Authenticity and Learning

Nietzsche's Educational Philosophy

David Cooper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135175504
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

David E. Cooper elucidates Nietzsche's educational views in detail, in a form that will be of value to educationalists as well as philosophers. In this title, first published in 1983, he shows how these views relate to the rest of Nietzsche's work, and to modern European and Anglo-Saxon philosophical concerns.

For Nietzsche, the purpose of true education was to produce creative individuals who take responsibility for their lives, beliefs and values. His ideal was human authenticity. David E. Cooper sets Nietzsche's critique against the background of nineteenth-century German culture, yet is concerned at the same time to emphasize its bearing upon recent educational thought and policy.

1
Authenticity

The issue posed by Nietzsche is how the individual shall live in the era of history following ‘the death of God’. God’s death is his metaphor not only for the dissolution of religious faith, but for ‘the devaluation of our hitherto highest values’—those of the Enlightenment and Romanticism as much as of Christianity.(1) Not only God, but Progress, the Perfectibility of Man, Historical Destiny, and Universal Morality, are dead or dying. God is dead because we killed Him, or rather abetted His suicide. That is: our hitherto highest values have destroyed themselves by being taken to their logical conclusion. In particular, the religious and moral value of honesty, together with the Enlightenment spirit of enquiry and objectivity, have conspired to display the ‘shabby origins’ of our beliefs and values—including those of religion, morality, and the Enlightenment themselves. The result is that ‘the universe seems to have lost value, seems “meaningless”’.(2) The outcome is nihilism: the sense that ‘the highest values have devalued themselves. There is no goal. There is no answer to the question “Why?”’.(3)

Few would deny that our century has witnessed catastrophic events bearing the mark of nihilistic rage against traditional beliefs and values, or that each decade has spawned movements, among the young especially, which are distinguished more by their iconoclasm than their constructive programmes—Flappers, Dadaists, Futurists, Angry Young Men, Absurdists, Punks, and so on. But the young become old, and the dominant image today is not supplied by bomb-throwing Nekrasovs or abusehurling skinheads. The dominant impression is less one of aggressive, iconoclastic intellectual ferment than of comfortable acceptance of many traditional values or an equally comfortable turning aside from reflection on matters of value, an immersion in ‘the business of life’. The end of ideology, rather than of God, seems the more manifest event of recent times.

Nietzsche would not see this as contradicting his prediction of ‘the advent of nihilism’, for what he meant by that was not at all confined to aggressive intellectual and physical iconoclasm, to nihilism ‘on the St. Petersburg model’. Nihilism, he urged, can be manifested in many ways. To be sure, there is the apocalytpic St Petersburg version, with men ‘constantly plung-apocalyptic wandering through an endless night’, rushing ‘restlessly, violently headlong, like a river which wants to reach its end’.(4) But there is the Buddhistic version, too: a quiet rejection of this world and its values, in favour of an immaterial state wherein self-identity is dissolved. More important, nihilism is also manifested in those attitudes which, a moment ago, seemed to contrast with it—comfortable acceptance of tradition, or ‘the practical man’s’ equally comfortable indifference to questions of value. For Nietzsche, unreflective acceptance of established beliefs and values belongs to ‘passive’ nihilism, when people ‘tired and exhausted’ welcome a condition in which ‘everything that refreshes, heals, calms, stuns, comes into the foreground under various disguises; religious or moral or political or aesthetic’.(5) As for the ‘restlessness, haste, [and] hustling’, and ‘the reduction of problems to ones of pleasure and displeasure’, of those who pride themselves on getting on with the real business of life, these are but symptoms of a deep pessimism about the reality of values, which is itself a form of nihilism.(6) Such people, of course, have their pursuits—after wealth, say: but this is no longer the purpose it once was in an age when belief in Progress put a value upon wealth. Today ‘the true purpose of all wealth is forgotten’.(7)

Among the various manifestations of nihilism, says Nietzsche, it is the St Petersburg version which is to be least feared. Not only does it reveal, in full nakedness, just what has happened—the devaluation of values—but its suicidal ferocity ensures that it would only be a transitional phase, to be followed by a better age when men would return, purged, to the creation of new values: ‘an age which will carry heroism into the field of knowledge and wage wars for the sake of principles’.(8) Far more depressing and insidious are the muted, masked, ‘self-narcoticizing’ versions which would let nihilism become ‘the normal condition’.(9) Moreover, at least nihilists of the St Petersburg brand retain a will, however negative its direction; and ‘better that a man wills nothing, than that he does not will’.(10)

