13. Harmonious Interaction of People

If we want to get a clear and complete picture of institutions that relate to the education of the individual, this can only be done if we relate them to our cultural life and its ideals. But what point of view should we take to understand our cultural life itself?

For a people as advanced as ours, it may seem pedantic to leave it to the inspiration of the moment to answer such questions, or to philosophize at length, deriving a few hollow phrases from mere abstract sentences, while spurning to ask our great ancestors. The high culture to which our people has risen has long since led it to gain clarity about its position in world history. The magnificent blossoms in art and science that our nation's classical era has produced have long made it clear to the unbiased and educated that the Greek spirit has been rejuvenated in the regions of Germania. Just as the more noble education poured out of Hellas through all the veins of the ancient world, so German education flows into the culture of all newer peoples in a fertilizing way. Seen in this light, it appears more than a mere figure of speech when Schiller connects his philosophical reflection to the Greek myth in the essay “On Grace and Dignity”. This prefigures the location of our reflection. If, with Fichte, we regard the Germans as the original or ancestral people of the modern world, they will be seen as representatives of modern culture, with whom we compare the Greeks, a people equal to all of them.

In this comparison, decisive contrasts emerge. The complex conditions of modern social life in our advanced culture have disrupted the disposition towards humanity that was originally present in every individual in its entirety, and no longer allow it to mature in the individual, but only in the whole of human society. In the individual Greek, the whole of humanity is reflected to us as in a mirror; with us, this disposition no longer develops in the individual, but only in the whole state. One person particularly develops this, the other that mental faculty, and in doing so neglects the others, so that one

would like to claim that the mental powers also express themselves in experience as separately as the psychologist separates them in the presentation, and we see not only individual subjects, but entire classes of people develop only a part of their abilities, while the rest, as with crippled growths, are barely hinted at with a faint trace. You have to ask around from individual to individual to glean the totality of the species.

The entire culture of the Greeks is an expression of the harmonious activity of all forces. No part of human nature is neglected, none is particularly favored. No split has yet occurred in the forces at work, which is why they worked so harmoniously. That is why the Greeks were so happy, because they had no sense of lack in human nature. As the culture of the Greeks presents itself to us as complete in itself, it appears to us as an ideal.

But man could not remain standing on the standpoint of the Greeks. The culture of the Greeks formed a culminating point, and one could only rise to even higher spheres by splitting the forces. We would never have achieved our great intellectual accomplishments if individual mental faculties had not been particularly strongly developed in particular individuals. If we take a look at educated Europe, this soon becomes perfectly clear to us. The Italian is endowed with the most vivid imagination and the most lively sense of art, the Frenchman with dazzling rhetoric, the Englishman with a critical mind. We also find all these details in the ancient Greeks, but never developed separately by themselves. There, the contrasts only exist separately in our abstracting minds; in reality they do not exist separately. In the modern world, we are now dealing not with ideal contrasts, but with real ones. But while the peoples just mentioned, who were mainly from educated Europe, were content with their one-sided education, the Germans – and here they resemble the Greeks – had a longing when the brilliant epoch of their literature shone on the horizon of intellectual life: to reunite the contrasts that had arisen in reality in an ideal way. As in so many things, here too the stimulus proceeded from the Romance peoples. Rousseau set the conditions of natural life as an ideal in contrast to the unnatural conditions of modern state life. This was the fundamental idea which, purified by the profound thinking of Fichte and Schiller, was overcome and led to a really satisfactory solution. If we consider the prose writings of that time that leaned more towards the philosophical direction, such as Fichte's lectures on “the scholar”, Schiller's “aesthetic letters” or Jean Paul's “Levana”, we see the same idea recurring. The latter writer expresses it as follows:

Each of us has within him his ideal price-man, whom he secretly strives to set free or quiet from youth.

This whole view also comes across to us clearly and distinctly in Schiller's saying:

Always strive for the whole, and if you cannot become a whole, as a serving member, join a whole.

This whole quest becomes even clearer to us when we compare the way in which weaker, more narrow-minded spirits were divided by the split that occurred in the modern world with regard to intellectual forces, and how differently strong, far-sighted spirits sought to find an ideal way out. One of the former is now Hölderlin. Completely absorbed in Greek culture, which presents him with the whole of human nature in an indivisible unity, he feels the deepest pain at the fragmentation among Germans, a pain to which he gives a meaningful expression in the following words:

You see artisans among the Germans, but not human beings; thinkers, but not human beings; priests, but not human beings; masters, servants, boys, and set people.

Schiller and Fichte now confront this narrow-minded view in a truly magnificent way and find the way out of the error. I called Hölderlin's view narrow-minded because it neglects the members in relation to the whole. The individual spiritual power had to suffer, it had to remain at a certain level so that the harmony of the whole would not be destroyed. But a further look only arouses our interest in the whole if we see the whole in the perfection of each individual link and not in the neglect of them.

It was necessary to consider a means by which, despite the perfection of the individual power, the whole could still be seen in each individual power. And this task is solved in Schiller's “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of the Human Race.” —

Through the ideal human being that is active in each individual person, the potential for all of humanity is manifested in him. This ideal human being is now represented in the state as a “whole”.

By having to choose a particular station, each individual is no longer purely and simply human; he is a priest, a lawyer, a teacher, a technician, an artist, a physician, etc. Given the constant progress of civilization, there should be an infinite number of individual stations. The infinite isolation and specialization [illegible word] through the one-sided education of the individual [illegible word] is now contrasted with what we want to call the social sense; the interaction of individuals. The entire organism of a nation is moving towards a cultural ideal that consists in perfection and that has its roots in the spirit of the individual. When the powers and abilities of individuals combine to create an overall performance, we see a great ideal personality, embodied in society, striving towards a common goal. In this great personality, we encounter everything that the Greeks present to us in an undivided way in each individual. The ideal of their way of working is the harmonious interaction of all possible forces, and their product is a product of freedom. This latter magnificent manifestation of the purely human, of which we become more and more aware in the course of history, is the creator of the highest that man can achieve. But it is only possible through the harmonious interaction and lively interweaving of all possible human abilities and powers. The more one-sided our education is, the more we distance ourselves from this harmony of the powers of the mind. But the necessity of a one-sided education has already been repeatedly pointed out. In this case, the individual must seek what he does not find in himself in connection with his fellow human beings. And so he appears to society as a microcosm, in a different way than it was the case with the Greeks. By losing freedom through his one-sidedness, he gains as a serving member of the whole. From now on, his individual strength is no longer his property, but a link in the whole social activity. Thus, by giving himself completely to society and willingly receiving from it, he regains that state, which Schiller calls the aesthetic one, that is observed in the Greeks, that poor [breaks off]