Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]

Human Resource Management 11th Edition Noe Solutions Manual All Chapters

Download as pdf or txt
Download as pdf or txt
You are on page 1of 29

Human Resource Management 11th

Edition Noe Solutions Manual


Go to download the full and correct content document:
https://testbankfan.com/product/human-resource-management-11th-edition-noe-soluti
ons-manual/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Fundamentals of Human Resource Management 7th Edition


Noe Solutions Manual

https://testbankfan.com/product/fundamentals-of-human-resource-
management-7th-edition-noe-solutions-manual/

Strategic Human Resource Management Canadian 2nd


Edition Noe Solutions Manual

https://testbankfan.com/product/strategic-human-resource-
management-canadian-2nd-edition-noe-solutions-manual/

Fundamentals of Human Resource Management 6th Edition


Noe Solutions Manual

https://testbankfan.com/product/fundamentals-of-human-resource-
management-6th-edition-noe-solutions-manual/

Fundamentals of Human Resource Management 4th Edition


Noe Solutions Manual

https://testbankfan.com/product/fundamentals-of-human-resource-
management-4th-edition-noe-solutions-manual/
Fundamentals of Human Resource Management 5th Edition
Noe Solutions Manual

https://testbankfan.com/product/fundamentals-of-human-resource-
management-5th-edition-noe-solutions-manual/

Human Resource Management Gaining A Competitive


Advantage 10th Edition Noe Solutions Manual

https://testbankfan.com/product/human-resource-management-
gaining-a-competitive-advantage-10th-edition-noe-solutions-
manual/

Human Resource Management Gaining A Competitive


Advantage 9th Edition Noe Solutions Manual

https://testbankfan.com/product/human-resource-management-
gaining-a-competitive-advantage-9th-edition-noe-solutions-manual/

Fundamentals of Human Resource Management 6th Edition


Noe Test Bank

https://testbankfan.com/product/fundamentals-of-human-resource-
management-6th-edition-noe-test-bank/

Fundamentals of Human Resource Management 5th Edition


Noe Test Bank

https://testbankfan.com/product/fundamentals-of-human-resource-
management-5th-edition-noe-test-bank/
Human Resource Management: Gaining a Competitive Advantage, 11e Instructor’s Manual

Chapter 9 – Employee Development

This chapter continues to build from previous chapters by focusing on employee development and
its role within the organization (LO9-1) as well for the careers and growth of employees. Table 9.1
may help to illustrate the distinction of both training and development, yet how they both are
interrelated. Within this discussion, LO9-2 and LO9-3 may be introduced, as both bring into focus
how employee goals and corporate objectives may be bridged for the benefit of both. Figure 9.1 on
may be employed to better illustrate the process and responsibilities of both. LO9-5 and LO9-6 may
then be introduced, as both are related to the skill development of employees. Discussion of these 2
LOs within the context of performance management can help aid in student understanding. LO9-4,
then, could be discussed as a way to illustrate different methods for developing employees.

Instructors may wish to introduce LO9-10 as a method for identifying and selecting employees.
LO9-7, LO9-8, and LO9-9 may then be introduced within the examples of succession planning and
leadership identification. Instructors may then wish to revisit these three objectives and discuss
how they apply to all employees within the organization, and how strong training, development,
and performance management practices are strategic imperatives for organizations.

Learning Objectives
LO 9-1: Explain how employee development contributes to strategies related to employee
retention, developing intellectual capital, and business growth.

LO 9-2: Discuss the steps in the development planning process.

LO 9-3: Explain the employees’ and company’s responsibilities in planning development.

LO 9-4: Discuss current trends in using formal education for development.

LO 9-5: Relate how assessment of personality type, work behaviors, and job performance can be
used for employee development.

LO 9-6: Explain how job experiences can be used for skill development.

LO 9-7: Develop successful mentoring programs.

LO 9-8: Describe how to train managers to coach employees.

LO 9-9: Discuss what companies are doing to melt the glass ceiling.

LO 9-10: Use the 9-box grid for identifying where employees fit in a succession plan and construct
appropriate development plans for them.

Copyright © 2019 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution


without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Human Resource Management: Gaining a Competitive Advantage, 11e Instructor’s Manual

Society for Human Resource Management Body of Competency &


Knowledge

This chapter contains content which may be identified within the following content areas in HR
Expertise:
• Strategic HR Planning
• Employee Engagement & Retention
• Learning & Development
• Structure of the HR Function
• Organizational Effectiveness & Development
• Workforce Management
• Technology Management
• Diversity & Inclusion

Human Resource Certification Institute’s A Guide to the HR Body of


Knowledge

This chapter contains content which may be identified within the following content areas:
• Business Management & Strategy
• Human Resource Development

Other Classroom Materials: CONNECT


There are CONNECT exercises available through McGraw-Hill, which can greatly assist student
preparation for class and understanding of chapter concepts. Instructors may wish to structure the
class, where students must complete the CONNECT exercises prior to class, thus, further reinforcing
material and allowing instructors to expand and challenge student understanding during class time.
CONNECT exercises may be set-up to be time-based, requiring students to practice chapter
materials for a specific timeframe. It is the instructors’ discretion how they desire to include this
into the course grade, but a low-stakes grading system based on completion is suggested to help
encourage student usage, while minimizing penalties for mistakes during completion.

