EDUCATION AND PERSONALITY
It is essential at the very outset to understand clearly what is meant
by _concrete personality_, and why the particular or empirical
personality, as we are usually accustomed to consider it, is nothing
more than an abstraction.
Ordinarily, relying on the most obvious data of experience, we are led
to believe that the sphere of our moral personality coincides exactly
with the sphere of our physical person, and is therefore limited and
contained by the surface of our material body. We consider this body in
itself as an indivisible whole, with such reciprocal correspondence and
interdependence of its parts as to become a veritable system. It seems
to us also that this system moves in space as a whole when the body is
displaced, continuing to remain united as long as it exists. We look
upon it as though it were separated from all other bodies, whether of
the same or of different kinds, in such a manner that it excludes others
from the place it occupies, and is itself in turn excluded by them. One
body then, one physical person, one moral personality--that moral
personality which each one of us recognises and affirms by the
consciousness of the ego.
And in fact when I walk I am not a different person from when I think.
My ego remains the same whether my body moves through space or whether
my mind inwardly meditates. Impenetrability, which is possessed by
matter, seems to be also a property of human individualism.
From my ego every other ego is apparently excluded. What I am no one
else can be, and I in turn cannot be confused with another person. Those
of my fellow beings that are most intimately, most closely related to me
seem yet as completely external to me, as thoroughly sundered from my
spirit, as their bodies are from mine. My father, my brother are dead.
They have vanished from this world in which I nevertheless continue to
exist; just as a stone remains in its place and is in no way affected
when another stone near by is removed; or as a mutilated pedestal may
still remain to remind the onlooker of the statue that was torn away.
Hundreds of individuals assemble to listen to the words of an orator.
But no necessary ties exist between the various persons; and when the
speaking is over, each one goes his way confident that he has lost no
part of himself and that he has maintained his individuality absolutely
unaltered.
Our elders lived on this planet when we had not yet arrived. After we
came, they gradually withdrew, one after the other. And just as they had
been able to exist without us, so shall we continue to live without
them, and away from them develop our personality. For each one of us,
according to this point of view, has his own being within himself, his
own particular destiny. Every man makes of himself the centre of his
world, of that universe which he has created with deeds and thoughts: a
universe of ideas, of images, of concepts, of systems, which are all in
his brain; a universe of values, of desirable goods and of abhorred
evils, all of which are rooted in his own individual will, in his
character, and originate from the peculiar manner in which he personally
colours this world and conceives the universe.
What is another man's sorrow to me? What part have I in his joys? And
how can the science of Aristotle or of Galileo be anything to me, since
I do not know them, since I cannot read their books, and am totally
unfamiliar with their teachings? And the unknown wayfarer who passes by,
wrapped in his thoughts, what does he care for my loftiest conceptions,
for the songs that well forth from the depths of my soul? The hero's
exploit brings no glory to us; the heinous deed of the criminal makes us
shudder indeed, but drives no pangs of remorse through our conscience.
For every one of us has his own body and his own particular soul. Every
one, in short, is himself independently of what others may be.
This conception, which we ordinarily form of our personality, and on
which we erect the system of our practical life in all our manifold
relations with other individuals, is an abstract concept. For when we
thus conceive our being, we see but a single side of it and that the
least important: we fail to grasp that part which reveals all that is
spiritual, and human, and truly and peculiarly ours. I shall not here
investigate how the human personality has two aspects so totally
different one from the other; and in what remote depths we must
search for the common root of these two contrasting and apparently
contradictory manifestations. Our task for the moment is to establish
within ourselves through reflection the firm conviction that we are
not lone individualities: that there is another and a better part of
us, an element which is the very antithesis of the particular, that
one, namely, which is the deep-seated source of our nature, by which
we cease, each one of us, to be in irreducible opposition to the rest of
humanity, and become instead what all the others are or what we want
them to be.
