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Anti-Education NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS CLASSIC S ANTI-EDUCATION FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844-1900) was born in Ri:ickenbei Liitzen,a farmingtown outside of Leipzig, to a long line of Lutheran ministers. After his father'searly death froma brain disease, the familyrelocated to Naumburg an der Saale. Nietzsche attended the Schulpfortaboarding school, where he became enamored with the music of Richard Wagnerand the writings of the German Romantics, before going on to study at the Universities of Bonn and Leipzig. As a university student, Nietzsche gained a reputation as a classical philologist and discovered Arthur Schopenhauer's lhe Worldas Will and Representation,the "cadaverous perfume" of which would hang over him throughout his career. Aftera period of compulsory military service, Nietzsche was appointed to the facultyof the University of Basel at the age of twenty-four. He published his first book, lheBirth ofTragedy, in 1872, but his deteriorating health soon forcedhim to retire fromacademia. In the itinerant period that followed,Nietzsche completed his most influential works, including ThusSpoke Zarathustra (1883-85), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and lheAntichrist (1888). He suffereda mental breakdown in Turin on January 3, 1889-purportedly at the sight of a horse being beaten by a coachman. Beforecollapsing, Nietzsche is said to have thrown his arms around the horse's neck to shield it fromthe whip. Three days later, he wrote in a letter to his mentor Jacob Burckhardt that he would rather be "a Basel Professonhan God." He was subsequently hospitalized, and lived the rest of his lifean invalid in the care of his mother and sister. DAMION SEARLS has translated many classic twentieth-century writers, including Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Elfriede Jelinek, Christa Wolf, Hans Keilson, and Hermann Hesse. For NY RB Classics, he edited Henry David Thoreau's Thejournal: IS37-IS6I and has translated Nescio, Robert Walser, Patrick Modiano, AlfredDoblin, and Andre Gide. He is currently writing a book about Hermann Rorschach and the cultural history of the Rorschach test. PAUL REITTER is a professor of Germanic languages and literatures and the director of the Humanities Institute at Ohio State. His work has appeared in Harper'sMagazine, Bookforum, TheParis Review, TheNation, and The TimesLiterary Supplement as well as in various scholarly journals. He is the author of three books, and recently collaborated with Jonathan Franzen and Daniel Kehlmann on TheKraus Project. CHAD WELLMON is an associate professorof German studies at the University of Virginia and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He is the author of Becoming Human: Romantic Anthropologyand theEmbodiment ofFreedom and OrganizingEnlightenment: Information Overloadand the Inventionojthe Modern Research Universityand edits the blog InfernalMac hine. ANTI-EDUCATION On the Future ofOur Educational Institutions FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE Translated fromthe German by DAMION SEARLS Edited and with an introduction and notes by PAUL REITTER and CHAD WELLMON NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS Efitiil New York THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK PU BLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY w014 www.nyrb.com Translation copyright© 2016by Damion Searls Introduction and notes copyright© 2016by Paul Reitter andChad Wellmon All rights reserved. Library ofCongress Cataloging -in-Publication Data Nietzsche, FriedrichWilhelm, 1844 1900, author. [Uber die Zukunft unserer Bildungsanstalten. EnglishJ Anti-education/ by Friedrich Nietzsche; introduction and annotation by Paul Reitter andChad Wellmon, translated by Damion Searls. pages cm. -(New YorkReview Books classics) ISBN 978-1-59017-894-2 (alk. paper) r. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844 1900. 2. Education-Philosophy. 3. Educational change-Germany. I. Title. LB775.N547N5313 2015 370.1 dc23 2015014216 ISBN 978-1-59017-894-2 Available as an electronic book; ISBN 978-1-59017-895-9 Printed in the United States ofAmerica on acid-freepaper. 10 987654321 CONTENTS Introduction · vii Lecture I · 3 Lecture II , 20 Lecture III 37 Lecture IV 53 Lecture V · 70 Nietzsche's Introduction and Preface · 87 Notes · 97 INTRODU CTION IN JANUARY 1869, when he was just twenty-four and a long way fromhaving completed his dissertation, Friedrich Nietzsche was of.. fered a peach of a job-a professorship in classical philology at the University of Basel, where standards for employment were looser than at its German counterparts.1 Nietzsche was delighted, so much so that upon learning the good news, he broke into song and spent the rest of the day singing melodies from Tannhauser, his favorite opera. Theposition did havewhat some scholars might haveconsid­ ered a drawback. On top of teaching eight hours a week at the uni­ versity, Nietzsche would be required to give an additional six hours of instruction at a local gymnasium. But this wouldn't be a problem, he told his doctoral adviser, Friedrich Ritschl, one of Germany's most renowned classicists. Ritschl