The following activities are available in Connect for this chapter:


• Case Analysis – Determining Developmental Planning
• Case Analysis – Employment Experiences
• Case Analysis: Which Interpersonal Relationship Would Be Best?
• Click & Drag – Taking Steps Toward Career Development
• Click & Drag – Analyzing Assessments
• Case Analysis – Succession Planning: Who’s Next?
• Video Case – Allstate Embraces Employee Development

Guidance to Discussion Questions and End of Chapter Sections

Discussion Question 1: Assessment could be used to create a productive work team by selecting
individuals who would work well together. Also, assessment would help individuals understand
themselves and their work style so that they can better understand their reactions to others.

Copyright © 2019 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution


without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Human Resource Management: Gaining a Competitive Advantage, 11e Instructor’s Manual

Assessment can also help match teams with assignments that allow them to capitalize on their
preferences and strengths.

Discussion Question 2: An effective 360-degree feedback system is where employees’ behaviors


and skills are evaluated not only by subordinates, but also by peers, customers, their bosses, and
themselves. The raters are given a questionnaire to complete asking them to rate the person on a
number of different dimensions. Raters are often asked to rate the degree to which each particular
item is considered a strength or needs development. Some benefits of the system include collecting
multiple perspectives of mangers’ performance, allowing the employee to compare his own
personal evaluation with the views of others, and formalizing communications about behaviors and
skills rated between employees and their internal and external customers. Studies have shown that
performance improvement and behavior change occur as a result. Reliable or consistent ratings
are provided, raters’ confidentiality is maintained, the behaviors or skills assessed are job-related
(valid), the system is easy to use, and managers receive and act on the feedback.

Discussion Question 3: Companies develop mentoring programs because it allows employees to


increase their knowledge and develop skills by interacting with a more experienced employee. A
mentor is an experienced, employee who helps develop another employee. One major reason why
companies form formal mentoring programs is because they ensure access to mentors for all
employees, regardless of race or gender. Also, participants in the mentoring relationship know
exactly what is expected of them. Mentor programs are used to socialize new employees, increase
the likelihood of skill transfer from training to the work setting, and to provide opportunities for
women and minorities to gain the exposure and skills needed to evolve into managerial positions.
Mentoring relationships provide opportunities for mentors to develop their interpersonal skills and
increase their feelings of self-esteem and worth to the organization. Mentors provide career
support and psychological support to their protégés. Protégés normally receive higher rates of
promotion, higher salaries, and greater organizational influence.

Discussion Question 4: Rationale should apply assessments, which are valid and reliable as
discussed in previous chapters, relating to the job responsibilities as outlined in the question.

Discussion Question 5: Some ways that an employee’s current job could be changed to develop his
or her leadership skills include job rotation assignments, enlarging the current job by adding
challenges or new responsibilities, and transfers or promotions. Also, the current employees could
be sent to workshops updating them on the various management skills where they have to interact
and participate to gain a feeling for the different management skills when in practice.

Discussion Question 6: Students should be able to identify opportunities such as formalized


learning, volunteer work, and others.

Discussion Question 7: A sabbatical is a leave of absence from the company for personal
reflection, renewal, and skill development.

Discussion Question 8: Coaching is when a peer or manager works with an employee to motivate
him, help him develop skills, and provide reinforcement and feedback. Coaching may take on three
different forms. One role is the one-on-one with an employee, which includes giving them feedback.
The second role is to help employees learn for themselves which involves helping them find experts
who can assist them with their concerns and teaching them how to obtain feedback from others.

Copyright © 2019 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution


without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Human Resource Management: Gaining a Competitive Advantage, 11e Instructor’s Manual

The third role includes providing resources such as mentors, courses, or job experiences that the
employee may not be able to gain access to without the coach’s help.

Discussion Question 9: Managers may be reluctant to coach their employees because they would
rather avoid confrontation. Managers may not feel comfortable with their skill set, nor with the
relationship between the employee, or just simply may feel as though they do not have the time.

Discussion Question 10: Some benefits would include improved employee morale if employees
feel that the company cares about their careers, better career planning for the company, a better fit
with the company and the employees, and so on. The risks are that employees may decide to
change careers and leave the company after the company has spent time and money training them.

Discussion Question 11: The manager’s role in a career management system include self-
assessment, reality check, goal setting, and action planning. Students may vary regarding which is
more difficult, however, a common theme may be when the manager must confront the employee.

Discussion Question 12: An example of a 9-box grid is Figure 9.5. They are useful in identifying
talented employees who can be groomed for top-level management positions in the company by
comparing employees within one department, function, division, or the entire company and
identifying what talent might be missing from the firm as well.

Discussion Question 13: Student answers may vary. Mentoring programs would work better for
unknown leaders, while transfers may be suggested for arrogant leaders.

Exercising Strategy:
Leadership Development at HITT Contracting
1) Student responses may identify how professional development and career management can
occur through the mentorship and learning opportunities. Students may then link this to the
ability to meet business outcomes.
2) Students may identify several interpersonal skills; however, they should link the specific
skill and the competency model mentioned within the passage. Others may identify specific
skill or learning opportunities related to the industry.

