Man is man in that he is self-consciousness. Even the despicable tyrant
who brutally domineers over the wretch who is forced to submit to his
overbearing arrogance, even he wants his slave to be intelligent,
capable of guessing his thoughts, and refuses to consider him as an
unconscious tool of his whims. The mother who tenderly nurses her sick
child is indeed anxious for the health of the body over which she
worries, and she would like to see it vigorous and strong. But that body
is so endeared to her, because by means of it the child is enabled to
live happily with her; through it his fond soul can requite maternal
love by filial devotion; or in it he may develop a powerful and
beautiful personality worthy to be adored as the ideal creature of
maternal affection. If in the bloom of physical health he were to reveal
himself stupid and insensate, endowed with mere instinctive sensuality
and bestial appetites, this son would cease to be the object of his
mother's fondness, nay, he would arouse in her a feeling of loathing and
revulsion. It is this sense of loathing that we feel towards the brutes,
to the extent that we never can be sympathetically drawn to them, and
that we also feel for the human corpse from which life has departed; for
life is the basis of every psychological relation, and therefore of
every possible sympathy.
Education is union, communion, inter-individual unification; and unity
is possible only because men spiritually convene. Matter, we have seen,
nature, things, the non-spirit is multiplicity. As soon as the
multiplicity of natural elements begins to be organised, already in
their organism spiritual activity shines forth. In the spirit is the
root and possibility of every unification. It is spirit that unites men.
Education therefore cannot be a social relationship and a link between
men except by being a spiritual tie among human minds. Therefore it is
now, and has at all times been, what it naturally ought to be, education
of the spirit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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