2.1 Liberation from Scholarliness? SE on Philosophical Education

“Education of the philosopher” is an ambiguous phrase. It might refer to the training that anyone seeking to become a philosopher, or to educate the philosopher within herself, can receive by taking courses in philosophy. If the education of the philosopher can occur through “philosophical training,” what is meant by this phrase? Perhaps its most evident sense is “training in the skills that are characteristic of professional philosophers who work at universities, teaching philosophy courses and doing philosophical research.” Clarifying terms, making distinctions, isolating arguments, querying arguments for validity and soundness, constructing arguments of one’s own, interrogating “claims” by probing the evidence, testing general assertions by proposing counter-examples – these are real skills. Not everyone has them. They are possessed in abundance by the person whom a particular academic subculture likes to call a “good philosopher.” Perhaps some possess these skills without any philosophical training. It remains possible, however, that a well-designed philosophy curriculum can train students to develop these skills. Even if a student must have some of these skills in advance, she can learn to exercise them at a higher level than she can without training. Such schooling is analogous to the practical education given by a skilled musical instructor, who can train an enthusiast to play scales more fluidly and quickly than she could before. Philosophy departments that particularly value this training will sometimes describe a search for a new colleague as an effort to hire the “best athlete.”

Some will deny that philosophy is a kind of athleticism. They will protest that the conception of “philosophical training” sketched earlier is unduly technical. Even if the skills mentioned previously are occasionally useful, they do not lie at the center of philosophy. There is still philosophical training, but it develops other qualities than the skills that technicians associate with “good philosophers.” These are the virtues of those who do serious work in the history of philosophy. Such virtues include hermeneutic subtlety, adept analysis of historical context and influences, competence in foreign languages, knowledge of both primary texts and other works (notebooks, correspondence, and the like), awareness of the particular questions asked by an author (as distinct from questions of “the current debate”), mastery of the scholarship of predecessors, perception of connections to other inquiries and disciplines. These are virtues appropriate to the scholar of the history of philosophy.

One might expect Nietzsche to scorn the first paradigm sketched earlier (the philosopher as technician) and favor the second (the philosopher as historical scholar). How does this expectation fare? Any reader of SE cannot fail to be struck by the multiple passages that subject the scholar to withering critique. The scholar prides himself on the production and discovery of Wissenschaft – the knowledge yielded by the application of a strict, disciplined method (or set of such methods) to a determinate subject matter.Footnote ¹⁸ What does Nietzsche think about the scholar and the Wissenschaft that he loves? He writes: “A scholar (ein Gelehrter) is nowadays doomed to being warped or deformed – because he is to be educated by Wissenschaft, an inhuman abstraction” (SE 2.168). If Nietzsche regards the scholar as a lower type than the philosopher, then it appears that whatever the education of the philosopher consists in, it cannot be education in the scholarly history of philosophy. The final section of SE confirms this impression. Mentioning by name three eminent scholars in the history of philosophy, Nietzsche wonders who can “rescue the history of Greek philosophy from the narcotic haze” produced by their scholarly labors (SE 8.219–220).

It seems that real education in philosophy has little to do with the history of philosophy – and a certain reading of SE suggests precisely this conclusion. (I will return to this misreading shortly.) Is it therefore the case that Nietzsche sees the education of the philosopher as the development of the power to think, along the lines of the technical conception of “philosophical training” sketched earlier? There is more textual evidence for ascribing this view to Nietzsche than one might think. An aphorism from HH begins: “Schooling has no more important task than to teach rigorous thinking, careful judgment, logical conclusions; that is why it must refrain from everything that is not suitable for these operations – religion, for example” (HH 265). Some relationship exists between “education as promoting the habits of critical thinking” and the education of the philosopher, conceived as part of “culture” in Nietzsche’s sense. But exactly what is the relationship?

Let us return to SE. Preparing to launch an attack on “our contemporary system builders” (SE 8.221), Nietzsche suggests that the academic philosophers known to him do not have the “logic, prudence, modesty, and creativity” that he finds among scholars in other disciplines (SE 8.221). Perhaps this simply points to the need to train philosophers better, in order to make them more logical. That qualities such as caution, modesty, and creativity can similarly be trained is possible, though more difficult to see. For Nietzsche, the thinker who abundantly possesses all the virtues that one might hope to acquire by careful and deliberate “philosophical training” is Kant. But is Kant a philosopher? Nietzsche answers:

Philosophical training might enhance a person’s capacity to think rigorously and logically, but it does so in the manner of a scholar.

For Nietzsche, what distinguishes the technician adept in logical reasoning from the learned exponent of the history of philosophy is less important than what they share. Insofar as they are produced by training, both are scholars – at best. Neither is a philosopher. Philosophical training can produce scholars who are “university philosophers,” but it cannot produce philosophers. Nietzsche knows, of course, that many academics who are accustomed to being called “philosophers” (by themselves and others) will bristle at the judgment that they are not actual philosophers. But before rejecting this judgment, we should inquire more deeply into its basis. Assuming a minimum of competence in clear thinking, what else does Nietzsche require of the person who merits the name “philosopher”?Footnote ¹⁹

For a precise answer to this question, consider what Nietzsche takes to distinguish Schopenhauer or Lucretius from Kant. That Kant had “philosophical talent” is evident. But the decisive factor, Nietzsche says, is not “the rarity or vigor of talent but the influence of a certain basic heroic attitude and the degree of real organic affinity with genius” (SE 6.210). What sets Lucretius apart is not the truth of atomism, the rigor of his deductions, or even the beauty of his poetry. It is rather “his courage and outrage at the oppressions afflicting mankind” (SE 8.221). Schopenhauer’s philosophical superiority to Kant does not reside in his greater conceptual fecundity. It is his intense exercise of three virtues: honesty, cheerfulness, and steadfastness (SE 2.172). In displaying these virtues, Schopenhauer is able to live in accordance with own philosophy. He excels in the “courageous manifestation” (SE 3.172) of the philosophical life. Does Kant? Here is Nietzsche’s judgment:

What sets the philosopher apart from the scholar is his independence, his utter lack of servility, as displayed by his sublime indifference to academic status or the “plaudits of public opinion” (SE 6.210). There is an intellectual type who cannot resist these temptations, and who therefore becomes a scholar rather than a philosopher. Such a person thinks and lives “at the expense of the purity of his character, as a ‘deferential tramp,’ greedy for honor and position, circumspect and pliable, obsequious to influential people and his betters” (SE 7.215). In order to be a real philosopher, one must not shrink from confronting the dangers that come with the heroic life: unbearable isolation, despair of truth, moral, and intellectual hardening. One must possess the kind of resolute independence that does not come from “philosophical training” and may be stifled by it.

It would, however, be a mistake to reduce the philosopher to the human type whose sole value is independence. Rejection of servility is only part of what makes the philosopher a “genuine human being.” No less important is a certain depth of feeling, a passionate longing for what lies above any object of scholarly research.

The scholar, to the extent that he reduces his experience to grist for the mill of scholarship, is alienated from his own humanity. Nietzsche suggests how this might happen to the scholar who supposes himself a philosopher: “Let a man once acquire the habit of turning every experience into a purely intellectual affair, a dialectical game of question and answer, and it is amazing how quickly he will shrivel in the process until reduced to a rattling skeleton” (SE 6.204).

Qualities that belong to the philosopher, as distinct from the scholar, are not produced by “training.” But can they be educated? As we have seen, Nietzsche criticizes any approach that conflates philosophical education with a certain kind of education in the scholarly history of philosophy. Does SE, in accord with the reading auditioned earlier, reject the relevance of the past as such?

Nietzsche singles out for special ridicule the kind of academic philosopher who says: “To a man with ideas, history has nothing new to say” (SE 8.221). Such presentism is one way that the academic philosopher reveals himself as an “utterly irrelevant man,” someone who uses his intellect to “find a reason why it was more philosophical to know nothing than to learn something” (SE 8.221). Contrary to the appearance generated earlier, Nietzsche does not reject the history of philosophy tout court. What he rejects is the specific version of it that cannot tell the difference between “the greatest and most complex ideas” and “the most lunatic subtleties ever devised by the human mind” (SE 8.220). Unwilling to make such judgments, this approach requires students to take exams on the details of philosophical systems. Such examinations, he says, are “a caricature of a philosophical education!” (SE 8.220).

In rejecting the caricature, Nietzsche affirms his own interest in the genuine article. A truly philosophical education will include knowledge of the great philosophers of the past. Nietzsche never doubts that reading their works slowly and carefully can be useful in fostering the seven virtues that I associated previously with serious practitioners of the history of philosophy. The questions he insists on asking are these: How can a person acquire knowledge of past philosophers in a way that such knowledge is able to educate her? How can acquaintance with philosophers of the past nourish and enable the production of a person’s inner philosopher? Real education is initiation into the “circle of culture” (SE 6.198*), which develops the philosopher, artist and saint within. In what way might knowledge of particular philosophers, from Plato to Schopenhauer, belong to education thus conceived?

SE gives a definite answer to this question. A philosopher should be regarded not as an architect of a system whose details need to be memorized but as an inspiration who shows us a way of thinking and living more truthfully, more honestly, and more courageously that we would otherwise. To say this in SE’s own terms: a philosopher matters only to the extent that he can be taken as an exemplar. This is precisely the function that Schopenhauer serves for Nietzsche. An exemplar displays, with uncommon brilliance, a certain mode of excellence. As Conant says, the exemplar’s role is twofold: “to allow us to arrive at an articulate conception of what we value, and to ensure that we fasten upon duties suited to our need” (Reference Conant and Schacht2000, 232).Footnote ²⁰ Strictly speaking, the particular excellence of the exemplar is inimitable. That does not mean that in the early stages, the person who gains inspiration from an exemplar will involve a degree of imitation. But things that begin as faint strivings – as efforts to emulate an inspiring master – will lead eventually to thoughts and works that display what Nietzsche calls your “productive uniqueness” (SE 3.178*). “Eventually” is a vague term, but greater precision would be inappropriate. There is no single timetable; it may take a while. “Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself,” as Miles Davis said.

Education in philosophy is education to the philosopher. As part of the enterprise that Nietzsche calls “culture,” philosophical education necessarily involves coming to know instances of past philosophical greatness as exemplary. But learning from an exemplar must not be conflated with discipleship. Nietzsche knows this temptation from direct experience. At one time, suggests the conclusion of SE 2, his early love of Schopenhauer was in danger of assuming precisely this form. In time he saw that the best way to honor an exemplar is to follow his example until you find yourself doing and thinking and desiring things that might never occur to the exemplar – things that go beyond him, or are even antithetical to him. (“A good educator knows cases in which he is proud of the fact that his pupil remains true to himself in opposition to him.” [AOM 268]) Such things indicate that you have moved closer to “becoming who you are.” The exemplar has played his role as one of your educators, who can “be nobody but your liberators” (SE 1.166).

For any real philosophical education, the past is relevant – but not in the way imagined by those trained to reduce the history of philosophy to a succession of philosophical systems. The past matters insofar as it provides exemplars, which are invaluable in the ascent from ego to one’s higher self. This is the core of Nietzsche’s view of the education of the philosopher, as expressed in SE. He never abandons this core. He does, however, deepen his view in two basic ways. In the rest of this section, I will show how.

