Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Education: Rethinking Ethics, Equality and the Good Life in a Democratic Age 9781138544512, 9781351003506

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Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Education

Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Education makes the case that Nietzsche’s philosophy has significant import for the theory and contemporary practice of education, arguing that some of Nietzsche’s most important ideas have been misunderstood by previous interpreters. In providing novel reinterpretations of Nietzsche’s ethical theory, political philosophy and philosophical anthropology and outlining concrete ways in which these ideas can enrich teaching and learning in modern democratic schools, the book sets itself apart from previous works on Nietzsche. This is one of the first extended engagements with Nietzsche’s philosophy that attempts to determine his true legacy for democratic education. In its engagement with both the vast secondary literature on Nietzsche’s philosophy and the educational implications of his philosophical vision, this book makes a unique contribution to both the philosophy of education and Nietzsche scholarship. In addition, its development of four concrete pedagogical approaches from Nietzsche’s educational ideas makes the book a potentially helpful guide to meeting the practical challenges of contemporary teaching. This book will be of great interest to Nietzsche scholars, researchers in the philosophy of education and students studying educational foundations. Mark E. Jonas is Associate Professor of Education and Associate Professor of Philosophy (by courtesy) at Wheaton College in Illinois. Douglas W. Yacek is Research Fellow and Lecturer in the Leibniz School of Education and the Institute for Special Education in the Faculty of Philosophy at the Leibniz University Hannover in Germany.

New Directions in the Philosophy of Education Series Editors: Michael A. Peters University of Waikato, New Zealand; University of Illinois, USA Gert Biesta Brunel University, UK

This book series is devoted to the exploration of new directions in the philosophy of education. After the linguistic turn, the cultural turn, and the historical turn, where might we go? Does the future promise a digital turn with a greater return to connectionism, biology, and biopolitics based on new understandings of system theory and knowledge ecologies? Does it foreshadow a genuinely alternative radical global turn based on a new openness and interconnectedness? Does it leave humanism behind or will it reengage with the question of the human in new and unprecedented ways? How should philosophy of education reflect new forces of globalization? How can it become less Anglo-centric and develop a greater sensitivity to other traditions, languages, and forms of thinking and writing, including those that are not rooted in the canon of Western philosophy but in other traditions that share the ‘love of wisdom’ that characterizes the wide diversity within Western philosophy itself. Can this be done through a turn to intercultural philosophy? To indigenous forms of philosophy and philosophizing? Does it need a post-Wittgensteinian philosophy of education? A postpostmodern philosophy? Or should it perhaps leave the whole construction of ‘post’-positions behind? In addition to the question of the intellectual resources for the future of philosophy of education, what are the issues and concerns that philosophers of education should engage with? How should they position themselves? What is their specific contribution? What kind of intellectual and strategic alliances should they pursue? Should philosophy of education become more global, and if so, what would the shape of that be? Should it become more cosmopolitan or perhaps more decentered? Perhaps most importantly in the digital age, the time of the global knowledge economy that reprofiles education as privatized human capital and simultaneously in terms of an historic openness, is there a philosophy of education that grows out of education itself, out of the concerns for new forms of teaching, studying, learning and speaking that can provide comment on ethical and epistemological configurations of economics and politics of knowledge? Can and should this imply a reconnection with questions of democracy and justice? This series comprises texts that explore, identify and articulate new directions in the philosophy of education. It aims to build bridges, both geographically and temporally: bridges across different traditions and practices and bridges towards a different future for philosophy of education. In this series Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Education Rethinking Ethics, Equality and the Good Life in a Democratic Age Mark E. Jonas and Douglas W.Yacek For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com.

Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Education

Rethinking Ethics, Equality and the Good Life in a Democratic Age

Mark E. Jonas and Douglas W. Yacek

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Mark E. Jonas and Douglas W. Yacek The right of Mark E. Jonas and Douglas W. Yacek to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-54451-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-00350-6 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

This book is dedicated to Scott, who gave me Nietzsche, and Sunny, who gave me everything else & Andrew, who taught me to be a self-overcomer.

Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations and note on translations

x xi

Introduction: Nietzsche’s educational legacy

1

Nietzsche as educator 1 The challenges of reading Nietzsche 3 What can Nietzsche offer education in a “democratic age”? 7 The value of authenticity 7 Modern moral degradation 10 The Nietzschean ethical alternative 11 Leveling-up vs. leveling-down equality 13 Aims and outline of the book 18 1

The doctrine of perspectivism

26

Introduction 26 Perspectivism according to Ramaekers 27 The evolution of Nietzsche’s epistemology 29 “ Truer” and “falser” perspectives: an analysis of GM III:12 31 The Nietzschean self I: the ontological dimension 35 The Nietzschean self II: the social dimension 38 The development of consciousness out of social need 39 The superficial and perspectival nature of consciousness 40 The superfluity of consciousness 41 Conclusion 42 2

Educational implications of perspectivism: empathizing with the other Introduction 46 The challenge of passive empathy 47

46

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Three senses of perspectival seeing 49 The pedagogy of perspectival empathy 54 Conclusion 59 3

The doctrine of self-overcoming

61

Introduction 61 Self-overcoming according to Aviram 61 Self-overcoming according to Hillesheim and Rosenow 65 Self-overcoming as modified self-mastery 68 Harmony vs. power 68 Socratic rationality vs. embodied reason 70 Self-sacrifice vs. gift-giving egoism 73 The self-overcoming free spirit 76 Conclusion 78 4

Educational implications of self-overcoming: embodying reason, embracing struggle

82

Introduction 82 The pedagogy of embodied self-mastery I: cultivating “reason” 83 Learning to “think” 85 Learning to “speak and write” 89 The pedagogy of embodied self-mastery II: embracing struggle 92 The will to pity 93 Reflective pity in the classroom 95 Conclusion 97 5

The doctrine of the order of rank

99

Introduction 99 Nietzsche’s reputation as radical elitist 101 Nietzsche’s qualified egalitarianism: a plea to the “youthful souls” 102 The need for the “philosophers, artists and saints” 105 The cultural cooperation of “youthful souls” and the “philosophers, artists and saints” 109 The role of the “many” in higher culture 111 Political consequences of the order of rank 115 Conclusion 117 6

Educational implications of the order of rank: creating a culture of emulation Introduction 120 The history of emulation as a pedagogical principle 121

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The pedagogy of inspirational emulation I: encouraging self-emulation 125 The pedagogy of inspirational emulation II: cultivating peer-to-peer emulation 128 Inspirational vs. ambitious emulation 129 Inspirational emulation in the classroom 133 Conclusion 136 7

The doctrine of ressentiment

140

Introduction 140 Nietzsche’s reputation as a “Machiavellian” elitist 142 The inevitable decline of political aristocracies: Beyond Good and Evil, section 262 146 Nietzsche’s alternative to political aristocracy: aristocratic self-overcoming 148 The overcoming of ressentiment 153 Conclusion 155 8

Educational implications of ressentiment: cultivating a disposition of gratitude

157

Introduction 157 The benefits and scope of gratitude 158 Gratitude according to White 159 The difficulties in White’s account of gratitude 161 Nietzschean gratitude 163 The calculus of benefit vs. the psychology of gratitude 164 Self-effacing vs. self-assured gratitude 167 Possible objections to Nietzschean gratitude 169 The pedagogy of radical gratitude 172 Conclusion 174 Conclusion: Nietzsche’s pedagogical vision for the good life

177

References Index

184 191

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the publishers of the following articles and book chapters for granting permission to use portions of these publications in this book: “Finding truth in ‘lies’: Nietzsche’s perspectivism and its relation to education.” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 42(2), 269–285. [with Y. Nakazawa] “Going to school with Friedrich Nietzsche: The self in service of noble culture.” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 33(4), 391–411. “Learning to see with different eyes: A Nietzschean challenge to multicultural dialogue.” Educational Theory, 64(2), 99–121. “A (r)evaluation of Nietzsche’s anti-democratic pedagogy: The overman, perspectivism and self-overcoming.” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 28(2), 153–169. “The social significance of egoism and perfectionism: Nietzsche’s education for the public good.” In T. Simpson (Ed.), The relevance of higher education. Landham, MA: Lexington Books. “When teachers must let education hurt: Rousseau and Nietzsche on compassion and the educational value of suffering.” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 44(1), 45–60. “Advancing equality and individual excellence: The case of Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer as Educator.” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 33(2), 173–192. “The use and abuses of ‘emulation’ as a pedagogical technique.” Educational Theory, 67(3), 241–263. [with D. Chambers] “Overcoming ressentiment: Nietzsche’s education for an aesthetic aristocracy.” History of Political Thought, 34(4), 669–701. And “Gratitude, ressentiment, and citizenship education.” Studies in Philosophy and Education, 31(1), 29–46. This project would not have been possible without the help of countless people with whom we have discussed the ideas and theses defended in this book over the years. These include but are not limited to Scott Kizer, Megan Laverty, Bryan McCarthy, Yoshiaki Nakazawa, Avi Mintz, Sunny Jonas, Paul McCloud and Anna Yacek. We would like to extend special thanks to our research assistants Alicia Mundhenk, Ines Potthast and Yannik Hehemann for their invaluable commentary and assistance in the preparation of the manuscript. We also want to thank Yoshiaki Nakazawa and Drew Chambers, who contributed with Mark Jonas on articles that are partially reproduced here.

Abbreviations and note on translations

In line with the standard citation practices in research on Nietzsche, this book refers to Nietzsche’s works with the abbreviations listed below. Two citations next to an abbreviation indicate that quotations from the work may follow one or the other cited translation. References to Nietzsche’s works employ section numbers rather than page numbers, with the exception of Schopenhauer as Educator, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life and On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, for which both section and page number are given. Although translations of Nietzsche’s works since (and including) the publication of Kaufmann’s translations are generally strong, there are always nuances of style and meaning that are lost in the process of translating Nietzsche for general readership. Thus, we have occasionally made slight amendments to the English translation or provided our own where we have felt that the rendering has distorted or obscured the original meaning in the German and have indicated so in a footnote. For this, we have consulted the Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA) and Kritische Gesamtausgabe (KGW) of Nietzsche’s texts edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari and published by de Gruyter, as well as the digitized version of the KGW (eKGWB) edited by Paolo D’Iorio and published by Nietzsche Source. In developing its exegetical argument, this book makes use of only those works that Nietzsche felt ready for public or semi-public audience. This includes published works, authorized manuscripts, letters and essays written for friends and family, but not his vast Nachlass (literary estate) of private notes and jottings. Because some of the most influential interpretations of Nietzsche’s works do not follow this practice, we sometimes refer to portions of his Nachlass collected under the title The Will to Power in order to engage with their readings. Finally, any citation of a text whose reference information is in German implies that we have translated the passage ourselves. A

The Antichrist (1954). In W. Kaufmann (Trans.), The portable Nietzsche. New York, NY: Viking Press. BGE Beyond Good and Evil (2010). W. Kaufmann (Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage Books. Beyond Good and Evil (2005). J. Norman (Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

xii

BT

CW D EH

FE GM

GS

HC HH HL

SE TI WP WS Z

Abbreviations and note on translations

The Birth of Tragedy (2000). In W. Kaufmann (Trans.), Basic writings of Nietzsche. New York, NY: Modern Library. The Birth of Tragedy (2012). In R. Spiers (Trans.), The birth of tragedy and other writings. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. The Case of Wagner (2000). In W. Kaufmann (Trans.), Basic writings of Nietzsche. New York, NY: Modern Library. Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (1997). R. Hollingdale (Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ecce Homo (1989). In W. Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale (Trans.), On the genealogy of morals and ecce homo. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Ecce Homo (1967). W. Kaufmann (Trans.). New York, NY: Random House. On the Future of Our Educational Institutions (2004). M. W. Grenke (Trans.). South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press. On the Genealogy of Morals (1989). In W. Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale (Trans.), On the genealogy of morals and ecce homo. New York, NY: Vintage Books. On the Genealogy of Morals (2000). In W. Kaufmann (Trans.), Basic writings of Nietzsche. New York, NY: Modern Library. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (1974). W. Kaufmann (Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage Books. The Gay Science (2001). J. Nauckhoff & A. Del Caro (Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Homer’s Contest (1996). In C. Acampora (Trans.), Nietzscheana #5. Urbana, IL: North American Nietzsche Society. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1996). R. Hollingdale (Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (1997). In R. Hollingdale (Trans.), Untimely meditations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Schopenhauer as Educator (1997). In R. Hollingdale (Trans.), Untimely meditations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Twilight of the Idols (1966). In W. Kaufmann (Trans.), The great books foundation, set 3, vol. 8. Chicago, IL: The Great Books Foundation. The Will to Power (1968). W. Kaufmann (Ed.) & R. Hollingdale (Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage Books. The Wanderer and His Shadow (1996). In R. Hollingdale (Trans.), Human all-too human. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1982). In W. Kaufmann (Trans.), The portable Nietzsche. New York, NY: Viking Press.

Abbreviations and note on translations

xiii

Citations of Nietzsche’s collected works in German are drawn from the following sources: KGB

Nietzsche Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (25 vols.) (1975–2004). G. Colli & M. Montinari (Eds.). Berlin, Germany: de Gruyter. KGW Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (24 vols.) (1967–2006). G. Colli & M. Montinari (Eds.). Berlin, Germany: de Gruyter. eKGWB Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (24 vols.) & Nietzsche Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (25 vols.) (n.d.). Paolo D’Iorio (Ed.). www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB KSA Kritische Studienausgabe (15 vols.) (1999). G. Colli & M. Montinari (Eds.). Berlin: de Gruyter.

Is it not manifest that our academic institutions should have a wider scope; that they should not be timid and keep the ruts of the last generation, but that wise men thinking for themselves and heartily seeking the good of mankind, and counting the cost of innovation, should dare to arouse the young to a just and heroic life; that the moral nature should be addressed in the school-room, and children should be treated as the high-born candidates of truth and virtue? – Ralph Waldo Emerson (1909, pp. 26–27)

And so it is with all matters of education: In vain strive those unbounded, unfettered minds To reach the purest heights of perfected creation. Seekest thou great things, then begin thy preparation. The true master is he whom limitation binds, And only the law can bring us liberation. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1953, p. 324)

Introduction Nietzsche’s educational legacy

Nietzsche as educator In January 1872, Nietzsche delivered the first of several public lectures he was to hold as a newly appointed professor at the University of Basel. Having just sent off his first (and last) major work in classical philology, The Birth of Tragedy, to his publisher, Nietzsche chose to turn his attention to a topic that had preoccupied him since returning from his service as a medical orderly on the front lines of the Franco-Prussian war. Already a keen observer of the late nineteenthcentury Zeitgeist in Europe, Nietzsche decided to concentrate his first philosophical preoccupations on what he considered the wayward state of education in the rapidly modernizing German social landscape. Nietzsche considered the triumphant Prussian leviathan, along with the educational reform initiatives it was adopting with unprecedented enthusiasm, to be a “highly dangerous power to culture” (KGB 11.1 107, quoted in Young, 2010, p. 141), one that could be kept from further destruction only by a swift change of educational course. Nietzsche accordingly entitled his lecture series On the Future of Our Educational Institutions and engaged the current reform fervor in a decidedly philosophical manner – the lectures were offered in the form of a Platonic dialogue (albeit with a generous helping of the en vogue literary Romanticism). Just as Greek philosophy emerged out of educational concerns, so the young philologist’s philosophical career began with questions about school reform, pedagogy and, generally, what he was to call in the lectures “the most delicate technique of all that there ever can be in an art . . . the technique of education [Technik der Bildung]” (FE 2, p. 43).1 The young Nietzsche’s interest in education can hardly be understated. Nietzsche was to devote two of his four Untimely Meditations (1874–1876) to specifically educational questions – On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life and Schopenhauer as Educator – and his next work, Human, All Too Human (1878), is littered with reflections on everything from the tasks of an educational science (HH I:242) to the role of the school (HH I:265), effective pedagogy (HH I:266, 372), the ideal teacher (HH II:180) and systemic educational problems of the day (HH I:228, II:320). As a professor at Basel, Nietzsche, like

2

Introduction

other members of the Basler philological-pedagogical Seminar, taught courses at the local grammar school, the Pädagogium, on various topics in ancient Greek language and literature. Here Nietzsche agitated for and ultimately organized several curricular and administrative improvements. Among his reform efforts were the addition of a further year in Greek instruction for all students (for which he suggests the name Selecta), the adoption of Ernst Koch’s textbook Griechische Schulgrammatik, a petition to the city to decrease wagon traffic noise during school hours and a change to course planning to avoid scheduling students for more than two hours of Greek in a given day (Holub, 1995). Nietzsche’s efforts to improve the pedagogical offering of the elite school did not go unnoticed by his students. Reflecting on their studentship under Prof. Dr. Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s former pupils consistently reported that he was a demanding but inspiring and devoted teacher who, unlike his much older colleagues, strove to forge a vital connection between the culture of Greek antiquity and their own practical concerns (quite in line with his own understanding of the ideal Greek-Germanic relationship defended in the Birth of Tragedy). In this, Nietzsche was acting on a pedagogical ideal he had formulated already in his student days in Leipzig: The aim that lies before me is to become a really practical teacher and to be able to awaken the necessary reflection and self-examination in young people which will enable them always to keep the why, the what, and the how (but particularly “the why”) of their discipline ever before their eyes. (KGW I.4 60 [I], quoted in Young, 2010, p. 68) This meant not only adopting a more “progressive” approach to philological instruction than the traditional method but also maintaining a polite and caring relationship with his pupils. Nietzsche recounts, for example, that [w]henever a pupil failed to recite adequately the topic of the previous class, publicly I always blamed myself – I said for example, that everyone had a right to demand of me further elucidation and commentary if what I had said was too cursory or vague. A teacher has an obligation to make himself accessible to every level of intelligence. (KSA 13 24 [I] 4, quoted in Young, 2010, p. 102) This approach, along with the five-course dinners he would put on for his pupils at the end of semesters, seems to have forged a strong bond between the philologist and his charges. Nietzsche reports that “[d]uring the seven years in which I taught Greek to the top form of the Basel grammar school I never once had occasion to mete out a punishment” (EH I:4). By the time Nietzsche held his lectures on education before the Basler intelligentsia, he considered himself finally ready to “expose the nature of the educational system” (KGB 11.1 107), a task that he had promised to undertake in

Introduction

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a letter to his friend Carl von Gersdorff in late 1870. In the lectures, Nietzsche points to two problematic movements on the fin-de-siecle educational scene: (1) the expansion of education (Bildung) to an increasingly wider audience and (2) its diminution within the current reform efforts (FE 1, pp. 35–40). This thesis may sound the alarms that Nietzsche is here revealing his anti-democratic, even reactionary colors. How could anyone be against expanding education to all? Yet it becomes clear in the lectures that Nietzsche’s main rhetorical target is the state’s involvement in both of these movements. As Nietzsche puts it, the new reforms require that education “give up its highest, noblest, and most elevating claims and resign itself to the service of . . . the state” (FE 1, p. 36). In other words, Nietzsche is, and would remain for the rest of his career, highly skeptical that the state could be trusted to organize an educational system directed towards human flourishing. The Prussian state’s promises to expand “education” were not expressions of an authentic interest in education for Bildung, i.e. education for the attainment of culture, Nietzsche argues, but only from a desire to meet its own immediate political demands or to satiate those of the ever-expanding economy. Nietzsche aptly christens the state’s educational motive education for currency, intending the double meaning of addressing “current” issues and acquiring money (ibid.). The self-described Prussian Kulturstaat – a term that had come into parlance with the establishment of the Prussian department of education, the Kultusministerium, in 1817 – was thus a contradiction in terms for Nietzsche (cf. TI “What the Germans Lack” 4). Only a sufficiently vibrant and politically independent Kultur could be entrusted with the task of educating for Bildung. Indeed, this is why Nietzsche can undertake a strident critique of public education in the lectures and yet simultaneously outline a positive educational program, one founded on a rigorous apprenticeship in the mother-tongue and the immersive study of Hellenic life.

The challenges of reading Nietzsche Given Nietzsche’s extensive intellectual engagement with educational concerns, it may come as a surprise that many scholars either wholly ignore his contribution to the history of educational thought or attempt to prove its incompatibility with the educational aims and practices of democratic societies. A common thread among philosophers of education who have engaged with Nietzsche’s works is that he rejects all forms of organized education, and a fortiori democratic education (e.g. Allen, 2017; Johnston, 2001; Rosenow, 1989; Jenkins, 1982). This points to a peculiar, and lamentable, idiosyncrasy of Nietzsche’s reception in Anglo-American philosophy. Namely, Nietzsche’s actual words are given much less attention than what seems to fit with our preconceptions about who Nietzsche was. As an unfortunate case in point, Nietzsche’s five lectures on education have recently been re-published in an otherwise helpful edition under the misleading title Anti-Education (Nietzsche, 2016). As we have seen, the young professor and grammar school teacher was patently not anti-education. Indeed,

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his lectures argue explicitly for the creation of truly educational institutions (Bildungsanstalten), i.e. institutions for Bildung, and he devoted a remarkable amount of his intellectual energy as an upstart philosopher to thinking about and even organizing educational reforms. Such misrepresentations of Nietzsche’s views are par for the course in the secondary literature, prompting periodic correctives with titles such as What Nietzsche Really Said (Solomon & Higgins, 2000), Making Sense of Nietzsche (Schacht, 1995) and What Nietzsche Means (Morgan, 1965). Some of this misrepresentation can be explained by the tarnishing of Nietzsche’s reputation at the hands of his sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who cynically and ultimately successfully marketed Nietzsche’s philosophy to the National Socialists (who themselves were stupid enough to think he was an ideological ally, to use a favorite Nietzschean term of derision).2 Yet the most obvious culprit in this widespread misunderstanding is Nietzsche himself. The complexity, multivalence and eclecticism of Nietzsche’s style pose serious exegetical challenges for the reader. Nietzsche employs numerous genres for presenting his ideas: essays, treatises, poems, aphorisms, dialogues, thought experiments, myths and narratives. He employs several voices between sections and sometimes even within a single block of prose. He uses manifold changes in tone, mood and content for dramatic effect. And he uses contradictions, maledictions, sarcasm, jokes and flattery alongside sober analysis and critique. Readers who have approached him as a traditional philosopher expositing a systematic view of the world not only have been baffled by his changing styles, tones, contradictions and inconsistencies but are often offended at his maledictions, jokes, sarcasm and invectives. Some have even claimed to find sinister intentions lurking behind his words. Another central challenge of reading Nietzsche on which previous interpreters have stumbled is the provocativeness and multifacetedness of Nietzsche’s conception of power. At times, Nietzsche, with bombastic self-assertion, presents his conception of the will to power as a fundamental metaphysical principle that explains, well, just about everything there is to explain about the world. “The world is will to power – and nothing besides!” (WP 1067), Nietzsche exclaims in a frequently quoted passage from the Nachlass. At other times, the will to power seems to be a specifically psychological thesis, explaining the nature of the deep psychological drives that motivate individual action (e.g. BGE 23). In this mode, the will to power explains the interaction between our subconscious drives and affects, which each vie to control the psyche and submerge the influence of the others. In yet other passages, Nietzsche’s conception of the will to power seems to apply primarily to cultures and religious traditions, whose periodic moral “revaluations” are triggered by the struggle of a previously marginalized class to assert their influence and come to power: “A tablet of the good hangs over every people. Behold it is the tablet of their overcomings; behold, it is the voice of their will to power” (Z I: “On the Thousand and One Goals”). While much ink has been spilled in the effort to determine the nature of and relationship between these three descriptive senses of the will to power, the fact

Introduction

5

that Nietzsche additionally uses the term “power” in a normative sense has probably led to the most confusion among scholars. Nietzsche describes power not only as something we see at work in the world around us but as something we ought to strive for. For Nietzsche, power is desirable; it constitutes strength and flourishing, and we ought to pursue it above all else. “[D]o not permit yourself to stop before any ultimate wisdom, ultimate goodness, ultimate power” (GS 285), Nietzsche exhorts us in The Gay Science, for example. Nietzsche’s apotheoses of power in the normative sense complicate interpretations of the doctrine, since they often employ terms and ideas that we associate with the colloquial sense of power, i.e. power over other people, in metaphorical guise. Put differently, he “revalues” our notion of power, to use a term that becomes central for Nietzsche’s later moral psychology. For example, in another passage in The Gay Science, Nietzsche asserts that “every strengthening and enhancement of the human type also involves a new kind of enslavement” (GS 377), thus seeming to imply that progress towards a more powerful culture requires actual human subjugation. It is statements like these that have led interpreters to cast Nietzsche as a brutal Machiavellian who endorses severe competitiveness in individual affairs and ruthless Realpolitik in social ones. The case against these common “elitist” readings of Nietzsche’s philosophy is an important one to make, and it will occupy roughly the last four chapters of this book. But it is important to say now that Nietzsche flatly and consistently rejects the desirability of the colloquial conception of power as subjugation. Nietzsche does believe that the will to power is an important explanatory category for understanding the social and natural world; he does think power is normatively superior to powerlessness; but he patently does not think that ethically desirable forms of power are those involving power over others. “Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising one’s power upon others,” Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science, yet “the state in which we hurt others . . . is a sign that we are still lacking power, or it shows a sense of frustration in the face of this poverty” (GS 13). Elsewhere, Nietzsche avers that the truly “strong and domineering natures” are those individuals who are able to “give style to [their] character,” thus commanding their own “strengths and weaknesses . . . under a law of their own.” In contrast, “[i]t is the weak characters without power over themselves who hate the constraint of style” (GS 290). Echoing this view in a note written in the early 1880s, Nietzsche laments the German public’s tendency to “think that strength must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty,” which leads them to “submit with fervor and admiration” before such expressions of raw strength and to “devoutly enjoy terror.” Nietzsche adds, “That there is strength in mildness and stillness, they do not believe easily” (eKGWB/NF-1880, 7 [195], quoted in Kaufmann, 1982, p. 228). Nietzsche explicitly and consistently argues that those who happen to have achieved this power-in-mildness additionally possess the “duty” to treat “the mediocre more tenderly than [themselves] and [their] peers” (A 57). Thus, what Nietzsche means by “power” in the normative sense is far from what we typically mean when we speak of “power politics,” “economic power,” “power

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structures” and so forth. The highest form of power, for Nietzsche, is not power over others but power over oneself, the power to self-overcome. The question remains why Nietzsche writes about power, and other topics for that matter, with such misleading ambiguity (at least for the incautious reader) and generally employs such a challenging style of presentation. The answer, as becomes clear already in his appeals to the “youthful souls” in Schopenhauer as Educator, is that he intends to transform his readers. Indeed, Nietzsche attempts to speak directly to his readers in each one of his texts: to the “free spirits” in Human, All Too Human, to the “yea-sayers” in The Gay Science, to the “philosophers of the future” in Beyond Good and Evil and to “the knowledgeable ones” in On the Genealogy of Morals. In doing so, Nietzsche presents his philosophical reflections not primarily as a series of ideas to be systematized and rationally appropriated by his readers but as a way of life to be lived. As Solomon (2003) points out, Nietzsche is “primarily in the business of self-transformation, or soultransformation. . . . This refers both to his own self-transformation through his thinking and his writing and, more important for us, to our self-transformation, as his readers” (p. 11). Nietzsche’s stylistic multivalence and eclecticism is invaluable to this end since Nietzsche believes conventional attempts to change people’s lives by argument or proof to be utterly ineffective. As he says in Daybreak: It is not enough to prove something, one has also to seduce or elevate people to it. That is why the man of knowledge should learn how to speak his wisdom: and often in such a way that sounds like folly! (D 330)3 For Nietzsche, the reliance on the propositional form alone not only does not change lives but even undermines the individual’s ability to be changed – namely, by ignoring the physiological and affective components of our thought. Therefore, rather than using primarily a propositional-argumentative form of address, which can be analyzed from an ostensibly disinterested point of view, Nietzsche uses a variety of rhetorical strategies he hopes will transform his readers and encourage them to abandon their pursuit of disinterested knowledge. At root, he wants to invigorate his readers’ thinking by “attacking” them from all angles, as it were. His weapons are manifold because the intellectual armor of every person is different. But all he needs is one small crack in their armor – one opening place where the transformation of the human being within the armor can begin. As Nietzsche writes in a letter to Lou Salomé, “Style should be suited to the specific person with whom you wish to communicate” (quoted in Salomé, 2001, p. 77). Put simply, Nietzsche’s goal is not so much to convince us that his arguments are true (although sometimes he does), but it is rather to provoke us into becoming a better person than we were before reading him. He wants us to approximate, to the degree we are capable, ideal human beings and our society to approximate, to the degree it is capable, a vibrant and noble culture. His writings

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are offered as an attempt to draw these ideals out of us. In short, Nietzsche’s philosophy, as he succinctly puts it in Human, All Too Human, “labours at the transformation [Umschaffung] of convictions, that is to say at culture” (HH II:323). It is, in other words, an extended, continual and unified attempt to express an ideal of human flourishing and promote a vision of the good life.

What can Nietzsche offer education in a “democratic age”? It is the central thesis of this book that Nietzsche’s conceptions of individual and social flourishing, as well as his criticisms of the particular ways modernity militates against them, help us to rethink some problematic assumptions that have crept into our current system of values and ideals – assumptions about what is worth striving for within a mass consumer culture, what it means to educate well in a society committed to equality and how we can lead a meaningful common life in an increasingly connected but troublingly competitive social landscape. This book develops this thesis by deeply engaging with some of Nietzsche’s key ideas and drawing out their consequences for contemporary education. Since this task will take the duration of the book, readers will receive a full picture of Nietzsche’s relevance to education only as they make their way through its various chapters (especially the even-numbered “practical” chapters). Yet given the controversy surrounding Nietzsche’s philosophical legacy and the challenges of his style, it will be helpful to outline now the main aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy that we believe contribute to the educational life, in the broadest sense, of modern multicultural democracies. Four aspects are most salient: his defense of authenticity against the massifying tendencies of modern life; his clear-sighted diagnosis of modern moral degradation; his advancement of a positive ethical alternative; and his plea for “leveling-up equality” against its mortal opponent, “leveling-down equality.” The value of authenticity

The first way Nietzsche’s philosophy speaks to contemporary educational concerns follows from Nietzsche’s conception of individual flourishing. Essential to the ideal of individual flourishing that Nietzsche advances over the course of his career is the idea of self-overcoming. The passage from Nietzsche’s corpus that is most commonly cited in this context is found at the end of a section entitled “To Physics!” in The Gay Science. Nietzsche speaks directly to his readers here, drawing them into his company with an irresistible “We” and exclaiming, “We, however, want to become those who we are – the new, the unique, the incomparable, those who give themselves their own laws, who create themselves!” (GS 335). For many interpreters, this passage has seemed to constitute the outlines of an ethics of radical individualism that anticipates key elements of existentialist thought. According to this reading, Nietzsche thinks that the

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only way out of our total subjugation – whether to Christian morality, to the conformism of modern life or to the various “errors” of Western philosophy (Nietzsche’s three favorite targets) – is to affirm the absolute individuality of the self. Authentic individuality demands not only that we seek out a set of values and a way of life that is compatible with whom we think we are but that we create our own values and thereby our very selves. This existentialist reading is pushed even further when linked together with Nietzsche’s controversial theory of subjectivity – a theory that famously rejects the notion of a stable Cartesian subject “behind” our thoughts and actions. From this standpoint, one emphasized mostly by Nietzsche’s postmodern readers, Nietzsche’s doctrine of self-overcoming seems to encourage a never-ending process of self-creation and re-creation. Nietzsche’s promotion of self-overcoming thus amounts not only to an ethic of authentic self-creation but, as one interpreter has put it, to a pedagogy of ceaseless “self-reformulation” (Bingham, 2001). According to these interpreters, Nietzsche does not care what kind of self is created, nor what moral-cultural paradigm it originally appropriates, so long as the self is reformulated continually from one form to another. While Bingham and other postmodern readers of Nietzsche have applauded the groundwork his doctrine of self-creation has laid for the development of radically constructivist and poststructuralist educational theory, others have been alarmed by the implications of the doctrine. One camp worries that Nietzsche’s ethic of self-creation promotes an impossibly difficult and psychologically dangerous goal, forcing us to cast aside all our previously internalized conventions, values and ideals, along with the human relationships that they supported (Rosenow, 1989). The other camp worries about the moral relativism that selfovercoming seems to imply. Making ourselves and our preferences the final arbiter of the values we adopt seems to “permit everything” (Arcilla, 1995). A similar but more nuanced interpretation of this doctrine sees it as an early strain of modern emotivism – the belief that all moral justification is mere rationalization of deeper, non-rational motives. According to William Barrett (1958), sheer “power” becomes the “only value” that can assert itself once we have rejected the moral paradigms that had previously guided our behavior (p. 204). On Alasdair MacIntyre’s (1981) understanding, the “gigantic and heroic act of the will” (p. 114) required by self-creation is emblematic only of the solipsistic and selfdestructive individualism peculiar to modern life. Indeed, MacIntyre attributes the contemporary breakdown of moral deliberation and the manipulativeness of modern relationships to the influence of such emotivist glorifications of the individual. In light of these influential interpretations, the doctrine of self-overcoming may seem to our readers a rather poor source of potential insight for improving contemporary education. Luckily, however, each of these interpretations has grossly misconstrued Nietzsche’s intentions. Nietzschean self-overcoming is not a solipsistic affirmation of individualism, nor is it an endorsement of ceaseless self-creation and re-creation, but it is a call to become masters of ourselves. A

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full defense of this claim will have to wait until Chapter 3, but it will be helpful to point out a few passages now in which Nietzsche seems to clearly hold this position. In a key section in The Wanderer and His Shadow, for example, Nietzsche explicitly forges a connection between self-overcoming and self-mastery: All those who do not have themselves sufficiently under their own control and who do not know morality as continual self-mastery [Selbstbeherrschung] and self-overcoming [Selbstüberwindung] practised in great things and in the smallest, involuntarily become glorifiers of . . . that instinctive morality which has no head but seems to consist solely of heart and helping hands. It is, indeed, in their interest to cast suspicion on a morality of reason [Vernunft] and to make of that other morality the only one. (WS 45)4 In the 1886 preface to Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche associates “health” with the concept of self-mastery: “the way is still long to that tremendous, overflowing state of security and health . . . to that mature freedom of the spirit, which is equally self-mastery [Selbstbeherrschung] and training of the heart” (HH P:4). This association is crucial, since “health” is the concept alongside “power” that Nietzsche increasingly uses in his later works to refer to a state of human flourishing. In characterizing his conception of flourishing in this way, Nietzsche is invoking a long tradition in philosophy beginning with Plato, which calls each of us to work towards a rational ordering of the soul and self-mastery as the final fruits of our educational efforts. More precisely, Nietzsche’s self-overcoming is a revaluation of this philosophical tradition, one that attempts to update both its assumed philosophical anthropology and its conception of reason by means of his insights into moral psychology.5 For Nietzsche, our central task is to harness and express our volatile, power-seeking inner drives in ways that realize human excellence. This disciplined harnessing and expression of the drives is what Nietzsche thinks constitutes a powerful and flourishing individual life, and it is precisely what Nietzsche seems to have in mind when he uses the term “self-overcoming.”6 In offering us a characteristically modern rendering of the self-mastery doctrine, we confront the first way in which Nietzsche’s philosophy can serve the educational life of modern democratic societies. We moderns are increasingly bombarded with advertisements that cynically exploit our subconscious desires and fears in order to create false needs. If Nietzsche’s doctrine of self-overcoming can provide insight into the nature of these psychological mechanisms and show us how to flourish in spite of them, he has taught us an important moral lesson. Relatedly, but perhaps even more importantly, modern democracies are particularly susceptible to massification, conformity, consumerism and, to put it in Nietzsche’s terms, herd-thinking. This is because they, by nature, place their faith so confidently in the power of the people and generally

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take a laissez faire stance on the outputs of mass culture. Against this backdrop, Nietzsche is, like Kierkegaard and other existentialist thinkers, a committed defender of the individual and the value of authenticity. Nietzsche’s call for us to be authentic individuals, to know ourselves and to take an active role in our self-creation can shield us from the conformism that modern democracies too often demand of us. Modern moral degradation

The second way Nietzsche speaks to contemporary educational concerns has to do with his understanding of what we might call the “moral logic” of modernity. To get to this understanding, we should first confront a potentially serious problem that remains with enlisting Nietzsche as a source of democratic inspiration. Saying that Nietzsche promotes an ideal of flourishing is tantamount to saying that he advances a perfectionist moral worldview. That is, Nietzsche’s appeals to the reader to become powerful self-overcomers are informed by a concrete conception of what a flourishing individual life looks like, and his texts call us to embrace these ideals. This may make us uneasy. Haven’t we surpassed the days of moral perfectionism, of a belief in a perfected state of humanity? Mustn’t we now embrace a pluralism of values, traditions and ways of life? What are we to do about Nietzsche’s unapologetic promotion of an individual and cultural ideal? Before addressing this question in the greater detail it deserves, it is important to note that a great part of Nietzsche’s moral philosophy is formulated in reaction to the particular moral pitfalls of modern life. In other words, Nietzsche’s moral appeals descend from a worry that the modern world militates in a particularly insidious way, not just against his philosophical ideals, but against the very idea that anything could be more important than economic well-being or political service. “In individual moments,” Nietzsche observes of us, we all know how even the most far-flung arrangements of our life are made in order to flee from our true calling [Aufgabe] . . . how we hastily give our heart away to the state, to money-making, to sociability or science, simply so as not to possess it ourselves, how we devote ourselves to our daily labor more feverishly and thoughtlessly than would be necessary to live, for it seems to us even more necessary to avoid reflection. (SE 5; our translation) According to Nietzsche, modernity has a profound leveling effect on the moral imagination. We have difficulty articulating an account of the good life in terms other than wealth, civic responsibility, “sociability” and the accruement of scientific knowledge. In response to this state of affairs, Nietzsche poses a pointed question in Schopenhauer as Educator that is worth repeating: “Who is there then, amid these dangers of our era, to guard and champion humanity, the

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inviolable sacred treasure gradually accumulated by the most various races?” (SE 4, p. 150). Thus, not only is the modern moral imagination leveled; Nietzsche observes that the rapidly modernizing social landscape would bring with it new assaults on our humanity and that we are in need of those who would defend it. Now, how does the philosopher view the culture of our time? . . . When he thinks of the general haste in the world around him and the increasing speed with which it is falling, of the cessation of all contemplativeness and simplicity, it almost seems as if he is perceiving the symptoms of a complete eradication and uprooting of culture. The waters of religion are ebbing away and leaving behind swamps or isolated pools; the nations are drawing back from one another in the most hostile manner and long to tear each other to pieces. The sciences, pursued without measure and with a spirit of the blindest laissez faire, are breaking up and dissolving all firmly held belief; the educated classes and states are being swallowed up by an enormously contemptible money-economy. Never was the world more worldly, never poorer in love and goodness. The scholarly classes are no longer lighthouses or refuges in the middle of all this agitation and worldliness; they become daily more restless, thoughtless and loveless. Everything serves the coming barbarism, contemporary art and science included. (SE 4; our translation) The prescience of this passage demonstrates the second reason we should read Nietzsche for democratic inspiration. Nietzsche is simply one of the most insightful observers and critics of the (post)modern world that we come across in the Western canon. Multicultural democracies must develop some way to combat the ills of mass consumer culture, whose cheap appeals to sex and immediate pleasure deaden the mind and soul. They must also devise a way to counteract the destructive forces inherent to advanced technocratic capitalism, which now threaten to dissolve all sense of privacy, leisure and, as Nietzsche puts it, “contemplativeness” [Beschaulichkeit]. Nietzsche’s accounts of modern life, such as can be found in this early essay but also his later reflections on the coming democratic age, especially the doctrine of the “last men” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, can be invaluable to this end. The Nietzschean ethical alternative

Although Nietzsche’s critiques of modern moral degradation and his ethics of self-overcoming may provide us with needed guidance through some of the special moral challenges of contemporary life, they do not yet constitute an exhaustive conception of human flourishing. As it stands, there is a potentially worrying open-endedness to Nietzsche’s moral philosophy. Authenticity and self-overcoming can be appropriated to almost any end, the objection may go, as long as the end promises to be anti-modern and appeal to some aspect of

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individuality, whether good or bad. Given the history of Nietzsche’s problematic appropriations, first by the Prussians in World War I and then by the National Socialists in the lead up to World War II, this may appear to be a damning weakness of Nietzsche’s ethical worldview, and it is made only worse by Nietzsche’s own self-described “immoralism.” Does Nietzsche have a positive ethical vision that tells against such diverse appropriations? He does. While there are certainly some readers who have been led astray by Nietzsche’s self-descriptions of immoralism and free-spiritedness, he makes clear throughout his corpus, and most scholars now accept, that his attacks on “morality” are to be understood as so many tokens of his commitment to the ethical life. Crucial to Nietzsche’s positive ethical vision, however, is his refusal to understand the “ethical life” as one consumed with trying to fit one’s actions into the traditional categories of “right” or “wrong,” “good” or “evil.” Nietzsche’s provocative thesis in On the Genealogy of Morals is that the words “good” and “evil” were invented by weak-willed and small-minded people in an effort to overturn the (higher) moral values that the Greeks and Romans held so as to reinterpret their weakness as a strength. As a result of this recasting of human action into such moralistic terms, the straightforward concepts of guilt and punishment were “eternalized” in Christian morality. They became respectively the doctrines of original sin and eternal damnation, which render everyone inescapably guilty and deserving of punishment and systematically make them weaker, full of fear, spite, mistrust, self-deception and self-loathing. Within this moral paradigm, Nietzsche believes we come to blindly obey moral edicts without genuinely understanding or appreciating their aesthetic significance. Modern individuals, under the influence of Kant’s particular brand of Christian morality, have learned to conflate moral action with action in accordance with some ultimate set of moral duties or values. For Nietzsche, this blind and thoughtless obedience only deepens our conformity and further degrades the moral character of our lives. Nietzsche wants to overthrow this moralistic ethics of obedience and replace it with a new and empowering worldview that will make human beings stronger, more generous, gracious and honest, and simultaneously less obsequious, conformist and fearful. Like his moralizing predecessors, Nietzsche promotes graciousness, justice, temperance, honesty, generosity, civility, equanimity, gratitude, courage, faithfulness, magnanimity and hope. But the main difference between Nietzsche and the moral tradition he defines himself against is his belief that these qualities should be valued because they make the world more beautiful when exercised at the right times, with the right people, with the right motives and in the right way – not because they maximize utility, are good in themselves or are ordained by God.7 When people act with genuine courage or grace, their actions have aesthetic value; the world becomes more beautiful. When they act recklessly or foolishly, they make the world uglier. Thus, as for Aristotle and Plato, morality and beauty are inextricably intertwined for Nietzsche. Indeed, on our reading, Nietzsche’s positive ethical statements converge into

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a unique brand of virtue ethics, making him an important forerunner of the neo-Aristotelian turn of the late twentieth century.8 In addition to the qualities listed here, Nietzsche tirelessly praises the virtues of aesthetic creativity, intellectual honesty, resilience, unconventionalism, a capacity for deep solitude and effusive, life-affirming gratitude, virtues he believes have gotten short shrift from previous moral thinkers. Nietzsche’s positive vision of the good life – in which we are called to overcome our tendency to blindly follow moral edicts, to follow an inbred sense of duty and to avoid the more difficult path towards virtue – thus promotes the pursuit of health and power in the same spirit that virtue ethicists promote eudaimonia or flourishing. When we finally overcome our tendency to act morally simply because we are conditioned to do so, and instead choose to act morally only when doing so genuinely makes the world a better place, we will not only become more virtuous but find deep joy in being so. Rather than simply following the herd by obeying a system of mores, we become “affirmers” of life, to use Nietzsche’s turn of phrase, who find our deepest satisfaction in making the world a more beautiful place. And this means that we will not sit back idly when we witness others attempting to make the world uglier by harming, demeaning or attacking others. Leveling-up vs. leveling-down equality

Though Nietzsche’s ethical alternative may be helpful for diagnosing, and perhaps even for “inoculating” us against some of the moral pitfalls of modern life, it does not quite demonstrate Nietzsche’s relevance to the educational practice of modern multicultural democracies. This book hopes to show that Nietzsche’s philosophy does in fact possess concrete resources for improving teaching and learning in democratic societies. This may strike readers as surprising, given his troubled reputation, but also as improbable, given that Nietzsche is an outspoken critic of democracy, in particular the value it places on “equality.” The cultural vision Nietzsche offers in response not only is perfectionistic but promotes an “order of rank” among human beings. Does democratic education really have something to learn from a democracy-denouncing anti-egalitarian? The full answer to this question will come only in the course of addressing each of Nietzsche’s doctrines and their implications for education in the following chapters. Yet to ensure our readers are at least open to the idea of a democracy-promoting Nietzsche, several things should be said at this stage. Nietzsche’s cultural vision, it is true, promotes an order of rank. He believes that society should adopt a hierarchical form and thereby follow the natural hierarchy of value among individuals. In other words, to put it bluntly, Nietzsche believes that some individuals are more “valuable” than others and that these more valuable individuals should take on the role of cultural and spiritual leaders. Though this may strike us as appalling or at the very least problematic, Nietzsche’s order of rank is centrally concerned with the varying aesthetic value

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between individuals, not with any supposed differences in their basic rights or fundamental human worth. Both in terms of achievements and inherent talents, some people can simply do more to advance culture, and on Nietzsche’s view, they deserve to be celebrated and honored by the rest of us. But even this formulation doesn’t quite get Nietzsche’s position right. Although Nietzsche believes that “philosophers, artists and saints” (SE 5, p. 159) advance culture in a way that average citizens cannot, he thinks that the latter have a crucial role to play in the creation of a flourishing culture. Not only do they have a role to play – Nietzsche argues that it is through cooperative participation in a vibrant, noble culture that both the masses and cultural leaders achieve a state of flourishing. Nietzsche’s term for this state of social flourishing in his later works is the “noble culture” [vornehme Kultur] (e.g. TI “What the Germans Lack” 6). As Nietzsche puts it in Schopenhauer as Educator all individuals have a role to play in the creation of a vibrant, flourishing culture: [T]hese new duties are not the duties of a solitary; rather in adopting them one enters into a powerful community held together, not by external forms and laws, but by a fundamental idea. It is the fundamental idea of culture [Kultur], insofar as it knows to set for each of us but one task: to promote the production of the philosopher, artist and saint within us and without us and thereby to work towards the perfection of nature. (SE 5; our translation) The “philosophers, artists and saints” Nietzsche has in mind do not, as we might think, refer to the nineteenth-century European intelligentsia, which was made up of almost exclusively white men pursuing various careerist aims in the academy, the artworld or the church; nor do they refer to the, again, predominately white, male, educated upper classes who prided themselves on patronizing each of these institutions. Indeed, Nietzsche repeatedly insists that these classes are decadents who contribute almost nothing to a flourishing culture and lambasted them with the label Bildungsphilister – cultural philistines – throughout his philosophical career. Rather, in a properly functioning culture, Nietzsche’s “philosophers, artists and saints” will come from all socio-economic classes and races, and they will be judged by the merits of their unique contribution to culture alone. Thus, although we may disagree with Nietzsche that we attain flourishing only within this sort of hierarchical culture, Nietzsche’s cultural vision is one that hopes to maximize the flourishing of all individuals, regardless of their ethnic, social and economic class background. He is, in this sense, an egalitarian. This vision may still not sit well with our democratic values and ideals, however. Modern multicultural democracies pursue many different aims in order to guarantee their citizens a stable and harmonious coexistence, but two of their most central ones are: (1) to strive to create conditions in which each person, no matter their race, sex, religion and so forth, can achieve their “full potential,” whatever that may be; and (2) to achieve as much equality as possible

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between individuals. Both of these goals are essential to a flourishing democracy. The problem is that they are in tension with one another. If everyone is given the opportunity to maximize their innate talents and gifts, then those who are more innately talented or gifted may accelerate faster than those who are not as innately talented and gifted. And if they accelerate faster, the gap between the highest achievers and the lowest will only widen. On the other hand, if, for the sake of equality, we deny the most innately talented and gifted opportunities to maximize their potential and instead give priority to the less talented and gifted (say, because the social distribution of goods has failed to attain some basic threshold level of well-being for the least advantaged), then we are failing to support them in the maximizing of their potential. The question then becomes: How can we minimize this tension so that both democratic goals can be achieved? Obviously, we will never be able to eliminate the tension altogether. But can we get better at minimizing it? We, like other defenders of democracy, believe that we can and that Nietzsche provides insights into how to do it. Paradoxically, it is Nietzsche’s nuanced criticisms of the value of equality and the psychological basis of its valuation that lead us to these insights. In many places in his texts, Nietzsche seems to be an unmitigated opponent of equality. “The doctrine of equality!” Nietzsche exclaims in Twilight of the Idols, “There is no more poisonous poison: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, whereas it is the end of justice” (TI “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” 48). Pulled out of the context of his whole corpus, this passage seems to clearly indicate that Nietzsche is an enemy of egalitarianism and thus cannot help us with the basic tension of democratic societies we mentioned previously. But, in fact, Nietzsche does value equality and wants human beings to pursue it. In an earlier work, Nietzsche claims, for example, that [t]he thirst for equality can express itself either as a desire to draw everyone down to oneself (through diminishing them, spying on them, tripping them up) or to raise oneself and everyone else up (through recognizing their virtues, helping them, rejoicing in their success). (HH I:300) When Nietzsche denounces equality, he has this latter sense in mind, the “desire to draw everyone down to oneself.” From Nietzsche’s point of view, far too many of the defenders of equality in modern democracies espouse its value not because they want to raise everyone else up to the highest level they can achieve but because they secretly resent those who are talented and gifted. From this perspective, any distinction of talent and achievement made between individuals is suspicious because potentially hurtful or damaging to the people placed in the “lower” category. It constitutes an attack on their basic humanity, it is claimed. In essence, this is Nietzsche’s doctrine of ressentiment. Nietzsche believes that such individuals use the rhetoric of equality merely to compensate for their own feelings of inferiority and thereby deny what all people ought to be equally

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entitled to in democratic societies – namely, the maximization of their potential. Nietzsche wants to devise a culture in which everyone’s innate talents and gifts, no matter what degree they begin at, are fully realized. From our point of view, Nietzsche’s critical reflections on the psychology of equality, though insightful, ultimately overstate his case. While Nietzsche thinks the vast majority of people who defend equality do so only out of a spirit of ressentiment, we are more hopeful than he is. Nevertheless, his critique does point to a troubling tendency in modern democracies. Namely, we too often assume that, in order to benefit the least advantaged students, we have to deprive other students of the opportunity to maximize their potential. Theorists and practitioners sometimes write as if human flourishing is just such a zero-sum game. For example, it is well known (as Tooley, 2010, points out) that middle-class families do more to perpetuate inequality than systemic inequities in the quality of schooling. When middle-class parents read to their children in the evenings, and provide enrichment opportunities during summers and weekends, they put their children at a significant advantage for success in later schooling and competition for jobs. These advantages cannot be easily overcome by merely encouraging non-middle-class students to work harder in the classroom. The middle-class students will likely be at a permanent advantage, and inequality would likely grow as the middle-class students capitalize on their advantage in later years. However, it would be outrageous to argue that, because of these advantages, middle-class students should be, in their first years of schooling, sent to special “decelerated classrooms” in which they are deprived of meaningful learning so as to give time to the disadvantaged students to catch up with them. And yet when we call for educational reforms that aim to “eliminate the achievement gap” or “rectify social injustice” without defining how they will address the needs of students of all levels of talent and achievement, then we fall into precisely this kind of “leveling-down” logic. Similarly, when we agitate for developing common educational “standards” without thinking about how we will support those who consistently perform both below and above them, we have, again, committed the error of leveling-down. In short, we cannot put off maximizing anyone’s potential on the premise that the concerns of another group are more pressing. This, then, is the fourth and final way that Nietzsche’s philosophical legacy can contribute to contemporary education. Nietzsche helps us reconceptualize how we see differences of talent and giftedness so that our strivings for equality can avoid committing the error of leveling-down. In the current intellectual climate, we tend to see all differences of talent and achievement as either (1) mere accidents to compensate or (2) the undeniable products of hard work. (Let’s bracket those moments when our vision is impaired by the resentmentspawned inferiority complex Nietzsche describes.) Operating in the first mode, call it the “sociological faith,” we think that our achievements in life are strongly, if not wholly, determined by the accident of our birth into a particular socioeconomic class. Furthermore, we think that what counts as an achievement is

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itself arbitrary, a mere peculiarity of our particular culture. In these moments, we are quick to say that academic success is a mere result of “privilege” or “social capital,” that academic challenges are due to “systemic injustice” or hostile “power structures.” Of course, differences of talent and achievement are often accidents that result from the unjust distribution of social capital and privilege, but they are also often the result of innate ability, interest, aptitude and dedication. The second “hard work” explanation captures at least the significance of personal “dedication” in the emergence of differences of talent and achievement (the sociological faith sees even this as an accident of birth). This is the familiar “meritocratic faith.” Operating in this mode, we think that all differences of achievement can be explained by pointing to the hard work that the achievers have done in the past. Under the sway of the meritocratic faith, we like to promise our children that they can be whatever they want to be and quote the statistic that mastery of any craft or skill only requires 10,000 hours of practice. Now, there is no doubt that the meritocratic faith, just like the sociological faith, points to a real lever in the production of differences of achievement. Hard work matters. However, it simultaneously overlooks the significance of innate ability and giftedness. As Michael Sandel (2007) points out: We want to believe that success . . . is something we earn, not something we inherit. Natural gifts, and the admiration they inspire, embarrass the meritocratic faith; they cast doubt on the conviction that praise and rewards flow from effort alone. In the face of this embarrassment we inflate the moral significance of striving, and depreciate giftedness. (p. 28) So why does it matter that we so often fall into one of these two faiths, especially since there is real truth to the way they both depict the social world? There are several things to say. The sociological faith, when unchecked by our meritocratic sensibilities, leads directly to the leveling-down error; we focus all our energies on “redistributing” to those who have lost out in the lottery of birth and forget that democracy owes it to all its citizens to maximize, or at least to attempt to maximize, their potential. In doing so, we tend to fixate on only those things that can be distributed, such as money, jobs, credentials and accolades, rather than, say, excellence or friendship. On the other hand, the meritocratic faith, without sociological insight, is optimistic to the point of naiveté. Lacking an appreciation of innate talentedness, it can, and does, beget fierce competition for the things that count (often arbitrarily) as achievement. The dizzying schedules of middle-class children – with piano lessons, sports, SAT prep classes and so forth – are at least in part a result of the blind acceptance of this faith. While each faith can contribute an important corrective to one another, there is still something missing from a political worldview that is carried out only in these terms. Nietzsche’s sustained celebrations of excellence, talentedness and cultural achievement help us to see that the basic problem with the sociological

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Introduction

and meritocratic faiths is that they both deny human uniqueness. Part of what makes humanity beautiful is that humans are not identical but are enormously diverse with respect to both how we look and act, and also what we are capable of. To say that all differences of talent and achievement are always mere products of social capital or privilege, that our definitions of what counts as “talent” and “achievement” are purely arbitrary or that they are always the product of hard work is to deny that people are unique and deserve to have their uniqueness celebrated. Crucially, to deny this uniqueness is not only undemocratic; as Nietzsche argues, it actually undermines our ability to improve the situation of the least advantaged. In other words, falling into the meritocratic or sociological faith actually robs ourselves of important resources for combating inequality. For there is often no more powerful source of motivation to make a change in our lives than the acknowledgement of excellence, talentedness and great achievement in others. We are inspired by excellence, even, and perhaps especially, by the kind that we can never fully reach. Nietzsche’s philosophy is thus not identical to or straightforwardly apologetic of democratic education, but it is an indispensable dialectical counterpart to it. In particular, Nietzsche’s ideas surrounding perspectivism, self-overcoming, the order of rank and ressentiment sharpen our capacity to discern whether our modern multicultural democracies have maintained a commitment to promoting individual excellence in schools, or whether they have fallen prey to a form of reactionary egalitarianism that, in the name of equality, diminishes human potential, disempowers teachers and, ironically, perpetuates systemic injustice. It is one of the central theses of this book that this leveling-down logic is widespread in education and that Nietzsche’s educational philosophy provides inspiration for how educators might drive it out. This does not mean that liberal democracies should or could adopt Nietzsche’s ideas wholesale – many of them are far too radical for that – but they can provide important insights for educational theorists and practitioners who want to work towards the improvement of democratic education.

