CHAPTER IV
REALISM AND IDEALISM IN THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE
We found it necessary in the previous chapter to pass from the abstract to the concrete in order to arrive at the truth. The universality of the individual was made clear when for the empirical concept of the individual, abstractly considered, we substituted the deeper and more speculative one of the individual himself in the concreteness of his relationships. In like manner, the fundamental antinomy of education was resolved as soon as we replaced the abstract idea of the dualism of teacher and pupil, by the idea of their intrinsic, profound, unseverable unity as it gradually works out and is actualised in the process of education. We were enabled therefore to conclude that the real teacher is within the soul of the pupil, or, better still, the teacher is the pupil himself in the dynamism of his development. So that, far from limiting the autonomy of the disciple, the master, as the propulsive element of the pupil’s spontaneity, penetrates his personality, not to suppress it, but to help its impulses and facilitate its infinite development.
The same method of resorting to the concrete now 64 leads us to the determination of a third essential element in the process of education. We have spoken of the master, and we have spoken of the pupil,—of the latter as becoming actual as universal personality, of the former as becoming identical with this same personality. We must now take up the connecting link between the two, that is, culture. By culture we mean the content of education, the presupposed heirloom which in the course of time must pass from the teacher to the pupil. This spiritual content, in being apprehended, appears under different aspects: as erudition and information; as formation of personal capacities and training of spiritual activities; as art and science; as experience of life and as concept and ideal of existence; as simple cognition and as a norm of conduct. It includes everything that comes within the scope of teaching, and from whose value education derives its peculiar worth.
Culture, so defined, may be conceived of in two ways; and in as much as their differences are highly significant in the sphere of education as elsewhere, we must now somewhat carefully consider them.
These two ways correspond to two opposite conceptions of reality, and as such they pertain to philosophy. But men in general constantly have recourse to them, and so it happens that people frequently indulge in philosophic speculations without knowing it; and much philosophising goes on outside of the schools of the 65 specialists, who are few compared to the great number of those who in their own way handle genuine concepts of philosophy.
Let us begin from the most obvious of these concepts, from the one which is fundamental and original to the human mind. Our whole life, if we consider the data of experience, seems to unfold itself on the substratum of a natural world, which therefore, far from depending on human life, represents the very condition of it. In order to live, to act, to produce, or in any way to exercise an influence on the external world, we must, first of all, be born. Our birth is the effect of a life which is not our life, which step by step rises and grows and spreads until it gathers all nature within itself. This nature existed before we were born, it will continue to be after we are all dead. Men draw their life from an organic and inorganic nature which had to exist in order that they might come into being. When nature will cease to provide these conditions, human life, according to this point of view, will come to an end; but nature, transformed, chilled, darkened, dead, will yet continue to be.
On this living trunk of nature our own life is grafted; animals come into existence, and among animals the human species. Each of us, as he comes into the world, finds this nature, developed, abundant, diversified in millions of forms, traversed by innumerable forces, organised up to the most highly developed structures, 66 man included. We find this nature, and we begin to study it. We examine its parts one by one, their complexity, and the difference of their functioning. For each one of them has its peculiar way of being and of acting; it has its “laws.” The aggregate of these laws, mutually corresponding, and integrating one another, constitutes the natural world—reality—as it stands before us. With this external reality we strive to become acquainted; and in order that we may live in it we either adapt ourselves to it, or adapt its conditions to ourselves. In this reality too we acquire the knowledge of the needs of our organism and of the means by which they may be satisfied,—the ratio, so to speak, between natural desires and controlled resources.
We are also told that our organism is in constant change and hurries on to its destination, to our death, which we abhor as passionately as we cherish life, but which we accept because such is the law of human life, fatal and inexorable; for reality is what it is, and we must adapt ourselves to it.
But if reality appears as constituted before us, as therefore conditioning our existence, and as existing independently of us; if it is indifferent to reality whether we be in it or not; if we are truly extraneous to it, the conclusion must then be drawn that we, from the outside, presume to know reality and to move about it without being this reality itself or any part of it. For 67 all reality is thought by us as a connected whole, though indeed vaguely; in its totality it is regarded as an object known to us, but existing in utter independence of this knowledge of ours. Its whole process is therefore complete in objective nature, which conditions our spiritual life, and this in turn can mirror reality but can never be a part of it.