Managing People:
Employee Development at ESPN
1) Development plans usually include descriptions of strengths and weaknesses, career goals,
and development activities for reaching the career goal. An effective development plan
focuses on development needs that are most relevant to the organization’s strategic
objectives.
2) While the responses to this question may vary, students should identify the fact that
identifying individuals with leadership potential requires the organization to recognize
alignment with their own strategic goals and objectives. The 9-box grid (Figure 9.5) should
be identified, as well as that such a tool can be connected to the organization’s performance
management practices.
3) Students may identify how ESPNs core business is difficult to learn through courses, and
that employees are better served through developmental experiences, which may lend itself
to saving money in the face of lay-offs.

Copyright © 2019 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution


without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Human Resource Management: Gaining a Competitive Advantage, 11e Instructor’s Manual

HR in Small Business:
How Service Express Serves Employees First
1) Students may express the opinion that it is protean, given the number of opportunities
available. Given the emphasis on the employees’ desires, students may discuss how while it
is development, it is focused on retention and job satisfaction.
2) Answers will vary, but students may generally recommend some development methods that
align with SEI’s strategy.

Chapter Cases: Discussion Guidance

Enter the World of Business:


Development is 3M’s Adhesive for Maintaining a Competitive Advantage

Instructors should note that at the end of Chapter 9 there is a “Look Back” section which, revisits
the case and asks 3 questions. Suggested guidance for each is as follows:
1) Students should discuss how the opportunities support 3M’s strategy of product
development. Thus, learning supports employees to create new and innovative products.
2) Students should recognize the imperative for the business to support all employee learning.
3) Responses may vary, but should activities the method with the strategy.

Competing through Globalization:


Wanted: Leaders in Growth Markets
Responses will vary, but should apply the material from the textbook.

Competing through Technology:


The Cloud Keeps Mentoring Group
Responses should identify the matching of mentor/mentoree, the scheduling and reminders, and
other mechanisms through the system that support the relationship.

Integrity in Action
Development is More than Preparing for Promotion
Student responses should link the leadership behavior development with ethics. Responses to the
second question should identify the need to have ethical and moral employee actions at all levels of
an organization.

Competing through Sustainability:


Serving on Nonprofit Boards Benefits Many
Responses should recognize the need to link the board opportunity to the manager’s developmental
needs, such as exposure to oversight, fiscal responsibilities, strategic decisions, etc. Planning would
assist with this identification.

Copyright © 2019 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or distribution