There are at least two reasons why Nietzsche thinks that comfortable acceptance and comfortable evasion are, in an age which has seen the death of God, forms of nihilism. First: once the massive challenge to our hitherto highest values has been made, then the failure to grapple with it constitutes an admission, au fond, that it cannot be answered. It can only be because people suspect ‘there is no answer to the question “Why?”’ that they desperately and unreflectingly hang on to established answers or avert their gaze from the whole matter. After all, if there are values and beliefs that should guide one’s life, how could it be a matter of blithe, unreflective indifference which these were? Second, the failure to grapple with the challenge is a denial, a negation, of one’s human nature, of the uniquely human capacity for self-conscious concern with beliefs, values, and purposes. No doubt it has always been that most people, for the most part, have failed to exercise this capacity, but it is only with the death of God, with the uncovering of the ‘shabby origins’ of established beliefs and values, that this failure becomes an evasion, a refusal to face what is before one’s eyes. It is only then that a challenge has been issued, to which the response may be affirmation or denial of one’s human nature. This is why the death of God is an event of unparalleled significance.

Nietzsche’s assimilation to nihilism, in the familiar sense, of attitudes usually thought to contrast with it, is illuminating: but it runs so strongly against our familiar talk that it is best, perhaps, to pose Nietzsche’s question, ‘How to overcome nihilism?’, in different terms. In doing so, we introduce a theme, dimly portended in the previous paragraph, which in its various twists and turns, will occupy us throughout the book. There is a term Nietzsche himself rarely employs, but which is the most suitable label for a constant object of his philosophical concern—‘authenticity’. There are countless passages, at any rate, where he affirms the paramount value of what several later writers have intended by that term. Clearly it will not be an inappropriate label for what is expressed in passages like these:

‘Better to remain in debt than to pay with a coin that does not bear our own image’—so our sovereignty wills.(11)

The individual is something totally new and creating anew, something absolute, all his actions entirely his own. In the last resort, the individual derives the values of his actions from himself alone.(12)

Nietzsche’s question could now be posed as follows: ‘How to live authentically without collapsing into nihilism of the familiar, iconoclastic, negative kind?’ It is not, of course, difficult to avoid that collapse: comfortable acceptance of inherited values, or comfortable evasion of questions of value, will both do the trick. But these are not authentic alternatives, for we should hardly describe those who sidestep nihilism in these ways as ‘creating anew’, or ‘deriving values from themselves alone’. The coins in which they have bought themselves off scarcely ‘bear their own image’.

When the question is posed in these terms, it is clear that Nietzsche’s main focus is upon ‘how to live authentically’, rather than upon how to avoid nihilism (à la St Petersburg). It is not the latter, but inauthentic living, which threatens to become ‘the normal condition’, and Nietzsche’s effort is devoted to struggling against that threat. In this chapter, I try to lend more precision to the question Nietzsche asks and to produce a rough picture of what our label, ‘authenticity’, is to express. Each subsequent chapter serves, in its way, to fill out that picture.

During his years as a university professor, Nietzsche often raised the question of authenticity as one which faces the teacher. When the teacher enters an institution, he not only encounters buildings, classrooms, and playgrounds, but policies, beliefs, purposes, and values that permeate its activities. Some of these settle what is to be taught, and how; some the manner in which the curriculum is divided; others shape the disciplinary rules in force—and so on. They are not ones of his own making, nor is he likely to have much impact upon them. A familiar disturbance felt by a teacher arises when some of these policies, values, or whatever, are not ones to which he can subscribe. He cannot, say, agree to the assumptions on which the history lessons he is to teach are based; or to the moral basis, perhaps, for some of the school’s rules; or to the general aim—winning scholarships, say—which percolates through the school’s activities. The disturbance produces a problem of authenticity, for unless the teacher resigns or is willing to invite considerable friction at work, he must simulate agreement to views that are not his.

A different disturbance is felt when a teacher resents the position he is placed in vis-à-vis his pupils: the way, perhaps, he is set up as a sure judge in front of them on matters that seem to him to be problematic, matters that do not permit the distinction between teacher and pupil which the style of the school imposes. This is the problem felt by Rickie Elliot in E.M.Forster’s The Longest Journey, when he regrets having taken a post, at his wife’s bidding, to teach classics at a boarding school:

I feel myself a learner, not a teacher. It’s different if I was really a scholar. But I can’t pose as one, can I? I know much more than the boys, but I know very little. Surely the honest thing is to be myself to them. Let them accept me or refuse me as that.(13)

But the headmaster will not allow Rickie ‘to be himself’, so that until he resigns he does, after all, have to be a poseur.