Aims and outline of the book In employing Nietzsche as a dialogical partner for improving democratic education today, this book carries on the increasing engagement with Nietzsche’s educational legacy that has occurred over the last decade. Philosophers of education have begun to look to Nietzsche for inspiration in areas as diverse as professional education (Joosten, 2015), aesthetic education (Stolz, 2017), mindfulness education (Steel, 2014), citizenship education (Jonas, 2012) and multicultural education (Yacek, 2014). At the same time, we consider it important to confront, rather than side-step, those influential threads in Nietzsche scholarship that have characterized Nietzsche as a thoroughgoing relativist (Arcilla, 1995, p. 78), a radical individualist (Rosenow, 1989), an unyielding elitist (Fennell, 2005; Aviram, 1991; Jenkins, 1982; Rawls, 2005; Dombowsky, 2004; Appel, 1999; Hurka,

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1992; Ansell-Pearson, 1991; Detwiler, 1990; Thiele, 1990) and an opponent of democratic education (Johnston, 2001). Thus, the first general aim of this book is to demonstrate that, contrary to these standard interpretations, Nietzsche’s philosophical legacy has tremendous import for the theory and contemporary practice of education. To do so, this book offers several exegetically rigorous reinterpretations of central Nietzschean ideas that have been consistently misunderstood by interpreters of Nietzsche’s educational philosophy – namely, his doctrines of (1) perspectivism, (2) self-overcoming, (3) the order of rank and (4) ressentiment. Contrary to the claims of previous interpreters, Nietzsche advocates neither licentious individualism nor radical elitism, so we argue, but rather proposes a compelling and coherent vision of human flourishing that aims to promote the excellence of all individuals. The second general aim of this book follows directly from the first. In correcting these various misinterpretations of Nietzsche’s most important educational ideas, we attempt to demonstrate concrete ways in which Nietzsche’s philosophy can enrich teaching and learning in modern democratic schools. To accomplish these two general aims, the book proceeds by devoting a chapter to dealing with misconceptions surrounding one of Nietzsche’s philosophical doctrines and follows this discussion with a chapter outlining the educational implications of the doctrine, and so forth for each of the aforementioned doctrines. This progression is broken up into two broad parts. The first part of the book deals with (mis)interpretations of Nietzsche’s educational ideas that have stemmed largely from “postmodern” readers, while the second part engages with those that can be broadly categorized as “analytic” interpreters. The point of engaging with both of these traditions is to acknowledge the important work that each has done in the past several decades, but also to show that neither have provided a fully satisfying account of Nietzsche’s educational ideas. In singling out Nietzsche’s doctrines of perspectivism, self-overcoming, the order of rank and ressentiment in our analysis, we believe we have highlighted the four ideas in Nietzsche’s corpus that speak most directly to the special challenges that educators face in modern multicultural democracies. This does not mean that the multitude of other themes and ideas in Nietzsche’s corpus are irrelevant for contemporary education, such as those surrounding the Dionysian, nihilism, eternal recurrence, the death of God and amor fati. Particularly, Nietzsche’s thoughts on art may offer crucial resources for aesthetic education today, and his psychological insights have still not been sufficiently mined for their potential contribution to current learning theory. Though aesthetics and psychology are undoubtedly crucial to contemporary educational thought, it seems to us that issues of ethics, equality and the good life are most germane to the concerns of modern educators, and these issues lie at the core of each of these four Nietzschean doctrines. Thus, the “philosophy of education” we piece together from Nietzsche’s work in this book should not be understood as a logically basic philosophical system, nor one that is exhaustive of the Nietzschean universe of ideas. Rather, in making use of his ideas as a springboard for improving teaching

20

Introduction

and learning in the contemporary educational landscape, it is a philosophy of education written for and addressed to our democratic age. To this end, the argument of the book develops as follows. The first chapter presents an extended account of Nietzsche’s perspectivist epistemology and the conception of the self on which it is based. This task is necessitated by the inadequacy of previous accounts of Nietzsche’s perspectivism in the philosophy of education literature, which have misconstrued the doctrine as a variety of epistemic relativism and, consequently, an outright rejection of any distinction between “truth” and “lies” (Ramaekers, 2001; cf. Aviram, 1991). By offering an in-depth engagement with Nietzsche’s central published formulation of perspectivism, the famous section 12 of Nietzsche’s third essay in On the Genealogy of Morals, as well as an extended account of Nietzsche’s conception of the self, Chapter 1 shows that Nietzsche’s perspectivism is much more akin to epistemic realism than epistemic relativism. As such, Nietzsche’s perspectivism is supposed to guide his readers – and, by extension, educators – to adopt only those perspectives that are likely to increase their and others’ flourishing. Which perspectives count as instrumental to flourishing begins to become clear when we turn to the educational import of Nietzsche’s concept of perspectivism, the task of Chapter 2. Continuing the discussion of the previous chapter, we argue in Chapter 2 that Nietzsche’s doctrine of perspectivism provides crucial guidance not only for understanding the role of different perspectives in the construction of knowledge but also for learning how to deeply engage with the perspectives of others. In other words, Nietzsche’s perspectivism helps us to understand how we might empathize with people very different from ourselves, a quality that is essential in modern multicultural societies. This chapter therefore begins with an indepth engagement with the important work on dialogue and its limitations by critical pedagogues such as Ellsworth (1989), Jones (1999) and especially Boler (1997). In this context, we show that Nietzsche’s concept of perspectivism points to a robust way of empathizing with the perspectives of others that avoids what Boler has called “passive empathy.” In particular, Nietzsche’s perspectivism yields a tripartite “pedagogy of perspectival empathy” in which students learn to (1) heed the many perspectives that arise from their own subjective interests, (2) find new ways to conceptualize their experience through learning foreign languages and (3) seek out, internalize and live the perspectives of others. Building upon these three Nietzschean pedagogical pillars, we turn to a recent attempt to formulate a democratic pedagogy of perspectival empathy – Megan Laverty’s (2007) conception of dialogue as philosophical inquiry. Aware of the shortcomings of democratic dialogue emphasized by the critical pedagogues, but also intent on upholding such dialogue in the face of relativity and political disengagement, Laverty proposes a dialogical pedagogy founded on cooperative philosophical inquiry. Although we argue that Nietzsche would endorse Laverty’s pedagogy of dialogical philosophical inquiry as a critical element of the pedagogy of perspectival empathy, we conclude that Laverty’s pedagogy, and

Introduction

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indeed any pedagogy of perspectival empathy founded exclusively on dialogue, cannot ultimately offer students a way of empathizing with the perspectives of others that avoids “passive empathy” (Boler, 1997). Chapter 3 focuses on Nietzsche’s doctrine of self-overcoming, the idea that has gained by far the most attention from philosophers of education in Nietzsche’s corpus. After reviewing some of the central voices in this debate, the chapter takes on what has become the standard conception of self-overcoming in the literature – namely, self-overcoming as a process of continual self-creation and self-re-creation, in which the individual ceaselessly chooses to formulate radically new, authentic values by which to live (Aviram, 1991; Bingham, 2001). We demonstrate that this conception of self-overcoming simply overlooks the many passages in Nietzsche’s oeuvre, in which he describes self-overcoming, not as self-creation, but as a form of self-mastery. For Nietzsche, self-overcoming refers to the familiar goal of submitting one’s internal drives and impulses to a rational self-order, yet Nietzsche modernizes this Platonic idea in his understanding of rationality as, at root, an embodied practice. Embodied rational selfordering occurs when individuals carefully consider what makes their lives the most flourishing and powerful and overcome the tendencies within them that undermine this flourishing. Nietzsche thus replaces the values of internal harmony and intellectualism in Plato’s doctrine of self-mastery with the values of individual empowerment and embodiment. As a result, Nietzsche’s doctrine of self-overcoming advances a form of “gift-giving egoism,” which rejects solipsistic emotivism and self-sacrifice even while it promotes the ethical primacy of the individual, as we show in the second half of the chapter. Chapter 4 extends this discussion by arguing that (1) Nietzsche’s understanding of “embodied reason” has crucial consequences for the modern classroom, and (2) the cultural tendency to preempt students’ encounters with educational struggles ultimately stems from a lack of understanding regarding the relationship between self-mastery and meaningful learning. Concerning (1), Nietzsche’s conception of embodied reason implies two areas of important educational work: learning to “think” and learning to “speak and write,” as he puts it in Twilight of the Idols. In each case, Nietzsche understands these terms in a thoroughly embodied sense. We are to learn to think as a kind of “dancing,” in which we pursue a personal style of expression and performance in the disciplines we are studying. We are to learn to “speak and write,” Nietzsche urges, from immersive experiences in classical culture and from a kind of literary apprenticeship with exemplary writers and thinkers. These ultimately cultivate our ability to appreciate beauty and excellence so that we know how to produce the same in ourselves through self-overcoming. After this discussion, we turn to (2), which addresses a phenomenon in schools that can stop this process in its tracks: false pity. In this context, we refer to important studies showing that teachers often intervene too early to alleviate students’ struggles to learn and grow. Nietzsche believes teachers must show a kind of pity towards their students if they are to become their highest selves, but it must be a special sort

22

Introduction

of pity – one that acknowledges not only that certain kinds of struggle and suffering are instrumental for learning but that the experience of self-overcoming itself produces a special kind of joy that students can learn to appreciate in its own right. In Chapter 5, we move into the second part of the book and explore Nietzsche’s concept of the order of rank. This idea seems to be a straightforwardly elitist notion, as many philosophers and philosophers of education have been led to believe. And yet we argue in this chapter that Nietzsche’s concept of the order of rank is crucial for democratic life and education because it helps us understand the distinction between civically damaging inequality and civically empowering inequality. We argue, counterintuitively, that the “noble culture” Nietzsche promotes throughout his corpus implies a society that supports and serves average individuals as much as, or even more than, it does “higher” individuals. Thus, in this chapter, we give an account of Nietzsche’s notion of the “philosophers, artists and saints” and the noble culture they are supposed to help bring about, both of which show up most prominently in his early essay Schopenhauer as Educator. At the same time, we engage with both the radically elitist reading of this text by, for example, John Rawls (2005) as well as the radically egalitarian reading by Stanley Cavell (1990), showing that they both misconceive the political meanings of these ideas. What Nietzsche has in mind is an aesthetic-meritocratic cultural paradigm, in which people are mutually inspired by one another, even though they do not share the same level of talent and achievement. This inspiration comes from a basic moral and spiritual equality that is not threatened by inequalities of talent and achievement. While his conception requests that teachers help students embrace inequality with respect to talent and achievement in the classroom, it simultaneously demands a dissolution of social power distributions based on wealth, birth, race/ethnicity, sex and so forth. In Chapter 6, we draw the consequences of this discussion for the development of an empowering culture in the classroom. In particular, we outline the ways Nietzsche’s conception of the order of rank helps us to appreciate when inequality in the classroom undermines democratic values, and when it supports them. As a concrete example of the latter, we analyze contemporary and historical understandings of educational “emulation.” Previously, the concept of emulation, understood as the competitive comparisons of student performance, was considered an essential educational practice. Yet, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such practices were strongly criticized by influential educational theorists, so that by the present day the term is seldom used in contemporary education. We argue that this development reflects a problematic aversion among educators to student-to-student comparisons. Drawing on both Nietzsche’s agonistic conception of competition and historical conceptions of emulation, we propose something we call “inspirational emulation,” whereby individuals in the classroom of various abilities can look to each other for inspiration in maximizing their own academic skills and for achieving their own

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self-overcoming. This inspiration is not the dishonest inspiration that implies that all students are equally talented or equally able to achieve at the same level in the classroom but a more authentically grounded inspiration. That is, inspirational emulation teaches that the effort to become one’s best and highest self, no matter one’s native ability, is what makes all students in the class moral equals. As such, a culture of mutual inspiration and admiration can exist, all the while celebrating the differences of ability and achievement. In Chapter 7, we explore a potential difficulty in promoting the aesthetic order of rank that Nietzsche promotes, namely the problem of ressentiment – a term Nietzsche uses to describe the animosity that can be engendered between social classes on different hierarchical levels of society, particularly the “lower” towards the “higher.” Drawing on several passages in Nietzsche’s later works, Anglo-American interpreters have consistently interpreted Nietzsche’s discussions of ressentiment as a directive to cultural elites to exploit the masses. As we show, this is a radically incorrect interpretation of Nietzsche’s intentions. Nietzsche is genuinely concerned about the problem of ressentiment, but the way he thinks we should combat it is not to relegate the masses to lives of political and cultural inferiority but to offer them opportunities to flourish in significant ways. Ressentiment threatens to undermine the health and flourishing of enormous numbers of human beings, and therefore Nietzsche wants to overcome it by helping individuals recognize its pernicious nature. Ultimately, we argue that Nietzsche’s solution to the problem of ressentiment is not to marginalize the resentful but to empower them to overcome their ressentiment. Following this exegetical work, Chapter 8 addresses itself to the educational problem that the prevalence of ressentiment presents. That is, it attempts to provide an answer to the question: How can democratic education avoid the resentment increasingly prevalent in today’s schools and in broader society? In other words, how can we teach children to respect themselves and others when the surrounding political culture encourages them to see others’ accomplishments as threats to their well-being and flourishing? To answer these questions, we look to the civic function of gratitude. Discussions of the personal and communal advantages of gratitude have been particularly well articulated by Patricia White (1999), who argues for a broadening of the experience of gratitude in students and thus stakes out what we take to be the commonsense view of the educational value of civic gratitude. Unfortunately, this commonsense view encounters normative difficulties that threaten to undermine it. We examine these difficulties and suggest that Nietzsche’s account of the psychological relationship of resentment and gratitude offers a way of rectifying them. Nietzsche offers a unique perspective on gratitude that, we argue, can help improve students’ agency and self-confidence and increase their interest in supporting the flourishing of others. Moreover, encouraging a disposition of radical gratitude can produce a more productive attitude towards correcting social wrongs, while also contributing to students’ appreciation of others’ gifts and talents.

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Introduction

In the conclusion, we piece together each of the pedagogies that fall out of the four doctrines we discuss in the book – the pedagogy of perspectival empathy, the pedagogy of self-overcoming, the pedagogy of emulation and the pedagogy of gratitude – and show how they cohere with Nietzsche’s vision for the good life. We argue that Nietzsche’s educational philosophy is a call for us to educate a new generation of teachers who are committed to the pursuit of embodied wisdom and to bringing about a society organized as a democratic community of learning. In thus drawing inspiration for liberal democratic theory and practice from Nietzsche’s works, this book follows a tradition within Anglo-American philosophy and philosophy of education that has correctly identified Nietzsche’s indispensability for theoretical reflection on the educational challenges of complex multicultural democracies (e.g. Joosten, 2013; Blake, Smeyers, Smith, & Standish, 2012; Church, 2006; Bingham, 2001; Smeyers, 2001; Ramaekers, 2001; Villa, 2000; Schrift, 2000; Sassone, 1996; Owen, 1995; Warren, 1988; Hillesheim, 1986; Connolly, 1981). However, the book sets itself apart from these contributions by providing several novel reinterpretations of Nietzsche’s political philosophy and philosophical anthropology, as well as a concerted effort to draw out the practical consequences of these ideas for pedagogy, student development and learning. In addition, prior work on Nietzsche in philosophy of education has been constrained, with the sole exceptions of Blake, Smeyers, Smith, and Standish (2012) and Cooper (2010), to article-length treatments of Nietzsche’s ideas, making the present work one of the first book-length engagements with Nietzsche’s educational philosophy.

Notes 1 Translation amended. The line in the German runs: “die allerzarteste Technik, die es in einer Kunst geben kann, auf die Technik der Bildung.” The original translation renders “Technik” as “technical science,” which both misconstrues the German and confuses the sentence. “Technik” is much closer to “technique” or, with the increasing industrial progress of the early twentieth century, “technology.” Additionally, to refer to a “science,” the German would almost always use “Wissenschaft” in some form: “Naturwissenschaft,” “Geisteswissenschaft,” etc. Finally, it simply does not make sense that a “technical science” would be “in art” (the original translation omits “an,” which corresponds to “einer”). 2 Throughout his corpus Nietzsche consistently rejects the two principles that would become the ideological foundation of National Socialism: German nationalism and Antisemitism. A passage from Nietzsche’s late work Beyond Good and Evil stands as an ultimate statement of this abiding opposition: “Don’t let in any more Jews! And lock the doors to the east in particular (even to Austria)!” – thus commands the instinct of a people whose nature is still feeble and uncertain, so that it could be easily wiped out, easily extinguished, by a stronger race. The Jews, however, are beyond all doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race at present living in Europe, they know how to succeed even under the worst conditions. . . . The fact that the Jews, if they desired (or if they were forced, as the anti-Semites seem to want), could already be dominant, or indeed could literally have

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control over present-day Europe – this is certain. The fact that they are not working and making plans to this end is likewise certain. . . . [W]hat they wish and want instead . . . is to be absorbed and assimilated into Europe . . . in which case it might be practical and appropriate to throw the anti-Semitic hooligans out of the country. (BGE 251) 3 In this passage from Daybreak, the “man of knowledge” serves as the translation of the German “der Wissende,” which is appropriate given the use of the masculine definite article “der.” However, when “man” occurs in the plural in the English, it is almost always “Menschen” in German, which implies no particular gender. “Mensch” is also often the German of “man,” as in the term Übermensch. Awareness of this translation practice is important, as Nietzsche’s general statements about humanity and culture can show up in the English as unconcerned with or inapplicable to women. Yet the German does not bear this reading out. With this, we do not mean to sweep Nietzsche’s misogynistic excursuses on women under the rug. As grating and offensive as these are, they make up a tiny portion of Nietzsche’s corpus and remain unconnected with his general philosophical positions. 4 Translation amended. See Chapter 3, section “Self-Overcoming as Modified Self-Mastery,” for an explanation of these amendments. 5 The seldom-quoted line after Nietzsche’s famous call to self-creation in The Gay Science states that to become “creators in this sense . . . we must become the best learners and explorers of everything lawful and necessary in the world” (GS 335). This surprising qualification makes sense only if we begin to understand Nietzsche’s call to self-create as a call to a modified notion of self-mastery, one that is carried out in accordance with the new “laws” of moral psychology Nietzsche attempts to formulate throughout his texts. 6 That is, when he is using the term in a normative sense at the level of the individual. Nietzsche does also employ the idea, in connection with the descriptive sense of the will to power, to explain the moral-cultural dynamics of past societies (e.g. GM III:27). 7 “It goes without saying that I do not deny, presupposing I am no fool, that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged – but for different reasons than formerly” (D 101). 8 For others who read Nietzsche as a virtue ethicist, see Alfano (2013); Daigle (2006); Foot (2006); Solomon (2003); Brobjer (2003); Slote (1998); Swanton (1998); Hunt (1991); and Kaufmann (1982).

Chapter 1

The doctrine of perspectivism

Introduction One of Nietzsche’s most famous ideas is his doctrine of perspectivism, the theory that there is no “God’s-eye” view of the world from which reality can be seen in its purest form, untainted by the distortions and limitations of human perception. He famously declares that “there are no facts, only interpretations,” and that “there is only a perspective seeing; only a perspective knowing” (GM III:12). These kinds of statements make excellent sound bites for those who want to praise or blame Nietzsche for being a thoroughgoing relativist. But they are also part of a much more robust and sophisticated thesis on the perspectival nature of human knowledge, which he considers to be fundamental to understanding what human beings are truly capable of learning and knowing. Nietzsche’s broader theory of perspectivism has received considerable scholarly attention from philosophers as well as philosophers of education, although in the case of the latter, the theory is rarely examined in detail. Because of this general neglect, Nietzsche’s perspectivism has become a source of substantial confusion and misunderstanding among philosophers of education. With these problems in mind, this chapter attempts to do two things. The first is to provide a faithful representation of Nietzsche’s epistemology of perspectivism. In doing so, we engage with Stefan Ramaekers’ (2001) interpretation of Nietzsche’s perspectivism, which ascribes to Nietzsche the provocative view that Nietzsche completely dispenses with the categories of “true” and “false” and thus considers the particular socialization one receives to be immaterial for the educational process, so long as it is eventually transcended. The sections following this account aim to show that this picture of Nietzsche’s epistemology is a distorted one. Nietzsche does not promote inculcation into arbitrary cultural paradigms but rather favors those that promote human flourishing. This claim is motivated, first, by a close analysis of the evolution of Nietzsche’s epistemic views throughout his career and an in-depth examination of the infamous 12th section of the third essay in On the Genealogy of Morals, both of which serve to show that Nietzsche retains a concept of “truer” perspectives even as he rejects correspondence theories of truth. Nietzsche believes, in particular, that certain

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psychological states such as resentfulness produce especially distorted perspectives. In other words, individual subjectivity, for Nietzsche, plays a central role in the process of acquiring and internalizing knowledge. This second point, essential for the development of Nietzsche’s educational theory in further chapters, necessitates a close look at Nietzsche’s theory of subjectivity, which occupies the final two sections of the chapter.

Perspectivism according to Ramaekers Unlike the majority of educational theorists who discuss Nietzsche’s perspectivism, Stefan Ramaekers (2001), to his credit, offers an in-depth analysis of Nietzsche’s perspectivist conception of knowledge. Ramaekers’ stated intention in his article is to demonstrate that Nietzsche is not an epistemological relativist. Ramaekers begins this demonstration by claiming, justly, that Nietzsche does not believe that objective truth, traditionally conceived, exists. Nietzsche, it is true, rejects the traditional correspondence theory of truth. In this traditional view, one’s ideas and statements about the world correspond either accurately or inaccurately to reality, to the way things are in the universe. Propositions that reflect reality accurately are true; propositions that reflect reality inaccurately are false. Nietzsche repudiates this view of knowledge because he considers the idea of an external, objective reality unintelligible. It is unintelligible because anytime one experiences an aspect of this supposed objective reality, the aspect is necessarily distorted by virtue of being presented through one’s subjective experience(s). If every time one thinks about or discusses reality it is instantaneously distorted, then it is obvious that one cannot know that such a reality exists at all, because to know it exists is to think about it – which is to say, to distort it. For Nietzsche this means that the distinction between the seeming, subjective world and the true, objective world is nonsensical. As Ramaekers correctly argues: “Nietzsche means that there is no distinction at all between the true world and the seeming one. . . . The opposition between the seeming world and the true world converts into the opposition between ‘world’ and ‘nothing’” (p. 259). Nietzsche made “it unambiguously clear that there are only perspectives. . . . [H]e tried to overcome the opposition between background and foreground, between ‘text’ and ‘interpretation’, between ‘absolute knowing’ and ‘relative knowing’, between the ‘true world’ and the ‘seeming world’” (p. 259). Because these distinctions no longer make sense, the next step in Ramaekers’ argument is to claim that Nietzsche has eliminated any supposed relativity engendered by his position. If all there is are perspectives, Ramaekers argues, one can no longer be mistaken about the way the world is; the absence of a “true” world means that “there is nothing there to be interpreted, there is not something one can tell a lie or be mistaken about” (p. 259). By making this claim, Ramaekers distinguishes himself from what Brian Leiter (1994) calls the “Received View,” which affirms as one of its fundamental premises that

28 The doctrine of perspectivism

Nietzsche believes the world has no “determinate nature or structure” (p. 334). Ramaekers rejects this view because it would imply that Nietzsche believes that there is a world behind our perspectives, even if we can never determine what the structure of that world is. For Nietzsche, there cannot be any world at all behind our perspectives because “there are only perspectives” – full-stop – not perspectives of things. According to Ramaekers, if one understands this principle, “the problem of relativism dissolves naturally with Nietzsche” (p. 265). The final move in Ramaekers’ argument is directly relevant to education. For Ramaekers, after students have been taught to obediently live according to the perspectives – or, as he provocatively puts it, “lies” – that their culture promotes, they are eventually freed (and even encouraged) to recognize that the paradigms (and all paradigms, for that matter) are lies; then, they are expected to modify those lies that they have been taught or create new lies by which they can live (p. 264). For Ramaekers, the content of the initial lie does not matter, so long as students are made to believe it. “In view of the importance Nietzsche attaches to obedience, to being embedded, one should not be surprised that he considers initiating the child into a particular constellation of arbitrary laws to be a natural part of her education” (p. 260). Yet there are several problems with Ramaekers’ attempt to dispel suspicion of Nietzsche’s relativism. First, Ramaekers misleadingly calls cultural perspectives and paradigms “lies.” The use of the word “lie” is misleading for two reasons. The first is that even though Ramaekers is only using the word metaphorically, “lies” might – because it means untruths in the vernacular – come across as meaning something stronger than what Ramaekers intends, thus distorting Nietzsche’s actual position. The second and more important reason is that by using the word “lies” to refer to all epistemological paradigms, Ramaekers fails to acknowledge that Nietzsche believes some paradigms are “truer” than others (from an everyday experience point of view), and therefore to call them lies diminishes the “truth” in them. Thus, while Ramaekers hopes his article will help eliminate the interpretation that Nietzsche is a relativist, it is in danger of doing just the opposite. In addition, and more importantly, Ramaekers does not seem to be aware of the evolution of Nietzsche’s perspectival account of knowledge. When one carefully studies the progression of Nietzsche’s epistemological views, it becomes clear that his rejection of the true-vs.-seeming-world distinction applies only to his later period. As Brian Leiter (1994) argues, Nietzsche rejects the concept of an external reality as unintelligible only in his post-Beyond Good and Evil works. In other words, while his earlier works reject the possibility of ever attaining objective knowledge of the thing-in-itself, or even the knowledge of the existence of the thing-in-itself, it is only in the post-Beyond Good and Evil works that he becomes aware of the implications Ramaekers has justly pointed out, namely that if the “true” world is abolished, then the “false” world must also be. Yet, the elimination of the true world and the seeming world does not mean that Nietzsche cannot affirm any epistemological criteria by which

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we can evaluate truth claims. The fact is that it is precisely because Nietzsche rejects the notions of the true and false world that truth and falsity can be rescued. For Nietzsche, there are indeed only perspectives – but some perspectives can be “truer” than others. This does not mean that they are truer according to the traditional standard of better reflecting “absolute reality,” “reality itself ” or “the really real” but rather that they better reflect our perspectival reality, that is, the reality before us every day. To motivate these counterclaims, both the evolution of Nietzsche’s epistemology as well as his conception of the self must be adequately understood. In what follows, we treat the evolution of Nietzsche’s epistemology first and then provide a reinterpretation of the famous section 12 in the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals where Nietzsche enunciates his mature conception of perspectivism. Thereafter, we offer a comprehensive account of the Nietzschean self, which will support the idea that, for Nietzsche, perspectives are “truer” in the sense of their contribution to individual and cultural empowerment.

The evolution of Nietzsche’s epistemology The evolution of Nietzsche’s epistemology has been treated at considerable length by Maudemarie Clark (1990) and Brian Leiter (1994). Leiter points out that in his early period, Nietzsche “accepted the ‘metaphysical correspondence theory, the conception of truth as correspondence to the thing-in-itself ’” (p. 334). Leiter, following Clark, calls this point of development “Stage I.” Stage I began with Nietzsche’s earliest essays and continued through Human, All Too Human. In Stage I Nietzsche believed that there was an objective reality that stood behind the world of human experience. But because we are forever separated from this objective realm by the subjective nature of our experience, our perceptions are false because they necessarily distort this reality. This concept, first articulated by Kant, is known as the falsification thesis. In the early 1880s, Nietzsche came to reject this conception and moved into “Stage II,” in which he distanced himself entirely from any conception of the thing-in-itself, arguing that it was incoherent. Unfortunately, Nietzsche did not acknowledge that the rejection of the idea of the thing-in-itself necessarily compromised the falsification thesis, which is based on a Kantian duality between the noumenal and phenomenal realms. If all of our perceptions are false, that is to say, they falsify what the world is really like in itself, then there must be some standard by which they are judged false. There must be, in other words, a true reality about which our perceptions are a distortion; that reality is another name for the thing-in-itself. So while Nietzsche denied as incoherent any conception of absolute reality or the thing-in-itself, he implicitly reaffirmed this reality by continuing to hold the falsification thesis. This Stage II inconsistency continued through Beyond Good and Evil, after which Nietzsche finally entered “Stage III” – his mature and final stage. In Stage III, which extends from On the Genealogy of Morals through Ecce Homo, Nietzsche realized the implication of his rejection of the thing-in-itself: if

30 The doctrine of perspectivism

there is no thing-in-itself, then there is no objective reality that our perspectives falsify or distort. The falsification thesis thus no longer holds. The phenomenal world becomes the only world there is. Leiter’s thesis that Nietzsche’s epistemology went through these stages was earlier developed by Maudemarie Clark (1990). Clark illuminates the development of Nietzsche’s philosophy by analyzing the section “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable” in Twilight of the Idols. She argues that Nietzsche’s own philosophy follows the last three phases of this section, the final phase being his ultimate position.1 Clark’s point can be illustrated by examining the final three phases in “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable”: 4

5

6

The true world – unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us? (Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.) The “true” world – an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating – an idea which has become useless and superfluous – consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it! (Bright day; breakfast, return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato’s embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.) The true world – we have abolished. What world remains? The apparent world perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one. (Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA). (TI “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable” 6)

Phase 4 represents the Stage I Nietzsche, in which he holds the metaphysical correspondence theory and believes that our knowledge is true only if it corresponds to the thing-in-itself. Since our knowledge does not accurately reflect the thing-in-itself, it is false. Phase 5 represents the Stage II Nietzsche, in which he realizes that the thing-in-itself is unintelligible since we can have absolutely no accurate knowledge of it, even that it exists.2 However, he keeps writing as though everything is false by virtue of the residue of the falsification thesis, and thus all knowledge claims must be false since they have nothing to which they can correspond. In this phase, Nietzsche has not realized that by denying the thing-in-itself, he must deny this notion of falsity. Phase 6 represents the Stage III Nietzsche who holds that since the notion of an objective world has been abolished, the seeming world must equally be abolished; and if the seeming world is abolished, then it is no longer false – it is the only world we have and thus is true or false in relation only to itself.3 Through this analysis we see that Ramaekers has correctly identified the overarching epistemological framework of Nietzsche’s later works – namely the rejection of the falsification thesis. The difficulty is that Ramaekers states his conclusions only in negative terms. He denies the possibility of objective criteria

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for truth and falsity (based on the rejection of the falsification thesis) without explaining Nietzsche’s new criteria for truth and falsity. By focusing on the fact that “there are only perspectives” in Nietzsche’s Stage III epistemology, Ramaekers simultaneously ignores the equally important fact that some perspectives are “truer” than others in this stage. This oversight is problematic because it may lead readers to believe, in spite of Ramaekers’ good intentions, that Nietzsche’s perspectivism is radically relativistic. They may be led to believe that any perspective is as “true” as any other, which is, as we shall now see, the opposite of Nietzsche’s position.

“Truer” and “falser” perspectives: an analysis of GM III:12 GM III:12 is routinely cited to support relativistic interpretations of perspectivism. Generally speaking, interpreters hoping to demonstrate Nietzsche’s relativism fixate on his famous dictum from this passage: “There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing.’” The use of the italics in “only” and the use of the scare quotes in “knowing” do indeed give the impression that Nietzsche is a relativist. And the fact is that Nietzsche is a relativist if we mean that he does not believe there can be knowledge in the objective, absolute sense. Nevertheless, one need only read the clause that immediately follows this passage to see that Nietzsche’s purported relativism needs qualification. Nietzsche claims that while there is only a perspective seeing and knowing, the more perspectives we have the better: “and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’, be.” From this passage alone we already see a new epistemological criterion developing. Even though there are “only perspectives,” we can accumulate more and more perspectives so that our account of the thing before us gradually becomes more complete. “Objectivity” is given scare quotes because there can be no absolute objectivity, a perspective-neutral, God’s-eye view of things.4 Nonetheless, we can have a more complete, which is to say truer, point of view of the world around us (and not beyond us). Indeed, earlier in the passage Nietzsche even calls for a return to “the real and actual” and to leave our metaphysical “errors” that have taught us to “deny our own reality.” Crucially, Nietzsche calls this denial “a violation and a cruelty against reason – a voluptuous pleasure that reaches its height when the ascetic self-contempt and self-mockery of reason declares:‘there is a realm of truth and being, but reason is excluded from it!’” (GM III:12, emphasis added). This interpretation naturally leads to the question of the basis on which Nietzsche can make such discriminations between reasonable and unreasonable, truer and falser perspectives. If Ramaekers, Leiter and Clark are correct that the rejection of the falsification thesis leads to the impossibility of objective truth, on what grounds can we judge one perspective as epistemically superior, as truer or more complete, in comparison to another? Leiter’s analysis of the

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“optical metaphor” in GM III:12 attempts to answer just this question. We will quote Nietzsche’s metaphor here for clarity’s sake, then move to Leiter’s account: Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject”; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason,” “absolute spirituality,“ “knowledge in itself ”: these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity” be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this – what would that mean but to castrate the intellect? (GM III:12) According to Leiter (1994), the optical metaphor must be broken down into four constituent claims: 1

2

3 4

Necessarily, we see an object from a particular perspective: for example, from a certain angle, from a certain distance, under certain conditions (perspectivism claim). The more perspectives we enjoy – for example, the more angles we see the object from – the better our conception of what the object is actually like will be (plurality claim). We will never exhaust all possible perspectives on the object of vision (infinity claim). There exists a catalogue of identifiable factors that would distort our perspective on the object: for instance, we are too far away or the background conditions are poor (purity claim). (p. 345)

Leiter (1994) then translates these claims into their epistemic analogues: 1 Necessarily, we know an object from a particular perspective: that is, from the standpoint of particular interests and needs (perspectivism claim). 2 The more perspectives we enjoy – for example, the more interests we employ in knowing the object – the better our conception of what the object is like will be (plurality claim).

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3 We will never exhaust all possible perspectives on the object of knowledge (there are an infinity of interpretive interests that could be brought to bear) (infinity claim). 4 There exists a catalogue of identifiable factors that would distort our knowledge of the object: that is, certain interpretive interests and needs will distort the nature of the objects (purity claim). (pp. 345–346)5 As Leiter correctly asserts, these four claims meet the perspectival criteria of GM III:12 as well as all of the other claims about perspectivism found throughout Nietzsche’s later published works. (1) They acknowledge the impossibility of disinterested knowledge. (2) They acknowledge the need for other perspectives. (3) They acknowledge the fact that no knowledge will ever be complete or universal. (4) Most importantly, they also acknowledge the incontrovertible fact that Nietzsche time and time again insists that certain perspectives are objectively better than others. Obviously, the first three premises accord with Ramaekers’ position. The question then remains whether Leiter is right about the fourth (purity) claim. This is the question of epistemic privilege. Are there perspectives that, by virtue of a distorted frame of mind, reflect “reality” less clearly? A look again at GM III:12, where Nietzsche describes individuals who, because of an “incarnate will to contradiction,” cannot but help to “vent their innermost contrariness,” might be enough to show this, but we will advance a few more of the countless examples where Nietzsche rejects certain perspectives because they are, by virtue of a debilitating intellectual weakness, fundamentally distorting and therefore less “false.” Take for instance Nietzsche’s rejection of the perspectives of the theologians in The Antichrist. Nietzsche rejects Christianity for many reasons, but a significant one is that he believes it causes its adherents to be unable to evaluate reality objectively. According to Nietzsche, Christianity shrivels the individual’s self-respect and in so doing encourages them to let their ressentiment distort their naturally affective perspectives. “Whatever a theologian feels to be true must be false: this is almost a criterion of truth. His most basic instinct of self-preservation forbids him to respect reality at any point or even to let it get a word in” (A 9).6 This represents an extremely clear example of Leiter’s purity claim. Nietzsche claims that the theologian’s feeling of truth (his perspective) is false because his selfpreserving instinct is so distorted that he cannot apprehend “reality.” His vision is clouded by his own ressentiment, and thus his perspective is compromised. Ecce Homo reveals another example of the way internal passions can distort our grasp of empirical reality. This time German nationalism is the object of Nietzsche’s censure. He claims that the German nationalists have perpetrated all of the great crimes of the century by their failure to overcome their own internal idealism, which has prevented them from apprehending the truth. All great crimes against culture for four centuries [the German nationalists] have on their conscience. – And the reason is always the same: their innermost cowardice

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before reality, which is also a cowardice before the truth; their untruthfulness that has become instinctive with them; their “idealism.” (EH “The Case of Wagner” 2) In this case, German nationalism has a distorting effect and therefore causes the nationalists’ perspective(s) to be inferior to, say, one whose nationalism is moderated by a number of other perspectives. These are but two of the countless examples of Nietzsche’s rejection of perspectives because they do not align with “reality” or “truth” or “knowledge.” One begins to wonder why Ramaekers has ignored the possibility that some propositions may be truer or more faithful to reality than others.7 A hint of an answer comes when we consider Ramaekers’ contention that students cannot develop greater understandings of truth. He claims that it is important to notice that [the student’s discovery that her socialization has inculcated her with lies] does not lead her towards the truth . . . but rather, room is made for the appreciation of lying as lying. For Nietzsche the only truth there can possibly be in the end is this notion of lying as lying. “I was the first to discover the truth, through the fact that I was the first to experience the lie as lie.” (2001, p. 264) It is the last sentence – which is a quotation from Nietzsche’s notebooks – that seems to throw Ramaekers off. He thinks the passage means that for Nietzsche there is only one truth – that all “truths” are lies. This is a misunderstanding of what Nietzsche means, however. Nietzsche does not mean that he discovered that all supposed truths are necessarily lies but that many of the supposed truths of his culture were lies. He was the first to discover that the “truths” of the ascetic priests, the Kantians, and the German nationalists were lies. In other words, it was only after he scrutinized what these people claimed as true that he began to realize what was true and what was false. He awoke from his own “dogmatic slumber” so that he could arrive at a truer perspective. That this is so can be seen by examining the nearly identical passage that Ramaekers references in support of the previous one. Ramaekers points us to Ecce Homo where Nietzsche echoes the sentiment from his notebooks: It is my fate that I have to be the first decent human being; that I know myself to stand in opposition to the mendaciousness of millennia. – I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies – smelling them out. – My genius is in my nostrils. (EH “Why I Am a Destiny” 1) From this we see that Nietzsche’s perspective is in opposition to the “mendaciousness of millennia”; he opposes the lies of the millennia. Is his perspective

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merely another lie that stands in opposition, or does he conceive his perspective as truer than those of his predecessors? As we read on we recognize that it is the latter. Nietzsche claims that exposing the lies of the culture will lead to a profound upheaval and says: “For all that, I am necessarily also the man of calamity. For when truth enters into a fight with lies of millennia, we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes” (EH “Why I Am a Destiny” 1). Nietzsche understands the truth not because he realized that all supposed truths are lies but because the supposed truths of his culture were lies. Once he became aware of the lies he began to be able to see the truth. His own perspectival vision was cleared of the radically distorting effects found in the cultural decline that he formerly embodied. From the preceding analysis we see that while Ramaekers is correct to suggest that Nietzsche denies, from an absolute point of view, the opposition of knowledge and belief, truth and falsity, appearance and reality, Ramaekers treads on his own dangerously relativistic ground when he fails to acknowledge the possibility that certain perspectives are, from an empirical point of view, truer and more faithful to reality than others. It is precisely because Nietzsche ultimately rejects the distinction between the supposed world and the true world that the possibility is opened up for what we might call his “modified realism.” One perspective is truer than another if it better reflects the empirical reality that is before us every day. To ask the question whether it is really truer is to revert back to Nietzsche’s thought in Stage II, which he himself rejected. There is no such thing as really true or really false – there is just true or false based on observation, reason, experience, education and so on.8 While this account may serve to clarify the relationship between perspectivism and relativism, it still does not quite do justice to the depth and sophistication of Nietzsche’s doctrine of perspectivism. As Nietzsche makes clear in GM III:12, there are certain passions and affects that are especially distorting, thereby making individuals less capable of apprehending the truth. Individuals whose ability to observe and reason well has been clouded by miseducation or a psychologically distorting emotion are less capable of using a variety of perspectives in the service of knowledge, as Nietzsche puts it. Thus, for Nietzsche, knowledge – or, more precisely, our ability to know the world – is intimately tied up with our subjectivity. In other words, in order to access “truer” perspectives, we need to be certain kinds of selves. This statement has clear implications for education, and especially his doctrine of self-overcoming, yet to appreciate its full educational import, we will first need to discuss Nietzsche’s conception of the self.

The Nietzschean self I: the ontological dimension Part of the confusion surrounding Nietzsche’s doctrine of perspectivism can be explained by the general avoidance among philosophers of education of engaging with the Nietzschean self at an ontological level. This neglect is understandable, for piecing together Nietzsche’s often vague accounts of the self into an

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exhaustive theory of subjectivity is a laborious and perhaps even impossible task. In the accounts of the self to be found in Nietzsche’s published works – that is, not in the Nachlass – Nietzsche seems to be ambivalent about how to present the ontology of the self. On the one hand, Nietzsche is anxious to do away with the traditional Cartesian conception of the self that posits an immutable substratum “behind doing, effecting, becoming” (GM I:13). Nietzsche never tires of polemicizing this “atomism of the soul” (BGE 12), as he calls it, and the false doctrine of causality that it underlies (e.g. TI “‘Reason’ in Philosophy” 3). Against this view, Nietzsche outlines a conception of the self as a totality of subconscious drives and affects: “However far a man may go in his self-knowledge, nothing can be more incomplete than his image of the totality of drives which constitute his being” (D 119). Later he calls this image of the self the “soul as a society constructed of our drives and affects” (BGE 12). In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche seems to want to explain subjectivity and its correlate psychological phenomena solely in terms of these drives and affects. Not only does Nietzsche consider “thinking” merely “a relation between these drives” (BGE 36); he even reduces the human will to “fundamentally an affect” (BGE 19).9 Nietzsche goes even further and hypothesizes that these drives and affects are ontologically basic: Assuming that our world of desires and passions is the only thing “given” as real . . . aren’t we allowed to make the attempt and pose the question as to whether something like this “given” isn’t enough to render the so-called mechanistic (and thus material) world comprehensible as well? (BGE 36) Nietzsche answers his own question: “In the end, we are not only allowed to make such an attempt: the conscience of method demands it” (BGE 36).10 With the basic constituents of the self transposed into the realm of the metaphysical, Nietzsche can describe their interaction with his overarching metaphysical principle – the will to power. Thus, the basic constituents of the self struggle against one another to increase their power and dominate the organism (D 109). The self is nothing but the constellation of these struggling drives and affects. As Acampora (2006) puts it, the self is the struggle (p. 326). But, as already mentioned, Nietzsche is ambivalent about this account. Nietzsche’s reductionist account of the self is supposed to simultaneously avoid what he calls “materialistic atomism” (BGE 12), the doctrine that the self can be reduced to independent, ontologically basic constituent parts. In an attempt to reconstruct Nietzsche’s path through these two atomisms, Christoph Cox (1999) develops a comprehensive account of Nietzsche’s theory of subjectivity. The first step in Cox’s account is to show that Nietzsche construes the basic drives and affects that make up the self as relational forces rather than substantial elements (contra materialistic atomism). These drives and affects are, at base, “an organic form of the basic ‘force-points’ posited by Boscovich to replace the

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materialist atom. . . . They are, as it were, temporary dams or accumulations of force rather than subsisting entities” (p. 128). The second step is to show that Nietzsche conceives of the subject as an “achieved, accomplished, produced, constructed” phenomenon rather than a “given” or “atomic” entity (contra soul atomism). According to Cox’s reading, the basic affective elements of the self produce the subject’s perspectives of their own accord; “the subject does not have” them (p. 137). For this, Cox relies on the close link between the concepts of “affect” and “interpretation” especially in The Will to Power, which, according to Cox, demonstrates the basic interpretive quality of the affects. If affects are already “interpretative,” this means that the perspectives that they eventually yield are not the products of the subject’s conscious interpretation but the source of its interpretations. Finally, Cox concludes that the unity of the self is nothing but “the result of the ordering, organizing, and subordinating power of the dominant affective interpretation” (p. 132). As such, Cox argues against previous interpretations of Nietzsche’s theory of subjectivity that have relied too much on the “plurality claim” of GM III:12, i.e. that the individual can accumulate multiple perspectives on a given object and therefore gain a more “objective” view of things. Cox contends that interpreters who grant the self the ability to accumulate perspectives in this way are committed to a view of the self as a “central, stable subject” (p. 122) in which these perspectives accumulate, a conception of the self that Nietzsche rejects. There are several problems with Cox’s argument against an “active” Nietzschean self, i.e. a self that is more than a mere product of its interpretive affects. First of all, Cox assumes that the “central, stable self ” in which accumulated perspectives (somehow) inhere is identical with the Cartesian subject that Nietzsche repudiates. In other words, for Cox, perspectival accumulation and Nietzsche’s repudiation of soul atomism are logically incompatible. However, Nietzsche himself is not aware of this alleged incompatibility. In fact, earlier in the passage from On the Genealogy of Morals, in which Nietzsche promotes perspectival accumulation, Nietzsche repudiates soul atomism. “Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject’” (GM III:12). Nietzsche does not seem to believe these two theses to be incompatible, nor do we have any reason to believe them so. Accumulation does not imply a static, atomistic self. A second major problem with Cox’s argument is that it ignores further textual instances of perspectival accumulation and the “optical analogy” from GM III:12. It may be tempting to assume that this passage is merely an isolated analogical experiment gone awry, but Nietzsche repeatedly stresses the importance of perspectival accumulation for acquiring knowledge and power. In the preface to Human, All Too Human published just a year before On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche invokes the concept twice. Nietzsche writes, “[I]t is still a long road . . . to that mature freedom of spirit which . . . permits access to many and contradictory modes of thought” (HH P:4).11 Two sections later, Nietzsche

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explains “how power and right and spaciousness of perspective grow into the heights together” (HH P:6). Furthermore, Nietzsche employs an identical analogy in section 249 of The Gay Science. The final problem with Cox’s task to reconstruct Nietzsche’s theory of subjectivity without the notion of an “active” self is that it simply does not do justice to the bulk of Nietzsche’s philosophical writings, which continually appeal to the reader to take up the task of changing their lives for the better. Even in Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche seems to be thinking in a particularly reductionistic mode, he states explicitly that the active self or soul need not be completely done away with. In the same breath that Nietzsche rejects soul atomism, he also claims that “there is absolutely no need to give up ‘the soul’ itself, and relinquish one of the oldest and most venerable hypotheses – as often happens with naturalists” (BGE 12). Nietzsche’s musings on the basic constituents of the self are meant to shake us out of our own dogmatic slumber about human psychology, laying bare the extent to which we are truly determined, controlled and constructed beings, but not to smother us in a deterministic and naturalistic reductionism that does away with all sense of control over the perspectives we choose. Thus, although Cox is correct in his presentation of the Nietzschean self as a constellation of affects, his rejection of perspectival accumulation is not conclusive. Thus, the question remains as to which options for the ontology of the Nietzschean self are still tenable. One most compelling option – and the one we explore later – is the construal of the self as an agonistic, mutable constellation of affects with the ability to accumulate perspectives.12

The Nietzschean self II: the social dimension By accounting for the ontological makeup of the Nietzschean self, we have come far in our efforts to define the elusive Nietzschean “self.” But we are not finished yet. If we take a moment to reflect on our own selves as they are right now, we do not seem to notice the incessant rumblings of an agonistic, affective self, as the ontological formula discussed previously suggests we should. In all that we do, think and feel it seems like some more or less static subject – namely “I” – is willfully doing, creatively thinking and spontaneously feeling. Internally, we seem to be Cartesian subjects. And yet, when we turn a watchful eye upon ourselves, we begin to observe uncanny regularities in our doings, recurring clichés in our thoughts and predictable fluctuations in our feelings. Suddenly, we seem to consist of habits and mannerisms, thoughts and beliefs, hopes and dreams, the contents of which have been influenced by the social environment in which we have been educated. The customs of the family, the decrees of the state, the dogmas of the church, the teachings of the school – each of these institutions has molded our identity in some way. As social animals, it is our fate. Hence what is missing in Nietzsche’s ontological presentation of the self so far is an account of its sociality. Luckily, Nietzsche does provide a compelling

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account of the social character of the self elsewhere in his corpus. In an aphorism entitled “On the ‘Genius of the Species,’” Nietzsche attempts to trace the very origin of the sociality of self. Along the way, Nietzsche reveals a critical threshold in the anthropological history of humankind: the threshold at which our ancestors lost the direct guidance of our “unconscious and infallible drives” and were “reduced to their ‘consciousness,’ their weakest and most fallible organ” (GM II:16). What triggered this fateful development? The development of consciousness out of social need

In order to answer this question adequately, let us take a look at Nietzsche’s own words on the emergence of consciousness in the human species. In brief, the development of language and the development of consciousness . . . go hand in hand. . . . The emergence of our sense impressions into our own consciousness, the ability to fix them and, as it were, exhibit them externally, increased proportionately with the need to communicate them to others by means of signs. The human being inventing signs is at the same time the human being who becomes ever more keenly conscious of himself. It was only as a social animal that man acquired self-consciousness. (GS 354) Nietzsche couples the emergence of consciousness with the social need for linguistic expression. Nietzsche’s genealogy of language and consciousness proceeds as follows.13 Under the duress of scarce resources and hostile predators, the life of pre-conscious humans was an unremitting struggle for survival. This “most endangered animal . . . needed help and protection, he needed his peers” (GS 354). Securing help from peers was no easy task, however. Pre-conscious humans needed to learn to translate their feelings of pain, hunger and anxiety into understandable commands that would, in turn, motivate their peers to ameliorate their distress.14 For this translation to be possible, they needed to “know” themselves and what distressed them; they needed to “know” how they felt; they needed to “know” what they thought. In a word, they needed consciousness.15 Once the exigencies of their predicament finally yielded this “self-knowledge,” now-conscious humans could at last “express [their] distress.” Of course these expressions initially took on very primitive forms, but as the hostility of conditions and need for further cooperation persisted, more and more sophisticated forms of expression were required: “Where need and distress have forced men for a long time to communicate and understand each other quickly and subtly the ultimate result is an excess of this strength and art of communication” (GS 354) Thus, grimaces and gesticulations became standardized “signs of communication” and “words” that, in turn, were able to represent a vast spectrum of feelings, desires and needs.

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Does Nietzsche, then, grant the self a sort of intuitive, pre-conscious knowledge? After all, it seems from the previous discussion that we can “know” our feelings and the sources of our distress prior to our “translation” of them into signs of communication. However, Nietzsche has couched the word “know” in scare quotes for good reason. The “knowledge” that Nietzsche is referring to arises purely in the context of communication; that is, we have knowledge of our feelings and sources of distress only insofar as that knowledge is necessary for communication and survival. As Nietzsche puts it, “We simply lack any organ for knowledge . . . we ‘know’ (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species.” We cannot know any more about these objects of interest because “consciousness does not really belong to man’s individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature. . . . [I]t has developed subtlety only insofar as this is required by social or herd utility.” Thus, conscious thinking is not translated into signs of communication at all. Conscious thinking is just these signs of communication: “[C]onscious thinking occurs in words, that is to say signs of communication” (GS 354). The superficial and perspectival nature of consciousness

The close connection Nietzsche forges between language and consciousness has several important consequences for Nietzsche’s philosophy of mind. In particular, Nietzsche believes that conscious thought, as serving a merely social function, is ineluctably superficial and perspectival. This is the essence of phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand them: Owing to the nature of animal consciousness, the world of which we can become conscious is only a surface-and sign-world, a world that is made general and meaner. (GS 354)16 The influence of Nietzsche’s Stage II epistemology – viz. the remnants of Nietzsche’s belief in the falsification thesis – is quite obvious in this passage, but the important point for Nietzsche’s theory of subjectivity is that the signs of communication in which conscious thought is necessarily rendered are incomplete generalizations of reality. The vast “continuum” of detail with which we interact is funneled into the conceptual framework provided by the finite number of general signs. Although generalization ensures common understanding, the infinite detail of the world thereby undergoes a “reduction to superficialities” (GS 354). But this should not surprise us. As we have seen, language did not evolve for the purpose of reflecting this infinite detail but for communicating as quickly and efficiently as necessary to ensure cooperation in the linguistic community (GS 111). The generalizing nature of language explains why we need ever more perspectives to fill out our view of the world (i.e. the infinity claim of perspectivism).

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A question arises. Could we not simply begin to multiply the signs, words and concepts in our language in order to enrich our expressive abilities? Could we not invent new words that are more sensitive to the detail of the world? Katsafanas (2005) answers these questions insightfully. We already do invent more precise signs, words and concepts for explaining experience; this is the business of the sciences. However, this approach can take us only so far in our search for knowledge, for the words we use to communicate, no matter how precise, represent only one particular mode of generalizing the detail of the world (Katsafanas, 2005, p. 17). Our language is one among many, and each offers its own, unique conceptual machinery for understanding experience. That is to say, our language necessarily limits the set of possible perspectives we can have on the world. Nietzsche illustrates this point clearly in his discussion of the remarkable “family resemblance” of philosophies derived from the same language group in Beyond Good and Evil. We will quote at length, for the passage succinctly reflects much of the previous discussion. Under an invisible spell, [philosophers] will each start out anew, only to end up revolving in the same orbit once again. . . . [S]omething leads them into a particular order, one after the other, and this something is precisely the innate systematicity and relationship of concepts. In fact, their thinking is not nearly as much a discovery as it is a recognition, remembrance, a returning and homecoming into a distant, primordial, total economy of the soul, from which each concept once grew. . . . Where there are linguistic affinities, then because of the common philosophy of grammar . . . everything lies ready from the very start for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems; on the other hand, the way seems as good as blocked for certain other possibilities of interpreting the world. Philosophers of the Ural-Altaic language group . . . are more likely to “see the world” differently. (BGE 20) Thus, our conscious apprehension of reality is not only generalized; it is also perspectival. Conscious thought constrained to one set of linguistic perspectives consists in nothing but the “perspective of the herd” (GS 354). The superfluity of consciousness

There is one more aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy of mind that is necessary to mention before drawing out the consequences of this analysis for Nietzsche’s theory of subjectivity. Namely, Nietzsche believes, provocatively, that consciousness is superfluous. “The problem of consciousness,” Nietzsche writes, “first confronts us when we begin to realize how much we can do without it” (GS 354). But how much can we really do without our consciousness? Nietzsche answers: “[W]e could think, feel, will, remember and also ‘act’ in every sense of

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the term, and yet none of all this would have to ‘enter our consciousness’” (GS 354). How are we to understand such a claim? Is consciousness for Nietzsche merely an epiphenomenon – without causal efficacy? With this question we again return to the issue of Nietzsche’s reductionism. What seems clear from Nietzsche’s theory of mind and essential for our present discussion is that he does not believe our conscious thoughts, beliefs, feelings and wills – perspectives, for short – to be the proper causal antecedents of our behavior. As we have seen in the previous section, Nietzsche wants to explain all of human behavior with the fundamental elements of the self – that is, its affects. These are the true causal antecedents of behavior for Nietzsche. Crucially, however, this is not to say that conscious perspectives have no effect on human behavior. On the contrary, Nietzsche believes that conscious mental states can become causally efficacious, but, as Riccardi (2013) has pointed out, their content must first be “reshaped so as to figure as the content of the unconscious and intentionally structured drives which actually determine . . . agency” (p. 20). This “reshaping” is the process that Nietzsche variously refers to as “internalization,” “incorporation” or “in-animation” (Riccardi, 2013, pp. 19–20; e.g. GS 11; GM II). Only after internalizing the perspectives that we encounter in social intercourse can they come to guide the activity of our constituent affects.17 To put this another way, Nietzsche’s perspectivism, combined with his theory of subjectivity, turns out to be a quasi-Aristotelian defense of the importance of (re-)habituation in the learning process. If an idea or conscious perspective is to truly change who we are and what we do, then it must be deeply internalized within the affective substructure of the self. Our learning experiences must deeply affect us, to use this term in a double sense. Nietzsche’s perspectivism thus leads directly to the implication that the acquisition of knowledge requires a particularly robust form of epistemic engagement. The nature of this engagement is spelled out in the following chapter.

