§ 204. The system of individual education begins with the
transfiguration of the immediate individuality into beauty. On the side
of nature this system is passion, for individuality is given through
nature; but on the side of spirit it is active, for spirit must
determine itself to restrain its measure as the essence of beauty.
§ 205. Here the individual is of value only in so far as he is
beautiful. At first beauty is apprehended as natural, but then it is
carried over into the realm of spirit, and the Good is posited as
identical with the Beautiful. The ideal of æsthetic education remains
always that there shall be also an external unity of the Good with the
Beautiful, of Spirit with Nature.
--We cannot here give in detail the history of Greek Education. It is
the best known among us, and the literature in which it is worked out is
very widely spread. Among the common abridged accounts we mention here
only the works of Jacobs, of Cramer & Bekker's "Charinomos." We must
content ourselves with mentioning the turning-points which follow from
the nature of the principle.--
§ 206. Culture was in Greece thoroughly national. Education gave to the
individual the consciousness that he was a Greek and no barbarian, a
free man and so subject only to the laws of the state, and not to the
caprice of any one person. Thus the nationality was freed at once from
the abstract unity of the family and from the abstract distinction of
caste, while it appeared with the manifold talents of individuals of
different races. Thus the Dorian race held as essential, gymnastics; the
Æolians, music; the Ionics, poetry. The Æolian individuality was
subsumed in the history of the two others, so that these had to proceed
in their development with an internal antagonism. The education of the
Dorian race was national education in the fullest sense of the word; in
it the education of all was the same, and was open to all, even
including the young women; among the Ionic race it was also in its
content truly national, but in its form it was varied and unlike, and,
for those belonging to various great families, private. The former,
reproducing the Oriental phase of abstract unity, educated all in one
mould; the latter was the nursery of particular individualities.
§ 207. (1) Education in the heroic age, without any systematic
arrangement on the subject, left each one perfectly free. The people
related the histories of the adventures of others, and through their own
gave material to others again to relate stories of them.
--The Greeks began where the last stage of the active system of
education ended--with piracy and the seizure of women. Swimming was a
universal practice among the sea-dwelling Greeks, just as in
England--the mistress of the ocean--rowing is the most prominent
exercise among the young men, and public regattas are held.--
§ 208. (2) In the period of state-culture proper, education developed
itself systematically; and gymnastics, music, and grammatics, or
literary culture, constituted the general pedagogical elements.
§ 209. Gymnastics aimed not alone to render the body strong and agile,
but, far more, to produce in it a noble carriage, a dignified and
graceful manner of appearance. Each one fashioned his body into a
living, divine statue, and in the public games the nation crowned the
victor.
--Their love of beautiful boys is explicable not merely by their
interest in beautiful forms, but especially by their interest in
individuality. The low condition of the women could not lie at the
foundation of it, for among the Spartans they were educated as nearly as
possible like the men, and yet among them and the Cretans the love of
boys was recognized in their legislation. To be without a beloved
([Greek: aitês]), or a lover ([Greek: eispnêlas]), was among them
considered as disgraceful as the degradation of the love by unchastity
was contemptible. What charm was there, then, in love? Manifestly only
beauty and culture. But that a person should be attracted by one and not
by another can be accounted for only by the peculiar character, and in
so far the boy-love and the man-friendship which sprang from it, among
the Greeks, are very characteristic and noteworthy phenomena.--
§ 210. It was the task of Music, by its rhythm and measure, to fill the
soul with well-proportioned harmony. So highly did the Greeks prize
music, and so variously did they practise it, that to be a musical man
meant the same with them as to be a cultivated man with us. Education in
this respect was very painstaking, inasmuch as music exercises a very
powerful influence in developing discreet behavior and self-possession
into a graceful naturalness.
--Among the Greeks we find an unrestricted delight in nature--a
listening to her manifestations, the tone of which betrays the
subjectivity of things as subjectivity. In comparison with this tender
sympathy with nature of the Greeks--who heard in the murmur of the
fountains, in the dashing of the waves, in the rustling of the trees,
and in the cry of animals, the voice of divine personality--the sight
and hearing of the Eastern nations for nature is dull.--
§ 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 ([Greek: grammata]), i.e. the
elements of literary culture, reading and writing. Much attention was
given to correct expression. The Fables of Æsop, 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 _Hetæræ_ undertook the same
revolution; in the place of the [Greek: potnia mêtêr] 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 asserted 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 institutions.
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 guardianship of the state which
assumes 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 æsthetic 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 identity 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 friendship. 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 noble 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_."