Kai Wortmann
“The time is July 1885, the place Mount McGregor, to which the eighteenth president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, has re-tired to write his memoirs. On his deathbed, unable to speak be-cause of the throat cancer that was killing him, Grant penciled the following note to his doctor [...]: ‘The fact is I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three.‘“ (Ingoldt 2017: 71)
This story was told by Tim Ingoldt1, one of the anthropologists who cur-rently force us to think about ourselves as always in the making. “Life is not; it goes on” he writes (2017: 74) and the radicality of this proposal is – as far as I can see – far from being understood in education. Maybe it is because our field of study still owes most of its vocabulary to a humanist tradition.
Now, in recent debates about a posthumanist education (e.g., Snaza and Weaver 2014; Wimmer 2014; 2019; Herbrechter 2014; 2018; Friesen 2018;
Bojesen 2020), the question was posed whether humanism is still a useful set of thoughts for education. While I follow most of the criticisms of problematic aspects of the humanist way of speaking in education, I still argue that it is still useful – however, only highly modified. The modifica-tion I propose consists in a shift from a tradimodifica-tional humanism in the fol-lowing of Humboldt – that has a strong view about what ‘a human’ is and
1 I owe Ingold's text the first part of this text's title.
should be – to a pragmatized humanism that focuses on the relations between humans which, in line with Ingoldt's proposal, continuously shape and re-shape our lives. The argument for this shift from traditional to a pragma-tized humanism consists of six parts.
As a start, 1.), I will outline my pragmatist perspective on the question of usefulness since the question of this paper is not whether or not hu-manism is right but whether it is useful for education. From this perspective I will explore how a humanism could look like that would be productive in educational language and practice. 2.) I will argue for maintaining a descrip-tive openness regarding the questions of what is ‘human’ and what ‘the human being’ is. Educational practice should not hope for an anthropolog-ical foundation. For my undertaking of pragmatizing humanism, openness would 3.) also be required in a normative sense, that is, in relation to the questions of how ‘man’ should become, how education can make individ-uals ‘truly’ or ‘more fully’ human and contribute to a ‘humanization’ of the world. Education should not indulge in a normative meta-narration – es-pecially not if it hides its own normativity under the cloak of necessity.
This would be 4.) a matter of not succumbing to theoreticism in hu-manism, that is, of using the term's ‘-ism’ as ironically as possible. An ed-ucationally appropriate humanism would be a theoretical attitude that does not constitute itself in disparaging demarcation from practice. The prob-lem of much of what is called ‘humanistic pedagogy’ is that instead of turning to concrete people, it fully relies on pathos formulae such as ‘hu-manity’. This thought style I will call ‘theoreticistic’.
The last three points taken together suggest, 5.), that an educational humanism should be understood as radically relational. If one accepts the challenge of recognizing other people as the only relevant authority, with-out prescribing what and how they are, a radically relational humanism al-lows individuals not to be played off against society (and vice versa), but to take into account the manifold interrelationships of actors acting in ed-ucational situations. Finally, 6.), I want to point out that the proposed ver-sion of a pragmatized, postanthropological, and radically relational human-ism could be useful for education because it offers a vocabulary for defending education against all ‘higher purposes’.
A Pragmatist Perspective, or:
“The application of Humanism to epistemology”
Rejecting any instance beyond other people is a negative move. However, it is not a negating one: I do not want to claim that there is no God, no justice, no truth, and no anthropological constant of ‘man’. My proposal is a more modest one: we should not concern ourselves with such fixings in our pedagogical speech and actions.
Instead of such concerns, we can focus on the effects of the language we use. This is a distinctly pragmatist proposal. F. C. S. Schiller, the first great European pragmatist, put this very well when he described pragmatism as
“in reality only the application of Humanism to the theory of knowledge”
(Schiller 1903: xxi). If one takes this seriously, the search for an education-ally appropriate humanism cannot be about recognizing or correctly de-scribing something that others did not recognize or which they described wrongly, but rather about offering a description that changes and hopefully improves educational language and practice. However, what exactly an im-provement would consist of cannot be determined ex ante, since it is no longer an approximation to a pre-defined goal. Richard Rorty put this nicely:
“On the pragmatist view I am putting forward, what we call ‘in-creased knowledge’ should not be thought of as in‘in-creased access to the Real, but as increased ability to do things – to take part in social practices that make possible richer and fuller human lives.
