REFLEXIVE VERSUS AFFIRMATIVE EMANZIPATION1
Emancypacja refleksyjna versus afirmatywna

Summary/Abstract: The article introduces the figure of Klaus Mollenhauer, the forerunner of emancipatory pedagogy in Germany. As Dietrich Benner, the author, explains, the emancipatory action possesses a character of its own; thus, the conceptions of emancipatory pedagogy divide into affirmative and reflexive ones. In the first group, the emancipation cannot be understood without the theory of interests, developed by Jürgen Habermas. The forerunner for the second group was Mollenhauer. The study begins with an analysis of the differences between positive and negative emancipation. The sense of carrying out an emancipative action lies not in replacing a given arrangement or state of things with another, of one positiveness with another, but in maintaining the bond with the negativity of experience. Thanks to this, emancipation remains an open and reflexive process. According to Mollenhauer, the emancipative reflection is based on “specific dialectics, which makes it possible to criticize the encountered praxis through relating to the project of a better future, not yet known, because still in the making”. In the second point, Benner explains the meaning of such a concept of emancipation for upbringing and education. The considerations contained in the third, and last, point, are devoted to Mollenhauer’s greatest achievement: bringing pedagogical thinking back into the relation with the aesthetic space. It is in that way that “pedagogy gives up admonishing art on how it should form a man, and opens to the «admonitions of art»”.

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