without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
XVII
This mathematics of ours was bound in due course to reach the
point at which not merely the limits of artificial geometrical form but
the limits of the visual itself were felt by theory and by the soul alike
as limits indeed, as obstacles to the unreserved expression of inward
possibilities—in other words, the point at which the ideal of
transcendent extension came into fundamental conflict with the
limitations of immediate perception. The Classical soul, with the
entire abdication of Platonic and Stoic ἀταραξία, submitted to the
sensuous and (as the erotic under-meaning of the Pythagorean
numbers shows) it rather felt than emitted its great symbols. Of
transcending the corporeal here-and-now it was quite incapable. But
whereas number, as conceived by a Pythagorean, exhibited the
essence of individual and discrete data in “Nature” Descartes and his
successors looked upon number as something to be conquered, to
be wrung out, an abstract relation royally indifferent to all
phenomenal support and capable of holding its own against “Nature”
on all occasions. The will-to-power (to use Nietzsche’s great formula)
that from the earliest Gothic of the Eddas, the Cathedrals and
Crusades, and even from the old conquering Goths and Vikings, has
distinguished the attitude of the Northern soul to its world, appears
also in the sense-transcending energy, the dynamic of Western
number. In the Apollinian mathematic the intellect is the servant of
the eye, in the Faustian its master. Mathematical, “absolute” space,
we see then, is utterly un-Classical, and from the first, although
mathematicians with their reverence for the Hellenic tradition did not
dare to observe the fact, it was something different from the
indefinite spaciousness of daily experience and customary painting,
the a priori space of Kant which seemed so unambiguous and sure a
concept. It is a pure abstract, an ideal and unfulfillable postulate of a
soul which is ever less and less satisfied with sensuous means of
expression and in the end passionately brushes them aside. The
inner eye has awakened.
And then, for the first time, those who thought deeply were obliged
to see that the Euclidean geometry, which is the true and only
geometry of the simple of all ages, is when regarded from the higher
standpoint nothing but a hypothesis, the general validity of which,
since Gauss, we know it to be quite impossible to prove in the face
of other and perfectly non-perceptual geometries. The critical
proposition of this geometry, Euclid’s axiom of parallels, is an
assertion, for which we are quite at liberty to substitute another
assertion. We may assert, in fact, that through a given point, no
parallels, or two, or many parallels may be drawn to a given straight
line, and all these assumptions lead to completely irreproachable
geometries of three dimensions, which can be employed in physics
and even in astronomy, and are in some cases preferable to the
Euclidean.
Even the simple axiom that extension is boundless
(boundlessness, since Riemann and the theory of curved space, is
to be distinguished from endlessness) at once contradicts the
essential character of all immediate perception, in that the latter
depends upon the existence of light-resistances and ipso facto has
material bounds. But abstract principles of boundary can be
imagined which transcend, in an entirely new sense, the possibilities
of optical definition. For the deep thinker, there exists even in the
Cartesian geometry the tendency to get beyond the three
dimensions of experiential space, regarded as an unnecessary
restriction on the symbolism of number. And although it was not till
about 1800 that the notion of multi-dimensional space (it is a pity that
no better word was found) provided analysis with broader
foundations, the real first step was taken at the moment when
powers—that is, really, logarithms—were released from their original
relation with sensually realizable surfaces and solids and, through
the employment of irrational and complex exponents, brought within
the realm of function as perfectly general relation-values. It will be
admitted by everyone who understands anything of mathematical
reasoning that directly we passed from the notion of a³ as a natural
maximum to that of an, the unconditional necessity of three-
dimensional space was done away with.
Once the space-element or point had lost its last persistent relic of
visualness and, instead of being represented to the eye as a cut in
co-ordinate lines, was defined as a group of three independent
numbers, there was no longer any inherent objection to replacing the
number 3 by the general number n. The notion of dimension was
radically changed. It was no longer a matter of treating the properties
of a point metrically with reference to its position in a visible system,
but of representing the entirely abstract properties of a number-
group by means of any dimensions that we please. The number-
group—consisting of n independent ordered elements—is an image
of the point and it is called a point. Similarly, an equation logically
arrived therefrom is called a plane and is the image of a plane. And
the aggregate of all points of n dimensions is called an n-
dimensional space.[76] In these transcendent space-worlds, which are
remote from every sort of sensualism, lie the relations which it is the
business of analysis to investigate and which are found to be
consistently in agreement with the data of experimental physics. This
space of higher degree is a symbol which is through-and-through the
peculiar property of the Western mind. That mind alone has
attempted, and successfully too, to capture the “become” and the
extended in these forms, to conjure and bind—to “know”—the alien
by this kind of appropriation or taboo. Not until such spheres of
number-thought are reached, and not for any men but the few who
have reached them, do such imaginings as systems of
hypercomplex numbers (e.g., the quaternions of the calculus of
vectors) and apparently quite meaningless symbols like ∞n acquire
the character of something actual. And here if anywhere it must be
understood that actuality is not only sensual actuality. The spiritual is
in no wise limited to perception-forms for the actualizing of its idea.
XVIII
From this grand intuition of symbolic space-worlds came the last
and conclusive creation of Western mathematic—the expansion and
subtilizing of the function theory in that of groups. Groups are
aggregates or sets of homogeneous mathematical images—e.g., the
totality of all differential equations of a certain type—which in
structure and ordering are analogous to the Dedekind number-
bodies. Here are worlds, we feel, of perfectly new numbers, which
are nevertheless not utterly sense-transcendent for the inner eye of
the adept; and the problem now is to discover in those vast abstract
form-systems certain elements which, relatively to a particular group
of operations (viz., of transformations of the system), remain
unaffected thereby, that is, possess invariance. In mathematical
language, the problem, as stated generally by Klein, is—given an n-
dimensional manifold (“space”) and a group of transformations, it is
required to examine the forms belonging to the manifold in respect of
such properties as are not altered by transformation of the group.
And with this culmination our Western mathematic, having
exhausted every inward possibility and fulfilled its destiny as the
copy and purest expression of the idea of the Faustian soul, closes
its development in the same way as the mathematic of the Classical
Culture concluded in the third century. Both those sciences (the only
ones of which the organic structure can even to-day be examined
historically) arose out of a wholly new idea of number, in the one
case Pythagoras’s, in the other Descartes’. Both, expanding in all
beauty, reached their maturity one hundred years later; and both,
after flourishing for three centuries, completed the structure of their
ideas at the same moment as the Cultures to which they respectively
belonged passed over into the phase of megalopolitan Civilization.
The deep significance of this interdependence will be made clear in
due course. It is enough for the moment that for us the time of the
great mathematicians is past. Our tasks to-day are those of
preserving, rounding off, refining, selection—in place of big dynamic
creation, the same clever detail-work which characterized the
Alexandrian mathematic of late Hellenism.
A historical paradigm will make this clearer.
column 1 column two
CHAPTER III
THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY
I
PHYSIOGNOMIC AND SYSTEMATIC
CHAPTER III
THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY
I
PHYSIOGNOMIC AND SYSTEMATIC