Neither of these disturbances, however, induces the critical problem of authenticity that a third does. The thought which may strike the teacher is not that he cannot subscribe to, or authoritatively transmit, various beliefs and values, but that he has slipped into, fallen into, unreflective acceptance of them. They have become part of the school’s furniture; they go with the job like the free stationery. The Pascalian thought might set in that, were he teaching ‘on the other side of the Pyrenees’ or in a different age, then it would have been a very different set of beliefs and values into which he would have slipped. He may not be able to think of reasons against what he has come to accept: what disturbs is that he has simply taken so many things on board, not worked them out for himself. Even if he does have a basis from which to criticize the beliefs and values he has accrued, this basis will itself consist of presuppositions and conceptions that can fall victim to the same worry. The subject he teaches, for example, will have its own presuppositions: and are they not ones he simply found himself sharing as a result of his training and the climate in which it took place? Would he not have accepted very different ones, had he been trained the other side of the mountains?—and, if so, what has been his responsibility for his outlook?

This disturbance, once set in, has no obvious terminus: for it is the case with all beliefs and values that they, or ones from which they derive, have been acquired through inheritance, hearsay, training, received opinion, everyday chatter, and so on. Because the problem becomes global, embracing all beliefs and values, it is not one that teachers alone confront. But although tinkers and tailors can feel it as well, it was appropriate to introduce it in connection with teachers for, in a peculiarly important way, they are transmitters, as well as recipients and inheritors of beliefs and values. The teacher confronts not only his relation to his beliefs and values, but his pupils’ relation to theirs, since he is instrumental in shaping it. It is this latter relation, indeed, which is often the more vivid one for teachers, and which they discuss under a heading like ‘indoctrination’. But it is bizarre if a genuine concern for the authenticity of one’s pupils’ views remains accompanied by a sanguine indifference towards the ways in which one’s own views have come about.

There is, naturally, no short answer to the question of how the teacher, for whom this disturbance has arisen, should proceed. At this stage, indeed, there can hardly be a long one either, given the vagueness of notions like ‘deriving values from oneself’ or ‘making beliefs one’s own’. But it is worth stating at once that one response, which many might feel to be natural, would be overhasty. I mean the response that it could only be through ‘child-centred’ or ‘discovery method’ teaching that pupils could be put in an authentic relation to the views they will emerge with. This is too quick, since it could be that thoroughly traditional methods are prerequisites for developing that discipline without which the forging of views for oneself would be a charade. Nietzsche, who has harsh things to say about ‘mechanical’ teaching, also writes:

The most desirable thing remains, under all circumstances, a hard discipline at the right time; namely, at that age when it still makes one proud to see a lot demanded of one… there are no good scholars who do not have the instincts of a capable soldier…. What does one learn in a hard school? Obeying and commanding.(14)

It would also be premature to judge the impact which teaching can have in promoting authentic beliefs and values. For some, authenticity is too private a state to be produced by the relatively public enterprise of teaching; while, for others, it is too much a function of wider social factors for the relatively insulated activity of teaching to be fundamental. The first view runs through many of Hermann Hesse’s books: Siddartha, for example, whose hero, a young Indian noble, dedicates his life to the attempt to be ‘true to himself’. No teaching, he decides can help him; not because it is false, but because it is teaching. Despite his admiration for the Buddha, he refuses to join Gautama’s disciples, for this would be to succumb to the views of another, expressed in another’s words. On the other hand, a main theme of Theodor Adorno’s book The Jargon of Authenticity is that inauthentic existence is a direct result of social and economic evils which the ‘superstructural’ enterprise of education can hardly touch. Indeed, to encourage men to seek authenticity through personal or educational endeavour is to abdicate the real responsibility of changing the class structure which is at the root of inauthentic life.

We need not deny that no teacher can substitute for personal endeavour, that there is necessarily something lonely about the quest to forge values and beliefs for oneself. Nor need we deny that certain social conditions may be less favourable than others to this quest. But it remains that the course of this quest can surely not be unaffected by what a person hears, learns, and experiences from his teachers. The spirit, if not the letter, of the following remark of Nietzsche’s will therefore serve us as a premise: ‘I cannot see at all how a person can put things right again who failed to go to a good school at the right time. Such a person will not know himself.’(15)

Do many people encounter the problem of authenticity felt by our teacher? Both less and more than might appear. At times and in places during this century, concern for authenticity seems to have attained epidemic proportions—among German students of the 1920s, ‘café existentialists’ of post-war Paris, or the California ‘hippies’ of the 1960s. But one says ‘appears’ and ‘seems’ since not in all cases, presumably, was invocation of the jargon of authenticity matched by seriousness of concern. On the other hand, there are many who, without invoking the jargon, express concerns to which it would not be inappropriate; those teachers, for example, who are p...