"Between Man and Man" by Martin Buber
Education (Rede über das Erzieherische, 1926)
An address to the Third International Educational Conference, Heidelberg, August 1925, whose subject was “The Development of the Creative Powers in the Child”
“The development of the creative powers in the child” is the
subject of this conference. As I come before you to introduce it I
must not conceal from you for a single moment the fact that of
the nine words in which it is expressed only the last three raise
no question for me.
The child, not just the individual child, individual children,
but the child, is certainly a reality. That in this hour, while we
make a beginning with the “development of creative powers”,
across the whole extent of this planet new human beings are
born who are characterized already and yet have still to be
characterized—this is a myriad of realities, but also one reality. In
every hour the human race begins. We forget this too easily in
face of the massive fact of past life, of so-called world-history,
of the fact that each child is born with a given disposition
of “world-historical” origin, that is, inherited from the riches of
the whole human race, and that he is born into a given situation
of “world-historical” origin, that is, produced from the riches of
the world’s events. This fact must not obscure the other no less
important fact that in spite of everything, in this as in every hour,
what has not been invades the structure of what is, with ten
thousand countenances, of which not one has been seen before,
with ten thousand souls still undeveloped but ready to
develop—a creative event if ever there was one, newness rising
up, primal potential might. This potentiality, streaming
unconquered, however, much of it is squandered, is the reality
child: this phenomenon of uniqueness, which is more than just
begetting and birth, this grace of beginning again and ever
again.
What greater care could we cherish or discuss than that this
grace may not henceforth be squandered as before, that the
might of newness may be preserved for renewal? Future history
is not inscribed already by the pen of a causal law on a roll which
merely awaits unrolling; its characters are stamped by the
unforeseeable decisions of future generations. The part to be
played in this by everyone alive to-day, by every adolescent and
child, is immeasurable, and immeasurable is our part if we are
educators. The deeds of the generations now approaching can
illumine the grey face of the human world or plunge it in dark-
ness. So, then, with education: if it at last rises up and exists
indeed, it will be able to strengthen the light-spreading force in
the hearts of the doers—how much it can do this cannot be
guessed, but only learned in action.
The child is a reality; education must become a reality. But
what does the “development of the creative powers” mean? Is
that the reality of education? Must education become that in
order to become a reality? Obviously those who arranged this
session and gave it its theme think this is so. They obviously
think that education has failed in its task till now because it has
aimed at something different from this development of what is
in the child, or has considered and promoted other powers in
the child than the creative. And probably they are amazed that I
question this objective, since I myself talk of the treasure of
eternal possibility and of the task of unearthing it. So I must
make clear that this treasure cannot be properly designated by
the notion of “creative powers”, nor its unearthing by the
notion of “development”.
Creation originally means only the divine summons to the life
hidden in non-being. When Johann George Hamann and his
contemporaries carried over this term metaphorically to the
human capacity to give form, they marked a supreme peak of
mankind, the genius for forming, as that in which man’s
imaging of God is authenticated in action. The metaphor has
since been broadened; there was a time (not long ago) when
“creative” meant almost the same as “of literary ability”; in face
of this lowest condition of the word it is a real promotion for it
to be understood, as it is here, quite generally as something
dwelling to some extent in all men, in all children of men, and
needing only the right cultivation. Art is then only the province
in which a faculty of production, which is common to all,
reaches completion. Everyone is elementally endowed with the
basic powers of the arts, with that of drawing, for instance, or of
music; these powers have to be developed, and the education of
the whole person is to be built up on them as on the natural
activity of the self.
We must not miss the importance of the reference which is
the starting-point of this conception. It concerns a significant
but hitherto not properly heeded phenomenon, which is cer-
tainly not given its right name here. I mean the existence of an
autonomous instinct, which cannot be derived from others,
whose appropriate name seems to me to be the “originator
instinct”. Man, the child of man, wants to make things. He does
not merely find pleasure in seeing a form arise from material
that presented itself as formless. What the child desires is its own
share in this becoming of things: it wants to be the subject of
this event of production. Nor is the instinct I am speaking of to
be confused with the so-called instinct to busyness or activity
which for that matter does not seem to me to exist at all (the
child wants to set up or destroy, handle or hit, and so on, but
never “busy himself”). What is important is that by one’s own
intensively experienced action something arises that was not
there before. A good expression of this instinct is the way chil-
dren of intellectual passion produce speech, in reality not as
something they have taken over but with the headlong powers of
utter newness: sound after sound tumbles out of them, rushing
from the vibrating throat past the trembling lips into the world’s
air, and the whole of the little vital body vibrates and trembles,
too, shaken by a bursting shower of selfhood. Or watch a boy
fashioning some crude unrecognizable instrument for himself. Is
he not astonished, terrified, at his own movement like the
mighty inventors of pre-historic times? But it is also to be
observed how even in the child’s apparently “blind” lust for
destruction his instinct of origination enters in and becomes
dominant. Sometimes he begins to tear something up, for
example, a sheet of paper, but soon he takes an interest in the
form of the pieces, and it is not long before he tries—still by
tearing—to produce definite forms.