Now, at last, it is possible to take the decisive step of sketching an


image of history that is independent of the accident of standpoint, of
the period in which this or that observer lives—independent too of
the personality of the observer himself, who as an interested member
of his own Culture is tempted, by its religious, intellectual, political
and social tendencies, to order the material of history according to a
perspective that is limited as to both space and time, and to fashion
arbitrary forms into which the superficies of history can be forced but
which are entirely alien to its inner content.
What has been missing, till now, is detachment from the objects
considered (die Distanz vom Gegenstande). In respect of Nature,
this detachment has long ago been attained, though of course it was
relatively easy of attainment, since the physicist can obviously
systematize the mechanical-causal picture of his world as
impersonally as though he himself did not exist in it.
It is quite possible, however, to do the same as regards the form-
world of History. We have merely been unaware of the possibility.
The modern historian, in the very act of priding himself on his
“objectivity,” naïvely and unconsciously reveals his prepossessions.
For this reason it is quite legitimate to say—and it will infallibly be
said some day—that so far a genuinely Faustian treatment of history
has been entirely lacking. By such a treatment is meant one that has
enough detachment to admit that any “present” is only such with
reference to a particular generation of men; that the number of
generations is infinite, and that the proper present must therefore be
regarded just as something infinitely distant and alien is regarded,
and treated as an interval of time neither more nor less significant in
the whole picture of History than others. Such a treatment will
employ no distorting modulus of personal ideals, set no personal
origin of co-ordinates, be influenced by none of the personal hopes
and fears and other inward impulses which count for so much in
practical life; and such a detachment will—to use the words of
Nietzsche (who, be it said, was far from possessing enough of it
himself)—enable one to view the whole fact of Man from an immense
distance, to regard the individual Cultures, one’s own included, as
one regards the range of mountain peaks along a horizon.
Once again, therefore, there was an act like the act of Copernicus
to be accomplished, an act of emancipation from the evident present
in the name of infinity. This the Western soul achieved in the domain
of Nature long ago, when it passed from the Ptolemaic world-system
to that which is alone valid for it to-day, and treats the position of the
observer on one particular planet as accidental instead of normative.
A similar emancipation of world-history from the accidental
standpoint, the perpetually re-defined “modern period,” is both
possible and necessary. It is true that the 19th Century A.D. seems to
us infinitely fuller and more important than, say, the 19th Century B.C.;
but the moon, too, seems to us bigger than Jupiter or Saturn. The
physicist has long ago freed himself from prepossessions as to
relative distance, the historian not so. We permit ourselves to
consider the Culture of the Greeks as an “ancient” related to our own
“modern.” Were they in their turn “modern” in relation to the finished
and historically mature Egyptians of the court of the great
Thuthmosis who lived a millennium before Homer? For us, the
events which took place between 1500 and 1800 on the soil of
Western Europe constitute the most important third of "world"-history;
for the Chinese historian, on the contrary, who looks back on and
judges by 4000 years of Chinese history, those centuries generally
are a brief and unimportant episode, infinitely less significant than the
centuries of the Han dynasty (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.), which in his
"world"-history are epoch-making.
To liberate History, then, from that thraldom to the observers’
prejudices which in our own case has made of it nothing more than a
record of a partial past leading up to an accidental present, with the
ideals and interests of that present as criteria of the achievement and
possibility, is the object of all that follows.
II

