Fritzman's Courses
-- In
order not to be untrue to my type, which is a yes-saying type
and deals in contradictions and criticisms only indirectly, only
unwillingly, I will set forth right away the three tasks for which
educators are required. One must learn to see, one must learn
to think, one must learn to speak and write.
The goal of all three tasks is a noble culture. --
To learn to see -- to accustom the eye to composure, to
patience, to letting things come to it; to put off judgment, to learn
to walk around all sides of the individual case and comprehend it from
all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling in
spirituality: not to react to a stimulus right away, but to
keep in check the instinct to restrict and exclude. Learning to see,
as I understand it, is almost what is unphilosophically termed
will-power: what is essential here is precisely not to
"will," to be able to put off a decision. All unspirituality,
all commonness is based on the inability to resist a stimulus -- one has
to react, one follows every impulse. In many cases, such a compulsion
is already a sickness, decline, a symptom of exhaustion -- almost
everything that unphilosophical coarseness calls vice is simply this
physiological inability not to react. --
A useful application of having learned to see: one will become, as a learner
in general, slow, suspicious, and resistant. It will be with a hostile
composure that one will let strange new things of every sort
make their initial approach -- one will draw one's hand back from them.
Leaving all one's doors open, submissively flopping belly-down before
every little fact, a constant readiness to jump in and interfere, to plunge
into other people and other things, in short, the celebrated
"objectivity" of modern times is bad taste, is ignoble par
excellence. --
...Thinking needs a technique, a plan of study, a will to mastery ...
thinking wants to be learned as dancing wants to be learned, as
a kind of dancing.... For we cannot subtract dancing in any
form from noble education, the ability to dance with feet,
with concepts, with words: need I add that one must also be able to
dance with the pen -- that one must learn to write? -- Friedrich Nietzsche
Fall 2012 - Spring 2013
On sabbatical leave
503-768-7477
Updated on 2 May 2012
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