Theodor Litt
Theodor Litt was a German culture and social philosopher as well as a pedagogue.
In the debate with Dilthey, Simmel and Cassirer, Litt developed an independent approach in cultural philosophy and philosophical anthropology, which was determined by the dialectical view of the relationship between the individual and society, man and the world, reason and life. At the same time, he projected these thoughts into a that had its starting point in progressive education at the beginning of the 20th century and, via Litt's student, extended into the discussion on educational reform in the 1970s. Litt identified with the Weimar Republic and, as rector of the University of Leipzig, came into conflict with National Socialism, was banned from lecturing in 1937 and retired early. Nevertheless, he continued to publish critically against the ruling ideology. After the end of the Second World War, he could not come to terms with the ideology of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany and therefore moved to the Universität Bonn, where he founded the Institute for pedagogy.
Life
Born in Düsseldorf, Litt was the son of the grammar school professor Ferdinand Litt and great-nephew of the theatre director and actor. From 1890 to 1898, Litt attended the humanistic Städtisches Gymnasium in Düsseldorf. He then began teacher training in philosophy, history and classical philology at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. In Bonn, he became a member of the Sängerverbindung, in Berlin of the Akademische Liedertafel in the. In 1904 he was awarded a doctorate in classical philology with a dissertation written in Latin. After four years as a teacher of ancient languages and history in Bonn, Kreuznach and from 1906 as a senior teacher in Cologne at the, he was employed for six months as a referent in the Prussian Ministry of Culture in Berlin.Litt's interest in philosophy and pedagogy is said to have been triggered, among other things, by the Trauma of the First World War. As early as 1919, the University of Bonn appointed Litt as an associate professor of education. In Individual and Community, Litt gave an outline of cultural and social philosophy. Alongside Ernst Troeltsch, Ernst Cassirer and Georg Simmel, Litt became a member of the Leipzig School for social philosophy. In 1920, he succeeded Eduard Spranger, who moved to the University of Berlin, as chair of philosophy and education at the Leipzig University, where he served as university lecturer or rector until 1937.
In 1927, Litt addressed his pedagogical problems in his work Führen oder Wachsenlassen. His rejection of irrational, organological and romantic ideologies as well as his claim to respect for the growing and developing human being led to hostility from the National Socialists. In his inaugural speech as Rector of the University of Leipzig in 1931, he spoke out in favour of maintaining an independent university. For Litt, the Nazi regime ushered in the end of his first creative period from 1919 to 1937. He did not bow to the regime, which attacked his anti-National Socialist stance. At the university association conference in October 1932, Litt suggested a declaration by the university teachers taking a stand against the National Socialist movement. Nevertheless, Litt is named among the signatories of the Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State of 11 November 1933. In 1934, his lectures were severely disrupted and the University of Leipzig was even temporarily closed. In 1936, Litt ended a lecture tour to Vienna because the Nazi authorities banned him from lecturing. Returning to Leipzig, he demanded his early retirement, which he achieved in 1937.
Litt nevertheless did not let this stop him from publishing the small paper Der deutsche Geist und das Christentum in 1938. In it he criticised Alfred Rosenbergs antisemitic The Myth of the 20th Century, wherein the latter advocated a religion to replace Christianity. Litt found great favour among devout Christians, and the relatively large print run was immediately sold out. But Litt disappointed the rejection by his colleagues who belonged to the humanities pedagogy, such as Eduard Spranger and Wilhelm Flitner, most of whom remained in their chairs during the National Socialist era despite agreeing with Litt's critique. Only Herman Nohl was dismissed from his post in 1937. In 1944, when Litt was also banned from giving lectures at the Saxon Academy of Sciences, he withdrew completely.
Litt's second creative period began in 1945. On Ernst Cassirer's recommendation, he was assigned the task of the democratic reform of Leipzig University. Although Litt taught again in 1946, after a lecture on The Significance of Pedagogical Theory for the Training of Teachers in East Berlin he came into conflict with the Socialist Unity Party of Germany and took up a professorship in philosophy and education at the Universität Bonn. Litt founded and remained head of the Institute for Educational Sciences until his death. His numerous lectures such as Self-Criticism in Modern Culture or Political Ethics and Pedagogy were just as well received as his paper Die politische Selbsterziehung des deutschen Volkes, which gave rise to the inauguration of a series of papers by the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. In 1962, Litt's last publication, Freiheit und Lebensordnung, was published, which again dealt with his confrontation with totalitarian types of power and their political theories.
Litt was a member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Sciences of the GDR, of the and the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. He was an honorary doctor of the universities in Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität.
Litt died in Bonn at the age of 81.
Philosophical position
Dialectical way of thinking
As a philosopher, Litt was strongly influenced by the dialectical way of thinking, which was determined by his engagement with Kant and Herder on the one hand and Hegel on the other. Like Eduard Spranger, Herman Nohl, Wilhelm Flitner and Erich Weniger, he is counted in the camp of the. He himself described his position as cultural pedagogy after Ernst Troeltsch, which believed that it could gain pedagogical goals from a historically saturated overall view of the cultural sphere in harmonising dialectics from tradition – covering contradictions and far removed from conflicts of power and interest.Thinkers such as Georg Simmel, Wilhelm Dilthey and Edmund Husserl also influenced his philosophical worldview. Jonas Cohn's book Theorie der Dialektik inspired him to examine problem areas in pedagogy dialectically. But for Litt, a critical examination of contradictions was not necessary for the purpose of education. For Litt, the dialectic manifests itself in the antinomy of individual and community, in the antinomy of reason and life, and in the opposition of subjective spirit and objective spirit.
With his dialectical way of thinking, Litt aimed to abolish one-dimensional views and their credibility in an all-encompassing context. In doing so, he proceeded rationally, contrarily as well as dialectically at the same time and conceived an extensive philosophy of culture as well as a philosophical anthropology. He attempted to bring together the fundamental opposition between cognition and life into an orderly whole by means of an overall view of interpretative ideas. The "free-thinking" educational science of Wolfgang Klafki and the educational reform of the 1960s took up Litt's didactic approach to supporting education in the humanities, but above all in history, with reference to technology, science and the world of work. Talcott Parsons' social theory is also trained on it.