Nature and History[77] are the opposite extreme terms of man’s


range of possibilities, whereby he is enabled to order the actualities
about him as a picture of the world. An actuality is Nature in so far as
it assigns things-becoming their place as things-become, and History
in so far as it orders things-become with reference to their becoming.
An actuality as an evocation of mind is contemplated, and as an
assurance of the senses is critically comprehended, the first being
exemplified in the worlds of Plato, Rembrandt, Goethe and
Beethoven, the second in the worlds of Parmenides, Descartes, Kant
and Newton. Cognition in the strict sense of the word is that act of
experience of which the completed issue is called “Nature.” The
cognized and “Nature” are one and the same. The symbol of
mathematical number has shown us that the aggregate of things
cognized is the same as the world of things mechanically defined,
things correct once and for all, things brought under law. Nature is
the sum of the law-imposed necessities. There are only laws of
Nature. No physicist who understands his duty would wish to
transcend these limits. His task is to establish an ordered code which
not only includes all the laws that he can find in the picture of Nature
that is proper to himself but, further, represents that picture
exhaustively and without remainder.
Contemplation or vision (Anschauen), on the other hand—I may
recall Goethe’s words: “vision is to be carefully distinguished from
seeing”—, is that act of experience which is itself history because it is
itself a fulfilling. That which has been lived is that which has
happened, and it is history. (Erlebtes ist Geschehenes, ist
Geschichte.)
Every happening is unique and incapable of being repeated. It
carries the hall-mark of Direction (“Time”), of irreversibility. That
which has happened is thenceforth counted with the become and not
with the becoming, with the stiffened and not the living, and belongs
beyond recall to the past. Our feeling of world-fear has its sources
here. Everything cognized, on the contrary, is timeless, neither past
nor future but simply “there,” and consequently permanently valid, as
indeed the very constitution of natural law requires that it should be.
Law and the domain of law are anti-historical. They exclude incident
and casuality. The laws of nature are forms of rigorous and therefore
inorganic necessity. It becomes easy to see why mathematics, as the
ordering of things-become by number, is always and exclusively
associated with laws and causality.
Becoming has no number. We can count, measure, dissect only
the lifeless and so much of the living as can be dissociated from
livingness. Pure becoming, pure life, is in this sense incapable of
being bounded. It lies beyond the domain of cause and effect, law
and measure. No deep and pure historical research seeks for
conformities with causal laws—or, if it does so, it does not
understand its own essence.
At the same time, history as positively treated is not pure
becoming: it is an image, a world-form radiated from the waking
consciousness of the historian, in which the becoming dominates the
become. The possibility of extracting results of any sort by scientific
methods depends upon the proportion of things-become present in
the subject treated, and by hypothesis there is in this case a defect of
them; the higher the proportion is, the more mechanical, reasonable,
causal, history is made to appear. Even Goethe’s “living nature,”
utterly unmathematical world-picture as it was, contained enough of
the dead and stiffened to allow him to treat at least his foreground
scientifically. But when this content of things-become dwindles to
very little, then history becomes approximately pure becoming, and
contemplation and vision become an experience which can only be
rendered in forms of art. That which Dante saw before his spiritual
eyes as the destiny of the world, he could not possibly have arrived
at by ways of science, any more than Goethe could have attained by
these ways to what he saw in the great moments of his “Faust”
studies, any more than Plotinus and Giordano Bruno could have
distilled their visions from researches. This contrast lies at the root of
all dispute regarding the inner form of history. In the presence of the
same object or corpus of facts, every observer according to his own
disposition has a different impression of the whole, and this
impression, intangible and incommunicable, underlies his judgment
and gives it its personal colour. The degree in which things-become
are taken in differs from man to man, which is quite enough in itself
to show that they can never agree as to task or method. Each
accuses the other of a deficiency of “clear thinking,” and yet the
something that is expressed by this phrase is something not built
with hands, not implying superiority or a priority of degree but
necessary difference of kind. The same applies to all natural
sciences.
Nevertheless, we must not lose sight of the fact that at bottom the
wish to write history scientifically involves a contradiction. True
science reaches just as far as the notions of truth and falsity have
validity: this applies to mathematics and it applies also to the science
of historical spade-work, viz., the collection, ordering and sifting of
material. But real historical vision (which only begins at this point)
belongs to the domain of significances, in which the crucial words are
not “correct” and “erroneous,” but “deep” and “shallow.” The true
physicist is not deep, but keen: it is only when he leaves the domain
of working hypotheses and brushes against the final things that he
can be deep, but at this stage he is already a metaphysician. Nature
is to be handled scientifically, History poetically. Old Leopold von
Ranke is credited with the remark that, after all, Scott’s “Quentin
Durward” was the true history-writing. And so it is: the advantage of a
good history book is that it enables the reader to be his own Scott.
On the other hand, within the very realm of numbers and exact
knowledge there is that which Goethe called “living Nature,” an
immediate vision of pure becoming and self-shaping, in fact, history
as above defined. Goethe’s world was, in the first instance, an
organism, an existence, and it is easy therefore to see why his
researches, even when superficially of a physical kind, do not make
numbers, or laws, or causality captured in formulæ, or dissection of
any sort their object, but are morphology in the highest sense of the
word; and why his work neither uses nor needs to use the specifically
Western and un-Classical means of causal treatment, metrical
experiment. His treatment of the Earth’s crust is invariably geology,
and never mineralogy, which he called the science of something
dead.
Let it be said, once more, that there are no exact boundaries set
between the two kinds of world-notion. However great the contrast
between becoming and the become, the fact remains that they are
jointly present in every kind of understanding. He who looks at the
becoming and fulfilling in them, experiences History; he who dissects
them as become and fulfilled cognizes Nature.
In every man, in every Culture, in every culture-phase, there is
found an inherent disposition, an inherent inclination and vocation to
prefer one of the two forms as an ideal of understanding the world.
Western man is in a high degree historically disposed,[78] Classical
man far from being so. We follow up what is given us with an eye to
past and future, whereas Classical man knew only the point-present
and an ambiance of myth. We have before us a symbol of becoming
in every bar of our music from Palestrina to Wagner, and the Greeks
a symbol of the pure present in every one of their statues. The
rhythm of a body is based upon a simultaneous relation of the parts,
that of a fugue in the succession of elements in time.
III
There emerge, then, as the two basic elements of all world-
picturing, the principle of Form (Gestalt) and the principle of Law
(Gesetz). The more decidedly a particular world-picture shows the
traits of “Nature,” the more unconditionally law and number prevail in
it; and the more purely intuitive the picture of the world as eternally
becoming, the more alien to numbers its manifold and intangible
elements. “Form is something mobile, something becoming,
something passing. The doctrine of formation is the doctrine of
transformation. Metamorphosis is the key to the whole alphabet of
Nature,” so runs a note of Goethe’s, marking already the methodic
difference between his famous “exact percipient fancy” which quietly
lets itself be worked upon by the living,[79] and the exact killing
procedure of modern physics. But whatever the process, a remainder
consisting of so much of the alien element as is present is always
found. In strict natural sciences this remainder takes the form of the
inevitable theories and hypotheses which are imposed on, and
leaven, the stiff mass of number and formula. In historical research, it
appears as chronology, the number-structure of dates and statistics
which, alien though number is to the essence of becoming, is so
thoroughly woven around and into the world of historical forms that it
is never felt to be intrusive. For it is devoid of mathematical import.
Chronological number distinguishes uniquely-occurring actualities,
mathematical number constant possibilities. The one sharpens the
images and works up the outlines of epoch and fact for the
understanding eye. But the other is itself the law which it seeks to
establish, the end and aim of research. Chronological number is a
scientific means of pioneering borrowed from the science of
sciences, mathematics, and used as such without regard to its
specific properties. Compare, for instance, the meaning of the two
symbols 12 × 8 = 96, and 18 October, 1813.[80] It is the same
difference, in the use of figures, that prose and poetry present in the
use of words.
One other point remains to be noted.[81] As a becoming always lies
at the base of the become, and as the world-picture representative of
becoming is that which history gives us, therefore history is the
original world-form, and Nature—the fully elaborated world-
mechanism—is the late world-form that only the men of a mature
Culture can completely actualize. In fact, the darkness
encompassing the simple soul of primitive mankinds, which we can
realize even to-day from their religious customs and myths—that
entirely organic world of pure wilfulness, of hostile demons and kindly
powers—was through-and-through a living and swaying whole,
ununderstandable, indefinable, incalculable. We may call this Nature
if we like, but it is not what we mean by “nature,” i.e., the strict image
projected by a knowing intellect. Only the souls of children and of
great artists can now hear the echoes of this long-forgotten world of
nascent humanity, but it echoes still, and not rarely, even in the
inelastic "nature"-medium that the city-spirit of the mature Culture is
remorselessly building up round the individual. Hence that acute
antagonism between the scientific (“modern”) and the artistic
(“unpractical”) world-idea which every Late period knows; the man of
fact and the poet do not and cannot understand one another. Hence
comes, too, that tendency of historical study, which must inevitably
contain an element of the childish, the dreamy, the Goethian, to
dress up as a science, to be (using its own naïve word)
“materialistic,” at the imminent risk of becoming a mere physics of
public life.
“Nature,” in the exact sense, is a way of possessing actuality which
is special to the few, restricted to the megalopolitans of the late
periods of great Cultures, masculine, perhaps even senatorial; while
History is the naïve, youthful, more or less instinctive way that is
proper to all men alike. At least, that is the position of the number-
based, unmystical, dissectable and dissected “Nature” of Aristotle
and Kant, the Sophists and the Darwinians, modern physics and
chemistry, vis-à-vis the lived, felt and unconfined “Nature” of Homer
and the Eddas, of Doric and Gothic man. To overlook this is to miss
the whole essence of historical treatment. It is history that is the truly
natural, and the exact mechanically-correct “Nature” of the scientist
that is the artificial conception of world by soul. Hence the paradox
that modern man finds "nature"-study easy and historical study hard.
Tendencies towards a mechanistic idea of the world proceeding
wholly from mathematical delimitation and logical differentiation, from
law and causality, appear quite early. They are found in the first
centuries of all Cultures, still weak, scattered and lost in the full tide
of the religious world-conception. The name to be recalled here is
that of Roger Bacon. But soon these tendencies acquire a sterner
character: like everything that is wrung out of the soul and has to
defend itself against human nature, they are not wanting in
arrogance and exclusiveness. Quietly the spatial and
comprehensible (comprehension is in its essence number, in its
structure quantitative) becomes prepotent throughout the outer world
of the individual and, aiding and aided by the simple impressions of
sensuous-life, effects a mechanical synthesis of the causal and legal
sort, so that at long last the sharp consciousness of the
megalopolitan—be he of Thebes, Babylon, Benares, Alexandria or a
West European cosmopolis—is subjected to so consistent a
pressure of natural-law notions that, when scientific and
philosophical prejudice (it is no more than that) dictates the
proposition that this condition of the soul is the soul and the
mechanical world-picture is the world, the assertion is scarcely
challenged. It has been made predominant by logicians like Aristotle
and Kant. But Plato and Goethe have rejected it and refuted it.