2.2 Rehabilitating the Scholar: Education and “Historical Philosophizing”

To the degree that the past contains exemplars beneficial for the philosopher’s development, SE does not deny history’s relevance for philosophy. Nevertheless, by insisting on the gulf that separates the philosopher from the scholar, it seems to deny the interest of scholarly history that labors to uncover particular details. In HH, Nietzsche qualifies this insistence by acknowledging the scholar’s potential usefulness for the philosopher. It may be, as he says, that the philologist or historian are mostly engaged in “antlike industry” (HH 282; see also CWFN 12.22:1875,3[63]). But the cumulative effect of their inquiries is a substantive increase in our knowledge of history. Such knowledge is not an optional extra for the philosopher. Nor is it an extrinsic addition to philosophy, as one part of a layer cake is placed on top of another. Philosophy and history must be genuinely integrated, so that the person whose inner philosopher has been educated will find herself engaged in “historical philosophizing” (HH 1).

But why? “A lack of historical sense is the congenital defect of all philosophers” (HH 2). Nietzsche’s reasons for judging the lack of historical sense to constitute a philosophical failing can be gathered by comparing HH’s assertions about “historical philosophizing” with a later text from 1888, Nietzsche’s last productive year. The section of TI on “‘Reason’ in Philosophy” begins:

By cultivating the historical sense within philosophy, one can free oneself from the error of assuming that philosophers have access to “eternal facts” or “absolute truths” (HH 2). It is not that integrating the historical sense into philosophical thinking will be especially easy. Regarding the “origin and history of moral feelings,” Nietzsche observes that the “old philosophy does not even acknowledge such problems and has always used meager excuses to avoid investigating the origin and history of moral feelings” (HH 37). The philosopher’s recourse to such excuses, Nietzsche thinks, arises from a kind of pride. (For instance, he may regard his thinking as making direct contact with the heart of being, or employing concepts that cut nature at its joints.) To humble this pride, Nietzsche suggests that the philosopher’s disinclination to consider the “low” origins of highly valued things does not distinguish him from the common herd but places him squarely within it. “Mankind loves to put the questions of origin and beginnings out of mind: must one not be almost inhuman to feel in himself the opposite inclination?” (HH 1).

Philosophers without the historical sense tend not to illuminate what they analyze. Rather, they typically suck the life out of it: “they kill, they stuff, when they worship, these conceptual idolaters” (TI, “Reason” 1). Nietzsche does not regard this tendency as an irreversible condition. The practitioner of historical philosophizing will not hesitate to embrace the “innocence of becoming” (TI, “Four Great Errors” 7, 8). She will acknowledge multiplicity and flux without trying to explain it away. Accordingly, historical philosophizing will demand a certain modesty; the philosopher must renounce contact with entities like “being as such” or “the thing-in-itself.” Such renunciation of dogmatic philosophy might seem familiar enough. Is this not, after all, a cardinal point of Kant’s “critical philosophy”? Nietzsche expressly anticipates this possibility and intends to block it. Kantians who grant the mind’s inability to grasp the thing-in-itself “look for reasons why it is being withheld from them. ‘It must be an illusion, a deception which prevents us from perceiving that which is: where is the deceiver to be found?’” (TI “Reason” 1). Such a perspective does not overcome the fundamental prejudice “being=reality; becoming=unreality.” It merely despairs of truth. Rather than yield to such despair, which Nietzsche explicitly identifies as a danger of the Kantian outlook (SE 3.176), the philosopher must cultivate the combination of modesty and courage that historical philosophizing requires. She must aim to understand things that are lofty and noble as outgrowths of what is simple and crude. Well before Kant, Vico suggests that in order to grasp a thing’s “nature” (natura), one must have recourse to its “coming-to-be” (nascimento; Vico Reference 77Vico2020, 79). Nietzsche’s practitioner of historical philosophizing will resemble Vico more than Kant.

Such “meta-philosophical” considerations might seem to take us away from the question of what Nietzsche intends by the education of the philosopher within. But they cannot be avoided. From the composition of HH to the final year of his authorship, Nietzsche consistently holds that the cultivation of the philosopher demands the nourishment of the historical sense and a willingness to embrace becoming. One might nevertheless wonder: Does the education of the philosopher, thus conceived, produce any specific benefits for the person so educated? In the remainder of this subsection, I want to justify a positive answer to this question by considering two kinds of benefit. The first is an improvement in the power of judgment. The second is superior access to the phenomena that merit philosophical reflection.

How might practice in “historical philosophizing” enhance a person’s power of judgment? One way – perhaps the most obvious way – is that she will be able to assess the past more fairly than those who lack the historical sense. HH 26 gives a helpful example: the difficulty of entering into “the whole medieval Christian world view and feeling of man.” For us moderns, medieval texts such as the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas seem inaccessible or quaint. Can historical philosophizing help us?

The point is not that we should “turn back” to an older period. For the authorial persona of HH (and perhaps Nietzsche himself), the way forward is indicated not by Schopenhauer, whom he now sees as enmeshed in the old “metaphysical need,” but by the names “Petrarch, Erasmus, Voltaire.” Nevertheless, genuine enlightenment requires more than the single-minded pursuit of an agenda or the uncritical privileging of “our intuitions.” It demands nuanced, accurate, fair-minded judgment of older sensibilities and periods. Otherwise we become mere hacks, blind to our own defects.

The education of a person’s inner philosopher can enable her to judge the past more justly than she would otherwise. Can it have a similar effect on her judgments about the present? Those in whom the historical sense has not grown are likely to identify the assumptions and prejudices of their own time as the decrees of common sense. But in refusing to understand their era as a development out of previous times, do they grasp their own time? Some today suppose that science’s primary task is to enable us to overcome constraints imposed by nature, so that we become nature’s masters and possessors. They do not put the matter quite this way; they lack the conceptual vocabulary to do so. But their continuous dependence on an “infinity of devices,” their prioritization of health and security over other goods, and other such behaviors reveal them as “baby Cartesians,” insofar as they unconsciously but faithfully enact the program proposed by Descartes in Part Six of Discourse on the Method. (America is “one of the countries in which Descartes is studied least but his precepts are respected most,” as Tocqueville writes [Reference Tocqueville2004, 483]). To judge one’s own age accurately, one cannot take it as something that is simply “given.” One must be able to see it from an outsider’s perspective. In an aphorism titled “Alienated from the present,” Nietzsche writes:

Philosophy informed by historical sensitivity can make us better judges of both the past and our own time.

A second benefit of historical philosophizing is the way it provides access to phenomena that otherwise remain obscure or unavailable to us. An example of such access appears in the first book of GS:

This aphorism’s force can be difficult to appreciate, if we persist in viewing emotions such as love or avarice or envy as nothing more than functions of unchanging human biology – as something like natural kinds. But this is just the kind of historical insensitivity out of which the genuine philosopher must be educated. The philosopher remains uniquely able to formulate the most urgent questions, to consider their connections to both life and truth, to weigh the pros and cons of different answers to these questions. But what provides access to much of the “matter” considered by the philosopher is historically informed Wissenschaft, attained by scholarly labor. That the philosopher himself will be a minutely focused scholar is unlikely. He will not have the requisite training in archival research, paleography, languages, and the like. But if he is to practice historical philosophizing, he must have some appreciation of the historian’s procedure, even as he refuses to conform his own thinking to the contours of this or that branch of scholarship.

One may grant Nietzsche the point that intelligent study of evolving cultural forms requires the historical sense. But is historical philosophizing really needed to understand the most basic objects that philosophers have traditionally considered – for example, the self? When Nietzsche exhorts the reader of SE to aim for self-knowledge and provides some hints for discerning “the fundamental law” of her “true self” (SE 1.166), his particular suggestions bear no obvious relation to the historical sense. By the time he writes HH, however, Nietzsche argues explicitly that access to one’s own self demands the cultivation of the historical sense. The self is not exempt from “becoming”; it is not an indivisible point onto which the philosopher can direct his introspective gaze. It more nearly resembles a work of art that has developed over a period of years, in distinct phases. Access to any of these phases requires a mental operation akin to a “higher kind of painting,” which isolates and depicts a particular section of one’s own development. What makes it possible for someone to paint in this way, Nietzsche argues, is “historical studies.” These studies “develop the capacity for this form of painting, for they continually exhort us, when occasioned by a period of history, or a people, or a human life, to imagine a quite definite horizon of thoughts, a definite intensity of feelings, the predominance of some, and the withdrawal of others” (HH 274). Self-knowledge may require the philosopher’s unsparing interrogation. But without access to the different phases of one’s self – the access provided by the historical sense – the philosopher will be misled, not least because he does not know what to interrogate.

What HH’s first volume describes somewhat dryly as phases or layers of the self receives more dramatic articulation in its second volume. Known from the highest perspective, the human self is more like a conduit through which the entire past flows, regardless of how conscious we are of this flow. Thus begins AOM 223:

If Nietzsche is correct to suppose that the philosopher can have access to himself and to the mortal souls he contains within himself, the only route to the self and the multitudes it contains is “history.” For a person to become who she is, her inner philosopher must be educated. This requires the integration of philosophy and history. Without this integration, the philosopher will be in the dark about how things are, and thus fall short of becoming the “genuine philosopher” to whom it falls to “issue commands and laws,” saying “it shall be so!” (BGE 211). As Paul S. Loeb observes in his detailed exegesis of BGE 211, “knowing the truth about how things are is an essential tool for conceiving and issuing new laws about how things should be” (Reference Loeb, Loeb and Meyer2019, 85).

Space permits no lengthy commentary on the later Nietzsche’s project of a revaluation of values. I will simply observe that once the philosopher becomes a “genuine philosopher” – a lawmaker as distinct from a mere “philosophical laborer” – he will play the role of educator, drawing upon his knowledge of the history of past value-creations (Loeb Reference Loeb, Loeb and Meyer2019, 88). He will replace the priests and theologians who once occupied this position; he will guide people by supplying new tablets of values, as suggested by both Z’s Prologue and Z III.12, “Old and New Tablets.” Of particular importance for the philosopher’s historical knowledge is his understanding of religions, since he will “make use of religions for his project of cultivation and education (Züchtungs- und Erziehungswerke), just as he will make use of whatever political and economic states are at hand” (BGE 61). Is Nietzsche himself such an educator? For several reasons, one might think so. He occasionally refers to himself as an educator (EH “Books” SE); his own texts prescribe the sovereignty of philosophy over religion; his authorial creativity expresses the “will to power” in a way that a reviewer of BGE compared to dynamite. But the question is tricky. Against the proposal that Nietzsche identifies himself with the “genuine philosopher,” Loeb argues persuasively that Nietzsche sees himself as a herald whose task is to pave the way for Zarathustra, his future philosophical heir (Reference Loeb, Loeb and Meyer2019, 99).

However one answers the question of Nietzsche’s relation to the genuine philosopher, it seems clear from the closing “catechism” of GS III that a central task of the philosopher is to determine the values and weights of things anew (GS 269). But he cannot do possibly do this, the catechism implies, unless he attains liberation from shame (GS 275).Footnote ²² This suggests another task of philosophical education: attaining freedom from the “ascetic ideal.”

