XIV. Aesthetic Education

It is also very interesting to look at these things from a statistical point of view. In doing so, I am being neither pedantic nor unscrupulous, but my findings are the results of deliberate investigation. If I were to write a book about education in German, the word Freiheit would appear again and again in certain chapters. To find out whether the corresponding word freedom could be also used in an English book on education, I carefully looked through the likely chapters of such a book, and discovered that the word freedom did not appear at all, not once. This is the sort of thing for which we should develop a fine perception, because it is the very thing we need for greater world understanding. And it should be considered during the school years as well. I am keenly aware of this when writing books, as I mentioned. Consequently I am very cautious in the choice of certain words. If, for example, I use the German word Natur in various sentences, I can be certain that it will be translated as the word nature in English. There is no doubt at all that Natur would be translated as nature. And yet, the English word nature would awaken a very different concept than would the German word Natur. This is why, when anticipating translations, I have paraphrased certain words in some of my writings. I do this to avoid the wrong interpretation of what I want to say. Of course, there have been numerous times when I used the word Natur, but when it was important to match the German concept with a foreign one, I paraphrased Natur with “the sensory world” ( die sinnliche Welt), especially if the book was likely to be translated into Western languages. To me, “the sensory world” seems to match, more or less, the concept of Natur as used in German. Obviously, I expected sinnliche Welt to be translated as nature in English, only to find that, again, it was translated literally into “the sensory world.” It really is very important to be aware of the living genius of language, especially where an artistic treatment of language is concerned.