In order to fix our attention on this more profound aspect of our inner
life, I shall take as an example one of those elements which are
contained in the concept of nationality, Language. Language it must be
remembered does not belong _per se_ to nationality; it belongs to it in
virtue of an act by which a will, a personality, affirms itself with a
determined content. We must now point out the abstract character of
that concept by which language, which is a constituent element of our
personality, is usually ascribed to what is merely particular in it.
That language is a peculiar and constituent element of personality is
quite obvious. Through language we speak not to others only, but to
ourselves also. Speaking to ourselves means seeing within ourselves
our own ideas, our soul, our very self in short,--it means
self-consciousness, as the philosophers say, and therefore
self-control, clear vision of our acts, knowledge of what stirs within
us; it means, therefore, living not after the manner of dumb
animals, but as rational beings, as men. Man cannot think, have
consciousness of himself, reason, without first expressing all that to
himself. Man has been defined as a rational animal; he may also be
defined as the speaking animal. The remark is as old as Aristotle.
Man, however, this animal endowed with the faculty of speaking, is not
man in general who never was, but the real man, the historical man,
actually existing. And he does not speak a general language, but a
certain definite one.
When I speak before a public, I can but use my language, the Italian
language. And I exist, that is I affirm myself, I come into real being,
by thinking in conformity with my real personality, in so far as I
speak, and speak this language of mine. _My_ language, the _Italian_
language. Here lies the problem. Were I not to speak, or were I to
speak otherwise than I know how, I would not be myself. This manner of
expressing myself is then an intrinsic trait of my personality. But this
speech which makes me what I am, and which therefore intimately belongs
to me, could it possibly be mine, could I use it, mould it into my own
life-substance, if, mine though it be, it were yet enclosed within me in
the manner that every particle of my flesh is contained within my body,
having nothing in common with any other part of matter co-existing in
space? Could my language in short really be my language, if it belonged
exclusively to me, to what I have called my particular or empirical
personality?
A simple reflection will suffice to show that my language, like a beacon
of light, inwardly illumines my Thought, and renders visible to me every
movement and every sense, only because this language is not exclusively
my own. It is that same language through which I grasp the ancient
authors of Italy. I read about Francesca da Rimini and Count Ugolino,
and find them within me in the emotion of my throbbing soul. I read of
Petrarch's golden-haired Laura, of Ariosto's Angelica, fair love of
chivalrous men and the unhappy friend of youthful Medoro. I read of the
cunning art whereby the Florentine secretary, in his keen speculative
discourses, sought to establish the principalities and the state of
Italy. I read of the many loves, sorrows, discoveries and sublime
concepts which did not blossom forth from my spirit, but which, once
expressed by the great men of my country, have, because of their merits,
continued to exist in the imagination, in the intellect, in the hearts
of Italians, and have thus constituted a literature, a light-shedding
history which is the life of language, varied indeed and restless, but
ever the same. This is the language which I first heard from the dear
lips of my mother, which gradually and constantly I made my own by
studying and reflecting on the books and on the conversations of those
who for years, or days, or instants, were with me in my native town and
exchanged with me their thoughts and their sentiments; the language
which unites to me all those who, living or dead, together constitute
this which I call and feel to be my own people.
Yet I might want to break away with my speech from this glorious
communion. I might try to demonstrate to myself that my speech is
exclusively mine, and surely I would thus accomplish something. I would
produce an exception which in this case too would serve to confirm the
rule.
For surely a man may devise a cryptic language, a cipher, a jargon.
