“Radigal Humanism” in “Radical Humanism”
On His Essay “Schopenhauer as Educator”
“SCHOPENHAUER AS EDUCATOR,” one of the four parts of Thoughts Out of Season, appeared in 1874. At that time Bismarck’s Reich was three years old. The works of Karl Marx were already complete, and Sigmund Freud was about to finish the gymnasium. In Germany the first unions were already founded, the years of rapid economic expansion had passed their peak, and many enterprises had been ruined by the stock market crash of 1873. In Vienna Johann Strauss’s operetta Die Fledermaus had just been performed for the first time. The Third Republic had been established in France, and Great Britain’s industrial and imperial power was growing; two years later Queen Victoria became empress.
For the thirty-year-old Friedrich Nietzsche, the pastor’s son from Röcken and young university teacher in Basel, 1874 was an unhappy year. But could any year of this life, which aimed to be heroic and yet was one long martyrdom, be called happy? Like his teacher Schopenhauer, Nietzsche scorned the idea of happiness. But the former had a good time of it with his poodle, his genius, and his inveterate arrogance, whereas Nietzsche suffered, sometimes lamentingly and in revolt against his fate, but more often in silence. When he began writing Thoughts Out of Season, he really did have little objective cause for contentment—even if it had not been for his neurotic or, as I tend to believe, already latently deranged condition. His early work, The Birth of Tragedy, this first grand design of his mythical thought, written between the years 1869 and 1871, had been rejected upon its appearance in 1872 as “unscientific” by the guild of classical philologists, particularly by his teacher Ritschl and by Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, who treated him with even greater severity. His physical state was anything but satisfactory; he really was “always sick in some way after 1873,” as Jaspers has expressed it. He was especially plagued by those headaches that in Doctor Faustus, for whose title figure Nietzsche was the model, Thomas Mann called with touching ambiguity the “head ache.”
It was in such circumstances that Thoughts Out of Season was written, the four great essays with which Nietzsche emerged as a social and cultural critic. Of the four, “Schopenhauer as Educator” appears to me to be the most important by far. For this essay contains the entire Nietzsche in a nutshell. It contains everything that still excites us today about this unique thinker but also irritates us: his powerful, suggestive eloquence, which, however, constantly runs the risk of becoming mere loquaciousness; his inclination to megalomania; the intensity of his style, which always borders on a sometimes rather dubious lyricism; his polemical force, which all too easily obscures the actual meaning of the statement; the specifically Nietzschean misanthropy, which the psychologist may trace to a lack of love (since Nietzsche’s love for others went unrequited); the verbal excess that still today fascinates some thinkers, while others are struck with fear and trembling when they contemplate such intemperateness.
As regards the content of the essay, I would like to begin by stating that the title is alien to the text, that it is misleading. The reader learns very little about Schopenhauer, even less than someone interested in Flaubert learns about him from Sartre’s monumental work on the great author of Madame Bovary. When Nietzsche wrote the third part of Thoughts Out of Season he had already left the philosophy of Schopenhauer far behind him. What he says about the master—and even quantitatively it is very little—is a projection of his own problems and a pretext for a critical polemic against his time and its trends. Nietzsche did not contribute to making an educator of Schopenhauer. He could not do it; for he himself was uneducable, a problem child of the spirit, a loner. He talks a great deal about Schopenhauer’s solitude, but he means his own:
He was a hermit through and through; he had not one truly like-minded friend to console him—and between one and none there lies an infinity, as there always does between something and nothing. No one who has true friends knows what true loneliness is, even if the world around him were his enemy.—Oh, I see that you do not know what isolation is. Wherever there were powerful societies, governments, religions, public opinions, in short, wherever there was tyranny, it hated the solitary philosopher; for philosophy provides mankind with an asylum that no tyranny can invade: the cavern of the soul, the labyrinth of the heart.
This is not the solitude of Schopenhauer, who responded with wholesome rage when no notice was taken of him but for the rest leisurely developed his rentier’s philosophy of life (which attained its most authentic expression in his unpretentious Wisdom of Life).1 No, this is Nietzsche’s own solitude: his threatened health, his ever-precarious financial situation, his life without love—above all, without a woman’s love, something that for Schopenhauer would have been nothing but a vexatious burden. And as far as Goethe’s “labyrinth of the heart” is concerned, it certainly offered poor Nietzsche no asylum; and what he called the “cavern” was in truth more a hell.