It is important to recognize that the instinct of origination is
autonomous and not derivatory. Modern psychologists are
inclined to derive the multiform human soul from a single
primal element—the “libido”, the “will to power”, and the like.
But this is really only the generalization of certain degenerate
states in which a single instinct not merely dominates but also
spreads parasitically through the others. They begin with the
cases (in our time of inner loss of community and oppression
the innumerable cases) where such a hypertrophy breeds the
appearance of exclusiveness, they abstract rules from them, and
apply them with the whole theoretical and practical question-
ableness of such applications. In opposition to these doctrines
and methods, which impoverish the soul, we must continually
point out that human inwardness is in origin a polyphony in
which no voice can be “reduced” to another, and in which the
unity cannot be grasped analytically, but only heard in the pres-
ent harmony. One of the leading voices is the instinct of
origination.
This instinct is therefore bound to be significant for the work
of education as well. Here is an instinct which, no matter to what
power it is raised, never becomes greed, because it is not
directed to “having” but only to doing; which alone among the
instincts can grow only to passion, not to lust; which alone
among the instincts cannot lead its subject away to invade the
realm of other lives. Here is pure gesture which does not snatch
the world to itself, but expresses itself to the world. Should not
the person’s growth into form, so often dreamed of and lost, at
last succeed from this starting-point? For here this precious qual-
ity may be unfolded and worked out unimpeded. Nor does the
new experiment lack demonstration. The finest demonstration I
know, that I have just got to know, is this Children’s Choir led by
the marvellous Bakule of Prague, with which our Conference
opened. How under his leadership crippled creatures, seemingly
condemned to lifelong idleness, have been released to a life of
freely moving persons, rejoicing in their achievement, formable
and forming, who know how to shape sights and sounds in
multiform patterns and also how to sing out their risen souls
wildly and gloriously; more, how a community of achievement,
proclaimed in glance and response, has been welded together
out of dull immured solitary creatures: all this seems to prove
irrefutably not merely what fruitfulness but also what power,
streaming through the whole constitution of man, the life of
origination has.
But this very example, seen more deeply, shows us that the
decisive influence is to be ascribed not to the release of an
instinct but to the forces which meet the released instinct,
namely, the educative forces. It depends on them, on their purity
and fervour, their power of love and their discretion, into what
connexions the freed element enters and what becomes of it.
There are two forms, indispensable for the building of true
human life, to which the originative instinct, left to itself, does
not lead and cannot lead: to sharing in an undertaking and to
entering into mutuality.
An individual achievement and an undertaking are two very
different matters. To make a thing is mortal man’s pride; but to
be conditioned in a common job, with the unconscious humility
of being a part, of participation and partaking, is the true food of
earthly immortality. As soon as a man enters effectively into an
undertaking, where he discovers and practises a community of
work with other men, he ceases to follow the originative instinct
alone.
Action leading to an individual achievement is a “one-sided”
event. There is a force within the person, which goes out,
impresses itself on the material, and the achievement arises
objectively: the movement is over, it has run in one direction
from the heart’s dream into the world, and its course is finished.
No matter how directly, as being approached and claimed, as
perceiving and receiving, the artist experiences his dealings with
the idea which he faces and which awaits embodiment, so long
as he is engaged in his work spirit goes out from him and does
not enter him, he replies to the world but he does not meet it
any more. Nor can he foster mutuality with his work: even in the
legend Pygmalion is an ironical figure.
Yes; as an originator man is solitary. He stands wholly without
bonds in the echoing hall of his deeds. Nor can it help him to
leave his solitariness that his achievement is received enthusi-
astically by the many. He does not know if it is accepted, if his
sacrifice is accepted by the anonymous receiver. Only if someone
grasps his hand not as a “creator” but as a fellow-creature lost in
the world, to be his comrade or friend or lover beyond the arts,
does he have an awareness and a share of mutuality. An
education based only on the training of the instinct of origin-
ation would prepare a new human solitariness which would be
the most painful of all.
The child, in putting things together, learns much that he can
learn in no other way. In making some thing he gets to know its
possibility, its origin and structure and connexions, in a way he
cannot learn by observation. But there is something else that is
not learned in this way, and that is the viaticum of life. The being
of the world as an object is learned from within, but not its
being as a subject, its saying of I and Thou. What teaches us the
saying of Thou is not the originative instinct but the instinct for
communion.