Secret codes and conventional cants are resorted to by individuals who
have some reason to conceal their meaning from others. Such individuals,
however, can form but very small groups, and because of the artificial
character of their communications never may constitute a nation. An
artificial jargon of this sort is however a language of some kind: it
must be, since art imitates nature. It complies with the law that is
immanent in the peculiar nature of language, namely, that there be
nothing secret or hidden in it, for speech and in general every form of
spiritual activity invests a community and aims at universality. The
jargon is possible only because of the key by which it may be translated
back into the common language. Give a ciphered document to the
cryptographer; by study and ingenuity--that is by the use of that very
intelligence which arbitrarily combined the cipher--he discovers the
key; thus he too breaks up the artificial form, and draws from it the
natural flow of a speech that is intelligible to all those who speak the
same national tongue. And again, words as they flow from the inspired
bosom of the poet, when they first appear in the freshness of the new
artistic creation, do have something that is cryptic. That language is
the poet's own; it never had been used by another; a jargon before it is
deciphered may be and is the language of a particular personality. But
if we look more attentively, we shall see that in both cases the
language is the language of the community. The inspired poet does indeed
speak to himself, but with the consciousness of a potential audience, he
utters a word to himself which must eventually be intelligible to others
because it is by its nature intelligible. In the conditions in which the
poet finds himself when speaking, he must use that word and no other,
and any other person in those same spiritual conditions would use, could
not help using, the same word. For his word is the Word, the one that is
required by the circumstances. And since he is a poet, a serious mind
uttering a word which needs no translation, it will be the word of his
own people first and then of humanity at large, in so far as its beauty
will inspire men of different nations and of diverse speech with the
desire of learning the poet's own intimate language.
All this is true because the spirit is universal activity, which, far
from separating men, unites them. It realises historically its
universality in the community of the family, of the city, of the
district, and of the nation, and in every form of intimate aggregation
and of fusion which history may call into being.
Language may or may not be in the formation of a man's nationality. What
however must be ever present is the Will by which man every moment of
his life renovates his own personality. Can the Will, by which each one
of us is what he is, be his own Will, exclusively his own? Or is the
Will itself, like language, not perhaps a national heirloom, but surely
a common act, a communion of life, in such a way that we live our own
life while living the life of the nation?
Of course, in the abstract, as I have explained above, my will is
particular. But we must be reminded that Will is one thing, and
faint wishing another. There is such a thing as real effective
volition, and there is something which strives to be such and fails;
this latter we might call "velleity." Real will does not rest
satisfied with intentions, designs, or sterile desires; it acts, and
by its effectiveness it reveals itself, and by its value shows its
reality. And our being results not from velleities but from the real
will. We are not what we might conditionally desire to be, but what we
actually will to be. A velleity we might say is the will directed to
an end which is either relatively or absolutely impossible; will is
that which becomes effective.
But, then, when is it that my will really is effective, really
_wills_? I am a citizen of a state which has power; this power, this
will of the state expresses itself to me in laws which I must obey. The
transgression of laws, if the state is in existence, bears with it the
inevitable punishment of the transgressor, that is, the application of
that law which the offender has refused to recognise. The state is
supported by the inviolability of laws, of those sacred laws of the
land which Socrates, as Plato tells us, taught his pupils to revere. I,
then, as a citizen of my country, am bound by its Law in such a
manner that to will its transgression is to aim at the impossible.
If I did so, I should be indulging in vain velleities, in which my
personality, far from realising itself, would on the contrary be
disintegrated and scattered. I then want what the law wants me to
will.
It makes no difference that, from a material and explicit point of view,
a system of positive law does not coincide throughout with the sphere of
my activity, and that therefore the major part of the standards of my
conduct must be determined by the inner dictates of my particular
conscience. For it is the Will of the State that determines the limits
between the moral and the juridical, between what is imposed by the law
of the land and what is demanded by the ethical conscience of the
individual. And there is no limit which pre-exists to the line by which
the constituent and legislative power of the State delimits the sphere
subject to its sanctions. So that positively or negatively, either by
command or by permission, our whole conduct is subject to that will by
which the State establishes its reality.