2.3 Educating Beyond the Ascetic Ideal

That Nietzsche considers the philosopher’s education to require historical Wissenschaft is clear enough. To the extent that philosophers lack the historical sense, their judgment will be defective and they will have limited access to the data of philosophical problems worth pursuing. Nevertheless, the person who has been educated up to the point of “historical philosophizing” but no further has not gone far enough. She has yet to be liberated from the ideal that has informed both traditional philosophy and the pursuit of Wissenschaft. This is the unconditional will to truth, or what GM III calls the “ascetic ideal.”

Liberation from the grip of the ascetic ideal does not entail the abandonment of Wissenschaft. It does, however, require some distance from it. The rehabilitation of Wissenschaft examined in the last subsection should not be conflated with a replacement of philosophy by Wissenschaft. Nietzsche denies that Wissenschaft can ever supplant philosophy, because Wissenschaft lacks the power to generate the ideals that inform it. “It first requires in every respect an ideal of value, a value-creating power, in the service of which it could believe in itself – it never creates values” (GM III.25). Which ideal powers modern secularized Wissenschaft? In its lower forms, the answer is either “none” or something that barely qualifies as an ideal, for example, “increasing the GDP” or “perpetuating the existence of institutions devoted to scholarship.” For many scholars, the question “why Wissenschaft?” (GS 344) barely arises. Scholarly endeavors have a way of turning into Pascalian diversions – distractions from hard questions that the scholar would rather not face. Nietzsche challenges his scholarly readers directly: “Wissenschaft as a means of self-narcosis: do you have experience of that?” (GM III.23)

Not every scholar, of course, fits this description. Nietzsche acknowledges that some practitioners of science are driven by a higher motive – that of pursuing truth, no matter how difficult or self-punishing the pursuit may be. Like Schopenhauer, these noble souls adopt as their own motto the words of Juvenal, vitam impendere vero (“to stake life on truth”; see SE 7.215). But however dramatic or violent their break with traditional religion, have they been liberated from the ascetic ideal? To this question, Nietzsche replies in the negative. Wissenschaft “opposes and fights, on closer inspection, not the ideal itself but only its exteriors, its guise and masquerade, and by denying what is exoteric in this ideal, it liberates what life is in it” (GM III.25). Insofar as modern Wissenschaft is driven by a genuine ideal, it is the conviction that nothing is more valuable or more divine than truth, and that truth is beyond critique. But why should this be the case? What about truth makes it immune to questioning? Why should truth be sought at the expense of life?

For anyone whose inner philosopher is educated according to Nietzschean canons, learning to ask questions such as those raised previously is necessarily a part of the curriculum – perhaps its high point. Nothing can be taken for granted, and certainly not the ascetic ideal. Despite its historic dominance, it has no necessary claim on the philosopher. Its power – Nietzsche says twice – is “faute de mieux,” for lack of a better alternative (GM III.28; EH “Books” GM). But what does liberation from the ascetic ideal look like? It cannot be a matter of doing whatever is easily accessible to the last man, for example, “consuming content.” Sinking below the ideal by such means is hardly freedom from the ideal; it is merely nihilism. For liberation to be a real possibility, one must remain a philosopher who aspires to “become who one is.”

One sign of freedom from the ascetic ideal is persistence in asking the questions that it has traditionally discouraged. When Nietzsche poses the question “why Wissenschaft?” he means this as a real question, rather than a dogmatic pronouncement that any justification of Wissenschaft is impossible. Nietzsche’s point, however, is not just that one should ask questions about the ascetic ideal that are usually not posed by its adherents. The deeper point is that philosophical questions should be posed in a different manner, one that banishes the spirit of gravity. What would be the characteristic disposition of the person able to ask such questions in a natural way? Two aphorisms from BGE suggest a definite answer to this question. The first is BGE 94: “A man’s maturity – consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play.”Footnote ²³ A kind of seriousness about questions traditionally considered unaskable will indicate some real maturation of the philosopher. But notice that “seriousness” and “playfulness” are not for Nietzsche “opposite values.” If the philosopher asks serious questions, he does so in a playful manner, in a way more akin to “gay science” than modern “system.” Some, of course, will hear the commendation of play as an invitation to mere frivolity. But this is not what Nietzsche means. To see why, consider this passage from Beyond Good and Evil:

Fear is one affect of the philosopher. To pose questions and listen for their answers can inspire terror, particularly if one is really listening and not just hearing what one wants to hear. But fear is neither the only nor the dominant affect of the human type described by BGE 292. What overcomes fear is the more powerful affect of wonder.

Wonder can manifest itself as being struck by one’s own thoughts as if from outside. Or it might appear in the self-recovery that follows an experience of terror. Either way, the childlike wonder that playfully asks questions is a sign that some real liberation from the ascetic ideal is beginning to take place. But what can foster the disposition of wonder? Is wonder the kind of thing that can be learned? As we have seen, the education of the philosopher will involve a turn to “historical philosophizing,” which requires some familiarity with Wissenschaft. Can “wonder” occupy a spot on the curriculum, without its childlike spirit getting compromised or destroyed?

Discursive meditations on the nature and objects of wonder are unlikely to be helpful, at least if the aim is to produce the disposition of wonder, rather than simply reflect on it. That GM III contains Nietzsche’s most concentrated discussion of the ascetic ideal is difficult to deny. It is noteworthy, then, that he does not point to GM – one of his most conventionally structured texts – as his work that is most likely to stimulate wonder. Rather, he points to Z (see EH “Books” GM; Loeb Reference Loeb2010, 208–211). Nor does he suppose that impassioned polemics against Wissenschaft are the answer, even if “a depreciation of the ascetic ideal unavoidably involves a depreciation of Wissenschaft” (GM III.25). He points to Z because he regards it as his most inspired work of art. The cultural force that serves as the most potent stimulus to wonder – and thereby promises the most-effective liberation from the ascetic ideal’s grip – is neither philosophy nor science but art, which is “much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science (Wissenschaft)” (GM III.25).

If the philosopher is to sustain a life of questioning, being struck by his own thoughts as from outside, he cannot become jaded. His impulse to inquiry must not be ground down by the forces that kill wonder. Therefore, the education of the philosopher, within and without, necessarily includes the aesthetic experience that keeps wonder alive. Any prospect of being educated beyond the ascetic ideal will require art.

3.1 Aesthetic Education

Aesthetic education is a necessary condition of culture in Nietzsche’s sense of the term. It is not “poietic” education, the education of an artist qua maker of an artwork (Taminiaux Reference Taminiaux1993, 57). Its aim is to improve a person’s capacity for aesthetic experience. But how does Nietzsche understand “aesthetic experience”? For an exemplary instance, consider this notebook entry from 1872:

In fact, Nietzsche attended two performances of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in 1872: one on June 28, the other in June 30. Days before, he wrote the composer of Tristan to express his excitement: “A telegram from Bülow that has just arrived from Munich gives me the hope of hearing Tristan this week! It is not possible to experience a richer and fuller summer – and all through you! How could I thank you!”Footnote ²⁴ That the performance was received with a degree of enthusiasm commensurate with Nietzsche’s anticipatory excitement is attested by Cosima Wagner’s diary after the event: “At 3 o’clock arrival of Herr v. Gersdorff, much about Tristan, tremendous impression on everybody, a Herr Hildebrand is reported to have said, ‘It is like the Eleusinian mysteries’” (Reference Wagner1978, 507).

Experiencing a Wagnerian opera in this way is not the default. Plenty have left a performance of Wagner without being in the least transformed. “I lament an education in which understanding Wagner has not been attained, in which Schopenhauer sounds raw and unharmonious; this education has failed,” he says.Footnote ²⁵ Given the proper education, Nietzsche supposes, it is possible that one might become the right kind of hearer, susceptible to aesthetic education. When he speaks of “understanding Wagner,” he does not mean attaining a technical knowledge of Wagner’s music. “The expert musicologist may show, through his playing or listening, that he does not understand what he hears, despite his skilled descriptions,” writes Roger Scruton. “The decisive fact is the experience itself” (Reference Scruton1997, 212). For Nietzsche, an educational curriculum might provide its students with advanced musicological knowledge and nevertheless be a failure. The test of aesthetic education is not theoretical sophistication. It is the awakening of a capacity for a certain kind of experience.Footnote ²⁶

But how can such a capacity be awakened or enhanced? Can a person be formed not by mere knowledge of music, but by music itself? That Nietzsche has this latter question in mind is indicated by an 1875 notebook entry that mentions “the completely modern human being through and through still empty of music, not yet formed by it” and laments the “lack of music in education” (CWFN 12.233:1875,12[25]). We may ask: what are the forces that prevent us from seeing or hearing a work of art in a way that compares to the “impression” that Tristan made on Nietzsche in the summer of 1872?

This question receives a definite answer in the UM published exactly four years after Nietzsche sees Tristan. Though taken by some to be uninspired, the essay “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” expresses some of his deepest thoughts about the nature of aesthetic education.Footnote ²⁷ Any sound concept of aesthetic education, Nietzsche proposes, must grapple with the question: why do we need art? Here Nietzsche takes an uncompromisingly negative stance against one answer to this question: “To stupefy or intoxicate! To narcotize or deaden! One way or another to force our conscience into unconsciousness!” (RWB 6.273). This is a modern degradation of art’s function. Art is not some kind of drug. It is not a means for escape or diversion. To see what it is, we must be freed from the conception of art as amusement. In order to attain this freedom, Nietzsche says, we must undergo “two harrowing rites of purification and initiation” (RWB 6.273).

The first rite is a commitment to cleanse oneself of all that is impure about the modern attitude toward art. Such cleansing occurs primarily through negation – that is, through opposition to the “illusory pleasure and quiet drunkenness in the manner of our ‘art-lovers’ (Kunstfreunde)” (RWB 5.271). Here the “avowed enemy of art” (italics in original) can be a useful ally, “since the art against which he avows hatred is exactly that which is understood to be art by the ‘art-lover’” (RWB 5.271). Advocates of “art education,” looking to gain new subscribers, will sometimes make questionable appeals to a hedonistic conception of art. The reduction of art to a delivery system for pleasure must be exposed: “there is no hunger here, no satisfaction, only a dull charade with the illusion of both” (RWB 5.271). The “energy, time, and money squandered in every household on the education of so-called aesthetic interests,” Nietzsche writes, must be put in the service of an altogether different conception of art. It would be easy to misconstrue Nietzsche by supposing him to urge deadly earnestness against easygoing pleasure. Should one have this expectation, he quickly defeats it. Still worse than the dilettantish art-lover, he says, is the person who lacks natural feeling and uses art as a stimulant to arouse feelings that he never has otherwise. “Men yearn for suffering, anger, hatred, passion, sudden terror, and breath-taking suspense, and they summon the artist to be the conjurer of this devilish chase” (RWB 5.272).