This instinct is something greater than the believers in the
“libido” realize: it is the longing for the world to become
present to us as a person, which goes out to us as we to it,
which chooses and recognizes us as we do it, which is con-
firmed in us as we in it. The child lying with half-closed eyes,
waiting with tense soul for its mother to speak to it—the mys-
tery of its will is not directed towards enjoying (or dominat-
ing) a person, or towards doing something of its own accord;
but towards experiencing communion in face of the lonely
night, which spreads beyond the window and threatens to
invade.
But the release of powers should not be any more than a presuppo-
sition of education. In the end it is not the originative instinct
alone which is meant by the “creative powers” that are to be
“developed”. These powers stand for human spontaneity. Real
education is made possible—but is it also established?—by the
realization that youthful spontaneity must not be suppressed but
must be allowed to give what it can.
Let us take an example from the narrower sphere of the ori-
ginative instinct—from the drawing-class. The teacher of the
“compulsory” school of thought began with rules and current
patterns. Now you knew what beauty was, and you had to copy
it; and it was copied either in apathy or in despair. The teacher of
the “free” school places on the table a twig of broom, say, in an
earthenware jug, and makes the pupils draw it. Or he places it on
the table, tells the pupils to look at it, removes it, and then makes
them draw it. If the pupils are quite unsophisticated soon not a
single drawing will look like another. Now the delicate, almost
imperceptible and yet important influence begins—that of criti-
cism and instruction. The children encounter a scale of values
that, however unacademic it may be, is quite constant, a know-
ledge of good and evil that, however, individualistic it may be, is
quite unambiguous. The more unacademic this scale of values,
and the more individualistic this knowledge, the more deeply do
the children experience the encounter. In the former instance
the preliminary declaration of what alone was right made for
resignation or rebellion; but in the latter, where the pupil gains
the realization only after he has ventured far out on the way to
his achievement, his heart is drawn to reverence for the form,
and educated.
This almost imperceptible, most delicate approach, the raising
of a finger, perhaps, or a questioning glance, is the other half of
what happens in education.
Modern educational theory, which is characterized by tend-
encies to freedom, misunderstands the meaning of this other
half, just as the old theory, which was characterized by the habit
of authority, misunderstood the meaning of the first half. The
symbol of the funnel is in course of being exchanged for that of
the pump. I am reminded of the two camps in the doctrine of
evolution, current in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
the animalculists, who believed that the whole germ was present
in the spermatozoon, and the ovists who believed it was wholly
present in the ovum. The theory of the development of powers
in the child recalls, in its most extreme expressions, Swammer-
dam’s “unfolding” of the “preformed” organism. But the
growth of the spirit is no more an unfolding than that of the
body. The dispositions which would be discovered in the soul of
a new-born child—if the soul could in fact be analysed—are
nothing but capacities to receive and imagine the world. The
world engenders the person in the individual. The world, that is
the whole environment, nature and society, “educates” the
human being: it draws out his powers, and makes him grasp and
penetrate its objections. What we term education, conscious and
willed, means a selection by man of the effective world: it means to give
decisive effective power to a selection of the world which is
concentrated and manifested in the educator. The relation in
education is lifted out of the purposelessly streaming education
by all things, and is marked off as purpose. In this way, through
the educator, the world for the first time becomes the true
subject of its effect.
There was a time, there were times, where there neither was
nor needed to be any specific calling of educator or teacher.
There was a master, a philosopher or a coppersmith, whose
journeymen and apprentices lived with him and learned, by
being allowed to share in it, what he had to teach them of his
handwork or brainwork. But they also learned, without either
their or his being concerned with it, they learned, without
noticing that they did, the mystery of personal life: they received
the spirit. Such a thing must still happen to some extent, where
spirit and person exist, but it is expelled to the sphere of spiritu-
ality, of personality, and has become exceptional, it happens
only “on the heights”. Education as a purpose is bound to be
summoned. We can as little return to the state of affairs that
existed before there were schools as to that which existed before,
say, technical science. But we can and must enter into the com-
pleteness of its growth to reality, into the perfect humanization
of its reality. Our way is composed of losses that secretly become
gains. Education has lost the paradise of pure instinctiveness and
now consciously serves at the plough for the bread of life. It has
been transformed; only in this transformation has it become
visible.
Yet the master remains the model for the teacher. For if the
educator of our day has to act consciously he must nevertheless
do it “as though he did not”. That raising of the finger, that
questioning glance, are his genuine doing. Through him the
selection of the effective world reaches the pupil. He fails the
recipient when he presents this selection to him with a gesture
of interference. It must be concentrated in him; and doing out
of concentration has the appearance of rest. Interference divides
the soul in his care into an obedient part and a rebellious part.