But the Will of the State does not manifest itself solely by the
enactments of positive legislation. It opens to private initiative such
courses of action as may presumably be carried on satisfactorily without
the impulse and the direct control of the sovereign power. But this
concession has a temporary character, and the State is ever ready to
intervene as soon as the private management ceases to be effective. So
that even in the exercise of what seems the untrammelled will of the
individual we discern the power of the State; and the individual is free
to will something only because the sovereign power wants him to. So
that in reality this apparently autonomous particular will is the will
of the state not expressed in terms of positive legislation, there being
no need of such an expression. But since the essence of law is not in
the expression of it, but in the will which dictates it, or observes it,
or enforces the observance of it, in the will, in short, that wills it,
it follows that the law exists even though unwritten.
In the way of conclusion, then, it may be said that I, as a citizen,
have indeed a will of my own; but that upon further investigation my
will is found to coincide exactly with the will of the State, and I want
anything only in so far as the State wants me to want it.
Could it possibly be otherwise? Such an hypothesis overwhelms me at the
very thought of it. For it would come to this,--that I exist and my
state does not:--the state in which I was born, which sustained and
protected me before I saw the light of day, which formed and guaranteed
to me this communion of life; the state in which I have always lived,
which has constituted this spiritual substance, this world in which I
support myself, and which I trust will never fail me even though it does
change constantly. I could, it is true, ignore this close bond by which
I am tied and united to that great will which is the will of my country.
I might balk and refuse to obey its laws. But acting thus, I would be
indulging in what I have called velleities. My personality, unable to
transform the will of the state, would be overcome and suppressed by
it.
Let us however assume for a moment that I might in the innermost depths
of my being segregate myself. Averse to the common will and to the law
of the land, I decide to proclaim over the boundless expanse of my
thought the proud independence of my ego, as a lone, inaccessible summit
rising out of the solitude. Up to a certain point this hypothesis is
verified constantly by the manner in which my personality freely becomes
actual. But even then I do not act as a particular being: it is the
universal power that acts through my personal will.
For when we effectively observe the law, with true moral adhesion and
in thorough sincerity, the law becomes part of ourselves, and our
actions are the direct results of our convictions,--of the necessity of
our convictions. For every time we act, inwardly we see that such must
be our course; we must have a clear intuition of this necessity. The
Saint who has no will but the will of God intuitively sees necessity in
his norm. So does the sinner in his own way: but his norm is erroneous
and therefore destined to fail. Every criminal in transgressing the
law obeys a precept of his own making which is in opposition to the
enactments of the state. And in so doing he creates almost a state
of his own, different from the one which historically exists and must
exist because of certain good reasons, the excellence of which the
criminal himself will subsequently realise. From the unfortunate point
of view which he has taken, the transgressor is justified in acting as
he does, and to such an extent that no one in his position, as he
thinks, could possibly take exception to it. His will is also
universal; if he were allowed to, if it were possible for him, he
would establish new laws in place of the old ones: he would set up
another state over the ruins of the one which he undermines. And what
else does the tyrant when he destroys the freedom of the land and
substitutes a new state for the crushed Commonwealth? In the same
manner the rebel does away with the despot, starts a revolution and
establishes liberty if he is successful; if not, he is overcome and must
again conform his will to the will of that state which he has not been
able to overthrow. So then, I exercise my true volition whenever the
will of my state acts in my personal will, or rather when my will is
the realisation of the will of a super-national group in which my state
co-exists with other states, acting upon them, and being re-acted upon
in reciprocal determinations. Or perhaps better still, when the
entire world wills in me. For my will, I shall say it once again, is
not individual but universal, and in the political community by which
individuals are united into a higher individuality, historically
distinct from other similar ones, we must see a form of universality.