Conclusion With the ontological and social dimensions of the Nietzschean self in place, we are now in a position to understand what might be called the “educational meaning” of perspectivism. Perspectives are the conscious expressions of the individual’s affective energy and as such the vehicle by which the affective substructure of the self can be modified. Though this may seem an abstract formula, it is crucial for understanding the educational lessons we can draw from perspectivism. Contrary to relativistic readings of Nietzsche’s perspectivism, Nietzsche wants to do away with fundamentally detrimental perspectives that, when internalized, disempower individual agency. He is therefore committed to an educational program that cannot abide a process of socialization into just any cultural paradigm, but only one that will promote students’ ability to see the world in truer and more empowering ways. Although Ramaekers (2001) was correct to point out that Nietzsche wants educated individuals to

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eventually overcome their cultural paradigms to the degree that those paradigms are life-denying, Nietzsche is very clear that this should happen only after they have learned to observe, think and express themselves in coherent and selfempowering ways. Individuals who overcome their cultural paradigms without knowing how to engage with ideas in a productive manner will lead themselves and their culture only into further decline. Culture is not elevated when students reject one arbitrary cultural perspective in favor of an equally arbitrary one but when they are educated into powerful ways of thinking that can help them reject the decadence in their culture and in themselves and promote new artistic, ethical and intellectual expressions of power and beauty. Only a disciplined and well-rounded education based on a rigorous engagement with exemplary works of the past and present will achieve this end. What kinds of contents and pedagogical methods does an education like this specifically entail? This question will occupy us in the next chapter.

Notes 1 In an earlier work, John Wilcox (1974, p. 123) offers a similar assessment. 2 While Clark (1990) and Leiter (1994) focus on Nietzsche’s rejection of the thing-initself because of its incoherence, there is perhaps an even stronger current in Nietzsche’s thought that he rejected the thing-in-itself in Stage II for its uselessness and superfluity. For a detailed examination of Nietzsche’s rejection of the thing-in-itself, see Poellner (1995, pp. 87–91). 3 Clark (1990) further demonstrates Nietzsche’s change of perspective on the falsification thesis by pointing out that in his post-Beyond Good and Evil works (On the Genealogy of Morals, The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, The Antichrist and Ecce Homo) he completely drops his concerns to repudiate the possibility for knowledge, and instead affirms truth claims time and time again. In other words, the skepticism about the possibility of any knowledge whatsoever that we find in his pre-GM works can no longer be found in his mature works. For a thoughtful response to Clark’s reading see R. Lanier Anderson’s (1996) challenge to Clark’s inference about the absence of skeptical claims by Nietzsche in his post-Beyond Good and Evil works. He suggests that this is less about a fundamental change in Nietzsche’s epistemology and more about a waning interest in discussing such topics. 4 At this point this interpretation is in agreement with Ramaekers (2001). He says: “Nor does Nietzsche’s perspectivism mean that a multiplicity of perspectives should be combined to form a kind of universal overview of the world or a universally valid perspective” (p. 259). However, the following sentence is where the interpretation presented in this paper departs from Ramaekers. 5 The two other claims Leiter identifies are what he calls the infinity claim, “We will never exhaust all possible perspectives on the object of knowledge”; and the purity claim, “There exists a catalogue of identifiable factors that would distort our knowledge of the object; that is, certain interpretive interests and needs will distort the nature of the objects.” 6 Nietzsche’s rejection of Christianity is (in)famous. His critiques are sometimes strident to the point of absurdity, such as the claim here that whatever a theologian believes is true must necessarily be false. Obviously, this is absurd. A theologian who believes that 2 + 2 = 4 is certainly not uttering a falsehood. Of course, Nietzsche’s point is not meant to be taken as literally true – it is meant to be provocative and suggestive of the distorting influence

44 The doctrine of perspectivism Christianity practiced in a certain way can have on certain people. Using these provocative claims is part of Nietzsche’s style – he wants to provoke the readers into reflection on their ultimate values. But it is important to distinguish Nietzsche’s style and what he actually believes about the groups he attacks, such as the Jews, the Germans, the Buddhists, the Socialists, the Christians and the countless other groups. For example, Nietzsche does not believe all Christians are the same. He distinguishes Christians who have adopted an anemic, popular brand of Christianity from more “serious” Christians – those who take Jesus’ claims seriously and rigorously attempt to live according to them. He says, for example: When I wage war against Christianity I am entitled to this because I have never experienced misfortunes and frustrations from that quarter – the most serious Christians have always been well disposed toward me. I myself, an opponent of Christianity de rigueur, am far from blaming individuals for the calamity of millennia. (EH “Why I Am So Wise” 7) “What to do in order to believe?” – an absurd question. What is wrong with Christianity is that it refrains from doing all those things that Christ commanded should be done. (WP 194) Christians have never put into practice the acts Jesus prescribed for them, and the impudent chatter about “justification by faith” and its unique and supreme significance is only the consequence of the church’s lack of courage and will to confess the works Jesus demanded. (WP 190) It is false to the point of nonsense to find the mark of the Christian in a “faith,” for instance, in the faith in redemption through Christ: only Christian practice, a life such as he lived who died on the cross, is Christian. Such a life is still possible today, for certain people even necessary: genuine, original Christianity will be possible at all times. Not a faith, but a doing; above all, a not doing of many things, another state of being. . . . To reduce being a Christian, Christianism, to a matter of considering something true, to a mere phenomenon of consciousness, is to negate Christianism. (A 39) Throughout this book, Nietzsche will attack Christians and other groups, but it is important to recognize that he does not necessarily mean exactly what he says, and we shouldn’t regard what he says as reflecting the thoughts, motivations and attitudes of those groups upon which he casts aspersions. 7 Of course, we must always recall that by “truth” and “reality,” Nietzsche does not mean a kind of thing-in-itself, or the “really real.” “Truth” and “reality” refer to the reality before us, not some sort of transcendent reality that we can never access because of our embeddedness. 8 In illuminating the empirical grounds for Nietzsche’s modified realism it should not be inferred that he is unwilling to defend moral, aesthetic and metaphysical truth claims. Nietzsche does think that certain artistic expressions are superior to others and certain moralities are superior to others and certain metaphysics are superior to others. These remain under the purview of his modified realism in that they are based on empirical observation combined with the critical faculty found in the use of reason. Interpreters like Leiter and Clark, while their exegeses are excellent for the most part, do not sufficiently illuminate this aspect of Nietzsche’s thought, implying that he is something more like an empiricist in the mold of Hume.

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9 The conception of the Nietzschean self as a constellation of drives and affects has become the standard account in general Nietzsche scholarship. The conception is defended by such authors as Christa Acampora (2006, pp. 314–333); Cox (1999); Brian Leiter (2006, pp. 281–321); and John Richardson (2001, pp. 150–185). The conception is implicit in Eliyahu Rosenow’s earlier study (1989, pp. 307–316). Other educational theorists – Aharon Aviram (1991, pp. 219–234) and Charles Bingham (2001, pp. 337–352), for example – have based their interpretations of self-overcoming on a more constructivist view of the Nietzschean self, thus disregarding his rather frequent references to the affective substructure of the self. 10 The experimental hue of this passage should be noted. Much of Nietzsche’s later discussion of the self featured in his published works strikes a similarly hypothetical tone. This is most obvious in sections 12 and 36 of Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche’s explicit presentations of the self and the ontological structure of the world thus take on the character of working hypotheses rather than foundational premises of a metaphysical system. However, Nietzsche would not have us place his hypotheses on par with, say, Cartesian atomism. “[T]he conscience of method,” Nietzsche writes, necessitates our view of the world as a “life of the drives” (BGE 36; see Leiter, 2002 for a discussion of Nietzsche’s naturalistic commitment to a scientific method of inquiry). In contrast, his notes from this period adopt a more sure-footed tone, discussing the metaphysical properties of affects and the affective structure of perspectives (see Cox, 1999, pp. 127–128). We take this contrast to indicate a hesitancy with his reductive theory of subjectivity in light of his rejection of materialism. For further discussion of Nietzsche’s experimentalism, see Kaufmann (1982, pp. 198–227). 11 With the invocation of the concepts of “self-mastery” and “contradictory modes of thought” we hear the first echoes in the middle period of the ideal that was established in the early period. 12 Following Cox’s terminology, we will henceforth refer to occurrences of “affects,” “drives,” “passions,” “instincts,” “desires,” “powers,” “forces” and “impulses” in Nietzsche’s text simply as “affects” (1999, p. 127). As Cox explains in the paragraph that follows, “[t]hese affects are as close as one comes to a ‘bottom floor’ in Nietzsche’s multi-leveled theory of subjectivity” (1999, p. 127). 13 Nietzsche’s theory of consciousness remains operative throughout his later works as well. See Katsafanas (2005, pp. 1–31) and Riccardi (2013). 14 It should be noted that social cooperation, for Nietzsche, emerges as a relationship between stronger and weaker natures rather than as one between reciprocating equals, established by social contract. See GM II:17. 15 More precisely we might say that pre-conscious humans needed a “higher-order representation.” Drawing from current philosophy of mind, Riccardi (2013) argues that a mental state M becomes conscious “when it is ‘indexed’ by a higher-order representation (HOR) of some kind which signalizes to one that one is in M” (p. 6). The particular HOR that Riccardi ascribes to Nietzsche is a higher-order thought (HOT) as evidenced by the fact that Nietzsche ties the emergence of consciousness with the ability to “‘know’ what he thought” (GS 354). Thus, it is this HOT that evolved out of the predicament of early human beings. 16 Translation amended. Kaufmann translates verallgemeinerte as “made common” in this passage, ignoring that the root of the word – allgemein – can also mean “general” or “universal.” 17 How Nietzsche conceptualizes the psychological and physiological processes at play in internalizing perspectives is still very much an open question in general scholarship on Nietzsche. For a sample of the multitude of interpretations of the process and its import for Nietzsche’s views on free will and autonomy, see Gemes and May (2011).

Chapter 2

Educational implications of perspectivism Empathizing with the other

Introduction With a comprehensive understanding of Nietzsche’s perspectivism in place, we are now in a position to discuss some important educational implications that can be drawn from it. As we saw in the previous chapter, perspectivism is an epistemological concept that has to do with gaining increasingly truer understandings of the world by examining as many facets of an object of knowledge as possible. From this formula, which required some exegetical motivation in light of Nietzsche’s unjustified reputation as a relativist, we drew two important conclusions for education. First, because Nietzsche thinks that there are certain perspectives, worldviews and ways of life that are “truer” and more conducive to flourishing than others, we concluded that the educational process should direct us towards these empowering perspectives and away from those that make us weaker and less flourishing. One’s inculcation into a particular worldview, in other words, is not an arbitrary exercise. Rather, Nietzsche favors inculcation into an educational paradigm that is deeply influenced by classical culture, in particular the culture of ancient Greece, which placed immense value on artistic expression and embodied self-cultivation. This inculcation prepares us to be the good thinkers, inquirers and reasoners that Nietzsche thinks we should become. We will pick up this important thread in Chapter 4. In the present chapter, we examine the second educational conclusion to be drawn from Nietzschean perspectivism. Because, for Nietzsche, our conscious perspectives are, in a certain sense, “surface phenomena,” i.e. manifestations of deeper affects that Nietzsche considers to be the true motive forces of thought and action, we concluded that a change in the way we think and act requires deep engagement with perspectives different than our own. In this chapter, we show that this result has significant consequences for democratic education in particular. Namely, we argue that Nietzschean perspectivism can teach us crucial lessons about how to conduct cross-cultural dialogue and empathy in modern democratic schools. The argument of the chapter proceeds as follows. After discussing the connection between dialogue, empathy and perspectivism in the first section, the

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rest of the chapter is concerned with developing a Nietzschean “pedagogy of perspectival empathy” based on the three methods of robustly engaging with perspectives that Nietzsche offers his readers.1 In particular, we demonstrate that, for Nietzsche, there are three senses of “seeing” perspectivally that are relevant to the empathy-promoting classroom: (1) learning to heed the many perspectives that arise from our own subjective interests, (2) learning new ways to conceptualize our experience through learning foreign languages and (3) learning to seek out, internalize and live the perspectives of others that empower us as individuals. Building upon these three Nietzschean pedagogical pillars, we turn to Megan Laverty’s (2007) recent attempt to formulate a pedagogy of empathy based on philosophical dialogue, showing that in spite of its merits it cannot ultimately offer students as robust a way of empathizing with the perspectives of others as Nietzsche’s pedagogy of perspectival empathy does. The robustness of this pedagogy is crucial, we argue, for the educational experiences it affords students can help them to engage with others across the deep cultural, political and philosophical divides that define modern multicultural democracies.

The challenge of passive empathy It has become commonplace in the contemporary discussion of democratic education to stress the importance of learning to “see the world through the eyes of others.” Not only must we learn that a variety of respectable perspectives exist on the matters that concern us most – that is, not only must we learn to tolerate competing religious, political and ethical doctrines – we must also learn to employ these perspectives to enrich our own experience of the world. Such exercises are thought to be crucial for modern multicultural democracies, for they teach their practitioners to appreciate the complexity of the many ways humans have come to cope with their existential worries and to formulate their hopes. On the foundation of this mutual respect, democratic societies promote the formation of public spaces where individuals can share their perspectives and undertake collective projects to act upon those they have in common. For many theorists, the school is where children are to be prepared for their participation in public life and thus where this robust form of civic engagement is to be learned. In other words, it is a central aim of democratic education to cultivate a special form of other-directed understanding, or what we might call “perspectival empathy,” so that political action appropriately responds to the concerns of diverse others. This perspectival empathy, i.e. the willingness and ability to see the world through the eyes of others, is thus a cornerstone of civic engagement. Maxine Greene (1978) sounds the call for perspectival empathy in her influential work Landscapes of Learning. She writes, A political realm . . . cannot exist unless the individuals involved are able to make the kinds of judgments that transcend personal subjectivity. It cannot

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exist unless the participants see things as persons located in a concrete social reality – persons with the capacity to look through the perspectives of those around them. (p. 89) Dialogue, on account of its intersubjective, participatory and cooperative nature, is often considered to be the preferred pedagogical method for teaching students this perspectival empathy. The dynamic arena of ideas created in dialogue provides a space for students to begin understanding the unique perspectives of others and for the others to respond. Only within this dialectic of understanding and response can genuine empathy be developed. As Susan Verducci (1999) puts it, “[m]oral empathy maintains stringent standards of confirmation; it requires dialogic confirmation from the other” (p. 340).2 However natural the connection between dialogue and perspectival empathy may seem, it has recently been met with fierce opposition. Elizabeth Ellsworth’s (1989) essay “Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering?” is perhaps the most famous polemic against democratic dialogue. In the piece, Ellsworth criticizes dialogical pedagogies for disregarding the necessarily insurmountable epistemological and cultural barriers separating members of socially diverse groups. Ellsworth understands dialogue as a tool of domination, one that forces individuals who cannot or dare not speak to members of dominant social groups to reveal the idiosyncrasies of their perspectives. This coercion, brought on by even well-meaning teachers, is at best disrespectful of an oppressed people’s right to be silent; at worst, it is “voyeuristic” (p. 311). Against dialogical pedagogies, Ellsworth implores educators to adopt a “pedagogy of the unknowable,” which creates spaces for students to “talk back” to dominant social groups and thereby demand their respect, rather than flatter their understanding (p. 318). Alison Jones (1999) further articulates Ellsworth’s pedagogy of the unknowable, arguing that democratic dialogue is not only voyeuristic but imperialistic – an attempt to storm the epistemological borders of people’s thoughts, cultures and lives and take the spoils for our own. Dialogue thus serves as a “strategy of surveillance and exploitation” that merely “reassures the authority of the colonizer” (Jones, 1999, p. 309). Jones explains the imperialistic will to dialogue as issuing from a self-conscious insecurity with the limits of our knowledge. According to Jones, we must come to terms with these limits and accept the silence of the other as an “exclusion from – [an] inability to hear – the voice of the marginalized” (p. 307). Finally, Megan Boler (1997) problematizes the dialogue–empathy connection from an angle opposite to that of Ellsworth and Jones. In her article “The Risks of Empathy” Boler questions whether even an explicit effort to develop empathy in students can accomplish the democratic aims it purports to serve. For Boler, empathic pedagogies tend to promote a merely “passive” form of empathy and encourage only a mindless appropriation and disposal of others’ perspectives. Thus, they fail to “challenge rigid patterns of thinking that perpetuate injustice.” Boler doubts that this empathy “leads to anything close

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to justice, to any shift in existing power relations” (p. 255). Like Ellsworth and Jones, Boler proposes a pedagogy that focuses on epistemological limitation and estrangement in relation to the object of study and that eschews the “easy consumption” of perspectives encouraged by passive empathy (p. 266). What are we to make of this challenge from critical pedagogy? Are we hopelessly confined to a subset of perspectives that cordon us off into epistemologically isolated genders, classes and races? Should we abandon the ideal of democratic dialogue in light of these epistemological differences and embrace instead a pedagogy of estranged “talking back”? Is the empathy sought after in dialogue doomed to remain consumptive and passive? These are difficult questions, and any pedagogy hoping to employ dialogue for teaching genuine perspectival empathy must face them squarely. Surprisingly perhaps, it is precisely here that Nietzsche – though not often mentioned in democratic educational circles – can be of some assistance. Nietzsche’s perspectivism is especially well suited to address the challenges of the critical pedagogues, for it anticipates the perspectival standpoint epistemology that underlies their critiques. As we saw in the previous chapter, although Nietzsche obviously rejects standard correspondence theories of truth, he patently denies that his perspectivism entails cultural relativism, a doctrine that seems to lurk in the background of the attacks on dialogical and empathic pedagogy from critical pedagogy. For Nietzsche, learning to see through different perspectives is a crucial activity for increasing the “objectivity” of our experience of the world. But what exactly does it mean to “see through different perspectives”? If this empathic ability is as crucial to democratic educational theory as theorists like Maxine Greene suggest, then this metaphor must be translated into a more concrete and practicable quality that educators can endeavor to cultivate in their classrooms. As we will show, Nietzsche’s three senses of seeing through different perspectives or “eyes” yield a content-laden pedagogy of perspectival empathy, one that has the potential to avoid the disengaged “passive empathy” that Boler criticizes.

Three senses of perspectival seeing In order to concretize what it means to “see through different eyes,” we will have to return to Nietzsche’s “optical analogy” in GM III:12, which we discussed in the previous chapter. As we recall the passage, Nietzsche is adamant about rejecting “contradictory concepts” such as “pure reason” or “knowledge in itself,” for he believes that abiding such concepts amounts to the postulation of an “eye turned in no particular direction.” As Nietzsche aptly observes, however, an unturned eye is an “absurdity and a nonsense.” According to Nietzsche, the eye that turns and truly sees something is necessarily guided by the “active and interpreting forces” or “affects,” which decisively shape the content of the subject’s perception (GM III:12). There is no escaping the formative influence

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of these forces and affects, for Nietzsche believes them to be the fundamental elements of the self. Under this conception of the self, it is clear why Nietzsche condemns the desire to eliminate the will from our perceptions of the world. Any attempt to eliminate its influence – that is, any attempt to choke off the influence of the affects – would severely weaken the structural integrity of the self; it would “castrate the intellect,” as Nietzsche puts it. Indeed, Nietzsche argues in the passage that we enrich our experience of reality by taking heed of the various affective elements of our selves and the diverse perspectives that they produce. He writes, “the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, the different eyes . . . the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be” (ibid.). It is only in countenancing these various perspectives that we can approach objective knowledge about the world. Thus, according to Nietzsche’s perspectivist epistemology, we can already say that seeing through different perspectives means (1) allowing the various affective elements of our self to shape our conscious perception of reality into their characteristic perspectives and, subsequently, (2) employing these various perspectives in order to fill out the detail of the world around us. This is not to give free reign to our volatile affects, to our “sinister impulses” and “hidden desires,” as previous interpreters such as Eliyahu Rosenow (1989, p. 311) have suggested. “Learning to see,” Nietzsche writes, requires accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides. That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts. (TI “What the Germans Lack” 6) In order, then, to ensure that our attempts at seeing the world with different eyes are not just arbitrary, kaleidoscopic alterations of viewpoint, but shifts of perspective that are truly productive of knowledge, we must first be prepared to look within ourselves to discover which affective constituents are active and steadily to allow the many subjective perspectives they produce to inform our perception of the world. “To see what is,” Nietzsche declares, “[o]ne must know who one is” (TI “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” 7).3 Yet this is not the only sense in which one can learn to see perspectivally for Nietzsche. The next method of seeing perspectivally becomes clear when we reexamine the social dimension of Nietzsche’s conception of the self. To recall, we said in the previous chapter that the affective substructure of the self always manifests itself in a perspective and that the causal ground of human behavior is, for Nietzsche, just this substructure. Thus, it seems perfectly superfluous to say, “there is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing,’” and introduce

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the concept of the perspective, when Nietzsche could presumably have said, “there is only an affective seeing, only an affective ‘knowing.’” Put differently, why must we perceive reality through perspectives rather than directly with the affects? The answer to this question can be addressed after making a brief observation. When we perceive our surroundings with the intention of enriching our experience of them, we must necessarily actuate our consciousness. This is plain: acts of volition are conscious by definition. But now we have ventured into the choppy water of Nietzsche’s theory of consciousness. In the section from The Gay Science discussed in the previous chapter, Nietzsche argues that conscious thought arose to assist in social survival, not to capture the rich complexity of experience. It is therefore confined by the language in which it is conducted (GS 354). Although this observation may seem like a criticism of our all-too-human cognitive limitations, it can in fact be illuminated in a much more constructive light. A particular language represents one social group’s unique way of consciously conceptualizing their experience. That is to say, a particular language is an assemblage of conscious perspectives that represent the shared experience of a social group. When individuals in the social group use the language, their perception of reality is necessarily shaped by the particular perspectives that the language offers. Of course, there are many languages, and thus there are many different ways of conceptualizing experience, that is, of seeing the world. This fact is crucial for understanding the second sense of perspectival seeing Nietzsche offers, and Nietzsche himself acknowledges it in his discussion of the remarkable “family resemblance” of metaphysical and epistemological theories derived from the same language group in Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche finds that philosophies that have developed out of the Indo-European language group have always posited an atomistic subject (for example, the “I” of Descartes) due to the predominance of the subject–predicate grammatical form in the languages of the group. In contrast, languages in the Ural-Altaic language group, “where the concept of the subject is most poorly developed,” do not fall as often into this trap. Because of this fundamental linguistic idiosyncrasy, Nietzsche concludes, “Philosophers of the Ural-Altaic language group . . . are more likely to ‘see the world’ differently” (BGE 20). Thus, the second method of seeing through different eyes is, quite simply, to employ the perspectives embedded in other languages. In speaking our native language – in fact, in merely thinking consciously – we are necessarily constrained to seeing the world according to the perspectives provided by our language. If we intend to shift these perspectives and see the world through a truly different set of perspectives, then, necessarily, we will have to learn another language. Each language has countless examples of structural idiosyncrasies, and each of these examples can lend its learners perspectival insight. For example, while “ambition” is a strongly positively connoted personality trait in English, its counterpart in German, Ehrgeiz, which means literally “honor-stinginess,” casts

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the quality in a rather unflattering light. Of course, Nietzsche does not make our task as simple as reviewing our German flashcards. As he explains later in Beyond Good and Evil, “[u]sing the same words is not enough to get people to understand each other: they have to use the same words for the same species of inner experiences too; ultimately, people have to have the same experience base” (BGE 268). Thus we cannot be content merely to study the grammar of a foreign language or memorize the translations of words and phrases into our language. If we do so, we will succeed only in learning “words instead of facts and ideas” (HH I:267). Instead, Nietzsche would have us learn to experience the world through the conceptual framework of the foreign language, which is to say, to think in that language. The only way to achieve this, however, is to attempt to have the same experiences as the people who speak the language. Learning a foreign language, then, must mean coming to understand the emotional connotations of its phrase and meter, the historical references to celebrated people and places, the symbolism of its grammatical structures, the nuances of its diction, the aesthetic quality of its prose and the “tempo of its style” (BGE 28). And in order to gain such an intimate knowledge of the language, we will have to immerse ourselves in the music, art, literature, drama and, if possible, the living society of the people whose language we aim to learn. Only in this way can we hope to experience life through the eyes of the language (BGE 28; TI “What the Germans Lack” 7). There seems to be one remaining way in which seeing the world through another perspective can be understood. Namely, it seems that we should not only be able to shift our perspectives by conceptualizing experience in the way that individuals of other language groups do but also to be able to see through the unique perspectives of individuals within our own language group, that is, our friends, neighbors, coworkers and fellow citizens. Does Nietzsche have anything to say on this type of perspectival empathy? In fact, Nietzsche has quite a bit to say. In the early essay entitled On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, Nietzsche argues that we can engage with a perspective in two different ways. (He actually uses the word “knowledge” throughout the essay, but, as previously argued, Nietzsche believes all knowledge is perspectival.) First, we can take on the perspective without intrinsic need or desire for it – it is forced upon us. In this case, the perspective “no longer acts as an agent for transforming the outside world [nach außen treibendes Motiv] but remains concealed within a chaotic inner world” (HL 4, p. 78). Second, we can take on the perspective because we wish to use it “in the service of life” (HL 1, p. 67). In the next essay, entitled Schopenhauer as Educator, Nietzsche refines this notion further: The only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that also proves something, namely to try and live according to it, has never been taught at universities; rather all that has been taught is the critique of words by means of other words. (SE 8; our translation)4

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If we truly wish to inspect the validity of a philosophy – or, in the terms we have been using, a perspective – we have to be prepared to internalize those perspectives and to see if they serve life (BGE 6). Learning to see perspectivally in this third sense requires us to understand the ideas, beliefs and cultural perspectives that we encounter in others within the context of the lives they encourage. Now, it is obvious that not all the perspectives we encounter in social life will offer us empowering ways of seeing things. Nietzsche is outspoken about the fact that there are many perspectives that wholly distort reality and weaken the individual in the process. In The Antichrist, for example, Nietzsche criticizes the theologian, who “sees all things in a distorted and dishonest perspective” (A 9), as well as the “priestly type,” who “has a life interest in making mankind sick and in so twisting the concepts of good and evil, true and false, as to imperil life and slander the world” (A 24). Nietzsche would, therefore, not have us live by just any perspective, as the last chapter demonstrated, but only by certain perspectives that contribute to our health and power as individuals. In spite of all this, Nietzsche is not terribly optimistic that we will be able to find individually empowering perspectives represented in our living culture. In fact, Nietzsche believes that we should not expect to find much perspectival diversity at all. Although many people claim to live their lives according to diverse religious, moral and political perspectives, they really only succeed in following the dictates of what Nietzsche calls “herd morality.” Beneath these ostensibly diverse perspectives and their, at times, wildly divergent cultural manifestations, Nietzsche finds common human fears and errors that have been codified into moral axioms. The fear of solitude, the fear of the neighbor, the fear of the individual and the fear of taking responsibility for one’s own existence – all of these fears Nietzsche discovers to be motivating the cultural visions on which our lives are based.5 They have given rise to moralities of “good and evil,” where it is promulgated: “Everything that raises the individual above the herd and frightens the neighbor will henceforth be called evil; the proper, modest, unobtrusive, equalizing attitude and the mediocrity of desires acquire moral names and honors” (BGE 201). Where, then, might we search for the truly empowering perspectives that will elevate us from these ubiquitous herd moralities? Other than looking to Nietzsche’s books – which Nietzsche no doubt recommends – there is yet one more place we can look to find these perspectives. Surprisingly, it is in our history books. In On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, Nietzsche argues that it is an awareness of history that separates us from herd animals. (He means real animals this time, not adherents of herd moralities.) Although we may sometimes envy our animal counterparts for the simple and unaffected existence they lead, Nietzsche observes that they are ineluctably chained to the moment, unable to grant significance to either their happiness or their suffering. Our ability as humans to self-reflect and remember the past, however, allows us to do just this: “to transform and incorporate into [ourselves] that which is past and foreign . . . to assimilate and appropriate the things of the ‘past’ in order to

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muster [c]heerfulness, the good conscience, the joyful deed, confidence in the future” (HL 1, p. 63). In other words, we gain a future by embracing our past. In particular, Nietzsche outlines three ways that history can be used in a constructive way for our lives – the monumental, antiquarian and critical approaches to history – yet it is the first that is central to finding the perspectives we are looking for. In this approach, we use history for life by searching into the past to find individuals and cultures that may serve as exemplars of human excellence. The individuals we seek, for whom we would create monuments, demonstrate creative genius, intellectual honesty and moral courage – the virtues of the powerful individuals that Nietzsche constantly praises in his published works. The cultures we seek, again for which we would create monuments, stand for intellectual nobility, respect of the individual and, most of all, the cultivation of creative genius. Thus, Nietzsche writes, “[h]istory belongs above all to the man of deeds and power . . . who needs models, teachers, comforters and cannot find them among his contemporaries” (HL 2, p. 67). It is in studying these powerful individuals and cultures that we find the perspectives we seek.

The pedagogy of perspectival empathy The three senses of seeing that Nietzsche advances in his corpus serve an important purpose in supporting his broader educational edifice. In fact, Nietzsche considers learning to “see” in this robust way to be a fundamental element of his educational philosophy. It is one of the “three tasks for which educators are needed. One must learn to see, one must learn to think, one must learn to speak and write: the goal in all three is a noble culture” (TI “What the Germans Lack” 6). In this section, Nietzsche even offers a “practical application of having learned to see.” For Nietzsche, those who have learned to see need “to be able to suspend decision,” to have the “strong will” necessary to “let strange, new things of every kind come up to oneself ” and yet to withhold hasty judgment or an uncritical embrace of them (ibid.). Nietzsche contrasts this with a stance that is all-too open to the foreign and novel, a stance of radical acceptance that is always “prepared for the leap of putting oneself into the place of, or of plunging into, others and other things” (ibid.). Nietzsche’s worry is that we take on just any new idea or perspective without evaluating whether it is truly empowering or destructive, just because it is foreign and novel. We might describe this as “overactive” empathy, the opposite problem that Boler (1997) characterizes with the term “passive empathy.” This is a crucial insight, one that connects Nietzsche to other theorists in the democratic tradition who have themselves attempted to formulate an empathic pedagogy that avoids its inherent pitfalls. Both Nicholas Burbules (1993) and Megan Laverty (2007), for example, acknowledge the problem of “relativism” that can arise in dialogues intended to cultivate understanding and empathy across cultural divides. When one attempts to remain responsive to all participants, Burbules (1993) observes that discussion can easily degrade into “a kind

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of interview, in which anything can be said, but not questioned’’ (1993, p. 125). Such relativistic conversations can be a case of passive empathy or overactive empathy, depending on whether what is said is spiritedly affirmed (no matter its content) or simply permitted to be in the intellectual space. Building on this critique, Laverty points out that this relativism, while an important problem, is but one of the challenges that effective dialogical pedagogies face. She writes that an associated, and even greater, threat is students’ sense that they are participating in a farce. Students frequently report that they want to listen to one another with open minds but find that their own preferences and prejudices are only further engrained by the conversation. Positive and negative judgments of one another are reinforced, causing students to become more, and not less, entrenched in their views. A culture of cynicism and complacency can ensue as students discern a disparity between the discourse of greater tolerance and their own inability to realize it in practice (p. 126). In other words, dialogical pedagogies may serve the very opposite of the democratic ideal that is supposed to justify their implementation. Students’ stereotypes are reinforced, and their desire to free themselves of them is squelched. Laverty (2007) argues that this threat can be circumvented, however, by employing a different kind of dialogue than the relativistic conversations that usually characterize dialogical pedagogies. Laverty presents a pedagogy of dialogical philosophical inquiry, in which students are to “come to a deeper understanding of what is distinctive about human experience” by addressing “concepts that are common to us all, central to our lives, but indefinitely contestable.” Students should pose questions such as “What does it mean to be a friend?, What is it for something to be beautiful? and How are we to be fair?,” and in listening to the various answers to these questions, they should “strive to understand what the other is saying but want to test its plausibility as well.” Because the nature of these questions highlights our inherent intellectual boundaries, students learn to appreciate the limits of their own perspectives and to respect the contributions others can make to broaden and multiply their perspectives; “they come to trust and respect other’s unique, albeit flawed, wisdom, they recognize that we are all specialists and novices in the realm of human understanding.” In light of this recognition, Laverty believes her pedagogy of philosophical dialogue offers educators a way of “promoting tolerance and sympathy” between diverse others in their classrooms (p. 127). There are two other ways Laverty’s pedagogy is intended to cultivate empathy. Because Laverty grants the facilitator only a minimal role in dialogical philosophical inquiry, the participants themselves are expected to ensure that various perspectives broached in the dialogue are represented fairly and defended adequately. They can “either elicit or silence the perspectives of others; they either make connections between the different perspectives or eschew some in the pursuit of others.” Students can witness for themselves how each contribution affects the value of the inquiry and come to see their “shared responsibility for answering questions, resolving disagreements and making decisions” (p. 128).

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The final way that dialogical philosophical inquiry promotes empathy, Laverty argues, can be seen in the type of interpersonal communication that it develops. Students taking part in a philosophical discussion must be prepared to allow their perspectives and values to be challenged. After students take part in several iterations of the method, “[a]n attitude of humility develops as they come to appreciate their perspective as inherently limited but indefinitely expandable” (p. 128). For this type of interaction, students learn to balance a self-assertive, critical, cataphatic style of speaking and listening with a receptive, compassionate, apophatic style. Laverty astutely observes that a dialogue that attempts to carry on under purely apophatic terms would be unconstructive, self-suppressing and ultimately contentless. Thus, she concludes, we do not seek to become tolerant of others through the engagement of apophatic listening to the exclusion or minimization of cataphatic listening; rather we seek to engage in apophatic listening as the condition of the possibility of making our cataphatic listening more truthful and just. (p. 130) Surprisingly perhaps, there is much in Laverty’s empathic dialogical pedagogy with which Nietzsche would agree. Although we might have expected that a pedagogy based on philosophical inquiry would place emphasis on the traditional concepts of “objectivity” or “knowledge in itself ” that Nietzsche loved to criticize, Laverty argues that the idiosyncrasies of personality expressed in cataphatic forms of dialogue should not be sacrificed for the sake of these unattainable ideals. In order to achieve a lively interchange of perspectives between participants, we should not attempt to suppress the individual personalities that are an irremovable part of the dialogue; rather, we should allow the subjective perspectives that originate in these personalities to be expressed, regulated and evaluated by the participants of the dialogue. Furthermore, Laverty’s (2007) characterization of the types of questions that should be posed in dialogical philosophical inquiry accords well with those Nietzsche would recommend. Almost as if she anticipated the Nietzschean response, Laverty is careful not to formulate her questions according to the traditional formulae of analytic philosophy. Instead of posing standard questions such as What is friendship?, What is beauty? and What is justice?, which seem to imply that the subject can be removed from their investigation, she would have students ask the questions “Am I a good friend?, What is it for something to be beautiful? and How are we to be fair?” (p. 127), which weave the subject into their content. Nietzsche would applaud this approach, as he believes that discussing such concepts as “friendship,” “beauty” and “justice” will not qualify as a robust exercise in perspectival empathy if they are not discussed in connection with how they inform the ways the interlocutors lead their lives. Analyzing the notion of “justice” in itself – that is, detached from the types of lives that its

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various conceptions necessitate – would amount to merely a “critique of words by means of other words” (SE 8, p. 187). Although it is often very useful in philosophy to ignore the subjective element of inquiry in order to think clearly about how concepts are related to one another, this is not the type of philosophical inquiry that Nietzsche, or Laverty, would suggest for teaching perspectival empathy; we want students to come into contact with the diverse perspectives that make people truly “other” and to see if these new perspectives can enrich their experience of the world. With this latter qualification, Laverty’s pedagogy additionally averts the problem of overactive empathy that Nietzsche introduces in the previous passage from Twilight of the Idols. Philosophical dialogue is not just about “acceptance” and “openness”; it is a concerted effort to find out how we can live better. Yet further, Laverty’s pedagogy expertly circumvents much of the criticism from the critical pedagogues. Although she does not mention these theoretical opponents in her essay, Laverty’s pedagogy of philosophical inquiry defuses both Elizabeth Ellsworth’s (1989) reservations about the teacher’s authoritative, even voyeuristic, role in managing dialogical privilege and silence as well as Alison Jones’ (1999) worries about the limitations of our ability to “hear“ and understand others. With regard to Ellsworth, Laverty suggests that the students themselves become the managers of perspective sharing and silencing. This student-led approach avoids the “contradiction between the emancipatory project of critical pedagogy and the hierarchical relation between teachers and students” that Ellsworth problematizes (1989, p. 308). Furthermore, because philosophical dialogue abstracts from the emotionally and politically charged nature of cultural exchanges, students need not resort to silence as a defense mechanism against “voyeuristic” invasion. Silencing others loses its political advantages in philosophical inquiry; it becomes merely an obstacle to progress that can be arbitrated by the participants themselves. Indeed, silence takes on a new meaning in philosophical inquiry altogether. Freed from its bad conscience, silence can be a sign of self-assured contemplation and reflection. With regard to Jones, Laverty argues that philosophical dialogue naturally activates an empathic, apophatic type of listening to mediate the exclusionary, cataphatic hearing that Jones would lament. Students of philosophical dialogue inevitably realize that their attempts to explain the world have definite limits and that their dialogical others find themselves in the very same position. This experience of the ultimate “unknowable,” rather than isolating students behind epistemological iron curtains, encourages students to listen closely, apophatically, to others’ perspectives and to explore whether these might shed light on aspects of the world that their own perspectives leave obscured. Thus, Laverty’s pedagogy includes the ineluctable dimension of the “unknowable” without succumbing to the isolationist epistemology of Jones and her colleagues. The question remains, however, whether Laverty’s pedagogy adequately addresses the “farce” that students feel in dialogical attempts to inculcate empathy.

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Can dialogical philosophical inquiry develop the type of empathy necessary for students to become engaged, empowered individuals, or does the empathy it encourages fall into passiveness? From a Nietzschean standpoint, it does not seem like Laverty’s pedagogy alone can address Boler’s challenge. Although philosophical dialogue seems to be a great way to motivate students to learn about the diverse perspectives of others, it does not seem to offer them a way to learn how to employ these perspectives as guides for living an empowered life. Laverty’s presentation of her pedagogy stops right where the essential empathetic learning may take place – in learning to live the perspectives of others. In addition to students inquiring into the content of the various perspectives expressed by participants in philosophical dialogue, Nietzsche would argue that students should discuss their perspectives relative to (1) the forms of life they encourage and (2) the lifestyle changes that dialogue participants would have to make in order to adapt to the new forms of life. For example, say we claim that justice is doing good to friends and harm to enemies. In order to learn how we might live by this perspective, we should, in concert with our dialogical counterparts, first consider the “quality” of life to which it leads. Is life by this definition of justice an empowered one? Does it grant greater significance to life? Does it contribute to the ennoblement of culture? How does this definition of justice affect the individual’s development of self-mastery? This is the first set of questions participants should ask. Subsequently, participants should attempt to reinterpret the decisions they have made in their own lives and to envision the choices they will make in the future in light of the new perspective. Would our life be better now, had we adopted this perspective? How does the new perspective accord with the ones we already harbor? Which perspectives would we have to renounce to accord with the new perspective, and what is its value for our lives in comparison? Can we empower ourselves and serve the edification of culture if we adopt this perspective now? This is the second set of questions participants might ask. Now, simply posing these “Nietzschean” questions and discussing their answers in a dialogue course certainly cannot exhaust the pedagogy of perspectival empathy. Robust engagement with diverse perspectives is part and parcel of a democratic curriculum, and, as such, it can be promoted in a variety of curricular forms. Whether students interact with the religious beliefs of their peers in a social studies course, come across the translation of “Ehrgeiz” in their German course, study the lives of exemplary individuals in their history course or simply experience how their Algebra teacher exemplifies the qualities and values of an expert mathematician (Strike, 2005) – all of these instances offer students the opportunity to engage with diverse perspectives and consider their viability in enriching their lives. By offering students a general set of questions that they can then use to connect subject matter to their lives, the Nietzschean pedagogy of perspectival empathy enables students to evaluate diverse perspectives in these various curricular forms.

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Conclusion By turning to Nietzsche’s doctrine of perspectivism, we have attempted to develop a pedagogy of perspectival empathy. If we grant that an essential aim of the democratic school is to prepare students for agency in public spaces, where the empathic ability to see the world with different eyes is crucial, then we must seriously pose the question of what this metaphor means in practice. Nietzsche’s doctrine of perspectivism offers three parts of an answer to this question, respectively. According to Nietzsche, seeing the world through different eyes means: 1

2 3

Inspecting objects in the world through the various perspectives manifested by our many innate interests. It is important to observe which interests are active within us in order to prevent any one interest from disproportionately shaping our account of things. Learning to conceptualize our experience with another language, which is to say, with fundamentally different perspectives of experience than our own. Internalizing the perspectives of others and subsequently evaluating their constructiveness for life. Perspectives that empower us individually and inspire us culturally are the ones we should seek out and attempt to live by. History is a great place to find such perspectives and dialogue a great place to share them.

Self-reflection, language learning, historical studies and philosophical dialogue take central roles in Nietzsche’s pedagogy of perspectival empathy. Even placed in these general terms, however, the pedagogy of perspectival empathy outlined here still does not capture Nietzsche’s imperative for students to live the perspectives they encounter. At some point, students will have to walk out of the classroom and act on those perspectives they have deemed worthy of experimentation; they must make the “brave and rigorous attempt to live in this or that morality” (D 195). It is here that Nietzsche’s educational philosophy extends beyond a pedagogy of the school and develops into a pedagogy of life – though even to distinguish between the two is misleading. Indeed, because the evaluation of different types of lives is the critical element of Nietzsche’s pedagogy of perspectival empathy, Nietzsche’s educational philosophy transcends the school-life distinction and may therefore greatly ease students’ own attempts to bridge the gap. Under the Nietzschean pedagogy of perspectival empathy, students are provided with vivid images of powerful individuals and inspired cultures, which they may use as guides for the formation of their own lives outside the school. Here, in the absence of the pedagogue, individuals can turn to Nietzsche’s broader philosophical doctrines – self-overcoming and amor fati, for example – to learn how to become true masters of themselves and their fate. And yet even these most personal endeavors, if they are to go well, should be supported by our educators, Nietzsche believes. Thus, in the next two chapters, we will discuss, first, what Nietzsche’s doctrine of self-overcoming means for the individual and, second, what it entails for education.

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Notes 1 Although presenting Nietzsche as a proponent of empathy may seem to clash with his usual iconography as an unabashed vilifier of pity, the empathy we argue he endorses is always one that empowers both empathizer and empathized rather than a form of empathy that entails only a passive mirroring of the other’s emotional state. Throughout his corpus, Nietzsche himself distinguishes between Mitgefühl (literally “with-feeling”; variously translated as “sympathy” or “empathy”) and Mitleid(en) (literally “with-suffering”; predominantly translated as “pity”), evaluating the former consistently positively. See, for example, HH P:5, I:33 47; BGE 26 206; TI “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” 2. Indeed, even Nietzsche’s critique of Mitleid(en) cannot be considered categorically vilifying, as we discuss in Chapter 4. 2 For other notable examples of democratic theorists who consider dialogue central for developing empathy, see Schertz (2007, pp. 185–198); Laverty (2007, pp. 125–132); Burbules (1993); Freire and Shor (1987, pp. 11–32); and Kazepides (2010). 3 Of course, we will succeed only in beholding a perspective on the constituents of ourselves. For Nietzsche, all conscious perception, even self-perception, is perspectival. 4 Compare Z I: “On Reading and Writing” I and D 195. 5 On the fear of solitude, see GS 50; on the fear of the neighbor, see BGE 201; on the fear of the individual, see GS 117; and on the fear of taking responsibility for our own existence, see SE 1.

Chapter 3

The doctrine of self-overcoming

Introduction With an understanding of Nietzsche’s theory of perspectivism and the conception of the self that it is built upon, we are now in a position to tackle another of Nietzsche’s most famous doctrines: self-overcoming. Self-overcoming has arguably been Nietzsche’s most referenced idea in the philosophy of education journals over the last thirty-plus years. The problem is that, just like perspectivism, his theory of self-overcoming has been largely misunderstood. This is unfortunate because, as we shall see over the next several chapters, self-overcoming has tremendous pedagogical value for contemporary educators. In this chapter, we set the stage for the later chapters by offering an in-depth analysis of self-overcoming. Understood properly, Nietzsche’s philosophy of self-overcoming lays the groundwork for a powerful methodology for encouraging student agency in democratic classrooms. Our chapter begins by examining a series of arguments about self-overcoming made in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Aharon Aviram, James Hillesheim and Eliyahu Rosenow. Contrary to their positions, we argue that self-overcoming is not the creation and re-creation of one’s self, nor the radical rejection of one’s internalized moral convictions, but it is something much closer to the traditional sense of self-mastery.1 In this we agree with Walter Kaufmann (1982) who asserts that the goal of self-overcoming is not self-realization or self-transcendence or self-reformulation but rather self-mastery through the restraining and overcoming of passions and desires so that the energy found therein can be channeled into more life-affirming activities (p. 238–255). The ultimate form of lifeaffirmation is the ability not to be governed by our desires. This does not mean that we should attempt to extirpate our desires, but rather we should try to master them and use them in ways that promote further self-mastery.

Self-overcoming according to Aviram In his article Nietzsche as Educator, Aviram (1991) weighed in on a debate about Nietzsche’s educational philosophy that had occurred throughout the 1980s. His article was extremely ambitious and helpfully identifies some of the ambiguities

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in Nietzsche’s philosophy that were fueling the debates. Unfortunately, his arguments concerning self-overcoming were problematic. While Aviram illuminated some of the tensions within the debate, his ultimate conclusion regarding self-overcoming – that it is the ability to reject one’s own self-identity – is untenable. Aviram’s understanding of self-overcoming is founded on a misconstruction of Nietzsche’s concept of perspectivism and his repudiation of the transcendent self. With the proper understanding of those concepts offered in the last two chapters, we will be able to identify where Aviram goes wrong. Aviram (1991) begins his analysis of self-overcoming by a general definition of what it means. “‘Self-overcoming’ suggests the subjection of one layer of the individual’s personality to another” (p. 220). This notion of self-overcoming is vague as it stands, and therefore Aviram offers further elaboration. His explanation leads to a very thorough, highly delineated explication of the various senses of the epistemological, ontological and psychological aspects of both authenticity and self-overcoming. Within each of these senses there are further subdivisions, qualifications and elaborations. In order to understand his analysis one has to keep track of a vast number of categories and definitions on the way to Aviram’s ultimate formulation of self-overcoming. Fortunately, for the purposes of our argument, it is not necessary to outline all of these categories and definitions. Instead, we will focus on the final formulation of the two types of selfovercoming and illustrate the fundamental problem with them. Aviram distinguishes between two types of self-overcoming. There is the self-overcoming found in what he calls “overman (a)” and the self-overcoming found in what he calls “overman (b).” While he offers two versions of the overman, he believes overman (b) to be the “real” overman (p. 224). Overman (b) is the individual who aspires “to eliminate his subjective ego” (p. 223), who provides the “maximal expression of the . . . will to power . . . once . . . he surrenders his subjective shadow ego” (p. 223) and who is “capable of acknowledging that he has no particular identity” (p. 224). Aviram bases these claims on what he considers to be one of Nietzsche’s underlying metaphysical principles, namely the “universal principle of the eternal change of perspectives” (p. 225). According to Aviram, Nietzsche’s doctrine of perspectivism posits the radical relativity of human perception (p. 223). All humans apprehend the world from their own perspective and have no basis by which to evaluate other perspectives. For Aviram’s Nietzsche, as for Ramaekers after him, any perspective is as good as any other. The overmen are the ones who recognize this fact and live in a perpetual self-reformulation in which they favor one “arbitrary” (p. 224) perspective after the next and in so doing repeatedly redefine who they are based on the continual and arbitrary change of perspectives. To become an overman of the highest type one must be able to use various perspectives to subject one layer of one’s personality to another layer. Aviram recognizes, however, that this interpretation does not entirely square with what Nietzsche affirms about the overman. He admits that Nietzsche frequently offers images of the overman that are dominated by a particular

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perspective, rejecting all others. To rectify this problem he systematically explains what Nietzsche means by his other versions of the overman, thus creating a hierarchy of overmen, in which various versions are placed along a continuum (pp. 224–226). The problem is that not only is this distinction between overmen dubious but it is completely unnecessary. Aviram’s misstep begins when he asserts, “On the epistemological level . . . there is the contradiction between Nietzsche’s perspectivism, on the one hand and his positive and categorical presentation of the overman as the only human ideal worth striving towards, on the other” (p. 221). It is the former – perspectivism – that leads Aviram into his confusion. Aviram argues correctly that Nietzsche promotes the overman as an ideal being who embodies certain intellectual, moral and physical qualities that should be emulated. But Aviram argues incorrectly that Nietzsche’s perspectivism is inconsistent with any hierarchy of intellectual, moral and physical qualities. As we have seen, this is not a correct interpretation of perspectivism. When perspectivism is properly understood it is not inconsistent with Nietzsche’s concept of the overman but actually supports it. The problem stems from the fact that Aviram (1991) gives The Will to Power equal status as Nietzsche’s published works. The ideas expressed in The Will to Power can serve to illuminate concepts in the published works but should never define them.2 If the ideas in The Will to Power conflict with the ideas in the published works, one must rely on the latter to clarify the readings of the former. Thus, when one comes to the concept of perspectivism and its relationship to the overman, one must rely primarily on the published works. This is something Aviram does not do. He uses the concept of the overman found in the published works but uses the concept of perspectivism found in The Will to Power. In fact, every one of his references to perspectivism is from The Will to Power. This embroils him in the supposed contradiction between perspectivism and the idea of the overman. Nietzsche’s concept of perspectivism found in The Will to Power is, for the most part, more radical than the concept in his published works. Why is that? We can never know with certainty. What we do know is that the generally weaker form found in the published works is what he wanted the public to see. This does not mean that the radical version cannot inform our understanding of the published version. But it can inform our understanding of the published version only if it does not undermine other aspects of the published works. Unfortunately, the relativistic perspectivism found in The Will to Power does undermine the published works, which, as we have seen, distinguish between falser perspectives and truer perspectives. The goal of having diverse perspectives is not to encourage the “arbitrary changing of socially defined life-styles” (p. 224) that Aviram (1991) recommends, but rather it is to choose perspectives that increase and refine our knowledge and power. Aviram’s misconception of perspectivism leads him to believe that the doctrine of self-overcoming, in its most developed form, necessitates the denial of

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the self, when the opposite is the case. As we have seen, Nietzsche’s perspectivism is formulated as a reaction to the notion of pure objectivity, which claims that perspectives colored by subjective interests are therefore false, illusory or unreliable. Nietzsche advances a new notion of objectivity to replace this one, according to which our knowledge of a thing is increased when it is viewed from a variety of perspectives, each of which possesses its own affective substructure within the self. Perspectivism thus leads us back to the self by repudiating the idea of the transcendent self that underlies the notion of pure objectivity. Nietzsche believes in vital and evolving selves and impassioned knowledge – not in the eternal, changeless and static selves and the dispassionate knowledge of Descartes and Kant. As we saw in the first chapter, however, Nietzsche does reject the notion of an ontologically independent “self ” behind our actions. He asserts for instance in a much-quoted passage: “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything” (GM I:13). While this seems like an overt repudiation of the self, it is actually only a refutation of a neutral, independent, unembodied, unemotional entity that can objectively choose between a variety of actions. In other words, Nietzsche is repudiating a Cartesian notion of the self. This is seen if we read a few lines immediately preceding the previously quoted passage. For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so. (GM I:13) The operative word is “neutral.” There is no neutral, unbiased and ontologically independent entity behind our actions. There is, however, a self behind our actions, but it is a self that is imbued with the will to power. The self cannot be abstracted from power because the self is power. But does this not prove that there is no self-identity? On the contrary, if there is no self, there is no power; if there is no power, there is no self. Strong individuals – if they are truly strong – will not try to escape from their self-identity as if it were a mask but will find ways to make their self-identity even stronger. Contrary to what is implied by Aviram’s (1991) position, an individual does not reach the status of the overman once he or she is “psychologically capable of acknowledging that he or she has no particular identity” (p. 224). Rather, as we will argue in subsequent sections, individuals approach the status of the overman when they consistently choose activities that expand the strength of their self-identity – that is, when they become self-overcomers. From this analysis we see that Aviram’s supposed contradiction between Nietzsche’s perspectivism and the ideal of the overman is misconstrued.

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Perspectivism, properly understood, is consistent with the overman because the overmen are the ideal beings who, through the ability to take different perspectives, always choose activities that make them more powerful. Perspectivism is not the foundation for the belief that there is no self but rather that there is a self: a self that can either be strengthened or be diminished. Having arrived at the end of our analysis of Aviram’s misconstruction of selfovercoming, and before we offer an alternative conception of self-overcoming, it will be helpful to briefly examine the debate to which Aviram was responding. The debate is important because it reveals the other pole of interpretation concerning self-overcoming. While Aviram holds that self-overcoming entails the non-identity of the self, Rosenow (1989) and Hillesheim (1990) argue that selfovercoming necessitates a radical break with all of one’s personal and cultural values. Rosenow and Hillesheim understand that Nietzsche does not advocate the loss of self-identity; however, they partially misconstrue Nietzsche’s “revaluation” of the traditional concept of self-mastery.

Self-overcoming according to Hillesheim and Rosenow Two of the principal factions within the debate over self-overcoming to which Aviram was responding were James Hillesheim and Eliyahu Rosenow. Hillesheim and Rosenow traded articles over a four-year period in which they attempted to explain Nietzsche’s position regarding self-overcoming. Hillesheim (1986), in an article entitled “Suffering and Self-cultivation: The Case of Nietzsche,” argued that Nietzsche’s concept of self-overcoming could be appropriated in the classroom. Hillesheim’s argument rests on the belief that self-overcoming (Hillesheim actually uses the translation “self-surpassing”) could be used as the “universal principle of individual creativity” (p. 173). He claims that “with the doctrine of man as something ‘unfinished,’ as a being with the potential to be forever transcending itself,” Nietzsche has provided us with one essential ingredient of a philosophy of education – a vision of “what man can become” (p. 173). “What man can become” is, for Hillesheim, a forever self-realizing and self-transcending being whose main goal is perpetual creativity and self-creativity. Rosenow (1989) responded to Hillesheim in a paper published three years later called “Nietzsche’s Educational Dynamite.” In this paper, Rosenow argues that Hillesheim was incorrect to translate Selbstüberwindung and Selbstaufhebung as “self-surpassing” because it fails to take into account the fact that Nietzsche did not want to improve the self through self-creation but rather deconstruct the self through “overcoming and annihilating the self ” (p. 308). Rosenow’s main argument rests on his conviction that “Nietzsche’s self-overcoming is a rendering – or, to use his terms, a revision and ‘revaluation’ – of the traditional concept of self-mastery or self-control” (pp. 308–309). For Rosenow, self-mastery is the ability to use reason to overcome one’s passions in support of morality and social conventions.