This increased richness is not the effect of a magnetic attraction exerted on the human mind by the really real, nor by reason's ability to penetrate the veil of appearance. It is a relation between the hu-man present and the huhu-man past, not a relation between the huhu-man and the non-human.” (Rorty 2007: 108)
In this quote Rorty used “richer and fuller human lives” to point in the direction he wants knowledge to contribute to, however, without saying in
what it would consist in. Although this might appear as a theoretical weak-ness, it in fact is a strategic move in Rorty's pragmatist “deep humanism”
(Bernstein 2008).
Descriptive Openness, or:
Don't Tell Me What's ‘Human’!
As far as I can see, the question of what it means to be human hardly moves anyone outside of universities. Nobody has the feeling – maybe: not anymore – that their cultural, e.g., educational, practice depends on the an-swer to this question; hardly any teacher would see herself as being able to teach only with the background of a definite answer. Only in Philosophical Seminars and Institutes of Education it is sometimes claimed that without
‘anthropological foundations’ the subject cannot be taught. Defining ‘hu-man’ is said to be necessary, in order to make legitimate assumptions about the right way of dealing with humans to get a standard by which it can be measured how ‘humane’ actions, organizations, or political measures are or could become.
Such assumptions are the humanistic heritage of education, which suf-fers from being “philosophical” in Rorty's sense, while according to him we live in a “literary culture” already (2007: 91). Whereas the philosophical culture assumed that “there is a way things really are – a way humanity and the rest of the universe are and always will be, independent of any merely contingent human needs and interests” (ibid.: 93), literary culture is “always in search of novelty, rather than trying to escape from the temporal to the eternal” (ibid.: 94). In our literary culture, the question of what it means to be human is not seen as a cultural problem, but as one that is treated only by professional philosophers in depressingly grey seminar rooms.
This loss of relevance is accompanied by the increasingly greater ef-forts required to detach the ‘nature of man’ from his concrete socio-mate-rial contexts. This detachment is necessary for an anthropological founda-tion but in our literary culture it becomes clear how costly this operafounda-tion is. For example, I find it increasingly difficult to make the achievements of Historical Anthropology, however great and historically undeniable they
may have been, plausible to students of education. They are hardly able to take the philosophical concern of an anthropological foundation seriously enough to get any thrills by the move from examining ‘humanity’ to exam-ining concrete, historically situated humans. In the end I must agree with Rorty that
“this change is an advance. It represents a desirable replacement of bad questions like ‘What is Being?’, ‘What is really real?’, and ‘What is man?’ with the sensible question ‘Does anybody have any new ideas about what we human beings might manage to make of our-selves?’“ (Rorty 2007: 92)
Normative Openness, or:
Situational Justifications Only!
The theoretical figure of ‘humanity’ as the ‘historical destiny’ of the human individual or species is found in educational thinkers as different as Rous-seau, Kant, and Humboldt and even in ‘critical’ pedagogues of the 20th century such as Paulo Freire. All four of them endeavor to work out the extent to which pedagogy contributes to a fuller development of ‘human-ity’. Before Rousseau, more theologically or moralistic oriented theorists did not have this problem: According to Oelkers, Rousseau was the first to
“simply shift the path of the soul” from union with God in the course or the end of life “at its beginning” and accordingly sees the soul as “simple innocence that can only be corrupted subsequently by external influence”
(1999: 142, transl. KW).
Whereas Rousseau's pedagogy consists primarily in the protection from social reality, because both the inner and outer nature of the child guaran-tees its prosperity in its absence, since Humboldt's humanism at the latest, the need for a normative definition of the goal of education has corre-sponded with the anthropological foundation in the form of ontological claims. For it is not clear which forces are to be formed when Humboldt determines the “true end of Man” in the “highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole” (1854:
11). This need for normative meta-narratives legitimizing these activities, brought about by the – compared to Rousseau's views – increased im-portance of activity, leads almost inevitably to pathos formulae such as
‘maturity’ (Mündigkeit), which can neither be clearly determined and thus achieved by educational means nor assigned to a distinct group of people.