IV

The task of world-knowing—for the man of the higher Cultures a


need, seen as a duty, of expressing his own essence—is certainly in
every case the same, though its process may be called science or
philosophy, and though its affinity to artistic creation and to faith-
intuition may for one be something felt and for another something
questionable. It is to present, without accretions, that form of the
world-picture which to the individual in each case is proper and
significant, and for him (so long as he does not compare) is in fact
“the” world.
The task is necessarily a double one, in view of the distinction
between “Nature” and “History.” Each speaks its own form-language
which differs utterly from that of the other, and however the two may
overlap and confuse one another in an unsifted and ambiguous
world-picture such as that of everyday life, they are incapable of any
inner unity.
Direction and Extension are the outstanding characters which
differentiate the historical and the scientific (naturhaft) kind of
impressibility, and it is totally impossible for a man to have both
working creatively within him at the same time. The double meaning
of the German word “Ferne” (distance, farness) is illuminating. In the
one order of ideas it implies futurity, in the other a spatial interval of
standing apart, and the reader will not fail to remark that the historical
materialist almost necessarily conceives time as a mathematical
dimension, while for the born artist, on the contrary,—as the lyrics of
every land show us—the distance-impressions made by deep
landscapes, clouds, horizon and setting sun attach themselves
without an effort to the sense of a future. The Greek poet denies the
future, and consequently he neither sees nor sings of the things of
the future; he cleaves to the near, as he belongs to the present,
entirely.
The natural-science investigator, the productive reasoner in the full
sense of the word, whether he be an experimenter like Faraday, a
theorist like Galileo, a calculator like Newton, finds in his world only
directionless quantities which he measures, tests and arranges. It is
only the quantitative that is capable of being grasped through figures,
of being causally defined, of being captured in a law or formula, and
when it has achieved this, pure nature-knowledge has shot its bolt.
All its laws are quantitative connexions, or as the physicist puts it, all
physical processes run a course in space, an expression which a
Greek physicist would have corrected—without altering the fact—into
“all physical processes occur between bodies” conformably to the
space-denying feeling of the Classical soul.
The historical kind of impression-process is alien to everything
quantitative, and affects a different organ. To World-as-Nature certain
modes of apprehension, as to World-as-History certain other modes,
are proper. We know them and use them every day, without (as yet)
having become aware of their opposition. There is nature-knowledge
and there is man-knowledge; there is scientific experience and there
is vital experience. Let the reader track down this contrast into his
own inmost being, and he will understand what I mean.
All modes of comprehending the world may, in the last analysis, be
described as Morphology. The Morphology of the mechanical and the
extended, a science which discovers and orders nature-laws and
causal relations, is called Systematic. The Morphology of the
organic, of history and life and all that bears the sign of direction and
destiny, is called Physiognomic.

