Aristotle and Ancient Educational IdealsDavidson, Thomas
Philosophy
Aristotle and Ancient Educational Ideals
Davidson, Thomas
Aristotle, 384 BC-322 BC; Education, Greek
not do all the three was looked upon as uncultured. Nor could he hide
his want of culture, since young men were continually called upon, both
at home and at more or less public gatherings, to perform their part in
the social entertainment.
The strictly musical instruction of this period was almost entirely
confined to simple, strong Doric airs, sung to an accompaniment which
was played on an instrument closely resembling the modern guitar (λύρα,
κίθαρις). Complicated and wind instruments were unpopular, and the
softer or more thrilling kinds of music, Lydian, Phrygian, etc., had not
yet been introduced, at least into schools. Anything like the skill and
execution demanded of professional players, who were usually slaves or
foreigners, was considered altogether unworthy of a free man and a
citizen, and was therefore not aimed at. Fond as the Athenians were of
the fine arts, they always held professional skill in any of them,
except poetry and musical composition, to be incompatible with that
dignity and virtue which they demanded of the free citizen. A
respectable Athenian would no more have allowed his son to be a
professional musician than he would have allowed him to be a
professional acrobat.
It is difficult for us to understand the way in which the Greeks
regarded music. Inferior as their music was to ours in all technical
ways, it exerted an influence upon their lives of which we can form but
a faint conception. To them it was a dæmonic power, capable of rousing
or assuaging the passions, and hence of being used for infinite good or
evil. No wonder, then, that in their education they sought to employ
those kinds which tended to "purgation" (κάθαρσις), and to avoid those
that were exciting, sentimental, or effeminate! No wonder that they
disapproved of divorcing music from the intellectual element contained
in the words, and allowing it to degenerate into a mere emotional or
sensual luxury! Music the Greeks regarded, not indeed as a moral force
(a phrase that to them, who regarded morality as a matter of the will,
would have conveyed no meaning), but as a force whose office it was, by
purging and harmonizing the human being, to make him a fit subject for
moral instruction. Music, they held, brought harmony, first into the
human being himself, by putting an end to the conflict between his
passions and his intelligent will, and then, as a consequence, into his
relations with his fellows. Harmony within was held to be the condition
of harmony without.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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