ABSTRACT
During the productive years, 1872-4, Nietzsche’s main writings were a concentrated attack upon the cultural, and especially educational, trends which the founding of the new German Reich after the victory over France, in 1871, had accelerated. These were trends which stretched far back, but Nietzsche was right to think that in the new, unifi ed, militaristic Germany they would be given new impetus. The relevant writings are the second and third of the Untimely Meditations, and the fi ve public lectures given before the Akademische Gesellschaft in Basel during 1872, entitled Über die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten (‘On the future of our educational institutions’). Already, in a letter to his friend Gersdorff in 1870, Nietzsche had announced his intention to ‘lay bare in public… the culturally very dangerous power’ of the Prussian education system, which was now to spread over Germany as a whole.(1) And sixteen years later, when refl ecting on these early writings, he wrote:
The emphasis, in these early years, upon education was not unrelated to Nietzsche’s personal life. In 1869, he had accepted, at an unusually young age-and with considerable misgivings-a Chair in Classical Philology at the University of Basel; only to fi nd, as predicted, that academic teaching was stifl ing for him. Like many letters of the time, his fi ve lectures on education reveal a man struggling to decide whether he can, with integrity, remain a teacher within the public system. A main reason behind his choice of Schopenhauer as the hero of his third ‘Meditation’ was that philosopher’s renunciation of university teaching. (Actually Nietzsche’s portrait of Schopenhauer’s motives and character was a strangely rose-tinted one.) It was the advice and pressure of Richard Wagner which largely explains why Nietzsche remained at his post. He had fallen under the spell of the composer in 1869, when Wagner was living at Tribschen near Basel, and was to remain under it until the fi rst Bayreuth Festspiel of 1876. In the fi ve lectures, a ‘Master’ convinces a ‘Disciple’ to remain a teacher, in order to provide a base within academia for the dissemination of the ‘Master’s’ ideas. Clearly, it is ‘Meister’ Wagner convincing the wavering young Nietzsche, who found it a scandal that ‘offi cial’ culture, especially within the universities, was blind, indeed hostile, to the new Wagnerian forces. His writings at the time-The Birth of Tragedy and those just mentioned-may be seen, in part, as the attempt to impress this scandal upon those among whom it was most marked-his fellow-scholars and teachers.(3)
After the break with Wagner, and his resignation from the Basel Chair, Nietzsche was not again to write a book on education. In fact, he was hardly again to write books in the usual
sense, as against loosely connected essays, aphorisms, and notes. Certainly his interest in ‘the future of our educational institutions’ declined, mainly because he despaired that these could become the vehicles of true education; but with the nature of education, his concern never waned. Comments upon it, often lengthy, are scattered throughout the writings of his last active years up to 1889. There is a good sense, too, in which Nietzsche’s whole philosophical enterprise was educational: for at the centre there is always the concern with a new kind of man, who will create new kinds of value, and who can be produced only through education or ‘breeding’, not through social, political, or economic reform and progress. Nor, I think, do his last thoughts on education fundamentally confl ict with his fi rst. There are, it is true, metaphysical themes which inform the earlier critique and which, on the surface, do not fi gure later on-but even here, we have transposition, not silencing, of the themes. If he no longer speaks of ‘the genius and the saint’ as the goals of an education that accords with ‘Nature’s purpose’, he does speak of the ‘overman’ that must be bred as the highest expression of ‘the will to power’ which permeates all nature.