If I say that the text under discussion here already contains the entire Nietzsche in a nutshell, I have to explain what I see in it that is so typical or foretelling for this thinker and his subsequent development. And this brings me first of all to the superman. In “Schopenhauer as Educator” he still is not called that. But he is already present. Nietzsche says that it must be the goal of mankind to give rise to the “genius.” Nothing is more repulsive to him than Bentham’s formula of the “greatest happiness of the greatest number.” “Oh, Philistine,” he cries out angrily, “as though it could make more sense to permit numbers to decide when it is really a matter of worth and meaning!” The tendency toward quantification that social philosophy took over from the natural sciences is for him a scandal. What alone matters to him is that humanity ceaselessly strive to produce individual great men. This demand is raised again and again with irritating urgency. It contains, to be certain, no more and no less than the essence of Nietzsche’s criticism of his time and its culture.
Creation of the superman: that in itself already implies the reevaluation of values; for when Nietzsche speaks of the “great man,” he means neither the statesman of genius (for example, Bismarck, whose name is not mentioned) nor the researcher of genius (in some special field or other); he does not even mean the artist (in the sense of the Romantic notion of genius). The great man, as an ideal type, is recognized and identified in Schopenhauer. But Schopenhauer is only a mask. Behind the surly face of this man, who is always referred to as the “old one” (since it is absolutely impossible to imagine him as young), we find Nietzsche’s own face, the face of the Gallic warrior. The genius is Nietzsche himself. The text reveals the particularities of his entire later work also in that it has a decidedly subjective, even autobiographical character. When Nietzsche speaks of the world he means himself; when he says “culture” he has his own world of thought in mind. Friedrich Nietzsche’s entire work is nothing but an attempt at introspection, self-portraiture, self-stylization—to be sure, however, a brilliantly successful attempt. Whoever wishes is free to speak of a “narcissistic neurosis,” but the psychological concept would not detract from the vast dimensions of his impressive as well as vexing work.
In a certain, of course strictly limited, sense, Nietzsche actually does prove himself in this work to be a disciple of Schopenhauer: in his total, uncompromising scorn of those whom Schopenhauer called the far-too-many. He has as little use for them, for the man on the street (to employ a modern American expression), as the established order had for him. He regards the “pursuit of happiness,” which remains the basis of every democratic, liberal society, as nothing but an insolent presumption. Mankind, a lowly species, has not grasped that its sole task is to promote the rise of the “true man.” It deserves the whip of Nietzsche’s philosophy, the “hammer” with which this thinker imagines he is philosophizing, whereas in the last analysis he is merely lamenting and accusing.
Nevertheless, in his lamentations and accusations Nietzsche, as expression of Hegel’s Weltgeist, combines his personal subjectivity with objectively warranted criticism of his epoch. Let us pause for a moment in order once again to remind ourselves what Nietzsche’s times were like. In the case of Germany they are marked by an extraordinary self-complacency that rapidly shifts from euphoria to satiety. Despite the bank crash, occasional economic recessions, and awakening consciousness among the working class, the people are in accord with capitalism triumphans. The great war was won. The Reich is splendidly armed. What more could anyone want?
If one is a Nietzsche, one wants much more and also something completely different. Above all, this Reich, which is the pride of the “far-too-many,” means nothing at all to him. Binding, an author with Nietzschean pretenses, writes that the first words he can recall his father saying were “Reich und Kaiser.” Nietzsche, who could have been Binding’s father, said the following about the Reich in “Schopenhauer as Educator”:
There are at the moment naïve people . . . in Germany who . . . say that for a few years now all has been well with the world, and that whoever cherishes heavy, dark doubts about life is disproved by the “facts.” Because the truth is that the foundation of the new German Reich is the decisive victory blow against all the “pessimistic” philosophizing. . . . It is a deep disgrace that such disgusting, idolatrous praise of these times can be uttered or repeated by so-called thinking and honorable people.
So much for the Reich. And there is not even mention of the Kaiser. There is mention, however, of triumphant capitalism, even if Nietzsche is obviously not familiar enough with the economic term to employ it. For when he says that the “tremendous migration of peoples over this huge earth, their founding of cities and states, their wars, their confused gatherings and dispersions, their chance amalgamations, their learning from one another, their mutual deceptions and oppressions” are “the continuation of the animal state,” then he has his own epoch in mind, the saeculum obscurum, as he not unjustifiably describes his century. It is the world of capitalism that has made deception and oppression its law, and the successful capitalistic oppressor and deceiver is merely the repulsive caricature of the “great man,” as Nietzsche sees him.
