Is it possible to educate to Freedom? Pedagogy and practical philosophy from Kant to Herbart

In our paper, we reconstruct the notions of freedom involved in Kant and Herbart’s educational theories. We analyse the various meanings of ‘freedom’ and discuss their compatibility with education and the establishment of scientific pedagogy in the 18th and 19th centuries. In our interpretation, Herbart’s functionalist notion of freedom both maintains the formal character of Kant’s morals and overcomes the sharp distinction between transcendental and empirical freedom, so as to make pedagogy possible on the basis of moral concepts. The first part of the paper focuses on Kant’s concept of freedom as it was used in his lecture notes on pedagogy. More specifically, we argue that it does not correspond to Kant’s moral concept of freedom. In fact, while the latter is a transcendental concept, the former is empirical. Kant’s pedagogy is divided into physical and practical education; in this context, it has to be specified that “all that which has reference to freedom is called practical” (Ped, AA 09: 455.06-07). However, in his lectures Kant did not refer to the principle and foundation of morality. Rather, he referred to a progressive empirical acquisition of the human capacity to act in accordance with the dictates of the moral law, grounded on transcendental freedom. Transcendental freedom is neither discussed nor further defined in this text. So far, the dating of the manuscripts employed by Rink to edit Kant’s lectures on pedagogy is unknown, just as unknown is the dating of the manuscripts themselves, which were presumably destroyed during the Second World War. Nevertheless, we know that Kant lectured on pedagogy four times: in the winter semesters 1776/77, 1783/84, and 1786/87, and in the summer semester 1780. We also know that Kant had used the Bock’s handbook since 1780. In view of this, since Rink wrote that he edited a text based on Bock’s handbook, the Kantian class notes we are referring to cannot date to 1776/77 (although we cannot exclude that Rink compared the lectures dating back to 1776/77 with the following notes). Even though Kant’s concept of transcendental freedom had already been defined in 1780, it was not used in the lecture notes on pedagogy, since Kant understood morality, moral foundation, and education as sharply different concepts, however closely they were supposed to interact. As the holder of Kant’s chair in Königsberg, Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841) pursued the foundation of scientific pedagogy within his system of realistic philosophy. Based on the fact that Herbart aimed to reform and perfect Kant’s critical enterprise, his understanding of freedom within practical philosophy and education is analysed in the second part of the paper. Herbart contended that Kant’s moral concept of freedom is inadequate to establish both practical philosophy and pedagogy. He was not alone in considering Kant’s transcendental freedom to be far too abstract and useless in order to justify values or principles of action. Yet, contrary to his coevals, he did not renounce formality, but rather tried to re-establish it within a pluralist, relational axiology. In this context, inner freedom is one of Herbart’s practical ideas, i.e. one of the ideal relationships in which objective aesthetical judgements are grounded. We highlight the relational aspects of Herbart’s formal notion of freedom and argue that they represent a step towards a functionalist theory of morals, where the idea of an absolute or unconditional foundation is overcome. Whereas Kant had to sharply distinguish between a transcendental and an empirical concept of freedom, Herbart tried to bridge this gap in a functionalist way by replacing transcendental freedom with practical ideas. This implies that moral concepts and values are considered to be models of action and that they can be used to develop an educational theory. Thus, it becomes possible to deduce the basic concepts of education from morals and to determine exact relationships between moral ends and pedagogical activity.