Part 9 (1/2)

-- 211. The stringed instrument, the cithern, was preferred by the Greeks to all wind instruments because it was not exciting, and allowed the accompaniment of recitation or song, i.e. the contemporaneous activity of the spirit in poetry. Flute-playing was first brought from Asia Minor after the victorious progress of the Persian war, and was especially cultivated in Thebes. They sought in vain afterwards to oppose the wild excitement raised by its influence.

-- 212. Grammar comprehended Letters (???ata), i.e. the elements of literary culture, reading and writing. Much attention was given to correct expression. The Fables of aesop, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, and later the tragic poets, were read, and partly learned by heart. The orators borrowed from them often the ornament of their commonplace remarks.

-- 213. (3) The internal growth of what was peculiar to the Grecian State came to an end with the war for the Hegemony. Its dissolution began, and the philosophical period followed the political. The beautiful ethical life was resolved into thoughts of the True, Good, and Beautiful.

Individuality turned more towards the internal, and undertook to subject freedom, the existing regulations, laws and customs, to the criticism of reason as to whether these were in and for themselves universal and necessary. The Sophists, as teachers of Grammar, Rhetoric, and Philosophy, undertook to extend the cultivation of Reflection; and this introduced instability in the place of the immediate fixed state of moral customs. Among the women, the _Hetaerae_ undertook the same revolution; in the place of the p?t??a ?t?? appeared the beauty, who isolated herself in the consciousness of her charms and in the perfection of her varied culture, and exhibited herself to the public admiration. The tendency to idiosyncrasy often approached wilfulness, caprice and whimsicality, and opposition to the national moral sense. A Diogenes in a tub became possible; the soulless but graceful frivolity of an Alcibiades charmed, even though it was externally condemned; a Socrates completed the break in consciousness, and urged upon the system of the old morality the pregnant question, whether Virtue could be taught? Socrates worked as a philosopher who was to educate. Pythagoras had imposed upon his pupils the abstraction of a common, exactly-defined manner of living. Socrates, on the contrary, freed his disciples--in general, those who had intercourse with him--leading them to the consciousness of their own individuality. He revolutionized the youth in that he taught them, instead of a thoughtless obedience to moral customs, to seek to comprehend their purpose in the world, and to rule their actions according to it. Outwardly he conformed in politics, and in war as at Marathon; but in the direction of his teaching he was subjective and modern.

-- 214. This idea, that Virtue could be taught, was realized especially by Plato and Aristotle; the former inclining to Dorianism, the latter holding to the principle of individuality in nearly the modern sense. As regards the pedagogical means--Gymnastics, Music, and Grammar--both philosophers entirely agreed. But, in the seizing of the pedagogical development in general, Plato a.s.serted that the education of the individual belonged to the state alone, because the individual was to act wholly in the state. On the other hand, Aristotle also holds that the state should conduct the education of its citizens, and that the individual should be trained for the interest of the state; but he recognizes also the family, and the peculiarity of the individual, as positive powers, to which the state must accord relative freedom. Plato sacrificed the family to the state, and must therefore have sacred marriages, nurseries, and common and public educational inst.i.tutions.

Each one shall do only that which he is fitted to do, and shall work at this only for the sake of perfecting it: to what he shall direct his energies, and in what he shall be instructed, shall be determined by the government, and the individuality consequently is not left free.

Aristotle also will have for all the citizens the same education, which shall be common and public; but he allows, at the same time, an independence to the family and self-determination to the individual, so that a sphere of private life presents itself within the state: a difference by means of which a much broader sway of individuality is possible.

--These two philosophers have come to represent two very different directions in Pedagogics, which at intervals, in certain stages of culture, reappear--the tyrannical guardians.h.i.+p of the state which a.s.sumes the work of education, tyrannical to the individual, and the free development of the liberal state-education, in opposition to idiosyncrasy and fate.--

