ABSTRACT
Following on Socrates’ claim in the Theaetetus, Aristotle had famously announced in the Metaphysics that ‘it is owing to their wonder that men begin and at first began to philosophize’. In The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche notes that Aristotle certainly ‘did not hit the nail on the head when he discussed the ultimate end of Greek tragedy’. The lectures On the Future of our Educational Institutions’ continue Nietzsche’s tacit critical exploration of Aristotle. In a notebook from winter 1872-73 in which Nietzsche discusses the pre-Platonic Greek philosophers, he writes that the philosopher ‘is beyond the sciences: dematerializing’. Nietzsche calls attention to his political reforms and relates him to the Pythagoreans. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks and the lectures on educational institutions are texts that, by their very incompletion, signal the grave doubts that Nietzsche came to have about the viability of his project as he then conceived of it.
