Anti-Education by Friedrich Nietzsche

Author:Friedrich Nietzsche
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590178959
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2015-11-17T05:00:00+00:00

LECTURE IV

March 5

HONORED listeners!

Having loyally followed my story up to this point—now that we have made it this far through a lonely, remote, occasionally rude dialogue between a philosopher and his companion—you are now, I can only hope, inclined to make your way like hale and hearty swimmers through the second half of our journey, especially since I can promise you that a few more puppets will soon appear in the little marionette theater of my narrative, and that, in general, if you have persevered until now, the waves of the story will carry you more quickly and easily to its conclusion. What I mean to say is that we have almost reached a turning point—and so it is all the more appropriate to take a short look back and recall what we may have gathered from this wide-ranging conversation.

“Remain at your post!” the philosopher appeared to be exhorting his companion. “You are right to hope! For it is ever more obvious that we have no educational institutions, and that we need them. The gymnasium was established for this noble purpose, but our gymnasiums are either hothouses of a dubious ‘culture’ that seeks to defend itself against a true education it truly hates (that is, an aristocratic education limited to a few select individual souls), or else the breeding grounds of a small-minded, sterile, academic erudition that may serve to make us deaf and blind to the blandishments of that dubious ‘culture,’ but that has nothing in common with education.” The philosopher had drawn his companion’s particular attention to the strange degradation that is inevitably at the heart of a culture whenever the state believes it controls culture and can pursue state aims by means of culture; whenever the state enlists culture in the struggle against foreign enemies as well as what the philosopher dared to call the “truly German spirit.” This spirit—whose noblest needs link it to the spirit of the Greeks, which has proven steadfast and courageous in the difficult past, pure and lofty in its aims, and which can, through its art, respond to the highest calling, that of freeing modern man from the curse of modernity—this spirit, the philosopher said, is condemned to live in isolation, cut off from its legacy. Yet its slow lament, echoing through the wasteland of the present, terrifies the cluttered and gaudily bespangled cultural caravans of our time. We should provoke terror, the philosopher said, not just wonder; we must attack, he advised, not timidly flee; above all, he encouraged his companion not to worry too much about the individuals whose higher instincts fill them with revulsion against the barbarism of the present day. “Let such a one perish: the Pythian God was not unwilling to find a new tripod, a second Pythia, so long as the mystic vapor still welled up from the deep.”

Once again the philosopher intoned: “Note well, my friend, two things that must never be mistaken for each other. A person needs to learn much if he

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