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DH Coll. 2: Education and Personal Development. Humanism and Humanistic Psychology.

by on December 15, 2023 with No Comments

Part I: Personal Development and Humanistic Psychology. Erich Fromm. Viktor Frankl.

Part II: Humanism and Education.

Part III: Werner Jaeger. Paideia.

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Part I

 

 

 

 

Part II

Humanism and Education.

 

 

 

Part III

Werner Jaeger. Paideia.

 

The Essence of Classical Culture, by WernerJaeger (en)

Paideia: An introductory excerpt to Jaeger’s work from book II, on the essence of education.

[ … ] “However important these consequences may be for the history of philosophy, it is Socrates’ idea of the aim of life which marks the decisive point in the history of paideia. It threw a new light on the purpose and duty of all education. Education is not the cultivation of certain abilities; it is not the communication of certain branches of knowledge — at least all that is significant only as a means and a stage in the process of education. The real essence of education is that it enables men to reach the true aim of their lives. It is thus identical with the Socratic effort to attain phronésis, knowledge of the good. This effort cannot be restricted to the few years of what is called higher education. Either it takes a whole lifetime to reach its aim, or its aim can never be reached. Therefore the concept of paideia is essentially altered; and education, in the Socratic sense, becomes the effort to form one’s life along lines which are philosophically understood, and to direct it so as to fulfil the intellectual and moral definition of man. In this sense, man was born for paideia. It is his only real possession. All the Socratics agree on this point. Therefore it must have come into the world through Socrates, though he himself said he did not know how to teach. Numerous judgments could be quoted to prove that through the changes initiated by Socrates the concept and the meaning of paideia took on a broader and deeper spiritual significance and that its value for man was raised to the highest point. It will be enough to cite a remark made by the philosopher Stilpo, a prominent member of the Socratic school founded in Megara by Euclid. After the sack of Megara, Demetrius Poliorcetes wished to show Stilpo special favour by compensating him for the loot of his house: so he commanded him to render an account of all the property he had lost. Stilpo wittily replied, ‘No one carried off my paideia.’ This epigram was a new version, revised to fit the time, of a famous maxim by one of the seven wise men, Bias of Priene, which is still current in its Latin form : omnia mea mecum porto, ‘all that is mine I carry with me’. For the follower of Socrates, paideia became the sum-total of ‘all that was his’ — his inner, life, his spiritual being, his culture. In the struggle of man to retain his soul’s liberty in a world full of threatening elemental forces, paideia became the unshakable nucleus of resistance.” (Werner Jaeger. Paideia, book II, p. 69-70.)

 

Paideia: the Ideals Of Greek Culture, by Werner Jaeger. 

Volume I. Archaic Greece and the Mind of Athens.
Volume II. In Search of the Divine Centre.
Volume III. The Conflict of Ideals in the Age of Plato.

(From Archive.org)

Paideia, review/discussion

Old Ideals for a New World?, by Borit Karlsson. 

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Humanism and Theology, by Werner Jaeger. (The Aquinas Lecture, 1943)

A review of Humanism and Theology by Charles Hartshorne. (Source: Journal of Religion, Vol. 24, No.3, 1944.)

Two forms of humanism are distinguished: a relativistic, skeptical, man-centered form (Euripides, Protagoras); and a theocentric or, at least, God-including form (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas). Both forms have endured throughout European history. The continuity of the development is traced. It is pointed out that the effect in Greece of the skepticism of the Sophists was only to bring about a higher level of theological humanism. The suggestion is made that this cyclical development indicates “a structural law of the mind which requires God as the center of its world.” I should add that there is every sign that we have been going through another turn of the spiral. Modern sophism has not gone for nothing. Because of it, we can no longer look to Thomas and Augustine for our “integral humanism.” But we might look to William James, Fechner, Whitehead, Berdyaev, Niebuhr!

The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, by Werner Jaeger. (The Gifford Lectures, 1936)

Werner Jaeger, by Friedrich Solmsen (Biographie) (de)

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