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SCHILLER INSTITUTE
Partial List of
Pedagogical Articles
on www.schillerinstitute.org

Below you will find a partial listing of some pedagocial exercises, designed to help break through the handicap of “sense-certainty”, the unfortunate perspective from which most people view the world these days. If you would like more information on the classes and discussions in your area about this, please call, or email us at the address below.

You will find related material if you read the original translations of the works of great thinkers. Please check the full listing of FIDELIO articles, for articles on many other topics not listed below.

Click or scroll down to Schiller Institute translations of the poems, Archimedes and the Student. and Human Knowledge by Friedrich Schiller. Below that you will find a short excerpt from Lyndon LaRouche on the relationship between Music and Science.



Related Poetry
by Friedrich Schiller

This poem, “Archimedes and the Student”, was quoted by Carl Gauss in his book on Astromony, in which Gauss was commenting on the degraded condition of science education and its reflection in political thinking, in his time.

Archimedes and the Student

To Archimedes came a youth desirous of knowledge.
“Tutor me,” spoke he to him, “in the most godly of arts,
Which such glorious fruit to the land of our father hath yielded
And the walls of the town from the Sambuca preserved!”
“Godly nams’t thou the art? She is’t,” responded the wise one;
“But she was that, my dear son, e’re she the state served.
Woulds’t thou but the fruits from her, these too can the mortal engender;
Who doth woo the Goddess, seek not the woman in her.”

translated by William F. Wertz

To see Johannes Vermeer’s 1688 painting “The Astronomer”, which was featured on the cover of a 1997 Fidelio Magazine, click here. (The person who is painted is believed to be Antony Leeuwenhock, the inventor of the microscope.)

Human Knowledge

While thou readest in her, what theyself thou in her hast written,
While thou in groups for the eye dost her phenomena range,
Thine own cords hast extended upon her unending expanses ,
Thinkest thou, thy spirit doth grasp knowingly Nature’s extent.
The astonomer doth so describe the heaven with figures,
That in the eternal expanse lighter the view is discerne’d.
Knits remote solar bodies, through Sirius-distances parted,
To anoher in the swan and in the horns of the bull.
But understands he therefore the mystic dances of the orbits,
While him the vault of the stars showeth its global design?

translated by William F. Wertz

Excerpt from Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. on Music and Science:

“...You have the same thing in great music, generally. You have the case of a great conductor, Wilhelm Furtwangler. Wilhelm Furtwangler was the one who really taught me the inner principles of music—just by hearing his recorded performance, of all things, a Tchaikovsky symphony, sitting overseas in India in January of 1946, after the end of the war—and I heard something coming out of that recording, which was amazing. And then, I understood it. It was what he referred to, as “performing between the notes.”

“And that’s the secret, here. Already. The secret of the Bach motet, is, “performing between the notes.” And, John had, I think, some great fun in helping people see more clearly, what it means, “singing between the notes,” in order to get the connection of the whole composition to each part within it, and how the parts relate to this whole idea.

“This is the social process. This is what society really should be like: Is, to look at ourselves, in this way; to look at ourselves, as an immortal kind of creature, which is born in the flesh, and dies in the flesh, but participates in immortality, between those bookends and beyond. To reach out to generations like those of slaves and others, before us, and to hear their voices singing to us; when we sense that they are immortal, because they left us something, which lives in us, today. And that we do not fully understand these gifts, when they are first presented to us. And part of our development, is to relive those gifts. And, as these young people did with the chorus, is to work deeper and deeper, into an understanding, of nuances, which are not something that we added to it, precisely. In the case of this work, Bach already intended it. When people are learning to perform the thing better and better, today, they are realizing what Bach already intended. When Furtwangler made great conducting of Beethoven exceptional quality, he was doing what Beethoven intended.

“So, this relationship of development in the individual, development in the composer, development in the audience, development in those who come after us, is an expression of that immortality.

The same thing is true in physical science: We discover things which we can not see with the senses, but which are the most powerful forces in the universe. No one has ever tasted gravity; or chewed it. I’ve never seen it—but it’s a very powerful principle. We can describe it. We can master its functions. We can apply it. But, you can’t see it with the senses. True ideas can not be seen with the senses: They lie between the cracks. They lie in those discoveries of principle which no animal can make. They lie in the transmission of the experience of discovering principles, from one generation to another. And that is precisely what this society lacks.”