passed that message on to the hir­ ing committee, along with his imprimatur, and the appointment was made. It's likely, then, that when Nietzsche set offfor Basel, Ritschl felt confident he had helped launch another brilliant academic career. Yet only a year later, Nietzsche had begun to move away from the kind of philological work that had led his mentor at the University of Leipzig to call Nietzsche the most precocious student he had ever seen: studies on Diogenes Laertius's account of ancient philoso­ phers, contributions to an Aeschylus lexicon, and so on. Further­ more, Nietzsche had started to show signs of deep disillusionment, differentfrom the ambivalence toward academia that he had feltas a student. For all his excitement upon receiving the offerfrom Basel, vii viii . INTRODUCTION he had already been wondering whether the discipline at which he excelled was right forhim. Arthur Schopenhauer was one of Nietzsche's lodestars during his student years, and academic writing, compared to Schopenhauer's, seemed "dead." In the autumn of 1867, Nietzsche outlined an essay -which he would never complete-on Democritus and the "his­ tory of literary studies in antiquity and modernity," with the goal of impressing upon "the philologists a number of bitter truths."2 The firstbitter truth was the notion advanced by Schopenhauer that "all enlightening thoughts" stem only froma few "great geniuses," from individuals, as a recent biographyof Nietzsche has it, "who most as­ suredly did not pursue philological and historical studies.'' 3 Richard Wagner, who in 1868 became forNietzsche the living model of ge­ nius, was certainly no academic. Even while distinguishing himself in Leipzig as a philological prodigy, Nietzsche had considered aban­ doning the field. But in 1870, he had a new plan, to expose publicly, 4 as he pledged to a friend, the whole Prussian system of education. The plan came to fruition in On the Future ofO ur Educational Institutions. In a series of five lectures held at Basel's city museum between January and March 1872, Nietzsche took aim at all of Ger­ many's chief institutions of postprimary learning: the Realschule, the gymnasium, and the university.5 He also went afi:er individual specializations, including his own fieldof philology, which he main­ tained was both a key symptom and a cause of a larger process of decline. Nietzsche's troubled reckoning with German academic cul­ ture gained a new urgency and depth in On theFuture ofO ur Edu­ cationalInstitutions. But the lectures havea greater significancethan that. Here Nietzsche sets offdown the path toward becoming an anti-academic philosopher of modernity and its ills.6 From his student days to his last writings, Nietzsche combined a reverence forthe classical world, construed in his own idiosyncratic manner, with a skepticism toward modern society. But if there is much continuity to this line of thought in his works, it also evolved over time. What the lectures add-what beginswith them-is a spe­ cificand striking critique of the role of German educational institu- INTRODUCTION . ix tions in debasing antiquity and modern culture more broadly. In On · the Futureof Our EducationalInstitutions, philology and the culture of nineteenth-century German scholarship, or Wissenschaft,become one of modernity's most pressing problems. Philology and Wissen­ schaft distort and diminish precisely the resource that might help modernity redeem itself: namely, ancient forms of life. A figure in the lectures remarks, "Philologists perish and are reduced to dust because of the Greeks-that is a loss we can live with-but forAn­ tiquity itself to be shattered because of the philologists!" Here the figure is not merely amplifying the complaint that classical scholars have a special giftto drain the lifefrom their material; he is making an argument that places the destructive tendencies of classical schol­ arship within a complex causal web, whose strands include an ascen­ dant consumerism, progressive pedagogical ideals and practices, an emerging culture of mass journalism, the modernization of academic labor, the cynicism of modern scholars, and in the middle of it all, the newly expanded Prussian state, which, according to Nietzsche's protagonist, wants to suppress the drive for true education and culture. Nietzsche leveled his attack on the contemporary pedagogical proj­ ect within the context of a long-standing debate. Educational policy had been a matter of deep concern in Germany since at least the be­ ginning of the nineteenth century, and by the second half of the cen­ tury, the German educational system was widely considered to be the best in the world. TheBritish critic, poet, and pedagogue Matthew Arnold believed it was, as did such American educational reformers as Henry Tappan,the firstpresident of the University of Michigan, and Andrew Dickson White, the co-founderof Cornell University. Arnold, Tappan, and White certainly wouldn't have had much trouble findingGermans who agreed with them. Germany's schools and universities were, understandably, a source of national pride. Its elementary schools educated a greater percentage of the population than their British and French counterparts.
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