For this reason, then, we are justified in saying that our personality
is particular when we consider it abstractly, but that concretely it
realises itself as a universal and therefore also as a national
personality. This conception is of fundamental importance for those of
us who live in the class-room and have made of teaching our life's
occupation, our ultimate end, and the real purpose of our existence. For
in this conception of human activities we find the solution of a problem
that has been present in the minds of thinking men ever since they began
to reflect on the subject of education, or, in other words, from time
immemorial. Education, we must remember, is not a fact, if by fact we
mean, as we should, something that has happened, or is wont to happen,
or must inevitably take place in virtue of the constancy of the law
which governs it. We teachers are all sincerely convinced that
education, as we speak of it, as it draws our interests, for which we
work, and which we strive to improve, is not now what it was before. For
there is no education that works out in conformity with natural laws. It
is a free act of ours, the vocation of our souls, our duty as men. By it
more nobly than by any other action man is enabled to actualise his
superior nature. Animals do not educate: even though they do raise their
young ones they yet form no family, no ethical organism with members
differentiated and reciprocally correlated. But we freely, by an act of
our conscience, recognise our children, as we do our parents and our
brothers; and we discern our fellow-beings in ourselves and ourselves in
others; and by the growth of our own we unconsciously develop the
personality of others; and therefore in the family, in the city, in any
community, we constitute one spirit, with common needs that are
satisfied by the operations of individual activity which is a social
activity.
Man has been called a political or a social animal. He might therefore
be considered also as an educating animal. For we do not merely educate
the young ones, our young ones. Education being spiritual action bearing
on the spirit, we really educate all those that are in any way and by
any relations whatsoever connected with us, whether or not they belong
to our family or to our school, as long as they concur with us in
constituting a complete social entity. And we not only train those of
minor age, who are as yet under tutelage, and still frequent the schools
and are busily intent upon developing and improving their skill, their
character, their culture. We also educate the adults, the grown-up men
and women, the aged; for there is no man alive who does not daily add to
his intellectual equipment, who does not derive some advantage from his
human associations, who could not appropriately repeat the statement of
the Roman emperor--_nulla dies sine linea_. Man always educates.
But here, as in every other manifestation of his spiritual activity, man
does not behave in sole conformity with instinct; he does not teach by
abandoning himself, so to speak, to the force of natural determinism. He
is fully aware of his own doings. He keeps his eyes open on his own
function, so that he may attain the end by the shortest course, that he
may without wasting his energies derive from them the best possible
results. For man reflects.
It is evident then that education is not a scheme which permits
pedagogues and pedants to interfere with their theories and lucubrations
in this sacred task of love, which binds the parents to the children,
brings old and young together, and keeps mankind united in its never
ceasing ascent. Before the word came into being, the thing, as is
usually the case, already existed. Before there was a science and an
incumbent for the chair, there existed something that was the life of
this science and therefore the justification of the chair. There was the
intent reflectiveness of man, who in compliance with the divine saying,
"Know thyself," was becoming conscious of his own work, and therefore,
unwilling to abandon his actions to external impulses, began to question
everything. What the lower animal does naturally and unerringly through
its infallible instinct, man achieves by the restless scrutiny of his
mind. Ever thoughtful, always yearning for the better, he searches and
explores, often stumbling in error, but ever rising out of it to a
higher station of learning and of art. Our education is human, because
it is an action and not a fact; because it is a problem that we always
solve and have to keep solving for ever.
This intuitive truth is demonstrated experimentally to us by the very
lives we live as educators. As long as the freshness of our vocation
lasts, as long as we can remain free from mechanical routine and from
the impositions of fixed habits; as long as we are able to consider
every new pupil with renewed interest, discover in him a different soul,
unlike that of any other that we have previously come in contact with,
and differing within itself from day to day; as long as it is still
possible for us to enter the class-room thrilled and throbbing in the
anticipation of new truths to reveal, of novel experiments to perform,
of unexpected difficulties to overcome, in the full consciousness of the
rapid motion of a life ever renewed in us and around us by the incoming
generations, that flow to us and ebb away unceasingly towards life and
death; so long shall we really live and love the teacher's life, so long
shall we demonstrate to ourselves and to others the truth I have already
affirmed.
