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Rudolf Steiner e.Lib
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The Study of Man
Rudolf Steiner e.Lib Document
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The Study of Man
Schmidt Number: S-3826
On-line since: 23rd June, 2002
If you yourselves have a well developed knowledge of the growing
child, permeated by your own will and feeling, then you will be able
to teach and educate well. Through an educational instinct which will
awaken within you, you will be able to apply the results of this
will-knowledge in the different departments of your work. But this
knowledge must be truly real, which means it must rest upon a true
understanding of the world of facts. Now in order to come to a real
knowledge of the human being we have sought to place him before our
minds from the standpoint first of the soul, and then of the spirit.
We must be clear that a spiritual conception of man makes it necessary
for us to consider the different conditions of consciousness, and to
know that, primarily, our life spiritually takes its course in waking,
dreaming and sleeping; and that all the different manifestations of
human life can be characterised as fully awake, dreaming or sleeping
conditions. We will try once more to descend gradually from the spirit
through the soul to the body, so that we have the whole human being
before us and also may be able to sum these observations at the end
into a kind of hygiene of the growing child.
Now, as you know, the period of life which concerns us in teaching and
education is that which includes the first two decades; and this time,
as we know, is further divided into three periods. Up to the change of
teeth the child bears a very distinct character, shown in his wanting
to be an imitative being; he wants to imitate everything he sees in
his environment. From the seventh year to puberty we have to do with a
child who wants to take on authority what he has to know, to feel and
will. And only with puberty comes the longing in man to gain a
relationship to the world through his own individual judgment.
Therefore in dealing with children of primary school age we must
remember that at this age they long for the sway of authority from the
innermost depths of their beings. We shall educate badly if we are not
in a position to hold our authority in this age.
Now what we have to do is to survey the whole life activity of the
human being in a spiritual description. This activity as we have
already shown from varied points of view, includes thinking-cognition
on the one hand, and willing on the other; feeling lies between. Now
with regard to thinking-cognition it is man's task between birth and
death gradually to permeate it with logic, with all that enables him
to think logically. But what you yourselves, as teachers, have to know
about logic must be kept in the background. For logic is, of course,
something pre-eminently scientific; it must be brought to the children
only through your whole general attitude. But as teachers you will
have to have a mastery of logic.
Our exercise of logic, that is, of thinking-cognition, is an activity
of three members. Firstly, in our thinking-cognition we always have
what is called conclusions. In ordinary life thinking is expressed in
speech. If you examine the structure of speech you will find that in
speaking you are continually forming conclusions. This activity of
forming conclusions is the most conscious of all human activities. Man
could not express himself in speech unless he were continually
uttering conclusions nor could he understand what another person said
to him unless he were continuously receiving conclusions. Academic
logic usually dismembers conclusions, thus falsifying them at the
outset, in so far as conclusions appear in ordinary life. Academic
logic takes no account of the fact that we form conclusions every time
we look at any one single thing. Suppose that you go to a menagerie
and see a lion. What do you do first of all when you perceive the
lion? First you bring what you see in the lion to your consciousness;
and only by this bringing to consciousness do you gain an
understanding of your perceptions of the lion. Before you went to the
menagerie, in your ordinary life, you learned that beings that have
the form and habits of the lion you are now looking at are
animals. This knowledge acquired in ordinary life you
bring with you into the menagerie. Then you look at the lion and find:
the lion is doing just what you have learned that animals do. You
connect this with what you have brought with you out of your knowledge
of life and then you form the judgment: the lion is an animal. It is
not until you have formed this judgment that you can understand the
particular concept lion. The first thing you form is a
conclusion; the second is a judgment; the last thing you
come to in life is a concept. Of course you are not aware that
you are continuously carrying out this activity; but it is only by
means of this activity that you can lead a conscious life which
enables you to communicate with other human beings through speech. It
is commonly thought that one comes to concepts first of all. This is
not true. The first thing in life is conclusions. And in reality, if
when we go into the menagerie we do not exclude our perception of the
lion from the rest of our experience, but bring it into line with the
whole of our previous experience, then what we accomplish first in the
menagerie is the drawing of a conclusion. We must be clear on this
point; going into the menagerie and seeing the lion is merely a single
act and it belongs to the whole of life. We did not begin living when
we entered the menagerie and turned our attention to the lion. This
action is linked on to our previous life, and our previous life plays
into it too, and what we take out with us when we leave the menagerie
will again be carried over into the rest of life. If now we consider
the whole process, what is the lion first of all? He is first of all a
conclusion. That is absolutely true: the lion is a conclusion.
A little later, the lion is a, judgment. And a little later
still, the lion is a concept.
