Schopenhauer as Educator
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~31,800 words · 151 passages
Cite this work
- APANietzsche. (n.d.). Schopenhauer as Educator. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/schopenhauer-as-educator
- MLANietzsche. "Schopenhauer as Educator." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/schopenhauer-as-educator.
- ChicagoNietzsche. Schopenhauer as Educator. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/schopenhauer-as-educator.
What it is about
Schopenhauer as Educator (1874): not a book about Schopenhauer, but about what it means to have a teacher.
Context and history
Nietzsche explains less of Schopenhauer's philosophy than the effect finding it had on him, and from this comes the question that runs through all his work: how to become what one is. It is also an attack on the university as a factory of harmless scholars. It is one of the four Untimely Meditations (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, 1873-1876). The catalogue holds three of them separately and also the whole of Part I. English translation from the complete edition edited by Oscar Levy (1909-1913), the one in the public domain. It is over a century old and it shows. The original is GERMAN, and citation should follow the original: the catalogue holds two of them, Also sprach Zarathustra and Der Wille zur Macht; for the rest, only the translation is here.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvellously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time. He knows this, but hides it like an evil conscience;—and why? From fear of his neighbour, who looks for the latest conventionalities in him, and is wrapped up in them himself. But what is it that forces the man to fear his neighbour, to think and act with his herd, and not seek his own joy? Shyness perhaps, in a few rare cases, but in the majority it is idleness, the "taking things easily," in a word the "tendency to sloth," of which the traveller spoke. He was right; men are more slothful than timid, and their greatest fear is of the burdens that an uncompromising honesty and nakedness of speech and action would lay on them. It is only the artists who hate this lazy wandering in borrowed manners and ill-fitting opinions, and discover the secret of the evil conscience, the truth that each human being is a unique marvel. They show us, how in every little movement of his muscles the man is an individual self, and further—as an analytical deduction from his individuality—a beautiful and interesting object, a new and incredible phenomenon (as is every work of nature), that can never become tedious. If the great thinker despise mankind, it is for their laziness; they seem mere indifferent bits of pottery, not worth any commerce or improvement. The man who will not belong to the general mass, has only to stop "taking himself easily"; to follow his conscience, which cries out to h