We've read about Nietzsche's problems with the obsession
with history at the expense of life in his
society, and the way that he thinks that education
as instruction versus stimulationengenders it.
In this reading, Nietzsche tells us about an alternative
model of education.
One that he thinks fosters the growth of individuals in
a better fashion by permitting free and independent thinking.
Nietzsche talks about searching for oneself,
not as being a process of looking within, but as a
process of looking beyond.
Your true self, he says, is not within you, but above you.
There is no essential human nature for Nietzsche.
He buys Hegel and Marx's idea that human nature is
in a process of historical becoming, and it's not
a static type of thing.
Individuals have shaping power with respect to their
own natures, but we don't just shape our natures
by sort of sitting and thinking to ourselves one
day, who do I want to be?
We need motivators.
We need sources of inspiration.
We need muses.
This is where the role of the educator comes in.
Nietzsche writes about Schopenhauer, who is not
somebody who actually taught Nietzsche in the way we
usually think about teaching.
He encountered Schopenhauer through his books, but
Nietzsche says that Schopenhauer has been an
extremely influential educator for him by presenting to
him both a model of what Nietzsche would like to be.
And also a model of what Nietzsche
would not like to be.
So we see here that the process of self-creation
is a process of looking outside of yourself,
and then reflecting back within.
The individual is irreplaceably unique, but
we're often too lazy and afraid to acknowledge this.
It's hard to have to create ourselves, to have to
reflect on others in order to decide who we want to
be, but Nietzsche advocatea taking one's own path.
Becoming yourself, for Nietzsche, is
finding yourself.
On page 174,
Nietzsche talks about the process of finding ourselves
as becoming ourselves.
And he says that this is really challenging
because the human is a dark and veiled thing.
In addition, once we take the veils away, there's no
sort of core self waiting for us to be discovered.
I often liken this to the quote from Shrek
where Shrek says he's like an onion.
He has many layers.
For your information, there's a lot more to
ogres than people think.
Example?
Okay.
Um, ogres are like onions.
They stink?
Yes.
No!
They make you cry?
No, you leave them out in the sun.
They get all brown and start sprouting little white hairs.
No!
Layers!
Onions
have layers.
Ogres have layers.Onions have layers.
You get it?
We both have layers.
Oh, you both have layers, you know, not
everybody like onions.
But one thing that Shrek doesn't mention is that
when you peel away all of the layers of an onion,
there's nothing left.
There's no pit or kernel at the center of an onion.
That is Nietzsche's view of the self.
He talks on page174 about how once we start peeling away
the outer shell, we don't ever get to the core, right?
The human being can shed seven times 70 skins
and still not be able to say this is really you.
Nietzsche got to it before Shrek.
And this process of digging down into the
depths of ourselves is by no means a neutral one.
It's actually extremely dangerous.
And it's only to be undertaken with great care because
we can find things there that are really terrifying.
We can find things there that we're not ready to deal with.
We can actually do damage to ourselves by looking within
and unpeeling ourselves.
This is why it's actually better on Nietzsche's view
to find ourselves by looking outside of ourselves.
Because a) looking outside of ourselves actually protects
us from the potentially damaging process of looking
within and b) because if we look within ourselves,
there's ultimately going to be no core self to find.
So it's kind of a misleading project, anyway.
We best find ourselves through reflecting on our educators,
he suggests on page 175.
So how do we find ourselves by reflecting on our educators?
How is this different from just seeing somebody
else and saying, I want to be like them.
Well, Nietzsche says that the role of the educator is to
transform the human being.
The educator is somebody who is able to set an example,
both for what you want to be and for what you don't
want to be, but is also able to sort of take the
talents, the strengths, the weaknesses, the challenges
that you have as a student,
and see a principle of organization within them,
bring them into harmony.
In talking about Schopenhauer as an educator, Nietzsche
identifies three things that Schopenhauer taught
him and three dangers that Schopenhauer led
him to be aware of and want to stay away from.
So the three things that Schopenhauer
taught Nietzsche are
Honesty, cheerfulness and steadfastness.
And he goes through these in, you know, quite
beautiful detail in section two of this reading.
But the three dangers that Schopenhauer has that
Nietzsche wants to stay away from are isolation,
melancholy and hardening.
Nietzsche says, and this is perhaps unsurprising given
that we've read Schopenhauer,
and so you've seen some of his pessimism firsthand, Nietzsche
says that Schopenhauer kind of locked himself off from
other people and didn't have friends and he would have been
better if he had had friends.
He also thinks that Schopenhauer's melancholy
actually meant that ultimately Schopenhauer
despaired of the truth.
He wasn't in a position to actually even seek truth.
He was sort of lost in this morass of, I
don't know what's real.
I don't know what's right.
I don't know what's wrong.
And so I'm just going to be left in a kind of despair.
And the third danger, hardening, Nietzsche
associates with Schopenhauer being limited
by his own uniqueness.
Schopenhauer yearned for genius within himself.
And this meant that ultimately he experienced a moral and
an intellectual hardening.
He was so obsessed with being a genius that he
couldn't actually live.
Right.
If you're so caught up with your own sense of identity,
then you don't have a lot of space for actually
living out in the world and creating things, right?
It's like if I'm the greatest author of all time, then
I'm too fixated on that, I'm probably not going to be
out actually writing books.
For Nietzsche,one can be ruined by uniqueness
and that's what happened to Schopenhauer.
But one can also be ruined by a fear of
uniqueness, he says on 193.
Unfortunately, living at all means living in danger
on Nietzsche's view.
You can perhaps see there that his inspiration from
Schopenhauer isn't just in Schopenhauer as a philosopher,
but it's also in the content of Schopenhauer's
philosophy itself, much of which Nietzsche draws on.
I look forward to talking with you more about this in
Slack, including perhaps the three types of human beings
that Nietzsche discusses in this reading--Rousseau's,
Goethe's, and Schopenhauer's as well as the idea that many
of us tend to flee, hide, or
escape our own existence because it's so intense to
drop down into ourselves, which is the theme Nietzsche
returns to on page 204-205.