In addition, these unattainable objectives are characterized by a mixture of normative declarations with descriptive elements, often identified as onto-logically essential or onto-logically necessary.
The pedagogical need for normativity is also evident in the current de-bate about posthumanist education. Norm Friesen, for example, points out again that “education, its engagements, artifacts and discourses are all un-avoidably purposive and normative” (2018: no pagination). This assump-tion is also represented in the 1982 book The Aims of Educaassump-tion Restated by John White, which still is extremely influential in the English educational discourse. In contrast, in the German philosophy of education there is cur-rently widespread agreement that the outcome of an educational process (Bildungsprozess) neither can nor should be determined in advance. This con-tradiction between the German and English discussions can be resolved by translating ‘education’ not as ‘Bildung’ but as ‘Erziehung’. Normativity can-not be denied for the latter term since the metaphor of ‘pulling’ (ziehen in Erziehung) already contains a direction in which one is pulled. However, we should distinguish between the need for local, temporary, situational justi-fications of educational practices on the one hand and a normative meta-narrative that claims to provide an ultimate measure on the other hand.
The view presented by White and others that the former (concrete justifi-cations in concrete situations) rely on the latter (a foundation) seems to me nothing but a theoreticistic overestimation of oneself as educational theo-rist. An educational humanism should rather do without.
Humanism without Theoreticism, or:
Being Modest About What Theory Can Do
The label ‘humanistic education’ often refers to theories that do not focus concrete people and concrete educational activity. By devoting themselves to pathos formulae such as ‘humanity’, humans are out of their scope. This way of doing theory can be called “theoreticistic”. With Rölli, theoreticism can be understood as a “theoretical form”, “which pretends to be self-con-tained”, “remains trapped in the purely theoretical”, and is thus incapable of taking into account the contingencies of concrete situations and actions (Rölli 2014: 162–163, transl. KW). Such a suggestion could be countered by saying that a critique of theoreticism put forward in the language of theory automatically becomes entangled in a performative self-contradic-tion. But this objection would presuppose the very dualism between theory and practice that John Dewey described as
“the idea of a higher realm of fixed reality of which alone true science is possible and of an inferior world of changing things with which experience and practical matters are concerned. They [Plato and Aristotle] glorified the invariant at the expense of change, it being evident that all practical activity falls within the realm of change.“ (Dewey 1929: 16–17)
Insofar as education deals with practical activities, it must not rise above them. An educational humanism beyond theoreticism however does not mean an “apotheosis of disorientation, but only a farewell to principle”
(Marquard 1981: 17, transl. KW); not a turn away from theory, but only from theoreticistic theory. An educationally appropriate humanism would be a theoretical attitude that does not constitute itself in disparaging de-marcation from practice.
Towards a Radically Relational Humanism
Up to this point I argued that a radically relational humanism should not refer to any instances beyond other people. Pragmatist ways of speaking, described by William James as “turn towards concreteness [...], towards facts, towards action, and towards power” (James 1907: 51), can contribute to this endeavor. The turn described by James also characterizes the pro-posals of Bruno Latour, from whom we can learn what it would be like to understand ourselves radically relational. For Latour, things – and this in-cludes people – are assemblies of relations with other things that make a thing as a thing possible in the first place. The often-used metaphor of the network (‘actor-network-theory’) should not only draw attention to the re-lations between things, but also to the fact that every thing itself always already consists of a network. The radicality of my proposal of a pragmatized hu-manism that is fruitful for education, therefore, lies in a twofold relational move: committing humanism to the relations between people (and to nothing else) and recognizing the relationality of each individual (without presupposing a conception of what individuals are or should become).
Understanding even a single person as relational could allow to always reckon with other actors in her who influence, enable, or force her into being. Latour irritates our humanist understanding of “the individual”, when he casually uses it as an example for a group:
“If you still believe that groups exist ‘by themselves’, for instance
‘the individual’, just try to remember how much labor had to be done before each of you could ‘take your life into your own hands’.