Other passages make his criticism of capitalistic society even clearer. We read that the quantitative principle of education is just as dangerous as “the economic doctrine of laissez-faire [is] for the morality of entire peoples.” But Nietzsche is most unequivocal when he speaks of the “selfishness of the profit-seekers” and exposes the capitalistic formula of property plus education as a mystification. In his own words: “Firstly, there is the selfishness of the profit-seekers, something that requires the help of culture and helps culture in return, while at the same time wishing to dictate its goals and limits.” The word “manipulation” was still not part of the German vocabulary, but the fact itself could not be overlooked. Nietzsche clearly recognized it. Let us listen further:
From them [the profit-seekers] comes that favorite tenet and sorite that more or less states: as much knowledge and education as possible; thus, the greatest possible need for it; thus, the greatest possible production; thus, the greatest possible profit and happiness.—So goes the seductive formula. Its proponents would define education as the insight that enables one to be truly modern in one’s needs and their satisfaction but that also gives one command of every means and method of making money as easily as possible. The aim would be to create lots of “current” people, in the sense of “currency” as it is applied to money. According to this view, a nation will be all the happier the more such “current” people it has.
Is not this “current” person the same one who nowadays is called “alienated”? And was not all of education—and here it is a matter of education and educational institutions—the same education whose repressive function is the subject of today’s debates? Nietzsche is protesting against the false alliance of “intelligence and property,” of “wealth and culture.” This truly shows him to be a “man out-of-season,” a reevaluator of values in opposition to his epoch—which I have described as the period of capitalism triumphans. If one wishes, one can call Nietzsche’s “current man” the “average man” (as statistics construe him); one would also be justified in calling him the “one-dimensional” man. In any event, the “current man” is Nietzsche’s contemporary, the product and supporter of capitalistic society, who is content if he is granted just that much culture as is required to serve the interests of “general and world trade.” Needless to say, the “culture” envisioned by Nietzsche and that already appears dimly on the horizon in “Schopenhauer as Educator” is incompatible with what his contemporaries called culture or civilization. His culture is not the culture of the scholars, who, he says, are shielded from all “artificial and excessive hypotheses.” Nor is it the culture that he scornfully describes as one of wealth, refinement, and well-mannered dissemblance. Nietzsche’s culture is excess, dissipation, immoderation through and through, a culture of “fire,” as he very expressly says with reference to Richard Wagner. Nietzsche’s conception of culture, both esthetic and moral-amoral, must be understood as the antithesis of the culture or civilization of his day, as a protest against the image of man with which contemporary capitalism presented him.
But it is high time to avert misunderstandings. Far be it from me to see a kind of frustrated Marxist in the Nietzsche whom we encounter in “Schopenhauer as Educator.” Nothing could be more demagogic and foolish than that. Everyone knows that Nietzsche was as opposed to the wishful thinking of the socialism of his epoch as he was to bourgeois democracy; but he rejected the latter much more radically than the former. For it was not just democracy that provoked his hate and scorn but the state altogether. That makes him a forerunner of the modern anarchistic anthropology that is being sent us from France these days and is associated with the names Michel Foucault and Giles Deleuze (two thinkers, by the way, who constantly make reference to him). He writes of the state and its cultural presumption in “Schopenhauer as Educator”:
There is . . . the selfishness of the state, which desires the greatest dissemination and popularization of culture, and possesses the most effective tools for achieving its ends. If it feels strong enough not only to unleash but also at the right time to harness, if its foundation be firm and broad enough to bear the entire educational structure, then the spread of education among its citizens will benefit the state in its competition with other states. Wherever there is now talk of a “civilized state,” this state has the task of freeing the spiritual wishes of a generation, to the degree that they can serve and benefit the existing institutions—but only to this degree.
These are highly modern thoughts! By no means is Nietzsche speaking here of the state we describe today as “totalitarian,” but rather of the bourgeois-capitalistic society that he knew and that was formed into a state in Wilhelmine Germany in the same way as it was in the Western democracies. Already here it becomes apparent how he would have viewed the totalitarian state. It may be, however, that—as the party philosopher of the Third Reich, Alfred Bäumler, tried to prove—he would have welcomed the state of the blond beasts, with their military triumphs and their eugenic “Lebensborn.”2 I don’t believe that he would have, but it is not entirely unimaginable. —Please pardon the digression. A most repulsive thought forced itself upon me; I wrote it down, but I absolutely doubt its probability. I see Nietzsche as the forebear not of Nazi barbarism but rather of a subjectivistic-anarchistic rebellion against the masses. Wherever we read in “Schopenhauer as Educator” we discover a vehement polemic against everything that is concealed behind the concept of a mass society, a concept that may be unclear but, not without good reason, has become part of linguistic usage. Again and again we encounter formulations of a kind common to the discourse of our own time, as, for example, when Nietzsche says that the people of his day are “the tormented slaves of the moment, the prevailing views, and the fashions.” Today we would say: of relevance, manipulation, and conformism.
Nietzsche becomes our contemporary, too, when he ridicules the intellectual dictatorship of both the natural sciences and history, but at the same time settles accounts with the speculative-constructive metaphysics of German idealism:
Earlier, especially in Germany, the philosophers were so deep in thought that they were constantly in danger of running into the wall. Now they have about them, as Swift tells us of the Laputans, a whole swarm of flappers to give them an occasional light stroke on the eyes or someplace else. . . . The flappers are the natural sciences and history . . .