In the West, the Systematic mode of treating the world reached


and passed its culminating-point during the last century, while the
great days of Physiognomic have still to come. In a hundred years all
sciences that are still possible on this soil will be parts of a single
vast Physiognomic of all things human. This is what the “Morphology
of World-History” means. In every science, and in the aim no less
than in the content of it, man tells the story of himself. Scientific
experience is spiritual self-knowledge. It is from this standpoint, as a
chapter of Physiognomic, that we have just treated of mathematics.
We were not concerned with what this or that mathematician
intended, nor with the savant as such or his results as a contribution
to an aggregate of knowledge, but with the mathematician as a
human being, with his work as a part of the phenomenon of himself,
with his knowledge and purposes as a part of his expression. This
alone is of importance to us here. He is the mouthpiece of a Culture
which tells us about itself through him, and he belongs, as
personality, as soul, as discoverer, thinker and creator, to the
physiognomy of that Culture.
Every mathematic, in that it brings out and makes visible to all the
idea of number that is proper to itself and inborn in its conscious
being, is, whether the expression-form be a scientific system or (as in
the case of Egypt) an architecture, the confession of a Soul. If it is
true that the intentional accomplishments of a mathematic belong
only to the surface of history, it is equally true that its unconscious
element, its number-as-such, and the style in which it builds up its
self-contained cosmos of forms are an expression of its existence, its
blood. Its life-history of ripening and withering, its deep relation to the
creative acts, the myths and the cults of the same Culture—such
things are the subject-matter of a second or historical morphology,
though the possibility of such a morphology is hardly yet admitted.
The visible foregrounds of history, therefore, have the same
significance as the outward phenomena of the individual man (his
statue, his bearing, his air, his stride, his way of speaking and
writing), as distinct from what he says or writes. In the “knowledge of
men” these things exist and matter. The body and all its elaborations
—defined, “become” and mortal as they are—are an expression of
the soul. But henceforth “knowledge of men” implies also knowledge
of those superlative human organisms that I call Cultures, and of
their mien, their speech, their acts—these terms being meant as we
mean them already in the case of the individual.
Descriptive, creative, Physiognomic is the art of portraiture
transferred to the spiritual domain. Don Quixote, Werther, Julian
Sorel, are portraits of an epoch, Faust the portrait of a whole Culture.
For the nature-researcher, the morphologist as systematist, the
portrayal of the world is only a business of imitation, and corresponds
to the “fidelity to nature” and the “likeness” of the craftsman-painter,
who, at bottom, works on purely mathematical lines. But a real
portrait in the Rembrandt sense of the word is physiognomic, that is,
history captured in a moment. The set of his self-portraits is nothing
else but a (truly Goethian) autobiography. So should the biographies
of the great Cultures be handled. The “fidelity” part, the work of the
professional historian on facts and figures, is only a means, not an
end. The countenance of history is made up of all those things which
hitherto we have only managed to evaluate according to personal
standards, i.e., as beneficial or harmful, good or bad, satisfactory or
unsatisfactory—political forms and economic forms, battles and arts,
science and gods, mathematics and morals. Everything whatsoever
that has become is a symbol, and the expression of a soul. Only to
one having the knowledge of men will it unveil itself. The restraint of
a law it abhors. What it demands is that its significance should be
sensed. And thus research reaches up to a final or superlative truth
—Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.[82]
The nature-researcher can be educated, but the man who knows
history is born. He seizes and pierces men and facts with one blow,
guided by a feeling which cannot be acquired by learning or affected
by persuasion, but which only too rarely manifests itself in full
intensity. Direction, fixing, ordering, defining by cause and effect, are
things that one can do if one likes. These things are work, but the
other is creation. Form and law, portrayal and comprehension,
symbol and formula, have different organs, and their opposition is
that in which life stands to death, production to destruction. Reason,
system and comprehension kill as they “cognize.” That which is
cognized becomes a rigid object, capable of measurement and
subdivision. Intuitive vision, on the other hand, vivifies and
incorporates the details in a living inwardly-felt unity. Poetry and
historical study are kin. Calculation and cognition also are kin. But,
as Hebbel says somewhere, systems are not dreamed, and art-
works are not calculated or (what is the same thing) thought out. The
artist or the real historian sees the becoming of a thing (schaut, wie
etwas wird), and he can re-enact its becoming from its lineaments,
whereas the systematist, whether he be physicist, logician,
evolutionist or pragmatical historian, learns the thing that has
become. The artist’s soul, like the soul of a Culture, is something
potential that may actualize itself, something complete and perfect—
in the language of an older philosophy, a microcosm. The systematic
spirit, narrow and withdrawn “abs-tract”) from the sensual, is an
autumnal and passing phenomenon belonging to the ripest
conditions of a Culture. Linked with the city, into which its life is more
and more herded, it comes and goes with the city. In the Classical
world, there is science only from the 6th-century Ionians to the
Roman period, but there was art in the Classical world for just as
long as there was existence.
Once more, a paradigm may help in elucidation.
Soul World
Existence potentiality → fulfilment → actuality
(Life)
becoming → the

You might also like