Kant's Conception of Pedagogy: Toward Education for Freedom

Introduction

xv Introduction In correspondence that bookends the appearance of the two editions of the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant testifies to the pedagogical, moral purpose of his entire life’s work.1 He lived and wrote during the peak of the eighteenth-century pedagogical debates whose roots stretch back to the sixteenth century and exert their influence forward into the nineteenth century. During Kant’s lifetime, pedagogical issues were at the forefront of both public and academic life. At the popular, social, and political levels, as well as in educational and philosophical circles, the eighteenth century, in the self-understanding of its participants, was a pedagogical, philosophical, and philanthropic age. Kant critically engaged the debates, and he gave his personal, public, and philosophical support to a major educational reform movement of his day, the Philanthropinismus movement. Yet, Kant has not typically been included in the great tradition of philosopher-educators; the present study seeks to rectify that. To read his critical philosophy in its historical-philosophical context, in relation to the education debates of his time, reveals the pedagogical purpose informing it at its core. Kant is in agreement with his contemporaries on the great goals of the age: the development of a moral- and civic-minded citizenry and of human freedom. His disagreement has to do both with the underlying human self-understanding and the meanings of these terms and achievements as construed by his predecessors and contemporaries. Thus, in effect, one finds a virtual fourth critique, an anthropological one, embedded within the critical philosophy.2 1. Citations to Kant’s correspondence as well as his statements within his writings will be given in the course of the discussion. 2. Recent scholarship is attending to the importance of Kant’s anthropology, both for a complete understanding of his own thought and in relation to the field of anthropology as it comes into its own by the nineteenth century. Discussion, both of the issue of the relation of the anthropology lectures to the critical philosophy and of the distinctiveness of Kant’s idea of anthropology from the empirical anthropology for which his student Herder was so influential, is found in the introductions by the editors of the editions of the xvi I N T R O D U C T I O N The precise interpretative claim of the present study is that the socalled missing critical, transcendental treatise on education is extant in Kant’s writings, namely, in the form of the Doctrines of Method (Methodenlehren , for which a more telling translation would be “Ways of Instruction ”)1 with which he concludes each of his major works: Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, Critique of Judgment (both reflective aesthetic and teleological judgments), and Metaphysics of Morals: Metaphysical Principles of Virtue. From the analysis of the Ways of Instruction, one can extrapolate articles for a constitution of a cosmopolitan education that parallels the structure of Kant’s articles for a republican constitution for perpetual peace. In other words, I here offer the interpretative counterpart to the articles for a just, free external order: the principles for a just, inner freedom. My further argument is that these principles of inner freedom constitute the transcendental condition for the possibility of genuine outer freedom. With the formal principles in place, the argument turns to the question of material principles that would fulfill the formal conditions for an education for freedom. To appreciate the importance and current relevance of the interpretation proposed— beyond a new understanding of Kant’s thought and our Enlightenment heritage—the epilogue turns to concerns about education and human life as expressed in contemporary literature. anthropology lectures that Kant gave over the entire course of his academic life. It is not at all a settled question in this scholarship as to what the relation between the lectures on anthropology and the critical philosophy is. The English translation is scheduled to appear in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. The German edition, Kant’s Vorlesungen über Anthropologie, vol. 25, 2.1 of Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, ed. Reinhard Brandt and Werner Stark, appeared in 1997 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter). See also Reinhard Brandt, Kritischer Kommentar zu Kants Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1999); John Zammito, Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Brian Jacobs and Patrick Kain, eds., Essays on Kant’s Anthropology (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2003). The argument in the present study is based...