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The traditional concept of self-mastery was based on a dualistic notion of the self, according to which our desires and passions are in a constant struggle with our reason. On this understanding, reason was seen as the highest and most important component of a human being. People were considered human to the degree that they were reasonable. On the other hand, our bodily passions and desires were seen to be unruly and animalistic. In order for us to be human, reason must subjugate the passions. To give into the desires of the body was to be enslaved; to be free meant that reason must master the passions. Education was seen as the social practice that trained students in the use of their reason so that they could learn to overcome their “evil” instincts, thereby becoming fully human. Informing this conception of the fully human being was the ideal of complete social and psychical harmony. Moderation was, in this sense, the most desirable and praiseworthy virtue that human beings could possess and political harmony the best condition a community could obtain. Rosenow (1989) asserts that this traditional picture of self-mastery is denied by Nietzsche. Indeed, self-overcoming is nearly the opposite of self-mastery, claims Rosenow. He argues that Nietzsche advocates throwing off all rational strictures that limit the expression of our animalistic selves. Ultimately, Rosenow argues that self-overcoming (as opposed to self-mastery) is therefore dangerous: [O]vercoming morality, reason, and the conventions of cultural tradition is a dangerous enterprise. Nietzsche, who repeatedly refers to himself as a psychologist who is familiar with human nature, is well aware of this. If authenticity can be gained by giving up reason and by surpassing morality, then man may throw off all restraints and set free his most sinister impulses. (p. 311) Thus, unlike Hillesheim, Rosenow thinks that self-overcoming is not something that should be haphazardly introduced into education. Hillesheim (1990) responded to Rosenow the following year in “Nietzschean Images of Self-Overcoming: Response to Rosenow.” In his response, Hillesheim agrees that “traditional educational thought has made much of the concept of ‘self-mastery’ or ‘self-control’ and that it is this doctrine that Nietzsche challenges” (p. 212). Hillesheim also agrees that self-overcoming entails the negation or discarding of the self. Hillesheim thinks, however, that there is a way of mitigating some of the consequences that Rosenow fears. If one is to embark on this dangerous journey of self-overcoming, or if one wishes to guide others, there is something that one can do to minimize the risks by providing direction and encouragement. This can be done, Nietzsche argues, through the use of example, through images of people who have created selves worthy of attention and possible emulation – that is people, real or imaginary, who are worthy of being our educators. (1986, p. 213)

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The point in bringing up this debate between Rosenow and Hillesheim is that they explicitly and clearly lay out the recurrent conception of selfovercoming found in the philosophy of education literature, a conception that we challenge. The belief that Nietzsche regards self-overcoming as the mere re-creation of the self in any manner is problematic. For Nietzsche, selfovercoming is much closer to the traditional notion of self-mastery than Hillesheim and Rosenow seem to realize. In a crucial passage from The Wanderer and His Shadow already discussed in the Introduction to this book, Nietzsche draws an explicit connection between self-overcoming, self-mastery and reason. All those who do not have themselves sufficiently under their own control and who do not know morality as continual self-mastery [Selbstbeherrschung] and self-overcoming [Selbstüberwindung] practised in great things and in the smallest, involuntarily become glorifiers of . . . that instinctive morality which has no head but seems to consist solely of heart and helping hands. It is, indeed, in their interest to cast suspicion on a morality of reason [Vernunft] and to make of that other morality the only one. (WS 45)3 Several sections later, Nietzsche promotes practicing an everyday abstemiousness as way of clearing the path to eventually achieve the “joy” of self-mastery. A lack of self-mastery [Selbstbeherrschung] in small things brings about a crumbling of the capacity for it in great ones. Every day is ill employed, and a danger for the next day, in which one has not denied oneself some small thing at least once: this gymnastic is indispensable if one wants to preserve in oneself the joy of being one’s own master. (WS 305) Furthermore, in the 1886 preface to Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche closely associates “health” with the concept of self-mastery: “the way is still long to that tremendous, overflowing state of security and health . . . to that mature freedom of the spirit, which is equally self-mastery [Selbstbeherrschung] and training of the heart” (HH P:4). This association of health and self-mastery constitutes a crucial moment in Nietzsche’s corpus, since “health” becomes the concept alongside “power” that Nietzsche increasingly uses in his later work to refer to a state of human flourishing. The notions of self-creation, self-surpassing, self-realization, self-transcendence and self-reformulation – all words used to describe self-overcoming in the philosophy of education journals – have missed this crucial connection between self-mastery and self-overcoming. But if the two ideas so closely coincide, why does Nietzsche use the term “self-overcoming” at all, we might ask? Why not just say “self-mastery”?

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Self-overcoming as modified self-mastery The answer to this question lies in the way Nietzsche takes up the traditional idea of self-mastery. Nietzsche, it is true, does modify or “revalue” the traditional conception of self-mastery, as Rosenow and Hillesheim observe, just not in the way they believe he does. Nietzsche revalues the traditional model of self-mastery in two central ways. First, Nietzsche replaces the ideal of social and psychical harmony, the raison d’etre of self-mastery, with the increase of human power. Second, he reinterprets the role of reason in the self-mastering soul, updating it with his psychological insights into the human subject. In particular, he hopes to replace the dualistic and intellectualistic sense of reason embedded in the traditional sense of self-mastery – i.e. reason as Socratic rationality – with a notion of embodied reason. The result of this revaluation of selfmastery is a uniquely Nietzschean sense of gift-giving egoism. Harmony vs. power

For Nietzsche, the will to power is the final, irreducible motive for all human behavior. “A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength – life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results” (BGE 13).4 Humans, as humans, crave power above all else, even more than pleasure. This craving is not just one among many other desires and passions we might have; it is the ultimate governing principle of human nature (Kaufmann, 1982, pp. 178–206).5 But not only is power the driving force behind all of our actions, it is also the glory of life (A 2). Nietzsche admired, revered and extolled those individuals who expressed their wills to power most powerfully. But how does one demonstrate power most powerfully? Not by mastering others (an inferior form of power in Nietzsche’s mind) but by mastering one’s self, that is to say one’s desires and impulses. “This is the apotheosis of power, and there can be no question but that Nietzsche agreed with that ancient tradition . . . that the man who conquers himself shows greater power than he who conquers others” (Kaufmann, 1982, p. 252). (We will return to Nietzsche’s concept of power over others vs. power over one’s self in Chapter 7.) At first glance, this endorsement of self-mastery appears to contradict Nietzsche’s frequent laudations of the passions. Nietzsche characteristically rejects any attempt to rid oneself of passions and desires in favor of one’s supposed disinterested decision-making or inquiry.6 As Solomon (2003) points out: “Nietzsche is one of the few philosophers to attempt an unrestrained defense of the passions” (p. 70). And this is what concerns Rosenow (1989) so deeply; if all expressions of the passions are equally viable in Nietzsche’s thinking, how do we avoid moral and aesthetic anarchy? The answer is that Nietzsche believes there are certain expressions of the passions that lead to greater power. The goal for Nietzsche is not that individuals should merely discharge the will to power behind their passions in haphazard

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and impulse-driven ways but that they should moderate, control and direct it thoughtfully, even rationally. While the passions are in themselves expressions of power, they are not the ultimate expressions by themselves. What leads us to more powerful expressions of the passions, then? It is in fact a process of “sublimation” [Sublimierung] (D 202; GM II:7) or “spiritualization” [Vergeistigung] (e.g. BGE 229, 271; A 57; TI “Morality as Anti-Nature” 1, 3) of the passions that leads to higher, more robust expressions of the will to power – that is, the simultaneous redirection of their trajectory and exploitation of their motivational force. Rosenow, Hillesheim and Aviram seem to miss this all important aspect of Nietzsche’s doctrine of self-overcoming. They offer no tenable criteria to distinguish between these expressions of power.7 Not only this, the image that Rosenow (1989) conjures up of the individual who uses Nietzsche as an excuse to “throw off all restraints and set free his most sinister impulses” (p. 311) is an image that Nietzsche would abhor. A man who is not willing to become master over his wrath, his gall and vengefulness, and his lust, and who tries to become a master in anything else, is as stupid as the farmer who lays out his field beside a torrential stream without protecting himself. (WS 65) This individual is not powerful, free-spirited or praiseworthy but “stupid.” Nietzsche has little patience for those looking for an excuse to throw off their restraints in the way Rosenow has in mind. Likewise, the individual who, lacking needed self-control, tries to wholly extirpate his or her passions also falls under Nietzsche’s “stupid” category. As Nietzsche claims: All passions have a phase when they are merely disastrous, when they drag down their victim with the weight of stupidity. . . . Formerly, in view of the element of stupidity in passion, war was declared on passion itself, its destruction was plotted. . . . Destroying the passions and cravings, merely as a preventive measure against their stupidity and the unpleasant consequences of this stupidity – today this strikes us as merely another acute form of stupidity. . . . The same means in the fight against a craving – castration, extirpation – is instinctively chosen by those who are too weak-willed, too degenerate, to be able to impose moderation [ein Maass] on themselves. (TI “Morality as Anti-Nature” 1–2) While it is true that any expression of a passion is, at root, an expression of the will to power, Nietzsche thus clearly demonstrates that there are inferior and even dangerous expressions of this will. Rather than these inferior and dangerous expressions, Nietzsche envisions someone who harnesses the tremendous psychical energy of these impulses and channels them into less “stupid” expressions. His goal is not to eliminate the passions, nor to give them free reign, but to

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“spiritualize” them. As individuals choose to act in less “stupid” ways, a radical change in their conception of power simultaneously occurs. Whereas before they felt powerful only when they were overcoming some external obstacle, now they realize that the greatest obstacle to the most powerful expressions is not external but is rather internal; the obstacles are the desires within themselves. In other words, their greatest source of power is to be found in their own self-mastery. You shall become master over yourself [Du solltest Herr über dich werden], master also over your virtues. Formerly they were your masters; but they must be only your instruments beside other instruments. You shall get control over your For and Against and learn how to display one and then the other in accordance with your higher goal. . . . You shall above all see with your own eyes where injustice is always at its greatest: where life has developed at its smallest, narrowest, neediest, most incipient and yet cannot avoid taking itself as the goal and measure of things and for the sake of its own preservation secretly and meaning and ceaselessly crumbling away and calling into question the higher, greater, richer. (HH P:6) Importantly then, Nietzsche does not completely repudiate the harmony ideal that guides the traditional doctrine of self-mastery – indeed his doctrine of self-overcoming itself seems to point to its own ideal of self-harmonization in the notions of spiritualization and sublimation. Rather, by accentuating the role of power in the self-mastering individual, he hopes to call attention to both the inevitability of personal struggle in the process of self-mastery as well as its moral importance. The more affective energy one has to sublimate, the greater potential this person has to create and do good in the world. As Nietzsche puts it in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star” (Z P:5). Socratic rationality vs. embodied reason

Nietzsche’s insistence on the need to sublimate the passions and channel them into the proper direction is connected to his suspicion of “pure” rationality. While Nietzsche unequivocally promotes and praises “reason,” he criticizes the disembodied, purely logical form of rationality that has become the hallmark of science and philosophy. For Nietzsche, reason is deeply connected with the affects; the two must work in tandem for a person to become a flourishing and self-empowered human being. Put differently, choosing to act in ways that increase our power is what it means for Nietzsche to act in accordance with reason. Reason is the obverse of that “stupidity” described previously that gives free reign to one’s passions and affects, or else attempts to extirpate them. This formula may strike some readers as surprising given the fact that it is common for interpreters to regard Nietzsche as fundamentally opposed to

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reason (Sigad, 1986; Aviram, 1991; Levine, 1995) and that Nietzsche himself often decries rationality, at least as he sees it embodied in Socrates and the Wissenschaftler of his day. This criticism of intellectualistic rationality has led some to read Nietzsche as opposed to reason tout court, while others suggest that, for Nietzsche, reason is merely one way of viewing the world, no more valuable than any other (Nehamas, 1985; Schrift, 1990). Alan Schrift (1990), for example, makes precisely this latter claim (p. 182). According to Schrift, there are no grounds for believing the claims of reason as opposed to any other claim. He lumps reason together with “metaphysics,” “morality,” “religion” and “physics” (p. 182); all of these ways of viewing the world are no less legitimate than any other. But Schrift goes even further, arguing that not only are reason and the belief that some things are truer than others merely two out of a countless number of equally legitimate perspectives, but they are actually harmful to the development of the individual because they “rob existence of the ‘marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity’ which permit the production of fresh interpretation” (p. 155).8 This means that any “truth” that an individual upholds is itself continually open to revision. In fact, Schrift argues that not only does Nietzsche claim that all “truths” are open for revision but that he also believes that to regard one perspective as truer than another is to diminish the enjoyment of life. But this is not Nietzsche’s position. Indeed, his position is nearly the opposite. To reiterate the theme of Chapter 2, not all perspectives are as good as others, and in order to determine which is better, one must use one’s reason. As becomes clear in many of Nietzsche’s statements on the self-mastery ideal, reason is a crucial faculty for the self-overcoming individual. The ideal individuals he is advocating for are those who are able to exercise their reason to a high degree, both employing and suppressing it at the right times. Reason is the very instrument through which self-mastery occurs and power is increased. As Kaufmann (1982) indicates: While Nietzsche thus comes to the conclusion that reason is man’s highest faculty, his view is not based on any other principle than the power standard. Reason is extolled not because it is the faculty that abstracts from the given, forms universal concepts, and draws inferences, but because these skills enable it to develop foresight and to give consideration to all the impulses, to organize their chaos, to integrate them into a harmony – and thus to give man power: power over himself and nature. (p. 230) Nietzsche does not want to overthrow reason; on the contrary, he wants it to be more pronounced than ever before. This does not mean that Nietzsche, in the end, embraces the cold, dispassionate rationality of the Cartesian, Kantian or logical positivist, or believes that self-overcoming individuals should subjugate their passions to reason, or worse, eliminate them altogether. Indeed, it is precisely this false opposition between reason and passion that Nietzsche attempts

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to repudiate. Nietzsche’s revaluation of self-mastery seeks to replace this dualistic conception of reason with a conception of reason as itself imbued with passion. Put differently, reason, for Nietzsche, is embodied; it is a faculty combining intelligence and affect that, at least in theory, governs our passions in ways that heighten our expressions and feelings of power. Nietzsche contrasts this embodied conception of reason with a disembodied rationality that he attributes to Socrates and his descendants. When one finds it necessary to turn reason into a tyrant, as Socrates did, the danger cannot be slight that something else will play the tyrant. Rationality was then hit upon as the savior; neither Socrates nor his “patients” had any choice about being rational: it was de rigeur, it was their last resort. The fanaticism with which all Greek reflection throws itself upon rationality betrays a desperate situation; there was danger, there was but one choice: either perish or – to be absurdly rational. . . . One must be clever, clear, bright at any price: any concession to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downward. (TI “The Problem of Socrates” 10) In The Gay Science, Nietzsche adumbrates a notion of reason that avoids the “absurdly rational” character of Socratic intellectualism. Nietzsche upholds the value of reason while he simultaneously affirms its affective basis. But what are goodheartedness, refinement, and genius to me when the person possessing these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his believing and judging and when he does not consider the desire for certainty to be his inmost craving and deepest need – as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower! Among some pious people I found a hatred of reason and I was well disposed towards them for that; for this at least betrayed their bad intellectual conscience! (GS 2) Reason is thus wrapped up with the passions in its attendant “desire” for certainty and endangerment by “slack feelings.” Nietzsche’s conception of reason as imbued with passion becomes even more pronounced if we keep reading into the next section of The Gay Science. Here Nietzsche distinguishes the reason of “higher individuals” from that of “lower individuals.”9 Lower individuals cannot understand the reason of the higher because they are, according to Nietzsche, moral and aesthetic philistines who “cannot comprehend how anyone could, for example, risk health and honor for the sake of a passion for knowledge” (GS 3). Thus, on this analysis, self-overcoming is not the abnegation or destruction of one’s self in favor of a new, entirely original self, nor is it the rejection of all rational strictures. Rather self-overcoming is the ability to choose, by means of

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the faculty of embodied reason, to overcome aspects of the self (certain passions, desires, emotions, thoughts, etc.) that do not maximize our power – the aspects of ourselves that passionately cry out to be expressed. The self-overcoming individual is the person who has enough self-discipline and reason to master those aspects and sublimate them into greater expressions of power. This person is the higher individual, the “spiritualized” individual who no longer has to extirpate his passions, nor give free reign to them. Thus, reason gives man mastery over himself; and as the will to power is essentially the “instinct of freedom” (GM II:18), it can find fulfillment only through rationality. Reason is the “highest” manifestation of the will to power, in the distinct sense that through rationality it can realize its objective most fully . . . a strong spirit need not make war on the impulses: it masters them fully and is – to Nietzsche’s mind – the acme of human power. (Kaufmann, 1982, pp. 230–233) Self-sacrifice vs. gift-giving egoism

One of the important upshots of the following discussion is that Nietzsche’s doctrine of self-overcoming advances a unique conception of egoism. It is Nietzsche’s advocacy of egoism that has led MacIntyre (1981) and others (Rosenow, 1989; Johnston, 1998; Thiele, 1990) to misinterpret Nietzsche as radically individualistic. Paraphrasing an aphorism in The Gay Science (335), MacIntyre argues that Nietzsche is an “emotivist” who believes that because modern humanity has lost a proper conception of order of rank, the only morality left that has any validity is that of willful, egoistic self-assertion. According to MacIntyre, Nietzsche’s ethical egoism requires that individuals make moral decisions based solely on their own desires, without regard for the impact these decisions will have on others. MacIntyre (1981) interprets Nietzsche thus: If there is nothing to morality but expressions of will, my morality can only be what my will creates. There can be no place for such fictions as natural rights, utility, the greatest happiness for the greatest number. I myself must now bring into existence “new tables of what is good.” (pp. 113–114) While MacIntyre is correct that Nietzsche advocates egoism, he is incorrect when he suggests that individuals must therefore ignore the impact these decisions will have on others. On the contrary, Nietzsche insists the self-overcoming egoist must take into account the impact moral decisions will have on others – it is just that the accounting should avoid making moral decisions solely for the sake of others, which is what Nietzsche believes modern morality requires. At the root of Nietzsche’s notion of egoism lies a contrast he draws between obeying the precepts of morality because custom demands and choosing to

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act in accordance with a set of values because it makes one more powerful and whole. Nietzsche describes the detrimental effects that morality as custom has had on humankind. Because we operate under the assumption that “[t]he most moral man is he who sacrifices the most to custom,” we call for “[s]elfovercoming [Selbstüberwindung] . . . not on account of the useful consequences it may have for the individual, but so that the hegemony of custom, tradition, shall be made evident in spite of the private desires and advantages of the individual” (D 9). Nietzsche goes on to contrast the detrimental self-overcoming found in the morality of custom with the beneficial self-overcoming found in the egoism of those individuals who obey laws they prescribe to themselves as means of their own advancement and elevation. Those moralists, on the other hand, who, following the footsteps of Socrates, offer the individual a morality of self-control and temperance as a means to his own advantage, as his personal key to happiness, are the exceptions . . . [in so doing] they cut themselves off from the community, as immoral men, and are in the profoundest sense evil. (D 9)10 The fact that Nietzsche calls the second, beneficial kind of valuations “evil” is instructive. Whenever he refers to himself as an “immoralist” or promotes “immorality” he is not promoting anarchy and lawlessness but only a refusal to “do what is right” for the sake of custom. Nietzsche implores us to “do what is right” only if it will actually be beneficial both for ourselves and, as we shall see, for humanity as a whole. Importantly, doing what is beneficial for ourselves and humanity in fact very often amounts to doing those things that Western culture would also be inclined to call “moral.” As Nietzsche asserts later in Daybreak: “It goes without saying that I do not deny – unless I am a fool – that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged – but I think the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto” (D 103). Many of the moral behaviors that we now perform should continue to be cultivated, but only because they make us “happier” and more powerful, not because they are sanctioned by “morality.” Nietzsche’s egoism must be qualified in a second way, however. Not only does Nietzschean egoism often share principles and actions that are also found in the edicts of morality, it is also not completely self-interested.11 On the contrary, the egoism that Nietzsche seeks is one that confers benefits on others as well as oneself. This is a widely misunderstood aspect of Nietzsche’s advocacy of egoism. A full treatment of Nietzsche’s cultural vision and the role of the individual within it will have to wait until Chapter 5,12 but it is important to point out now that, for Nietzsche, the health of the individual cannot be separated from the health of the community. The community is healthy only as the individual members of the community are healthy; to be healthy is to

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desire the health of others. Nietzsche asserts that having healthy and powerful community members (D 449, 554, HH I: 300), friends (GS 14) and even – in his late works – enemies (EH “Why I Am So Wise” 7) is essential to one’s own sense of power and well-being. Nietzsche believes that the most powerful and healthy (the most egoistic) always desire power and health in others because (1) power and health are beautiful to behold (and beholding beautiful things makes us powerful through inspiration) and (2) desiring the power of others demonstrates a “spiritualization” of our will to power. Instead of seeking to exercise our power by the domination of others, we exercise it by dominating our need to dominate others. Fully egoistic individuals never act out of duty or self-sacrifice but out of a desire for health and power; and they also desire to increase and support the health and power of their community – including both their friends and enemies. Nietzsche’s advocacy of egoism is therefore meant to make the individual maximally healthy, but this occurs only when the community is maximally healthy. In other words, the egoism is valuable to the individual only insofar as it increases the health of the community. In contrast to Christianity, as he sees it, Nietzsche does not believe that humanity will be best served when individuals sacrifice their own happiness and well-being. He believes that humanity at large will be best served only when individuals seek their own happiness and well-being. It is in this state of consecration that one should live! . . . This is ideal selfishness: continually to watch over and care for and to keep our souls still, so that our fruitfulness shall come to a happy fulfillment! Thus, as intermediaries, we watch over and care for to the benefit of all; and the mood in which we live, this mood of pride and gentleness, is a balm which spreads far around us and on restless souls too. (D 552) For Nietzsche, egoism is meant for the benefit of the individual and the “benefit of all.” Importantly, as should be clear, Nietzschean egoism is not a license to do whatever one wants, to whomever one wants, whenever one wants. On the contrary, Nietzsche’s conception of egoism has nothing to do with selfishness as we might conventionally understand it. The egoism that Nietzsche recommends has to do with improving one’s health and power, not gratifying one’s desires. In fact, gratifying one’s desires without consulting whether it would be healthful to do so is a sure sign of one’s unhealth. In Nietzsche’s mind, unreflectively gratifying our desires is as unhealthy to us and our community as “self-sacrifice” is. The reason Nietzsche despises “self-sacrifice” is that he believes that those who promote it are intentionally sabotaging the moral, physical, intellectual and spiritual strength of human beings. These individuals need human beings to be weak so that they can feel strong. Nietzsche will later call this nihilistic expression of the will to power ressentiment (see Chapter 7). “Self-sacrifice” is the moralistic code word that attempts to disguise the real motivation: ressentiment.

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Nevertheless, this does not mean that egoists should not care about being generous with others. In the foreground of his conception of egoism is “a feeling of fullness, of power that seeks to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of wealth that would give and bestow: the noble human being, too, helps the unfortunate, but not, or almost not, from pity, but prompted more by an urge begotten by excess of power” (BGE 260). Nietzsche believes that true egoists will, like Zarathustra, be “gift-givers,” who give themselves for the sake of the world, while all the time acting egoistically: Verily, I have found you out, my disciples: you strive, as I do, for the giftgiving virtue. . . . This is your thirst: to become sacrifices and gifts yourselves; and that is why you thirst to pile up all the riches in your soul. Insatiably your soul strives for treasures and gems, because your virtue is insatiable in wanting to give. You force all things to and into yourself that they may flow back out of your well as the gifts of your love. Verily, such a gift-giving love must approach all values as a robber; but whole and holy I call this selfishness. . . . With its rapture it delights the spirit so that it turns creator and esteemer and lover and benefactor of all things. (Z I: “On the Gift-Giving Virtue” 1) To summarize, for Nietzsche, the egoism of self-overcoming is paradoxically the only way to help others. To sacrifice oneself – to become smaller and weaker – will ultimately only make others weaker as well. The only hope to improve others is to choose a lifestyle that increases one’s power. But to increase one’s power one must not merely do whatever one wants and make others weaker. Rather, one must develop “self-control and temperance” (D 9) so that one has the strength to behave with nobility, magnanimity and generosity, thereby making others stronger.

The self-overcoming free spirit Having provided an alternative to Aviram’s, Rosenow’s and Hillesheim’s interpretation of self-overcoming, and having outlined Nietzsche’s power-centered, embodied and egoistic revaluation of self-mastery, we need to examine one other expression of the self-overcomer that Nietzsche employs repeatedly throughout his corpus: the free spirit. The standard interpretation of the free spirit is similar to Rosenow’s (1989) account of the self-overcomer, i.e. individuals that must overcome “morality, reason, and the conventions of cultural traditions” (p. 311). According to the standard view, the free spirit is someone who manages to free himself from the dominion of his culture. . . . The free spirit is not necessarily better off to be free from the shackles of society. Rather, the free spirit has achieved a considerable feat by liberating himself from society, even if he has merely attained a less correct view. (Mintz, 2004, p. 164)

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Mintz (2004) believes that what characterizes free spirits is not their ability to use reason and self-mastery to guide their choices regarding which perspectives and attitudes make them more flourishing and powerful individuals. Rather, according to Mintz, it is their willingness to deny the perspectives of their culture, even if their denial diminishes their knowledge of the truth. In her analysis of the free spirit, Amy Mullin (2000) argues similarly, claiming that “free spirits are not characterized by values that they have in common, but are instead identified by their ability to shake loose of contemporary value judgments and to interpret differently” (p. 387).13 It would appear that for Mullin and Mintz free spirits will always and necessarily take a different view from that of their culture. This is not the case, however. If we take a careful look at the passages in Human, All Too Human where Nietzsche defines the free spirit, we will see that it does not indicate the radical interpretation that the standard view recommends. He is called a free spirit who thinks differently from what, on the basis of his origin, environment, his class and profession, or on the basis of the dominant views of the age, would have been expected from him. . . . [W]hat characterizes the free spirit is not that his opinions are the more correct [dass er richtigere Ansichten hat] but that he has liberated himself from tradition [dass er sich von dem Herkömmlichen gelöst hat], whether the outcome has been successful or a failure. (HH I: 225) From this passage alone one could easily assume that Mintz’s and Mullin’s conception of the free spirit discussed previously is correct. However, to leave it at that is to miss the context in which this passage is found. To begin with, we must consider the last sentence of the aphorism, which immediately follows the previous passage. It says: “As a rule, though, he [the free spirit] will nonetheless have truth on his side, or at least a spirit of inquiry after the truth: he demands reasons, the rest demand faith [Er fordert Gründe die Anderen Glauben]” (HH I: 225). The first important thing about this passage is that it already denies the claim that “free spirits are not characterized by values that they have in common” (Mullin, 2000, p. 387). Nietzsche states plainly that what the free spirits have in common that distinguishes them from those who follow herd values is that they “demand reasons,” whereas the herd “demand[s] faith.” The importance of these attributes is reemphasized in the first lines of the next aphorism. “The fettered spirit takes up his position, not for reasons, but out of habit; he is a Christian, for example, not because he has knowledge of the various religions and has chosen between them” (HH I: 226). This passage illuminates what makes the fettered individuals unfree. It is not that they believe and act on ideas that are untrue but rather that they believe and act on ideas without reasons for doing so. This is in contrast to free spirits, who believe and act on ideas because they have reasons for doing so. This implies that, were free spirits to examine various religions, they would choose to follow one or the other based on reasons, not on faith.14 But if this is what characterizes free

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spirits, then it is entirely conceivable that they could actually choose to follow the herd while remaining free all of the time, assuming of course that they have reasons for doing so. All that matters is that free spirits examine what the herd does and determine that what they do is consistent with living a flourishing and powerful life. Thus, it seems that a free spirit could adhere to the same ideas as fettered spirits while still remaining free. Does this mean that Nietzsche is being inconsistent? On first glance it would appear so. However, when we more carefully examine Nietzsche’s definition of the free spirit from HH I:225, we begin to see differently. To recall, the free spirit is one who “thinks differently from what . . . would have been expected from him” and who “has liberated himself from tradition” (HH I: 225). It would be easy to interpret this passage as indicating that the free spirit does not believe what society believes and does not value what society values. This is not what the passage claims, however. Nietzsche argues that a true free spirit is one who “thinks differently” about ideas and values, not that the free spirit necessarily has “different ideas or values.” Nietzsche is arguing that the way free spirits think about their culture’s ideas and values is different; specifically, free spirits examine ideas and values, and through their “spirit of inquiry” determine whether there are any reasons to affirm them. This is not the case with the fettered spirits, who do not examine their culture’s ideas or values at all but merely take them on faith or by tradition. Thus, the free spirit and the fettered spirit think differently about values even if they happen to affirm the same values. The same goes for the notion of being “liberated” from one’s tradition. The operative word here is “tradition.” To be liberated from tradition means to no longer base one’s opinions on what others have historically affirmed, even if one continues to believe the same thing on the basis of reasons.15

Conclusion Truly free spirits are thus those who do not believe and act on faith or because of tradition but instead believe and act because of reasons. Free spirits must evaluate every perspective of their culture (and other cultures), as well as their own history, to determine whether or not they should adopt these perspectives. And free spirits must use reason and self-mastery to evaluate every perspective in the right way. Thus, the image of the free spirit properly understood is the embodiment of Nietzsche’s doctrine of self-overcoming. Far from being a call to continual self-reformulation or to a dangerous individualism, self-overcoming is a plea to become masters of ourselves, to deeply embody the dictates of reason, to inquire into the foundations of our cultures and traditions so as to participate in them reflectively and thus to practice a form of egoism that benefits all. This statement leads us back to the question of how to help individuals develop this “self-mastery and discipline of the heart.” As Nietzsche writes in Daybreak, we rarely achieve this state of self-mastery and “reasonable freespiritedness,” as we might call it. Rather, we remain as “children” and

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rarely learn to change our view; most of us are our whole lives long the fools of the way we acquired in childhood of judging our neighbors (their minds, rank, morality, whether they are exemplary or reprehensible) and of finding it necessary to pay homage to their evaluations. (D 104) So what must we do to become the masters of ourselves that Nietzsche calls us to be? This question forms the central concern of the next chapter.

Notes 1 By “traditional” we mean the concept of self-mastery that refers to the moderation of one’s passions and desires by one’s rational faculty. Nietzsche’s concept is distinct from the traditional, but it shares more with it than do the alternative notions of selfovercoming that we will examine. 2 This fact is echoed by Solomon and Higgins (2000) when they say: “A curious perversity in Nietzsche scholarship is that some commentators have preferred Nietzsche’s scrambled notes to his masterful publications” (p. 83). Other authors who oppose the unrestricted use of Nietzsche’s Nachlass include Magnus (1988); Clark (1990); Alderman (1977); and Leiter (1994). 3 Translation amended. The original translation renders “Selbstbeherrschung” as “self-command” and “Vernunft” as “rationality.” An extended discussion of why “self-mastery” and “reason” are better renderings of “Selbstbeherrschung” and “Vernunft” occurs in the following section. 4 See also GM II:12, where Nietzsche claims “that in all events the will to power is happening” and that “the essence of life [is] its will to power.” 5 There is a tendency in contemporary scholarship to treat Kaufmann as a historically important but ultimately unreliable reader of Nietzsche. This is troublesome because this means that there are very few arguments repudiating his reading of Nietzsche – one noteworthy counterexample is Robert Solomon who frequently engages Kaufmann’s “mistakes.” Generally, however, Kaufmann is discounted by offhand comments often related to the belief that his reading of Nietzsche is “too humanistic.” Undoubtedly, there have been more sustained and rigorously argued repudiations of his interpretation; the problem is that no one, in our experience at least, is referencing those repudiations. It almost seems that Kaufmann is ignored or dismissed primarily because he is considered outmoded. Indeed, as one anonymous reviewer of an earlier work of ours suggested, “Many contemporary students of Nietzsche, especially those in Education and opinionmakers upon which philosophers of education are apt to rely, consider Kaufmann oldfashioned and superseded. This judgment regarding Kaufmann, while no doubt flawed, is widely and unreflectively held.” This is not to say that Kaufmann’s interpretation is not without its flaws. But it behooves readers of Nietzsche, especially educators, to offer him a fair hearing. Does his interpretation square with what Nietzsche affirms or does it not? That is the question that must be asked. It must be asked because Kaufmann’s interpretation may help to protect us from allowing our culturally embedded biases to predetermine our reading of Nietzsche; Kaufmann’s ideas may have been expressed decades ago, but that is precisely why they may afford important insights into Nietzsche’s writings and our own cultural biases. 6 See also TI “Morality as Anti-Nature” 1–2. 7 As we have seen Aviram does try to distinguish between the forms of power, but because his conception is based on a fundamental flaw, his distinction between the forms of power loses its force.

80 The doctrine of self-overcoming 8 This is indeed a concern of Nietzsche’s. However, his solution is not to diminish the need for reason but to emphasize the additional need for aesthetic, emotional and physiological capacities as well. In The Gay Science he begins to assimilate these modes of reason into what might be called a “philosophy of the body” (GS P:2). 9 See also Nietzsche (D 109). 10 It is important to note that, unlike in the early period, when Nietzsche is suspicious of Socrates, the Nietzsche of the middle period generally regards him as a free spirit who taught us much about how we should live (WS 86). 11 In this vein, Young (2006, pp. 66–67) takes issue with Nietzsche for not properly distinguishing between selfishness and self-interestedness. Young claims that Nietzsche’s attribution of selfishness to any individual who benefits from a set of principles is incorrect, suggesting that an individual in this case may be self-interested but not selfish. Young’s point is entirely correct; if an individual experiences pleasure from supporting his or her friend financially, this does not mean that the individual helped his or her friend only because, or even primarily because, he or she experienced pleasure. He or she may have helped the friend because he or she believed that helping one’s friends is a good thing to do. 12 Thus, while Mintz (2004), for example, correctly identifies Nietzsche’s criticism of morality’s attempt to force every individual to “serve society rather than his own selfish goals” (p. 163), he fails to appreciate the ambiguity in Nietzsche’s concept of egoism. For Nietzsche, egoism is not an individual’s insistence on serving “his own selfish goals” but is rather his insistence on becoming a more powerful and more whole individual, which according to Nietzsche necessarily benefits the whole of culture and the individuals in that culture as well. Thus, the best way to serve society for Nietzsche is not to sacrifice one’s self but to elevate one’s self so that the entire community can benefit. 13 This explanation of the free spirit corresponds to Mullin’s (2000) most mature level of free-spiritedness. In her detailed analysis of the various kinds of free spirits, Mullin identifies eight different levels of free-spiritedness that appear throughout Nietzsche’s writings. Because the goal of this study is to find the ideal human and the education that will produce that human, we focus only on the highest stage of the free spirit. 14 Of course, to those who do not profess the religion it may appear that the religious person has no reasons for professing the religion and only does so out of “faith”; but, as Nietzsche indicates in his example, there are those that profess a religion based on an unwillingness to explore the reasons why their religion might be justified on empirical, aesthetic or metaphysical grounds. These individuals are religious only by faith and are, from Nietzsche’s point of view, unfree spirits. Free spirits, on the other hand, base their religious profession on grounds that are empirical, aesthetic, metaphysical and so on. 15 Take, for example, a young woman considering going to college who refuses to attend the college that her parents and grandparents attended because that is where they suggest she goes. In doing so, the woman may appear to be a free spirit who has rejected tradition. But before we can determine whether she is actually a free spirit we need to determine whether she has broken with tradition out of faith in another tradition (say, because her boyfriend was going to a different school, where his parents and grandparents went) or for her own reasons. As it turns out, when we ask her why she is refusing to attend the school that her family recommends, she says the reason is that she wants to go to the school that has the best theater department in the country (her parents want her to be a doctor). According to the criteria Nietzsche offers in the previous passage at least, we can safely determine that she is a free spirit. We are now excited to discover which school she will end up attending, and therefore we go with her to the bookstore where she can find books that rank theater departments. As we begin to examine the books with her, we are as shocked as she is to discover that the school with the best theater department happens to be the school her family recommended she attend. Of course, we are at a

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bit of a loss and ask her what she will do. Her answer resolves the apparent contraction in the previous passages. She argues with perfect lucidity that her goal in rejecting her parents’ request was not that she did not want to go to that school but that she believed that doing something merely out of tradition was to place oneself in fetters, whereas to do something for reasons one developed for oneself was to liberate oneself, even if the decision ended in the same action. If she then chose not to follow the reasons she had discovered merely so that she would not have the appearance of following tradition, then she would be as unfree as if she had followed tradition in the first place. She therefore chooses to attend the school that her parents desired, but she does so for reasons and not for tradition. By this, she is a free spirit, even though to an outside observer she might appear to be fettered.

Chapter 4

Educational implications of self-overcoming Embodying reason, embracing struggle

Introduction Self-overcoming is a modified form of self-mastery, according to which individuals should employ their reason to determine which beliefs and actions are conducive to the most powerful and flourishing life. Though this reading accords closely with many of Nietzsche’s seminal statements of the doctrine, the common misunderstanding of self-overcoming as an injunction to throw off the shackles of social convention and assume new values indiscriminately persists nonetheless. What this conception misses is precisely the discriminating role that reason is supposed to play in the process of self-overcoming, a role that carries important consequences for any concerted educational effort to cultivate self-overcoming. The question we explore in this chapter is thus how Nietzsche thinks self-overcoming can be cultivated in an educational setting. Unfortunately, Nietzsche believes that contemporary democratic societies do not do a very good job of cultivating these crucial qualities and thereby inhibit their citizens’ pursuit of a flourishing life. In particular, Nietzsche thinks there are two barriers to flourishing in democratic societies that a committed pedagogy of self-overcoming must ultimately address. The first has to do with reason itself. Although reason can in theory help us to distinguish between those affective expressions that will further empower us and those that make us weaker, Nietzsche is of the opinion that our reason is not in good working order in the modern world. Reason is, in other words, giving us the wrong information about which passions we should master and overcome and which ones we should indulge, as well as how we should do so. On Nietzsche’s view, we are decadents in our indulgences and ascetics in our abstinences, whose methods of self-mastery are either brutal in their effects or self-deceptively ineffective. One of the central reasons for this widespread rational pathology – the “unreason in the nature of this age” (SE 7, p. 179) – is our experience in schools. Indeed, Nietzsche believes that one of the chief failings of the contemporary educational system is its ineptitude at teaching sound reasoning. And yet he thinks this should be the school’s central mission: “The school [die Schule] has no more important task than to teach rigorous thinking [strenges Denken], cautious

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judgment [vorsichtiges Urteilen] and consistent reasoning [konsequentes Schließen]” (HH I:265). The second barrier to flourishing that Nietzsche’s pedagogy of self-overcoming promises to counteract has to do with our capacity to self-overcome. Nietzsche believes that we have not sufficiently developed the internal fortitude necessary to self-overcome when reason calls for it. We are not able to consistently face the struggle and the suffering involved in the task of self-overcoming. Interestingly, Nietzsche thinks a significant reason for this general incapacity is our tendency to pity students when they encounter struggle. This promotes a culture of defeatism in the face of struggle and a culture of struggle-avoidance. Because self-overcoming often requires protracted struggle and even momentary suffering (e.g. in overcoming a strong passion or counteracting an addiction), unreflective pity in education is a serious problem. This chapter will treat each of these barriers – the lack of an education in reason and the unreflective use of pity by educators – in turn. Using Nietzsche’s insights this chapter offers a way of thinking about what teachers can do if they want to help students develop and exercise their reason in more life-affirming and empowering ways. However, this is only half of the battle. Once students are able to think clearly about which expressions of their passions will lead to a more empowered life, they must also have the courage and strength of will to master those that would prevent them from living these lives. Studies have shown that teachers are increasingly unwilling to allow their students to struggle in the classroom, however. Their fear is that the experience of struggle, in forcing students to confront their limitations, will undermine their self-esteem or self-confidence. But, according to Nietzsche, students must be willing to embrace struggle if they want to become their highest selves. Thus, the doctrine of self-overcoming calls teachers to overcome their desire to pity and protect, and to adopt a form of pity that will help encourage the students to become their highest selves. In the second half of this chapter we therefore examine Nietzsche’s condemnation of pity and show the ways teachers use it to protect students from embracing self-mastery.

The pedagogy of embodied self-mastery I: cultivating “reason” In the previous chapter, we learned that “reason” is a crucial element of Nietzsche’s doctrine of self-overcoming. This result might have seemed somewhat surprising given Nietzsche’s relativist reputation, but once it was argued that the doctrine of self-overcoming is a modified form of the traditional concept of self-mastery it may have seemed quite the opposite. Reason is front and center in the self-mastery tradition. It occupies the seat of authority in the intellectual realm; it is the rightful ruler of the soul. While Nietzsche’s conception of self-overcoming leans heavily on this tradition, both Nietzsche’s conception of reason and his understanding of

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its role in the process of self-mastery differ importantly from their counterparts in the self-mastery tradition. According to the doctrine of self-overcoming, we should strive to live life according to “reason,” and we should still attempt to install it as the ruler over the soul; however, we should not fall into the dualistic trap of thereby thinking of reason as an element of the psyche separate from the passions. The faculty of reason corresponds to that sensibility or understanding that allows us to distinguish between expressions of passions that we should overcome and those we should indulge so that we are empowered by their actualization. In other words, if we recall the discussion of perspectivism in Chapter 1, reason helps us to fulfil the “purity claim” of perspectival knowledge – that is, to determine which “interpretive interests and needs . . . distort the nature of the objects” before us and which depict them appropriately (Leiter, 1994, p. 345f.). Because Nietzsche’s doctrine of perspectivism maintains that we always observe the world, including ourselves, from a particular point of view, even our account of the empowering or debilitating quality of our various interpretive interests will be perspectival. As such, the dictates of reason too draw on the same affective basis that motivates any other thought or action for Nietzsche. Reason is, in other words, imbued with passion. The converse is also true. Passion can take on an intelligent form. With this thesis, Nietzsche’s doctrine of self-overcoming repudiates the ageold philosophical prejudice against the body and its passions and reverses its predilection for disinterested, disembodied rationality. This reversal is of historical import. It would usher in the dramatic epistemological developments of, especially, the latter part of the twentieth century, in particular the rise of constructivist theories of knowledge “production.” But this reversal is also of tremendous educational import. The goal of cultivating not just rationality but embodied reason challenges much of what we take for granted in modern schooling. Nietzsche believes that it is high time for our schools to take up this challenge. Speaking of the state of education in the rapidly modernizing late nineteenth century, Nietzsche observes: What the “higher schools” in Germany really achieve is a brutal training, designed to prepare huge numbers of young men, with as little loss of time as possible, to become usable, abusable, in government service. . . . In present-day Germany no one is free any longer to give his children a noble education [vornehme Erziehung]: our “higher schools” are all set up for the most ambiguous mediocrity, with their teachers, curricula, and teaching aims. And everywhere an indecent haste prevails, as if something would be lost if the young man of twenty-three were not yet “finished,” or if he did not know the answer to the “main question”: which calling? . . . Our overcrowded secondary schools, our overworked, stupefied secondary school teachers are a scandal: for one to defend such conditions . . . there may perhaps be causes – reasons there are none. (TI “What the Germans Lack” 5)

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Nietzsche voices several objections in this passage – to the “haste” of modern education, to its permission of mediocrity, to its instrumentalization to the needs of the state and the economy – but his main objection to this state of educational affairs is its overall inability to provide its patrons with a “noble education.” Clearly much turns on what Nietzsche means by this phrase, and in such situations Nietzsche’s typical move is to leave his readers just at this point, neither explaining nor specifying what he means by the term in question. Yet he does something different here. Rather than lament the state of education and move on, Nietzsche outlines a three-pronged educational program that he believes can both address the general degradation he found on the educational scene of his day and gradually build up the noble culture he had, since his earliest writings, hoped for. I put forward at once – lest I break with my style, which is affirmative and deals with contradiction and criticism only as a means, only involuntarily – the three tasks for which educators are required. One must learn to see, one must learn to think, and one must learn to speak and write: the goal in all three is a noble culture [vornehme Cultur]. (TI “What the Germans Lack” 6) We have already seen this passage come up once in this book; it was the point of departure for Nietzsche’s pedagogy of perspectival empathy, which grew out of the profound sense of “seeing” that Nietzsche conveys in this section and throughout his corpus. Yet Nietzsche understands each of the other domains – thinking, speaking and writing – in an equally profound sense. Indeed, Nietzsche offers these practices as substantive alternatives to what could be found in late nineteenth-century “higher schools.” More precisely, Nietzsche understands each as an embodied practice, whose pursuit cultivates the embodied reason he finds crucial for the task of self-overcoming. Learning to “think”

In order to understand the full import of Nietzsche’s conception of thinking, it will be helpful to review first what we moderns usually think about thinking, to invoke a famous turn of phrase sometimes used to define philosophy itself. We might start with the idea of “reasoning.” In the English vernacular, it is quite typical to conflate rationality and reason. To reason is to employ a rational mode of thought that helps clarify concepts, connect causes to effects, calculate our chances of success, predict probable outcomes, assess risk, etc. When we equate these two ideas, we in fact show our hand regarding our background philosophy of thinking. Thinking is, for us, a largely intellectual, cognitive activity. We consider thinking an event of the mind, best carried out in the terms of what we believe is the highest form of intellectual reflection available to us, scientific inquiry. As philosophers of the twentieth century have insightfully pointed out,

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thinking for us operates almost exclusively under a paradigm of “calculative rationality” [rechnerische Rationalität] (Heidegger, 1985) or “functionalist rationality” [funktionalistische Vernunft] (Habermas, 1995). According to these critiques, thinking basically consists in the generation of and choice among several considered courses of action, which choice is decided on the basis of its probable and efficient realization of our immediate ends, desires and interests. From his earliest published work, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche too was concerned with our all-too-enthusiastic embrace of this rationalistic paradigm of thinking. In this text, for example, Nietzsche argues that the German educational system is steeped in an intellectual tradition that values rationalistic theory over embodied praxis. [T]he highest ideal [German education] knows is theoretical man, equipped with the highest powers of understanding and working in the service of science, whose archetype and progenitor is Socrates. The original aim of all our means of education is to achieve this ideal; every other form of existence has to fight its way up alongside it, as something permitted but not intended. (BT 18) Nietzsche echoes this concern in a sprawling polemic against the “men of learning,” the Wissenschaftler, of his day in Schopenhauer as Educator. According to Nietzsche, the educational environment of the university has been corrupted by a breed of professors, who possess a certain drive to dialectical investigation, the huntsman’s joy in following the sly fox’s path in the realm of thought so that it is not really truth that is sought but the seeking itself, and the main pleasure consists in the cunning tracking, encircling, and correct killing. (SE 6, p. 170) Thinking becomes here the macabre act of hunting down inconsistencies and faulty premises. Worse, if we “add to this the impulse to contradiction, the personality wanting to be aware of itself and make itself felt in opposition to all others” (SE 6, p. 170) that Nietzsche observes among the professors, then we have a picture of the university academic for whom controversion and negation “becomes a pleasure and the goal is personal victory” (SE 6, p. 170). When we are taught by such people, a mocking skepticism or a discouraged resignation is difficult to avoid, both of which Nietzsche thought to be grave dangers to the student in such an environment (SE 8, p. 187). Nietzsche’s “rattling of bones” metaphor in the following passage captures the consequences of both quite well. If one accustoms oneself to translating every experience into a dialectical question-and-answer game, it is astounding in how short a time he

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becomes parched by the activity, how soon we hear from him only a rattling of bones. Everyone knows and sees this: thus how is it possible that the youth nevertheless do not shrink back from such skeleton-men, but blindly and without restraint give themselves over to the sciences again and again? This behavior can hardly arise from the supposed “drive to truth”: for how could there be any drive at all towards cold, pure, inconsequential knowledge! (SE 6; our translation) In voicing these criticisms, Nietzsche alludes to the fact that there is an alternative way of thinking and reasoning that avoids the reductionistic rationalism of the scientific paradigm and truly follows the “desire for truth” (and is better suited to attaining the latter). Importantly, this alternative is not a repudiation of science tout court. Indeed, Nietzsche criticizes the university philosophers he had become acquainted with in his student days for generally avoiding true engagement with the sciences. One has only to reflect on his time as a student; in my case, for example, the academic philosophers were quite indifferent men. I counted them as people who stirred together something for themselves out of the results of the other sciences, who in leisure hours read the newspaper and went to concerts. . . . They were held to know very little and never to be at a loss for an obscure turn of phrase so as to conceal this lack of knowledge from others. . . . [I]n short, they always found reasons why it was more philosophical to know nothing than to learn something. If they did take up a bit of learning, it was merely to follow their secret impulse to flee the sciences and to found a dark domain in some one of their gaps or ill-lit corners. (SE 8; our translation) For Nietzsche, embodied reason and science are thus not mortal enemies but potential partners. Science, even scientific rationality, can be useful at times; Nietzsche’s philosophy itself often draws on the plethora of new ideas that were emerging in the physics, psychology, biology, history and, of course, philology of his day. Yet, if we cultivate this form of rationality alone, Nietzsche reminds us, we will never be fully empowered thinkers. He illustrates this with another powerful metaphor that comes in the passage from Twilight of the Idols with which we began. According to Nietzsche, thinking is itself a special kind of aesthetic practice. Learning to think: in our schools one no longer has any idea of this. Even in the universities, even among the real scholars of philosophy, logic as a theory, as a practice, as a craft, is beginning to die out. One need only read German books: there is no longer the remotest recollection that thinking requires a technique, a teaching curriculum, a will to mastery – that

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thinking wants to be learned like dancing, as a kind of dancing. . . . For one cannot subtract dancing in any form from a noble education – to be able to dance with one’s feet, with concepts, with words. (TI “What the Germans Lack” 7) Thinking properly understood is thus a kind of dancing. The import of this metaphor for education becomes apparent only when we inquire into what dancing actually is. So what is dancing exactly? Dancing is a structured practice that can be learned only after long apprenticeship into a particular tradition and style of dance. Once the dance has been “learned” – but of course no true dancer would ever claim to have exhaustively “learned” the dance – the knowledge one has acquired is profoundly embodied, involving theoretical knowledge of technique and timing as well as aesthetic knowledge of appealing display and movement. Having achieved this level of knowledge, one demonstrates in performance a trained improvisation and controlled invention. Through the deep internalization that occurs in learning the dance – that is, through appropriating its special form, its unique musical meter, its expressive potential as well as its aesthetic boundaries – one can finally bring one’s own style to its execution. One modifies or breaks custom where it feels right. One adds “style” to one’s “character,” to repeat Nietzsche’s famous formula from The Gay Science. What does all this have to do with thinking? The dance metaphor, it seems to us, compellingly characterizes, and in fact advances, how we think of “mastery” in the context of social practices. One way of describing masters of a practice – whether in a discipline like mathematics or a craft like carpentry – is to consider them “dancers” in Nietzsche’s sense. Masters have in effect learned to “dance” with the concepts, ideas and values of their practice, as well as with their “feet” (that is, whatever parts of their body are characteristically involved). While we often think of the master in static terms, as someone who consistently performs various tasks and processes well, Nietzsche entreats us to understand mastery in a richer, more dynamic way. The master is a creative innovator, whose on-the-fly inventions and contribution of personal style demonstrate the capacity to extend and reinvent the practice, while maintaining a deep commitment to it. These reinventions are not an attempt to cast off the practice’s conceptual or customary “shackles,” though they do involve critical engagement with the foundations of the practice. Rather they are the individual’s contribution to the social practice, keeping it alive, moving and strong. Learning to “think” in the Nietzschean sense thus implies a process of apprenticeship and initiation into disciplinary practices that is oriented to mastery. Crucially, this mastery should not be understood as mere mastery of technique, nor as frivolous questioning of established customs. The knowledge that one gains in mastery should not be mistaken for mere cognitive acquisition, nor as opposed to intellectual growth. And the reasoning one employs to attain mastery should not be reduced to scientific rationality, nor to mere aesthetic sensibility. Rather, to master a practice is to learn to dance with its concepts

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and customs, demonstrating a simultaneous critical commitment and committed critique. This “praxeological” theory of thinking, and the educational imperative that issues from it, connects Nietzsche’s ideas intimately to the neo-Aristotelian movement in educational theory represented by such philosophers as A. N. Whitehead, R. S. Peters, Alasdair MacIntyre and contemporary philosophers of education such as Joseph Dunne (2003), Christopher Higgins (2011) and Kristján Kristjánsson (2015, 2016). Additionally, Nietzsche’s praxeological theory of thinking calls into question the reigning “critical thinking” paradigm in our schools and universities today. Teachers and professors regularly defend their practices by referring to the fact that they are helping students to “question assumptions” or “think critically about what they take for granted.” While these may be worthy aims, Nietzsche helps us to see that their pursuit can be hazardous if done at the expense of other important aims. Educated in a culture of critical thinking, the individual may become incapable of engaging with ideas, systems of thought, theories and concepts in a way that actually enriches their experience. Instead they become mere fodder for preening contradiction. According to Nietzsche, education at the university often forces students to entertain “fifty systems [of thought] in the form of words and fifty critiques of them . . . side by side and intermingled” with little regard for their existential significance or “whether one can live in accordance with [them]” (SE 8, p. 187). This treatment of academic subject matter can send the message that ideas are simply things to be compared, contrasted and criticized, rather than guides to how we live our lives. Learning to “speak and write”

This discussion leads directly to the final two elements of the educational program outlined in Twilight of the Idols: learning to “speak and write.” If we recall the discussion of Chapter 1, Stefan Ramaekers (2001) claims that Nietzsche believes that students should be inculcated “into a particular constellation of arbitrary laws” that affords them the “precondition for making sense of anything and exploring the unfamiliar” (p. 260). While this claim is unobjectionable, it is the next step in his reading that becomes problematic. Ramaekers implies that the particular system of “lies” – his word for these laws, customs and perspectives – into which we inculcate students does not ultimately matter, only that they realize that this system is a lie and subsequently must “make [their] own lies, again and again” (p. 264). This is, as should now be apparent, the opposite of what Nietzsche thinks. Indeed, not only does Nietzsche reject this notion in a theoretical sense – his conception of thinking as “dancing” calls for a much more committed engagement with one’s cultural and practical communities – but he argues explicitly for a particular cultural paradigm that should frame our efforts to teach students to “speak and write.” As early as his 1872 lectures On the Future of Our

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Educational Institutions we see his insistence on a rigorous, discipline-based education that teaches students mastery in the classics: The same teacher would further have to show in our classical authors from line to line how carefully and rigorously every turn is to be taken, when one has the right artistic feeling in the heart and the complete understanding of everything of which one writes before the eyes. He will ever and ever again compel his students to express the same thoughts still once more and still better and will find no limit to his activity until the less gifted ones are gotten into a holy terror before the language, and the gifted ones into a noble inspiration of the same. (FE 2, p. 45)1 Nietzsche recommends this education in “speaking and writing” because only through it can students learn to think independently. It is only after they have learned to think from their experience with classical literature that they are capable of having noble, true and beautiful thoughts and expressions. To assume that students will be capable of such expressions apart from rigorous obedience to such an education is, for Nietzsche, the height of foolishness. In a statement of rebuke of those who do not believe students need such an education, Nietzsche declaims: Here each [student] is considered, without anything further, as a being capable of literature, who is permitted to have his own opinions about the most serious things and persons, whereas a correct education will strive precisely only straight therefrom with all spirit to suppress the laughable claim to independence of judgment and to habituate the young human being to a strict obedience under the scepter of genius. (FE 2, p. 49) The last two lines in this passage are important to highlight because they illuminate the subtle but important difference between a correct and incorrect understanding of Nietzsche’s insistence on discipline and obedience in schooling. While Ramaekers believes that strict obedience alone is the only necessary precondition for a Nietzschean education, this passage reveals that it is not obedience alone that is necessary but obedience of a certain kind, namely obedience under the “scepter of genius” – those individuals who are masters of their crafts. It is only after a rigorous education in the classics that students are capable of independence of judgment. Nearly ten years later Nietzsche echoes similar sentiments. He laments that the education of himself and his peers was compromised by the neglect of a true classical education in favor of a “formal education.” This latter approach did not inculcate true embodied knowledge or teach them the art of thinking and

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living well but instead merely promoted history and a superficial understanding of the classics. And then to look back on our life and also to discover something that can no longer be made good: the squandering of our youth when our educators failed to employ those eager, hot and thirsty years to lead us towards knowledge of things but used them for a so-called “classical education”! . . . If only we had been taught to revere these sciences, if only our souls had even once been made to tremble at the way in which the great men of the past had struggled and been defeated and had struggled anew[.] . . . What we felt instead was the breadth of a certain disdain for the actual sciences in favor of history, of “formal education” and of the “classics”! . . . Formal Education! Could we not have pointed to the finest teachers at our grammar schools, laughed at them and asked: “are they products of formal education? And if not, how can they teach it?” And the classics! Did we learn anything of that which these same ancients taught their young people? Did we learn to speak or write like they did? Did we practice unceasingly the fencing-art of conversation, dialectics? Did we learn to move as beautifully and proudly as they did, to wrestle, to throw, to box as they did? Did we learn anything of the asceticism practiced by all Greek philosophers? (D 195) Nietzsche thus argues that becoming self-determining entails an early period of immersive tutelage in which educators attempt to deeply embed students in classical culture so that they learn to model their “speaking and writing” closely after the exemplars it celebrates. Paradoxically, only this kind of tutelage can cultivate students’ independent reasoning; Nietzsche warns that expecting individual expression from students before such tutelage has taken place actually damages their ability to be truly “independent” [selbständig] individuals, as it makes them grasp for a form in which to express themselves unreflectively (FE 2). Put differently, if one is to develop the autonomy of personal style and creativity that Nietzsche claims constitute true mastery, one must first be inculcated by means of heteronomous apprenticeship into a practical tradition. For Nietzsche, this means that students should be inculcated into initial self-mastery “under the scepter of genius.” Thus, when they have learned to master themselves, they will possess the practiced taste to determine ends for themselves, a taste that will make them true individuals as well as elevate their culture (TI “What the Germans Lack” 6–7; FE 2, 3). The problem of education for Nietzsche is, therefore, not that it constructs selves, thereby undermining our self-determination, but that it constructs selves poorly, in a way that prevents students’ later achievement of self-determination. Education of this sort produces weak-willed conformists who are directed by the whims of their own desires and their cultures’ desires.