Anything that uses art to generate feelings that are otherwise absent, in an effort to escape from oneself, must be denied. Art as divertissement is degraded art. Where the degradation falls on a spectrum ranging from quiet drunkenness to crazed agitation is relatively unimportant. Each pole of this spectrum, as well as the points between, are manifestations of the disease that he terms “false feeling” (RWB 5.272). Art that is produced or experienced from false feeling will either make no difference or make things worse.Footnote ²⁸

The first rite of purification that Nietzsche recommends is essentially negative. Even if the person who craves initiation into culture “is capable of more than negation and scorn, if he can love, sympathize, and assist,” he writes, “he must begin with negation in order to prepare the way for his desire to be helpful” (RWB 5.271). What must be negated is any approach of art that nourishes “false feeling” by serving the anti-contemplative appetites of the modern soul, for which “the only remaining form of seriousness is reverence for the news delivered by the daily paper or telegraph. ‘Use every second,’ and so you can use it, ‘evaluate it as quickly as possible’ – one might think contemporary men have only one virtue: present-mindedness.” (RWB 6.272–273). The sharp character of Nietzsche’s negations must be noted. He judges them necessary to overcome “the most shameful lack in our education,” which he identifies as its lack of “the inspiring and informing soul of music” (RWB 5.270). But for Nietzsche, negation is never an end in itself. It is always a preliminary step on the way to something affirmative.

The second rite, at once harrowing but cleansing, that Nietzsche builds into his program of aesthetic education has two distinct but complementary aspects. From the artist’s perspective, the second rite is a commitment to face “his gravest danger, his supreme battle – men would rather tear him and his art to shreds than admit that they must slink away in shame before him” (RWB 6.273–274). From the audience’s perspective, the rite is a determination to resist whatever pressures might lead him to either hostile opposition or a shameful turning-away from the artist. For such resistance to occur, the first rite must have been successfully completed. Only then can a person turn to the light offered by art, resolving to distance themselves from the targets of Nietzsche’s quasi-Scriptural admonition: “They do not want light, but rather blinding; they even hate the light” (RWB 6.274; compare John 3:19–20).

Simply being in the proximity of great art is not the same thing as aesthetic education. “David Strauss heard the Pastoral and heard nothing.”Footnote ²⁹ The person who can hear the art of a composer such as Beethoven or Wagner requires a certain preparatio animi, an “attunement” to the work of art (Denham Reference Denham2014, 172). He must be ready to receive it in the spirit that Nietzsche suggests: “only as an innocent can he discover the innocence of art” (RWB 6.273). Such “innocence” is the precondition for having an experience like the one Nietzsche had when he heard Tristan in the summer of 1872. One must be disposed toward the “new light-bringer” who, “compelled by the love from which he was born,” speaks in the “voice of Wagner’s art”:

It would be easy to dismiss this passage as a remnant of the period when Nietzsche was an uncritical adulator of Wagner. But any such dismissal would be a mistake. Despite its overwrought character, the passage offers an essential clue to what Nietzsche takes to happen in any real aesthetic encounter. If a person’s capacity for “engaged aesthetic experience” (Denham Reference Denham2014, 184) has been cultivated, he will cease to think of art as diversionary or useful for some other end. Instead, art will become the occasion for moments of contemplation, whose character is best captured by the term Verklärung, “transfiguration.”

3.2 The Educative Power of Transfiguration

Verklärung and verklären, “transfiguration” and “to transfigure,” are privileged terms that Nietzsche uses to indicate an essential aspect of what happens in aesthetic experience. A musically educated person will not only hear tones; he will also hear something in the tones. This “something” is not just individual notes, or melodies, or rhythms, or chords. It is the whole, the Gestalt that is mysteriously constituted by these tones. Such a world is not literally “another” world. It is this world, but transfigured – that is, shown under a different aspect. Much of art’s interest and power lies in its ability to transfigure nature.

The musical art converts sounds into tones, without nullifying their natural character as sound. In music, aesthetic education involves learning to hear more than just noises or sounds. These are what David Strauss heard when he heard Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 and yet heard nothing.Footnote ³⁰ Aesthetic experience teaches one to hear sounds transfigured into tones, into intentional objects that constitute a world. As transfigured sounds, tones are what one hears when one hears music as music. In Book V of GS, published in 1887, Nietzsche scorns the proposal that someone’s understanding of music would improve by reducing tones to frequencies that can be expressed mathematically. “How absurd would such a ‘scientific’ estimation of music be! What would one have comprehended, understood, grasped of it? Nothing, really nothing of what is ‘music’ in it!” (GS 373).Footnote ³¹

If sound is transfigured into tone, it is also true that tones have a similarly transfiguring power. Twice in SE, Nietzsche identifies culture itself with a “transfigured physis.” Aesthetic experience gives us access to nature as transfigured in a particular way. This theme is sounded, briefly but unmistakably, on the essay’s first page:

Letting us into a transfigured world, art prompts us to ask: “which life is more real, where the daylight really is, and which is the cave” (RWB 6.274). It challenges our habitual but unreflective acquiescence to the view that the criterion for what is real is what is familiar to ordinary perception, sought by the person obsessed with “practical” goals and readily graspable to the “thoroughly unaesthetic person” (as Nietzsche calls Strauss).

Aesthetic education gives us access to a transfigured world. Its point, however, is not to make us inhabitants of a different world, but to show us this world under a new aspect. Art enables us to see the world under a different aspect than we typically do, and therefore to respond to it differently. What had been “aimless drifting about” yields to a new sense of mission – or revives an older but forgotten sense. When a work of art inspires us, the familiar affects of fear, laziness and ennui get driven out. We see and feel ourselves differently. In emphasizing the connection between art and what SE calls our “productive uniqueness” (SE 3.180), Nietzsche does not mean to say that art tells us that we are unique. Rather, it brushes aside the flotsam and jetsam that prevent us from glimpsing our uniqueness, and thus reveals us to ourselves. In so doing, it empowers us to think more clearly and act more resolutely with respect to the vocation or task that is uniquely ours. No matter how suffocated we might feel by the “cotton wool of daily life,” as Virginia Woolf calls it (Reference Woolf and Schulkind2002, 85), art’s power to disclose a “transfigured physis” can show us a glimpse of our higher self and its distinctive task.

Transfiguring art is connected deeply to life. Kant and Schopenhauer stress the disinterested character of aesthetic perception, and sometimes Nietzsche appears to echo this conception in his earlier works. But even here, he qualifies any strong conception of disinterestedness. In withdrawing our interest from pursuing ordinary objects of desire and consumption, art inclines us more intensely toward (that is, makes us more interested in) the task of “becoming who we are.” It does not, of course, prescribe any particular set of actions. But in showing us a transfigured physis, it awakens something in ourselves. In so doing, it gives us a new energy, a revitalized sense of our productive uniqueness. In disclosing our uniqueness, it suggests the unity of parts in a whole: “man, down to each twitch of his muscles, is himself, himself alone” (SE 1.163). To say that art transfigures “nature” is to imply that art transfigures ourselves, since we too are part of nature.Footnote ³²

But precisely how does art perform its transfiguring function? Can we give a more particular account of how aesthetic education works? To gain a deeper understanding of how the artist works upon nature, so as to yield a transfigured physis, we must return to RWB. What makes Wagner a great artist, Nietzsche thinks, is his capacity for responding to a chaotic and fragmented world that threatens to overwhelm anyone who lives in it. He seeks order, but not in the manner of a person who sifts through the debris and sorts it into various categories. Such a person would be a “polyhistor whose mind merely compiles and organizes.” Wagner is more powerful than that: “he sculpts and breathes life into the material he has brought together, he simplifies the world” (RWB 4.263).Footnote ³³

Nietzsche’s proposal that the work of the artist is to simplify might seem counter-intuitive. Does not a great musician take a limited stock of notes and, from that stock, create a work of remarkable complexity? In Wagner’s case, the intersection of drama and music (“Shakespeare and Beethoven next to each other – the boldest craziest insane thought”Footnote ³⁴) seems to lend additional force to the objection. But Nietzsche does not say that Wagner simplifies music. Rather, his claim is that he simplifies the world. As Scruton notes, this is part of music’s charm: it “inspires and consoles us partly because it is unencumbered by the debris that drifts through the world of life” (Reference Scruton1997, 122). The point may be particularly evident from music, but it can also be gathered by reflecting on the representational arts. Far from depicting everything that he might display on his canvas, the painter has to make choices. What he leaves out is no less important than what he includes. Even if the particular arrangement of splotches and pigments is strikingly complex, the world that one sees in the painting – assuming the artwork has the capacity for conjuring up a world – is only a small slice of existence. For the artist, the question is never whether to omit, but what one should omit. The more multiplicity that the artist sees, the greater his need to simplify.

Wagner’s power to create transfiguring art is directly connected to his capacity for simplifying.

Here we may pause to note some implications for aesthetic education. Any education that equips its recipient to encounter a novel or a symphony or a painting will involve some training in the power of simplifying. To learn what is significant in a novel like Madame Bovary, one cannot merely recite the episodes that occur in each chapter. One must somehow gather the episodes and characters together, representing them in a way that, compared to the immense detail of the world depicted by Flaubert, is indeed a simplification. No representation can avoid simplifying – but one can represent poorly or with insight. A test of whether a pupil’s simplifications are performed poorly or with insight is to ask: Do the simplifications enable the student to either contract or develop a theme at will, according to the needs at hand? Do they enlighten or trivialize? Aesthetic education does not merely produce “art lovers.” It instructs a person’s general capacity for relating parts to a whole, and the whole to its parts. Furthermore, it equips her to discern the manner in which the whole is expressed in each of its parts.Footnote ³⁵ All of this involves a kind of simplification that is analogous to the activity of the artist who “simplifies the world.” To discover how great artists excel in both compression and elaboration, or how they imply the presence of a whole in its parts (Nassar Reference Nassar2022, 18), one can do worse than immerse oneself in the symphonies of Beethoven or the operas of Wagner.

A transfigured world is a simplified world. This is as it should be, if art and aesthetic education are to prove capable of addressing our real needs. SE speaks to the matter in a general fashion, invoking the artist’s power to expose the “principle that every man is a unique miracle.” RWB gives a much richer account of art’s necessity:

The reference to our desire for a “quicker solution to the puzzles of life,” along with the sense that art somehow caters to this desire, may imply a concession to human weakness, and hence a critique of art. In due course, we will consider some critical remarks that Nietzsche himself makes in this vein, and how (or whether) they can be reconciled with the account given in RWB. For now, however, we should the possibility that what lies behind our desire for “the appearance of simplicity, if only for an instance” is something other than mere escapism. If we are to avoid the implication that the transfiguring art praised by Nietzsche is indistinguishable from the art he condemns, we must look for some distinction between escapist and non-escapist modes of simplification.

Anyone able to reflect on the human condition will sooner or later experience, Nietzsche suggests, a “threefold feeling of inadequacy” (RWB 4.266). The more deeply a person perceives the world, the less able he is to be (1) happy (“everything around us suffers and inflicts suffering”); (2) moral (“the course of human events is determined by force, fraud, and injustice”); and (3) wise (“so long as the whole of mankind has not entered the competition of wisdom,” individual growth in wisdom will encounter severe limits). What happens if our feeling of this threefold inadequacy grows deeper and deeper, with no end? The possibility that we might snap or otherwise lose our mind may become actual. In response, we are all too tempted to drug ourselves, so that we might grow numb toward the feeling of inadequacy. Or we might engage in other strategies that amount to cowardly evasion. How can we nobly preserve the tension, without perishing from it?