How many admonitions from parents, teachers, bosses, partners, and colleagues before we learned that we had better be a group of our own (the ego)?“ (Latour 2005: 32)
This constitutive dependence on others, which may be a painful lesson for education, consists in that “[w]e can substitute one attachment for another, but we cannot move from a state of attachment to that of unattachment”
(Latour 1999: 27). Hence, the radical relational question we should follow
“is no longer a question of opposing attachment and detachment, but in-stead of good and poor attachments” (ibid.: 22), how we are bound, in which situation, with whom, how stable, etc. In short, “there is only one way of deciding the quality of these ties: to inquire of what they consist, what they do, how one is affected by them” (ibid.). Such a shift of question erodes the dualisms of general/particular and collective/individual, which unfortunately are common in education. Latour humorously writes:
“When people complain about ‘hypostasizing’ society, they should not forget that my mother-in-law is also a hypostasis […]. This is exactly what the words ‘actor’ and ‘person’ mean: no one knows how many people are simultaneously at work in any given individual […].“ (Latour 2005: 54)
The hope behind the proposal of radical relationality is that pedagogical issues would be examined differently and possibly more closely, for in-stance by investigating who and what is at work in an individual. This re-quires more than simply replacing terms suggesting stability, like ‘person’
and ‘society’, by new ones such as ‘actor’ and ‘network’: it requires to em-brace education and its individuals without a stable assumption of what the individual is made of.
Why Still Humanism?
The impression might come across the reader's mind that the pragmatized humanism I proposed is everything but humanistic. As theoreticist demar-cation, this judgement would be of no interest. However, I want to make a case for not being against humanism but instead modifying humanism so that it becomes a set of (theoretical) vocabularies contributing to today's education.
The point I want to close with is that humanism still is a powerful force against instrumentalist views of education because it relates education to humans only and – at least in the pragmatized version put forward in this text – not to
a higher good. This is a much-needed move in a time in which both eco-nomical and critical approaches to education equally instrumentalize educa-tion, the first for skills and competences needed for ‘employability’ and the second in the forms of “education for citizenship, education for social jus-tice, education for sustainability, etc.” (Hodgson, Vlieghe and Zamojski 2017: 18).
The pragmatized, post-anthropological, and radically relational human-ism I proposed could be useful for education because it offers a vocabulary for defending education against all ‘higher purposes’, let them be god, jus-tice, truth, the economy, the technological transcendence of humanity (as sometimes found in transhumanism), and even the ‘humanity’ so dearly cherished in pedagogy. These ‘higher purposes’ consist of nothing but the theoreticistic abstraction of concrete people. Instead of the “Socratic idea of self-examination and self-knowledge” we can concentrate on “becom-ing acquainted with still more ways of be“becom-ing human” (Rorty 2007: 94). In-stead of a “view from nowhere” (Nagel 1986) we can try to take diverse perspectives; we can leave the remote positions on the ontological, anthro-pological, and ethical “commander hill(s)” (Rieger-Ladich 2019: 19, transl.
KW) and instead enter the turmoil of human relations.
References
Bernstein, Richard J. (2008). ‘Richard Rorty's Deep Humanism.’ New Liter-ary History, 39, 13–27.
Bojesen, Emile (2020). Forms of Education: Rethinking Educational Experience Against and Outside the Humanist Legacy. New York: Routledge.
Dewey, John (1929). The Quest for Certainty. New York: Minton, Balch and Company.
Friesen, Norm (2018). ‘Posthumanism = Posteducation: A reply to Siân Bayne’s Posthumanism: A Navigation Aid for Educators’. On Education.
Journal for Research and Debate, 1, no pagination.
Herbrechter, Stefan (2018). ‘Posthumanism and the Ends of Education.’
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Herbrechter, Stefan (2014). ‘Posthumanistische Bildung?’, in Sven Kluge, Gerd Steffens and Ingrid Lohmann (Eds.), Jahrbuch für Pädagogik 2014:
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Hodgson, Naomi, Joris Vlieghe and Piotr Zamojski (2017). Manifesto for a
Hodgson, Naomi, Joris Vlieghe and Piotr Zamojski (2017). Manifesto for a