Part 8 (1/2)

II. _Caste Education._

-- 189. The members of the Family are certainly immediately distinguished among each other as to s.e.x and age, but this difference is entirely immaterial as far as the nature of their employment goes. In China, therefore, every man can attain any position; he who is of humblest birth in the great state-family can climb to the highest honor.

But the progress of spirit now becomes so mediated that the division of labor shall be made the principle on which a new distinction shall arise in the family: each one shall perfect himself only in that labor which was allotted to him as his own through his birth into a particular family. This fatalism (caste-distinction) breaks up the life, but increases its tension, for spirit works on the one hand towards the deepening of its distinctions; on the other, towards leading them back into the unity which the natural determining directly opposes.

-- 190. The chief work of education thus consists in teaching each one the rights and duties of his caste so that he shall act only exactly within their limits, and not pollute himself by pa.s.sing beyond them. As the family-state concerns itself with fortifying the natural distinction by a far-reaching and vigorous ceremonial, so the caste-state must do the same with the distinction of cla.s.s. A painful etiquette becomes more and more endless in its requisitions the higher the caste, in order to make the isolation more sharply defined and more perceptible.

--This feature penetrates all exclusively caste-education. The aristocracy exiles itself on this account from its native country, speaks a foreign language, loves its literature, adopts foreign customs, lives in foreign countries--in Italy, Paris, &c. In this way man becomes distinguished from others. But that man should strive thus to distinguish himself has its justification in the mystery of his birth, and this is a.s.suredly always the principle of the caste-state in which it exists. The castes lead to genealogical records, which are of the greatest importance in determining the destiny of the individual. The Brahmin may strike down one of a lower caste who has defiled him by contact, without becoming thereby liable to punishment; rather would he be to blame if he did not commit the murder. Thus formerly was it with the officer who did not immediately kill the citizen or the common soldier who struck him a blow, &c.--

-- 191. The East Indian culture is far deeper and richer than the Chinese. The theoretical culture includes Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic; but these are subordinate, as mere means for the higher activities of Poetry, Speculation, Science, and Art. The practical education limits itself strictly by the lines of caste, and since the caste system const.i.tutes a whole in itself, and each for its permanence needs the others, it cannot forbear giving utterance suggestively to what is universally human in the free soul, in a mult.i.tude of fables (Hitopadesa) and apothegms (sentences of Bartrihari). Especially for the education of princes is a minor of the world sketched out.

--Xenophon's Cyropedia is of Greek origin, but it is Indian in its thought.--

III. _Monkish Education._

-- 192. Family Education demands unconditional obedience towards parents and towards all who stand in an a.n.a.logous position. Caste Education demands unconditional obedience to the duties of the caste. The family punishes by whipping; the caste, by excommunication, by loss of honor.

The opposition to nature appears in both systems in the form of a rigid ceremonial, distinguis.h.i.+ng between the differences arising from nature.

The family as well as the caste has within it a manifold fountain of activity, but it has also just as manifold a limitation of the individual. Spirit is forced, therefore, to turn against nature in general. It must become indifferent to the family. But it must also oppose history, and the fixed distinctions of division of labor as necessitated by nature. It must become indifferent to work and the pleasure derived from it. That it may not be conditioned either by nature or by history, it denies both, and makes its action to consist in producing an abstinence from all activity.

-- 193. Such an indifference towards nature and history produces the education which we have called monkish. Those who support this sect care for food, clothing, and shelter, and for these material contributions, as the laity, receive in return from those who live this contemplative life the spiritual contribution of confidence in the blessings which wait upon ascetic contemplation. The family inst.i.tution as well as the inst.i.tution of human labor is subordinated to abstract isolation, in which the individual lives only for the purification of his soul. All things are justified by this end. Castes are found no more; only those are bound to the observance of a special ceremonial who as nuns or monks subject themselves to the unconditional obedience to the rules of the cloister, these rules solemnly enjoining on the negative side celibacy and cessation from business, and on the positive side prayer and perfection.