Nietzsche’s answer to this question receives a variety of formulations, scattered across the corpus.Footnote ³⁶ But none of them necessarily improve upon the answer he gives in “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth”: “Art exists in order that the bow not break.” (RWB 4.267).

Art cannot “solve” any of our problems. How could it? (And what a sadly rationalist approach to art this would be, in Oakeshott’s sense of “rationalism.”) It does not dissolve the “terrible tension” engendered by deep reflection; it can release us from that tension “only for a few hours” (RWB 7.277). Art is contemplative. It exists not to rile us up, but to “demand stillness as long as it looks at us – because art is not for the battle itself but for the pauses before and during it.” Art cannot bring about the world’s redemption. But it can help us live in the world as it is, with a measure of gratitude. “Day and battle begin together, the holy shadows vanish, and art is again remote from us – yet its comfort remains with men all day” (RWB 4.266).

3.3 Education and the Development of Genius

Nietzsche’s conception of culture requires us to work for the production of genius not just in ourselves but also in the world. His primary way of performing the latter task, I have argued, is to promote aesthetic education. But I do not mean to neglect the other imperative – namely, to produce the artist “in ourselves.” Can education accomplish this goal? By means of an aesthetic education, a person may learn to read Shakespeare, and so respond to the world differently than she once did. But this does not make her into an artist who can write like Shakespeare. As Lichtenberg observes, “what you have to do to learn to write like Shakespeare is very far removed from reading him” (Reference Lichtenberg1990, 46). Can the artistry that we see in Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays be taught?

In one sense, the answer is straightforwardly “yes.” A writing instructor can show his pupils some traps that a good writer avoids and the techniques that he uses; he can proceed to exhort his students to write in a similar manner. That one can learn to emulate a model, so that one comes to write “like Shakespeare,” seems clear enough. But this possibility fails to get at what SE means by the task of producing the artist “in us.” To see why this is true, we may consider a passage from Nietzsche’s own exemplar, Schopenhauer:

The aspect of artistic production that consists in the acquisition of technique can be taught. Were art reducible to the conception implied by “the technical theory of art,” as Collingwood calls it (Reference Collingwood1938, 19), then the question might be settled. By teaching the techniques proper to a particular art, education would serve culture by promoting the production of the artist. But matters are hardly so straightforward. If we distinguish what makes Michelangelo a technician from what makes him an artist, the questions reassert themselves at once. Does education have the power to make someone an artist? Or must he already be one?

To this question, Schopenhauer’s answer is evident. What makes Shakespeare or Beethoven who they are is the “gift of genius and is inborn.” The artist as such cannot be taught. Education has some role in producing conditions that are hospitable for the emergence of genius, but education cannot itself produce genius. At most, it can merely improve the technical means by which genius gets expressed and communicated. A technician can play the Hammerklavier, but he could not have conceived it. In his centennial essay “Beethoven,” Wagner acknowledges the “development of Beethoven’s genius” (Reference Wagner1880, 35), without ever suggesting that genius is anything other than inborn. In technical matters, his teacher Haydn might have helped him, but not in essentials. “It seems as though he felt himself related to Haydn like one born a man to a childish elder,” Wagner writes. “As regards form he agreed with his teacher, but the unruly daemon of his inner music, fettered by that form, impelled him to a disclosure of his power” (Reference Wagner1880, 38).

When he was composing his centennial essay on Beethoven, Wagner was speaking regularly with Nietzsche, who publicly expressed great admiration for it (BT Pref). If “education of the artist” denotes anything beyond than technical education, then we can see why (the early) Nietzsche says so little: he does not really believe in it. With Schopenhauer and Wagner, he remains convinced that the “unruly daemon” is given. Education cannot itself bring genius into being. At most, it can help its recipient to acquire some techniques that are helpful for better communication.

Suppose one insists that a person’s genius is not static but develops over time. This insistence poses no significant threat to the view held by Schopenhauer and Wagner. There is no necessary contradiction in saying both that “genius is inborn” and “genius develops over time”; the two can be harmonized. The thought is present within much of the Bildung tradition (Nassar Reference Nassar2022, 159). Nevertheless, in the immediate aftermath of his break with Wagner, Nietzsche seeks a perspective that does not lean so heavily on the idea that genius is necessarily inborn, or constitutes some kind of miracle. Consider the following aphorism from HH:

Here we have clear evidence that Nietzsche comes to envisage “the education of the artist” as a real possibility. We can devise a curriculum that, if diligently followed, can produce people capable of making art. One might wonder: does Nietzsche gain his point by selecting a lowly art, one whose acquisition is not that difficult? Perhaps the art of short-story writing differs in kind from that of Beethoven. But Nietzsche gives no “in principle” justification for this view. If he does not set forth an educational program that would produce master musicians, this is not necessarily because he discerns any deep difference between short-story writing and musical composition. The remainder of HH 163 gives specific “how to” instructions for molding a short story writer – an example that Nietzsche thinks can be generalized. For any art, we may abandon the belief that its great works emerge through sheer inspiration. If we hold this belief, we do so to protect ourselves from doing the hard work necessary for excellence. We fall into what Conant calls “the cultivation of ethically impotent forms of admiration” (Reference Conant and Schacht2000, 209). Far easier to say “great artists are born” than to submit oneself to the countless hours of discipline required to become one. In both HH and the contemporaneous notebooks, Nietzsche distances himself from the view held by Schopenhauer and Wagner. What can be educated is not merely technical execution, but the ability to see and to compose in any art.Footnote ³⁷ The logic of HH 163 applies as much to Beethoven as to O’Henry (see HH 155).

In HH, Nietzsche strives to blur any strong distinction between education in craftsmanly technique, on the one hand, and education in artistic genius, on the other. He wants to make it difficult to tell where one leaves off and the other begins. In light of HH’s determination to expose inborn genius as a superstition, it seems easy to conclude that Nietzsche simply throws off the “cult of genius” perpetrated by Schopenhauer and Wagner. Finally, one might say, he grows up. This reading is not without some basis. Never again is Nietzsche the naive enthusiast for Wagner that he was prior to 1874. His effort to liberate himself from “the Master” is perfectly sincere; he must “become who he is.”Footnote ³⁸

We cannot, however, simply conclude that Nietzsche engages in a wholesale rejection of his former agreement with the position common to Wagner and Schopenhauer – namely, that education cannot bring artistic genius into being. Against any reading that would reduce Nietzsche’s total view about art and education to the perspective articulated by certain aphorisms of HH, the following five points must be kept in mind:

1. 1. Nietzsche is not insincere in HH. But we know from his notebooks that he writes this work as a kind of experiment, one that he conducts self-consciously. His aim is to “try out” a new style of thinking, in collaboration with Paul Rée, without forever committing himself to it.Footnote ³⁹ Wagner was not entirely wrong to dismiss HH as a series of “Rée-flections” (Wagner Reference Wagner1980, 100). Little can be straightforwardly attributed to Nietzsche on the basis of that text alone, even if it abounds in valuable thoughts that are crisply expressed.

2. 2. As the short story aphorism suggests, Nietzsche thought himself capable of devising educational curricula for particular crafts. Sometimes he uses this power for the benefit of others, as when he writes a style guide for Lou Salomé in 1882 that contains specific recommendations on how to write (Small Reference Small2016, 69). Surely, one might think, this implies that for Nietzsche writing well is a teachable skill, rather than a function of “genius.” But this is to overstate both the power and the intent of the style guide. Its instructions to Lou are not rules that, if followed diligently, will make her into a great writer. They are reminders that Nietzsche directs to an uncommonly bright student. As reminders, they can work only if Lou already knows something that cannot be taught.

3. 3. The turn against Wagner must be handled with care. In the “middle period” works, it receives bold statement in HH. It is visible in GS as well – but one may also note that GS quotes approvingly from RWB, the only UM that Nietzsche quotes directly in any of his published texts. The relationship between the two remains complicated. As Raymond Geuss reminds us, Nietzsche prided himself on his ability “to adopt a variety of different disguises or masks for his own deeper and more considered views. The later anti-Wagnerian pose is one such mask, a particular form of self-dramatization adopted at a certain time for particular reasons” (Reference Geuss1999, viii–ix).

4. 4. Part of Nietzsche’s experiment proceeds from his pain at the dissolution of his friendship with Wagner – pain that he acknowledged with admirable honesty (see Liébert Reference Liébert2004, 39). This pain drives him to express in his notebooks thoughts that go to the greatest possible extreme to combat any aesthetic opinion that Wagner might have held. For example: “Alas, ‘genius.’ It is not so very much to have created a Faust, a Schopenhauerian philosophy, an Eroica!”Footnote ⁴⁰ One can only imagine Wagner’s (justified) scorn if Nietzsche had directly uttered this bit of foolishness. Even if von Bülow had refrained from judging Nietzsche’s musical aptitude quite so harshly, one would still have little reason to believe that Nietzsche himself could ever have written a symphony approaching the heights of Beethoven’s 3rd. Having reduced an aspect of his newly acquired view to absurdity, he sensibly keeps this passage out of the published works.

5. 5. There is, of course, a non-absurd aspect to the view that even genius can be educated. The person whose genius has been unshackled continues to develop over time, enhancing his existing powers and perhaps even gaining new ones. But this observation (compatible with Schopenhauer and Wagner) does not warrant the indiscriminate claim that every appeal to genius is superstitious. Rather, it reinforces the strict limits of exogenous education. Perhaps anyone can be taught some degree of musical technique, but only Beethoven can discover what it is to excel as Beethoven, as his productively unique self. The same, mutatis mutandis, is true of the rest of us. If everyone has something worth calling genius, difficult to access, the correct inference is not “Even genius can be taught!” It is closer to the thought expressed at WS 267: “As educators, we should care only about self-education.”

HH calls into question the notion of genius, the character of the artist, and ultimately the value of art itself. It flirts with the idea that art is destined to give way to the higher achievement of science. But nothing in HH can be taken as definitive. We must continue to probe the development of Nietzsche’s thinking about art by considering its relations to self-education.

3.4 Art and Self-Education

However poorly Wagner, the only genius whom Nietzsche knew personally, may fare in Nietzsche’s “school of suspicion” (HH Pref 1), the later writings do not hesitate to invoke the concept of genius. Had Nietzsche simply repudiated the conceptual groundbass of the UMs, it would be difficult to explain his continued practice of recommending SE to new readers. We may, therefore, remind ourselves that Nietzsche’s later works do not abandon the idea of artistic genius, no matter how vehement their attack on Wagner.

Education that is not self-directed has little role to play in the development of genius. It does not follow, however, that genius requires no education at all. Which kind of education is most likely to develop artistic genius? One answer is suggested by Nietzsche in an aphorism titled “There are no educators.” This aphorism reads: “As educators, one should speak only of self-education … One day, when one has long since been educated according to the opinion of the world, one discovers oneself: that is where the task of the thinker begins, now it is time to call him to help – not as an educator, but as a self-educated person who has experience” (WS 267).