-- 215. The principle of aesthetic individuality reaches its highest manifestation when the individual, in the decay of public life, in the disappearance of all beautiful morality, isolates himself, and seeks to gain in his isolation such strength that he can bear the changes of external history around him with composure--”ataraxy.” The Stoics sought to attain this end by turning their attention inward into pure internality, and thus, by preserving the self-determination of abstract thinking and willing, maintaining an ident.i.ty with themselves: the Epicureans endeavored to do the same, with this difference however, that they strove after a positive satisfaction of the senses by filling them with concrete pleasurable sensations. As a consequence of this, the Stoics isolated themselves in order to maintain themselves in the exclusiveness of their internal unconditioned relation to themselves, while the Epicureans lived in companies, because they achieved the reality of their pleasure-seeking principle through harmony of feeling and through the sweetness of friends.h.i.+p. In so far the Epicureans were Greeks and the Stoics Romans. With both, however, the beauty of manifestation was secondary to the immobility of the inner feeling. The plastic attainment of the Good and the Beautiful was cancelled in the abstraction of thinking and feeling. This was the advent of the Roman principle among the Greeks.

-- 216. The pedagogical significance of Stoicism and Epicureanism consists in this, that, after the moral life in public and in private were sundered from each other, the individual began to educate himself, through philosophical culture, into stability of character, for which reason the Roman emperors particularly disliked the Stoics. At many times, a resignation to the Stoic philosophy was sufficient to make one suspected. But, at last, the n.o.ble emperor, in order to win himself a hold in the chaos of things, was forced himself to become a Stoic and to flee to the inaccessible stillness of the self-thinking activity and the self-moving will. Stoics and Epicureans had both what we call an ideal.

The Stoics used the expression ”kingdom”; as Horace says, sarcastically, ”_Sapiens rex est nisi--pituita molesta est_.”

II. _Practical Education._

-- 217. The truth of the solution of the beautiful individuality is the promise of the activity conformable to its purpose [i.e. teleological activity], which on the one hand considers carefully end and means, and on the other hand seeks to realize the end through the corresponding means, and in this deed subjects mere beauty of form. The practical individuality is therefore externally conditioned, since it is not its own end like the Beautiful, whether Stoical or Epicurean, but has an end, and finds its satisfaction not so much in this after it is attained as in the striving for its attainment.

-- 218. The education of this system begins with very great simplicity.

But after it has attained its object, it abandons itself to using the results of aesthetic culture as a recreation without any specific object.

What was to the Greeks a real delight in the Beautiful became therefore with the Romans simply an aesthetic amus.e.m.e.nt, and as such must finally be wearisome. The earnestness of individuality made itself in mysticism into a new aim, which was distinguished from the original one in that it concealed in itself a mystery and exacted a theoretically aesthetic practice.

-- 219. (1) The first epoch of Roman education, as properly Roman, was the juristic-military education of the republic. The end and aim of the Roman was Rome; and Rome, as from the beginning an eclectic state, could endure only while its laws and external politics were conformable to some end. It bore the same contradiction within itself as in its external att.i.tude. This forced it into robbery, and the plebeians were related to the patricians in the same way, for they robbed them gradually of all their privileges. On this account education directed itself partly to giving a knowledge of the Law, partly to communicating a capacity for war. The boys were obliged to commit to memory and recite the laws of the twelve tables, and all the youths were subject to military service. The Roman possessed no individuality of native growth, but one mediated through the intermingling of various fugitives, which developed a very great energy. Hence from the first he was attentive to himself, he watched jealously over the limits of his rights and the rights of others, measured his strength, moderated himself, and constantly guarded himself. In contrast with the careless cheerfulness of the Greeks, he therefore appears gloomy.

--The Latin tongue is crowded with expressions which paint presence of mind, effort at reflection, a critical att.i.tude of mind, the importance of personal control: as _gravitas morum, sui compos esse, sibi constare, austeritas, vir strenuus, vir probus, vitam honestam gerere, sibimet ipse imperare_, &c. The Etruscan element imparted to this earnestness an especially solemn character. The Roman was no more, like the Greek, unembarra.s.sed at naturalness. He was ashamed of nakedness; _verecundia, pudor_, were genuinely Roman. _Vitam praeferre pudori_ was shameful. On the contrary, the Greek gave to Greeks a festival in exhibiting the splendor of his naked body, and the inhabitants of Crotona erected a statue to Philip only because he was so perfectly beautiful. Simply to be beautiful, only beautiful, was enough for the Greek. But a Roman, in order to be recognized, must have done something for Rome: _se bene de republica mereri_.--

-- 220. In the first education of children the agency of the mother is especially influential, so that woman with the Romans took generally a more moral, a higher, and a freer position. It is worthy of remark that while, as the beautiful, she set the Greeks at variance, among the Romans, through her ethical authority, she acted as reconciler.