If you open a book on logic, that is, one of the older sort, you
usually find amongst the conclusions the following famous one:
All men are mortal. Caius is a man. Therefore Caius is
mortal. Caius is indeed the most famous logical personality. Now
actually this splitting up of the three judgments: All men are
mortal. Caius is a man. Therefore Caius is mortal, is only to be
found in the teaching of logic. In real life these three judgments
weave into one another, forming a unity, for the life in
thinking-knowing is in continual flux. You make all three judgments
simultaneously when you approach the man Caius. What you are thinking
of him already contains these three judgments within it. That is to
say: first comes the conclusion. And only after that do you form the
judgment, which is here put as the conclusion: Therefore Caius
is mortal. And the last thing you get is the individualised
concept: The mortal Caius.
Now these three things, conclusion, judgment and concept, exist in the
knowing process, that is, in the living spirit of man. What is their
relation to each other in the living spirit of man?
The conclusion can only live in the living spirit of man: only there
can it have a healthy life; that means: the conclusion is only
completely healthy when it occurs in fully waking life. This is very
important, as we shall see later.
Therefore you ruin the soul of the child if you make him commit to
memory ready-made conclusions. What I am now saying and shall
work out in detail with you later is of the most fundamental
importance for your teaching. In the Waldorf School you will get
children of all ages who bear the result of former teaching. The
children will have been taught in conclusions, judgments and concepts,
and you will soon experience the result of this. You will have to
build on the knowledge that the children have already acquired, for
you cannot begin at the beginning with each child. We are so placed
that we cannot build our school up from the bottom but have to begin
with classes of all ages. You will thus find that the children's souls
have already been prepared, and in your method of teaching in the
early days you will have to be very careful not to worry the children
to draw ready-made conclusions out of their sum of knowledge. If these
conclusions are too firmly fixed in the children's souls it is better
to leave them dormant and try to appeal to the child's present life in
the making of conclusions.
Judgment, also, will make its appearance, and this of course in the
full waking life. But judgment can also sink into the depths of the
human soul, to where the soul is dreaming. The conclusion should not
sink into the dreaming soul; only the judgment can do this. Thus every
judgment that we form about the world sinks down into the dreaming
soul.
Now what does this really mean? What is this dreaming soul? It is more
of the nature of feeling, as we have already learned. When in life we
form judgments and then pass on from them and continue on our way, we
carry these judgments with us through the world. But we carry them
through the world in feeling. This has also the further
implication that forming judgments brings about a kind of habit of
soul. You will be forming the soul habits of the child by the way you
teach the children to form judgments. You must be absolutely aware of
this fact. For it is the sentence which expresses judgment, and with
every sentence you say to a child you are contributing a further atom
to the habits of that child's soul. Hence the teacher, who possesses
authority, must always be conscious that what he says will become part
of the habits of soul of the child.
Now, to come from judgment to concept: we must realise that when we
form a concept it goes down into the profoundest depths of man's
being; regarding the matter spiritually, it goes down into the
sleeping soul. The concept makes its way right down into the sleeping
soul, and this is that part of the soul that is constantly at work
upon the body. The waking soul does not work upon the body. The
dreaming soul works upon it a little; it produces what lies in its
habitual gestures. But the sleeping soul works right into the very
forms of the body. In forming concepts, that is in formulating the
results of judgments in men, you are working right into the sleeping
soul, or in other words, right into the body of the human being. Now
when the human being is born, he has reached a high degree of
completion as far as his body is concerned; and the soul can
only develop in a finer way what has been given to the human being by
the stream of inheritance. But the soul does carry out this refining
work. We go about the world and we look at people. These people we
meet with have quite distinct faces. What is the content of these
physiognomies? They contain, amongst other things, the result of all
the concepts which teachers and educators inculcated in these people
during their childhood. From the face of the mature man streams out to
us the content of the many concepts poured into the soul of the child;
for, in forming the man's physiognomy it is with fixed concepts
among other things that the sleeping soul has wrought. Here we
see what power educational work has upon the human being. He receives
his stamp right down into his very body through the forming of
concepts.
The most striking phenomenon in the world to-day is that we find men
with such unpronounced features. Herman Bahr in the course of a
lecture in Berlin once described an experience of his in a very
spirited manner. He said that even as far back as the 1890's, if you
were to go to the Rhine in the neighbourhood of Essen, and walking
down the street were to meet people coming out of the factories, you
would have the feeling: no one of these people is different from
another; I am really looking at one single person who is coming out
like a picture in a duplicating machine; it is impossible to
distinguish these people from one another. A very significant
observation! And Herman Bahr made another observation which is also
very significant. He said: when in the '90s you were invited out to
dinner in Berlin you had a lady on your right and on your left hand,
but you really could not distinguish them from each other, except that
you knew one was on your right hand and the other on your left. Then
another day you were perhaps invited somewhere else, and it might
easily happen that you could not be sure: is this yesterday's lady, or
the lady of the day before?