By “self-education,” Nietzsche does not mean education in the void, as if learning were to occur with no external occasion or stimulus. On the contrary: he allows that “everything great educates, as soon as we become aware of it” (as he puts it in a notebook entry quoting Goethe).Footnote ⁴¹ Even Wagner acknowledges this point: as a genuine inspiration for Beethoven, J. S. Bach “became a guide for the man in the mighty development of his artistic life” (Wagner Reference Wagner1880, 59). What is distinctive about self-education, Nietzsche holds, is that it does not depend on institutions or textbooks or a specific class of people who call themselves “educators” or “teachers.” It might make use of them, but they are never required. As institutional aids become increasingly dispensable, education necessarily turns into self-education.

Any real development of the artist demands self-education. But what about the converse? Does the activity of self-education, taken seriously, require art? For the later Nietzsche, art has a definite role to play in “self-education for seriousness and terror” (ASC 7, quoting BT 18). It must serve not as a narcotic, but as a means of affirming and elevating life in the face of the difficult truths to which self-education leads. These include “every truth, even a simple, bitter, ugly, contrary, unchristian, immoral truth … For there are such truths” (GM I.1). Such art must sustain an inquirer’s vitality through the arduous pursuit of self-education. It is the art that is appropriate to “Dionysian pessimism” (GS 370) – that is, the “pessimism of strength” that differs from the “romantic pessimism” he once shared with Schopenhauer and Wagner. Such art will not shield the inquirer from the difficult truths obtained by self-education. Instead, he will help him to face those truths. But how? The conclusion of ASC provides a hint: “Laughter I have pronounced holy: you higher men, learn – to laugh!”

Aesthetic self-education, then, must proceed along the lines laid down by “gay science.” Even the most gifted so far have been unable to laugh at themselves “as one would have to laugh in order to laugh from the whole truth” (GS 1). If this capacity must itself be acquired by self-education, as ASC suggests, then art can help. Help is needed because even the person strong enough to endure “self-education for seriousness and terror” will suffer. Which artists are likely to appear on the curriculum laid down in the school of Dionysian pessimism, producing works that inspire or teach laughter? GS 370 answers: “dithyrambic perhaps like Rubens, or blissfully mocking like Hafiz, bright and gracious like Goethe, spreading a Homeric light and splendor over all things” (GS 370). Conspicuously absent from the list is Richard Wagner.

That Bizet, whom Nietzsche puts forward so zealously in CW as the apparent alternative to Wagner, also fails to appear on the list is striking. In fact, Bizet is not mentioned anywhere in GS. This omission is nearly inexplicable if we take Nietzsche’s frequent elevations of Bizet over Wagner at face value. The virulence with which Nietzsche’s published texts denounce Wagner can make it hard to hold onto the possibility that he is something other than straightforwardly antagonistic to Wagner. To take just one representative passage: Wagner’s last opera is the work of a “decaying and despairing decadent, suddenly sank down, helpless and broken, before the Christian cross” (NCW 676). The work is Parsifal, the opera that tells the story of the Grail knights. Applying the criterion of “gay science” might seem to demand the exclusion of Parsifal from self-education. Perhaps instead we should privilege a seemingly inferior artist such as Bizet over Wagner.

Suppose, however, that Nietzsche’s omission of Bizet from the text of GS is a hint, one that a reader might take seriously. This possibility, I think, receives corroboration from Nietzsche’s (very late) avowal to Carl Fuchs that “you should not take what I say about Bizet seriously” (KSB 8:554, #1214).Footnote ⁴² Though Nietzsche writes all sorts of critical things about Wagner, his actions tell a different and much more conflicted story. We know that he when he improvised on hotel pianos, the music he played was essentially Wagnerian (Gilman Reference Gilman and Parent1984, 218; Liébert Reference Liébert2004, 204). Despite his condemnation of Parsifal, he was not actually able to resist his desire to hear the opera. In early 1887, he writes Köselitz to tell him that he has finally heard the introduction to Parsifal (“in Monte Carlo!”). Nietzsche is simply unable to contain his enthusiasm:

Wagner never really lost his hold over Nietzsche, no matter how hard he tried to lose himself in Carmen. An implication for self-education is that the “gay science” criterion mentioned earlier cannot be applied mechanically. One must remain open to a wide range of aesthetic experience, including (and perhaps especially) the shadow of the past that one has ostensibly repudiated.

Taken straight without the mediation of art, self-education that yields difficult truths is unlikely to go far. It may well collapse in nihilistic despair. Only as an “aesthetic phenomenon is existence still bearable for us” (GS 107). But when it receives the vital support of aesthetic experience, self-education can develop a person’s genius. It can enable her to move beyond the chrysalis state. If this principle is visible in the artistic case, does it hold with equal force in rebus moralibus? I will take up this question in the next section on the saint.

4.1 Educating the Saint?

One might argue that SE’s elevation of the saint belongs squarely to Nietzsche’s earlier period. In the works beginning with HH, does not Nietzsche abandon the saint? It is true that HH contains few positive references to the saint. But a reader who follows more closely the train of thinking that runs through the “free spirit” works will discover any number of surprises. If the saint goes missing from HH, this is not because Nietzsche has abandoned the loving that is inseparable from the saint. What HH laments about those most likely to chatter about sanctity is not the presence of love in their hearts, but its absence (HH 129). It might be, of course, that HH affirms love but discards the saint – perhaps because the “saint” has been discredited by the death of God and in any case is hopelessly entangled with asceticism. On this reading, we should expect Nietzsche’s works after HH to contain virtually no positive discourse about the saint. But the reader who keeps an open mind, examining notebook entries that Nietzsche writes as sketches for Zarathustra, will discover something else: “to become artist (one who creates), saint (one who loves), and philosopher (one who knows) in one person – my practical goal!”Footnote ⁴⁵ This entry from the 1883 notebooks echoes an earlier entry from a notebook contemporaneous with GS: “The one who knows, the one who creates, the one who loves – these are one.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Both entries are decisive evidence that Nietzsche has not disavowed SE’s conviction that education exists for the sake of culture, understood precisely as the enterprise whose goal is produce the saint, along with the philosopher and artist.

We can grant that the saint is present on SE’s surface in a way that is not true of the later works. In these works, the saint seems to go underground. Why? One might cite Nietzsche’s determination to launch a campaign against the received versions of morality. To those unable to gain any distance from these versions, the saint appears as not the antithesis of morality, but its highest embodiment. Too much discourse about holiness and the saint would make Nietzsche seem like one of the “preachers of morality” that he deplores (see GS 292). In light of such considerations, it is not surprising that Nietzsche exhibits a marked reserve in speaking about the saint. Nevertheless, the things that are clearly visible in the foreground of Nietzsche’s published texts do not necessarily represent his deepest convictions, as he tells us in his notebooks.Footnote ⁴⁷ This applies particularly to his thinking about the saint.

A few months after the publication of GS, following the collapse of his relationship with Lou Salomé, he writes: “I have the ambition of a worldly saint.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In a letter to Malwida at the beginning of 1883, he refers to himself as an “odd saint” (wunderlicher Heiliger).Footnote ⁴⁹ Others shared the impression that something about the man resembled a saint. “He cooked for himself, fruit being his favorite food,” one of his early biographers writes. “His landlady and the neighbors admired his gentleness and called him ‘il santo’; they really thought he was a poor saint, and presented him with candles for his quiet evenings” (Mügge Reference Mügge1909, 65). I mean neither to argue for Nietzsche’s canonization nor to suggest that Nietzsche intended to pass himself off as a saint. But the sheer force of his dedication to his “task,” manifested in an austere life that involved continuous physical suffering, clearly reminded some observers of holiness (see Chamberlain Reference Chamberlain1996, 131). In this section, my aim is not to adjudicate this matter, but to ask whether there is any substantive relationship between education and the saint’s holiness.

Reading Plato’s Meno, or simply observing human beings, generates the strong suspicion that virtue is unteachable. Would this Socratic suspicion not apply still more strongly to holiness? The notion that one might intentionally form a saint through an educational program seems to be just the kind of proposal that Nietzsche would ridicule. But no matter how ridiculous it sounds, the reader of the notebooks will discover several entries bearing the title “Paths to the Saint.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Since Nietzsche places the saint near the center of culture, and since he takes culture to be acquirable by means of education, his texts invite us to look for the deeper connections between education and holiness.

4.2 Learning to Love

In considering the relation between education and the saint’s fundamental activity – that of loving, as indicated by the two notebook entries quoted earlier – the difficulties of any education that aims at cultivating the saint become particularly evident. Our modern educational institutions are at a peculiar disadvantage, Nietzsche holds, insofar as they are caught between antiquity and Christianity. Having lost any real sense of their mission, they tend to promote “a restlessness, a confusion in the modern soul, that condemns it to joyless sterility” (SE 2.169). Joyless sterility is the opposite of love as described at the peak of a Platonic dialogue that Nietzsche knew well. As Diotima shows Socrates in the Symposium, joyful love will be fecund. It will not only yearn for new visions and ideals; it will positively generate them.Footnote ⁵¹ As Zarathustra says, it will “create beyond itself” (Z I.4,31; I.17,56). In our present condition, however, this seems like an idle dream. Nietzsche writes:

Driven by the values of the modern corporation, our educational institutions do little to render their graduates more capable of loving, or more apt to grow in holiness. “As things stand now,” he writes, “our higher education endeavors to produce either scholars, or officials, or businessmen, or educated philistines, or more often, a potpourri of all four” (SE 6.209). Nietzsche’s assessment seems one of gloomy pessimism.

Beneath the pessimism, however, one may detect a counsel not to despair. The modern corporate university has a decidedly artificial character, as even those who embrace its lower aims can recognize. But its very alienation from nature suggests the possibility of removing the distortion, so that it may be directed toward higher aims and aspirations. We can imagine a new kind of institution that will encourage love rather than suffocate it. Certainly the task of creating any such institution will not be easy. Nietzsche’s description of the difficulty bears attention:

In tracing a path that leads from medieval times to our present situation, Nietzsche might seem to be unfair to the former. Does he not overlook the flourishing within the medieval university of the “priest/scholar” type whose commitment to rigorous scholarship is animated by love for the divine? Nietzsche’s target, however, is not so much medieval Dominicans or Franciscans as their secular descendants in whom the scholarly drive remains, but with little real love for anything transcending scholarship – especially holiness.

Nietzsche does not, of course, recommend a quixotic return to the Middle Ages. The “new basic principle” he calls for will not be nostalgic. Nevertheless, he retains some respect for the monastery, as he envisages a “monastery for free spirits” intended to provide a communal atmosphere in which free spirits can learn from another. In 1876, Nietzsche imagines spending a year in Sorrento with some students and friends in just this way: “We all have a house together and moreover a higher interest together: it will be a kind of monastery for free spirits,” he tells Reinhart von Seydlitz.Footnote ⁵² Such a monastery will provide a space for contemplation, which free spirits still require (GS 280). It may seem that I have wandered far from the saint. But aiming for holiness apart from contemplation – as if contemplative insight were something extrinsic to the saint – is a grave mistake. “Nonsense about a mother’s love,” he writes in a notebook entry contemporary with Z. “All love that is not matched by insight wreaks havoc.”Footnote ⁵³ Any loving that is worthy of the saint must be informed by a contemplative habit. Such contemplation will seek liberation from opinions that have been acquired merely though routine, or by deference to public opinion. Nietzsche recognizes no opposition between the free spirit’s contemplation and the saint’s active loving. The former is a necessary condition of the latter.