But a hidden influence proceeding from his integrity has an
integrating force.
The world, I said, has its influence as nature and as society on
the child. He is educated by the elements, by air and light and
the life of plants and animals, and he is educated by relation-
ships. The true educator represents both; but he must be to the
child as one of the elements.
The release of powers can be only a presupposition of education,
nothing more. Put more generally, it is the nature of freedom to
provide the place, but not the foundation as well, on which true
life is raised. That is true both of inner, “moral” freedom and of
outer freedom (which consists in not being hindered or
limited). As the higher freedom, the soul’s freedom of decision,
signifies perhaps our highest moments but not a fraction of our
substance, so the lower freedom, the freedom of development,
signifies our capacity for growth but by no means our growth
itself. This latter freedom is charged with importance as the
actuality from which the work of education begins, but as its
fundamental task it becomes absurd.
There is a tendency to understand this freedom, which may
be termed evolutionary freedom, as at the opposite pole
from compulsion, from being under a compulsion. But at the
opposite pole from compulsion there stands not freedom but
communion. Compulsion is a negative reality; communion is
the positive reality; freedom is a possibility, possibility regained.
At the opposite pole of being compelled by destiny or nature or
men there does not stand being free of destiny or nature or men
but to commune and to covenant with them. To do this, it is true
that one must first have become independent; but this independ-
ence is a foot-bridge, not a dwelling-place. Freedom is the
vibrating needle, the fruitful zero. Compulsion in education
means disunion, it means humiliation and rebelliousness. Com-
munion in education is just communion, it means being opened
up and drawn in. Freedom in education is the possibility of
communion; it cannot be dispensed with and it cannot be made
use of in itself; without it nothing succeeds, but neither does
anything succeed by means of it: it is the run before the jump,
the tuning of the violin, the confirmation of that primal and
mighty potentiality which it cannot even begin to actualize.
Freedom—I love its flashing face: it flashes forth from the
darkness and dies away, but it has made the heart invulnerable. I
am devoted to it, I am always ready to join in the fight for it, for
the appearance of the flash, which lasts no longer than the eye is
able to endure it, for the vibrating of the needle that was held
down too long and was stiff. I give my left hand to the rebel and
my right to the heretic: forward! But I do not trust them. They
know how to die, but that is not enough. I love freedom, but I do
not believe in it. How could one believe in it after looking in its
face? It is the flash of a significance comprising all meanings, of a
possibility comprising all potentiality. For it we fight, again and
again, from of old, victorious and in vain.
It is easy to understand that in a time when the deterioration
of all traditional bonds has made their legitimacy questionable,
the tendency to freedom is exalted, the springboard is treated as
the goal and a functional good as substantial good. Moreover, it
is idle sentimentality to lament at great length that freedom is
made the subject of experiments. Perhaps it is fitting for this
time which has no compass that people should throw out their
lives like a plummet to discover our bearings and the course we
should set. But truly their lives! Such an experiment, when it is
carried out, is a neck-breaking venture which cannot be dis-
puted. But when it is talked about and talked around, in intel-
lectual discussions and confessions and in the mutual pros and
cons of their life’s “problems”, it is an abomination of disinte-
gration. Those who stake themselves, as individuals or as a
community, may leap and crash out into the swaying void where
senses and sense fail, or through it and beyond into some kind of
existence. But they must not make freedom into a theorem or a
programme. To become free of a bond is destiny; one carries that
like a cross, not like a cockade. Let us realize the true meaning of
being free of a bond: it means that a quite personal responsibil-
ity takes the place of one shared with many generations. Life
lived in freedom is personal responsibility or it is pathetic farce.
I have pointed out the power which alone can give a content
to empty freedom and a direction to swaying and spinning
freedom. I believe in it, I trust those devoted toit.
This fragile life between birth and death can nevertheless be a
fulfilment—if it is a dialogue. In our life and experience we are
addressed; by thought and speech and action, by producing and
by influencing we are able to answer. For the most part we do
not listen to the address, or we break into it with chatter. But if
the word comes to us and the answer proceeds from us then
human life exists, though brokenly, in the world. The kindling
of the response in that “spark” of the soul, the blazing up of the
response, which occurs time and again, to the unexpectedly
approaching speech, we term responsibility. We practise
responsibility for that realm of life allotted and entrusted to us
for which we are able to respond, that is, for which we have a
relation of deeds which may count—in all our inadequacy—as a
proper response. The extent to which a man, in the strength of
the reality of the spark, can keep a traditional bond, a law, a
direction, is the extent to which he is permitted to lean his
responsibility on something (more than this is not vouchsafed to
us, responsibility is not taken off our shoulders). As we “become
free” this leaning on something is more and more denied to
us, and our responsibility must become personal and solitary.