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The pedagogy of embodied self-mastery II: embracing struggle To cultivate students’ reason, then, is to immerse students in a rich philosophical and literary tradition that takes inspiration from Hellenic culture and emphasizes a form of thinking that is embodied, rational and aesthetic all at once. This educational vision stands in stark contrast to what we might call the “scientistic” educational imaginary that has captivated the modern world, an imaginary that apotheosizes scientific rationality and “critical thinking” while it dispenses with conscious adherence to substantive moral and cultural values. Nietzsche’s surprising response to the hegemony of scientific rationality is to meet it on its own terms. Our rationality is unreasonable. In the context of self-overcoming, this means we are generally unable to reliably distinguish between those passions and drives that we should express and those we should master for the sake of our empowerment. Thus, the lack of an education in reason has the dire consequence that we become especially susceptible to the temptations of our consumer society and the addictive behaviors it encourages. Interestingly, Nietzsche’s polemics against the scientific paradigm often raise a further objection to its encroachments that we have not yet mentioned but that suggest a second dimension to his pedagogy of self-overcoming. When Nietzsche talks about the limitations of the scientific worldview, he often claims that it cannot properly handle the “problem of suffering.” This is an important criticism for Nietzsche, for suffering occupies a central place in his philosophical edifice. As we have already seen, the task of self-overcoming always implies a certain amount of suffering, namely in the struggle to overcome our powerful drives to do things we should not do. Yet suffering, Nietzsche claims, remains altogether “alien and unintelligible” to the paradigm of scientific rationality: Science relates to wisdom as virtuousness to holiness: it is cold and dry, it has no love and knows nothing of a profound feeling of dissatisfaction and longing. It is as useful to itself as it is damaging to its servants, insofar as it carries over its own character to the latter and thereby ossifies their humanity. As long as the promotion of science is understood to be the essence of culture, it passes by the great suffering man with merciless coldness. For science sees everywhere only problems of knowledge and suffering as something quite unseemly and incomprehensible, therefore at most another problem. (SE 6; our translation) Nietzsche’s criticism of science here is as profound as it is easy to misunderstand, given its seeming absurdity. Science, of all human endeavors, has dealt with the problem of human suffering with immense success, it seems. In the form of medicine and agriculture, science has led to the development of vaccines and pills that have dramatically reduced the debilitating illnesses that had

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once afflicted us and provided reliable sources of food for a staggering number of people worldwide (though an equally staggering number still go without food). It is precisely because suffering was made intelligible by the scientific mode of thinking that any of this was possible. So what could Nietzsche possibly mean by the claim that suffering remains “alien and unintelligible” to its concerns? The problem for Nietzsche is not the undeniable progress that science has made in reducing unnecessary physical suffering. Rather, Nietzsche takes issue with an all-too-common attendant of the scientific mode of thinking, namely, what he calls in The Birth of Tragedy “theoretical optimism.” That is, science claims to be able to rid the world of suffering altogether; it refuses to face the terrible truth that, in spite of all its efforts, human suffering is an ineluctable fact of life (BT 17). Put differently, we – in planning our cruise vacations, doing our online shopping, going to yoga lessons and making our fast-food orders – hope to escape suffering once and for all. This hope is, at least in part, a direct result of the promises of science and technology. The will to pity

Nietzsche takes it to be one of the most troubling aspects of modern life that this escapism – this refusal to face up to the ineluctability of suffering – has become so widespread and that we lack a widely celebrated form of art that could help us to confront suffering in a courageous and determined manner as tragedy did for the ancient Greeks. One form that this escapism takes in contemporary education is the feeling of pity that educators often feel for their students. Broadly speaking, Nietzsche believes that pity comes in two forms.2 The first form of pity is beneficial because it causes individuals and the human race to become stronger. The second form of pity is detrimental because it helps individuals and the human race itself to become weaker. Nietzsche, unsurprisingly, praises the first form of pity and denounces the second. He is concerned that overweening pity for suffering individuals actually weakens them in the long run. For instance, in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche discusses a form of pity he calls “farsighted” pity. Our pity is a higher and more farsighted pity: we see how man makes himself smaller, how you make him smaller – and there are moments . . . when we resist this pity – when we find your seriousness more dangerous than any frivolity. . . . And our pity – do you not comprehend for whom our pity is when it resists your pity as the worst of all pamperings and weaknesses? Thus it is pity versus pity. (BGE 225) Thus, far from being the opponent of all forms of pity that Nietzsche is sometimes thought to be, Nietzsche is concerned with opposing the kind of pity that weakens human beings. In a later passage, Nietzsche even claims that such

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farsighted pity is useful to the weak and ailing. It is to these masters “to whom the weak, the suffering, the hard pressed, and the animals too, like to come and belong by nature . . . when such a man has pity, well this pity has value” (BGE 293). Instead of receiving sympathy, the spiritually “weak and ailing” should be taught to overcome their weakness by educators who have, themselves, overcome their own weaknesses. To overcome one’s weakness does not mean to overcome suffering, however. What it does mean is to become a self-overcomer, to embrace the suffering of self-overcoming. Indeed, Nietzsche suggests that his own self-cultivation is dependent on his suffering. The whole economy of my soul and the balance effected by “distress,” the way new springs and needs break open, the way in which old wounds are healing, the way whole periods of the past are shed – all such things that may be involved in distress are of no concern to our dear pitying friends; they wish to help and have no thought of the personal necessity of distress, although terrors, deprivations, impoverishments, midnights, adventures, risks, and blunders are as necessary for me and for you as are their opposites. . . . No, the “religion of pity” (or “the heart”) commands them to help, and they believe that they have helped most when they have helped most quickly. (GS 338) Because suffering is not only inevitable but potentially empowering, it is reprehensible for “compassionate” individuals to intervene because of their own inability to master their feelings of pity. This is the problem of “overactive” empathy in another guise. Yet, as we have seen, Nietzsche does not reject the concept of empathy or even pity altogether, but he thinks it is misguided when it only seeks to abolish immediate suffering. This is a plea for self-mastery, for the governance of one’s passions (including the passion of pity) so that other individuals can be made strong and free – in other words, so that they can become masters of themselves. As he puts it in an already quoted passage from Human, All Too Human, those who lack “self-mastery and self-overcoming” become “involuntarily” defenders of an unreflective and “instinctive” “morality of pity” (WS 45). The operative word here is “involuntarily.” Nietzsche’s insight into the modern will to pity is that we should not unreflectively, that is to say involuntarily, assume it to be moral. This is to deny the possibility that pity can be governed by one’s “head” instead of by one’s “heart” (ibid.). For Nietzsche, the feeling of pity is not valuable in itself, but rather how one controls and thoughtfully allocates that pity determines its value. Allowing embodied reason to direct pity towards the strengthening of an individual – in an act of selfmastery – is the beneficial, reflective use of pity; to prescribe pity universally and thoughtlessly is reprehensible.3

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Reflective pity in the classroom

For Nietzsche, the feeling of pity we experience when we see someone suffer is never its own justification. In order to reflectively pity others, we must act on our pity only if assisting them will have the net effect of making them more autonomous. This means that true pity is not a feeling at all but is rather a “reasoned” decision about how to best assist an individual in becoming more autonomous. According to Nietzsche, educators must strive to develop selfmastery in themselves and employ that self-mastery to overcome the feeling of pity for their students so that the latter can develop self-mastery themselves. The problem is that studies have shown that teachers have a tendency to pity students too quickly and alleviate their struggles without reflecting on the long-term ramifications. For example, Avi Mintz (2017, 2008) argues that pain is a necessary and therefore desirable component of education. Mintz further argues that Anglo-American educators and theorists are, unfortunately, more inclined to try to mitigate pain in education rather than allow it.4 In an evocative example of the tendency of teachers to attempt to alleviate suffering, Mintz (2008) cites a study describing the lengths American mathematics teachers go to in order to protect students from struggle and confusion. Rather than allowing students to struggle through their difficulties, teachers are more often inclined to “rescue” the students so that they can feel successful and not be discouraged. Quoting the mathematics study, Mintz explains that “it is typical for the teacher to intervene at the first sign of struggle” and that “confusion and frustration, in this traditional American view, should be minimized” (p. 72). According to Mintz, while certain painful experiences can be educationally detrimental, there are many others that are educationally beneficial. Unfortunately, in trying to protect students from the former, educators often deny students the latter. Mintz’s study is important because it reveals the Western tendency to believe that students will learn best when they have positive and affirming experiences in the classroom, rather than when they experience painful struggles and difficulties. Nietzsche would decry this detrimental use of pity and would instead ask teachers to use self-mastery to overcome their immediate feeling of pity and instead consider how to make the student stronger – which is to say, to have “pity” on the student’s future self. Unfortunately, while Nietzsche’s prescription for inculcating self-mastery is compelling in theory, it presents a host of problems in practice. The most serious difficulty is how to determine when to act on the pity we feel for students and when not to. As Nietzsche indicates, there are times when it is necessary for the development of self-mastery to reasonably follow our pitying inclinations. Helping students overcome their fear of speaking in the classroom by gently encouraging them over a period of time may increase their mastery far more effectively than forcing them to speak immediately. On the other hand, other students may develop self-mastery more quickly by being forced to confront their fears by speaking immediately, and therefore we should

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not attempt to alleviate their suffering. The problem is that to adequately judge between even these two cases we would need “complete” knowledge of our students, including their background, intellectual abilities, psychological states, etc. On top of this, there are obviously serious psychological, ethical and legal ramifications at stake in forcing students to suffer when it is within our power to alleviate their suffering. As a consequence, it seems to us that the only possible implementation of Nietzsche’s ideas in the contemporary classroom is to focus less on how teachers are to determine when to show pity and to focus instead on how to help students guide teachers in those determinations. If teachers cannot accurately and safely determine when students need to experience more suffering and when they need to experience less, it is left to the students to make these determinations themselves. This means that the teacher’s role is to find ways of developing a culture of self-mastery and the desirability of suffering in the classroom. By doing so, teachers can encourage students to eschew pity in its detrimental forms and encourage it in its beneficial forms. Students can learn, in other words, how to educate teachers on when to act on their feelings of pity. Of course, discovering the best way to create a classroom culture of self-mastery including the desirability of suffering is no easy task, but it seems to be that task that must be done if we are to promote self-mastery in our students. How can teachers go about attempting to cultivate this culture of self-mastery and the willful embrace of suffering that is necessary to help students become their highest selves? Using a Nietzschean lens, the solution to this situation is found in the will to power. Education should not be founded on the belief that it is a necessary but undesirable means to an end – the end being financial prosperity and its attending luxuries. Instead, Nietzsche would likely argue that it should reemphasize the intrinsic desire for self-overcoming found in the will to power. In order to achieve this, students would need to be reaffirmed as agents – they would need to be reminded that there is joy in power and that there can be joy in struggle. But the only way to help them realize this is to refuse to advocate hedonism, to refuse to ask them to be mercenary by focusing on education as a means to an end. Education would need to become the end itself because it is what empowers students to become stronger, more disciplined and more powerful. Nietzsche would say that education, if it is to have any value, should show the individual how much one is able to endure: distress, want, bad weather, sickness, toil, solitude. Fundamentally, one can cope with everything else, born as one is to a subterranean life of struggle; one emerges again and again into the light, one experiences again and again one’s golden hour of victory – and then one stands forth as one was born, unbreakable, tensed, ready for new, even harder, remoter things, like a bow that distress only serves to draw tauter. (GM I:12)

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While this may sound a bit vague, there are steps educators can take towards this end. To begin with, teachers can begin to model their own self-overcoming for students. Naturally, for teachers to do this, they must themselves long for struggle, even the struggle with the bureaucratic structures of the school system. They must practice amor fati5 – Nietzsche’s plea to become lovers of fate – in front of students, so students can then see that overcoming oneself includes overcoming their circumstances just as they are, not how they wish they would be. Second, teachers need to not punish students by giving them work. According to Nietzsche the work is a boon; it is a chance for students to overcome themselves. If teachers give work as punishment, or even apologize for giving the work, the idea that work is undesirable will be reinforced. Third, educators must find ways to help students overcome both their weakness in the face of curricula and also their own indoctrinated belief that the struggle and failure to overcome are a sign to give up. In other words, students who repeatedly fail to overcome the curriculum may – until they are self-overcomers themselves – feel weak and overwhelmed, which will likely only make them long for their previous palliative: pleasure. Teachers must therefore find ways to support the students in their endeavors to become strong enough to overcome their curricular deficiencies. Of course, in outlining these first steps we realize that the project requires far more than a few adjustments to our current teaching methods, but these steps would at least be movements in the right direction. Our suggestion is that by advocating and, more importantly, modeling the good life through self-overcoming, individual teachers may be able to influence their students to reflect on the purpose of education and perhaps help them take greater responsibility for their own education.

Conclusion Self-overcoming is Nietzsche’s modification of the age-old educational imperative to become masters of ourselves, according to which we learn to sublimate internal passions that threaten to disempower the individual and to express those that promise empowerment. In order for the process of self-overcoming to consistently lead to flourishing, however, one requires (1) a form of embodied reason that gives us accurate information about which passions to sublimate and which to express and (2) the psychological strength to successfully sublimate in this way. Cultivating (1) means teaching students to “think,” “speak” and “write” in the profound sense that Nietzsche means with these terms. Learning to think means learning to “dance” with the concepts, values and ideals of the disciplinary practice into which one is apprenticing; it implies a dynamic form of mastery in which one achieves an individual style of expression. Learning to speak and write requires immersive experiences in classical culture, in which students undertake an apprenticeship in linguistic expression from exemplary writers and thinkers. This first dimension of the pedagogy of selfovercoming thus encourages educators to dispense with overly intellectualized

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and disembodied conceptions of teaching and learning. To cultivate (2), i.e. the capacity to sublimate, students must be given opportunities to struggle and learn in a culture that embraces such struggles. In this way, students develop a generalized capacity to suffer, which is an unavoidable experience in the process of selfovercoming. Thus, this second dimension of the pedagogy of self-overcoming implores teachers to overcome the (all-too-common) desire to intervene at the first sign of struggle in their students.

Notes 1 Translation amended. This passage should not be read straightforwardly as Nietzsche’s own voice. On the Future of Our Educational Institutions is a lecture series that purportedly reports on a dialogue between a “great philosopher” and some of his pupils. The philosopher is crotchety, cantankerous and arrogant and has to be compelled by his pupils to discuss his views on education. When he does so, he unleashes a fury of maledictions, prognostications and prescriptions that are, frankly speaking, extreme. The problem is how to interpret the philosopher’s statements. It is clear from reading Nietzsche’s texts from the same time period that the philosopher shares many ideas with Nietzsche; however, Nietzsche generally expresses himself less strongly and does not express all of the ideas of the philosopher. Thus, while the philosopher’s ideas can be safely attributed to Nietzsche, his use of dramatic expressions such as “complete understanding” and “holy terrors” should be taken loosely. His goal is to create extreme reactions – he wants readers (or his listeners in this case) to be shaken out of what he sees as their complacency and conventionality, and, as such, he uses dramatic language. 2 There are actually several senses of pity in Nietzsche. Nevertheless, for the time being, dividing pity into harmful and helpful categories is a useful schematic. 3 For an extended discussion of Nietzsche’s conception of suffering in education see Mintz (2004). While Mintz focuses exclusively on Nietzsche’s middle period, his conclusions are relevant for Nietzsche’s writings as a whole. 4 Mintz (2013) explains that social justice educators and theorists are noteworthy exceptions to this rule. Often they recommend that allowing students to experience suffering is a way of motivating a desire for social change. 5 Nietzsche used this term to describe the self-overcomer’s acceptance and affirmation of life. See the end of chapter 2 of Ecce Homo.

Chapter 5

The doctrine of the order of rank

Introduction In the previous four chapters, we examined Nietzsche’s doctrines of perspectivism and self-overcoming and outlined what contemporary educators might learn from them. In the next four chapters we will examine Nietzsche’s doctrines of the order of rank and ressentiment and similarly outline the insights to be drawn from them for contemporary education. Like perspectivism and self-overcoming, the order of rank and ressentiment have been largely misunderstood by contemporary interpreters. While in the case of the former two doctrines, the misunderstandings have generally come from interpreters with poststructuralist/Continental leanings, misunderstandings of the latter have generally come from interpreters with analytic leanings. As was the case with perspectivism and self-overcoming, Nietzsche’s concepts of the order of rank and ressentiment are closely connected, yet to achieve clarity of explication and application it will be helpful to separate them and address them in individual chapters. Our main goal in the following four chapters is to argue against the claim that the doctrines of the order of rank and ressentiment exhibit a form of radical political elitism that indicates Nietzsche’s desire to create political aristocracy in which the “elite” few exploit the “mediocre” many and use them for their own ends. Rather, we argue that Nietzsche’s vision is to establish a vibrant culture in which all individuals, no matter their innate level of talent or ability, are given robust opportunities to maximize their potential. In order to establish this interpretation of Nietzsche’s political vision, we will begin in this chapter with his doctrine of the order of rank [Rangordnung] as it is described in his early work Schopenhauer as Educator. We say “described” because, in fact, he does not use the specific term “Rangordnung” in Schopenhauer as Educator. Although it is not until his later works that he begins to use this more technical formulation, the concept is fundamental to Schopenhauer as Educator, constituting what we believe to be Nietzsche’s most concerted effort to derive a conception of social flourishing from its dictates. Thus, it makes sense to start there, especially since Schopenhauer as

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Educator is often quoted as representing Nietzsche’s radical elitism and antiegalitarianism.1 Contrary to the standard view, the order of rank as depicted in Schopenhauer as Educator is neither radically elitist nor anti-egalitarian, as we will demonstrate. While the text does explicitly distinguish between the few and the many, and argues that the advancement of the few must serve as the foundation of a thriving culture, it also promotes the well-being and flourishing of the many. Indeed, as this chapter argues, the text casts a cultural vision that is actually concerned for the well-being of the many to a greater degree than the well-being of the few.2 The aim of this chapter is not merely to set the record straight on Schopenhauer as Educator but to provide a context for understanding what contemporary educators can learn from it, which will come in Chapter 6. We argue that Schopenhauer as Educator offers an image of cultural flourishing that promotes the needs of the few and the many in the classroom. As we discussed in the Introduction, a tension between equality and the promotion of individual excellence is inherent in democratic societies. Recent educational policy debates demonstrate that there is profound political and cultural pressure to equalize achievement among all students, which would seem to necessitate diverting resources from the most educationally advantaged to the least educationally advantaged.3 What underlies much of this pressure is the assumption that inequalities of talent or achievement are necessarily detrimental to those who are the least advantaged. Nietzsche turns this assumption on its head. In Schopenhauer as Educator, Nietzsche argues that inequalities of talent or achievement are actually productive of excellence in all individuals. Furthermore, he believes that attempts to minimize inequality by slowing down the progress of the few can have serious negative consequences – for both the many and the few. While such measures are supposed to help the many, they actually serve to diminish their own flourishing as well as the flourishing of the few. This is not to say that Nietzsche wants to do away with all equality. On the contrary, he believes that in a flourishing culture there exists a fundamental equality common to all people – an equality that is more meaningful than the false equality that demands similar levels of achievement among community members.4 But this equality is possible only when inequalities of talent and achievement are recognized and celebrated.5 The result is a community in which all individuals – from the least to the most talented – are given the opportunity to achieve their highest selves and to become part of a flourishing culture that contributes to the benefit of all. This does not mean that Western democratic communities should adopt Nietzsche’s ideas wholesale, however. On the contrary, while his ideas are not as radically elitist as they are usually taken to be, they are more elitist than would be suitable for most contemporary democracies. Still, his ideas are worth examining because they provide initial insights about how democracies might best balance the desire for equality with the desire for individual success.

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Nietzsche’s reputation as radical elitist Before examining Nietzsche’s proposal for cultural flourishing in Schopenhauer as Educator it will be necessary to first briefly examine his reputation among Anglo-American analytic philosophers. Nietzsche has so long been considered a radical elitist that for our analysis of Schopenhauer as Educator to gain any traction, we will have to address his elitist reputation head on. While Walter Kaufmann (1982) and others have done much to rectify the common misunderstanding that Nietzsche was a proto-Nazi who promoted Germanic supremacy and the exploitation of the Jews, there is still a common interpretation among scholars that Nietzsche advocates a political aristocracy in which the few exploit the many. According to Maudemarie Clark (1999), it is Schopenhauer as Educator (and the unpublished “Greek State”) that is largely responsible for the “anti-democratic” interpretation of Nietzsche’s late works (pp. 126–127). Whether Clark is right about this is debatable, but what is not debatable is that, of Nietzsche’s early texts, Schopenhauer as Educator is the most often-cited text by commentators who interpret him as radically elitist. For example, in A Theory of Justice, Rawls (2005) summarizes the essence of this “standard view” by claiming that Nietzsche is a “perfectionist” of the elitist sort, who believes that for a society to become great, the masses must sacrifice their happiness and well-being, working slavishly for the production of individual great men. For his interpretation, Rawls relies on a single passage from Schopenhauer as Educator: Mankind must work continually to produce individual great human beings – that and nothing else is the task. . . . For the question is this: how can your life, the individual life, retain the highest value, the deepest significance? . . . Only by your living for the good of the rarest and most valuable specimens[.] (SE 6, p. 161, quoted in Rawls, 2005, p. 325) Rawls (2005) summarizes Nietzsche’s point in a succinct formula: “We give value to our lives only by working for the good of the highest specimens” (p. 325). Presumably, Rawls did not intend his gloss to be taken as the definitive political interpretation of Nietzsche, as it takes up less than a single page of text in a book more than 600 pages long. Nevertheless, as James Conant (2001) points out, Rawls’ interpretation has been “enormously influential” (p. 186; see also Lemm, 2007, p. 5). During the decades following the first publication of A Theory of Justice, the passage Rawls quotes has been quoted time and again as an example of Nietzsche’s disregard for the well-being of the masses in favor of the elite few.6 More recently, the passage has been invoked by Thomas Hurka (2009), who employs it to argue for a thesis similar to the one Rawls formulates. Nietzsche is famously antiegalitarian, favouring an aristocratic society and a strict “order of rank” among individuals. And his antiegalitarianism rests on

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a distinctive view about social aggregation, whereby the value in a society depends not on the total or average perfection of all its members but on the excellence of its few most perfect members. This view is expressed repeatedly in Nietzsche’s writings, from the earliest to the latest . . . [Nietzsche] finds no value whatever in the achievement of lesser human beings, so once the best have developed as far as they can it is a matter of indifference what other individuals do. (p. 18) Obviously, if the standard view is correct, then using Schopenhauer as Educator as a model for democratic inspiration would be perverse to a high degree. It is our contention, though, that the standard view is not the correct view regarding Schopenhauer as Educator. Rather than offering an image of an “antiegalitarian” and politically “aristocratic” society that places “no value whatever in the achievement of lesser human beings,” Schopenhauer as Educator provides an image of a partially egalitarian society that places a tremendous value on the achievement of all individuals, no matter their talent level. This society, as will be shown in the following sections, contains three groups of people, making up an order of rank, whose mutual support is crucial for social flourishing: (1) the many, (2) the “youthful souls” and (3) the few (“philosophers, artists and saints”). This analysis will hopefully contribute to the growing number of challenges to the standard view of Nietzsche’s works.7 However, to be clear, the primary aim currently is to illustrate the ways Schopenhauer as Educator may be a source for democratic inspiration.8

Nietzsche’s qualified egalitarianism: a plea to the “youthful souls” In light of the elitist standard view, we would expect to find a thoroughgoing contempt for the well-being and needs of the many in Schopenhauer as Educator. Yet from the very first pages Nietzsche expresses his concern for the many and laments the loss of their individualism and the pervasiveness of conformity. In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience[.] (SE 1, p. 127) Every person is unique, but, for some reason, nearly all individuals tend to hide their uniqueness like a bad conscience. Worse, Nietzsche believes that a certain cultural sickness has become omnipresent in contemporary society: laziness and the related fear of individuality. Under the influence of this laziness, modern individuals prefer living in conformity with the culture around them

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rather than living as a unique individual. To live as an individual who refuses to conform to the culture would require significant changes in behavior and significant changes in the relationship one has to one’s culture, all of which would cause some degree of pain and struggle. For Nietzsche, our laziness is, at least in part, a product of our fear of precisely this pain and struggle. Yet this tendency is not destiny. According to Nietzsche, all the individual needs to do to break free of the cult of conformity is “cease taking himself easily; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: ‘Be yourself! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself ’” (ibid.). For Nietzsche, all individuals know deep down that they are unique and that if only they would have the courage to do so, they could choose to reject conformity and live as a true individual (SE 1, p. 128). Indeed, Nietzsche believes that “every man is a unique miracle” (SE 1, p. 127) and as such deserves better than a life of conformity. Yet Nietzsche is appalled by the modern tendency to conformism, and the essay reads like a personal epistle to his readers, calling them to reject conformity and pursue their highest selves. In the first few lines of the essay, Nietzsche speaks directly to the reader, claiming “your true nature lies, not buried deep within you but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be,” and even goads him or her to act: “There exists in the world a single path along which no one can go except you: whither does it lead? Do no ask, go along it” (ibid.). So far then, three things are clear: (1) Nietzsche believes that all individuals know (at some level) that they are unique and irreplaceable; (2) Nietzsche believes that any individual can overcome their conformity if they “cease taking themselves easily”; and (3) every individual’s conscience calls to them to overcome their laziness and become their true selves. Already, this is strikingly egalitarian in its universality. Every person is unique, and every person wants, deep down, to live according to their uniqueness. Thus, at the level of their deepest existential foundation all individuals share a common existential reality – everyone is unique and irreplaceable qua human being, and in that sense they are equals. But it does not take long for Nietzsche to qualify this foundational egalitarianism. He goes on to say that it is only “youthful souls” who still have the realizable potential to overcome their laziness and become their true selves. Every youthful soul hears this call day and night and trembles when he hears it; for the idea of its liberation gives it a presentiment of the measure of happiness allotted to it from all eternity – a happiness to which it can by no means attain so long as it lies fettered by the chains of fear and convention. (SE 1, p. 127) This passage reaffirms the refrain that deep down, people want to be their true selves and reject their tendency towards conformity. But it adds a qualification – namely, that it is only the “youthful” soul who hears this call. It turns out that

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not all people in Nietzsche’s contemporary society are capable of overcoming their laziness by their own lights; it is only those who have not fully fallen victim to the machinations of the false culture that seeks to turn all people into factory products. Schopenhauer as Educator is written for these youthful souls because Nietzsche believes that it is they alone who have the capacity to understand his call to them, and it is they alone who have the potential to respond to his call. He hopes to motivate these youthful souls to action. So, while all people are equals at the level of their own individual uniqueness, they are not all equal with respect to (1) their ability to apprehend the happiness that will result from the overcoming of their laziness and (2) their ability to respond to the intuition by taking steps to become self-overcomers. Nevertheless, while he believes that youthful souls are individuals who retain the capacity to hear the call to “be themselves,” he also believes that they need to be inspired to listen to the call of their conscience. Like the rest of the masses, they are, for the most part, unresponsive to the calling of their deepest longings. Without stimulation they will likely go on in their conformity – sensing that they could be more but unable to overcome their current inertia. Nietzsche hopes his inspired rhetoric in Schopenhauer as Educator will stir their deepest longings. It must also be kept in mind that Nietzsche very clearly considers himself to be one of the youthful souls who must work to produce the talented few and not one of the talented few himself. Nietzsche believes that his inspired rhetoric is not the result of his own self-generated genius but is the result of his encounter with Schopenhauer, who awakened his own desire for individuality. Rather than believing himself to be a superlative genius like Schopenhauer, he sees himself as a fellow youthful soul who has been awakened to his own uniqueness and who seeks to similarly awaken others. As we shall see, he does not believe he can teach youthful souls how to discover their own uniqueness – only individuals like Schopenhauer can do that – but he does believe that he can inspire other youthful souls to seek out exemplars like Schopenhauer. There is more to be said concerning youthful souls, however. Not only does Nietzsche contradistinguish youthful souls from the average member of the masses, he also contradistinguishes them from the exemplary few – individuals whom he refers to interchangeably as “geniuses,” “philosophers, artists and saints” or “redemptive men” [erlösende Menschen]. These exemplary people are those individuals who are not only unique – a feature they share with the masses and the youthful souls – but have intellectual, artistic and/or moral gifts that are of the highest order. The philosophers, artists and saints are individuals who excel in certain capacities as human beings. They are the Mozarts, the Schopenhauers, the Aescheluses and so on – “geniuses” who are fountains of beauty and truth and who have the capacity to inspire enormous numbers of people through their artistic and intellectual works. We further discuss these individuals later, but the point here is that for Nietzsche youthful souls occupy a middle space between the masses and the few. Nietzsche believes that youthful souls

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have not completely lost their capacity for self-determination like average individuals have, but he does not consider them to be the talented and exemplary few. Indeed, on balance, Nietzsche believes that the youthful souls are closer to the many than the philosophers, artists and saints. The only difference between them and the many is not that they are more talented per se but that they have not fully fallen victim to the corrupting influence of contemporary culture. Nietzsche does not explain what it was about them that resisted the corruption, but for some reason they were able to do so. Nietzsche claims that youthful souls have a presentiment of their own happiness as they consider overcoming their laziness and conformity. This happiness comes from the liberation they feel when they reject their false selves and affirm their true selves. Speaking directly to his youthful readers, Nietzsche claims: The wondrousness of our existence in just this moment is what encourages us most strongly to live according to our own standards and laws: the inexplicable fact that we live precisely today and yet had an eternity to arrive, that we possess nothing more than the brief interval of today in which to demonstrate why and to what end we have come to be. (SE 1; our translation) This is what motivates the youthful souls – unlike the masses, they know “how bleak and senseless life can become without this liberation!” (SE 1; our translation).

The need for the “philosophers, artists and saints” Even though Nietzsche believes that, in contrast to the masses, youthful souls have the potential to overcome their laziness and conformity, he claims that they have little hope to do so without the help of others. While he believes that all one must do to become one’s true self is quit taking oneself easily, he simultaneously argues that one needs direction on how to cease taking oneself easily. Nietzsche asks the rhetorical questions: “But how can we find ourselves again? How can man know himself?” (SE 1, p. 129). The answer, as we have seen, is that one must find exemplars from among the few – the philosophers, artists and saints – who can serve as guides to find one’s self. While Nietzsche does not foreclose the possibility that one might somehow climb out of one’s conformity, he does believe that the most effective way to be liberated is to find individuals who can serve as liberators and redeemers. Certainly there may be other means of finding oneself, of coming to oneself out of the bewilderment in which one usually wanders as in a dark cloud, but I know of none better than to think on one’s true educators and cultivators. (SE 1, p. 130)

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Yet this thesis presents a serious problem. Nietzsche repeatedly observes in the essay that such exemplars are almost non-existent in contemporary culture. “Then one finally asks oneself: where are we, scholars and unscholarly, high placed or low, to find the moral exemplars and models among our contemporaries, the visible epitome of morality for our time?” (SE 2, pp. 132–133). He continues, “Never have moral educators been more needed, and never has it seemed less likely they would be found” (SE 2, p. 133). The fact that exemplars are so rare thus creates a dilemma. The only way for the youthful souls to be led to their highest selves and to escape their laziness is for them to find individuals who can serve as role models, but role models are lacking in contemporary society. If there are no exemplars, then youthful souls will never have the opportunity to be shown how to escape their limitations. Why are these exemplars lacking in the modern world? Nietzsche has two answers to this question. First, just like the masses, moral exemplars cannot be found because they have themselves been trained to be lazy and conformist. Second, exemplary individuals have been marginalized in contemporary society, which encourages them either to employ their gifts for “social success” or to move to the sidelines. According to Nietzsche, this is exactly the effect the so-called democratic movement in education was having on cultural life. Its aim was to produce as many current men as possible, in the sense in which one calls a coin “current.” And according to this conception, a people will be all the happier the more current men it possesses. [This is] the sole intention of our modern educational institutions. . . . All education that makes one solitary is here despised. (SE 6; our translation) A few pages later, Nietzsche adds: The state can assert its service to culture all it wants: it promotes the latter only to promote itself; it fails to grasp any goal higher than its own wellbeing and existence. What the money-makers want when they assiduously demand instruction and education is, in the last analysis, precisely money. . . . And for this reason the conditions for the emergence of genius in modern times have not improved. The hostility towards original men has progressed to such a degree that Socrates could not have lived with us today and at any rate would not have reached seventy. (SE 6; our translation) So what must youthful souls do to find philosophers, artists and saints who can guide them to their eternal happiness? There can be only one answer: Nietzsche claims that they must create the conditions in which exemplars can flourish, which means they must “work continually at the production of individual great men” (SE 5, p. 161).9

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Taken out of context, this passage sounds radically elitist to contemporary egalitarian ears. Nietzsche’s insistence that the masses work towards the production of “the great redemptive men” (SE 6, p. 162) has indeed been the central culprit in leading so many commentators to interpret the text as elitist. This interpretation appears even more justified when we consider a subsequent passage a few lines later that is arguably the most often-cited example of Nietzsche’s radical elitism. For here is the question before us: how might your life, the individual life, receive the highest value, the deepest significance? How might it least be wasted? Certainly only if you live for the benefit of the rarest and most valuable exemplars, not for the benefit of the many, that is, for those, who individually taken, are the least valuable exemplars. (SE 6; our translation) Rawls (2005) argues that this claim embodies a perfectionist theory in which typical human beings “give value to [their] lives only by working for the good of the highest specimens [Exemplare]” (p. 325); the assumption is that the lives of the many are of no value in themselves but receive value only to the degree to which they work for the good of the few.10 Hurka (2009) too takes up this line of reasoning when he claims that Nietzsche does not care about the achievement of the many but only the achievement of the few. Yet if we place this passage in the context of the entire essay, including Nietzsche’s asseverations of the value and individuality of every person, we see that Nietzsche advances this cultural vision not because he wants to deny happiness to non-great individuals; on the contrary, he wants to provide it to all. The reason Nietzsche claims that youthful souls must work continually for the production of great individuals is, first and foremost, to benefit the youthful souls. Nietzsche believes that in order to be happy and to be truly free the many must help support the flourishing of the few, so that the few can in turn support the flourishing of the youthful souls. The many are lazy, timid conformists who have lost their productive uniqueness. He considers this a cultural catastrophe, and he seeks to reinvigorate culture by encouraging the youthful souls from within the many to become their highest selves and to support the production of exemplary and redemptive individuals. The irony is that it turns out that the youthful souls – who come from the class of the many – are the most important first step in cultural renewal because it is they who are supposed to be the initial supporters of the production of the few. The few have been systematically marginalized, and Nietzsche believes, in an ironic twist, that it is the many – or at least the youthful souls – who must be, in a sense, the liberators of the few; the many must reestablish the philosophers, artists and saints, so that their cultural contributions can redeem the many. This means that the flourishing of the many and the few is inseparable and that both need each to become their highest selves. Upon this foundation, Nietzsche builds his partially egalitarian vision.

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It must be kept in mind that, for Nietzsche, the fundamental motivation the youthful souls have in working to reestablish the philosophers, artists and saints is internal. They pursue the advent of such exemplary individuals because they have a desire to attain their highest selves and they know that they will likely never attain them without guidance from the philosophers, artists and saints. As noted previously, these youthful souls know, by the light of their own conscience, that they will forever be miserable and trapped if they remain conformists who are too lazy to achieve liberation. These individuals are internally motivated by their own desire for happiness, and the only thing Nietzsche hopes to offer them is guidance on how to achieve that happiness. He explains what they already know at an intuitive level: in order to become their highest selves they must find moral exemplars who can help them “to distinguish between those things that really promote human happiness and those that only appear to do so” (SE 3, p. 142). They recognize that their current needs and desires have been constructed by a culture that wants them to conform to the dominant values of society. They know that they cannot trust themselves fully, and thus they must find someone who is greater than they are to guide them aright. The artists, geniuses and saints can do this. But, by and large, they do not exist – therefore the youthful souls must work to promote them. A question may arise: Why do the youthful souls need contemporary exemplars if they have historic exemplars such as Schopenhauer, Beethoven and others. Nietzsche’s answer is twofold. The first reason is that the inspiration that the exemplar provides is not only found in their great works but is equally found in their characters, attitudes and dispositions. Nietzsche believes that it is easier to see these things in living, present examples. They can be found in historical examples, but it is more difficult because one has to be able to discover the individuals behind their works. Nietzsche points out this difficulty by the example of his relationship with Schopenhauer’s writings. “But I had discovered [Schopenhauer] only in the form of a book, and that was a great deficiency. So I strove all the harder to see through the book and to imagine the living man” (SE 2, p. 136). The second reason Nietzsche wants living exemplars is because their achievements beautify the world and have the potential to draw others aloft. Agreeing with Goethe, Nietzsche claims that nature’s experiments are of value only when the artist finally comes to comprehend its stammerings, goes out to meet it halfway and gives expression to what all these experiments are really about – “that the causa finalis of the activities of men and the world is dramatic poetry” (SE 5, p. 160). Nietzsche extends Goethe’s assertions about poetry to the rest of art, as well as philosophy and morality. Importantly, these works are not meant to be mere self-expressions of the genius created without regard for others. On the contrary, Nietzsche argues explicitly that the ultimate goal of creating great and lasting works is the elevation of the few and the many. He claims that “the artist creates his work according to the will of nature for the good of other men” (SE 7, p. 178; emphasis added). This is thus an example of the gift-giving egoism that we saw Nietzsche promote in Chapter 3. That Nietzsche means to include the

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many in this statement is clearly seen a few lines earlier when he claims that under current cultural conditions the great and lasting works “strike home only at the few, while they ought to strike home at everybody” (SE 7, p. 178).

The cultural cooperation of “youthful souls” and the “philosophers, artists and saints” The question then becomes: How exactly do the geniuses and their works raise the many to a higher state? If Nietzsche claims that the artists produce their work “for the good of other men,” what is the “good” he imagines and how is it created? After painting the image of “Schopenhauer as an educator,” Nietzsche claims that “the hardest task still remains: . . . in short, to demonstrate that this ideal educates” (SE 5, p. 156). He explains that what happens when average people come into contact with great human beings or their works is that they gain access to an “intoxicating vision” (ibid.) that provides meaning to life. They see that life is more than making money or seeking honor and popularity – there is something richer and more fulfilling to seek after. Unfortunately, Nietzsche does not satisfyingly explain what this richer and fuller life is, beyond that when one experiences it one sees “something inexpressible of which happiness and truth are only idolatrous counterfeits.” In such a state, “the earth loses its gravity, the events and powers of the earth become dreamlike, a transfiguration spreads itself about him as on a summer evening” (SE 4, p. 155). Obviously, this ethereal and metaphysical description leaves a great deal to be desired, but it is clear that Nietzsche genuinely believes that the person who has this vision is a person who is on the precipice of personal transformation. Nietzsche recognizes that this initial ethereal explanation may not convince his readers, so he makes a more serious attempt to explain how exemplary individuals and their works transform the masses. “One might otherwise think it nothing but an intoxicating vision granted us only for moments of a time, and then leaving us all the more painfully in the lurch and prey to an even deeper dissatisfaction” (SE 4, p. 156). Nietzsche recognizes that merely offering individuals momentary glimpses of happiness may actually make them more prone to discouragement and escapism insofar as the vision will seem unattainable. The worry is that they will more deeply resign themselves to their lives of conformity because they will better understand just how difficult true happiness is to attain. Put differently, having the momentary vision may cause them even greater dissatisfaction with their lives, which may lead them to pursue money, honor and pleasure all the more. Nietzsche acknowledges this worry explicitly: The dangers are always great when things are made too difficult for a man and when he is incapable of fulfilling any duties at all; stronger natures can be destroyed by it, the weaker, more numerous natures decline into a reflective laziness and in the end forfeit through laziness their ability to reflect. (SE 5, pp. 156–157)

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Obviously, this state of affairs would not improve the laziness that is pervasive in contemporary culture; it may even deepen it. However, Nietzsche does not believe that it is necessary that such resignation occurs in light of such visions. How might the youthful souls avoid it, then? By recognizing that the intoxicating vision that was made possible by the philosophers, artists and saints is not a permanent state in which one is supposed to live at all times – something that is not even ensured for these exemplary individuals – but rather issues in a “fulfillable” set of activities and duties that youthful souls can achieve. Rather than longing for complete absorption in the intoxicating vision, which would destroy the youthful souls or reduce them to further laziness, the powerful youthful soul must “turn his soul in another direction so that it shall not consume itself in vain longing – and now he will discover a new circle of duties” (SE 5, p. 160). Nietzsche continues: [T]hese new duties are not the duties of a solitary; rather in adopting them one enters into a powerful community held together, not by external forms and laws, but by a fundamental idea. It is the fundamental idea of culture [Kultur], insofar as it knows to set for each of us but one task: to promote the production of the philosopher, artist and saint within us and without us and thereby to work towards the perfection of nature. (SE 5; our translation) There are several important things to note about these two passages. The first is that they reaffirm the dialectical relationship between the philosophers, artists and saints and the youthful souls outlined previously. The original intoxicating vision was made possible by the existence of such exemplary individuals; but this intoxicating vision leads the youthful souls to want to create more of such individuals so that they can achieve a renewed sense of the intoxicating vision and thus create even more exemplars. This is a mutually supportive situation in which the youthful souls and the geniuses are benefited. This leads to the second thing to notice in these passages – namely, that the youthful souls are not under political compulsion to work for the production of the geniuses. It is their choice. The word “duty” suggests that they are required to do it under compulsion from an external source, but it is clear from the context that Nietzsche is thinking of their duty to themselves. They “discover” their duties within themselves by having been previously drawn aloft by their intoxicating vision. They want to be part of a mighty community that, importantly, is not held together by external forces but by an idea in the heart of the person, to be part of a community that knows how neither wealth, nor honor, nor erudition can raise the individual out of the deep despair he feels at the valuelessness of his existence and how striving after these goods receives meaning only through an elevated and transfiguring overall aim: to gain power so as to use it to improve the physis

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and briefly to be a corrector of its fumblings and follies. At first only for the sake of himself, but through him ultimately for the sake of everyone. (SE 4; our translation) As the last sentence indicates, the exalted goal of perfecting nature is meant to benefit both individual and community. Nietzsche believes that the internal motivation of the youthful souls is, or can be, so strong that they will not only seek to improve their own physis but also, as Nietzsche himself is trying to do in writing Schopenhauer as Educator, seek to inspire others to join in the pursuit. By coming to this resolve he places himself in the circle of culture; for culture is the progeny of the self-knowledge and dissatisfaction of each individual with himself. Each person that believes in culture is thereby saying: “I see something higher and more human above me than I am myself. May everyone help me to attain it! For I will help those who know and suffer like I do.” (SE 4; our translation) Nietzsche believes that the desire to achieve true culture and the desire to help and be helped by others can be the universal desire of an entire community. The desire for culture is not just the desire of the youthful souls; it is also the desire of the philosophers, artists and saints. Nietzsche explicitly claims that [e]ach person cannot help but find in himself some limitation of his talent or his moral will, which fills him with longing and melancholy; and just as his feeling of sinfulness makes him long for the saint in him, so he carries, as an intellectual being, a deep longing for the genius in him. (SE 2; our translation) This longing is resident in the genius and the non-genius, for both have an ideal that they are striving for but which can never be fully obtained. “Even the greatest of men cannot attain to his own ideal. That Schopenhauer can offer us a model is certain, all the scars and blemishes notwithstanding” (SE 2, p. 143). There is a fundamental (and “incontestable”) identity that is held in common between the youthful souls and the geniuses, between average individuals and exemplary individuals. Each one wants to be part of a strong community that is striving to create a higher culture.

The role of the “many” in higher culture Having established the relationship between the philosophers, artists and saints and the youthful souls, we are now in a position to understand the relationship of these two groups with the many. It might be objected that while we have shown that there is a kind of symbiosis between the geniuses and the youthful

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souls in which both are benefited and both are needed for a higher culture, we have said almost nothing about more typical human beings. The last time they were brought up, it was shown that though they are, in the most fundamental respect, equal to the youthful souls insofar as they have an irreplaceable uniqueness, yet they are incapable of rescuing themselves from their current condition of conformity. The reason they cannot rescue themselves is because they seem to have lost the capacity to respond to the call of their consciences – it is different with the youthful souls who still have the capacity, albeit an attenuated one. What is to be done with these seemingly helpless individuals who make up the great majority of the world? At first glance, it would appear that Nietzsche believes that nothing can be done with them. Indeed, he explicitly claims that there is no more desolate and repulsive creature of nature than the human being who has avoided his genius and now nervously glances left and right, backwards and all around. Ultimately, one cannot such get a hold of such a person, for he is all exterior, without a core, a threadbare, painted, puffedup robe, a gilded ghost that cannot even arouse fear and certainly not pity. (SE 1; our translation) Clearly Nietzsche believes that there are certain members of the many who are trapped in their laziness and conformity, and it behooves us to try to understand what Nietzsche thinks can be done with them, if anything at all. The ramifications of this discussion are paramount; for if Nietzsche refuses to offer hope to these individuals, then our qualified egalitarian interpretation will largely break down. It would mean that the vast majority of humankind would receive no benefit from Nietzsche’s project in Schopenhauer as Educator. The first thing to note regarding Nietzsche’s conception of the masses is that there is no textual indication that Nietzsche believes that these individuals are inferior at the level of innate capacity. It is clear from the previous passage that even they have a “genius” that they have evaded. Moreover, a few lines earlier Nietzsche indicates that anyone “who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily.” Thus, all individuals that constitute the masses have their own particular genius and have, theoretically, the capacity to escape their conformity, if they would choose to do so. But there’s the rub – according to Nietzsche many (perhaps most) individuals have lost the ability “to choose to do so.” They are shells of their former selves. According to the standard view, Nietzsche has no interest in the achievement of these individuals; they should work for the good of the geniuses. But this is a misinterpretation. Nietzsche cares a great deal about them insofar as they are “repulsive and desolate” and breed further laziness and conformity in the current culture. They are a problem that Nietzsche needs to solve. So what is his solution?

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After establishing the goal of the youthful souls, Nietzsche goes on to outline what he calls the “two consecrations of culture” that are necessary for the youthful souls. The first consecration is an essentially self-regarding one: the youthful soul should “attach his heart to some great man” and become “ashamed of himself without any accompanying feeling of distress” so as to become his or her highest self (SE 6, p. 163). Interestingly, this shame ends up being a type of self-love. Rather than hating themselves, youthful individuals learn, for the first time, to love themselves enough to take on the task of self-overcoming. The hatred one feels is ultimately not directed at the self but only the weakness found in the false self. The true self, the higher self, becomes the hope and the promise that one can become strong, whether one is a genius or a common individual. Thus, for Nietzsche, the type of shame he advocates is not a negative feeling at all – it is a type of self-love. Unlike the first, self-regarding consecration, the second consecration is an other-regarding one. Nietzsche asserts that the individual should use his longings and his wrestling as the alphabet with which he can now read off the ambitions of mankind. Yet here too he may not remain still, he must ascend from this level to a yet higher one; culture requires from him not only that inner experience, not only the judgment of the exterior world rushing about him, but ultimately and above all an act, that is, the struggle for culture and an enmity towards all influences, habits, laws and institutions in which he does not recognize his goal: namely, the production of genius. (SE 6; our translation) Nietzsche is calling youthful souls not only to worry about their own happiness and their struggle to find happiness and liberation by achieving their own highest selves but also to worry about the culture at large. They must struggle to change those institutions that produce the laziness and conformity that have deprived the many of their uniqueness and prevented the increase of the philosophers, artists and saints. Which institutions does Nietzsche have in mind? He explicitly tells us in the paragraph following the two consecrations. The answer is education. He exposes the mechanisms by which education serves to establish widespread laziness and conformity through its emphasis on moneymaking, civic duty, the dissemination of popular culture and the productions of “scholars.” Nietzsche utterly condemns these practices and wants the youthful souls to undermine them. Unless schooling is transformed, the production of the few will never come about sufficiently to change culture, and the corruption of the many will continue apace, adding to the repulsiveness and desolation of culture. According to Nietzsche it is mass schooling that is creating pitiable automatons who seek money, honor, popularity and the like but do not achieve true happiness by being liberated by the works of philosophers, artists and saints.

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How might this situation be changed, then? Obviously, not by trying to inspire the many to work for the artist, geniuses and saints. Unlike the youthful souls who still have the capacity to be so inspired, the rest of the many have lost the capacity. The only hope for a permanent change in culture lies, therefore, in properly educating the next generation of individuals, and this requires the transformation of schooling. Nietzsche’s explanation of how schooling needs be transformed if true culture is to be attained begins with a remark about how few people recognize the need for cultural renewal and the role the philosophers, artists and saints play in that renewal (SE 6, pp. 163–164). He contrasts this lack of knowledge with the abundance of energy expended towards false culture. If only all that energy could be redirected towards true culture, then true culture might become a reality. But what would it require to redirect that energy? He argues that it is none other than to guide the many back to their consciences, which are capable of being inspired by the philosophers, artists and saints. Nietzsche claims that “men may reflect and argue about their ultimate goal as much as they like, in the obscure impulse in the depth of them they are well aware of the rightful path” (SE 6, p. 164). Nietzsche is again affirming the belief that all individuals have, at their core, the ability to understand what happiness is and how – in living a life of laziness and conformity – they will never achieve that happiness. But Nietzsche does not believe that the “obscure impulse” or “conscience” is strong enough to lead most human beings to the rightful goal. Instead, the obscure impulse must become less obscure – it must become explicit. Average individuals must be taught to experience the impulse as a willful desire, the longing of their hearts. Nietzsche argues that whoever “really is convinced that the goal of culture is to promote the production of true human beings . . . will think it very necessary finally to replace that ‘obscure impulse’ with a conscious willing” (SE 6, p. 164). Only when the masses develop such a conscious willing will it be possible for true culture to arise. True culture will be able to arise not only because the many will have been transformed into a multitude of youthful souls who recognize the need for exemplary and redemptive individuals to achieve true happiness but also for a second reason – that false culture will never again be able to gain a foothold. Nietzsche claims that if all individuals are taught to exchange the “obscure impulse” for conscious willing, then it will cease to be possible for that drive which does not know its goal, that celebrated obscure impulse, to be employed for quite different objectives and directed on to paths which can never lead to the supreme goal, the production of the genius. For there exists a species of misemployed and appropriated culture – you have only to look around you! (SE 6, p. 164) For Nietzsche, true culture occurs only when the entire community comes together to achieve a single goal. The work of creating culture begins with

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youthful souls, but it ends with all individuals – the most talented (few) and the least talented (many) – working together to continually achieve their highest selves. For Nietzsche, true culture is a culture in which philosophers, artists and saints are so prolific that they can inspire all individuals to achieve their highest selves. It is a world where schooling does not teach laziness and conformity but where all students have access to exemplars who can guide them to their higher selves and who reveal the basic stuff of their nature, which cannot be taught directly but only discovered (SE 1, p. 129). To repeat a passage quoted earlier, Nietzsche sums up his cultural vision as a powerful community held together, not by external forms and laws, but by a fundamental idea. It is the fundamental idea of culture, insofar as it knows to set for each of us but one task: to promote the production of the philosopher, the artist and the saint within us and without us and thereby to work towards the perfection of nature. (SE 5; our translation) The reason that all individuals must promote the geniuses within them and without them is that all individuals are trying to achieve an impossible individual goal – to become their highest self, which is “immeasurably” high above them. This means that in an important sense, the true self will never be achieved. In a way, every individual will “feel ashamed” with themselves because they will never reach their ideal. As we saw earlier, it is the same for average individuals as well as exemplary individuals. All individuals suffer the same kind of struggle, even if the ideal towards which each individual is struggling is uniquely his or her own. But to the degree that a community can increase the number of exemplary individuals, they will have an ever-expanding supply of exemplars who can guide them further towards their true selves; and the many will know that the geniuses are doing the exact same thing. They are trying, and failing, and trying again to reach their highest selves. Indeed, this is why Nietzsche describes the philosophers, artists and saints not only as “genius” and “exemplary” but also as “redemptive.” Their primary significance lies in the redeeming and uplifting influence they have on others.

Political consequences of the order of rank In Nietzsche’s conception of culture, all people – whether the few or the many – are equals insofar as they are all attempting to achieve their highest selves and are all falling short in their attempts. Nietzsche is, in this sense, what we might call a qualified egalitarian – he believes that all people share a common desire, common goal and common shortcomings in their pursuit of their highest selves, but he also believes that the self for which some individuals strive is more capable of producing great and lasting works. Not all selves are equal in this latter respect. But even this is not a bad thing; individuals who are superior in a particular way can be founts

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of inspiration that provide examples of beauty, courage, love and so on. By this inspiration they can motivate others to further growth towards their highest selves. With Nietzsche’s cultural vision in place, we are now in a position to return to the question posed at the beginning of this chapter: How can democratic communities reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable goals of maintaining equality while also giving every individual the opportunity to maximize his or her talents? Obviously, implementing the entirety of Nietzsche’s cultural vision will not work as a model for contemporary democracies. In today’s pluralistic democracies there are simply too many competing conceptions of the good. Therefore, to promote one definite cultural goal in the schools is simply neither feasible nor, on balance, desirable. Nevertheless, certain aspects of Nietzsche’s model of cultural flourishing are applicable to contemporary democracies. In particular, Nietzsche illuminates the way that the radical egalitarian impulse can backfire. On the one hand, democratic citizens seem to have a strong impulse towards equality, yet, on the other hand, democratic citizens seem to genuinely want to be inspired by greatness in others. How many children and adults have gone out into their driveways to practice their dribbling skills with a basketball after watching an inspiring basketball game? Or how many people have decided to learn the guitar after watching a virtuosic performance by their favorite band? Or how many people have been inspired to treat others differently by listening to a lecture by a famous humanitarian? These demonstrations of excellence are crucial sources of motivation, and thus to eliminate differences of social standing and accomplishment undercuts the very thing that inspires us to be better than we are now. The truth is that inequality of talent and achievement is politically and socially desirable. We should want others to achieve greatness because they can then inspire us towards our own greatness, regardless of whether we finally achieve their level of achievement. When we go out to dribble the basketball or take guitar lessons or resolve to treat our neighbor differently, we are not performing these activities so that we can become just as great as the person who inspired us. In most cases, we simply want to be better than we are right now. We are inspired to become something higher than we currently are. Radical egalitarianism backfires in another way. It is not just individuals – whether highly talented or less talented – who are prevented from being their highest selves by an impulse that wants to downplay or diminish differences. The entire society suffers because (1) intellectual, artistic or moral achievements – from geniuses or non-geniuses – will be less common because individuals are less likely to strive for their highest selves, and (2) individuals will not have learned to see inequalities of talent and achievement as a personal and cultural benefit that should be celebrated. Item (2) is a problem because it discourages individuals from seeing themselves as part of a community of excellence to which each and every person can contribute. Instead, it is possible that individuals will feel alienated, jealous or resentful because they have been made to believe that they are as potentially talented as everyone else, when, in truth, they are not. In these cases, the individual’s identity is founded on the false belief that

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they are equal with respect to talent and achievement – an identity that can be threatened by the truth – instead of having a truly egalitarian identity based on wanting to pursue one’s highest self and encouraging others to do the same, even if these others are more talented than they are. Nietzschean egalitarianism thus offers a counterpoint to these two pitfalls by calling us to work towards a culture in which differences of talent and achievement become inspirational resources for the uplift of all.

Conclusion Nietzsche’s conception of social flourishing is founded on the idea that it is possible for human beings to be inspired, rather than downtrodden, demotivated or discontented, by the acknowledgement of an order of rank among individuals – that is, by acknowledging that the talents and achievements of others are in some sense better than our own and doing so in such a way that we are drawn to pursue the greatest possible expression of our own talents and achievements. The issue is whether it is psychologically possible for individuals to learn to be inspired by others who are more talented than they are. It is often the case in democratic societies, and especially their schools, that differences of talent are downplayed because they are seen as a threat to our self-esteem, or else they are used to stoke a combative and ambitious form of competition. Yet, since the ability to be inspired by others who are superior to us does seem to be a natural sentiment, shouldn’t we instead leverage that ability and use it to fight envy or resentment? Put differently, isn’t it possible that something more could be achieved if we could learn to appreciate and celebrate the fact that some people are better at art, some are better at math, some are more generous, some are braver, some are wiser? If we learned to appreciate the superiority of our peers, we might just be inspired to improve ourselves. If we did so, we would start to become, according to Nietzsche, equals in a vastly more important respect – namely, in that each person is equal in their uniqueness. We are around for only a brief moment in the great swath of cosmic time, and rather than wishing we could be better than someone else, we should all equally be seeking our highest selves and refuse to settle for our lower selves. If Nietzsche is right, we should seek ways of facilitating the appreciation of the diversity of talents and achievements in our classrooms as a means for personal and societal flourishing. But how exactly might educators create a culture in which the appreciation of such diversity is cultivated? This question constitutes the focus of the following chapter.