But can the activity of loving be learned? And if so, can it be taught? One path toward learning to love is suggested by the Prologue of Z on “contempt” (Verachtung). Imagine a person with the reflective power to assess her present condition and despise it. In its original form, such contempt is little more than hatred of the body: “Once the soul looked despairingly upon the body, and at that time this despising was the highest thing: she wanted the body to be lean, ghastly, and starved. Thus she thought to slip away from the body and the earth” (Z Prologue 3,12). As Scott Jenkins observes, such contempt is not the same as either “noble contempt” (looking down on others from the standpoint of one’s excellence) or “moral contempt” (indignation or outrage, driven by ressentiment and directed at stronger natures). It is “religious-ascetic contempt” (Reference Jenkins, Ansell-Pearson and Loeb2022, 169–172). As destructive as it can be, religious-ascetic contempt is educable in that it provides a valuable starting point for what Zarathustra calls “the great contempt” (Z Prologue 3,12). This experience requires the person possessed by religious-ascetic contempt to cease fixating on the body and to see himself still more critically. If you can do this, Zarathustra says, you will experience “the hour in which even your happiness disgusts you, and likewise your reason and your virtue.” This experience sounds difficult and demanding – and so it is. But to the degree that it inspires a person to ask, “Where does this contempt come from? To what does it point?” this new contempt can educate. Precisely on account of its power to educate, Zarathustra calls it the “great contempt.”

For such contempt to be educational in a liberating manner, it must point to a higher ideal. Which higher ideal does it indicate? Though the Preface speaks elliptically of lightning, madness, and the Übermensch, Jenkins suggests that “great contempt” points to “a genuine love of oneself,” understood as “including or entailing contempt for oneself, presumably contempt for what one presently is” (Reference Jenkins, Ansell-Pearson and Loeb2022, 178). The point appears still more clearly in a central passage from SE:

In both SE and Z, the educative power of “great contempt,” modeled on but transcending “religious-ascetic contempt,” points toward one’s higher self. Because education can help learners see “the intimate connection between great contempt and the loving pursuit of an ideal higher than oneself,” (Jenkins Reference Jenkins, Ansell-Pearson and Loeb2022, 179), it seems that love of one’s higher self can be awakened.Footnote ⁵⁴

But does Nietzsche ever abandon the basic conviction that love itself cannot be taught, at least not within institutions?Footnote ⁵⁵ I am not sure that he does, but his sense of the issue grows ever more complex in works composed after SE. If love cannot be taught, it can nevertheless be learned. Or so suggests an aphorism from HH:

“Education and chance”: the implication is learning to love is often a matter of luck. But education can help, if only by raising the probability that something good might happen. It can do so, for example, by acquainting the learner with exemplars who inspire love. Or it might be intentional about selecting teachers who are appropriate for particular types of students. “I think I know to some extent which student I send to which teacher,” Nietzsche tells a correspondent in late 1882.Footnote ⁵⁶

GS IV includes a notable aphorism whose title is similar to HH 601, but whose tone is much more inspired. GS 334, “One must learn to love,” proposes an analogy between musical experience and the learning to love ourselves. Just as we learn to love a theme or melody that is initially alien to us – first, we learn to hear it as a discrete thing; second, we exhibit patience and indulgence toward it; third, we fall in love with it, sensing that we should miss it if it were no longer there – so too do we learn to love many things, including ourselves. “Even he who loves himself will have learned it in this way – there is no other way. Love, too, must be learned,” the aphorism concludes. Here Nietzsche complicates SE’s claim that either self-love is there or not, and that either way it cannot be learned. As if to underscore his commitment to love’s learnability, several notebook entries appear shortly after GS that bear the title “Paths to the Saint.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Michael Ure proposes an explicit link between education and GS IV’s highest love, amor fati. “Nietzsche expressly states that he now wants to learn how to love fate. He does not conceive the love of fate as a matter of grace, but as a matter of education” (Reference Ure2019, 165).Footnote ⁵⁸ Though I think Ure’s proposal is on target, I would also caution against construing the point in a way that obscures the importance of chance. To see this point, one may follow the thread of GS IV as it moves from GS 334 to GS 339, “Vita femina.” Ever in dialogue with Plato, Nietzsche acknowledges that the experience of beauty is the most potent generator of love. But “not even all knowledge and all good will suffice for seeing the ultimate beauties in a work.” Or so claims GS 339’s opening. Though education can provide knowledge and perhaps even incite good will, more is needed. “It requires the rarest of lucky accidents (der seltensten glücklichen Zufälle) for the clouds that veil the peaks to lift for us momentarily and for the sun to shine on them.” We need not be cynics who deny the very idea that education and “learning to love” are connected. But we should not delude ourselves into thinking that the essentials are under our control. Neither education nor any other human enterprise can lift the veil.

As if these difficulties were not sufficiently great, GS 339 proceeds to observe that it is not enough for [1] the clouds to be lifted. We must be able to perceive the unveiling, and to do so, we must [2] be standing “precisely at the right place.” This too is a matter of chance (Zufall), bound up with [3] the soul’s need to behold itself in an “external expression and likeness, as if it had to have something to hold onto and steady itself.” Should this need be felt strongly enough, we may find ourselves, sooner or later, standing in a place from which we can see the clouds parting. As to when the veil lifts (the moment, der Augenblick), we have no control. Nor do we have any control over whether it happens at all. It is ultimately a matter of fate – a fate that must be loved regardless (GS 276). Should the three factors mentioned by the aphorism converge, they may do so only a single time. “The highest peaks of everything good, be it work, deed, humanity, or nature, have so far remained hidden and covered from the majority and even from the best. But what does unveil itself for us unveils itself for only once!” (GS 339).

The limits on the power of education to foster loving are severe. Education cannot bring the kairos into being. It cannot undo the supremacy of chance. It cannot reverse the basic condition to which the aphorism gestures: “I mean to say that the world is brimming with beautiful things but nevertheless poor, very poor, in beautiful moments and in the unveilings of those things” (GS 339). Yet despite these limits, education can awaken the learner to the possibility of a “beautiful moment” that will transform her. It can inspire her to be alert to it, and to be present when it occurs. These possibilities suffice to distinguish real education from the joyless sterility of its counterfeits.

4.3 Education and Suffering

The saint’s central activity is loving – and particularly the “bestowing love” of which Zarathustra speaks: “This is your thirst, to become sacrifices and bestowals yourselves; and therefore you thirst to pile up all riches in your souls” (Z I.22.1,65). Bestowing entails the strong likelihood of suffering, as indicated both by the pairing of “sacrifices” with “bestowals” in the passage quoted, and still more dramatically in Zarathustra’s “Night Song.” This song is the lament of a lover who does not know the happiness of those who receive. “Oh the wretchedness of all who bestow! Oh the eclipse of my sun!” (Z II.9,91).

If “bestowing love” is a direct cause of suffering, then the saint is necessarily a suffering saint. That Nietzsche identifies with the figure of the saint who suffers is clear. His own life, he tells Lou Salomé, is a “terrible existence of renunciation” that is “as hard as an ascetic constriction of life (eine asketische Lebenseinschnürung) can be.”Footnote ⁵⁹ It is not that he regards suffering as a sign of moral superiority. About the suffering that he and others of his type endure, he remarks: “I doubt that such pain makes us ‘better’ – but I know that it makes us deeper” (GS Pref 3). To link suffering and depth in this way is to imply that suffering can be educative. Nietzsche encountered the idea in his early reading of Aeschylus, whose Agamemnon begins with the proposal πάθει μάθος: “learning comes through suffering.” The demanding curriculum of Schulpforta, where Nietzsche learned to read Aeschylus in Greek, would have reinforced this idea at practically every point. From Nietzsche’s perspective, Aristotle’s claim that “amusement does not go with learning – learning is a painful process” (Politics 8, 1339a) might seem a truism.

As much as he values suffering and despises the “wretched contentment” of approaches to existence that privilege comfort, Nietzsche knows that suffering is not inevitably or necessarily educative. It is not clear what, if anything, the hero of Goethe’s The Suffering of Young Werther learned from his suffering. How, then, might suffering lead to something other than bitterness, resentment, suicide, and despair? Under which conditions can suffering be genuinely instructive and enlightening?

In both SE and GS, Nietzsche argues that suffering can educate only if we adopt a certain stance toward it. The stance that he recommends is roughly the opposite of what many find tempting – namely, amelioration and avoidance. We apply this stance not only to others, wishing to “help” them as we possess only the most superficial grasp of their suffering, but also to ourselves. We refuse to let our suffering lie upon ourselves “even for one hour,” says GS 338, alluding to Jesus’s reproach of Peter at Matthew 26:40. In so refusing, we strip suffering of its educative power. If our suffering to be educative, we must enter more deeply into what GS 338 calls its “whole inner sequence.” Otherwise we will merely internalize or echo the superficial interpretations of others for whom “our personal and deepest suffering is incomprehensible.” Instead, we must seek what is “distinctively personal” about our own suffering, so that we can hear it better, listening to what it can teach us.

Because GS 338 articulates this perspective with maximum economy, it is helpful to turn to its more expansive articulation in SE. There too Nietzsche identifies the primary error to construct a life in which one strives, to the maximum extent possible, not to feel one’s own pain. “For all human arrangements are directed towards this end – that, through constant distraction of thinking, life may not be felt” (SE 4.191). Why, Nietzsche asks, must the hero take the opposite stance? Why must he “so passionately desire the opposite, namely, to feel life, which is the same thing as suffering from life”? For Nietzsche, this is a real question, reflection on which suggests an answer to the question about the circumstances under which suffering can be educative. The non-heroic attitude that runs away from suffering, rather than entering into its “whole inner sequence,” will find itself unable to formulate in any meaningful way the following three questions:

• “Why am I alive?

• “What lesson am I learn from life?

• “How did I become what I am, and why do I suffer from being what I am?” (SE 4.191).

That Nietzsche uses “lesson” (Lektion) in this context – a term that cannot but make the reader think about education – is significant. For the kind of education aware that “the path to one’s own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one’s hell” (GS 338), suffering is inescapable. Descent into l’inferno must come first, as Dante knows.