We teachers should be constantly on our guard against the dangers of
routine, against the belief that we have but to repeat the same old
story in the same class-room, to the same kind of distant, blank faces,
staring at us in dreary uniformity from the same benches. We shall
continue to be educators only as long as we are able to feel that every
instant of our life's work is a new instant, and that education
therefore is a problem that insistently stimulates our ingenuity to an
ever renewed solution.
Now the most important of all tasks, ancient and modern, in the field of
education is this,--the task of the teacher to represent the Universal
to his pupils, the Universal, of course, as historically determined.
Scientific thought, customs, laws, religious beliefs are brought before
the pupil's mind, not as the science, the laws, the religion of the
teacher, but as those of humanity, of his country, of his period. And
the pupil is the particular individual who, having entered upon the
process of education, and being submitted, so to speak, to the yoke of
the school, ceases to enjoy his former liberty in the pursuit of a
spiritual endowment and in the formation of his character, and, in
consequence of this educational pressure, bends compliantly before the
common law. Hence the world-old opposition to the coercive power of the
school, and the outcry raised from time to time against the privilege
demanded by the educator, who on the strength of the assumedly higher
quality of his beliefs, his learning, his taste, or his moral
conscience, claims to interfere with the spontaneous development of a
personality in quest of itself.
On one side education undoubtedly assumes the task of developing
freedom, for the aim of education is to produce men; and man is worthy
of this name only when he is a master of himself, capable of initiating
his own acts, responsible for his deeds, able to discern and assimilate
the ideas which he accepts and professes, affirms and propagates, so
that whatever he says, thinks, or does, really comes from him. Our
children are said to be properly raised when they give evidence of being
able to take care of themselves without the help of our guidance and
advice. And we trust that we have accomplished our task as educators
when our pupils have made our language their own and are able to tell us
new things originally thought out by them. Freedom then must be the
result of education.
But on the other hand, teaching implies an action exercised on another
mind, and education cannot therefore result in the relinquishment and
abandonment of the pupil. The educator must awaken interests that
without him would for ever lie dormant. He must direct the learner
towards an end which he would be unable to estimate properly if left
alone, and must help him to overcome the otherwise unsurmountable
obstacles that beset his progress. He must, in short, transfuse into the
pupil something of himself, and out of his own spiritual substance
create elements of the pupil's character, mind, and will. But the acts
which the pupil performs in consequence of his training will, in a
certain measure, be those of his teacher; and education will therefore
have proved destructive of that very liberty with which the pupil was
originally endowed. Is it not true that people constantly attribute to
early family influences and to environment--that is, to education--the
good and the bad in the deeds of the mature man?
This is the form in which the problem usually presents itself. The mind
of the educator is therefore torn by two conflicting forces: the desire
zealously to watch and control the pupil's growth and direct his
evolution along the course that seems quickest and surest for his
complete development; and, on the other hand, the fear that he may kill
fertile seeds, stifle with presumptuous interference the spontaneous
life of the spirit in its personal impulses, and clothe the individual
with a garment that is not adapted for him,--crush him under the weight
of a leaden cape.
The solution of this problem must be sought in the concrete conception
of individual personality; and this will be the theme of the next
chapter. But I must at the very outset utter an emphatic word of
warning. My solution does not remove all difficulties; it cannot be used
as a key to open all doors. For as I have repeatedly stated, the value
of education consists in the persistence of the problems, ever solved
and yet ever clamouring for a new solution, so that we may never feel
released from the obligation of thinking.
My solution must be simply accepted as affording a guidance by which
different people may, along more or less converging lines, approach
their particular objectives. For the problem presents itself under
ever-changing forms, and demands a continuous development, and almost a
progressive interpretation of the concept which I am going to offer as
an aid to its solution. No effort of thinking, once completed, will ever
exonerate us from thinking, from thinking unceasingly, from thinking
more and more intensively.