Notes 1 See: Ansell-Pearson, (1994, p. 40, 1996, p. 27); Appel (1999, p. 157); Thiele (1990, p. 14); Kahan (2011, p. 136); Jon Fennell (2005, pp. 88–89); Detwiler (1990, p. 100); Clark (1999, p. 127); and Conway (1997, p. 8).

118 The doctrine of the order of rank 2 This is not to say that Schopenhauer as Educator is the radically egalitarian text that Stanley Cavell (1990) and James Conant (2001) make it out to be. Cavell and Conant correctly resist the radical elitist interpretation that is standardly attributed to Schopenhauer as Educator, but they go too far by collapsing the qualitative distinctions Nietzsche makes between the few and the many. 3 For an overview of these debates see Warnick (2015, pp. 50–66). 4 It is important to note that the equality that can exist between individuals in a flourishing culture should not, in itself, be the goal of that culture; rather, it must be a by-product of each member in the culture striving to achieve his or her highest self. Nietzsche believes that any culture that strives for equality over all other cultural goals will necessarily decline as a culture, which is why he is so critical of modern democracies. Nevertheless, in contrast to the standard interpretation of Schopenhauer as Educator, Nietzsche’s ideas do not preclude all forms of equality from thriving cultures, but rather, as we shall see, they promote a specific form of equality. 5 It is this latter idea that has led so many to regard Schopenhauer as Educator as a radically anti-egalitarian text. 6 The exact same passage is used in Ansell-Pearson (1996, p. 27, 1994, p. 40); Appel (1999, p. 157); Thiele (1990, p. 14); Kahan (2011, p. 136); Fennell (2005, pp. 88–89); Detwiler (1990, p. 100); Clark (1999, p. 127); and, although he does not use the exact same passage, Conway (1997, p. 8), who uses nearby passages in Schopenhauer as Educator to make the same point. 7 There have been several challenges over the last thirty years, some regarding one or more texts of Nietzsche’s early works: Cavell (1990); Conant (2001); Lemm (2007, pp. 5–27); and Rowthorn (2017), some regarding texts exclusively in his middle works: Hargis (2010, pp. 475–507) and Detwiler (1990, pp. 169–188), some regarding texts exclusively in his late works: Conway (1997) and Clark (1999); and some regarding texts spanning all of his works: Jonas (2013). Cavell, Conant, Lemm and Rowthorn all challenge the radically elitist reading of Schopenhauer as Educator. Our interpretation is distinct from theirs in a couple of different ways. Like Lemm, we argue that Cavell’s and Conant’s reading is too egalitarian insofar as they collapse the hierarchical distinction between geniuses and the masses. In their repudiation of Rawls’ political perfectionism they eliminate the hierarchical character that is fundamental to Nietzsche’s moral perfectionism. But Lemm goes too far, arguing that Schopenhauer as Educator is not a moral perfectionist text at all. As our interpretation makes clear Nietzsche’s moral perfectionism is absolutely central to his conception of community. Thus, with Cavell, Conant and Lemm, we argue that Schopenhauer as Educator is not the radically elitist text that the standard view makes it out to be. But we argue against Lemm, insofar as we agree with Cavell and Conant that Schopenhauer as Educator is a moral perfectionist text, and against Cavell and Conant, insofar as we argue that Schopenhauer as Educator is not a fully egalitarian text. Rowthorn’s arguments are the closest to ours, although he frames them in different terms. 8 Interpreters who have looked for democratic inspiration in Nietzsche’s other texts include Church (2006); Hargis (2010); Owen (1995); and Warren (1991). Although they do not look to Nietzsche for democratic inspiration, Bruce Detwiler (1990) and Ruth Abbey (2000) offer interpretations of Nietzsche’s middle period that are broadly sympathetic to democratic ideals. 9 In each case that “men” or “man” occurs in the English translation, Nietzsche employs the term “Mensch” or “Menschen,” which does not imply a gender. Philosophers, artists and saints may be men or women. 10 This interpretation is misleading because it suggests that the average individual must work sacrificially, slavishly perhaps, for the good of the few. This is far from what Nietzsche intends. To see this, one need only read a few lines beyond this passage where Nietzsche claims that living for the good of the few is accomplished when one

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has learned to “love” and has “attached his heart to some great man” (SE 6, p. 163). Attaching one’s heart to a great individual is a far cry from working slavishly for them. When one attaches one’s heart to another, the individual is devoted to the other, but the devotion is not necessarily self-sacrificial. It may be self-enriching. In the same way that Nietzsche’s devotion to Wagner prior to the writing of Schopenhauer as Educator was simultaneously for the sake of Wagner and for the sake of Nietzsche, attaching one’s heart to an exemplar and letting them guide you to your own highest self is both sacrificial but also self-serving.

Chapter 6

Educational implications of the order of rank Creating a culture of emulation

Introduction As we have seen, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the order of rank is far from being an endorsement of the exploitation of the many at the hand of the few. The doctrine puts forward a cultural principle that calls each individual to pursue their highest selves and to contribute to the production of creativity, ingenuity, excellence and beauty both within themselves and in the communities in which they live. This principle is closely related to the doctrines of perspectivism and self-overcoming, given that the task of Nietzsche’s cultural leaders, the philosophers, artists and saints, is to produce empowering intellectual, aesthetic and ethical perspectives that will draw the many to overcome their proclivities to laziness and blind obedience and pursue a flourishing life. Likewise, the pedagogical import of Nietzsche’s order of rank is directly connected to the pedagogy of self-overcoming. As we argued in Chapter 4, Western educators have a difficult time letting the students struggle in the classroom. There is an impulse towards pity that urges teachers to alleviate any struggle for the student, as well as an implicit concern that a student will feel discouraged or that their sense of self-esteem or self-confidence will be diminished if they meet with difficulty. But struggle and suffering are essential to becoming one’s highest self, a selfmaster, which is the ultimate form of agency for Nietzsche. Thus, ironically, if teachers want to improve students’ sense of self-esteem and self-confidence, the most important thing to do is to help them view their struggles and suffering as empowering. Indeed, it is the central thesis of this chapter that teachers should orchestrate opportunities in which such empowering struggles can take place. In this chapter, we show that Nietzsche’s emphasis on the pursuit of the highest self within the doctrine of the order of rank, as well as the central place it grants to exemplars in this pursuit, implies a special form of peer-to-peer engagement that has tremendous educational import. Namely, Nietzsche’s order of rank points to a pedagogy of emulation, which involves both “self-emulation” and the emulation of others. This pedagogy grows out of Nietzsche’s unique conception of agonism, a form of contest that Nietzsche believes elevates both competitor and opponent and motivates each towards further self-empowerment.

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We argue that Nietzsche’s notion of agonism sheds important light on the historical debate about emulation as a pedagogical practice and opens up a new perspective on its disappearance from the contemporary educational imaginary. It is our belief that emulation, in the form of inspirational emulation, should be recovered for education today. The pedagogy of emulation developed in this chapter is formulated in reaction to what we take to be a widespread problem in contemporary education, one that is closely related to the omnipresence of unreflective pity that was criticized in Chapter 4. Many teachers today are worried about drawing attention to differences in students’ talent and achievement. Indeed, Anglo-American educational culture as a whole has become obsessed with avoiding student comparisons. Teachers are not allowed to share any information with other students, especially information that would reveal students’ intellectual capabilities or achievements. This fear of exposing differences in ability or achievement has slipped into the workings of the classrooms. Teachers fear that students who are not as talented may feel bad if the excellence that others achieve is put on display. Thus, they have a tendency to minimize any differences of achievement. But what if putting others’ excellence on display could prove to be an inspiration and motivation for all of the members of the class? As we saw in the previous chapter, Nietzsche argues that a kind of moral or spiritual equality can be attained between those of exceptional talent and achievement and those of more typical talent and achievement. The moral and spiritual equality is found in each member’s desires to become their highest self and to help others become their highest selves. In this chapter, we will outline some possible ways to create this moral and spiritual equality in the classroom.

The history of emulation as a pedagogical principle From the late eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century educational philosophers and practitioners around the world publicly debated the benefits and shortcomings of the use of “emulation” in schools (Staum, 1985, p. 178). During this period, “emulation” referred to a specific pedagogical practice in which students compared their academic achievements with one another’s to determine whose achievement was the highest. Emulation in an educational context encompassed multiple forms of peer-to-peer comparisons; however, its most common use was found in public contests that awarded prizes to winning students (Kett, 2013, pp. 104–106). Many educationists praised emulation for its ability to motivate students to want to achieve at higher levels (Staum, 1985, pp. 163–179; Kett, 2013, p. 94).1 Other educationists, though, condemned the practice for its tendency to foster invidious competition that created artificial distinctions between students and promoted envy (in those who achieved at lower levels) or vanity (in those who achieved at higher levels). Moreover, the critics of emulation claimed that it used external motivation for learning and did little to foster internal motivation.

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In the United States, competitive emulation began as a distinct pedagogical practice as early as the late seventeenth century and continued through at least the mid to late nineteenth century (Staum, 1985, p. 178). In these contexts, emulation was usually tied to either specific, scored competitions between students on examinations and other forms of assessments or public ranks and honorary distinctions. Both methods usually included publicly awarded prizes (Kett, 2013, pp. 104–106). Not surprisingly, the competitive component of these comparisons proved to be, generally speaking, a successful incentive. Much like athletic contests, competitive emulation brought out the competitive spirit in many students, and teachers witnessed marked academic improvement (Opal, 2005, pp. 445–470).2 The problem that ultimately led to the debate among educationists was that it was not at all clear that the academic improvement that was gained through this form of emulation was worth the social and psychological problems that were engendered by it – problems like invidious competition, arrogance, envy, embarrassment, strife and so on. Moreover, “competitive emulation” explicitly relied on leveraging external incentives in students rather than aiming to foster genuine (internal) motivation for academic excellence in and of itself. In light of these potential benefits and potential pitfalls, the debate among educational theorists on the use of competitive emulation as a pedagogical practice gained significant public exposure. Lectures, writing contests and debates on emulation were occurring across the country and internationally. Among the opponents of emulation in America, the most famous was Horace Mann. Mann was the primary architect of the Massachusetts Common Schools through his service as the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education from 1837 to 1848. During this tenure Mann produced annual reports concerning the condition of primary and secondary education in Massachusetts. As the foundation of his educational philosophy, Mann believed that common schools would “obliterate factitious distinctions in society” and says famously in his 12th Annual Report that education, “beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men” (Mann, 1891, pp. 58–59). It is unsurprising then to find that Mann stands vehemently opposed to the notion of competitive emulation, which explicitly affirms and promotes differences in talent and achievement between students. Mann argues that [emulation] tends to withdraw the mind from a love of knowledge for its own sake, to the desire of a conspicuous position and of ostentatious displays. . . . [K]nowledge acquired under this stimulus . . . will be less thorough and less permanent. . . . [I]ts tendency is to engender alienation, uncharitableness and envy among rivals; and . . . under the system of emulation as practised in our schools, those unhallowed passions of cupidity and of ambition will be nursed into strength, which . . . will corrupt the mercantile community . . . and desolate the political one. (Mann, 1891, pp. 58–59)

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In this passage, Mann offers two related reasons to oppose emulation. The first is that the competitions associated with emulation encourage students to be motivated not by a “love of knowledge for its own sake” but only by a desire to outdo others. Put differently, competitive emulation leverages the external motivation of winning a competition rather than the internal motivation of growing in intelligence and knowledge. Mann argues, correctly we might add, that external motivations produce learning that is “less thorough and less permanent.” Like Dewey (1973) a half century later, Mann recognizes that a student’s desire to win an academic competition does not produce genuine interest in the actual academic subject matter, which Mann argues is necessary for the highest level of learning to take place. Rather the student’s interest is only in winning the prize, which diminishes the learning of the subject matter. The second reason Mann opposes competitive emulation is that it creates strife and alienation among students, which leads to negative psychological consequences. According to Mann, what students learn from these competitions is to see other members of their community as their opponents and enemies – individuals to be defeated rather than individuals with whom one can cooperatively grow alongside. Mann argues that not only does competitive emulation breed antagonism in the classroom, but it will lead to further and more damaging antagonism in society. When students are trained to be motivated primarily by competition as youngsters, they will very likely continue to be motivated by competition as adults. This, Mann argues, will lead to the corruption of business and, ultimately, the corruption of politics. Classrooms that emphasize the successes and failures of individual students would produce a destructive “ambition of winning . . . approval,” leading “at first, to slight departures from decorum, ingenuousness, or rectitude, and, afterwards, to great delinquencies” (Mann, 1841, pp. 91, 42). Mann believed that there was no greater “intellectual injury” than for “the pride of a superiority” to be created in a student, either accidentally or intentionally (p. 91, 42). Mann was not alone in his condemnation of competitive emulation. Other influential educationists of the nineteenth century articulated similar concerns. J. L. Parkhurst (1831), for example, decries the pernicious consequences of competitive emulation because they connote “the desire for surpassing others, for the sake of the gratification which arises from surpassing them” (p. 541). In essence, emulation for Parkhurst is a vain pursuit that results only in pride. Ultimately, he concludes, “Emulation . . . appears very harmless in theory; but I suspect it will be found otherwise in practice” (p. 546). Another detractor of competitive emulation was David Perkins Page who was the author of Theory and Practice of Teaching, arguably the most popular American education textbook of the era. Page (1847) describes the results of competitive emulation as often leading to a situation in which students are gratified by their peers’ failures (as a result of a vicious competitive spirit). Claiming that ambition plagues students, Page likens them to Napoleon “who sought a throne for himself, though he waded through the blood of millions to obtain it” (pp. 122–123).

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Ultimately, the opponents of emulation won the debate, and emulation as a pedagogical practice waned in the late nineteenth century and all but disappeared by the early twentieth century. On the face of it, this was a welcome turn of events. As the critics rightly claimed, competitive emulation, as it was customarily used, fostered invidious competition and did little to increase internal motivation for learning. There was a cost, however, to be paid for its disappearance – namely that, in spite of its shortcomings and sideeffects, emulation was an effective academic motivator for many students. The public, peer-to-peer contests that were the basis of emulation catalyzed many students’ sense of competition, which, much like athletic contests, led to intense application. The desire to outperform their fellow students and the fear of being outperformed themselves led to vigorous attempts to master the material. Today, this form of competitive “emulation” is no longer used. The word “emulation” has lost its educational connotation and now means something closer to modeling one’s life upon another person, usually a person one admires. To emulate a person means to attempt to embody many of their actions, attitudes or other character traits. It is not quite imitation, which is more literally doing what someone else does, but it is a very close cousin. What are we to make of the history of this pedagogical idea? Is the removal of emulation from our educational vocabularies and our schools a welcome development or an impoverishment of the educational landscape? As we show in the next two sections, Nietzsche’s analysis of the agonistic character of human psychology helps us to see that there are certain forms of teacher-supported competitive comparisons that can be academically and psychologically beneficial to students. While public competitions and prizes, we can agree, can be a harmful presence in the classroom, this does not mean that all forms of peer comparisons are harmful. Unfortunately, these latter forms of comparisons are sometimes eschewed in classrooms for fear that they will lead to invidious competition. The logic goes something like this: if peer comparisons often lead to (spoken or unspoken) competition, then teachers would be wise to minimize comparisons. If these comparisons could be minimized, then the invidious effects of competition could also be minimized. While on the face of it this logic seems to make sense, it neglects the fact that peer comparisons are inevitable and that by eliminating teacher-supported comparisons the students are left to make comparisons on their own. This, in turn, often leads to the very competition that the teacher is trying to avoid. We argue that, in spite of these claims, Nietzsche’s thoughts on excellence, competition and struggle – in short, the philosophy of agonism that informs his doctrine of the order of rank – point us to a better approach to peer-to-peer classroom interaction, in which teachers can encourage beneficial forms of comparisons as a way to counteract negative ones. In what follows, we will outline a form of teacher-supported peer-topeer comparison that we believe has the potential to encourage academic and social growth in students.

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The pedagogy of inspirational emulation I: encouraging self-emulation The critique of emulation, as it was presented by its nineteenth-century detractors, can be summarized in roughly the following formula: academic competition leads to overweening ambition, unnecessary combativeness and a cruel desire for humiliation. Nietzsche, for his part, thinks of competition differently; indeed he completely reverses cause and effect within the detractors’ formula. Nietzsche argues that competitiveness is a passion deeply embedded in human psychology. It is likely an irremovable part of our motivational reservoir, and thus the task is not to cut off this source or leave it fallow, Nietzsche argues, but to sublimate it, to route it towards empowering ends. In this, Nietzsche places himself in the company of William James (1899) who, in his Talks to Teachers, also argues that “[t]he feeling of rivalry lies at the very basis of our being, all social improvement being largely due to it.” James continues, “There is a noble and generous kind of rivalry, as well as a spiteful and greedy kind” (p. 52). Nietzsche, reflecting on the cultural importance of rivalry and competition in Greek society, concurs with James’ sentiment. In an aphorism entitled “Greek Prudence” Nietzsche claims: Since the desire for victory and eminence is an inextinguishable [unüberwindlicher] trait of nature, older and more primitive than any respect for and joy in equality, the Greek state sanctioned gymnastic and artistic contest between equals, that is to say marked off an arena where that drive could be discharged without imperilling the political order. (WS 226) The famous competitions of ancient Greece were not just a cultural idiosyncrasy; in allowing a place for the competitive drive to exhaust itself in healthy and inspirational forms of contest, they played a crucial role in protecting the polis from political unrest, according to Nietzsche. In other words, these competitions allowed for sublimations of the competitive drive to occur. The gymnastic and artistic contests for which the ancient Greeks are famous redirected Athenian competitiveness towards cultivating aesthetic and physical excellence rather than allowing it to express itself in overpowering others. In Homer’s Contest, an early essay Nietzsche gave as a present to Cosima Wagner, Nietzsche takes up this topic again, this time discussing the role of competition in Greek education and comparing it to our attitude towards the same in the modern era. Nietzsche thinks we have something to learn from the Greek pedagogy of competition. Every natural gift must develop itself in fighting [muss sich kämpfend entfalten]. Thus the Hellenic popular pedagogy demands, whereas modern educators fear nothing more than the unleashing of so-called ambition.

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Today one fears selfishness as “evil in itself ”[.] . . . Every Athenian, for example, was supposed to develop himself in contests in order to be of the highest service to Athens. . . . There was no ambition toward the unmeasured and immeasurable as modern ambition generally is[.] (HC, p. 5) From these two passages, it is clear that Nietzsche, like James, also believes there to be an important difference between a “generous” and a “spiteful” form of competition. Unfortunately, the modern drive to compete has become dramatically inflamed; it is directed towards the “unmeasured” and “immeasurable”; and it demands not the ennobling of both parties in the contest but self-aggrandizement. That is, one has ambition for its own sake, a desire to win, glorify and enrich oneself at the expense of others, while the Greek had ambition only insofar as it would “cultivate himself ” so that he could be placed in the “highest service” of his community. Nietzsche takes issue with modern life for precisely this reason, for its “hastiness,” as he calls it in Schopenhauer as Educator, and for its “blindly raging industriousness,” as he calls it in The Gay Science. Nietzsche admits that such blind ambition “does create wealth and reap honors,” yet “at the same time depriving the organs of their subtlety, which alone would make possible the enjoyment of wealth and honors.” Nietzsche concludes: “The most industrious of all ages – ours – does not know how to make anything of all its industriousness and money, except always still more money and still more industriousness” (GS 21). Be that as it may, Nietzsche has still left us in the dark as to what constitutes the sublimated form of competition he claims to see in the Greek. How does Nietzschean competition differ from the athletic and academic competitions with which we are all familiar and which were trenchantly attacked by the critics of emulation? It is important to point out that Nietzsche agrees with these critics in two senses. First, he agrees that there is a problem with modern ambition: that it has become exaggerated and destructive. And second, he agrees that education is at least in part to blame for this state of affairs. He argues that “for educational purposes and to lead men to incorporate virtuous habits,” the educator characteristically “emphasizes effects of virtue that make it appear as if virtue and private advantage were sisters.” This is especially true with the socalled virtue of “industriousness” [Fleiss], which in the modern world is “represented as the way to wealth and honor and as the poison that best cures boredom and the passions.” This problem is that the educator thus “keeps silent about its dangers, its extreme dangerousness” (ibid.). In addition, Nietzsche sees in the inflammation of modern industriousness and ambition an insidious instrument of state authority for ensuring obedience and loyalty from its citizens. “The governments of the great states have in their hands two means of keeping the people subject to them in fear and obedience: a cruder one, the army, and a more refined one, the school.” The state strives to incite “a feverish thirst for advancement” by employing a slew of

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state examinations and state titles . . . so extensive that even those who have remained independent . . . are still plagued by a thorn of discontent until their position too has been noted and recognized from above through the gracious bestowal of ranks and orders[.] (HH II:320) The result, Nietzsche warns us presciently, is that teachers and students “will become even more closely attached to the aims of the government” and prepare the ground “for great wars” (ibid.). In spite of Nietzsche’s extended criticism of modern ambition, he differs from the critics of emulation on an essential point; namely, he does not locate the problems of modern ambition in the cultivation of competitiveness and emulation but rather in how we have cultivated the competitive drive, an error that has emerged simply because we have failed to understand its nature. On the Nietzschean view, the competitive drive and the will to power are closely related phenomena. Our desire to compete grows out of our desire to express ourselves and our drives in powerful ways. If so, then Nietzsche’s doctrine of self-overcoming already suggests what kind of competition Nietzsche would find most empowering. As we saw previously, Nietzsche thinks that expressions of the will to power that constitute the overpowering of others are both weak and, to use one of his favorite terms of derision, “stupid.” Likewise, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the order of rank calls for these expressions of the competitive drive to contribute to the achievement of one’s highest self in the context of a collective cultural striving for aesthetic, intellectual, moral and spiritual excellence. Thus, taking inspiration from the Greeks, a Nietzschean notion of generous competition would be one centrally concerned with simultaneously empowering the individual and establishing social flourishing. It is unsurprising, then, that this is precisely how Nietzsche talks about competition when he treats the topic head on. Nietzsche decries the “zero-sum” mentality of spiteful competition and instead promotes a kind of magnanimous competition that raises up both competitor and opponent. In intellectual competition, for example, Nietzsche argues that the truly wise person “without knowing it elevates his opponent into the ideal and purifies his contradictory opinion of every blemish and adventitiousness,” thinking of him as no less than a “god” (D 431). Likewise, for Nietzsche, a victory that discourages or humiliates its opponent is no victory at all. “The good victory must put the conquered into a joyful mood, it must possess something divine that does not put to shame” (WS 344). Even more forcefully, Nietzsche envisions a form of competition in which there is no “best.” Admiring the Greek’s intolerance of such competition, Nietzsche asks rhetorically, “Why should no one be the best?” Nietzsche answers: “Because with that the competition would dry up and the perpetual source of life of the Greek state would be endangered” (HC, p. 5). Thus Nietzsche’s sense of magnanimous competition or agonism implies a form of competitive interaction whose main aim is to keep the competition

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going, to raise up all involved, to avoid humiliation at all costs and to refuse to appoint a “best.” But what kind of competition is never-ending, entails no “best” and elevates the competitors in this way? In light of Chapters 3 and 4, one answer is: competition against oneself. As he has Zarathustra put it, “Whatever I create and however much I love it – soon I must oppose it and my love; thus my will wills it” (Z II: “On Self-Overcoming”). Nietzsche’s sense of agonism calls us, first, to compete against ourselves, to pursue an ever higher self. Thus, Nietzsche’s philosophy of agonism suggests a form of “self-emulation” and selfovercoming that William James also spiritedly endorses. James (1899) writes, for example, “Unquestionably, emulation with one’s former self is a noble form of the passion of rivalry, and has a wide scope in the training of the young” (p. 52). What does this self-emulation look like in practice? James gives his readers a clear example. I would mark out every year that progress was made and I would compare it with the progress of previous years. I would say to [the child]: “You are now grown so many inches taller; there is the ditch you jumped over, there is the burden you raised. There is the distance to which you could throw a pebble, there the distance you could run over without losing breath. See how much more you can do now!” Thus I should excite him without making him jealous of any one. He would wish to surpass himself. I can see no inconvenience in this emulation with his former self. (pp. 51–52) Crucially, self-emulation does not occur in an individualist vacuum, however. There is an educator in the background of James’ example, speaking to the child, encouraging the child on. In other words, self-emulation requires a respected other, an exemplar, that can inspire the pursuit of one’s highest self.

The pedagogy of inspirational emulation II: cultivating peer-to-peer emulation Self-emulation constitutes the first way in which the competitive drive can, and should, be sublimated in an educational context. Yet emphasizing the centrality of self-emulation should not mean giving up on all peer-to-peer competition in educational contexts. As James (1899) puts it, “to veto and taboo all possible rivalry of one youth with another because such rivalry may degenerate into greedy and selfish excess does seems to savor of sentimentality, or even fanaticism” (p. 52). While the historical opponents of emulation took the psychologically negative effects of competitiveness for granted, there were others in the debate who shared the Nietzschean sentiment that ambitiousness was only one expression of the competitive drive, that the competitive drive can be expressed in mutually empowering ways. Following some of the very same principles Nietzsche outlines for his philosophy of agonism, we suggest a form of

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competitive peer-to-peer interaction we call inspirational emulation, which does not lead to boundless ambition and cruelty but to mutual self-empowerment. Inspirational vs. ambitious emulation

There are two articulate defenders of emulation that offer images of emulation appearing to support the peer-to-peer agonism that Nietzsche wants to promote: Joseph Emerson and Elihu Baldwin. Emerson paints a vivid picture of the psychological and educational benefits that accrued from his experiences with emulation (Howell, 2009, p. 499). Emerson (1834) claims that as an adolescent he never indulged in hating a rival; no, nor for an hour; nor had occasion to strive against it. If, for a moment, I ever felt the stir of envy, in consequence of sudden and grievous discomfiture, it was but for a moment. . . . Nay, my rivals have been among my dearest friends. (p. 27) He goes on to say that his greatest rival became his greatest friend and that he considers this rivalry to be one of the “greatest blessings” he ever enjoyed. The stimulating influence of such a friend and rival, I consider one of the greatest blessings I have enjoyed. To be seated continually at his side, sometimes above him, though more frequently below him, to see his intense application, his untiring patience, his vigorous efforts for improvement, his unexceptional morals, and propriety of conduct – could not but be favorable to my progress. (ibid.) There are two aspects of Emerson’s experience that need to be highlighted. The first is that the spiteful competition between rivals that the opponents of ambitious emulation highlight appears to be absent in Emerson. Rather than creating artificial distinctions in which more successful individuals become arrogant and less successful individuals become envious, Emerson claims that friendship and mutual respect can be the result of competition. The second is that the competitive context brings Emerson to admire not merely the technical academic achievement (getting the answers right, for example) but the moral qualities of his or her rival’s character. Unlike the opponents of ambitious emulation, who narrowly consider the “academic” comparisons between students, Emerson has a much richer conception that includes virtues like patience and perseverance. We will return to this second component shortly. The persuasiveness of Emerson’s defense is increased when he discusses the effects on him as a result of emulation in college. He describes what might be called a community of scholars who all inspired each other to be the best

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they could be because they were in a kind of inspirational competition with each other. My chosen, my dearest associates were almost wholly from among those, from whom alone, as rivals, I had anything to fear – with whom I delighted to reciprocate instruction to the very utmost. I never grieved, I always rejoiced, to hear their correct and ready answers, their fine translations, their commanding eloquence, their thrilling rhetoric, and every performance suited to awaken in the teachers the glad well done. (p. 29) The tone of genuine admiration in this passage is unmistakable as is the almost palpable sense of energy and camaraderie. It is clear that, if we can trust his psychological self-report, Emerson’s experience with emulation was wholly positive and would be one that many teachers would welcome in their students. Ultimately, Emerson concludes that without emulation his learning would have been severely impeded, as would have his zeal for genuine learning (pp. 30–31).3 While Emerson paints a compelling picture of emulation from the point of view of personal experience, the educational philosophy that underlies his experience, and the pedagogical methods that helped to create it, are left implicit. Fortunately, Baldwin fills in some of these missing components in his more discursive account of the benefits of emulation. To begin with, Baldwin (1837) offers a definition of “emulation” and claims that the proper use of the term has not been settled.4 By some very recent and sensible writers on the subject of education, the practical question involved in our theme, would seem to be disposed without much difficulty. They consider the term emulation as synonymous with ambition and designating one of the modifications of selfishness. Now the desire of acquisition, which is found altogether in the love of having the preeminence, is doubtless inseparable from an envious spirit or from vanity, and ought to be rigidly discountenanced. It is a misanthropic desire and ungenerous, fraught with incalculable evils to the community. But this application of the term, emulation, has not obtained universally, if it has, in general, with the most accurate and discriminating writers. (p. 3) Baldwin’s point is that when he uses the word “emulation” he will not be using it in the negative sense that others attribute to it. He is perfectly comfortable to agree that on their definition of the term, emulation and its effects should be excluded from schools; but on Baldwin’s definition, the positive psychological results of inspirational emulation should be admitted in the schools – and not just admitted but encouraged. What is his definition? Drawing from Buck’s Theological Dictionary, Baldwin defines “emulation” as

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a generous ardor, kindled by the praiseworthy examples of others, which impels us to imitate, to rival, and, if possible, to excel them; a passion which involves in it, esteem of the person whose attainments or conduct we emulate, of the qualities and actions in which we emulate him, and a desire of resemblance, together with a joy springing from a hope of success. (p. 4) This definition is consistent with Emerson’s experience and represents a combination of inspirational emulation and its positive effects. For Baldwin, when one goes to a school where inspirational emulation is used, the result is a positive psychological state. It is important to note that Baldwin is in complete agreement with the opponents of selfish ambition when they say that the negative effects of emulation should not be encouraged in the classroom. These opponents, like Nietzsche, argue that competitions and comparisons that breed a desire to outdo others should not be admitted into the classroom, even though these motivate students to learn the material. Baldwin agrees that these forms of competition are pernicious and that even if they appear to improve motivation, they should be assiduously avoided in the classroom. Who has not heard of “a laudable and necessary ambition?” This is the principle, which recent writers have actually confounded with emulation; and through which it has been formally assailed, as though it were accountable for envy and hatred and moral strife. Ambition is however the thing, which, in the similitude and very garb of a generous propensity, does really overlook all right, and laughs at the claim of charity. It aims indeed at excelling, but for an inferior and selfish object, and often from the worst of motives. (p. 6) The primary difference between ambitious emulation and inspirational emulation is the reliance on or rejection of zero-sum competition, respectively. It is true that both methods use contexts and externalities to provide results, but the object of the motivation is decidedly different in each case. In ambitious emulation, instructors leverage selfish ambition in students by placing them in zero-sum contexts. Whether it is a classroom competition for a physical award or a team game in which one group loses and the other wins, the object of motivation is external to the student learners; a student in this context is encouraged to learn for the sake of prize acquisition. In this sense, ambitious emulation relies on motivation through external objects such as cash, trophies or the defeat of external individuals or groups. Moreover, ambitious emulation is effective only in a zero-sum context; if all students are inevitable winners, then ambition cannot be leveraged because it has no result on the outcome. As such, learning occurs at the expense of others (be it all other classmates or only the classmates

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on an opposing team), as it is the very prospect of others losing that cultivates the requisite motivation. On the other hand, inspirational emulation is able to reject zero-sum games because the object of motivation is, in important respects, not external but rather internal. In the context of such competitions, students do not seek to acquire that which is external (a prize or recognition) but rather seek to experience internal transformation and growth. The main motivator is simultaneously one’s current state and one’s potential future state, or, in other words, the possibility of personal excellence in contrast to the reality of relative deficient excellence. Thus, ironically, one could say that peer-to-peer emulation is actually a form of self-emulation, and this in two senses. First, the goal of the competition is genuine self-improvement rather than besting another, and second, the means employed are to see one’s opponent as a potential exemplar, to learn from one’s competition with them, to notice and admire the moral qualities they exhibit in competing, whether it ends in defeat or victory. In this sense, one might say that inspirational emulation relies on external motivation just as ambitious emulation does; however, this would be a misunderstanding of the object of motivation on which inspirational emulation actually relies. All learning occurs in environments with various stimuli, and, as such, any conscious evaluation and decision are the result of externalities; the key difference between the negative and positive emulations, as stated, is the object of motivation. Given the exemplars, the student of inspirational emulation does not seek to outdo the exemplars themselves or rob the exemplars of their attributes but rather seeks to become like them. In this way, pupils in inspirational emulation do not aim to best something external but rather aim to best their own present self; the motivation arises from an internal evaluation of oneself and is rooted in the internal prospect of becoming one’s greater self. Baldwin (1837) makes this fact explicit when he claims that students must be taught to regard comparisons and competitions in the correct manner: not as opportunities to outdo others but as opportunities to strive to reach one’s highest potential and rejoice when others reach their highest potential – even if they reach higher. The young should be made to understand the difference [between selfish ambition and mutual inspiration]; and that true emulation terminates, where envy and hatred of rivals or vanity in success, begins. . . . Emulation is kind and charitable, and magnanimous; and finds only regret in the mistakes, the deficiencies and disappointments of others; while she sincerely rejoices in their highest attainments and most splendid success. He that is truly emulous of others, would not, were it in his power, turn them back, nor for one moment retard their progress, in the race of improvement. He only strives to excel them, and will admire and love them the more for their superiority, which may render that impossible. (p. 6)

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Clearly Baldwin believes that students can be trained to know the difference between competitive emulation, which can lead to vanity, contempt, envy or resentment, and inspirational emulation, which can lead to love, admiration and respect. He believes that it is the teacher’s job to help the students eschew the former and pursue the latter. Unfortunately, while he claims this “can easily be taught,” he does not provide any direction on how teachers should go about it (Warnick, 2008, pp. 44–45).5 It is to this question that we turn in the next section. Inspirational emulation in the classroom

Some may argue that ambitious emulation persists in schools today in the form of grades, testing and so on (Kett, 2013, pp. 109–111).6 The logic goes something like this: students know their own grades and the grades of their peers, which produces feelings of arrogance and envy, suggesting that ambitious emulation persists in schools today. While it is true that such comparisons happen, these do not constitute ambitious emulation because the comparisons do not include school-sponsored publicity or intentionality. In other words, schools do not intend to encourage such comparisons let alone leverage them as a pedagogical technique. The reasons they do not encourage competitive comparisons are (1) the Family and Educational Rights and Privacy Act requires schools to keep grades, ranks and scores private, and (2) schools are generally aware of the negative psychological effects of these types of comparison. In reality, there is great distance from the pedagogical techniques that theorists decry and the pedagogical techniques used today. In the same way, some might argue that inspirational emulation exists in schools today in the form of teachers’ compliments and exhortations to model behavior of others. As with ambitious emulation, such methods are not consistent with historical inspirational emulation because they are typically not public and are also not academic in nature. Today, teachers may feel comfortable recognizing exemplary work in students but typically will only do so in private contexts. Moreover, when a teacher encourages a student to model another student, the teacher is often doing so in order to offer an explanation about a given task or to attempt to modify an unruly student’s behavior. In both instances, these exhortations are far less about the public creation of exemplars and are more about encouraging students to adhere to a teacher’s wishes. Today’s compliments and exhortations, then, model inspirational emulation very little. In reality, schools have, for some time, been rather more concerned about the dangers of the negative psychological results stemming from ambitious emulation.7 Schools claim to want to enable all students to succeed rather than simply sponsor academic games and contests. However, in the absence of educational emulation, the vices of ambitious emulation are not actually avoided; they are just redirected. Comparisons between students are rife in school, ranging from the clothes that students wear to the grades they receive. Ironically, the absence

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of educational emulation has not necessarily decreased such practices but has rather allowed them to exist without school sanction or regulation. Schools may not directly support the practices through a certain pedagogical technique, but so long as markers of comparison exist students will inevitably seek to compare themselves on the basis of such markers, resulting in the pernicious psychological consequences that the critics of emulation rightly attempted to eliminate. From this perspective, inspirational emulation might not only improve learning, but, as the Greeks did with their competitions, it might also offer more productive outlets for the kinds of comparison that happen naturally between students. Rather than ignoring the inevitability of comparisons and letting them fester, teachers could use inspirational emulation to harness the desire for comparison into a healthier, more empowering form. In this way, inspirational emulation urges teachers to create environments that encourage inspiration and discourage greed, arrogance, shame, insecurity and a host of other malevolent psychological consequences of unchecked comparison. The question now becomes: What conditions would be necessary for emulation to become a pedagogical force capable of cultivating the positive psychological and educational benefits of peer-to-peer comparison? While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to offer a systematic treatment of how a school might implement educational emulation, we offer seven practical principles of a classroom that cultivates the kind of empowering self-emulation and inspirational peer-to-peer emulation that Nietzsche hopes to promote. The first principle is probably so obvious that it hardly need be expressed. It is the idea that the teacher who wants to utilize inspirational emulation must believe that all students have the potential to regard themselves and their peers the way Emerson regarded himself and his peers. Clearly, Mann, Parkhurst and others did not believe that all students could come to share Emerson’s perspective. Parkhurst (1831), for example, acknowledges that certain individuals “can make frequent comparisons of [their] talents, attainments, and success with those of others, without exciting any selfish desire . . . [or] pleasure,” but he writes off such experiences by saying that “with men in general, the case is very different” (p. 546). Parkhurst believes that only exceptional individuals can rise above feelings of pride, vanity, jealousy, envy and so on, but the average student cannot. This type of belief would, from our point of view, undermine the potential success of emulation in the classroom, even if the proper pedagogical structure were in place. If a teacher believes, correctly or incorrectly, that certain students are absolutely incapable – either by natural disposition or by their upbringing and former education – of being inspired by the achievement of their peers, then the teacher should not use emulation in the classroom. The second principle is that teachers must primarily experience feelings of admiration and inspiration when they recognize greatness in their peers, and they must primarily experience feelings of humility towards their own accomplishments and magnanimity towards less capable peers. We claim that humility is the proper emotion to feel when one achieves a level of greatness because one recognizes how much further effort would be required to go beyond those

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accomplishments. If teachers do not experience these emotions but rather feel jealousy, envy or resentment at the success of others, they will not be able to suitably model a proper kind of humility and magnanimity for their students. The teacher’s ability to model appropriate emulation is essential if we hope that students will embody appropriate emulation. The third principle is that the explicit promotion of emulation must be woven into the fabric of the classroom. It is not enough for teachers to model inspirational emulation. Teachers must create a classroom culture that fosters emulation throughout. Whatever subject is being taught teachers should continually emphasize both the importance of cultivating one’s highest self and the manner in which students can be inspired in this pursuit by witnessing greatness in others. There must be constant reference to the greatness of individuals and how that greatness can lead to inspiration. This must include the reminder that comparisons are not zero-sum games and that the comparison with others is not to see others minimized by the comparison but a competition with oneself to achieve at the highest level possible. The fourth principle is that both the emulation of academic achievement and the emulation of character traits should be emphasized. As we have seen, ambitious emulation was generally based on the acquisition of correct answers or high grades. What was not emphasized was the genuine beauty, creativity or insight of the work produced, nor the admirable character traits that made such work possible. If inspirational emulation is to exist, students must learn to emulate artistically, intellectually or morally meaningful achievements and to emulate the dispositions and attitudes that made such achievements possible. A teacher should therefore highlight the student’s meaningful work and qualities that are admirable. Not only does this create an environment in which prizes are de-emphasized, as we will discuss again momentarily, but it also creates an environment in which any student can be an object of admiration. In this way, the egalitarian impulse that all can succeed can be appropriately balanced with the emulation of greatness. For example, a student can be praised and emulated for their rigorous attempt to produce their highest quality work, regardless of their level of academic or artistic achievement. Indeed, in this way character traits are, in an important respect, more relevant than the quality of work, since every academic endeavor requires hard work, perseverance, creativity, focus, collegiality and so on. This does not mean that all individuals will be “just as good as everybody else.” Rather, all individuals that embody admirable character traits can be proud of their exemplary character, even if their academic achievements are not as high as others. The fifth principle is that, in order to sufficiently highlight competition with oneself rather than competition with others, the use of explicit prizes should be eliminated. In certain ways, prizes are inescapable in most contemporary schools. As we have seen, the reliance on a grading system itself creates rewards (in the form of As), as do class ranks, scholarships, awards, standardized test scores, honor societies, extracurricular distinctions and so on. In order to avoid systems of petty competition (ones that lead to negative psychological effects), teachers must actively seek to devalue such artificial rewards and rather, as said

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previously, appropriately value internal motivators. At first glance, this may appear dishonest, but in reality it is a more true valuation than the alternative. Left alone, students will construct their own economy in which academically dubious honors are typically the highest valued currency, and enclaves will exist in which the opposite is true, but with the explicit and careful guidance of a teacher, an alternate school economy can be created so that students seek to accumulate character and knowledge, which are the most valuable assets. The sixth principle is that while prizes must be eschewed, recognizing academic and dispositional achievement should be a public affair. Emulation necessitates being able to identify the positive attainments, whether academic or dispositional, of others. A classroom that seeks to cultivate positive peer emulation should create instances in which students can see the achievement of their peers. As far as academic excellence goes, it is important to publicly commend such excellence because doing so can help create genuine interest in the material. If a teacher highlights the beauty, elegance or creativity of the achievement of one particular student, other students are better able to appreciate the beauty, elegance or creativity for themselves, and they thereby may be inspired to work harder on their own academic excellence. By the same token, laudable attitudes and dispositions like courage, hard work, determination and so on should be on display equally because they have the potential to inspire others to exhibit similar qualities of character. Thus, for emulation to be successful in math class, science class, English class and so on, it must include praiseworthy examples of outstanding excellence at both the subject matter level and the dispositional level. Finally, while teachers must be, in the early stages of developing a community of emulation, primarily responsible for determining which artifacts and which character traits are to be highlighted and praised, the seventh principle is that teachers must eventually transfer much of that responsibility to their students. If emulation is to be successful in individual instances, a culture of emulation must pervade in the classroom, where all students are praising one another’s work and characters. It should become a common (perhaps daily) practice in the classroom for one student to spontaneously express admiration at another student’s academic or dispositional successes and to want to draw other students’ attention to it. Moreover, it should be a common practice for students to ask other students how they might improve their academic skills or character traits. Ultimately, it should be the goal of the teacher to help students internalize a desire for positive emulation; they should cease seeing others’ successes as threats to their own self-esteem or personal identity and instead view them as challenges to improve. In order for this to happen, teachers need to make themselves less and less the focal point in promoting emulation.

Conclusion As many educationists claimed in their accounts of emulation, comparison is inevitable among students. Unprovoked, comparison can surface both negatively and positively, but it most often manifests itself in forms of envy, arrogance,

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despair and competitiveness. Ironically enough, by refusing to compare students (as many anti-emulationists recommend) there is a significant chance that comparisons will arise among students nonetheless, along with an illicit reputation economy. Left unrecognized, these comparisons can fester in students and produce the very vices that anti-emulationists fear. In the same way that the ancient Greeks created opportunity for healthy competition so as to prevent unhealthy forms of competition, it is essential for teachers to create a classroom environment that fosters a more beneficial system of comparison, one in which students recognize the greatness of others and are inspired to improve themselves as a consequence. Were emulation in this sense implemented in the schools, we might see an improvement of genuine self-esteem, greater intellectual camaraderie and higher achievement. On our view, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the order of rank helps us to imagine how we might conceive of the “emulative classroom.” The order of rank calls for a culture that celebrates excellence in the achievements of others, and emulation is the educational process by which we learn to derive inspiration from these achievements and pursue our highest selves. Through the Nietzschean lens, emulation thus involves a special form of aspiration or “agonism,” which constitutes a sublimation of the feelings of ambition, competitiveness or discouragement that often arise in peer-to-peer comparisons and competitions. In agonistic or inspirational emulation, students learn (1) to compete with the achievements of one’s prior self and (2) to appreciate the achievements and qualities of an opponent in a peer-to-peer competition. To achieve (1), the pedagogy of emulation encourages teachers to create opportunities for students to develop an aspirational attitude towards their own prior achievements. And to achieve (2), teachers are encouraged to create a classroom culture in which students can recognize differences of achievement between their peers and marvel at the excellence that others demonstrate. In this, they learn to overcome any feelings of jealousy or ambition that arise within them. For this sublimation to occur consistently, both teachers and students must dispense with the destructive zero-sum conception of competition that is omnipresent today and learn to celebrate excellence.

Notes 1 Staum (1985) asserts that “almost all eighteenth-century educators . . . recommended competition to stimulate learning or held classroom prize contests” (p. 163). In general, at the turn of the century the public debate about the true value of emulation began as nineteenth-century philosophers turned to address the socio-economic factors at play in the pedagogy. One of the earliest formal instances of debate on the topic occurred in France in 1800 as the French Academy held an essay contest on whether or not emulation was “a good means of education.” Staum writes that many pro-emulationists found the practice of emulation to be valuable as an appropriate means of taming self-interest by socializing self-interest into a desire to achieve the esteem of others. Anti-emulationists found the practice to be an open assault on equality and worried that such a practice would initiate haughtiness (and loathing of hard work) in the highest-achieving students (p. 165). Additionally, Kett (2013) writes, “Starting in the 1820s writers in many fields began to

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complain about ‘emulation’ as a national disease” (p. 94). Kett focuses more on the opponents of emulation than the proponents asserting that the opponents “equated emulation with the desire for ‘personal superiority’ over a competitor, and they alleged it bred envy and discord” (p. 94). Kett purports that no sudden change in definition accounted for this widespread condemnation of the concept but that in the period from the early to mid nineteenth century many educationists fastened on the negative connotation. Opal finds that American colleges, including Yale and Harvard, began to use emulation (prizes or honor given to students at “public examinations and exhibitions”) in the mid eighteenth century as an alternative to corporal punishment, a practice used previously as a motivator for learning (p. 455). Private academy founders towards the late eighteenth century then began to formulate their schools around emulation to model what they themselves had experienced in their higher education and to emphasize their understanding of a gentleman’s place in democratic society (a place underscored by “the drive for distinction”). In thinking of inspirational emulation as a pedagogical technique, there is the apparent relation to the twentieth-century conceptual terms “criterion-referenced testing” and “norm-referenced testing.” The former signifies using a fixed, predetermined standard by which to assess student achievement. The latter signifies using student performance to establish a norm by which to assess student achievement (this can be thought of as comparing students to their classmates in order to determine performance using, for example, a typical bell curve). The question, then, is how emulation fits into this supposed dichotomy. In an ideal situation, a classroom that implements emulation will have an established criterion (or criteria) for what excellence means in relation to the subject matter or coursework. However, norm-referencing comes into play as student achievement is highlighted (for its exhibition or approximation of the criterion) for the sake of peer motivation. In this way, it is not that student performance becomes the standard (as it does in a strictly norm-referenced context) but that student performance illustrates the standard and can therefore be motivational to others. Emerson’s experience demonstrates an example of how emulation can rest soundly on notions of both norm-referencing and criterionreferencing. Emerson speaks of “propriety,” “correct and ready answers” and a teacher’s “glad well done,” which indicates that Emerson had some sense of a standard of excellence in his teacher’s classroom. He was motivated, however, by his peer’s approximation of these standards, which spurred him not to beat his peers but to desire his own demonstration of excellence. In this way, Emerson provides an example of the appropriate medley of normand criterion-referencing in the classroom that uses emulation. In general, Parkhurst’s concern arises from a concern over the individualistic nature of emulation, as it exists in his experience. However, the true structural issue with such emulation is not its emphasis on individual concern (though, of course, that is a requisite aspect of its threat) but rather its emphasis on competition and petty reward. Those educationists were concerned about emulation’s diagnosed undesirable symptoms – such as pride, vanity, disloyalty, selfishness and so on – yet the underlying cause was a system that emphasized strife against alternate parties and incentivized uncharity. Unfortunately, Parkhurst’s reliance on the mainstream experience blinds him to legitimate discussion about the minority experience. Parkhurst’s argument, meant to be philosophical in nature, is bogged down in the mire of his specific individual and cultural reality, and is thus unable to consider any liberating possibilities. Warnick points out that social processes and contexts serve to reject or create exemplars regardless of a teacher’s wills or efforts. While it is true that teachers are beholden to systems outside of their control, a teacher can be instrumental in creating “a social group in which exemplification might take place” (p. 45). Teachers, then, are not in absolute control of all variables that might influence a student outside of the classroom. However, they are able to create a learning context that emphasizes distinctive educational and moral growth.

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In this way, in a new environment outside of the teacher’s control it can be hoped that students will bring what they have learned in the community created by their teacher back “home” with them. While this is not foolproof, it increases the prospect that some change could occur. Moreover, students may grow to prefer the environment of the classroom and may choose to search for communities within their non-school environments that are similar to the environment of the classroom. Thus we are concerned with the necessary elements for creating an environment in which positive psychological effects of inspirational emulation become normative. Warnick also highlights a second concern, namely that a teacher cannot be certain that a given exemplar will “take” for any given student due to elements outside of the teacher’s control such as a student’s psychology, social constructs and so on. It may be that students find a given exemplar to be repulsive, uninspiring or laughable. While it is true that exemplars become exemplars due to “social conventions” (p. 44), the teacher can, as in the earlier case, create social conventions in a classroom that will make a chosen exemplar valuable to students as they become embedded in the social conventions surrounding the exemplar. Moreover, as Warnick points out, it is still critically important in the process of creating an exemplar that “somebody directs observers to pay attention” to the exemplary features of an individual or an individual’s work (p. 38). In this sense, even the simple act of directing students to so-called exemplary features is important in the capacity of creating exemplars and ensuring that they are accepted by students. 6 In reality, grades and the concept of graded classrooms (in which students were grouped into different tracks depending on their performance, which was kept private) were developed in the late nineteenth century as an explicit response to educational emulation. In its original form, grading relied on private grades with public scaffolding. Students would know their own grades and not the grades of other students, but they would be aware of which student group they were in; thus there was always the incentive to improve grades to reach the higher grade-average group. The rationale behind grading was that grading systems would result in slow, justified advancement (as opposed to immediate, quick prizegiving as in emulation) and that each student would be ignorant of his or her standing as compared to other students. Thus “personal competition, the ‘worst passion’ of the heart, could be avoided.” Given this background, it is clear that the presence of grades, at least historically normatively speaking, should not be considered as an extension of educational emulation. 7 For examination of the effect of competition as a motivating pedagogical technique, see De Fraja and Landeras (2006, pp. 189–213). For a thorough analysis of the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (which competition as a motivator entails), see Deci, Vallerand, Pelletier, and Ryan (1991).

Chapter 7

The doctrine of ressentiment

Introduction Having established an interpretation of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the order of rank in his early work Schopenhauer as Educator and having outlined the ideas that contemporary educators can draw from it, we are now in a position to turn to a concept that constitutes a central concern of Nietzsche’s late works: ressentiment. While Nietzsche believes that individuals of extraordinary talent and achievement can be sources of inspiration to all other individuals, he worries that instead of feeling inspiration, many people will begin to resent these individuals and seek to diminish them. The reason Nietzsche fears this is because he believes that modern democracies are increasingly steeped in a spirit of ressentiment that encourages citizens to see others, especially those who are especially talented or gifted, as threats to their happiness. Ressentiment is the French word that Nietzsche uses to describe an internalized, and often subconscious, feeling of inferiority that he believes to pervade modern cultures. He places the blame for the emergence of this spirit on Jewish and Christian religious leaders who he claims masterminded a revaluation of values by making individual greatness a sin and meekness and conformity virtues. According to Nietzsche, the reason Christianity lauded the “poor in spirit” and welcomed the “weak and downtrodden” was not because it truly wanted to strengthen these groups but so that the priests, as the weakest and poorest in spirit of all, could fashion these qualities into an ideal and thereby create a culture of humble servants over whom they could lord. This revaluation of values reached its final consummation when it was connected with the democratic ethos of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although Christianity had lost much of its direct influence over the day-to-day activities of average citizens by this period, the damage was already done. The leaders of democracy could, in the name of equality, promote the same ideals of weakness, humility and conformity, while decrying excellence, self-confidence and nobility as holdovers of an aristocratic mentality. These “poison-mixers” and “despisers of life” (Z P:3), as Nietzsche calls them, are weak and cowardly and use ideas like “the welfare of all,” not because they actually care about elevating the many, but because they

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want to vent their will to power on the healthy and talented by diminishing their abilities and influence. According to Nietzsche these groups claim to care about the masses, but they actually want to establish themselves as the new elite, whose values have become the only values in existence. When this happens, the inventors of new values become the thought and value police and thereby exercise their power not only over the masses but also over the previous elite, who are thereby reduced to the masses. When this leveling process achieves its ultimate ends, it becomes a kind of social crime to explicitly suggest that some people genuinely rise above the level of the many, that they are more virtuous, more talented, more gifted, more beautiful and so on. On this view, democracy demands the abolishment of all orders of rank. Thus, according to Nietzsche, people who have been raised in modern society have been systematically taught to see beauty, graciousness, courage, selfovercoming and excellence as threats to their self-worth. They fear that if they are not as beautiful, gracious, courageous, powerful or talented as others, then they do not matter. Rather than overcome these feelings of inferiority by graciously and nobly rejoicing in the good fortune of others – thereby affirming their own beauty, grace, courage and power – the resentful seek to diminish others. Rather than rejoicing in others’ successes and being inspired to improve themselves, which is the goal of inspirational emulation, they seek to diminish others’ successes. Nietzsche’s beliefs about ressentiment pose a problem for our defense of his relevance for contemporary education. In particular, if ressentiment is as serious a problem as Nietzsche believes it is, then contemporary teachers and students may already be under its sway. If they are, then the culture of mutual emulation and esteem for which we advocated in the previous chapter may be an impossibility for many students. Students may already be subconsciously indoctrinated into the psychology of ressentiment and may not be able to draw inspiration from others because they see them as threats to their own identity and happiness. In other words, the psychological optimism on which the pedagogy of emulation rests is simply an exercise in naiveté. Fortunately, Nietzsche offers a solution to the problem of ressentiment – a solution that offers educational insight into how to improve the likelihood of the inspirational emulation model outlined earlier. The argument of this chapter runs as follows. In order to uncover Nietzsche’s solution to ressentiment, it will be first necessary to understand Nietzsche’s political vision – especially his supposed elitism in the late works. After examining the case for the elitist reading, we argue that this interpretation cannot be maintained in light of Nietzsche’s pessimism regarding the future of political aristocracies. Political aristocracies are breeding grounds for ressentiment, and therefore Nietzsche rejects them as a way of creating a higher culture. Next, we argue that in light of Nietzsche’s pessimism concerning political aristocracies, we must take seriously the notion that Nietzsche prefers an “aesthetic aristocracy” in which the aristocratic few do not dominate and enslave the many but ensure that they are provided with a robust

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education that allows them to flourish culturally and economically.1 Doing so will provide them with the resources to overcome ressentiment. According to Nietzsche, helping the many overcome ressentiment is not only essential for the flourishing of the entire culture but is essential for the psychological flourishing of each individual who makes up the many. Once we gain an understanding of what Nietzsche envisions with the overcoming of ressentiment, we can, in the following chapter, consider what contemporary educators can learn from it.