Is this affirmation of suffering’s educative power only a form of masochism? For Nietzsche to be able to answer this question in the negative, he must be able to identify some benefits conferred by “voluntarily” imposing upon oneself the “suffering of truthfulness” (as he says of Schopenhauer’s ideal). One such benefit, proposed in both SE 4 and GS 338, is the preservation of one’s “own way.” The prospect of immersing oneself ever more deeply in a particular community, so that one feels a sense of “belonging,” is enormously attractive. Doing so promises to divert us from our suffering. But there is a catch. For the person who would live the heroic life, Nietzsche suspects, inducements to communal belonging are so many means by which “others would like to defraud him of himself.” Against this “kind of conspiracy to lure him out of his cave,” the hero “balks, pricks up his ears, and decides, ‘I will remain my own!’” (SE 4.191). GS 338 makes a similar point: “I know, there are a hundred decent and praiseworthy ways of losing my own way, and they are truly highly ‘moral’! … All such arousing of pity and calling for help is secretly seductive, for our ‘own way’ is too hard and demanding and too remote from the love and gratitude of others.” It is not that renouncing the goods promised by membership in community is pleasant. On the contrary, it requires one to tear one’s heart away and suffer new bitternesses, as GS 309 reminds us. But from the heroic standpoint, the endurance of solitude is a necessary condition of preserving one’s own way.Footnote ⁶⁰

A second educational benefit conferred by suffering is that one can take it as an object of study, subjecting it to rational investigation. If a psychologist “should himself become ill, he will bring all of his scientific curiosity into his illness” (GS Pref 2). The person who suffers deeply, and who consents to feel her suffering, can become a more acute psychologist than the person who strives to escape suffering. Compared to what is available to those who live in a comforting bubble, she will have much greater access to the range of possibilities that constitute the human condition. In the language of the penultimate aphorism of GS, “The great health,” the oscillation of sickness and health will enhance her capacity for becoming an “argonaut of the ideal.” Traversing all the coasts of the human Mediterranean, she might discover “an as yet undiscovered land the boundaries of which no one has yet surveyed, beyond all the lands and nooks of the ideal so far, a world so over-rich in what is beautiful, strange, questionable, terrible, and divine” (GS 382).

If the possibility to which GS 382 points seems a bit much, one might nevertheless take seriously Nietzsche’s suggestion that deep suffering generates a salutary distrust of life. “The trust in life is gone: life itself has become a problem” (GS Pref 3). The condition is painful, but it may be required for any real development of what GS 2 calls the “intellectual conscience.” This is the disposition to ask hard questions, and to consider answers that do not cater to our desire for comfort. Great pain is valuable, Nietzsche says, insofar as it is “the ultimate liberator of the spirit” (GS Pref 3). If a person must shed multiple skins in order to grow into a new life, then what prompts and accompanies the shedding is pain. The pain might arise from a critique of ideas and opinions that were once comforting, perhaps even necessary, in an earlier phase of life. Painful as such losses are, they can nevertheless be evidence of “living, active forces within us shedding a skin. We negate and must negate because something in us wants to live and affirm itself, something we might not yet know or see!” (GS 307). Something like this, Nietzsche says, happened in his own case. From the suffering caused by illness and even “the illness of severe suspicion,” he was able to return newborn, having shed his skin in order to become “more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one had ever been before” (GS Pref 4).

This passage and others like them suggest a problem. It can be difficult to argue for the educational benefits of suffering without lapsing into intolerable self-righteousness or arrogance. To quote an anonymous poster on social media: “Unfortunately for my haters, my recent suffering has only made me more beautiful, gentle, and understanding.” Such egomania is a long way from the disposition of the truthful saint who “knows, like Meister Eckhart, that ‘suffering is the swiftest steed to carry you to perfection’” (SE 4.190). I do not think Nietzsche would deny that learning-through-suffering can generate a kind of egomania. Suffering always carries with it the danger of “moral and intellectual hardening” (SE 3.180). There is no reason to pretend that it is particularly easy to escape this danger. A rare kind of greatness is required precisely in order to avoid the kind of hardening that imprisons a person in his ego. This is the greatness that Nietzsche associates with the human type in whom suffering is most nobly undergone, the saint “in whom the individual ego has entirely melted away and whose life of suffering is no longer, or hardly any longer, felt individually” (SE 5.197).

For suffering to educate in a positive manner, it is not sufficient to reap the benefits mentioned previously. One must try to live in a way that is open to “moments and sparklings, as it were, struck from that most brilliant and amorous fire, by whose light we no longer understand the word I” (SE 5.197). Such a life, Nietzsche thinks, is not possible except by means of suffering. What keeps us bound to our “I” – our ego – is our desire for comfort and security. Only the loving fire of suffering can dissolve the hard, brittle ego. For those in whom the loving fire has melted away the ego, it is possible not merely to affirm, but actually feel the “profound sensation of likeness, compassion, and unity with all that is living” (SE 5.197*). This is Nietzsche’s ideal – articulated not just in SE but also in Z, which explicitly distinguishes the ego from the self. It appears with particular clarity in the following 1881 notebook entry:

The suffering that educates the most is the suffering that produces (or helps to produce) the cosmic feeling of ultimate solidarity with all that lives.

Becoming a saint and entering into solidarity with all that lives are not two separate things. Suffering has a sanctifying effect only if it induces a felt recognition of our deep kinship with others. If such a feeling is never attained, then a person’s suffering has failed to educate. Indeed, it is likely to generate the moral and intellectual hardening mentioned earlier.

4.4 Beyond Monumental Greatness

Excelling as a philosopher or an artist seems possible only for a small number, who stand to the rest of us as exemplars of greatness. The saint’s excellence, it might seem, is more widely accessible. Her greatness is displayed in loving, an act for which no special talent or training is necessary. From this perspective, it seems that Nietzsche’s understanding of greatness is not “elitist,” available only to a few. If the saint’s task is to move toward a higher self by overcoming the confines of a narrowly egoistic imprisonment of self, enabled by acts of bestowing love that occur amid much suffering, then in principle such greatness is possible for anyone. This does not, of course, make it easy. Quite the contrary: attaining real holiness might be more difficult than acquiring the virtues of philosophical discernment or aesthetic appreciation. What Conant observes with respect to self-knowledge in general has special applicability to the saint: “only the merest – and yet, nevertheless, the greatest of effort is required. What is needed is the most difficult thing of all – and yet anyone is capable of it any time” (Reference Conant and Schacht2000, 197). Greatness is both egalitarian and demanding.

Andrew Huddleston rejects this egalitarian picture: “It is courting incoherence to imagine a world in which everyone is great, the ego-stroking of kindergarten, and Nietzsche might add, democratic egalitarianism aside” (Reference Huddleston2019, 72). But Cavell, Conant, and other “egalitarian” readers of SE do not take Nietzsche to be predicting the arrival of a world in which “everyone is great.” Rather, their point is that Nietzsche addresses the call to everyone, even if he knows that only some will answer it. (Those who answer are typically not the “pedigreed” or “cultivated” set.) Huddleston himself seeks to interpret Nietzsche’s idea of culture in a way that includes the possibility of enhancing the lives of people with modest gifts: A “higher form of life is open to them, relative to where they began” (Reference Huddleston2019, 36; cf. 118n49). But such people never attain real greatness. According to Huddleston, Nietzsche regards their lives as a mode of slavery that happens to benefit them. “Slavery, on Nietzsche’s highly provocative view, is not just instrumentally beneficial. It is in the best interests of the slaves themselves” (Reference Huddleston2019, 125).

What generates the appearance of plausibility in this reading of Nietzsche? Of those who enter the circle of culture, moved by the sentiment “I see something above me, nobler and more human than myself” (SE 6.198), only a minority will proceed to think, create, or love on a world-historical scale, attaining greatness in this sense. Indeed, the majority will be laborers in the vineyard, working for something larger than themselves. This does not, pace Huddleston, necessarily make them slaves – either in a literal sense or in a more metaphorical sense as mere “functions” of a social whole (see GS 21). Certainly a person who attaches herself to a person or cause might “enslave” herself to an alien power, in order to evade the more demanding task of becoming who she is. As mentioned earlier, Nietzsche himself indicates this possibility near the end of GS 338. But masochistic attachment has nothing to do with the genuine power of exemplars, as conceived by SE. To the extent that a person endeavors “to cease being comfortable with himself” (SE 1.163*) and aspires to a higher self, her determination to assume a non-slavish relationship to an exemplar will grow. Consider, for example, a good violinist in a city orchestra. More than likely, her playing will never shine so brightly that she gets invited to tour the world as a renowned soloist, as Ray Chen does. Her role is that of a supporting player. But this hardly makes her Chen’s slave, or a slave to the orchestra’s conductor. Instead, she uses the inspiration that she gains from exemplars to walk her own path. Practicing and performing, learning what she can from the exemplar, she gradually develops her own approach. She makes new discoveries about her relation to the instrument, to the composers whose works she performs, and herself – discoveries that would otherwise be unavailable to her. That she will never reach the heights attained by Chen in performing Tchaikovsky’s “Violin concerto in D” is irrelevant. If she treats her place in the symphony as an occasion to cultivate her own productive uniqueness, becoming an individual, she gains liberation from mass conformity as she develops her own genius.Footnote ⁶²

But one might object: does any of this make the violinist great? Does she not still remain squarely within what Huddleston calls the “mediocre mass of individuals” (Reference Huddleston2019, 56)? To respond to this objection, one may begin by noticing the false note struck by the phrase. Insofar as one succeeds in becoming an individual, one has attained some distance from the mediocre mass, whose members fail to “become what they are.” In the lexicon common to Emerson and Nietzsche, “attainment of some non-trivial distinction from the mass” is the dominant sense taken by the word “individual.” Everyone has the capacity for productive uniqueness, Nietzsche claims explicitly. But discerning what productive uniqueness consists in, and realizing that uniqueness, is a difficult achievement, regardless of its scale. Whether the supporting violinist attains recognition matters little. To the degree that it realizes what Emerson calls “the divine idea which each of us represents” (Reference Emerson1888, 49), any courageous movement toward genuine self-reliance is great. For Huddleston’s version of Nietzsche, by contrast, either one belongs to a very small set of great individuals or one is a slave. This false dichotomy has little to do with the thinking of Nietzsche, for whom the life of heroic individualism “clearly bears no relation whatever to the petty ideas of those who discuss it most. They celebrate the memory of great men and imagine the great man is great in the same way that they are small” (SE 4.190) – that is, as measured by their proximity to the particular form of greatness that is “world-historical” or “monumental.”Footnote ⁶³

To drive this point home, we may return to the saint’s greatness, which is often non-monumental. For Huddleston’s Nietzsche, the many who “rest in unvisited tombs” cannot be great. As slaves or functionaries, their lives could have only instrumental value, residing in their capacity to promote the monumental greatness of others. Nevertheless, Huddleston tries to celebrate this value. They “have lives worthy of great respect,” he says, “when they aid in the flourishing of those exceptional and artists and statesmen whose tombs are visited in droves, and aid in the flourishing of these cultures” (Reference Huddleston2019, 174–175). As Huddleston notes, he takes the words “rest in unvisited tombs” from the closing of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. What Huddleston fails to mention is that the words describe Eliot’s picture of the saint, as incarnated in Dorothea. Considered from a monumental perspective, Dorothea is utterly unremarkable. But Eliot’s point is to emphasize that her greatness loses nothing for not being world-historic. As a “new Saint Theresa,” she embodies a holiness that displays itself in countless “unhistoric acts.” She will not receive accolades; she will not belong to those whom Huddleston takes to “cluster on the top step, so as to receive the laurels of greatness” (Reference Huddleston2019, 72). But the absence of laurels has no bearing on her actual greatness, which – says Eliot – is “incalculably diffusive” and makes life better “for you and me.” Dorothea’s greatness, along with that of other saints who “rest in unvisited tombs,” does not depend on their playing handmaiden to those buried in Père Lachaise.

What does Nietzsche think about unsung greatness? Consider, one last time, our supporting violinist who will never be famous. Should her lack of fame begin to prey on her, she can seek the assurance offered at GS 234, “A musician’s comfort.”