Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

IntroductionHuman, that by the time he wrote Schopenhauer he himself 'nolonger believed in Schopenhauer'. And there is· plenty of documentaryevidence from Nietzsche's own correspondence andunpublished papers, as well as from the testimony of friends suchas Paul Deussen, to show that he began to have serious reservationsabout the most central doctrines of Schopenhauer's philosophyonly a few short years after his dramatic 'conversion' toSchopenhauerianism as a student in Leipzig during Fall 1865.13By 1871 at the latest, he had privately rejected not onlySchopenhauer's 'world-negating' pessimism, but also his fundamental dualism of 'appearance' (,representations') and 'reality'(the 'will' qua 'thing in itself') . Even if one remains suspicious ofNietzsche's later claim that 'I distrusted Schopenhauer's systemfrom the start', 14 there still can be no doubt that by the time hewrote the third Meditation he had long since jettisoned any allegiancehe may once have had to the two most distinctive featuresof Schopenhauer's philosophical system.Why then does Nietzsche, writing in 1874, still considerSchopenhauer to be the very exemplar of a philosophical educator?The answer to this question lies in the radically new conceptionsof both 'education' and 'philosophy' that are propoundedin this text - though neither will seem all that new to readersacquainted with Nietzsche's unpublished notes from the immediatelypreceding years, for much of the content of Schopenhauer isdirectly anticipated in 'The Philosopher as Cultural Physician'and other posthumously published notes and manuscripts originallyintended for use in the 'philosophers' book' project.As described in the third Meditation, the philosophers' task is'to be lawgivers as to the measure, stamp and weight of things'(p. 144) and to provide their contemporaries with a new 'pictureof life' (p. 141); and it is precisely by establishing these new valuesand by erecting this 'new image of man' (p. 150) that a philosopher'educates' others. He does not, however, accomplish thesethings primarily by what he writes in his books or by the doctrineshe propounds in his system, but rather by the example of his own life.This is precisely how Nietzsche had interpreted the task andaccomplishment of the pre-Platonic philosophers in 'Philosophyin the Tragic Age of the Greeks', and it is also how he interpretsSchopenhauer's accomplishment as a philosophical educator inthis essay. Nietzsche thus feels free to ignore Schopenhauer'sphilosophical doctrines in a book entitled Schopenhauer as Educatorxvii