Courses

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?