Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Future of Our Educational Institutions.

Platt, Michael

NIETZSCHE, Friedrich. On the Future of Our Educational Institutions. Translated and introduced by Michael W. Grenke. William of Moerbeke Series. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine Press, 2004. ix + 182 pp. Paper, $24.00--This close translation of Nietzsche's five public lectures at Basel, Uber die Zukunft unserer Bildunsanstalten (January-March 1872), is accompanied by Nietzsche's introduction to the series, a preface to them as a possible book, as well as notes, plans, and passages from his letters at the time, and an excellent essay he wrote at Schulp-forta on Shakespeare's Cassius.

The translation of the lectures is closer than the flowing but inexact one by J. M. Kennedy (1910). Throughout Dr. Grenke supplements his translation by including German words, such as Erziehung and Bildung, in brackets, and by suggesting alternate, more literal translations. Even apart from a few English infelicities ("like" for "as," "this" without a referent, and mistakes in prepositional idiom), mistaken literalisms ("monstrous moment" for Nietzsche's "ungeheuer Moment" when Nietzsche is speaking of the missed "great moment" [Middleton] to make the captured Strasbourg University great), and one slip that might escape detection because it is almost plausible (p. 81: "lie" should be "live"), the result is sometimes awkward, as if one were listening to a German immigrant in whose English the contour of a German idiom shows, as still in parts of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Texas, but students of Nietzsche with some German will be grateful for such a wetsuit fidelity to the German.

The result also brings out something else. In a letter Nietzsche calls these lectures "durchaus exhortative" and in comparison with the just then published Die Geburt der Tragodie "popular oder exoterisch." These lectures are not in the gay, incisive, and flexible prose through which Nietzsche later reached both solitary individuals and whole publics; I count only three candidate aphorisms. Here Nietzsche seems a bit muscle bound; he knows he could say so much more and yet succeeds in restraining himself, but not easily. He begins by assuring his Basel audience that his criticisms of the educational institutions of the German-speaking world do not include Basel; he will only be reporting conversations he heard in his youth, between a philosophic genius and his former student; these consist in exhortations to solitary philosophic study and comprehensive criticisms of, first, the German Gymnasium and then the University, for their failure to teach good German prose, their encouragement of student freedom (when they should require disciplined obedience), for their democratic spread (instead of exacting elitism), for their leveling of culture (even unto journalism!), for their subservience to the State's need of bureaucrats, for their philological not philosophic relation to antiquity, and above all for their failure to follow the natural order of rank, institute the pyramidal order of rule, and emulate the Romans and Hellenes, who somehow accord with the German spirit. Conspicuously unmentioned is Christianity and in the final simile, the unnamed Wagner. Central in these dramatic conversations is whether a young teacher should go into solitude to become a philosophic genius, or remain in these bad institutions to seek out the few students apt for nobility.

Would these hundred pages of Nietzsche's reported dialogue repay line by line study, as a dialogue by Plato does? Are the speakers substantial enough to matter? Do these speeches fit the speakers? And do the arguments in the dialogue fit the actions, including shots from pistols and barks and bites from a dog? Dr. Grenke seems to have translated these lectures with such in mind, but only a long interpretive essay might show such a reading worthwhile, or an intensive seminar test it. Helpful would be Nietzsche's course, Einfuhrung in das Studium der platonischen Dialogue; how Nietzsche read Plato might tell how his own dialogues are to be read.

Another hypothesis is possible, and the materials Dr. Grenke translates allow the student to begin work. The large attendance and approving reception of the early lectures pleased Nietzsche. He intended to publish them as his second book. Yet he never gave the sixth lecture, left thirsty auditors parched, and began criticisms to correspondents; he described them to Malwida von Mesenbug as "nicht genug in die Tiefe," as "in eine farce eingekleidet, deren Erfindung recht gering ist." First he said they needed more work, then that they should never appear. Nietzsche's authority on the matter is unique, but since he also wrote Malwida about being cautious about regaling, or not regaling, Basel with "Wahrheiten meines Lebens," perhaps he merely regretted how much they had already revealed. Although he wavered, even mentioning a possible seventh lecture to complete the book, Nietzsche never published them, used one passage for Schopenhauer als Erzieher, and never again attempted public lectures.

Are these lectures just leftovers (Nachlass), more coherent and continuous than most, but not equal to any writings Nietzsche published, and, judging from Ecce Homo, would have us pay far more attention to? Probably. Still, even the abandoned struggles of such a thinker, being richer than the perfected, finished, and published works of most others, deserve attention, especially these lectures, because they are about something central to Nietzsche's life and to his thought, namely teaching and learning, especially such learning as constitutes a noble life, which, if a hundred lived it, would constitute a noble culture (Bildung). After all, the work Nietzsche came to regard as the greatest gift ever given to mankind, Also Sprach Zarathustra, tells the life of a teacher, who must give up lecturing others--not give that sixth lecture--go into solitude and learn the lesson he has been evasively exhorting others to learn, for only then will he become the surpassing man (Ubermensch) he really is. That Nietzsche looked forward to a future educational institution at which there would be chairs devoted to the interpretation of his Zarathustra also shows he also never ceased thinking about the institutions he exhorted others to think about in those lectures in Basel in the winter of 1872--Michael Platt, George Wythe College and College of Thomas More.