Nietzsche’s reputation as a “Machiavellian” 2 elitist While Walter Kaufmann and others have done much to reverse the common misunderstanding that Nietzsche was a proto-Nazi who promoted Germanic supremacy and the exploitation of the Jews, there is still a common interpretation among scholars that Nietzsche “advocates subversion of [democratic institutions] by a new nobility, accompanied by a political conception of the masses as inert and passive . . . as pliable, raw material for control and manipulation. . . . [H]e justifies exploitation and recommends slavery for some” (Dombowsky, 2004, pp. 128–129). It is believed that Nietzsche wants to reestablish a political aristocracy that gaily accepts with a clear (not bad) conscience “the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete beings, to slaves, to instruments.” It has to be the “fundamental faith” (one could almost say a “natural law”) of an aristocratic society that society does not exist for society’s sake but “only as the foundation and scaffolding on which a choice type of being is able to raise itself to its higher task and to a higher state of being.” (Ansell-Pearson, 1991, pp. 204–205; Nietzsche quotations are from BGE 258) Along these lines, one of the most rigorous and sustained attempts to reveal Nietzsche’s supposed elitism is Don Dombowsky’s (2004) book Nietzsche’s Machiavellian Politics. Dombowsky not only argues forcefully for a “Machiavellian”inspired Nietzsche, he also compellingly repudiates recent attempts to render Nietzsche’s ideas as sympathetic to democracy. Dombowsky correctly claims that these attempts are based on an illicit separation of Nietzsche’s “Dionysian philosophy and his radical aristocratic, authoritarian politics” (p. 6). Dombowsky argues that these “radical liberal democratic” interpretations wrongly assume that Nietzsche’s undemocratic and authoritarian ideas are something like aberrations in Nietzsche’s philosophy and are inconsistent with his pluralistic and egalitarian ideas of perspectivism and agonism. As Dombowsky points out, Nietzsche’s philosophy cannot be so bifurcated. Nietzsche’s political philosophy is not only consistent with but is part and parcel of his broader philosophy.3 Any attempt to bracket Nietzsche’s political elitism and look only

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to his epistemological, ethical or pluralistic statements will only serve to distort Nietzsche’s philosophical goals, both political and general. Dombowsky does not merely repudiate the radical liberal democratic reading, however; he also puts forward his own reading that radicalizes Nietzsche in another political direction. Not only is Dombowsky’s Nietzsche undemocratic; he is elitist in the radical sense of advocating the unrepentant and utter exploitation of the masses in favor of the few. “[Nietzsche] advocates subversion of [democratic institutions] by a new nobility, accompanied by a political conception of the masses as inert and passive . . . as pliable, raw material for control and manipulation. . . . [H]e justifies exploitation and recommends slavery for some” (Dombowsky, 2004, pp. 128–129). By characterizing Nietzsche’s philosophy in this way, Dombowsky rejects not only the radical democratic interpretation of Nietzsche but also any interpretation that claims that Nietzsche is anything other than exploitative of the masses. In other words, interpretations – like the one we offer – that acknowledge the anti-egalitarian strain in Nietzsche’s order of rank but do not go so far as to say that the order of rank entails exploitation and political domination must, on Dombowsky’s account, be rejected. On what basis does Dombowsky and others like him make such claims? Mostly on the seemingly unambiguous assertions Nietzsche makes throughout his corpus but especially in what Ansell-Pearson (1991) argues is Nietzsche’s most political book, Beyond Good and Evil. The stark, even brutal words Nietzsche sometimes employs in Beyond Good and Evil to describe the political relationship between higher and lower “types” certainly seem to support a radically elitist interpretation of Nietzsche: “Every enhancement so far in the type ‘man’ has been the work of an aristocratic society” (BGE 257). What is more, there are many other passages between sections 257 and 296 of Beyond Good and Evil that are similarly elitist. Based on these passages there seems to be good reason to ascribe a radically elitist interpretation to Nietzsche’s political views. It is not only political passages from Beyond Good and Evil alone that make the elitist interpretation plausible, however. The interpretation seems even more plausible in light of Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power, which in Beyond Good and Evil takes on a particularly combative tone. The will to power teaches that “life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation” (BGE 259). This desire to overpower and dominate is a function of “life itself ” and therefore is the fundamental drive of all human beings. All human beings, in other words, want, as their fundamental desire, to overcome all that is “alien and weaker.” On the face of it, this fits well with the radically elitist interpretation under consideration. Dombowsky (2004) recognizes this and takes issue with radical democratic theorists who construe the will to power by construing it as a “power for” rather than a “power over” (pp. 71–76).4 Dombowsky argues that the interpretation of the will to power as a “power for” – that is, as a form of empowerment that does not require the simultaneous disempowerment of others – does not do justice to the social conflict

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that is at the heart of the doctrine. On this count, Dombowsky is correct; words like exploitation (Ausbeutung), injury (Verletzung), overpowering (Überwältigung) and appropriation (Aneignung) connote power over something in a zero-sum context. Moreover, if we read just a few lines earlier from the previous passage, we cannot miss the social character of the will to power. Nietzsche argues that any attempt to eliminate the desire for injury and exploitation among individual human beings by “refraining mutually from injury, violence, and exploitation and placing one’s will on par with that of someone else” (BGE 259) necessarily leads to the diminution and weakening of humankind. This means that as soon as this principle [i.e. the avoidance of injury, violence and exploitation] is extended, and possibly even accepted as the fundamental principle of society, it immediately proves to be what it really is – a will to the denial of life, a principle of disintegration and decay. (BGE 259) If, as the radical democratic interpreters assert, the will to power does not imply a dialectic of empowerment and disempowerment, there would be no reason why “refraining from injury, violence, and exploitation” would lead to the “denial of life.” Put differently, if the highest life can flourish by merely having the power for the accomplishment of plans and goals, then living in a society that refrains from mutual injury would seem to make that all the more possible and thus would be an affirmation, rather than a denial, of life. Yet Nietzsche describes “mutually refraining from injury” as a denial of life, which implies that the will to power entails a zero-sum power over relationship, a dialectic of empowerment and disempowerment. The outcome of Nietzsche’s seeming defense of aristocracy is that for a society to flourish, it must be built on something other than absolute equality – the implicit goal of the socialist and democratic movements he criticizes – because that would strip individuals of the ability to exercise their wills to power. For Nietzsche, society must therefore be built on a hierarchical order of rank in which some dominate and others serve (BGE 257). He believes that all noble cultures of the past were based on an order of rank and that an order of rank must serve as the basis for any future culture if it is to elevate itself. The question then becomes: How does Nietzsche propose to establish this order of rank in his later political thought? The elitist answer to this question is to argue that Nietzsche desires the reestablishment of a political aristocracy wherein the elite enslave and exploit the masses with Machiavellian-inspired immoral politics, which recognizes no limits, and which believes it is able to justify its own despotism through the cultivation of a higher and nobler humanity which, in the creative hammer it will bring down to bear on mankind, will redeem the whole past of humanity. (Ansell-Pearson, 1991, p. 201)

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When a political elite rules, they are freed from the constraints of the morality of equal rights and the welfare of the masses and are therefore able to exercise their wills to power on their subjects in whatever ways seem best to them. Their goal is their own enhancement, and they use their subjects as tools to aid that enhancement. Also using passages from Beyond Good and Evil, Ansell-Pearson argues that Nietzsche promotes a radical elitism based on an aristocracy of “artist-tyrants” who establish the conditions necessary for the advancement of the highest types of human beings while simultaneously exploiting the lower types (p. 201). As members of the aristocracy enhance themselves, they become higher and higher types, eventually becoming, as it were, a new species of human who can now propagate themselves through breeding and populate the earth. This new species will redeem the past by overcoming the weakness found therein. The aristocracy becomes the meaning of humankind and sheds its glorious light on the slaves who make up its base. In seeming support of this interpretation, Nietzsche uses a powerful image of degeneration to describe what happens when a “slave morality” repudiates the order of rank and denies the aristocracy its rightful place at the head of society by forcing it to “tame” its will to power rather than exercise it on its subjects. To call the taming of an animal its “improvement” sounds almost like a joke to our ears. Whoever knows what goes on in menageries doubts that the beasts are “improved” there. They are weakened, they are made less harmful[.] . . . It is no different with the tamed man whom the priest has “improved.” In the early Middle Ages, when the church was indeed, above all, a menagerie, the most beautiful specimens . . . were hunted down everywhere; and the noble Teutons, for example, were “improved.” But how did such an “improved” Teuton who had been seduced into a monastery look afterward? Like a caricature of man, like a miscarriage: he had become a “sinner,” he was stuck in a cage, imprisoned among all sorts of terrible concepts. And here he lay, sick, miserable, malevolent against himself: full of hatred against the springs of life, full of suspicion against all that was still strong and happy. (TI “The ‘Improvers’ of Mankind” 2) For Nietzsche, this deplorable state of affairs is not merely bad for the “Teutons,” it is bad for the human species itself, since its most “beautiful specimens” [schönsten Exemplare] are tricked into giving up their beauty and become sick, miserable prisoners. Thus, according to the radical elitist interpretations of Nietzsche, we have a choice: either we reestablish a political aristocracy and elevate the species or we maintain an obsession with equal rights and enervate the species. With a summary of the elitist interpretation in place, we can now determine its credibility against the rest of Nietzsche’s corpus. While it is clear that

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Nietzsche believes we should reestablish an order of rank, it still remains to be seen whether this necessitates a politicized conception of order of rank that calls for the enslavement of some and empowerment of others, as the elitist interpreters suggest. We argue that it does not. In fact, as we will show, Nietzsche explicitly states that because political orders of rank are based on domination of the many by the few, they will, for this reason, ultimately and inevitably lead to the very decline in humanity he seeks to avoid. The only alternative is to develop an order of rank that is based on something other than political domination and slavery – namely, an aesthetic order of rank that is meant to elevate both the few and the many.

The inevitable decline of political aristocracies: Beyond Good and Evil , section 262 After offering a seemingly unalloyed defense of political aristocracies in sections 257–261 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche proceeds in section 262 to give a brief history of what happens to political aristocracies once they gain ascendance. Interestingly, rather than an inspiring picture of how humanity develops into a powerful, life-affirming new species, we find instead a grim picture about how humanity degenerates into a weak, mediocre new species. In section 262, Nietzsche argues that as an aristocratic group gains superiority over its enemies and subjects and submits them to political slavery, it seeks to establish its own ideals throughout the culture. To ensure the hegemony and purity of its values, the ruling group ruthlessly formalizes its values and establishes them in all of their customs. They become hard and unyielding, insisting that they cultivate only their virtues to the exclusion of all others; they institutionalize these virtues alone: “They do this with hardness; indeed they want hardness; every aristocratic morality is intolerant – in the education of youth, in the arrangements for women, in their marriage customs, in the relations of old and young, in their penal laws” (BGE 262). By institutionalizing their values, the ruling group hopes to ensure the permanence of their culture from generation to generation. “In this way a type with few but very strong traits . . . is fixed beyond the changing generations; the continual fight against ever constant unfavourable conditions is, as mentioned previously, the cause that fixes and hardens a type” (ibid.). At this point, it would seem that the aristocratic ideal has reached a point where it can begin to breed a new race of individuals, individuals who will be forever protected from the decadent ideals that would otherwise threaten it. Unfortunately, at the moment of the aristocratic triumph, the moment when it seems that their ideals will be established forever, the inevitable seeds of destruction are sown. Nietzsche argues that when the aristocratic elite has subjugated the last vestiges of internal and external enemies, it begins to disintegrate. Eventually, however, a day arrives when conditions become more fortunate and the tremendous tension decreases; perhaps there are no longer

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any enemies among one’s neighbors, and the means of life, even for the enjoyment of life, are superabundant. At one stroke the bond and constraint of the old discipline are torn: it no longer seems necessary, a condition of existence – if it persisted it would only be a form of luxury, an archaizing taste. Variation, whether as deviation (to something higher, stabler, rarer) or as degeneration and monstrosity, suddenly appears on the scene in the greatest abundance and magnificence; the individual dares to be individual and different. (ibid.) The individual begins to assert their individuality because, as we have seen, their will to power must find something to oppose. Human beings always seek an outlet for their wills to power, and thus when the aristocratic elite has defeated its external enemies and enslaved and disempowered the non-aristocratic members of society, individual members of the elite will necessarily seek new outlets for their wills to power. Nietzsche argues that without other options available, the members of the elite will choose the only things left to oppose that are worthy of opposition: their own values. Elites will decide to oppose the group to which they belong by rejecting its values and establishing their own. Thus, they become individuals – “immoralists.” According to Nietzsche, this marks the first step in the slow, but inexorable, decline of the aristocratic culture. At these turning points in history we behold beside one another, and often mutually involved and entangled, a splendid, manifold, often junglelike growth and upward striving, a kind of tropical tempo in the competition to grow, and a tremendous ruin and self-ruination, as the savage egoisms that have turned, almost exploded, against one another wrestle “for sun and light” and can no longer derive any limit, restraint, or consideration from their previous morality. . . . The “individual” appears, obliged to give himself new laws and to develop his own arts and wiles for self-preservation, self-enhancement, self-redemption. (ibid.) On the face of it, the move towards individuality might seem to be keeping with Nietzsche’s purported radical individualism and on that count may mitigate the impending loss of an aristocratic culture. Two paragraphs later, however, it is clear that Nietzsche does not consider the move towards individuality to be beneficial. On the contrary, it is a calamity. The “ruin and self-ruination” of the “junglelike” growth leads to only one place – mediocrity. As the junglelike profusion grows, those in the remnant of the aristocracy are left helpless and can only stand by as they discover that the end is approaching fast, that everything around them is corrupted and corrupts, that nothing will stand the day after tomorrow,

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except one type of man, the incurably mediocre. The mediocre alone have a chance of continuing their type and propagating – they are the men of the future, the only survivors. (ibid.) The advent of the mediocre under these conditions is startling because it is easy to get the impression while reading Nietzsche that the incurably mediocre, the last men, are only produced by democratic, socialist or Christian forms of society. It is easy to assume that Nietzsche believes aristocratic societies are protected from the rise of the last men by enslaving and abusing those individuals who might possibly spawn such a decline. It is therefore disconcerting to discover that mediocrity is a product of political aristocracy itself and not, as it seems in much of Nietzsche’s writings, merely a product of the “rabble.” But the undoing of the aristocracy from within the aristocracy itself is only the first danger the aristocracy faces with respect to mediocrity; there is yet another and equally fatal danger to political aristocracies that exploit the masses. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche describes the other way political aristocracies lead to mediocrity. In delineating “the origin of our moral prejudices” (GM I:2), Nietzsche describes the slow ruination of a “masterful” political aristocracy by their “slavish” inferiors, whom they had previously used and exploited. After laying the initial groundwork for the basic value structure of the master morality – which is rooted in self-affirmation – and the slave morality – which is rooted in ressentiment – Nietzsche echoes Beyond Good and Evil section 262 when he describes how the slave morality gained ascendance. Ressentiment was bred in the slaves (and their descendants) during their years of imprisonment and impotence, in which they were “downtrodden, pillaged, mistreated, abducted, [and] enslaved” (GM I:11). Naturally, they had no political power by which they could revenge themselves upon their aristocratic masters, but, because they were human, these slaves and their descendants were motivated by the will to power and therefore sought subtle ways to exercise power over their oppressors. The way they achieved their revenge was to invent a value system that inverted the values of their masters (GM I:12–16). Thus, the ancient Romans, of whom Nietzsche claims “nobody stronger and nobler has yet existed on earth or even been dreamed of ” (GM I:16), were overthrown by the slave morality of the resentful, which brought about what Nietzsche considers to be the greatest catastrophe in the history of the world. In other words, the dynamics of Roman aristocracy produced the uprising of ressentiment that precipitated its own ultimate downfall.

Nietzsche’s alternative to political aristocracy: aristocratic self-overcoming Because Nietzsche believes that enslaving and abusing the masses is not a permanent option for cultural renewal, he must find an alternative organization for such a renewal. The task is to find a form of social organization that maintains

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an order of rank between the few and the many and simultaneously protects the few from (1) the threat to itself from its own members by providing a higher and safer expression of the will to power than the exploitation of the many and (2) the threat from the many themselves who, because of the resentment they feel at being lower in the order of rank, revenge themselves on the elite by undermining their values. His solution to both of these threats is to reconfigure the role of the few in a society. Rather than being tyrants who express their wills to power by exploiting and enslaving the many, the few must express their wills to power by overcoming their desire to exploit and enslave the many. To counter the first threat, Nietzsche proposes the highest and safest expression of the will to power available to humankind: self-overcoming. In Chapter 3, we saw the central importance of self-overcoming for the individual, and we are now in a position to see why Nietzsche believes it is of central importance for social flourishing. To recall, since the will to power necessarily entails a “power over,” it seeks something to dominate. But since the ultimate subjugation of the many by the few leads to a decline in culture, Nietzsche must find another mode of domination in which the members of the few can safely participate. Nietzsche must, in other words, find an “enemy” that cannot be permanently subjugated, one that continually resists. That “enemy” is found within the individual elite him- or herself. The desires and passions in the individual (especially, as we shall see, the desire to dominate others) must be overcome through self-overcoming. Individuals who indulge their desire to dominate others without subjecting themselves to the organizing principle of reason become self-indulgent and incapable of participating in cultural renewal. Thus, according to Nietzsche, the best way for the elite to achieve a higher culture is not to dominate others but to choose a much more worthy opponent: their own passions and desires. The reason that one’s passions and desires are more worthy is because they must continually be dominated. The passions, being found in the psycho-physiological organism, thrust themselves upon the individual again and again, often with increasing subtlety and/or vigor. Mastering these desires takes continual awareness, fortitude and intelligence, and one’s will to power is therefore not easily or quickly satiated. On the contrary, in order to master one’s passions, one’s will to power must strive and strain continually – the very thing the will to power desires above all else. One’s will to power eschews contentedness or satiation because these static states inevitably lead to a loss of the feeling of power, as we see in Beyond Good and Evil; it leads to individual weakness and eventually to the deterioration of the whole culture. It is a different situation, on the other hand, when one’s opponents are the passions and desires found in one’s self. When one is in conflict with oneself there is a perpetual need for overcoming, which is what the will to power desires. There is still a struggle against an individual, which gives expression to the “power over,” but that individual is one’s own self instead of another. For us to achieve the highest form of power, Nietzsche argues, we should not ask “How and on whom should I exercise my craving?” but rather a different question altogether:

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“How can [I] spiritualize, beautify, deify [my] craving?” (TI “Morality as AntiNature” 1). In an illustrative passage, Nietzsche explicitly calls for the “spiritualization” of the will to dominate others: Another triumph is our spiritualization [Vergeistigung] of hostility. It consists in a profound appreciation of the value of having enemies: in short, it means acting and thinking in the opposite way from that which has been the rule. The church always wanted the destruction of its enemies; we, we immoralists and Antichristians, find our advantage in this, that the church exists. In the political realm too, hostility has now become more spiritual – much more sensible, much more thoughtful, much more considerate. . . . Our attitude towards the “internal enemy” is no different: here too we have spiritualized hostility; here too we have come to appreciate its value. The price of fruitfulness is to be rich in internal opposition; one remains young only as long as the soul does not stretch itself and desire peace. (TI “Morality as Anti-Nature” 3) It is in the individual’s internal “enemies” that Nietzsche finds the solution to his political problem. When an individual or a group of individuals enslaves and exploits those who are weaker they no longer need to stretch themselves; they no longer have to struggle when their enemies have no power to put up resistance. This leads to the loss of fruitfulness – the stagnation of the will to power and ultimately to the disintegration of higher values. To protect themselves from this stagnation the few must overcome their hostility to the many, and their desire to express that hostility through the subjugation or elimination of the many must be turned inwards. This entails a continual overcoming of themselves, which makes them “rich in internal oppositions.” In other words, for culture to be renewed, the few must sublimate their “hostility” (Feindschaft) towards the many and beautify their desire to dominate them by being “considerate” (schonend) to them. That is, the few must care for and support the many, rather than enslave them: They [the exceptional human beings (Ausnahme-Menschen)] are the most venerable kind of man; that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest. They rule not because they want to but because they are; they are not free to be second. . . . It would be completely unworthy of a more profound spirit to consider mediocrity [in the many] as such an objection. In fact, it is the very first necessity if there are to be exceptions: a high culture depends upon it. When the exceptional human being treats the mediocre more tenderly than himself or his peers, this is not mere politeness of the heart – it is simply his duty. (A 57) The reason that the many are necessary is not, as the radical elitist interpreters argue, so that the few can exploit them but so that the few are forced to experience hostility that they must overcome.

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“The world is perfect” – thus says the instinct of the most spiritual, the Yessaying instinct; “imperfection, whatever is beneath us, distance, the pathos of distance – even the chandala still belongs to this perfection.” The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness . . . in hardness against themselves; their joy is self-conquest [Selbstbezwingung]: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. (ibid.)5 The few become their highest selves and experience their greatest feeling of power by turning their hostility towards the many into consideration, kindness and tenderness. When the few self-overcome in this way, they experience not only a sense of power and well-being unlike any other but also the recognition that they will need to re-exercise that power over and over again, as their desire to overcome obstacles will never relent. Moreover, as we saw earlier, it is not enough merely to tolerate the many; one must also be grateful for their existence and even, as we shall see, give oneself as a gift to them. Nietzsche suggests that he wants the elite individual to be a doctor of the spirit aiding those whose head is confused by opinions without their being really aware who has aided them! Not desiring to maintain his own opinion or celebrate a victory over them, but to address them in such a way that, after the slightest of imperceptible hints or contradictions, they themselves arrive at the truth and go away proud[.] (D 449) There is no doubt that the doctor of the spirit has cultural power in this image, but that power is manifested not in the diminution of his patients but rather in their elevation. These doctors do not need to negate life by shaming their patients or demanding that their patients bow to the superiority of the doctors; exercising their wills to power in that way “impoverishes, pales, and makes uglier the value of things” (CW “Epilogue”). Rather these individuals beautify the world through their own sense of power that “gives to things out of its own abundance – it transfigures, it beautifies the world and makes it more rational” (CW “Epilogue”). This does not mean, however, that the patients have the same level of talent as the doctors or will necessarily achieve the same level of accomplishment as them; but it does mean that they will be aided by the doctors so that they may better pursue their highest selves. It also does not mean that Nietzsche wants to lower the ideal of excellence to which humanity must strive. Far from it. The many are necessary and should be elevated to the degree they can be, but to say that all humans should strive to achieve only the level that the many can achieve would be to diminish the potential of the few. Nietzsche denounces this “will to nothingness” so seriously that, in places, it would seem that he advocates the exploitation of the many. But to believe that Nietzsche would want, through exploitation, to further negate life is to misunderstand his entire philosophical project. As he says, “nothing can

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be tolerated less in [the higher] type than ugly manners or a pessimistic look, an eye that makes things ugly, or even an indignation over the way of the world” (A 57). These higher types must understand that the many should be encouraged to become their highest selves, but the few should also strive all the more to become their highest selves. For Nietzsche, to diminish the flourishing of the many or the few is to be no better than the “Chandala apostles” and “priests” whose “instinct is to destroy.” The truly powerful do not need to exploit the many to make themselves feel powerful; rather than exploiting the many, they should help them, not as an expression of pity, but as an expression of power. In the foreground there is this feeling of fullness, of power that seeks to overflow, the happiness of high tension, the consciousness of wealth that would give and bestow: the noble human being, too, helps the unfortunate, but not, or almost not, from pity, but prompted more by an urge begotten by excess of power. (BGE 260) The few should, like Zarathustra, be “gift-givers,” who “sacrifice” themselves for the sake of the world, while all the time acting “selfishly.” To repeat the passage quoted in the section on gift-giving egoism in Chapter 3: Verily, I have found you out, my disciples: you strive, as I do, for the giftgiving virtue. . . . This is your thirst: to become sacrifices and gifts yourselves; and that is why you thirst to pile up all the riches in your soul. Insatiably your soul strives for treasures and gems, because your virtue is insatiable in wanting to give. You force all things to and into yourself that they may flow back out of your well as the gifts of your love. Verily, such a gift-giving love must approach all values as a robber; but whole and holy I call this selfishness. . . . With its rapture it delights the spirit so that it turns creator and esteemer and lover and benefactor of all things. (Z I: “On the Gift-Giving Virtue” 1) It is important to note that Zarathustra uses the word “selfishness” very specifically. Beautifying the world by affirming life and making the many stronger, as the gift-giving virtue demands, should not be taken as a selfless or altruistic act. Rather, it is a “selfish” or egoistic act that is ultimately intended to make the few more powerful by making the culture that surrounds them more powerful. “Physician help yourself: thus you help your patient too. Let this be his best help that he may behold with his eyes the man who heals himself ” (Z I: “On the Gift-Giving Virtue” 2). By being selfish and helping themselves, individuals can choose to overcome their hostility, an overcoming that not only constitutes the highest and most permanent expression of their will to power but which becomes a model for the many. The latter must in turn embody a similar selfovercoming if both they and the culture to which they belong is to thrive.

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Self-overcoming is thus the way that the second threat to a higher culture – the threat that the resentful masses will undermine the values of the aristocracy – is prevented. The masses are not to remain passive and docile followers of a cultural movement led by the few but, as we saw in Chapter 5, to be co-creators of the cultural movement. They will not produce the same aesthetic emblems of high culture as the “philosophers, artists and saints” will, but their role is indispensable nonetheless; indeed, the masses are of more immediate importance because they must initiate the beginnings of this cultural renewal if the philosophers, artists and saints are ever to flourish in large numbers. Nietzsche invites individuals from all levels of society to participate in their own uplift and the development of their highest selves, which will allow them to achieve liberation and happiness. He encourages them to believe that they can be better than they are and that the role they play in the creation of culture is significant. They are not denied the potential to pursue their highest selves and their highest happiness but are in fact consistently encouraged to pursue these things. What must the few do to support the many? Nietzsche’s answer is clear: they must be given a robust education that not only provides for their social and economic needs but also gives them the ability to appreciate, and be inspired by, great cultural artifacts.

The overcoming of ressentiment In order for a higher culture to be engendered, the few and the many must work together to promote that culture. The problem is that the higher culture depends on the recognition that certain individuals have greater talent, giftedness, beauty, virtue and so on than others. This is simply a fact about human diversity. Unfortunately, according to Nietzsche, the democratic ethos has been subconsciously training the many to feel threatened by the talent and accomplishments of the “philosophers, artists and saints.” Nietzsche claims that the democratic ethos – which is itself not actually interested in benefiting the many but merely using them to attack the few – has convinced the many to be resentful of those who achieve more than them. Rather than celebrating and taking inspiration from excellence and the greatness of others, the many are told that they should seek their own greatness. The many are, in other words, discouraged from participating in the elevation of culture and instead choose to go their own way and become “culture-makers” themselves. The democratic ethos thus takes advantage of the many’s “self-serving” impulses by tempting them with promises of self-realization. It is to their self-serving impulses, to their weaknesses and vanities, that this temptation directs itself. The Zeitgeist whispers solicitously, “Follow me! Don’t go there! For there you are mere servants, helpers, tools, outshone by higher natures, never content with your uniqueness, pulled by strings, laid in chains as slaves, even as automata. Here with me you shall enjoy, as

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lords, your free personality; your talents can shine, you shall stand in the highest rungs, a terrific following will swarm about you, and the support of public opinion will please you even more than would a noble confirmation descending from the cold ethereal heights of genius.” (SE 6; our translation) Nietzsche argues that these insinuating voices do not actually care for the many. Indeed, they are fully aware that the many will never have a “tremendous following” or “public acclamation,” but they want to deceive the many into feeling threatened by the few who do. “If others gain a following or public acclamation, then they are superior” – this pseudo-democratic, populistic principle creates a feeling of inferiority in those who have listened to its charms. For when their strivings to outdo the few are eventually frustrated, the many are forced to recognize that the former’s achievements outshine theirs. Thus, they begin to labor against the artists, geniuses and saints and their influence, searching for anything that may tarnish their name or reputation. Ressentiment comes to rule the day. For Nietzsche, it is such “insinuating voices” that are intentionally using the many to drag down the few. They are creating ressentiment in the name of democracy and bidding the many to create a culture where the only excellence allowed is a denial of greatness in others. In doing so these insinuating voices create a throng made up of the deceived many, who resent the few and attempt to undermine them. The irony of this populistic seduction is that it claims to allow individuals to be whom they really are and to enjoy their own free personality. But Nietzsche argues that it is precisely this appeal to individuals’ lower natures that keeps them enslaved. They never try to maximize their potential or to become their true, unique self. They never seek after the greatness that is “immeasurably high above them,” because that would require them to acknowledge that they are currently not what they could be and that they need others to help guide them to their highest selves. Instead, they settle for mediocrity by refusing to allow “higher natures” to influence them. They cannot see what is possible for them because to do so would require that they look beyond themselves. Nietzsche therefore argues that ressentiment is harmful to the weak themselves because it is ultimately an enervating psychological state; it makes individuals weaker by channeling their psychological energy into bitterness, hostility and anger. Nothing burns one up faster than the affects of ressentiment [RessentimentsAffekten]. Anger, pathological vulnerability, impotent lust for revenge, thirst for revenge, poison-mixing in any sense – no reaction could be more disadvantageous to the exhausted[.] . . . Born of weakness, ressentiment is most harmful to the weak themselves. (EH “Why I Am So Wise” 6)6

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Thus, ressentiment could and should be eschewed on the basis of the harm it causes the individual. Nietzsche urges the many, instead, to become “active” individuals. Unlike reactive individuals who define themselves against a “hostile external world,” seeking to revenge themselves upon it, active individuals define themselves in terms of their self-mastery – their ability to master their urge to see the world as hostile and to seek revenge.

Conclusion What does it mean to embody an “active” rather than a “reactive” life in the sense implied by Nietzsche’s criticism of ressentiment? Nietzsche envisions someone who harnesses the tremendous psychical energy of resentment and channels it into gratitude. His goal, as we have seen repeatedly, is not to eliminate the energy but to “spiritualize” it (A 57; TI “Morality as Anti-Nature” 3). As this “spiritualization” occurs, a dramatic transformation of our conception of power simultaneously occurs. Whereas before we felt powerful only when we saw the object of our resentment brought down, we are now in a position to experience the tremendous joy that comes from overcoming resentment and choosing its opposite – gratitude. This feeling is no longer dependent on the other – it is self-contained. For Nietzsche, this is the pinnacle of power: to see one’s passions and desires, not the actions of others, as obstacles to happiness and to master those passions, making something beautiful out of them. In choosing gratitude for others, including one’s aesthetic, moral and intellectual “superiors,” we master our desire for revenge and can joyfully affirm ourselves and others. Our self-concept becomes so alive and fruitful that love is possible, even love for our enemies (GM I:10). The feeling of gratitude in such cases is not a sign of resignation, capitulation or weakness; on the contrary, it is a sign of strength of character, which the noble, magnanimous and powerful embody (BGE 49). “How much reverence has a noble man for his enemies! – and such reverence is a bridge to love” (GM I:10). Nietzsche embodies this philosophy when he, in his last work, expresses his own gratitude towards one of his mortal enemies: Richard Wagner. He was once a friend, but Nietzsche felt deeply betrayed by Wagner. His sense of betrayal went so deep that Nietzsche wrote two polemics against Wagner, and yet, true to his ideas, he has a kind of reverence for Wagner; and in spite of the betrayal he felt by Wagner he overcame his desire to resent him and instead “express[ed] [his] gratitude for what has been by far the most profound and cordial recreation of my life” (EC “Why I Am So Wise” 5). Thus, contrary to the standard interpretation, Nietzsche’s antipathy for ressentiment and the effect it wreaks on culture does not lead him to advocate a political aristocracy in which an elite few dominate and enslave the many and use them as mere tools. Rather, Nietzsche believes that if a flourishing culture in which every person seeks to become their highest selves is to become a reality, the overcoming of ressentiment needs to be a top priority. To this end, Nietzsche

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offers his readers some ideas on what it will take to overcome ressentiment and cultivate its opposite: gratitude. Since it seems clear that ressentiment is a widespread phenomenon of modern democratic societies, these ideas constitute an important educational aim. How might educators thus work against the influences of ressentiment and cultivate gratitude in their classroom? This is the topic of the next chapter.

Notes 1 For further discussions supporting the view that Nietzsche is fundamentally opposed to political slavery see Cooper (1983) and Young (2006, pp. 132–150). 2 Dombowsky’s use of the word “Machiavellian” (2004) is not unproblematic as it relies on a particular reading of Machiavelli, a reading that others do not share. 3 Dombowsky therefore also disagrees with those theorists who argue that Nietzsche is an apolitical or anti-political thinker. Like Appel (1999, p. 13), Dombowsky places responsibility for the apolitical interpretation of Nietzsche largely on Kaufmann’s pioneering work Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1982), but he also includes more recent interpreters such as Leiter (2002) and Brobjer (1998). Appel also includes Sadler (1995) and Thiele (1990) in the list. We would also add Hunt (1991). 4 Dombosky uses the term “power for” instead of “power to,” which is more common. For the sake of clarity, we will continue to use “power for” as a synonym for “power to.” 5 In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche explains why self-overcoming is not only the safest manifestation of the will to power but also the highest. He contrasts the self-indulgence of the aristocrats with the higher type of spirituality found in his positive reformulation of the ascetic ideal. The three great slogans of the ascetic ideal are familiar: poverty, humility, chastity. Now take a close look at the lives of all the great, fruitful, inventive spirits: you will always encounter all three to a certain degree. Not, it goes without saying, as though these constituted their “virtues” – what has this kind of man to do with virtues! – but as the most appropriate and natural conditions of their best existence, their fairest fruitfulness. (GM III:8) In the same vein, a few lines earlier Nietzsche claims that “the philosopher sees in [the ascetic ideal] an optimum condition for the highest and boldest spirituality and smiles – he does not deny ‘existence’, he rather affirms his existence and only his existence” (GM III:7). Notice that the philosophers (among whom Nietzsche later includes himself, in GM III:8) choose ascetic practice as an affirmation of life and a desire for the highest form of power they can achieve. The asceticism found in self-overcoming leads the elite individual to his or her highest self. This is why the brutal aristocrats are an inferior ideal for Nietzsche: they do not sufficiently appreciate their capacity to increase their power by mastering their desires and channeling them into avenues that will actually increase their sensation of power. Moreover, brutal aristocrats do not recognize the peril to their way of life that comes with subjugating the masses. 6 Fitzgerald (1998, p. 141) makes this case as well. He claims, following the Dalai Lama and Seneca, that resentment is an unhelpful emotion that does not contribute to our wellbeing – on the contrary, it diminishes it.

Chapter 8

Educational implications of ressentiment Cultivating a disposition of gratitude

Introduction Nietzsche’s thoughts on the origins and overcoming of popular ressentiment are of particular importance today, for, as it seems to us, contemporary political discourse, not to mention private discourse, is increasingly characterized by a rhetoric of resentment and vilification. Political and cultural civility has given way to strident accusations, outlandish bombast and unalloyed contempt from all points of the political spectrum. It seems like nearly all groups and subgroups in society feel that they are being unjustly treated by others. No matter what ideology, race, culture or ethnicity we identify with, whether “hegemonic” or “minority,” we all feel as if we have been or are being marginalized and have the right to assert our agenda over and against others. We all think that our values are the superior ones and that anyone who disagrees with us should be silenced. We believe that those who do not agree with our values are morally suspect and should be censored. The question we seek to answer in this chapter is whether Nietzsche can speak to this growing spirit of ressentiment, and if he does speak to it, whether educators might use his ideas to help us overcome it. We argue that Nietzsche here speaks to contemporary education in two important ways. First, Nietzsche explains how ressentiment does not just damage a culture, it actually harms the individual who feels it. He makes a compelling case that, contrary to our intuitions, resentment is not an empowering psychological phenomenon that helps us to challenge injustice but an enervating one that leads to internal and political strife. Thus, educators have an obligation to support their students in the overcoming of ressentiment, no matter what kind of political arrangement in which they live. Second, Nietzsche outlines the tremendous psychological and social benefits that can come from the cultivation of gratitude, the opposite of the resentful posture. Individual students can achieve a great sense of agency and self-confidence if they cultivate gratitude in their lives, and they can support the flourishing of others. Thus, this chapter attempts to offer several suggestions as to how teachers might help their students to overcome ressentiment and increase gratitude in their lives. This will not only help the individual but will also hopefully help us work against the ever-increasing culture of ressentiment.

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The benefits and scope of gratitude The positive psychological and social benefits of gratitude have been well documented (Grant & Gino, 2010; Bartlett & DeSteno, 2006; Tsang, 2006; Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, & Schkade, 2005; Gordan, Impett, Kogan, Oveis, & Keltner, 2012; Park, Peterson, & Seligman, 2004). These studies and others show that individuals who experience gratitude have a more robust sense of autonomy and are more likely to contribute positively to society. What is less clear, however, is the appropriate scope of gratitude – that is, when gratitude is a warranted response. On the one hand there are some who would argue that gratitude is only appropriate as a response to a beneficiary who has freely performed a specific action to a specific person that was explicitly meant to benefit that person (Berger, 1975; Simmons, 1979; Walker, 1981; McConnell, 1993). Others, however, argue that gratitude is warranted any time a person is benefited by the action of another, even if that action was not specifically meant by them nor was freely done (Smilansky, 1997; Martin, 1999; White, 1999). For the latter theorists, the benefits of gratitude are significant enough to encourage gratitude as widely as possible, even if it means feeling gratitude towards people who never intentionally tried to benefit us. For example, the latter theorists might argue that it is appropriate to feel gratitude towards a grocery clerk who bags one’s groceries. Of course, the reason the clerk bags groceries is not because they are trying to benefit the shopper but because they are required to do so in order to get paid. The clerk is motivated by a desire for money and not a desire to benefit shoppers. Nevertheless, these theorists argue that feeling and expressing gratitude to grocery clerks, and countless others, is an appropriate and desirable response from shoppers. If people experienced gratitude in these ways, it would lead to desirable social harmony. This is why White (1999) argues that gratitude is an essential democratic virtue, which she places on equal footing with other democratic virtues such as hope, courage, trust and honesty. In a sense, Nietzsche would applaud theorists who see gratitude as essential for social flourishing and something that should be felt broadly, but he would disagree about when it would be justified. Ironically, it is not that he thinks the aforementioned theorists are too broad in their promotion of gratitude but that they are too narrow. Nietzsche believes that gratitude should not only be felt towards those who do not intentionally want to benefit us but even towards those who try to harm us. While this may seem a radical conception of the appropriate scope of gratitude, we think Nietzsche’s ideas can offer insights to teachers who worry that a spirit of ressentiment may be preventing students from appreciating the achievements and talents of others. In order to make our case for the “radical” gratitude Nietzsche promotes, we start by focusing on White’s (1999) account of gratitude both because we find it to be a compelling and elegant statement of the “commonsense” view of the benefits and limits of civic gratitude but also because it appears to be unnecessarily limited in its scope. White assumes that gratitude is warranted

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only if individuals have been sufficiently benefited. We think this is a mistake. To illustrate our reasons, we first examine White’s position on gratitude in more detail, showing that it rests on assumptions about gratitude that do not address adequately the complexity of the relationship between individuals in modern multicultural democracies. Ultimately, White’s arguments may unintentionally lead to the disempowerment of individuals in such societies, especially those who need empowerment the most. As a way of avoiding this disempowerment, we look to Nietzsche’s ideas on ressentiment and gratitude. As we saw in the previous chapter, Nietzsche believes the majority of citizens in contemporary democracies are implicitly indoctrinated into subconscious resentment and as such will never know the power gratitude has to elevate their self-conceptions. Nevertheless, while Nietzsche himself is pessimistic about the prospects of educating democratic citizens out of their ressentiment, he offers an image of gratitude that belies that pessimism. We argue that Nietzsche offers a conception of gratitude that has the power to elevate, ennoble and enfranchise all members of democratic societies. The conception Nietzsche offers is rooted in his reevaluation of benefits and harms and his belief that gratitude can and should be cultivated even for one’s enemies.1 We argue that Nietzsche’s insights resolve conceptual difficulties in White’s argument, as well as the mainstream liberal view of gratitude more generally, and can lead us to establish a more viable form of gratitude as an important civic virtue that ought to be cultivated in courses in citizenship education.

Gratitude according to White White (1999) claims that gratitude is essential to a flourishing democracy because it helps foster universal amity between citizens leading to a “beneficent circle of gratitude” (p. 47). However, this beneficent circle of gratitude can obtain only in a “recognition” account of gratitude as opposed to the more traditional “debt” account. The “recognition” account of gratitude encourages citizens to participate in a reciprocal relationship in which we realize that “much that people do does in fact help to make communal civic life less brutish, pleasanter and more flourishing” (p. 49). This is the case even when the majority of individuals do not intentionally seek to make civic life more pleasant, less brutish or more flourishing for others. By merely participating in the daily activities of life in a democracy, citizens unknowingly and continually benefit other citizens. According to White, gratitude is an appropriate response to the multitudinous benefits unintentionally conferred upon us by others. Where such feelings are lacking, democracy does not flourish to the degree that it could. As a result, White argues that the cultivation of gratitude should be a staple of citizenship education.2 White contrasts this recognition account of gratitude with the debt account of gratitude, where the feeling of gratitude functions as a kind of debt owed to a benefactor who specifically and intentionally benefited the beneficiary and no

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other. On the debt account, gratitude is only warranted in very specific instances and requires that the beneficiary attempt to pay back the debt as soon as possible. It is different with the recognition account, where one can feel grateful for individuals, even if those individuals did not specifically and intentionally try to benefit anyone. On the recognition account, beneficiaries are not under an obligation to return the benefit in kind, an obligation that under the debt account necessitates an asymmetrical power relationship; rather, they appreciate the benefit as a gesture of goodwill between political equals and happily desire to extend similar benefits towards others. It is important to note that the desire to extend similar benefits does not need to be directed towards the original benefactors, which would closely resemble a repayment. Indeed, according to White, in many cases the original benefactors have already received benefit from the beneficiaries in the form of the acceptance of the benefit and the gratitude that attended it. White claims that this allows for situations in which people like to offer gifts or help and in accepting such help and recognizing the goodwill of the giver the beneficiary is benefitting the giver. And for this the benefactor too can be grateful, thus creating a beneficent circle of gratitude. (p. 47) According to White, the recognition account encourages gratitude by illuminating the fact that all citizens are benefited in innumerable ways through the day-to-day activities of other citizens, even when those citizens are not directly conscious of other citizens and do not intend to benefit them. White claims that the recognition account of gratitude encourages citizens to feel grateful for these innumerable benefits and those individuals who enact them. As a democratic citizen, rather than looking to see whether people are particularly concerned to benefit me, I might appreciate the fact that much that people do does in fact help make communal civic life less brutish, pleasanter and more flourishing. My appreciation would not lead me to make any kind of precisely calculated repayment but it would affect the way I feel about my fellow citizens and, in a broad sense, it would influence my relationship with them. (p. 49) The improvement of the relationship between citizens leads to the ever-widening and ever-strengthening beneficent circle of gratitude. The universal goodwill that attends this circle serves to strengthen the bonds of democratic unity. On the face of it, White’s position carries intuitive force. Life is made more harmonious because of the activities of others. When we reflect on it, we can feel grateful that our neighbors keep their lawn trimmed, that our mechanic

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fixes our car or that our students do their homework. We can feel grateful for these actions and for the people who do them even though we can admit that they do these activities ultimately in service to themselves. Our gratitude is not contingent on their intentions but on their actions; their actions benefit us irrespective of their intentions. The question arises, however, of what to do with those citizens who are systematically marginalized within society. It may be that we are benefited in innumerable ways by other citizens, but what about those individuals who, because of their ethnicity, social status, physical disability, etc., are shortchanged by society as a whole? It is here that White’s conception of gratitude becomes problematic.

The difficulties in White’s account of gratitude White believes that some individuals in democratic societies have sufficiently little for which to be grateful and therefore are excused from the need to feel gratitude. She explicitly mentions the homeless (p. 50). According to White, because the homeless are disenfranchised in significant ways, it is unreasonable to expect them to experience gratitude. Unfortunately, this admission undermines the thrust of White’s theory of gratitude. By the logic of her argument, it seems like the homeless ought to feel gratitude in the same way that other citizens do. While it is true that the homeless often suffer at the hands of democratic societies, it is also true that they benefit from them. Homeless people are often given shelter from the elements, for example, and while at these shelters they are generally given beds to sleep in. In other places they are given food to eat, are often provided with warm clothes and frequently have access to free mental and physical health facilities where they can receive medical treatment. According to White’s account, individuals who receive these services ought to be grateful. And these individuals have even more than this to be grateful for. They have the occasional smile or alms of the passerby. They generally have clean streets on which to sit and clean parks in which to walk or even to lie down. Recycling centers allow them to raise money by gathering discarded cans and bottles. There are also charities that provide other forms of support and bystanders who offer money. Religious groups frequently attempt to meet their spiritual needs as well as providing for some of their physical needs. In addition to these positive benefits, there are enormous numbers of “negative” benefits. Because of the actions of civil governments, homeless people are generally not in danger of wild animals, rabid dogs or epidemics of cholera. Nor are the homeless generally systematically rounded up, imprisoned, killed or deported,3 as they might be in countries without stable democracies. Democratic governments and citizens work together to provide these benefits and innumerable others. All of these things and many more would appear to make the lives of the homeless “more pleasant, less brutish and more flourishing.” Thus, in spite of White’s insistence otherwise, it would seem that according to her theory the homeless

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have reasons to be grateful just like the rest of society. The same would apply to other marginalized individuals in modestly healthy democratic societies. While their lot is not as good as it should be, it is far better than if they were living in the wild or in societies without stable democracies. It might be objected that we are missing the point of White’s argument. It is not that the homeless have nothing to be grateful for, but it is that they have significantly less to be grateful for than the average member of society. It is the absence of equality with respect to benefits that excuses the homeless and other marginalized individuals from gratitude, not the fact that they have no benefits at all for which to be grateful. Assuming this is White’s position, we must ask the follow-up question: If gratitude is owed only where there is relative equality with respect to benefits, how does one determine whether equality with respect to benefits has been sufficiently met? Unfortunately, the only criteria White offers on which an individual might make such a judgment lead to further difficulties. White allows that homeless peoples and other marginalized groups have just reason for not experiencing gratitude because they “feel themselves outside the polity . . . [and] experience prejudice and hostility” (p. 50). These are the only criteria she mentions in determining whether or not these individuals or groups should be exempt from gratitude. While these criteria may excuse the homeless from feeling gratitude (although, as we have shown, this comes into conflict with the other things White indicates about gratitude), they also excuse countless other people from feeling gratitude, people whom White does not wish to excuse. In fact, the number of people who feel themselves to be in some fundamental respect “outside of the polity” and who have experienced prejudice and hostility is potentially enormous. Indeed, as high school and college teachers we have had conversations with countless students and groups of students who claimed precisely this – that they felt marginalized, outside the mainstream and treated with hostility. The Young Republicans said such things on numerous occasions, for example. We also had individual students who claimed that their relative wealth made them feel alienated and judged by the predominantly middle-class student body. Several Christian students also voiced how insecure they were to express their beliefs in class because they felt marginalized and prejudged by the dominant secular ethos. The academically gifted students cited times when they were ridiculed, humiliated and marginalized. All of these students felt outside their community and provided legitimate instances of prejudice and hostility – indeed we witnessed them ourselves on many occasions. According to White’s criteria, these individuals and groups of individuals would be justified in not feeling gratitude towards others. However, as with the example of the homeless individuals, it would seem that these individuals and groups of students have much for which to be grateful. This brings us to the fundamental difficulty with White’s argument. White assumes that individuals who are not, or who do not believe they are, sufficiently benefited by others are justified in not feeling gratitude towards their democratic community. By her own criteria all individuals who feel themselves to

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be marginalized and can adduce evidence of prejudice and hostility have cause to refuse to feel gratitude. If the number of individuals who feel and experience these things is large enough – and from our experiences as teachers the number is high – then White’s promotion of gratitude will fall on deaf ears. Consequently, if gratitude is to be promoted widely in the schools, as White recommends, educators must find more universal criteria for advocating gratitude, criteria that promote gratitude even when feelings of marginalization – whether justified or not – dominate. Interestingly, White seems to recognize the need for more universal criteria for advocating gratitude – she even goes so far as to suggest that gratitude is warranted where only harm is intended. In her article, White refers to Christabel Bielenberg who witnessed the persecution of an individual by Nazi authorities and experienced gratitude both for the victim and, strangely enough, his tormentors (pp. 44–45). In the example, Bielenberg explains that the courage and magnanimity of the victim in the face of the persecution by his tormentors transformed her conception of herself and helped her overcome her own fear and weakness. Without the courage of the victim she would not have been transformed, but nor would she have been transformed without the detestable actions of the persecutors. The persecutors made the courageous and magnanimous actions of the victim necessary, which then made Bielenberg’s transformation possible.4 White argues that the debt account of gratitude cannot accommodate Bielenberg’s feeling of gratitude and promises that the recognition account of gratitude can. Unfortunately, White never makes good on that promise. Instead, the reader is left with the opposite impression – gratitude is only warranted when benefits clearly outweigh harms. If White had unpacked her ideas on Bielenberg’s experience of gratitude more thoroughly, perhaps they could have been reconciled with her ideas on the lack of gratitude in the marginalized; but as it stands we must look elsewhere for a resolution – and it is here that we turn to Nietzsche.

