Klaus Mollenhauer’s Hermeneutics

…and refusal of descriptive phenomenology

We had a grand eight-room apartment... [and this] family household was at times overrun by escaped youth from these “homes.” [While] my wife addressed some of their deeper insecurities, and answered their ongoing calls for breakfast, I would speak with student leaders about pedagogy and politics. [At other times, a young] Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin would carelessly burn holes in our upholstery with their cigarettes…[or] other young guests on LSD or just hashish, lying around and listening to my music, would catch sight of me and ask: “What’s he doing here?” (Mollenhauer, 1999 p. 16)

I don’t think that this book [Forgotten Connections] is a denial of the concept of emancipation; for me it is rather a different path that I first had to take one more time in order to arrive at a more substantial concept of emancipation. In addition, the problem of language played a big role for me. …So I thought, in order to find another language, I would have to realign my object of study. I found I was able to arrive at a better language for studying education and upbringing when I read more, say, of Franz Kafka’s educational text (Letter to his Father). Or the extraordinary care that Augustine takes in his writings. These are exercises in the Bildung of the self (Selbstbildung). To take a text from Augustine, when you interpret it, you cannot speak as if you were talking of sociological theory; the text would simply disappear. (Mollenhauer, 1991)

“Mollenhauer does not illustrate, he interprets. He needs to take detours by way of the products of arts and literature in order to see things that are otherwise unnoticeable.”

(Levering, 1987)

Nach so langer Erfahrung sei ‘Haus,’‘Baum’ oder ‘Brücke’ anders gewagt;immer dem Schicksal eingesagt,sag es sich endlich aus!Daß wir das tägliche Wesen entwirrn,das jeder anders erfuhr,machen wir uns ein Nachtgestirnaus der gewußten Figur.

After such long experience let “house,” “tree”, or “bridge” be dared differently Always whispered to destiny, finally and at last say it out.To untangle daily creation, which all differently endure,we make ourselves a constellationout of the known figure.

The “compression (Verdichtung) of this poem in discursive form, as a series of questions. To do this,” Mollenhauer says, would be of course “to cause damage to it. If what is said in the poem can be represented through argumentation without loss of meaning, it would not be a poem.”

However: insofar as we believe ourselves to be in the right when we analytically dissect the expressions of life, the self-presentations of a child –all according to the standards of our scientific Bildung, according to the measures of our treasured categories or dimensions of bodily or spiritual events-- to this extent it may also be allowed to do “damage” to this poem. Indeed, this [poetic dissection] is much preferable than in the case of the child. The poem remains, despite the analysis, what it is in itself.

We regularly presume our object is not this or that phenomenon, but as something that is already general, as a representative “figure” which has already taken its place in the “between” of inter-subjectivity; we waste comparatively little effort in carefully studying the subjective genesis of these figures.

It can only be detected and deduced from the outer traces that the child leaves behind. What’s more, the principles we apply to such investigations are obtainable from within ourselves only, and from the analogies based on our own experiences and the traces left behind by others. The risk of error is therefore extremely high. Academic jargon, regardless of the discipline, only gives us the illusion that we are able to reduce this risk.

Nevertheless, the unsayable still resides in the unconscious and is a source of our desires, hopes, fantasies and utopias, and thus – during childhood at any rate – is only manifested in an encrypted form. In art as in childhood, we seek to interpret such manifestations. We try to use our “divinatory abilities” to bring to awareness the non-conventionalized self of the child.

The question of Bildsamkeit arises precisely at this boundary. The subject, which is a mystery, or as Leibniz put it a “monad” devoid of windows [a unit or particularity without direct connection to others –trans], is compelled along the path of Bildsamkeit into the world of intersubjective agreements.

Regardless of the challenges involved, it still falls to society to educate children, which means taking them across the boundary from the unsayable of contingent subjectivity to the realm of language, culture and convention. Any other approach would be sentimental, and irresponsible in the most profound sense of the word.

It is a matter of describing, not of explaining or analyzing. It is expressed in Husserl's first directive to phenomenology, in its early stages, to be a 'descriptive psychology', or to return to the 'things themselves'” …It tries to give a direct description of our experience as it is, without talking account of its psychological origin and the causal explanations which the scientist, the historian or the sociologist may be able to provide.

Extreme cases such as autistic children, Kaspar Hauser or Victor of Aveyron do not pose marginal problems for pedagogy. Instead, they go to the heart of the question, how the understanding of children, their expressions and their formative movements (Bildebewegungen) are possible.

  

“Academic discourse remains on this side of this border. Debate about this border has been rare in academia, and has been left to poets and painters…”