TRANSCENDENTALISM IN THE CULTURE OF PEDAGOGICS OF SERGIUS HESSEN

Abstract

Sergius Hessen was searching a transcendent way of solving the problems connected with the development of human personality. He was doing so above and beyond the insofar acknowledged intellectual and empirical orientations and above the irrational cultural idealism or metaphysical aphorism. As a representative of the philosophy and pedagogy of culture, he intended to find educational space for the inner experience of man in his world of values and his morally-ethical life. Together with other Polish philosophers and educationists of culture like B. Nawroczycski and B. Suchodolski, he levelled severe criticism at the insofar existing pedagogical thought, based on a narrow horizon of empirical studies. It was a criticism of the naturalistic position in the philosophy of man, behavioural psychologism and extra-cultural sociologism, from the perspective of the superiority of cultural universalism. From this standpoint he educed an axiological and pedagogical view that the truth about culture is the truth about the sense of human transcendence. Such position led to anthropologism and anthropocentrism in pedagogics, which were going beyond the limits of purely existential experiences. That was, according to S. Hessen, a vision of man aspiring to the values through transcendent experiencing these values, and thus building the personality of man, as a subjective creator of the objective cultural values. In fact, thus perceived culture has become an “ultra-realistic and metaphysical” being, as a product of human creativity and a means of developing his horizons of experiencing culture. These values come back to the man, i.e. to their subjective creator.