1/9/2016 Anti-Education by Friedrich Nietzsche review – why mainstream culture, not the universities, is doing our best thinking

hinking | Books | The Guardian

Anti-Education by Friedrich Nietzsche

review – why mainstream culture, not the
universities, is doing our best thinking
The long-misunderstood philosopher, a hater of nationalism but supporter of independent
thought, disliked trends in higher education that are very evident today

John Gray
Friday 8 January 2016 07.30 GMT

T hroughout his life Nietzsche thought of himself as an educator, but the time he
spent working in higher education was not long and much of it he found frustrating.
Appointed professor in classical philology at the University of Basel in 1869 when
he was only 24 years old, he was seen as a prodigy with a brilliant career ahead of him.
However, he left academic life in 1878, due to his worsening health and increasing
disillusionment with institutionalised scholarship. The writings for which he is most
remembered were written in the following decade, which he spent wandering restlessly
around Europe. Then, in 1889, he suffered a disastrous mental collapse from which he
never recovered.

Until his death in 1900 Nietzsche remained a mute invalid under the guardianship of his
sister Elisabeth, a repulsive individual with whom he quarrelled bitterly when she
married an antisemitic high school teacher, Bernhard Förster, and accompanied him
to found an “Aryan” colony, Nueva Germania, in Paraguay. Following the failure of the
fly-blown settlement and the suicide of her husband, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche
continued promoting racist ideas by seizing control of her helpless brother’s writings,
establishing a Nietzsche Archive and methodically deleting passages in which he
lambasted the “race swindle”. For this service she was duly rewarded. On the basis of a
highly selective biography and a heavily redacted compilation of Nietzsche’s writings
that she published under the title The Will to Power, she was several times nominated by
admiring German academics for the Nobel prize in literature. When she died in 1935,
Hitler attended her funeral.

By the start of the 20th century Nietzsche was recognised as one of the leading thinkers
of the age. His influence was vast, though rarely of a kind of which he would have
approved. He despised nationalism and railed at the Prussian cult of the state, ridiculed
the faux Darwinism that was emerging as the ruling German ideology, attacked the
leading antisemites of his day and preferred the religion of the Old Testament to
Christianity. Yet he has been widely seen as an intellectual forerunner of fascism, and
even a proto-Nazi – crass misreadings. But if Nietzsche was neither of these things, nor
was he any kind of liberal. It is his critique of liberalism that makes him worth reading.

Beautifully produced by New York Review Books in a new translation, by Damion Searls,
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with an illuminating introduction, Anti-Education consists of five lectures Nietzsche

gave at the Basel city museum in 1872. (A sixth lecture was planned, but never
delivered; portions of the series were used in his book Untimely Meditations.) Presenting
his critique in the form of a series of dialogues between an old philosopher and a student
companion, Nietzsche argues that education (he uses the German word Bildung, a term
with multiple senses but that broadly means the formation of culture and individual
character) has been degraded by being subordinated to other goals. Both the German
gymnasium – the secondary school that prepared students for university – and
universities themselves had forfeited their true vocation, which was to “inculcate serious
and unrelenting critical habits and opinions”. Instruction in independent thinking had
been renounced in favour of “the ubiquitous encouragement of everyone’s so-called
‘individual personality’” – a trend Nietzsche viewed as “a mark of barbarity”. As a result,
education was dominated by two tendencies, “apparently opposed but equally ruinous
in effect and eventually converging in their end results. The first is the drive for the
greatest possible expansion and dissemination of education; the other is the drive for the
narrowing and weakening of education.” The first extends education too widely and
imposes it on a population that may not want or need it, while the second expects
education to surrender any claim to autonomy and submit to the imperatives of the
state.

There is more than a little truth in Nietzsche’s indictment. But to reach this nugget, you
will have to wade through pages of Romantic gibberish about the aristocracy of the spirit
and the privileges of genius, which foreshadow the absurd figure of the Übermensch that
he concocted in his later work as a redeemer for modern times. But when he observed
that education was increasingly being shaped by external forces, Nietzsche was on to
something important. A shift of the sort that was under way in 19th-century Germany
began in the UK with the regime of monitoring and assessing research that was imposed
in the late 1980s. Until that time universities had been autonomous institutions. Now
they have to justify themselves as somehow increasing national output – a requirement
that denies that intellectual life has value as an end in itself and assumes everything of
importance can be measured.

Other forces within education itself have been at work undermining universities as
places dedicated to independent thinking. The American cult of political correctness
may have begun as a response to ugly practices of discrimination, but it soon morphed
into a regime of taboos and dogmas. With the rise of “trigger warnings” and the demand
that campuses become “safe places” sheltered against intellectual disturbance, it may
not be long before the notion that universities exist to promote unfettered inquiry has
vanished from living memory.

There will be some who say this is a sign that liberal values have been abandoned. For
those who think like this there is a simple remedy for the maladies of higher education.
We must return to John Stuart Mill: let any idea however offensive be freely expressed,
so that it can be challenged and where necessary rationally rebutted. But at this point
Nietzsche poses some awkward questions. Mill believed everybody gained from freedom
of expression, including those who wanted to shut it down: all human beings want the
benefits that come from growing knowledge. But what if many are happy to relinquish
these benefits for the sake of values they consider more important and want to impose
on others? Mill’s answer is that what matters is the continuing advance of the species.
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But as Nietzsche understood, the idea of “humanity” as a collective agent with universal
goals that it pursues in the course of history is a secular residue of a religious faith in
providence. If you stick to empirical observation, all you will find is the human animal
with its many conflicting values and ways of life.

Nietzsche’s achievement was as a genealogist of morality, and his observations on the

origins of liberal values are peculiarly resonant today. As a pioneering classical scholar,
he knew there was nothing liberal about ancient Greek culture. Emerging in a long and
difficult process that included Europe’s wars of religion, a liberal way of life was an
offspring from Jewish and Christian monotheism – a fact our “new atheists” prefer to
ignore. One can value this way of life without being religious, but that doesn’t mean all
human beings want to live it. If people lose interest in free expression – as seems to have
happened in some sections of higher education – there is no argument that can persuade
them of its importance. What they want may be freedom from the dangerous business of
thinking.

The editors of Anti-Education, Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, describe Nietzsche as “an
anti-academic philosopher of modernity and its ills”, and conclude that answering the
questions he asked about education “might bring us little comfort” today. Anti-academic
Nietzsche may have been, but his mistake was in pinning his hopes on “high culture”. If
you look beyond the walls of the academy, you will find a scene that is remarkably vital.
Justin Kurzel’s film of Macbeth presents an uncompromisingly truthful vision of the
human situation unlike anything in the academic study of the humanities at the present
time. The Wire and Breaking Bad explored the contradictions of ethics with a rigour and
realism that is lacking in the baroque disquisitions on justice and altruism that occupy
philosophers. Amazon’s version of Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle is a more
compelling rendition of the slipperiness of consensus reality than you will find in any
number of turgid volumes of critical theory. Plenty of other examples could be cited.
Many educational institutions may be enmeshed in bureaucracy and self-censorship, but
the good news is that they are not forming our culture.

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