-- 221. The mother of the Roman helped to form his character; the father undertook the work of instruction. When in his fifteenth year the boy exchanged the _toga praetextata_ for the _toga virilis_, he was usually sent to some relative, or to some jurist, as his guardian, to learn thoroughly, under his guidance, of the laws and of the state; with the seventeenth began military service. All education was for a long time entirely a private affair. On account of the necessity of a mechanical unity in work which war demands, the greatest stress was laid upon obedience. In its restricted sense education comprised Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic; the last being, on account of its usefulness, more esteemed by the Romans than by the Greeks, who gave more time to Geometry. The schools, very characteristically, were called _Ludi_, because their work was, in distinction from other practice, regarded simply as a recreation, as play.

--The Roman recognized with pride this distinction between the Greek and himself; Cicero's Introduction to his Essay on Oratory expresses it. To be practical was always the effort of the reflective character of the Romans, which was always placing new ends and seeking the means for their attainment; which loved moderation, not to secure beauty thereby, but respected it as a means for a happy success (_medium tenuere beati_); which did not possess serene self-limitation, or s?f??s???, but calculation _quid valeant humeri, quid ferre recusent_; but which, in general, went far beyond the Greeks in persistency of will, in _constantia animi_. The schools were at first held publicly in shops; hence the name _trivium_. Very significant for the Roman is the predicate which he conferred upon theoretical subjects when he called them _artes bonae_, _optimae_, _liberales_, _ingenuae_, &c., and brought forth the practical element in them.--

-- 222. (2) But the practical education could no longer keep its ground after it had become acquainted with the aesthetic. The conquest of Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt, made necessary, in a practical point of view, the acquisition of the Grecian tongue, so that these lands, so permeated with Grecian culture, might be thoroughly ruled. The Roman of family and property, therefore, took into his service Greek nurses and teachers who should give to his children, from their earliest years, Greek culture. It is, in the history of education, a great evil when a nation undertakes to teach a foreign tongue to its youth. Then the necessity of trade with the Greeks caused the study of Rhetoric, so that not only in the deliberations of the senate and people, but in law, the ends might be better attained. Whatever effort the Roman government made to prevent the invasion of the Greek rhetorician was all in vain. The Roman youth sought for this knowledge, which was so necessary to them in foreign lands, e.g. in the flouris.h.i.+ng school of rhetoric on the island of Rhodes. At last, even the study of Philosophy commended itself to the practical Roman, in order that he might recover for himself confidence amid the disappointments of life. When his practical life did not bring him any result, he devoted himself in his poverty to abstract contemplation. The Greeks would have Philosophy for its own sake; the ataraxy of the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics even, desired the result of a necessary principle; but the Roman, on the contrary, wished to lift himself by philosophemes above trouble and misfortune.

--This direction which Philosophy took is noteworthy, not alone in Cicero and Seneca, but at the fall of the Roman empire, when Boethius wrote in his prison his immortal work on the consolations of Philosophy.--

-- 223. The earnestness which sought a definite end degenerated in the very opposite of activity with him who had no definite aim. The idleness of the wealthy Roman, who felt himself to be the lord of a limitless world, devoted itself to dissipation and desire for enjoyment, which, in its entire want of moderation, abused nature. The finest form of the extant education was that in _belles-lettres_, which also for the first time came to belong to the sphere of Pedagogics. There had been a degeneration of art in India and Greece, and also an artistic trifling.

But in Rome there arose a pursuit of art in order to win a certain consideration in social position, and to create for one's self a recreation in the emptiness of a soul satiated with sensual debauchery.

Such a seizing of art is frivolous, for it no longer recognizes its absoluteness, and subordinates it as a means to subjective egotism.

Literary _salons_ then appear.

--In the introduction to his _Cataline_, Sall.u.s.t has painted excellently this complete revolution in the Roman education. The younger Pliny in his letters furnishes ample material to ill.u.s.trate to us this pursuit of _belles-lettres_. In Nero it became idiotic. We should transgress our prescribed limits did we enter here into particulars. An a.n.a.lysis would show the perversion of the aesthetic into the practical, the aesthetic losing thereby its proper nature. But the Roman could not avoid this perversion, because, according to his original aim, he could not move except towards the _utile et honestum_.--