Nietzschean gratitude Nietzsche contributes to the discussion on gratitude by shifting the concept of gratitude from the calculus of benefit and harm to the psychology of the grateful. For Nietzsche, the actions of others are not what is essential to the experience of gratitude – the attitude of the individual is. According to Nietzsche, it is entirely possible and desirable for individuals to feel gratitude towards those who harm them. As he says of himself: One needs only to do me some wrong, I “repay” it – you may be sure of that: soon I find an opportunity for expressing my gratitude to the “evildoer” (at times even for his evil deed) – or to ask him for something, which can be more obliging than giving something. (EH “Why I Am So Wise” 5)5

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In other words, Nietzsche’s notion of gratitude is one that radically extends the scope of our traditional notion of gratitude. We are to be grateful to all, even our enemies, not because this is justified by their actions towards us, because they have benefited or harmed us intentionally or unintentionally, but because the psychology of gratitude is individually empowering. Nietzsche thus calls for a psychological commitment to gratefulness. Nietzsche’s shift from the calculus of benefit and harm to the psychology of the grateful is desirable as a basis for cultivating civic gratitude for the following four reasons, each of which helps us to elucidate his unique conception of “radical” gratitude. The calculus of benefit vs. the psychology of gratitude

First, it resolves the difficulty in White’s argument. The issue of who is sufficiently benefited in order to feel gratitude is moot because, on Nietzsche’s conception, all individuals ought to feel gratitude whether they are benefited or not. Of course, solving this problem alone does not thereby make Nietzsche’s conception tenable – indeed, to many it will seem that Nietzsche’s “solution” causes more difficult problems than the one it solves. For instance, the objection may be raised that feeling grateful to those who harm us is a psychological impossibility. Human beings are just not the type of beings who can feel grateful under such circumstances. In this case, the “solution” to White’s dilemma is no solution at all, since the state of affairs that would provide the solution can never be obtained. Another objection may be that such a conception of gratitude leaves no room for social justice; if everyone is grateful to those who harm them, then neither they, nor anyone else for that matter, will have any motivation to see the harms rectified or prevented in the future. This state of affairs will only give license to those who wreak such harms and grant them de facto impunity. Objections like these make Nietzsche’s supposed solution seem a solution in form only, not a serious contender for political or ethical consideration. The second benefit of Nietzsche’s shift to the psychology of the grateful follows the way it meets these objections, though a more satisfying reply to them will have to wait until the final subsection. In particular, Nietzschean gratitude directly speaks to issues of social justice in that it is proffered as a way of counteracting the prevalent feelings of resentment that run amok in modern democracies, especially in their schools. As we have seen, Nietzsche argues that this subtle but powerfully debilitating force threatens both individuals and communities by tacitly encouraging individuals to see others who are different from themselves as threats (GM I:10). Nietzsche suggests that widespread gratitude seems to us like an impossibility precisely because of this prevailing spirit of ressentiment. The prevalence of ressentiment raises a problem of social justice in particular because Nietzsche believes that ressentiment has a particularly debilitating effect on the marginalized individual. As Nietzsche argues, “ressentiment is most harmful to the weak themselves” (EH “Why I Am So Wise” 6). This is because the feeling of ressentiment categorically prevents the weak from affirming their self-worth

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and thus finding ways to work towards the improvement of their lot. Instead, ressentiment breeds hostility and anger towards those who are thought to be better off, since the latter are taken to be the sources of the inferiority they feel. Yet the problem of ressentiment goes deeper. The resentful mentality is not only psychologically debilitating; it has the additional effect of leading us to think that we have been slighted even when we have not been – that we are “marginalized” no matter our particular social position. The resentful gaze is always looking askance at what others have and what its host does not. Thus, the central issue here, and the one that bears directly on White’s analysis, is that by subconsciously embodying social resentment, we are largely prevented from feeling gratitude even in the case where benefits are manifest. White assumes that we need merely to be taught to see the benefits that others provide in order to feel gratitude, when in fact ressentiment may make feeling gratitude impossible, even when the benefits are clearly seen. Indeed, the apparent blindness to the benefits may itself be a strategy aimed to justify one’s feeling of hostility. To promote gratitude on the calculus of benefit and harm thus is to remain trapped in the belief that the gratitude one feels is based on the actions of others. This is the problem with White’s recommendation: because she allows individuals who feel themselves to be sufficiently harmed by others to not need to feel gratitude, they are given a vouchsafe to persist in their ressentiment. Instead of being challenged to overcome their feeling of alienation and persecution and the attending feeling of ressentiment, they remain trapped in it, thus losing the power that gratitude has to elevate their self-conceptions. A psychological commitment to gratitude is thus an antidote to the problem of ressentiment. The third reason to prefer this Nietzschean conception of gratitude is that it more effectively supports the goal of social cohesion that White desires. As Fitzgerald (1998) argues, gratitude may be useful for “promoting or preserving communal relationships” (p. 130). When individuals extend gratitude in spite of harm or benefit, indeed in all situations and at all times, Nietzsche argues that they become “gift-givers” who desire to bless others. According to Nietzsche, individuals who feel grateful even in the face of harm are so over-full in gratitude that they produce “all of the beautiful, all of the great art . . . the essence of both is gratitude” (CW “Epilogue”). The grateful beautify the world through a morality that affirms as instinctively as [the] Christian morality [of ressentiment] negates. . . . The former gives to things out of its own abundance – it transfigures, it beautifies the world and makes it more rational – the latter impoverishes, pales and makes uglier the value of things, it negates the world. (ibid.) This is echoed by Zarathustra when he claims that individuals who love life and seek to grow in the highest expression of power – power over one’s own tendency towards ressentiment – will naturally want to give the gift of power to

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others and in so doing exercise “a gift-giving virtue [that] is the highest virtue” (Z I: “On the Gift-Giving Virtue” 1). To repeat the passage on this virtue discussed in the previous chapter: This is your thirst: to become sacrifices and gifts yourselves; and that is why you thirst to pile up all the riches in your soul. Insatiably your soul strives for treasures and gems, because your virtue is insatiable in wanting to give. You force all things to and into yourself that they may flow back out of your well as the gifts of your love. (ibid.) In the next paragraph Zarathustra argues that those who do not experience life with gratitude are prone to the opposite. There is also another kind of selfishness, an all-too-poor and hungry one that always wants to steal – the selfishness of the sick [resentful]: sick selfishness. With the eyes of a thief it looks at everything splendid; with the greed of hunger it sizes up those who have much to eat[.] (ibid.) On Nietzsche’s accounting, those individuals who cultivate gratitude for others become “affirmative” by saying “yes” to life; they want to bless the world and elevate those who populate it. As we saw in the previous chapter, Nietzsche refers to this type of gift-giver as a doctor “of the spirit aiding those whose head is confused by opinions without their being really aware of who has aided them!” (D 449). As gifts are bestowed by the grateful, others will find it even easier to be grateful, thus increasing a sense of social connectedness. The fourth and final reason to support Nietzsche’s conception of gratitude is that it encourages self-affirmation. For Nietzsche, gratitude towards others, irrespective of the harm or benefit they intended, demonstrates a conception of self that is “active” – we thereby actively choose the kind of being we are and want to become and refuse to let the actions of others define who we are, which would make us reactive. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is “outside,” what is “different,” what is “not itself ”; and this No is its creative deed. This inversion of the value-positing eye – this need to direct one’s view outward instead of back to oneself – is the essence of ressentiment: in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs . . . external stimuli in order to act at all – its action is fundamentally reaction. (GM I:10) As we saw in the previous chapter, reactive individuals are those who define themselves in terms of a “hostile external world,” seeking to revenge themselves

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upon it, while active individuals define themselves in terms of their selfmastery – their ability to master their urge to see the world as hostile and to seek revenge. A psychological commitment to gratitude is thus tantamount to affirming oneself regardless of whether others do us harm or benefit; it is the resolve to become stronger through all of our experiences. Self-effacing vs. self-assured gratitude

With a Nietzschean conception of gratitude in place, an important caveat is in order. As we have shown, Nietzsche considers gratitude to be a beneficial psychological attitude – both for the individual and for the community. However, what remained implicit in our analysis is the fact that Nietzsche advocates only for a certain kind of gratitude. There is a form of gratitude that Nietzsche would reject because it is not beneficial from his point of view. This kind of gratitude is characterized by a strong sense of humility, bordering on embarrassment, where we, often with a feeling akin to relief, thank another person for some action that relieved us of some hardship. For example, upon being picked up at the airport by a friend, we are liable to say: “Thank you so, so much for picking me up at the airport when no one else could! I don’t know what I would have done if you couldn’t have come. I really can’t tell you how grateful I am that you did so. Please, please let me know if there is anything I can do.” In situations such as these, we see ourselves as dependent on the other. We are in some important sense characterized by a certain type of disadvantage or weakness that has to be compensated for by the other. In such moments, we recognize this disadvantage and are comforted by the fact that our benefactors overcame the hardship involved in rectifying it through their generosity. Nietzsche would not approve of this form of “self-effacing” gratitude because it inappropriately draws attention to an asymmetrical power relationship in a way that betrays a lack of self-respect in the beneficiary. The lack of self-respect is found not in the willingness to thank our benefactors – self-respecting thanks is something Nietzsche favors – but in the fawning manner of the thanks. For Nietzsche, our benefactors, if they were noble and not prone to being flattered, would be repulsed by such effusive thanks and would not be honored by it. What honors our benefactors is a simple expression of gratitude. The simple thanks does not draw any attention to an asymmetrical power relationship by virtue of its self-respecting character. Importantly, offering simple thanks is appropriate even where there is a formal asymmetrical power relationship between the benefactor and beneficiary. For example, if the person being picked up from the airport is a younger, low-level employee of the benefactor, it may seem that fawning gratitude is in order because an explicit asymmetrical power relationship is in place; in the contemporary mindset, the greater the benefactor’s status, the greater the expression of gratitude should be. For Nietzsche, however, the honoring expression in this case would be a simple, dignified thank you from the beneficiary. Were this done, the benefactor would sense the dignity and self-respect of the beneficiary, which would indicate a

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relative equality of attitude towards oneself and others, even if there is inequality in social status. For Nietzsche, nobility is defined as a “fundamental certainty that a noble soul has about itself, something that cannot be sought, nor found, nor perhaps lost. The noble soul has reverence for itself ” (BGE 287). Thus, in the most important respect, the simple thanks provides honor to the beneficiary because it betrays a substratum of nobility. Nietzsche’s goal is to promote a thriving culture in which every individual embodies a nobility of attitude, even though these same individuals vary widely with respect to the talents, skills, abilities and desires – i.e. the order of rank. The reason he praises the ancient Greeks is not because they were all equally talented or beautiful or intelligent but because he thought they cultivated a sense of deep respect for themselves and, at the same time, for individuals that may have been higher or lower on the order of rank (at least in his eyes). To put it differently, while it may seem odd to suggest that Nietzsche would want to affirm equality when he so often mentions the importance of recognizing an “order of rank” between people, it is important to distinguish between equality of attitude towards oneself and others and inequality with respect to one’s skills and abilities. As we indicated earlier, Nietzsche would be quite pleased with, and would affirm the propriety of, any individual who had enough self-respect to not grovel before a superior. Indeed, the ability to not grovel suggests that supposedly inferior individuals may be more superior than their station might suggest. Nietzsche would, in fact, have more respect for lower-stationed individuals who demonstrated such self-respect than he would for higher-stationed individuals who had contempt for their inferiors. Nietzsche indicates precisely such a view in the following: [T]here is nothing about so-called educated people and believers in “modern ideas” that is as nauseous as their lack of modesty and the comfortable insolence of their eyes and hands in which they touch, lick, and finger everything; and it is possible that even among the common people, among the less educated, especially among peasants, one finds today more relative nobility of taste and tactful reverence than among the newspaper-reading demimonde of the spirit, the educated. (BGE 263) Nietzsche’s nausea at the insolence of the educated middle and upper classes has its origin in their inability to respect and revere objects or people of profundity and great beauty. These “educated” individuals assume they are superior to everything and everyone and, as such, are blind to the beauty and profundity that is before them. Surprisingly this attitude, which lacks any semblance of gratitude, is, according to Nietzsche, ultimately rooted in ressentiment; for Nietzsche, these individuals have a subconscious fear that they are inferior to others and need therefore to assert their supposed superiority to make themselves feel important. The truly superior do not need others to recognize their

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superiority. On the other hand the individual who can express simple gratitude towards others, whether superior or inferior to them, demonstrates a type of superiority. In what sense is Nietzschean gratitude an alternative to this? Nietzsche’s notion of gratitude promotes in the individual a strong sense of well-being and competency. The grateful individual seeks, often with a feeling like joy, to acknowledge the significance of the actions of others in making them who they are. This grateful self-assurance might be conveyed by the following example, in which we have just received a prestigious award: “I want to express my gratitude to my parents, without whom this award would not have been possible. In the hard times and the easy times they challenged me to be the best I could be; and they inspired me to never give up, whatever struggles may come.” In experiences of this sort, we see ourselves as people who are competent and powerful and yet who recognize that others helped us to become this way. It is our sense of selfrespect, confidence and strength of character that motivates our desire to express gratitude, not our lack of confidence and weakness. In expressing this kind of gratitude we affirm our own self-assurance. This does not make us unwilling, however, to support others in their own confidence and self-assurance. On the contrary, as we have seen, the strengthening and supporting of others is the fundamental characteristic of the strong and self-assured person. It is the weak and cowardly who seek to diminish others. The contrast between these two experiences of gratitude is central to a proper understanding of gratitude in Nietzsche. The reason Nietzsche disapproves of the contemporary form of self-effacing gratitude is because he believes, as we have indicated, that it honors neither the benefactor nor the beneficiary. But the other, more significant problem with the contemporary form of gratitude is that it is rooted in a misconception about the nature of empowering human relationships. For Nietzsche, human friendship and community are beneficial only to the degree that they promote flourishing in the individuals that are comprised by the community. Flourishing does not mean the decrease of pain and struggle but the increase of self-respect, self-mastery, and the love of beauty and propriety. Thus, while Nietzsche would agree with White that gratitude makes life “less brutish and more flourishing,” it does not make life “pleasanter,” if by “pleasanter” White means free of all pain or struggle. Nietzsche argues that embracing and overcoming pain and struggle, rather than escaping it, provides people with dignity and self-respect. When we grovel in thanks before our benefactors, we lose our self-respect and demonstrate a lack of love of beauty and propriety. Possible objections to Nietzschean gratitude

Given Nietzsche’s ideas on gratitude, there are two potentially serious objections that may be raised against them: their psychological impossibility and their potential pacifism in the face of social injustice. According to the first objection,

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while experiencing gratitude towards those who harm others may be possible in theory, it is not possible in practice; human beings are just not the sort of beings who are genuinely capable of feeling gratitude when they are harmed, or so the argument goes. In this case, Nietzsche’s insistence that he feels gratitude towards all, including his enemies, is either untrue or a psychological idiosyncrasy that is not available to others. To show that gratitude in the case of harm is available to others, we turn to Fitzgerald’s (1998) article in which he also argues that gratitude ought to be felt towards those who harm. He gives several powerful examples of individuals who chose to feel gratitude towards their enemies. The first is the Dalai Lama who experiences gratitude towards his Chinese oppressors and argues that his fellow Tibetans ought to feel gratitude as well. Even our enemies give us the best training in patience. When we reflect on these holy instructions, in a way we should feel grateful to the Chinese. If we were still living in the same old system, I very much doubt that the Dalai Lama could have become so closely acquainted with worldly reality. I used to live in a very sheltered environment, but now that we are in exile there is no stigma attached to facing reality. In our own country, we could pretend that everything was in order because it was shrouded under a cloak of pomp and show. I had to sit on a high throne assuming the attitude of being the Dalai Lama. . . . It is quite possible that I could have become narrow minded, but because of the Chinese threats and humiliations, I have become a real person. So what happened in Tibet can be seen as a blessing in disguise. (quoted in Fitzgerald, 1998, p. 124) As in White’s example of Bielenberg, the Dalai Lama experiences gratitude when he realizes that persecution gives him an opportunity to grow in power and freedom. Fitzgerald also offers the example of the thirteenth-century Buddhist monk Nichiren who, like the Dalai Lama, experienced gratitude towards those who persecuted him, in this case Japanese authorities. Fitzgerald (1998) quotes Nichiren as saying: “Those people who slandered me and the ruler [who had me banished] are the very persons to whom I owe the most profound debt of gratitude” (p. 125). In addition to these two examples, Fitzgerald mentions other leaders of various religions who embraced and embodied similar ideas about gratitude towards their enemies (p. 125). These examples demonstrate that Nietzsche’s advocacy of gratitude is not as implausible as it seems. Yet, it could still be argued that all of these individuals represent exceptions who only by virtue of the notion of holiness in their religious traditions were able to feel gratitude in these circumstances. While it is true that these examples are exceptional, they are all exceptional only in that they exhibit a cultivated, rather than a natural, feeling of gratitude. For them, as

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well as for the average individual, gratitude towards those who harm us must be developed, something best done in an educational setting. Radical gratitude is rare not because humans are incapable of feeling it but because it has not been cultivated within them. The second possible objection to Nietzsche’s conception of gratitude is that if individuals feel gratitude towards those who harm them, then they will refuse to change the social conditions that gave rise to the harm in the first place. Put differently, if all individuals feel gratitude when someone harms them, it seems that they are implicitly giving their persecutors license to harm them and others again and again. To meet this objection, we again turn to Fitzgerald. Using the examples of the Dalai Lama and Nichiren, Fitzgerald (1998) demonstrates the ways individuals can feel gratitude for their persecutors while simultaneously actively opposing them. Neither Nichiren nor the Dalai Lama is guilty of being servile to the governments that persecuted them. Their feelings of gratitude did not stop them from opposing, standing up to and criticizing the words and actions of those who persecuted them. Their gratitude did not cause them to bend to the wishes of their persecutors. Both expressed their gratitude with feelings of goodwill towards their persecutors, but neither thought that goodwill implied servility. On the contrary, both thought that their persecution was bad for the persecutors, and so their gratitude only heightened their opposition to that persecution (p. 142). The examples of the Dalai Lama and Nichiren are helpful insofar as they represent concrete examples of individuals who experience gratitude in the face of persecution and yet continue to attempt to change the social conditions that led to that persecution. Still, many members of contemporary democratic societies will be concerned that the universalization of gratitude across the citizenry will impede the progress of justice. Our commitment to justice is so strong that we become angered when we see injustices perpetrated on others and experience resentment when the injustices are perpetrated on us. We have come to assume that anger and resentment are necessary for justice do be done. This is not the case, however. In fact, we would go so far as to say that it is a positively reprehensible aspect of our moral imagination. In the same way that Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi were able to rectify injustices without violence and resentment, so we are able to rectify injustice without violence and resentment. Martin Luther King Jr. (2007) states this explicitly. Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter. As you press on for justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using only the weapon of love. Let no man pull you so low as to hate him. . . . In your struggle for justice, let your oppressor know that you are not attempting to defeat or humiliate him, or even to pay him back for the injustices that he has heaped on you. Let him know that you are merely seeking justice for him as well as yourself. (p. 344)

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In the same way that love and peace permeated the call for justice in King and Gandhi, gratitude and hope can permeate the call for justice from us. On a Nietzschean view, what ought to motivate individuals to take action against injustice is not anger but aesthetic repulsion. For Nietzsche, acts of terror, pusillanimity, cowardice, corruption and so on are aesthetically repulsive; they are ugly, and in their ugliness they cause “nausea.” Nietzsche would argue that this nausea is what should motivate advocates of justice who want to rid the world of the injustice.6 When a mother discovers a piece of rotting food that her two-year-old son, unbeknownst to her, placed under the couch, she immediately removes the piece of food while fighting off nausea. It is the ugliness and nausea that caused her to act so quickly. In this case, it would be totally out of order for her to get angry, both because the boy did not know better and also because anger only increases the ugliness of the situation. When she lets repulsion do its work, the ugliness is quickly removed. And the same could be the case if we witnessed someone deliberately throwing trash out of their window and onto our streets. Our immediate response could be to call the police and report them and then go pick up the trash. Our motivation in seeking to apprehend the litterer does not need to be anger or resentment, but it could be the desire to have a beautiful street. The same goes for the more serious injustices of cruelty towards others or political oppression. These are disgusting injustices and should cause us intense repulsion and nausea – our nausea at knowing the injustices will continue if we do not turn in the perpetrators motivates us to take action. It is assumed that anger and resentment are the only appropriate responses to injustice, but Nietzsche would say that these responses are inferior to gratitude because they unnecessarily poison the person feeling them. Anger and resentment are not beautiful in themselves, whereas gratitude is. Thus, if gratitude can motivate us to take action against injustice – and Nietzsche thinks it will when properly understood – we have the opportunity to participate in an inherently beautiful activity, while simultaneously eliminating ugly ones.

The pedagogy of radical gratitude In discussing the pedagogical implications of Nietzsche’s advocacy of gratitude, there are three points that need to be highlighted. The first is that gratitude is not something that can be required of students in the same manner that we require them to show respect in a school assembly. Because gratitude is an emotion, it cannot, as Feinberg (1986) correctly indicates, be activated simply by an act of will. “There can be no duty to have a particular feeling or to act from a certain motive, for the pinpoint control over our emotions that would be required by such a duty is beyond our powers of self-manipulation” (p. 135). Because gratitude cannot be required as an act of will, educators cannot expect students to immediately feel gratitude towards other citizens

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in a democracy, especially those that harm them. This does not mean that educators cannot encourage gratitude in their students. On the contrary, educators should encourage gratitude, but it should take the form of cultivating a disposition towards gratitude rather than following a moral requirement. If students are taught to see the benefits that accrue to themselves when they choose to cultivate the feeling of gratitude, they will be more likely to become grateful people. Put differently, the role of the civic educator is to help students recognize the ill effects of resentment and the empowering effects of gratitude. Were educators to encourage gratitude by discussing the shortcomings of resentment and the benefits of gratitude – in Socratic questioning and guided self-reflections, for example – they would find that students are not insensitive to these effects and will often readily embrace gratitude. That has at least been our experience. Once students embrace the idea of gratitude, seeing the way it liberates them, they will be in a position to start cultivating the disposition towards it. The second pedagogical implication is that in their attempt to cultivate the disposition towards gratitude, educators must avoid relying on a calculus of benefits and harm. It has been our experience that Nietzsche is correct in his assessment of modern democratic societies – we are steeped in a culture of ressentiment. This is especially apparent in our schools, in which often unspoken but deeply felt experiences of alienation and hostility abound. The complex relationships and manifold hierarchies in the schools leave virtually no student untouched. The power of these emotions cannot be overestimated; in many cases they are the defining aspect of students’ lives. Moreover, and importantly for our discussion, the feelings of resentment and alienation that students experience are entirely rooted in the calculus of benefit and harm. They feel alienated and resentful precisely because they believe themselves to be shortchanged in more ways than they are benefited. It is partially this calculus of benefit and harm that has allowed students to remain trapped in alienation and resentment. Therefore, for a teacher to use a calculus of benefit and harm to defeat the alienation and resentment is to risk merely deepening them. Moreover, even if using a calculus of benefit and harm were to produce an increase in gratitude, it does not give students the opportunity to develop the active sense of self that Nietzsche recommends. Being rooted in the calculus of benefit and harm, students are forced to look to others to determine what emotions they are supposed to feel. If others benefit them more than harm them, they feel gratitude; if there is more harm than benefit, they feel resentment. When students are taught gratitude as Nietzsche and the Dalai Lama conceive it, they are given the chance to feel the power and liberty of choosing to feel gratitude even where harm is intended. They are freed from the psychological dominion of their perceived persecutors. When they are thus freed, they are in a better position to experience feelings of community and connection with their schools because they no longer experience feelings of hostility towards it. Their

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connection to community is important because we do not want students to see their emotions as completely independent from the actions of others but only independent from those emotions that lead to detrimental psychological states of mind, like resentment. The third pedagogical implication is that educators must help students renegotiate their relationships to pain and suffering. Nietzsche’s affirmation of gratitude is rooted in his belief that the suffering individuals feel is not an obstacle to happiness but is its foundation. In order to help students cultivate a disposition towards gratitude, even in the face of harm, we must help them reconsider the role of pain and suffering in their lives. As in the examples of the Dalai Lama and Nichiren given earlier, the pain we suffer can help to transform us into stronger, healthier individuals. Yet as we saw in Chapter 4, students are explicitly and implicitly taught that pain is undesirable and should be eschewed at all times. When this conception of pain is operative, students naturally have a more difficult time cultivating the disposition towards gratitude. Fortunately, as with gratitude, it has been our experience that students are very capable of recognizing the desirability of suffering and struggle and are even willing to start making efforts to embrace them in their lives.

Conclusion The central difficulty in White’s (1999) argument and, by extension, the standard liberal account of gratitude is that it promotes gratitude only when one’s life is made “less brutish, pleasanter and more flourishing” by the actions of others. Convinced that most individuals’ lives are made less brutish and more pleasant, White argues that gratitude ought to be promoted. Unfortunately, she allows that some individuals’ lives are, because of their marginalization, not made less brutish by others and excuses these individuals from feeling gratitude. This train of thought embroils her in thorny questions about who should or should not feel gratitude, but the deeper problem is that it encourages individuals to remain reactive, trapped in their ressentiment. The problematic implication of her theory is that the actions of others are what make some lives less brutish, pleasanter and more flourishing or more brutish, less pleasant and less flourishing. She argues that gratitude ought to be expected in the former case but not in the latter. Nietzsche argues otherwise. For him, our lives are made less or more brutish, less or more pleasant, and less or more flourishing, not by the actions of others, but by our own attitude towards those actions. Those who choose to feel resentment become unhappy and unhealthy, seeking to harm others; those who choose to feel gratitude towards others no matter what their actions become happy, healthy and powerful, thus seeking to benefit others. Nietzsche wants to support the latter disposition, as should the democratic educator. Were democratic educators to promote Nietzschean gratitude in citizenship education courses they would have the potential to

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help ameliorate the social conditions that lead to the marginalization of others, thereby leading to gratitude’s further expansion.

Notes 1 Many theorists (Berger, 1975; Simmons, 1979; Walker, 1981; McConnell, 1993) argue that the feeling of gratitude is only appropriate when it is directed towards those who have intentionally conferred a benefit. In this case, if a benefit is not intentionally conferred on a specific person or is done under duress, then gratitude is not an appropriate response. While it is true that other theorists (Smilansky, 1997; White, 1999; Martin, 1999) argue that this is an overly restrictive conception of gratitude and that gratitude should be felt whether or not the benefits were intentionally conferred, only Fitzgerald (1998) goes as far as Nietzsche who claims that it is desirable to feel gratitude even towards one’s enemies. In this way, Nietzsche departs from the conventional philosophical discourse about gratitude. Nevertheless, as we hope to show, his ideas can contribute meaningfully to discussions regarding the promotion of gratitude, especially as it concerns citizenship education. 2 As Card (1988), Fitzgerald (1998) and others have pointed out, suggesting that individuals can cultivate gratitude is counterintuitive. The counterintuitiveness is based on the fact that gratitude is one of the only virtues that has as its basis an emotional component. As Fitzgerald (1998) argues, we cannot be grateful to others unless we feel gratitude for them. Merely to act in a way that would be an appropriate response to feeling gratitude is not to be grateful but merely to act with “reciprocity.” “One cannot be grateful without feeling grateful. To be grateful for all that my mother has done for me may require actions, such as calling her on her birthday, but it also requires feeling a certain way about her” (p. 120). In this way, to encourage or promote gratitude is to encourage or promote a feeling. The problem is that the plausibility of promoting the feeling of gratitude is debatable. Camenisch (1981, p. 2) and Feinberg (1986, p. 135), for example, argue that emotions are generally not subject to our will. Therefore, if we do not feel gratitude, it is questionable whether we can effectively cultivate it. Nevertheless, because the feeling of gratitude often occurs naturally, once individuals realize that it is deserved, there seems to be good reason to help students realize that it is deserved in the hope that the feeling of gratitude might thereby be activated in them, whether or not they intentionally cultivate the feeling. In other words, while it may be implausible to encourage a student to feel grateful for a good deed, if they do not already feel it, it is plausible to help students recognize the presence of good deeds when they were previously unaware of them and in so doing establishing the conditions under which gratitude might naturally occur. Moreover, as McConnell (1993, pp. 96–112) and Weiss (1985, p. 494) argue, while one may not, strictly speaking, bring about a feeling of gratitude at will, one may cultivate an attitude or disposition towards gratitude, which may over time lead to increased feelings of gratitude. 3 Of course, there are instances where injustices like these happen, but they are not the norm in contemporary democratic societies. 4 Needless to say, neither we nor Bielenberg nor White suggest that evil actions like those of the Nazis are desirable, laudable or should be permissible. Rather, Bielenberg’s point is merely that gratitude can be felt simultaneously with horror and condemnation and that experiencing gratitude in these situations can actually lead to greater social activism. We discuss this point in more detail in what follows. Horror alone, being rooted in fear, may actually shut down positive activism; whereas gratitude, being rooted in love and hope, tends to increase positive activism.

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5 He also claims that he forbids himself all countermeasures, all protective measures, and, as is only fair also any defense, any “justification,” in cases when some small or very great folly is perpetuated against me. My kind of retaliation consists in following up the stupidity as fast as possible with some good sense. (EH “Why I Am So Wise” 5) 6 We say “at best” because, as we have already seen, Nietzsche believes that anger is a destructive emotion that wreaks havoc on the spiritual health of the individual as well as the community.

Conclusion Nietzsche’s pedagogical vision for the good life

Among Nietzsche’s published works, Human, All Too Human is by far the longest, extending over more than a thousand reflections, observations, aphorisms and the occasional joke. Roughly in the middle of this long collection, where even the most patient reader is likely to have started feeling pangs of exhaustion, Nietzsche includes a brief aphorism entitled “A vision.” The soaring hopefulness and idealism of the aphorism make it spring from the page, urging itself on the reader in a way quite unlike others before and after it. A vision. – Lectures and hours of mediation for adults, for the mature and maturest, and these daily, without compulsion but attended by everyone as a command of custom: the churches as the worthiest venues for them because richest in memories: every day as it were a festival of attained and attainable dignity of human reason: a new and fuller efflorescence of the ideal of the teacher, in which the priest, the artist and the physician, the man of knowledge and the man of wisdom, are fused with one another, with a resultant fusion of their separate virtues into a single total virtue which would also be expressed in their teaching itself, in their delivery and their methods – this is my vision: it returns to me again and again, and I firmly believe that it lifts a corner of the veil of the future. (HH II:180) Nietzsche envisions here a society organized as a community of learning, which celebrates the achievements of human reason and holds up the teacher as an ideal synthesis of its several departments – virtue, beauty, health and knowledge. Ideal teachers not only speak for each of these departments; they embody them in their “teaching itself,” in their “delivery” of the subject matter and their “methods,” which draw others to pursue the rich and flourishing inner life to which they know these departments converge. Nietzsche’s is a pedagogical vision, one founded on the idea that the just society is one firmly and enthusiastically committed to the principle of learning – that is, to a common embrace of the life of embodied wisdom. Nietzsche’s vision recalls a remarkably similar passage from Emerson’s Education, which serves as one of the epigraphs of this

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book. With equally hopeful idealism, Emerson (1909) calls for a new generation of teachers, “thinking for themselves and heartily seeking the good of mankind” who “should dare to arouse the young to a just and heroic life” and who believe “that the moral nature should be addressed in the school-room, and children should be treated as the high-born candidates of truth and virtue” (pp. 26–27). Emerson’s vision, like Nietzsche’s, addresses itself directly to the mission of our educational institutions. In a salvo of pointed challenges, Emerson asks of the democratic school: What abiding Hope can it inspire? What Reformer will it nurse? What poet will it breed to sing to the human race? What discoverer of Nature’s laws will it prompt to enrich us by disclosing in the mind the statute which all matter must obey? What fiery soul will it send out to warm a nation with his charity? What tranquil mind will it have fortified to walk with meekness in private and obscure duties, to wait and to suffer? (p. 26) Emerson’s questions are unsettling not because our answers to them are insufficient but because we seldom pose them in contemporary education at all. When we speak today of pursuing “lifelong learning,” of creating “communities of inquiry,” of adapting to the “knowledge society” and of cultivating “civic virtue,” we so rarely have Emerson’s and Nietzsche’s high-minded ideals in mind. Our notions of lifelong learning are too often reduced to periodic training courses and re-certification procedures, communities of inquiry to department meetings, the knowledge society to publication statistics and civic virtue to “prosocial” behavior. Schools shy away from addressing the “moral nature” of their students or from treating their students as “candidates of truth and virtue,” because they are paralyzed by the questions, “whose morality?” and “whose truth?” Teacher education focuses increasingly on narrow vocational concerns – on “think-pair-shares,” “formative evaluations,” “learning analytics” and so forth – at the expense of the moral-aesthetic qualities Nietzsche hopes to see cultivated in teachers. Against this backdrop, Nietzsche’s vision of a new pedagogy is a call to action. As high-minded as Nietzsche’s pedagogical vision may be, he does not provide as many specifics as one might hope. While we have attempted to draw out several important pedagogical implications from his writings in this book, Nietzsche does not give his readers as much as they might desire in the way of concrete details as to what his ideal teacher’s methods are, nor how we might educate the next generation of teachers to be the models of virtue, aesthetic sensibility, health, knowledge and wisdom that Nietzsche thinks they should be. This is a tall task, one requiring inspired educational institutions with curricula, administrative procedures, mission statements and holiday breaks. Emerson (1909) is no better on this point: “I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching,” he writes in the same essay

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(p. 32). Yet Nietzsche’s silence on some of the concrete particulars regarding the practice of teaching, if not Emerson’s as well, is very much in line with his philosophical method. As we have seen, Nietzsche wants his readers to think with him – to pursue their highest selves, to find their place in the collective effort to elevate the culture of their society, not to become his disciples (which is secretly to want to be him). “One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil,” Nietzsche’s Zarathustra exclaims, “Now I bid you to lose me and find yourselves” (Z “On the Gift-Giving Virtue” 3). This is what we have sought to do in this book – to think with some of Nietzsche’s most important and challenging philosophical doctrines and to see whether they contain some insight for improving how we educate in modern multicultural democracies. Nietzsche is a thinker that it serves us well to engage with because he is, first, a first-rate observer of human psychology and, second, he remains one of the most clear-eyed critics of the corruptions of modernity. Against the tendencies to conformism, decadence, competitiveness, resentment and mediocrity that he observes within society, Nietzsche resolves to be a staunch defender of authenticity, self-mastery, emulation, gratitude and excellence. Since these tendencies constitute what we consider to be some of the most destructive forces acting on the modern soul, we have focused on those aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy that promised to yield the most fruit for our efforts to educate against them. This inquiry has resulted in four pedagogical principles, which we believe could play a part in any concerted educational effort that aims to realize a more just, humane and flourishing world than the one modernity offers us. 1

The Pedagogy of Perspectival Empathy The pedagogy of perspectival empathy encourages us to become tireless inquirers into the complexity, beauty and promise of other people’s ways of life. Nietzsche’s doctrine of perspectivism thus yields a robust form of empathy with far-reaching consequences for civic interaction and engagement.

2

The Pedagogy of Embodied Self-Mastery The pedagogy of embodied self-mastery encourages us to seek out rich and challenging aesthetic experiences that teach us to channel our talents, interests, drives and sensibilities into the most sublime and creative forms they can take. In this way, Nietzsche’s doctrine of self-overcoming calls into question the overemphasis on cognitive educational aims and the culture of struggle-avoidance in contemporary education.

3

The Pedagogy of Inspirational Emulation The pedagogy of inspirational emulation encourages us to cultivate an attitude towards comparison and competition in which both are seen as opportunities to celebrate the achievements of others and pursue our best selves. Nietzsche’s doctrine of the order of rank therefore yields an approach to

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peer comparison that counteracts the widespread tendencies to antagonism, competitiveness and ambition and encourages mutual inspiration. 4

The Pedagogy of Radical Gratitude The pedagogy of radical gratitude entreats us to practice gratitude in all things, towards all people, at all times, regardless of whether we have been benefited or wronged, so as to maintain a constant disposition to grow from our experiences. Nietzsche’s exposé of the dangers of ressentiment illuminates the need for a form of social civility in which injustice inspires action rather than hatred.

Although Nietzsche’s pedagogical vision may not give us all the details we may want for educational guidance in a democratic age, his broader doctrines of perspectivism, self-overcoming, the order of rank and ressentiment do point to concrete pedagogical measures that could be adopted by contemporary educators. Of course, this does not mean that we believe educators should attempt to apply all of Nietzsche’s ideas in their classrooms. We have focused on the ones we have found most promising; yet there are others that are too radical, too abstract or too unconventional to integrate into a contemporary educational setting. In doing so, we hope to have, at the very least, communicated the spirit of Nietzsche’s pedagogical vision and shown that Nietzsche remains an educational thinker that demands our continued attention. It would be remiss to construe Nietzsche’s import for contemporary education merely as a contribution to pedagogy, however. The vision Nietzsche advances in Human, All Too Human is a pedagogical vision, but it is much more as well. It is a glimpse of the conception of the good life that pervades Nietzsche’s writings from the beginning to the tragic end. One of Nietzsche’s central contributions as an educational thinker is his almost singular preoccupation with questions about how to live well and what is worth striving for in a human life. Though it may seem clichéd or all-too obvious to hear from two philosophers of education: such questions must form a part of any good teacher’s understanding of what they are doing in their classrooms. The same goes for students. If education is to be all it can be, those engaged in the educational enterprise should have a conception of the good life that motivates their actions. Illuminated by this conception of the good life, we stand to gain from our educational experiences something that transcends the social goods of our educational institutions – goods such as educational credentials, social capital, prestige and useful knowledge. Put differently, in embracing these and only these goods, schools and universities already advance something like a conception of the good life, one that holds that the things worth striving for in a human life can be cashed out (almost literally) in terms of credentials, capital, prestige and useful knowledge, without remainder. We say “something like” because without a robust ideal informing us of what these various acquisitions and accolades are ultimately for, the school succeeds in advancing only a conception of mere life, a

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life absent an aspiration to seek something beyond the immediate pleasures and sacrifices that the economy encourages us to embrace. In Schopenhauer as Educator, Nietzsche claims that if we fail to strive for something higher than this – that is, for a “good” life rather than a life devoted merely to the accumulation of titles, degrees, wealth or pleasures – then we lead a life only slightly higher than those of animals, one that fails to attain to the “metaphysical significance” it deserves. Interestingly, Nietzsche characterizes such a life as one in which human suffering never gains the meaning it can, and should, possess for us: But let us reflect: where does the animal end, where does man begin? . . . As long as one desires life as he desires happiness, he has not raised his view above the horizon of the animal; he only desires more consciously what the animal seeks with blind urgency. But this is what we do for the greatest part of life: we usually never emerge from animality, we are ourselves the animals who seem to suffer senselessly. (SE 5; our translation) For Nietzsche, when we lack a conception of the good life that includes, and in some sense embraces, the suffering necessary to attain it, we can see suffering only as a senseless and lamentable phenomenon. In such a state, we seek all the more to escape the burden of our existence through the pursuit of status, wealth and pleasure. Thus, pursuing a conception of the good life means, for Nietzsche, not only drawing motivation from a worthy ideal of how a life can be lead well but also finding a source from which we can make meaning from our struggles and sufferings. While is it easy to condemn contemporary culture for exploiting our immediate desires and fantasies, Nietzsche reminds us that it is simultaneously in the business of exploiting our suffering. We “devote ourselves to our daily labor more feverishly and thoughtlessly than would be necessary,” Nietzsche observes (SE 5; our translation), because we are caught up in the hasty fervor of “getting ahead” and “making a name for ourselves.” In our more reflective moments, we suddenly find ourselves committed to a transitory and nihilistic “happiness” that promises to deliver us from hardship even while it demands it from us, that affords us relaxation even while it exhausts us and that levels our moral imagination while it bombards it with sensationalism. Rather than being led to an enduring state of flourishing that comes only through the hard work of self-overcoming and education, we are tempted with luxuries, technological conveniences and stimulating media that help us to escape from the seeming meaninglessness of our suffering. In closing, there are two important consequences of Nietzsche’s advancement of a conception of the good life that are worth mentioning. First, in passages such as the earlier one from Schopenhauer as Educator, Nietzsche makes clear that to have a conception of the good life means to believe that there are certain kinds of lives, taken from the examples of individuals who have actually lived

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these lives, that are more worth living than others. This may seem to be a banal logical point, but it is an important one nonetheless, given the pervasive tendency within democratic societies either to write off any attempt to evaluate a life as perfectionist and therefore illicit or at least to purge public institutions of such concerns. At this point, it should be clear why this is a problem. Schools and universities, as mentioned, already advance answers to the question of what kinds of life are worth living. Thus, the task we hope for them to take on is to embody better answers to these questions, answers that, on the Nietzschean view, uphold the values of empathy, self-overcoming, emulation, gratitude and the diversity of human excellence. These values, as we hope to have shown, are not only compatible with democracy but help us to fulfill its promise. Second, and finally, advancing a conception of the good life presupposes the view that the “good” plays a constitutive role in lives that are more worth living than others. In other words, the good life is tantamount to a life in which we attain, or at least pursue, goodness – in which the good pervades the relationships, the careers, the hobbies and even the leisurely preoccupations that we choose for ourselves. In this, Nietzsche champions the tradition of ancient Greece, which understood philosophy to be, as Pierre Hadot (2002) observes, a way of life. “For the ancients,” Hadot writes, the mere word philo-sophia – the love of wisdom was enough to express this conception of philosophy. . . . Philosophy thus took on the form of an exercise of the thought, will, and the totality of one’s being, the goal of which was to achieve a state practically inaccessible to mankind: wisdom. Philosophy was a method of spiritual progress which demanded a radical conversion and transformation of the individual’s way of being. Thus, philosophy was a way of life, both in its exercise and effort to achieve wisdom, and in its goal, wisdom itself. For real wisdom does not merely cause us to know: it makes us “be” in a different way. (p. 265) In our view, this passage sums up quite well what Nietzsche hoped to accomplish with his philosophical reflections, both for his readers and for himself. Nietzsche calls his readers to overcome the temptations of the modern world – its escapist pleasures, empty accolades and debilitating competitiveness – and to pursue a way of life that is marked by the desire for wisdom. Better, Nietzsche’s philosophy is an attempt to transform us into the kinds of individuals that pursue wisdom, that embodied form of moral-aesthetic knowledge that is ever needed but always “untimely.” Yet the time has come, Nietzsche implores us, to take this educational imperative seriously, to build up a society in which the pursuit of wisdom organizes and justifies the lives we make for ourselves. Indeed, his pedagogical vision urges that we might start in the schools, in preparing teachers “who have themselves been educated, superior, noble spirits, proved

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by words and silence, representing culture which has grown ripe and sweet” (TI “What the Germans Lack” 5). Of course, the task is no simple one. But as Nietzsche reminds us repeatedly throughout his corpus, the thought of struggle and difficulty is no argument against a course of action but often an indication that there is great value to be found in it. Also ans Werk!

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Index

aesthetic/aesthetics 19, 80n8, 80n14, 172; anarchy 68; aristocracy see aristocracy/ aristocratic; boundaries 88; capacity 80n8; creativity 13; culture 22, 72, 153; education 18, 19 (see also education); excellence (quality) 52, 125, 127; experience(s) 179; knowledge 88; moral-aesthetic 178, 182; order of rank 23, 146; perspective(s) 120; practice 87; sensibility 88, 178; superiors 155; thinking 92; truth 44n7; value 12, 13 agonism/agonistic 22, 38, 120–121, 123–124, 127–129, 137, 142, 180 amor fati 19, 59, 97 aristocracy/aristocratic 101–102, 140–148, 147–148, 153; aesthetic 141; political 99, 101, 142, 144–148, 155; Roman 148 asceticism/ascetic 31, 82, 91, 151, 156n5; priests see priests authenticity 7, 10–11, 62, 66, 179 Baldwin, Elihu 129–133 beauty 56, 135, 141, 145, 168, 179; appreciation of 21, 169; blindness to 168–169; examples of 116; and excellence 120, 136, 141, 153, 177; fountains of 104; and morality 12; and power 43, 141 Bildung 1, 3–4, 14 Christian/Christianity 33, 43–44n6, 75, 77, 140, 148, 150, 162; morality see morality civility 12, 157, 180 courage 12, 44n6, 54, 83, 103, 116, 136, 141, 158, 163 culture/cultural 1–5, 7–8, 11, 14, 16–17, 25n3, 28, 33–35, 43, 46, 48, 53–54, 57, 59, 76–78, 80n12, 92, 98–100, 102–103, 106–108, 110–111, 113–115, 117, 118n4, 137, 140, 142, 146, 149–150, 152–155, 157, 168, 179, 183; achievement 17;

aristocratic 147; artifacts 153; benefit(s) 116; bias 79n5; civility 157; classical 21, 46, 91, 97; classroom (educational) 96, 121, 135, 137; community 89; conception of 115; conditions of 109; contemporary (current/modern/Western) 74, 105–106, 110, 112, 140, 181; of critical thinking 89; of cynicism and complacency 55; decline of 35, 107; of defeatism 83; divide (barrier) 47–48, 54; edification of 58; elevation of 153; empowerment 29; of emulation 120, 136, 141 (see also emulation); excellence see excellence; flourishing see flourishing; functioning 14; future 144; goal(s) 114, 116, 118n4; Hellenic see Hellenism/ Hellenic; hierarchical 14; high(er) 111–112, 141, 149–150, 153; ideal 10; idiosyncrasy 125; importance of 125; inferiority of 23; leaders (elites) 13, 23, 120; life 106; mass (popular, consumer) 7, 10–11, 113; movement 153; of mutual inspiration 23; noble 6, 14, 22, 54, 58, 85, 144; paradigm 22, 26, 28, 42–43, 89; perspective 43, 53; philistines 14; political 23; power see empowerment/disempowerment; power/ powerful; pressure 100; principle(s) 120; reality 138; relativism 49; renewal 107, 114, 148–149, 153; of ressentiment 157, 173; of self-mastery see self-mastery; sickness 102; of struggle avoidance see struggle; tendency 21; tradition 66, 76; true/false 104, 111, 114–115; value 65, 92; vision 13–14, 53, 74, 100, 107, 115–116 Dalai Lama 156n6, 170–171, 173–174 democracy/democratic 17, 141–142, 154, 159, 173, 182; age 7, 11, 20, 180; citizens 159–160; critique of 13; defenders of/ leaders of 15, 140; -denouncing/-

192

Index

promoting 13; dialogue 20, 48, 49; education in (democratic education/ educator) 3, 13, 18–19, 23, 46–47, 49, 174; ethos/tradition 54, 118n4, 140; flourishing see flourishing; goals (aims) 15, 48; governments 161; ideal 55; inspiration 10–11; institutions 142; life 22; movement 106; pedagogy 20; pseudo-democratic 154; reading 143; school(s) (classrooms) 19, 46, 58–59, 61, 178; society(ies) (community, citizens) 3, 9, 15–16, 47, 82, 100, 116–117, 138n2, 156, 159–162, 171, 173, 175n3, 182; theory/theorists 24, 49, 60n2, 143; un-/anti- 3, 18, 101, 142–143; values 14, 22; virtue 158 Descartes (Cartesian) 36; subject 8, 36–38 Dewey, John 123 education: aesthetic 18, 19; contemporary 7–8, 10, 16, 19–20, 22, 82, 93, 99, 121, 141, 157, 178–180; democratic see democracy/democratic; formal 90–91; philosophy of/educational philosophy 18–20, 24, 54, 59, 61, 65, 67, 122, 130 egalitarianism/antiegalitarianism/(anti) egalitarian 13–15, 18, 22, 100–103, 107, 112, 116–117, 118n2, 135, 142–143 egoism/egoistic 21, 68, 73–76, 78, 80n12, 108, 147, 152 elitism 99, 107, 141–142; Machiavellian 5; radical 19, 100, 107, 145; see also egalitarianism embodiment/embodied 21, 78; rationality see reason/reasoning; see also self-mastery Emerson, Joseph 129–130, 134, 138n3, 177–179 empathy 20–21, 46–60, 94, 179, 182; perspectival 20–21, 24, 85, 179 empowerment/disempowerment 12, 18, 21–22, 42–43, 46–48, 53–59, 60n1, 82–84, 87, 92, 97, 143–152, 159, 164, 169; cultural 29; and gratitude 173; self- 70, 120, 129; see also power/powerful emulation 22, 66, 120–139, 141, 179, 182; ambitious 129, 131–133, 135; competitive 122–124, 133; inspirational 22–23, 121, 125, 128–135, 137, 138n3, 139n5, 141, 179; pedagogy of 24, 120–121, 137, 141; peer-to-peer 128, 132, 134, 136; self- 120, 125, 128, 132, 134 equality 13–16, 18–19, 125, 140, 144, 162, 168; as a goal 118n4; inequality 16, 18, 22, 100, 116, 168; leveling-up/-down 7, 13; psychology of 15–16; spiritual 22,

121; tension with individual excellence 100, 116, 137n1; see also egalitarianism equanimity 12 escapism/escapist 93, 109, 182 eudaimonia see flourishing excellence 9, 120–121, 124, 127, 140–141, 179; academic 122, 136; appreciation of (celebration of) 21, 137; community of (social) 116; criteria of (standards of) 138n3; cultural 127; of the few 102; human 9, 54, 182; ideal of 151; inspiration from 18, 153–154; personal (individual) 18, 100, 132; physical 125; promotion of 17, 19; see also virtue exceptional human beings (AusnahmeMenschen) 150; see also excellence faithfulness 12 falsification thesis 29–31, 40, 43n3 flourishing (eudaimonia) 5, 9, 13–14, 20–21, 23, 46, 97, 118n4, 169, 174, 179, 181; barriers to 82; cultural 14, 100–101, 116, 118n4, 142, 155; democratic 15, 159; of the few/many 23, 100, 107, 142, 152; human 3, 7, 9, 11, 16, 19, 26, 67, 70; ideal of 10; individual (flourishing individual life) 7, 9–10, 14, 77–78, 82, 120, 142, 177; of others 20, 23, 159; social 7, 14, 99, 102, 117, 127, 149, 158–160 free spirit/free-spiritedness 6, 12, 30, 69, 76–78, 80n10, 80nn13–14, 81n15 generosity 12, 76, 167 genius 34, 54, 72, 104, 106, 108–116, 118n7, 154; production of 110, 113–114; “scepter of ” 90–91 gift-giving 21, 68, 73, 76, 108, 152, 166 good life 10, 19, 24, 97, 177, 181–182; Nietzsche’s vision of 7, 13, 180–182 gratitude 12–13, 23–24, 155–156, 157–176, 175n1, 179, 180, 182; benefits of 23, 157–160, 162, 165, 173; circle of 159–160; Nietzschean 163–164, 169, 174; promotion of 158, 163, 165, 175n1; radical 23, 158, 164, 171–172, 180; scope of 158, 164 Habermas, Jürgen 86 happiness 53, 73–76, 101, 103–110, 113–114, 140–141, 152–153, 174, 181 health/(un)healthy 9, 23, 67, 72, 74–75, 125, 134, 137, 141, 161–162, 174, 176n6, 177–178; of the community 74–75, 162; and competition 137; and power 9, 13, 53, 67

Index Heidegger, Martin 86 Hellenism/Hellenic 3, 92, 125 herd 13, 40–41, 53, 77–78; morality 53, 77; thinking 9; see also thinking hierarchy/hierarchical 13–34, 23, 57, 63, 118n7, 144 honesty 12–13, 54, 158 immoral/immoralism 12, 25n7, 74, 144, 147, 150; see also morality individualism 7, 8, 19, 78, 102, 147 James, William 125–126, 128 justice/injustice 12, 15, 48–49, 56, 58, 70, 172, 175n3, 180; advocates of 171; call for 172; challenge 157; commitment to 171; definition of 58; end of 15; progress of 171; rectifying 171–172; social 16, 98n4, 164, 169; struggle for 171 (see also struggle); systemic 17–18 Kant, Immanuel (Kantian) 12, 29, 34, 64, 71 Kaufmann, Walter 5, 25n8, 45n10, 61, 68, 71, 73, 79n5, 101, 142, 156n3 King, Martin Luther Jr. 171 knowledge 26–37, 40–42, 43n3, 56, 48–52, 87, 91–92, 96, 136, 177, 182; construction of 20; disinterested (dispassionate) 6, 33, 64; embodied 88; “in itself ” 49; knowledge society 178; limitations of 48; man of 6, 25n3, 177; object of (objective) 46, 50, 64; passionate (love of) 72, 122–123; and perspectives 26–45, 56, 84; and power 63; scientific 10; self- 36, 39, 111; and truth 77; useful 180 learning 20, 24, 26, 47, 50, 52–53, 58–59, 87–88, 97, 123, 130–132, 134, 137n1, 178; community of 24, 177; in contemporary democratic societies (schools) 13, 19–20; context 138n5; empathetic 58; experiences 42; foreign languages 20, 47, 52, 59; lifelong 178; meaningful 16, 21; men of (Wissenschaftler) 86; motivation for 121, 124, 138; principle of 177; process of 42; to “see” 49–50, 54, 57, 85; to “speak and write” 21, 54, 85, 89, 91, 97; teaching and 13, 19, 98; theory 19; to think 21, 85, 87, 90, 97 Machiavelli (Machiavellian) 142, 144, 156n2 MacIntyre, Alasdair 8, 73, 89 magnanimity 12, 76, 134–135, 163 Mann, Horace 122–123, 134

193

masses 14, 23, 101, 104–107, 109, 112, 114, 118n7, 141–145, 153; exploitation of 23, 143, 144, 148, 156n5 mastery 73, 87–88, 90–91, 97 mediocre/mediocrity 5, 53, 84–85, 99, 146–148, 150, 154, 179 meritocratic faith 17–18 modern/modernity 7–16, 18–21, 46–47, 73, 82, 84–85, 92–94, 103, 106, 118n4, 125, 126–127, 140–141, 156, 159, 164, 168, 173, 179, 182; democracies see democracy/democratic morality 9, 12, 59, 65–67, 71, 73, 76, 79, 106, 108, 178; aristocratic 146–147; Christian 8, 12, 165; of custom 74; of equal rights 145; herd (popular) 53, 64, 80n12; noble (affirmative) 166 (see also culture/cultural); overcoming 66, 76; of pity 79 (see also pity); slave/master 145, 148, 166; see also immoral/immoralism multicultural/multiculturalism (cross-cultural) 7, 11, 13–14, 18–20, 24, 46–47, 159, 179 nationalism 24, 33n4, 34 Nichiren 170–171, 174 nihilism/nihilistic 19, 75, 181 objective/objectivity 27–33, 37, 49–50, 56, 64, 64, 73, 114 order of rank 13, 18–19, 22–23, 73, 99–119, 120–139, 140, 143–146, 149, 168, 179–180 overcoming see self-overcoming overman 62–65 pain 32, 37, 39, 95, 103, 109, 169, 174 pedagogy: of embodied self-mastery 83, 92, 179; of inspirational emulation 121, 125, 128, 130–132, 138n3, 139n5, 141, 179; of perspectival empathy 20–21, 24, 47, 48–49, 52, 54, 58–59, 85, 179; principles of 121, 179; of radical gratitude 180, 172; of self-overcoming 24, 82–83, 92, 98, 120 perfectionism 10, 118n7 perspectivism 18–20, 26–45, 46–60, 61–65, 84, 99, 120, 142, 179–180 pessimism (optimism) 17, 53, 141, 152, 159; theoretical optimism 93 “philosophers, artists and saints” 14, 22, 102, 104–111, 113–115, 118n9, 120, 153 philosophy 9, 20, 24, 45n15, 57, 70, 85, 108, 182; of agonism see agonism/agonistic; analytic 56; Anglo-American 3, 24; of the body 80n8; critique of 52; Dionysian 142; of education see education; of

194

Index

grammar 41; Greek 1; of mind 40–41, 45n15; Nietzsche’s 4–5, 7, 9–11, 18–19, 24, 30, 59, 61–62, 87, 128, 142–143, 155, 179, 182; scholar of 87; of thinking 85; validity of 53; Western 8 pity 21–22, 60n1, 76, 98n2, 112, 120, 152; (un-)reflective 83, 93–97, 121 pluralism/pluralistic 10, 116, 142 politics/political 3, 17, 20, 22–24, 99–100, 115–116, 122–123, 141–146, 156n1, 160, 164; and aristocracy 101–102, 141, 144, 146–153, 155 (see also aristocracy/ aristocratic); and authoritarianism (elitism) 99, 142, 145; community (order) 122–123, 125; contemporary discourse 57, 157; corruption of 123; disengagement 20; doctrine 47; harmony 66; oppression (compulsion) 110, 172; and perfectionism 118n7; perspectives 53; power 5; service 10; vision 141 postmodern/postmodernism 8, 19 power/powerful 1, 8–9, 13–14, 67–77, 79n7, 80n12, 92, 110, 125, 127, 132, 141, 155, 164–165, 169–170, 172–174; and affects 45nn9–10, 45n12; cultural 29; and empathy 60n1; and excellence 18; individuals 58–59; knowledge see knowledge; will to power; life 78; in a normative sense 5; over/for 144, 156n4; and perspectives 46, 53–54; and selfovercoming 10; social structures of 6, 17, 22, 49, 160, 167 priests (priestly type) 53, 140, 145, 152, 177; ascetic 34, 53 Rawls, John (Rawlsian) 18, 22, 101, 107, 118 reality 26–27, 29–30, 33–35, 40, 44n7, 53, 114, 155, 170; absolute 29; apprehension of 41; cultural 138n4 (see also culture/ cultural); empirical 33, 35; of excellence 132; existential 103; experience/perception of 50–51; external 28; objective 27, 29–30, 33; perspectival 29; social 48; true 29 reason/reasoning (rationality) 9, 21, 30–33, 35, 44n8, 65–66, 68, 70–73, 76–78, 79n3, 80n8, 80n14, 82–88, 91–92, 94, 149; cruelty against (hatred of) 31, 72; dictates of 84; (dis)embodied 21, 68, 70, 72–73, 84–85, 87, 94, 97; human 177; intellectualistic sense of 68; morality of 9, 67; pure 32; reasoner 46; role of/faculty of 68, 84; struggle with 66; students’ 91; unreason 82; value of 72 redemptive men 104, 107

reductionism 38, 42 reflection/(un)reflective 2, 10, 57, 75, 78, 83, 85; in ancient Greece 72; expression 91; and laziness 109; philosophical (theoretical) 24, 182; self- 59, 173; on ultimate values 44n6; (un)reflective pity see pity relativism/relativistic 35, 55; cultural 49 (see also culture/cultural); in dialogue 55; epistemic 20; moral 8; Nietzsche’s 28, 31; perspectivism and 31, 35, 42, 55 (see also perspectivism); problem of 28, 54 religion 11, 14, 71, 77, 80n14, 94, 170 resentment 16, 23, 117, 133, 135, 179 ressentiment 18–19, 23, 33, 75, 99, 140–156, 157–176, 179–180; discussions of 23; doctrine of 15; problem of 23; spirit of 16 revaluation (of values) 5, 65, 68, 72, 76, 140; see also value(s) Salomé, Lou 6 Schopenhauer, Arthur 1, 6, 10, 14, 22, 52, 86, 99–102, 104, 108–109, 111–112, 118n2, 118nn4–7, 119n10, 126, 140, 181 science 1, 10, 11, 24n1, 25n5, 41, 70, 86–88, 91–93, 103–104, 108, 112, 136; criticism/ promotion of 92 self 8, 20, 29, 35–40, 42, 45nn9–11, 50, 61–62, 66–67, 73, 113, 115; Cartesian conception of 8, 36–38, 64; -control 65–66, 69, 74, 76; -creation/-reformulation 8, 10, 21, 25n5, 61–62, 65, 67, 78; -emulation see emulation; -esteem/-worth 83, 117, 120, 136–137, 141, 164; -knowledge see knowledge; -mastery see self-mastery; -overcoming see self-overcoming; -respect 33, 167–169; -sacrifice 21, 73, 75; -transformation 6 self-mastery (Selbstbeherrschung) 9, 21, 25n4, 45n11, 61, 65–68, 70, 72, 77–78, 79n1, 79n3, 83, 95, 155, 169, 179; continual 9, 67; culture of 96; development of 58, 78, 95; embodied 46, 83, 92, 179; endorsement of/ plea for 68, 94, 96; ideal 71; initial 91; and joy 67; methods of 82; opposite (lack) of 66–67; process of 70, 84; revaluation of 72, 76; and self-overcoming 9, 66–68, 82, 94; tradition 83–84; usage of 95 self-overcoming (Selbstüberwindung) 7–9, 11, 18–19, 21–25, 35, 45n9, 59, 61–81, 82–85, 92, 94, 96–99, 113, 120, 127, 149, 153, 156n5, 180–182; aristocratic 148; concept/ conception of 21, 62, 65, 83; perspectivism and 99, 120; and self-mastery see selfmastery; self-overcomer/self-overcoming

Index individual 10, 64, 71, 73, 76, 94, 97, 98n5, 104, 149 skepticism 43n3, 86 sociological faith 16–18 Socrates (Socratic) 71–72, 74, 80n10, 86, 106, 173; rationality 68, 70 solipsistic 8, 21 soul atomism 37–38 spiritual/spirituality 13, 22, 32, 50, 75, 94, 121, 127, 150–151, 156n5; spiritualization (Vergeistigung) 69–70, 73, 75, 150, 155 strength/strengthening 5, 64–65, 68, 76, 122, 140, 160, 169; circle of gratitude 160; excess of 39; expressions of 64; of the individual 94, 155, 169; of others 169; psychological 97; and spiritual 75; weakness 5, 12; of will 83 struggle 22, 36, 39, 103, 113, 120, 124, 149–150, 169, 174, 181, 183; avoidance of 83, 179; for culture 113; educational 21; embracing 82–98; empowering 120; for justice 171; pain and 103, 169; personal 70; with reason 66 (see also reason/ reasoning); students’ 21, 83, 95–98, 120 subjectivity 8, 27, 35–38, 40–42, 45, 47; theory of 8, 27, 36–38, 40–42, 45n10 suffering 22, 53, 60n1, 65, 83, 92–96, 98n3, 120, 174, 181 teaching 13, 19, 38, 48–49, 57, 82, 84, 87, 97–98, 123, 177–178 temperance 12, 74, 76 thing-in-itself 28–30, 43n2, 44n7 thinking (to “think”) 6, 68, 85–90, 103; and affects 36; conscious 40–41, 51; creative 38, 150; herd see herd; for oneself 178; rational (scientific) 92–93; rigorous 82; theory/art of 89, 90 transformation 6–7, 109, 114, 132, 155, 163, 182

195

University of Basel 1 value(s) 8, 13, 15, 21, 44, 46, 55–56, 58, 76–78, 82, 86, 88, 94, 97, 101–102, 107, 141, 146–152, 157, 183; aesthetic see aesthetic/aesthetics; of aristocracy 153; of authenticity/authentic 7, 10, 21; democratic see democracy/democratic; devalue 135; educational 23, 96; of emulation 137n1, 182 (see also emulation); of equality 15; of expertise 58; herd see herd; hierarchy of 13; highest/-er 102, 107, 136, 150; internal sources of 136; judgments of 77; moral 12; of nature 108; pedagogical 61; personal 65; of pity see pity; pluralism of 10; of reason see reason/reasoning; revaluation see revaluation; social (cultural) 65, 78, 92, 102, 108 (see also culture/cultural); system of (set of) 7–8, 74; of things 165 (see also aristocracy/aristocratic); valuelessness 110 virtue 13, 15, 72, 126, 129, 146, 153, 156n5, 175n2, 177; civic 159, 178; democratic 158; desirable 66; distortion of 140; effects of 126; ethics 13 (see also value(s)); giftgiving 76, 152, 166; of industriousness 126; and mastery 70 (see also self-mastery); models of 178; path towards 13; of powerful individuals 54; praise of 13; total 177; truth and 178 von Gersdorff, Carl 3 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 108 Wagner, Richard 155 will to power 4, 5, 25, 36–37, 62–64, 68–69, 73, 75, 79n4, 96, 127, 141, 143–145, 147–150, 152, 156 wisdom 5–6, 24, 55, 92, 177–178, 182 youthful souls 6, 102, 109–115