which moderates and directs the child’s manifold activity through a set of occupations and prohibitions, accompanied by supervision, 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 only be noted that interest is of various kinds: empirical, for the knowledge of sensible things and facts; speculative, for the knowledge of the causes and laws governing 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. The teacher must not give free rein to a single interest, which would degenerate into exclusiveness (as, for example, in the case of a naturalist concerned only with plants or with one species of plant; or of an individual who loves only his fellow-countrymen or the members of his own family), but must make the pupil responsive to all interests (many-sidedness of interesting knowledge). In order, however, to avoid a cumbersome accumulation of information, he must strive to compose variety into harmony; he must therefore select and arrange the material, communicating it to the pupil in accordance with psychological laws (which make every doctrine and every science consist in adding new ideas to old ones, so as to form an organic whole), first arousing attention to the new idea, then associating it with those already possessed, and finally deducing from it a law or general principle; 3) moral culture, which is attained through the constant use of the following means: preserving the child by accustoming him to self-mastery; urging him to act by showing him the purpose and necessity of particular actions; impressing upon his mind above all the idea of duty; maintaining his spirit in calmness and serenity; employing exhortation and correction, and, once the action has been performed, approval or blame.
To crown and make these means effective, religious instruction is necessary, because it adds new strength to human motives and develops the feeling of one’s dependence upon God.
ASSESSMENT. – H. and his school possess valid and stimulating pedagogical merits: assigning pedagogy a firm foundation in philosophy; insisting on the psychological laws furnished by experience; invoking rational principles against every pedagogical empiricism; placing interest at the central point in the choice of subject matter and in the manner of communicating it; assigning pedagogy a very lofty aim, namely, the moral formation of the pupil; stimulating a broad and many-sided culture; confidence in the great power of education; enthusiasm for the teacher’s vocation—these are all grounds for commendation and approval. There are, however, points that are highly open to question: although the soul has no innate ideas, it does possess the powers necessary for acquiring ideas, and these therefore are not created by objects and cognitions; human freedom disappears, because man is reduced simply to a machine that moves and acts according to representations originating from outside, without possessing within himself any power to determine himself spontaneously;
everything that can derive its force and stimulus from the supernatural dimension of Christianity is lacking, above all from the presence of Grace and from cooperation in and the practice of the Sacraments.