From this point of view education and its transformation in
the hour of the crumbling of bonds are to be understood.
It is usual to contrast the principle of the “new” education as
“Eros” with that of the “old” education as the “will to power”.
In fact the one is as little a principle of education as the other.
A principle of education, in a sense still to be clarified, can only
be a basic relation which is fulfilled in education. But Eros and
the will to power are alike passions of the soul for whose real
elaboration a place is prepared elsewhere. Education can supply
for them only an incidental realm and moreover one which sets
a limit to their elaboration; nor can this limit be infringed with-
out the realm itself being destroyed. The one can as little as the
other constitute the educational attitude.
The “old” educator, in so far as he was an educator, was not
“the man with a will to power”, but he was the bearer of assured
values which were strong in tradition. If the educator represents
the world to the pupil, the “old” educator represented particu-
larly the historical world, the past. He was the ambassador of
history to this intruder, the “child”; he carried to him, as the
Pope in the legend did to the prince of the Huns, the magic of
the spiritual forces of history; he instilled values into the child or
he drew the child into the values. The man who reduces this
encounter between the cosmos of history and its eternally new
chaos, between Zeus and Dionysos, to the formula of the
“antagonism between fathers and sons”, has never beheld it in
his spirit. Zeus the Father does not stand for a generation but for
a world, for the olympic, the formed world; the world of history
faces a particular generation, which is the world of nature
renewed again and again, always without history.
This situation of the old type of education is, however, easily
used, or misused, by the individual’s will to power, for this will
is inflated by the authority of history. The will to power
becomes convulsive and passes into fury, when the authority
begins to decay, that is, when the magical validity of tradition
disappears. Then the moment comes near when the teacher no
longer faces the pupil as an ambassador but only as an indi-
vidual, as a static atom to the whirling atom. Then no matter
how much he imagines he is acting from the fulness of the
objective spirit, in the reality of his life he is thrown back on
himself, cast on his own resources, and hence filled with long-
ing. Eros appears. And Eros finds employment in the new situ-
ation of education as the will to power did in the old situation.
But Eros is not a bearer or the ground or the principle any more
than the will to power was. He only claims to be that, in order
not to be recognized as longing, as the stranger given refuge.
And many believe it.
Nietzsche did not succeed in glorifying the will to power as
much as Plato glorified Eros. But in our concern for the creature
in this great time of concern, for both alike we have not to
consider the myths of the philosophers but the actuality of
present life. In entire opposition to any glorification we have
to see that Eros—that is, not “love”, but Eros the male and
magnificent—whatever else may belong to him, necessarily
includes this one thing, that he desires to enjoy men; and educa-
tion, the peculiar essence bearing this name which is composed
of no others, excludes precisely this desire. However mightily an
educator is possessed and inspired by Eros, if he obeys him in
the course of his educating then he stifles the growth of his
blessings. It must be one or the other: either he takes on himself
the tragedy of the person, and offers an unblemished daily
sacrifice, or the fire enters his work and consumes it.
Eros is choice, choice made from an inclination. This is pre-
cisely what education is not. The man who is loving in Eros
chooses the beloved, the modern educator finds his pupil there
before him. From this unerotic situation the greatness of the mod-
ern educator is to be seen—and most clearly when he is a
teacher. He enters the school-room for the first time, he sees
them crouching at the desks, indiscriminately flung together, the
misshapen and the well-proportioned, animal faces, empty faces,
and noble faces in indiscriminate confusion, like the presence of
the created universe; the glance of the educator accepts and
receives them all. He is assuredly no descendant of the Greek
gods, who kidnapped those they loved. But he seems to me to be
a representative of the true God. For if God “forms the light and
creates darkness”, man is able to love both—to love light in
itself, and darkness towards the light.
If this educator should ever believe that for the sake of educa-
tion he has to practise selection and arrangement, then he will
be guided by another criterion than that of inclination, however
legitimate this may be in its own sphere; he will be guided by
the recognition of values which is in his glance as an educator.
But even then his selection remains suspended, under constant
correction by the special humility of the educator for whom the
life and particular being of all his pupils is the decisive factor to
which his “hierarchic” recognition is subordinated. For in the
manifold variety of the children the variety of creation is placed
before him.
