An elementary educational issue of our times? Klaus Mollenhauer’s (un)contemporary concern

At the occasion of the publication of its English translation as Forgotten Connections: On Culture and Upbringing (2014) and as a modest attempt to honor Klaus Mollenhauer’s work, I would like to insist on the persistent relevance of the basic intellectual endeavor that he proposed in his Vergessene Zusammenhange. Uber Kultur und Erziehung, first published in 1983. In order to do so I will comment on Mollenhauer’s introduction and on what I consider to be a very fortunate formulation of an elementary educational issue in the second chapter of the book. Although I welcome the translation very much (includi ng also the very helpful “Translators’ Introduction”) and am impressed by its quality, certainly given the difficulty of such a work especially in a field which has cultivated its own vocabulary in the German language, this will imply that I will have to touch briefly upon some translation issues. I first encountered Klaus Mollenhauer as a young doctoral student at the Center for Philosophy of Education of the University of Leuven (Belgium) in the early 1980’s. He came to Leuven; invited by my promoter Mariette Hellemans who, in her courses at the time, was dealing with the (German) tradition of critical hermeneutics and emancipatory pedagogy of which Mollenhauer was supposed to be one of the most influential representatives. A little later, together with Mariette Hellemans and my colleague PhD-student Paul Smeyers, we visited Mollenhauer in Gottingen where he taught at the university. On this occasion, we were warmly welcomed at his home where he expounded on the work he was doing regarding the ‘educational’ reading of paintings. He demonstrated many diapositives and also ‘tested’ his hypotheses on us regarding the interpretation of “Las Meninas” of Velasquez. He situated them in relation to those of Foucault and they became (together with many of the images that he showed us) a part of Forgotten Connections (see e.g. 2014, pp. 41-46). Afterwards, I had the opportunity to meet Mollenhauer at several conferences in Germany, including an intensive seminar on the work of Wilhelm Flitner organized by Helmut Peukert in Hamburg in 1989. The central question of this seminar concerned the ‘place’ of a ‘general educational theory or study’. The central reference was to Flitners well-known phrase that such a theory relies on a ‘basic pedagogical thought’ (“einen Padagogischen Grundgedankgang”) which brings different central and internal concepts into relation such as: ‘Bildung’, ‘Bildsamkeit’, ‘Bildungsweg’, ‘Bildungsziel’ (see Peukert, 1992). In retrospect, I can say that the seminar covered a decade in which German philosophy and theory of education (“Allgemeine Padagogik” or “Allgemeine Erziehungswissenschaft”), after the emergence and tremendous flourishing of critical and emancipatory pedagogy in the sixties and seventies, felt itself increasingly colonized by sociology and critical social theory (reducing education in one way or another to ideology or socialization and disciplinary power). A decade also in which it was confronted with what it considered to be a worn-out idea of individual emancipation and a pointless critique of education (as theory and practice) that seemed to imply the end of education. Mollenhauer’s Forgotten Connections was one of the first attempts to explicitly deal with these issues. In fact, in a short passage in the introduction and in an extensive footnote in the German version of ‘Forgotten Connections’ (which has not been translated in the English version) Mollenhauer explicitly states that the so-called “AntiPadagogik” (Anti-Pedagogy) – which he connects with the work of Miller and von Braunmuhl,