Fragments, Notes, and Unfinished Essays of 1872–1874

The themes on education from the 1872 lectures as well as the last ten sections of The Birth of Tragedy on the problems of theoretical man and morality can be supplemented by a number of unpublished writings during the early 1870s in order to identify Nietzsche’s development at the time as a teacher, as a writer who has distanced himself from scholarly philology, and as a philosopher who will soon announce the meaning of being timeless and, ultimately, a free spirit. The recovery of the metaphysics of truth was well on its way; the eternal had to be re-introduced into an era that had become much too enthusiastic about its narrow time. The many and varied pieces of the collection sometimes known as Das Philosophenbuch will be compared for one outstanding reason. The task ahead involves being able to separate only a few of the fragments, drafts, and incomplete and never-published essays and to understand Nietzsche’s personal relationship to them at the same time as presenting an interpretation that he may very well have adopted from Plato and during one of his university courses on his philosophy. One issue of rhetoric was, again, of utmost concern for the Greeks—at least to the philosophers who were not professionals and did not pride themselves on their linguistic expertise and services to paying students. In the Phaedrus, Plato writes. “If someone sets about skillfully teaching another person rhetoric, he will demonstrate with precision the essential nature of that towards which his pupil is to direct his speeches—which is, as you know, the soul.” The distinction is immediately noticeable for us: is language to be a study for the sake of the techniques of rhetoric, as a “device,” or for its human meaning for the soul and the implication for life? The question is a modern one and directly related to some of the more determined ideas promoted during the last century of theoretical enthusiasm. They were many, varied, and engaging; the fragility of language was only one tenet. Was the erosion of meaning a conscious and willful project, to better weaken the individual and render him defenseless against the onslaught of social forces? An educator who is concerned with teaching a student the essential skills of language—of reading, writing, and speaking, as Nietzsche was—will be devoted to the enhancement of his soul, the Greek psyche and its aspects far more than the material aspects of language and its various parts and functions. The linguistic, already defined as a problem in the 1872 lectures, will soon be explicitly connected and contrasted from his interpretation of physiology—the affects of reading and its transference as a process of self-cultivation. A human experience will be primary as opposed to any reduction to a scientistic technique. There will be many opportunities in what follows to highlight Nietzsche’s overall intentions in these humanistic works.