In education, then, there is a lofty asceticism: an asceticism
which rejoices in the world, for the sake of the responsibility for
a realm of life which is entrusted to us for our influence but not
our interference—either by the will to power or by Eros. The
spirit’s service of life can be truly carried out only in the system
of a reliable counterpoint—regulated by the laws of the different
forms of relation—of giving and withholding oneself, intimacy
and distance, which of course must not be controlled by reflec-
tion but must arise from the living tact of the natural and spirit-
ual man. Every form of relation in which the spirit’s service of
life is realized has its special objectivity, its structure of propor-
tions and limits which in no way resists the fervour of personal
comprehension and penetration, though it does resist any confu-
sion with the person’s own spheres. If this structure and its
resistance are not respected then a dilettantism will prevail
which claims to be aristocratic, though in reality it is unsteady
and feverish: to provide it with the most sacred names and atti-
tudes will not help it past its inevitable consequence of disinte-
gration. Consider, for example, the relation of doctor and
patient. It is essential that this should be a real human relation
experienced with the spirit by the one who is addressed; but as
soon as the helper is touched by the desire—in however subtle a
form—to dominate or to enjoy his patient, or to treat the latter’s
wish to be dominated or enjoyed by him other than as a wrong
condition needing to be cured, the danger of a falsification
arises, beside which all quackery appears peripheral.
The objectively ascetic character of the sphere of education must
not, however, be misunderstood as being so separated from the
instinct to power and from Eros that no bridge can be flung from
them to it. I have already pointed out how very significant Eros
can be to the educator without corroding his work. What mat-
ters here is the threshold and the transformation which takes
place on it. It is not the church alone which has a testing thresh-
old on which a man is transformed or becomes a lie. But in
order to be able to carry out this ever renewed transition from
sphere to sphere he must have carried it out once in a decisive
fashion and taken up in himself the essence of education. How
does this happen? There is an elemental experience which shat-
ters at least the assurance of the erotic as well as the cratetic man,
but sometimes does more, forcing its way at white-heat into the
heart of the instinct and remoulding it. A reversal of the single
instinct takes place, which does not eliminate it but reverses its
system of direction. Such a reversal can be effected by the elem-
ental experience with which the real process of education begins
and on which it is based. I call it experiencing the other side.
A man belabours another, who remains quite still. Then let us
assume that the striker suddenly receives in his soul the blow
which he strikes: the same blow; that he receives it as the other
who remains still. For the space of a moment he experiences the
situation from the other side. Reality imposes itself on him.
What will he do? Either he will overwhelm the voice of the soul,
or his impulse will be reversed.
A man caresses a woman, who lets herself be caressed. Then
let us assume that he feels the contact from two sides—with the
palm of his hand still, and also with the woman’s skin. The
twofold nature of the gesture, as one that takes place between
two persons, thrills through the depth of enjoyment in his heart
and stirs it. If he does not deafen his heart he will have—not to
renounce the enjoyment but—to love.
I do not in the least mean that the man who has had such an
experience would from then on have this two-sided sensation in
every such meeting—that would perhaps destroy his instinct.
But the one extreme experience makes the other person present
to him for all time. A transfusion has taken place after which a
mere elaboration of subjectivity is never again possible or
tolerable to him.
Only an inclusive power is able to take the lead; only an inclu-
sive Eros is love. Inclusiveness is the complete realization of the
submissive person, the desired person, the “partner”, not by
the fancy but by the actuality of the being.
It would be wrong to identify what is meant here with the
familiar but not very significant term “empathy”. Empathy
means, if anything, to glide with one’s own feeling into the
dynamic structure of an object, a pillar or a crystal or the branch
of a tree, or even of an animal or a man, and as it were to trace it
from within, understanding the formation and motoriality of
the object with the perceptions of one’s own muscles; it means
to “transpose” oneself over there and in there. Thus it means the
exclusion of one’s own concreteness, the extinguishing of the
actual situation of life, the absorption in pure æstheticism of the
reality in which one participates. Inclusion is the opposite of
this. It is the extension of one’s own concreteness, the fulfilment
of the actual situation of life, the complete presence of the reality
in which one participates. Its elements are, first, a relation, of no
matter what kind, between two persons, second, an event
experienced by them in common, in which at least one of them
actively participates, and, third, the fact that this one person,
without forfeiting anything of the felt reality of his activity, at
the same time lives through the common event from the
standpoint of the other.
A relation between persons that is characterized in more
or less degree by the element of inclusion may be termed a
dialogical relation.
A dialogical relation will show itself also in genuine conversa-
tion, but it is not composed of this. Not only is the shared silence
of two such persons a dialogue, but also their dialogical life
continues, even when they are separated in space, as the con-
tinual potential presence of the one to the other, as an
unexpressed intercourse. On the other hand, all conversation
derives its genuineness only from the consciousness of the ele-
ment of inclusion—even if this appears only abstractly as an
“acknowledgement” of the actual being of the partner in the
conversation; but this acknowledgement can be real and effect-
ive only when it springs from an experience of inclusion, of the
other side.
The reversal of the will to power and of Eros means that
relations characterized by these are made dialogical. For that
very reason it means that the instinct enters into communion
with the fellow-man and into responsibility for him as an
allotted and entrusted realm of life.
