Your Self!”: Nietzsche as Educator
“Be your self!” Nietzsche offers this sage—yet, today, relatively commonplace—advice at the beginning of “Schopenhauer as Educator.” We can be sure, however, that the meaning of this adage is anything but commonplace for Nietzsche. He is not reassuring his reader that they should take it easy. We cannot draw closer to this self by consulting a life coach. Still less does he appeal here to an immutable kernel of being that we might call the self, resting like a seed at the core of one’s everyday experience. For Nietzsche there is no soul-atom, no unitary monad to which we refer when we speak of the self.[2] Rather, this self would be the end result of a difficult labor. Nietzsche’s advice is issued as a challenge to the reader to differentiate self from others, and actively to create them-selves in the light of this difference:
The man who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: “Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.”[3]
Nietzsche’s call to his reader “to be your self,” as well as his later directive “to become what you are,”[4] are fascinating not only because they gesture toward the more-often neglected (by traditional philosophers) lived experience of the reader, but also to the extent that these commands are completely empty of normative content. One may say that this is precisely the point: that Nietzsche was not one to prescribe how one ought to live, and that, anyway, one does not “become who one is” by following the dictates of others. Perhaps more significantly, however, by leaving a gaping chasm at the site of the reader’s self—that is, by abstaining from telling the reader who they should be—isn’t it possible that Nietzsche thus primes his reader for a more radical subjection to his will? More precisely, we could read this content-free imperative “to be your self” as initiating the disarticulation of self in the present through which the self can then be reconstituted for a more ‘Nietzsche-an’ future. Nietzsche could be read, thus, to enact an intervention in the nihilistic present through the reorganization of his readers’ wills and capacities, and it is his text that would achieve such a coup.
This permission “to be your self”—taken together with other more-explicit instructions regarding how one should read, how one should philosophize, create art, play music, evaluate life—opens the reader to Nietzsche’s subjection of them in their doing, thinking, and desiring, such that even if, as he writes, these elements are “not you yourself,” they might as well be. Or at least, in line with his critique of the distinction between “deed” and “doer”[5] we might conjecture that what Nietzsche suggests here is a new mode of doing, thinking, and desiring that would create a better self: a break with present styles of living, led by his interruption of the reader’s self-reflection. For it is precisely the reader’s doing, thinking, and desiring to which Nietzsche lays claim with his challenge to examine and to become their self, in contradistinction to all with whom they share a world and a time. Bidding his reader to transcend the laziness characteristic of fashionable men, who are turned out like “factory products,” Nietzsche gestures toward an alternative future: a future of the artisan philosopher instead of a temporality of mass production, for which there is no future.
[H]ow right it is for those who do not feel themselves to be citizens of this time to harbour great hopes; for if they were citizens of this time they would be helping to kill their time and so perish with it—while their desire is rather to awaken their time to life and so live on themselves in this awakened life. (Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 128)
In so doing, Nietzsche appoints himself the seer of a future that can only be actualized by his readers, and even then, only by the ones who can envisage a future as free and novel as the one Nietzsche foreshadows. This is “judgment day,” and only those who subscribe to an open future, rather than the closed circularity and nihilism of everyman’s temporality, can truly live. As we shall see, however, such a future falls short of the open insecurity this vision promises to the extent that Nietzsche already underwrites it.[6] He could as well ask us, “Have you heard the Good News?,” thus heralding himself as a new savior.
But if Nietzsche’s appeal to the reader to invent a new temporal horizon and trajectory seems vaguely eschatological, the reference point for this quiet revolution is immanent to the reading of his texts. With a view to reevaluating his or her own self and role in human history, the reader should submit to Nietzsche’s teaching. For through his account of Arthur Schopenhauer’s formative influence upon him, Nietzsche offers himself as educator, benefactor, and even liberator.
[Y]our true nature lies, not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be. Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you what the true basic material of your being is, something in itself ineducable and in any case difficult of access, bound and paralysed: your educators can be only your liberators. (Untimely Meditations, 129)
What must be understood is that Nietzsche’s appeal to this liberated self is not only an antimetaphysical, or deconstructive, gesture (as so many have already argued). But also, Nietzsche sets out here to liberate the reader’s self for his own higher purpose. By divesting oneself of parochial commitments, as Nietzsche bids the reader to do, one is opened to a training, or education, that requires a commitment instead to Nietzsche’s cultural and philosophical project. The spirit of self-transformation that Nietzsche’s philosophy is renowned for promoting, is not simply a mode of freedom, but more accurately prepares the reader for subjugation to Nietzsche.
How would such a process of subjugation occur? If we were to take our cue from Nietzsche’s own account of the self—as a confederation of diverse impulses or wills—then what is necessary is a reordering of his readers’ drives. A reordering, that is to say, which would render them better suited to executing the vision of culture Nietzsche’s philosophy foretells. Yet importantly, the process of reorganizing his reader’s self, however indifferent to the individual this would seem to be, is, rather, deeply personal. In order to gain a sense of the exclusive character of this process, it is perhaps best to turn to Nietzsche’s own subjection to his philosopher–teacher, as described again in “Schopenhauer as Educator”:
I am one of those readers of Schopenhauer who when they have read one page of him know for certain they will go on to read all the pages and will pay heed to every word he ever said. I trusted him at once and my trust is the same now as it was nine years ago. Though this is a foolish and immodest way of putting it, I understand him as though it were for me he had written. (Untimely Meditations, 133)
By reading Schopenhauer, Nietzsche thus discovered his “true self.” Or perhaps, rather, Schopenhauer’s writing beckoned to a self that Nietzsche did not even know he had in him. It is by means of a similarly revelatory experience of self-discovery that Nietzsche’s readers find in him a teacher and formative influence. Let us keep in mind, however, that if Nietzsche chanced upon Schopenhauer, and upon himself in Schopenhauer, his own reader’s reception of him is not left to chance. For Nietzsche anticipates his reader’s response to him by building into his philosophy its many trajectories and futures. Nietzsche’s philosophy needs to be variously interpreted: if it is to beget a culture, then it must also be able to support a diversity of mutually conditioning—symbiotic—life forms. The interpretation, viewed as an artifact, is symptomatic of the form of life that produced it. Yet for Nietzsche interpretation also expresses the encounter that constitutes life forms: between a will and what feeds it. Nietzsche thus wishes to nourish, with his philosophy, the forms that best promote his revalued future; and to order, or classify the rest—thereby neutralizing their power and domesticating them to his goal. To gain insight into how this is achieved, we will need to review Nietzsche’s
