Question: Hello, I'm from Wiesbaden. Lyn, you mentioned a good friend of ours just passed away some days ago, and you mentioned that it was really on few occasions, that we really get to know people. We know their faces, their opinions, their behaviors; but that we don't really get to know them. So, I was wondering--particularly, also, at some point, inside the youth movement in our relations among ourselves. How do we really get to know the other person?

LaRouche: That's why Classical studies are so important. Because, in Classical art, great drama, music, and so forth--especially, I think, the most universally accessible, is great art. Which is one of the reasons, of course, why Schiller is so important in Germany, hmm? Because here you have the highest degree of perfection, in composition of drama, which means precisely the requirements, which I just described to the fellow from Mexico, is that, art means, we go into the imagination, into that realm, which is not a realm of fantasy; it's a realm of actually knowing. When we concentrate on the subject matter, in a very concentrated way, and thus we have an insight into what's going on.

Now, that carries over, into relations with people. For example: Great actors--you can always tell, when a great actor is, with a drama that's done well  -- you've probably seen a lot of bad ones, too -- but, in a great actor's performance, if it's well-staged, and the audience is reasonable quiet and responsive, then, what will happen, at the beginning of a great drama, the mind of the audience, the individual member of the audience, will begin to be captured, by what's going on on stage, so that, suddenly, they're really seeing--they're seeing the stage, but they're not thinking about the stage: They're seeing, in their mind, the reality, which the stage, in a sense, merely symbolizes.

The same thing in music. In great musical performances: The mind of the audience is transported, from the sound as such, into a second set of sound--the sound of the imagination: the movement, the passion of ideas, through these kinds of experience, to one thing: They tend to get us to think about the minds of other people. As great drama, gives us an insight into the mind of the character, which the great dramatist, such as Schiller, is presenting. So, we come out of there seeing inside the mind of that character. And we use that training of our mind, in great poetry, in great drama, or great music, to be able to look into the minds of others.

Now, to look at somebody else's mind, there has to be something going on there. So, this is greatly helped by a Classical educational training. And the function of Classical education, is essentially, to bring out this insight, into what's going on in the mind of a human being. By "inside," I mean the same thing I dealt with on the question of curvature, and what's outside the skin: That the reality is not the Cartesian manifold of sense perception. Sense perception is merely a shadow of the reality outside our skins. So, the trick is to get outside our skins, mentally, and to find, by experimental methods, to find out what the principles are outside, that we can willfully control, which will change the world of sense perception around us.

When we exchange ideas of that type, when we communicate the discovery of a principle of that type, to other people, we are engaging their minds, directly. And we get to know them, because we're actually thinking about what is going on inside their mind, not what they're projecting, by speech and so forth, from outside. Not merely sense impressions.

And, that's what the trick is: In Classical education and exercise, in Classical education, and in a way typified by Plato's dialogues, used as a rehearsal exercise, gives us a sense of the difference between knowing what is inside a person as a human being, as opposed to an animal-like response for that person, which has no human quality to it.

And, that's what really is knowing a human being. That's why, I insist, in education, that education must be based on this, not on teaching people opinions. Not on teaching them procedures; not on teaching them how to solve a mathematical problem by calculation. But, rather, how to develop their powers of insight into the discovery, and proof of a universal physical principle. Once you have that in mind, once that's clear to you, it is easier for you, to look at the person you're talking to, and see what's going on behind what they're saying, rather than simply what they're saying. This is the principle of irony and metaphor, in all great poetry and drama--especially poetry. Metaphor and irony are essential. If there's no metaphor and irony, there's no poetry--I don't care how it's done. Because the idea always lies in the behind the mere sense impression; behind the mere words, their literal meaning, in the ironies; in the double-meanings, the nuances. And, that's the key.

-30-