The element of inclusion, with whose recognition this clarifi-
cation begins, is the same as that which constitutes the relation
in education.
The relation in education is one of pure dialogue.
I have referred to the child, lying with half-closed eyes wait-
ing for his mother to speak to him. But many children do not
need to wait, for they know that they are unceasingly addressed
in a dialogue which never breaks off. In face of the lonely night
which threatens to invade, they lie preserved and guarded,
invulnerable, clad in the silver mail of trust.
Trust, trust in the world, because this human being exists—
that is the most inward achievement of the relation in education.
Because this human being exists, meaninglessness, however hard
pressed you are by it, cannot be the real truth. Because this
human being exists, in the darkness the light lies hidden, in fear
salvation, and in the callousness of one’s fellow-men the great
Love.
Because this human being exists: therefore he must be
really there, really facing the child, not merely there in spirit.
He may not let himself be represented by a phantom: the
death of the phantom would be a catastrophe for the child’s
pristine soul. He need possess none of the perfections which
the child may dream he possesses; but he must be really there.
In order to be and to remain truly present to the child he
must have gathered the child’s presence into his own store as
one of the bearers of his communion with the world, one of
the focuses of his responsibilities for the world. Of course he
cannot be continually concerned with the child, either in
thought or in deed, nor ought he to be. But if he has really
gathered the child into his life then that subterranean dialogic,
that steady potential presence of the one to the other is
established and endures. Then there is reality between them, there
is mutuality.
But this mutuality—that is what constitutes the peculiar
nature of the relation in education—cannot be one of inclusion,
although the true relation of the educator to the pupil is based
on inclusion. No other relation draws its inner life like this one
from the element of inclusion, but no other is in that regard like
this, completely directed to one-sidedness, so that if it loses
one-sidedness it loses essence.
We may distinguish three chief forms of the dialogical
relation.
The first rests on an abstract but mutual experience of
inclusion.
The clearest example of this is a disputation between two
men, thoroughly different in nature and outlook and calling,
where in an instant—as by the action of a messenger as
anonymous as he is invisible—it happens that each is aware of
the other’s full legitimacy, wearing the insignia of necessity and
of meaning. What an illumination! The truth, the strength of
conviction, the “standpoint”, or rather the circle of movement,
of each of them, is in no way reduced by this. There is no
“relativizing”, but we may say that, in the sign of the limit, the
essence of mortal recognition, fraught with primal destiny, is
manifested to us. To recognize means for us creatures the fulfil-
ment by each of us, in truth and responsibility, of his own
relation to the Present Being, through our receiving all that is
manifested of it and incorporating it into our own being, with
all our force, faithfully, and open to the world and the spirit. In
this way living truth arises and endures. We have become aware
that it is with the other as with ourselves, and that what rules
over us both is not a truth of recognition but the truth-of-
existence and the existence-of-truth of the Present Being. In this
way we have become able to acknowledge.
I have called this form abstract, not as though its basic
experience lacked immediacy, but because it is related to man
only as a spiritual person and is bound to leave out the full reality
of his being and life. The other two forms proceed from the
inclusion of this full reality.
Of these the first, the relation of education, is based on a
concrete but one-sided experience of inclusion.
If education means to let a selection of the world affect a
person through the medium of another person, then the one
through whom this takes place, rather, who makes it take place
through himself, is caught in a strange paradox. What is other-
wise found only as grace, inlaid in the folds of life—the influ-
encing of the lives of others with one’s own life—becomes here
a function and a law. But since the educator has to such an extent
replaced the master, the danger has arisen that the new phenom-
enon, the will to educate, may degenerate into arbitrariness, and
that the educator may carry out his selection and his influence
from himself and his idea of the pupil, not from the pupil’s own
reality. One only needs to read, say, the accounts of Pestalozzi’s
teaching method to see how easily, even with the noblest
teachers, arbitrary self-will is mixed up with will. This is almost
always due to an interruption or a temporary flagging of the act
of inclusion, which is not merely regulative for the realm of
education, as for other realms, but is actually constitutive; so that
the realm of education acquires its true and proper force from
the constant return of this act and the constantly renewed con-
nexion with it. The man whose calling it is to influence the
being of persons that can be determined, must experience this
action of his (however much it may have assumed the form of
non-action) ever anew from the other side. Without the action
of his spirit being in any way weakened he must at the same time
be over there, on the surface of that other spirit which is being
acted upon—and not of some conceptual, contrived spirit, but
all the time the wholly concrete spirit of this individual and
unique being who is living and confronting him, and who
stands with him in the common situation of “educating” and
“being educated” (which is indeed one situation, only the other
is at the other end of it). It is not enough for him to imagine the
child’s individuality, nor to experience him directly as a spiritual
person and then to acknowledge him. Only when he catches
himself “from over there”, and feels how it affects one, how it
affects this other human being, does he recognize the real limit,
baptize his self-will in Reality and make it true will, and renew
his paradoxical legitimacy. He is of all men the one for whom
inclusion may and should change from an alarming and edifying
event into an atmosphere.