The age he lived in but whose beliefs he repudiates and again and again tries desperately to break away from is, let us not forget it, that point in history when the still-budding natural sciences believed they were about to solve everything that they called the “riddle of the universe.” Vogt, Moleschott, Ludwig Büchner enjoyed high esteem. Ernst Haeckel was about to appear on the scene with his monistic-scientific world view. The humanities, on the other hand, had taken flight into the past. Nietzsche had ample occasion to witness this phenomenon in the person of Jakob Burckhard in Basel.
The state of philosophy, Nietzsche’s foremost concern, was wretched. He looks about and sees, as he writes, only “a ridiculous herd of poor philosophers” who are about to turn philosophy “into a ridiculous matter.” He sees one of the chief causes for this lamentable state of philosophy in what we would describe today as the “appropriation” of the philosophers by society:
As long as we have this state-sanctioned sham thinking, the grand effects of a true philosophy will be thwarted. . . . For this reason I believe it is a cultural necessity to deny philosophy all state and academic recognition and to relieve both state and academy of the impossible task of differentiating between true and false philosophy. Let the philosophers sprout where they can; deny them any prospect of employment or integration into the civic professions; don’t tickle them with rewards; indeed: persecute them, be unkind to them.
Naturally, this is the voice of Schopenhauer’s admirer, of the man whose teacher did not launch a successful university career, not so much because of some grim decision but because of the disgraceful fact that the students did not enroll in his courses but flocked next door to Hegel instead. It is also the voice of the young professor of philology at the University of Basel, who recognized very clearly that if he wanted to teach philosophy he would hardly have an easier time of it than his master, and for this reason finally chose an independent career as a writer. A psychological explanation of this sort may get at the motives, but it misses the content of Nietzsche’s diatribe, which must be understood within the context of intellectual history. If we disregard Nietzsche the person, forever wounded in his honor and therefore irritated, we will immediately perceive his radical, almost anarchistic rejection: rejection of the state, of public opinion, of society—whose overwhelming integrating power he recognized. His demand for “free-sprouting” philosophers, who enjoy no official recognition, are treated ill by society, if need be even persecuted, is by no means as absurd as it must have appeared to his contemporaries. He demanded what has been partially realized in our own century: thinkers outside the institutions, men like Sigmund Freud, who never gained an academic professorship, like Oswald Spengler, a private scholar, like Jean-Paul Sartre, who showed interest in the academic enterprise only to the extent that he wanted to contribute to its destruction.
I believe that the essay “Schopenhauer as Educator” contains in nuce not only the entire later Nietzsche, but that in all of its vexing and vexed content, including its distinct megalomaniacal and autistic features, it points beyond Nietzsche’s own time into ours. Above all, it marks the break in the history of ideas that Nietzsche’s entire work represents. We clearly discern the discontinuity that this thinker brought about. For Nietzsche was the man who burned all the bridges behind him, as it were. After Nietzsche there can be no return to Christianity, to the idealistic philosophy and humanism of the eighteenth century. He stands not only “beyond good and evil,” but beyond all tradition. Schopenhauer was influenced by Kant, Marx by Hegel; but Nietzsche appeared from nowhere, armed with the truly “hammering” mind of a man who was fated to madness. We must accept him for what he was: the prophet of a new day that never dawned, of a joyful wisdom that was not achieved, of a dance that was never danced. His work contains dreadful pronouncements. He says, for example, that it is more important that a philosopher arise on this earth than that a state and a philosophy go on existing. Or he calls out in his highly agitated, unconsidered, even thoughtless way that Brutus offers greater proof for the dignity of philosophy than Plato. In “Schopenhauer as Educator” we also find what is the keystone of his thought: “[Philosophy] should be something fearful; and those chosen to strive for power should know the source of heroism that flows in it.”
Fearfulness, hammer, power, heroism: such words came all too easily to this sickly man who longed so much and so vainly for free physis, who would not hurt a fly, and who in the end went insane while embracing a flogged cab horse. He was not only the enemy of the state and society but also the adversary of the image of man inherited from antiquity and elevated during the Enlightenment to the pinnacle of modernity. Almost a century after him structuralism is talking about the “death of man.” Every newspaper reader has a seat at the deathbed of mankind. The essay “Schopenhauer as Educator” guides us on the shortest path not only into Nietzsche’s world of thought but also into our own present.
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“Nietzsche—der Zeitgenosse: Zu seiner Betrachtung “Schopenhauer als Erzieher,” Merkur XXIX (December 1975): 1141-49.
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