In short, a certain uniformity has come over humanity, and this is a
proof that there has been no true education in the preceding years. We
must learn from these things what is really necessary in the
transformation of our educational life, for education has a deep and
far-reaching influence on the whole cultural life of the times.
Therefore we can say: at those times in life when man is not
confronted with any one particular fact, his concepts are living in
the unconscious.
Concepts can live in the unconscious. Judgments can only live as
habits of judgment in the semi-conscious, in the dreaming life. And
conclusions should really only hold sway in the fully conscious waking
life. That is to say, you must take great care to talk over with the
children beforehand anything that is related to conclusions, and not
let them store up ready-made conclusions. They should only store up
what can develop and ripen into a concept. Now how can we bring this
about?
Suppose you are forming concepts, and they are dead concepts. Then you
graft the corpses of concepts into the human being. You graft dead
concepts right into the bodily nature of man when you implant dead
concepts on him. What kind of a concept should we then give the
children? It must be a living concept if man has to live with it. Man
is alive, thus the concept must also be alive. If in the child's ninth
or tenth year you graft into him concepts which are meant to retain
their same form in him until he is thirty or forty years of age, then
you will be imputing him with the corpses of concepts, for the concept
will not follow the life of the human being as he grows and develops.
You must give the child such concepts as are capable of change in his
later life. The educator must aim at giving the child concepts which
will not remain the same throughout his life, but will change as the
child grows older. If you do this you will be implanting live concepts
in the child. And when is it that you give him dead concepts? When you
continually give the child definitions, when you say: A lion is
... this or that, and make him learn it by heart, then you are
grafting dead concepts into him; and you are expecting that at the age
of thirty he will retain these concepts in the precise form in which
you are now say: the making of many definitions is death to living
teaching. What then must we do? In teaching we must not make
definitions but rather must endeavour to make characterisations. We
characterise things when we view them from as many standpoints as
possible. If in Natural History we give the children simply what is to
be found, for example, in the Natural History books of the present
day, then we are really only defining the animal for him. We must try
in all branches of our teaching to characterise the animal from
different sides showing for example how men have gradually come to
know about this animal, how they have come to make use of its work,
and so on. But in a reasonable curriculum this characterisation will
arise of itself, if, for instance, the teacher does not merely
describe consecutively, say: first the cuttlefish, and then the mouse,
and finally man, each in turn, in natural-historical order but
rather places cuttlefish, mouse and man side by side and
relates them with one another. The interrelationships will prove so
manifold that there will result, not a definition, but a
characterisation. A right kind of teaching will aim, from the outset,
at characterisation rather than definition.
It is of very great importance to make it your constant and conscious
aim not to destroy anything in the growing human being, but to teach
and educate him in such a way that he continues to be full of life,
and does not dry up and become hard and rigid. You must therefore
distinguish carefully between mobile concepts which you give the child
and such concepts as need undergo no change.
These concepts will give the child a kind of skeleton in his soul.
Therefore you must realise that you have to give the child things
which can remain with him throughout his life. You must not give him
dead concepts of all the details of life concepts which must
not remain with him rather must you give him living concepts of
the details of life and of the world, concepts which will develop with
him organically. But you must connect everything with man. In the
child's comprehension of the world everything must finally flow
together into the idea of man. This idea of man should endure. All
that you give a child when you tell him a fable and apply it to man,
when in natural history you connect cuttlefish and mouse with man, or
when in teaching the children Morse telegraphy you arouse a feeling of
the wonder of the earth as a conductor all these are things
which unite the whole world in all its details with the human
being. This is something that can remain with him. But the concept
man is only built up gradually; you cannot give the child
a ready-made concept of man. But when you have built it up then it can
remain. In fact it is the most beautiful thing you can give a child in
school for his later life: the idea, which is as many-sided and
comprehensive as possible, of man.
What is living in the human being tends to transform itself in life in
a really living way. If you succeed in giving the child concepts of
reverence and devotion, living concepts of all that we call the mood
of prayer in the widest sense, such a conception, permeated by the
mood of prayer, is then a living conception and it lasts right on into
old age; and in old age it transforms itself into the capacity of
blessing, of being able to impart to others what comes from a mood of
prayer. I once expressed this in a public lecture in the following
way: a man or woman will only be able to impart blessing in old age if
he or she has learned to pray rightly as a child. If as a child one
learned to pray rightly then as an old man or old woman one can bless
rightly and with greatest power.
Thus to give children concepts of this kind, which have to do with the
most intimate nature of man, is to equip them with living concepts;
and this living element is open to change, it transforms itself,
changing with the very life of man. Let us once more consider this
threefold division of childhood and youth from a rather different
point of view. Up to the change of teeth man has a desire to imitate;
up to puberty he longs for an authority to look up to; after this time
he wants to apply his own judgment to the world.