But however intense the mutuality of giving and taking with
which he is bound to his pupil, inclusion cannot be mutual in
this case. He experiences the pupil’s being educated, but the
pupil cannot experience the educating of the educator. The edu-
cator stands at both ends of the common situation, the pupil
only at one end. In the moment when the pupil is able to throw
himself across and experience from over there, the educative
relation would be burst asunder, or change into friendship.
We call friendship the third form of the dialogical relation,
which is based on a concrete and mutual experience of
inclusion. It is the true inclusion of one another by human souls.
The educator who practises the experience of the other side and
stands firm in it, experiences two things together, first that he is
limited by otherness, and second that he receives grace by being
bound to the other. He feels from “over there” the acceptance
and the rejection of what is approaching (that is, approaching
from himself, the educator)—of course often only in a fugitive
mood or an uncertain feeling; but this discloses the real need
and absence of need in the soul. In the same way the foods a
child likes and dislikes is a fact which does not, indeed, procure
for the experienced person but certainly helps him to gain an
insight into what substances the child’s body needs. In learning
from time to time what this human being needs and does not
need at the moment, the educator is led to an ever deeper recog-
nition of what the human being needs in order to grow. But he is
also led to the recognition of what he, the “educator”, is able
and what he is unable to give of what is needed—and what he
can give now, and what not yet. So the responsibility for this
realm of life allotted and entrusted to him, the constant
responsibility for this living soul, points him to that which
seems impossible and yet is somehow granted to us—to self-
education. But self-education, here as everywhere, cannot take
place through one’s being concerned with oneself but only
through one’s being concerned, knowing what it means, with
the world. The forces of the world which the child needs for the
building up of his substance must be chosen by the educator
from the world and drawn into himself.
The education of men by men means the selection of the
effective world by a person and in him. The educator gathers in
the constructive forces of the world. He distinguishes, rejects,
and confirms in himself, in his self which is filled with the
world. The constructive forces are eternally the same: they are
the world bound up in community, turned to God. The educator
educates himself to be their vehicle.
Then is this the “principle” of education, its normal and fixed
maxim?
No; it is only the principium of its reality, the beginning of its
reality—wherever it begins.
There is not and never has been a norm and fixed maxim of
education. What is called so was always only the norm of a
culture, of a society, a church, an epoch, to which education too,
like all stirring and action of the spirit, was submissive, and
which education translated into its language. In a formed age
there is in truth no autonomy of education, but only in an age
which is losing form. Only in it, in the disintegration of
traditional bonds, in the spinning whirl of freedom, does per-
sonal responsibility arise which in the end can no longer lean
with its burden of decision on any church or society or culture,
but is lonely in face of Present Being.
In an age which is losing form the highly-praised “person-
alities”, who know how to serve its fictitious forms and in their
name to dominate the age, count in the truth of what is happen-
ing no more than those who lament the genuine forms of the
past and are diligent to restore them. The ones who count are
those persons who—though they may be of little renown—
respond to and are responsible for the continuation of the living
spirit, each in the active stillness of his sphere of work.
The question which is always being brought forward—“To
where, to what, must we educate?”—misunderstands the situ-
ation. Only times which know a figure of general validity—the
Christian, the gentleman, the citizen—know an answer to that
question, not necessarily in words, but by pointing with the
finger to the figure which rises clear in the air, out-topping all.
The forming of this figure in all individuals, out of all materials,
is the formation of a “culture”. But when all figures are shat-
tered, when no figure is able any more to dominate and shape
the present human material, what is there left to form?
Nothing but the image of God.
That is the indefinable, only factual, direction of the respon-
sible modern educator. This cannot be a theoretical answer to the
question “To what?”, but only, if at all, an answer carried out in
deeds; an answer carried out by non-doing.
The educator is set now in the midst of the need which he
experiences in inclusion, but only a bit deeper in it. He is set in
the midst of the service, only a bit higher up, which he invokes
without words; he is set in the imitatio Dei absconditi sed non ignoti.
When all “directions” fail there arises in the darkness over
the abyss the one true direction of man, towards the creative
Spirit, towards the Spirit of God brooding on the face of
the waters, towards Him of whom we know not whence He
comes and whither He goes.
That is man’s true autonomy which no longer betrays, but
responds.
Man, the creature, who forms and transforms the creation,
cannot create. But he, each man, can expose himself and others
to the creative Spirit. And he can call upon the Creator to save
and perfect His image.