Istina deteta: romantička kritika prosvetiteljske vizije odrastanja

Abstract

Рад настоји да искуша једну интуитивно саморазумљиво али непропитану и недокументовану хипотезу. Она гласи да још с краја осамнаестог и почетка деветнаестог века разумевању одрастања на начин рационалистичке традиције просветитељства, која се чини да доминира, равноправно конкурише једна непрекидно жива религијска и једна романтичка визија која, преломљено обнављајући прву, слици пожељног аутономног субјекта супротставља слику невиног детета. Противстављање тих ривалских концепција, које не само да различито схватају и вреднују животне доби, већ и предлажу супротстављене смерове „сазревања”, прегледно би да се представи излагањем кључних момената Кантовог рада „Одговор на питање: шта је просвећеност?”, као узорног представника позива да човечанство самозаконодавно изађе из малолетства и ступи у просвећени рационални поредак, те Хаманове критике такве, чинило му се, охолости људског духа, критике која евоцира јеванђеоску чистоту детињства. Противпросветитељску слику одрастања сасвим ће заоштрити и не нужно религијски профилисати и интонирати поједини немачки романтичари својим инсистирањем на „изворности”, те делови британског романтизма својим упућивањима на детињство као и за „одрасле” инструктивну слику раја. У извођењу би требало да се покаже да та представа романтизма, ако по правилу и није дата у маниру класичне филозофске аргументације већ, како доличи, песничке слике, стога није мање ни унутар себе кохерентна нити аутоматски мање пожељна, већ можда пре представља коректив хипертрофираној рационалности просветитељства.

The work primarily detects and exposes rival models of understanding of growing up. In the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment, marks and criteria of the successfulness of maturation are the independence of thought, gaining advanced and finally complete autonomy. Maturation is, especially in Kant, interwoven with the pathos of freedom, resistance to tutors and every patronage, but also with pointing out the responsibility, legality and purposefulness of the freedom that equally resists enthusiastic enticement and the rhapsodic craze. It is different, however, with the romantic and religious visions of growing up. Being an adult here means exactly to overcome “children’s diseases”, to eradicate “the sound and the fury”, to cure oneself from selfishness. Maturation is nothing but a deviation from the illusion of self-sufficiency and self-creation and conciliation with the insight that we are determined by units that rise above us. Those units, much older, more fundamental and more important than us, are the structures we are inexorably woven into and structures that primarily define us. Growing up means gaining awareness about the respect that we owe to entities we inevitably depend on, which enables and constitutes us, rather than defying it. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, this orientation had its significant representatives. Haman’s evocation of the Gospel image of maturity as sacred innocence is followed by the romantic redivinisation of sourcefulness, the affirmation of innocence, joy, and the focus and investment in the image of the “child”. Wordsworth, Blake and Shelley on the “island” side, and Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis and Schleiermacher, while articulating and profiling German Romanticism, celebrate childhood (and traits they attributed to it) in their writings. Immediacy, innocence, joy, personified in the image of “the child”, become keywords that oppose the methodical and graduate ascent, chain of argumentation, endless mediations, and old-age-seriousness of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. The research passion of the prudent adult who self-legislatively and responsibly builds him/herself through his/her own history, gives way to the existence of compelling self-sufficiency of childhood. Such an existence is not becoming, and such self-sufficiency is not only a possibility, but is itself a complete realization of the self. Through the motif of “the truth of the child”, characteristic for at least one major stream of the movement, romanticism thus openly rebels against the “truth” of the adult autonomous subject, which Enlightenment declared as its aim and password. The uprising, as befitting, is not expressed by means of scientific or philosophical elaboration, but by poetic images, imagination and unfettered textual play. Therefore, however, it is not less coherent within itself, nor with less claims to the validity of its concept of growing up. In any case, the Enlightenment vision of childhood as a self-evident point of resistance, as well as addressee of the call to come out of immaturity, even in Kant’s and, especially, in Coleridge’s time, is challenged with an image according to which self-legislative exit from the minority and enlightened rational order are not desirable notions of the state in which the already suspected rebellion against all tutors ends. “The Child” is a symbol warning and therefore at least an instructive corrective of the hypertrophied rationality.