This can be expressed in another way. When the human being comes forth
from the world of soul and spirit and receives the garment of his
body, what is it that he really wants to do? He wants to make actual
in the physical world what he has lived through in the past in the
spiritual world. In certain respects the human being before the change
of teeth is entirely involved in the past. He is still filled with the
devotion that one develops in the spiritual world. It is for this
reason that he gives himself up to his environment by imitating the
people around him. What then is the fundamental impulse, the
completely unconscious mood of the child before the change of teeth?
This fundamental mood is a very beautiful one, and it must be fostered
in the child. It proceeds from the assumption, from the unconscious
assumption that the whole world is of a moral nature. This is not
exclusively the case in souls of the present day (I have already drawn
attention to this in a lecture here) but by the very fact of becoming
a physical being man has the tendency at birth to proceed from the
unconscious assumption that the world is moral. It is good therefore
for the whole education up to the change of teeth and even beyond this
age, that one should bear in mind this unconscious assumption that the
world is moral. I drew your attention to this by reading you two
extracts, for which I had first shown you the preparation; this
preparation rested entirely on the assumption that one describes
things from a moral aspect. (In the lectures Discussions with
Teachers.) I tried to show in the first piece about the sheep-dog,
the butcher's dog and the lap-dog how human morals can be reflected in
the animal world. And in the poem about the violet, by Hoffman von
Fallersleben, I aimed at giving a moral without pedantry for children
up to seven or beyond; thereby working in harmony with this assumption
that the world is moral. This is the greatness and sublimity in the
outlook of childhood, that children are a race who believe in the
morality of the world, and therefore believe that the world may be
imitated. Thus the child lives in the past and is to a great extent a
revealer of the pre-natal past not of the physical past, but of
the past of soul and spirit.
From the change of teeth up to the time of adolescence the child
really lives continually in the present, and is interested in what is
going on in the world around him. When educating we must constantly
keep in mind that children of primary school age want always to live
in the present. How does one live in the present? One lives in the
present when one enjoys the world around one, not in an animal way,
but in a human way. And indeed the child of this age wants also to
enjoy the world in the lessons he receives. Therefore from the outset
we must make our teaching a thing of enjoyment for the children
not animal enjoyment, but enjoyment of a higher, human kind not
something that calls forth in them antipathy and repulsion.
There have of course been various good educational experiments on
these lines. But here we are faced with a certain danger, namely that
this principle of making teaching a source of pleasure and enjoyment
can easily deteriorate into something paltry and commonplace. This
must not happen. But the only sure preventive is for the teacher and
educator to be ever willing to raise himself above what is
commonplace, pedantic and philistine. This he can only do if he never
neglects to make a really living contact with art. For in seeking to
enjoy the world in a human, and not in an animal way one proceeds from
a definite assumption: namely that the world is beautiful. And
from the time he changes his teeth until puberty the child really
proceeds on the unconscious assumption that he shall find the world
beautiful. This unconscious assumption of the child that the world is
beautiful is not met by the regulations laid down for object
lessons, regulations which are often very crude and are drawn up
purely from a utilitarian point of view. But this assumption is met if
one will try and immerse oneself in artistic experience so that the
teaching in this period may be artistic through and through. It
sometimes makes one extremely sad to read present-day books on
education and to see how the good principle that education should be
made into a source of joy does not come into its own because what the
teacher discourses on with his pupils is inartistic and commonplace.
To-day it is much in favour to conduct object lessons on the Socratic
method. But the nature of the questions asked is utilitarian in the
extreme instead of partaking of the beautiful. And here no
demonstrations or showing of set examples will be of any help. It is
not a question of instructing the teacher that he shall adopt this
method or that when choosing set pieces for his object lesson. What is
essential is that the teacher himself by living in art should see to
it that the things he talks about to his children are artistic.
The first part of a child's life, up to the change of teeth, is spent
with the unconscious assumption: the world is moral. The second
period, from the change of teeth to adolescence, is spent with the
unconscious assumption: the world is beautiful. And only with
adolescence dawns the possibility of discovering: the world is
true. Thus it is not until then that education should begin to
assume a scientific character. Before adolescence it is
not good to give a purely systematising or scientific character to
education, for not until adolescence does man attain a right and
inward concept of truth.
In this way you will come to see that as the child descends into this
physical world out of higher worlds the Past descends with him; that
when he has accomplished the change of teeth the Present plays itself
out in the boy or girl of school age, and that after fourteen the
human being enters a time of life when impulses of the future assert
themselves in his soul. Past, present and future, and life in the
midst of them, this too is planted in the growing child.
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