[Sidenote: _Buddhistic Education--System of Active Education._]

-- 194. In the school of the Chinese Tao-tse, and in the command to the Brahmin after he has established a family to become a recluse, we find the transition as it actually exists to the Buddhistic Quietism which has covered the rocky heights of Thibet with countless cloisters, and reared the people who are dependent upon it into a childlike amiability, into a contented repose. Art and Science have here no value in themselves, and are regarded only as ministering to religion. To be able to read in order to mutter over the prayers is desirable. With the premeditated effort in the state of a monk to reduce self to nothing as the highest good, the system of pa.s.sive education attains its highest point. But the spirit cannot content itself in this abstract and dreamy absence of all action, though it demands a high stage of culture, and it has recourse therefore to action, partly on the positive side to conquer nature, partly to double its own existence in making history. Inspired with affirmative courage, it descends triumphantly from the mountain heights, and fears secularization no more.

SECOND GROUP.

THE SYSTEM OF ACTIVE EDUCATION.

-- 195. Active Education elevates man from his abstract subjection to the family, the caste, asceticism, into a concrete activity with a definite aim which subjects those elements as phases of its mediation, and grants to each individual independence on the condition of his ident.i.ty with it. These aims are the military state, the future after death, and industry. There is always an element of nature present from which the activity proceeds; but this no longer appears, like the family, the caste, the sensuous egotism, as immediately belonging to the individual, but as something outside of himself which limits him, and, as his future life, has an internal relation to him, yet is essential to him and a.s.signs to him the object of his activity. The Persian has as an object of conquest, other nations; the Egyptian, death; the Phnician, the sea.

I. _Military Education._

-- 196. That education which would emanc.i.p.ate a nation from the pa.s.sivity of abstraction must throw it into the midst of an historical activity. A nation finds not its actual limits in its locality: it can forsake this and wander far away from it. Its true limit is made by another nation.

The nation which knows itself to be actual, turns itself therefore against other nations in order to subject them and to reduce them to the condition of mere accidents of itself. It begins a system of conquest which has in itself no limitations, but goes from one nation to another, and extends its evil course indefinitely. The final result of this attack is that it finds itself attacked and conquered.

--The early history of the Persian is twofold: the patriarchal in the high valleys of Iran, and the religio-hierarchical among the Medes. We find under these circ.u.mstances a repet.i.tion of the princ.i.p.al characteristics of the Chinese, Indian, and Buddhist educations. In ancient Zend there were also castes. Among the Persians themselves, as they descended from their mountains to the conquest of other nations, there was properly only a military n.o.bility. The priesthood was subjected to the royal power which represented the absolute power of actuality. Of the Persian kings, Cyrus attacked Western Asia; Cambyses, Africa; Darius and Xerxes, Europe; until the reaction of the spiritually higher nationality did not content itself with self-preservation, but under the Macedonian Alexander made the attack on Persia itself.--

-- 197. Education enjoined upon the Persians (1) to speak the truth; (2) to learn to ride and to use the bow and arrow. There is implied in the first command a recognition of actuality, the negation of all dreamy absorption, of all fantastical indetermination; and in this light the Persian, in distinction from the Hindoo, appears to be considerate and reasonable. In the second command is implied warlike practice, but not that of the nomadic tribes. The Persian fights on horseback, and thus appears in distinction from the Indian hermit seclusion and the quietism of the Lamas as restless and in constant motion.

--The Family increases in value as it rears a large number of warriors.

Many children were a blessing. The king of Persia gave a premium for all children over a certain number. Nations were drawn in as nations by war; hence the immense mult.i.tude of a Persian army. Everything--family, business, possessions--must be regardlessly sacrificed to the one aim of war. Education, therefore, cultivated an unconditional, all-embracing obedience to the king, and the slightest inclination to a.s.sert an individual independence was high treason and was punished with death. In China, on the contrary, duty to the family is paramount to duty to the state, or rather is itself duty to the state. The civil officer who mourns the loss of one of his family is released during the period of mourning from the duties of his function.--

-- 198. The theoretical education, which was limited to reading, writing, and to instruction, was, in the usages of culture, in the hands of the Magians, the number of whom was estimated at eighty thousand, and who themselves had enjoyed the advantages of a careful education, as is shown by their gradation into Herbeds, Moheds, and Destur-Moheds; i.e.

into apprentices, journeymen, and masters. The very fundamental idea of their religion was military; it demanded of men to fight on the side of the king of light, and guard against the prince of darkness and evil. It gave to him thus the honor of a free position between the world-moving powers and the possibility of a self-creative destiny, by which means vigor and chivalrous feeling were developed. Religion trained the activity of man into actualization on this planet, increasing by its means the dominion of the good, by purifying the water, by planting trees, by extirpating troublesome wild beasts. Thus it increased bodily comfort, and no longer, like the monk, treated this as a mere negative.