Rethink.

“The harsh Helot condition to which the tremendous extent of science has condemned every single person today is one of the main reasons why education and educators appropriate to fuller, richer, deeper natures are no longer forthcoming. Our culture suffers from nothing more than it suffers from the superabundance of presumptuous journeymen and fragments of humanity; our universities are, against their will, the actual forcing-houses for this kind of spiritual instinct-atrophy. And all Europe already has an idea of this – grand politics deceives no one… Germany counts more and more as Europe’s flatland. – I am still looking for a German with whom I could be serious after my fashion – how much more for one with whom I might be cheerful! – Twilight of the Idols: ah, who today could grasp from how profound a seriousness a hermit is here relaxing! – The most incomprehensible thing about us is our cheerfulness…”

- Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Like all Nietzsche, this passage starts out in a way that I think I actually know what he’s talking about, and then he moves to more ambiguous territory. I understand the part about science taking away from our students that which can fulfill and empower: instead of being taught to make thoughtful choices or to build beautifully or even – gasp – to sacrifice, they are taught to “achieve,” where medals and pieces of paper confirm that yes, they are cogs in a machine.

What I do not understand begins with the second sentence quoted. What are the “presumptuous journeymen” and “fragments of humanity?” And what is the “will” of a university?

In today’s university, we have scholars that get hired for a price, and students that are enrolled because their tuition pays the university’s bills. I suppose “fragments of humanity” could refer to our using of textbooks and readers, that give fragments of the past’s voices, as opposed to the full say of a past thinker. But the university thrives on this sort of idiocy, as it makes money and creates trends and problems so as to assert its relevance among the populace, which could care less for the “deeper” natures. And I don’t think the German universities of Nietzsche’s time, while they might have been nationalist, and not terribly capitalist, can be exempted from this critique. They wanted cogs in a machine ultimately.

So Nietzsche must mean that the University has a higher purpose than any particular university can conceive. But if I say that, then what do I do with “all of Europe knows this?” Do we in America really know what we’re missing when we’ve turned colleges into just another way of getting more sports on TV? It would seem Nietzsche thinks the University’s higher purpose is knowable by the populace, and that the populace is sufficiently ironic and sarcastic as to not give a damn about that higher purpose.

There is another way to interpret these lines – we could say that German universities had a different purpose than ours, and that the German people knew they were diluting nationalism with a push towards the utility of the sciences. The problem with that reading is that it is too narrow. In a lot of ways, we’re Prussia/Germany in the late 19th century. Our university system comes from there primarily. While we’re not as imperial, we blindly follow political correctness the way they indulged in Anti-Semitism. And we can be bloodthristy and anarchic – as if we were never taught to behave, or never respected law as a good – when given the chance. The question is not the particular politics of the times, but rather the fact that the same forces are driving their politics and ours. It doesn’t matter if we blindly adhere to liberal democracy and they were consumed with nationalism. It’s all stupid, just to varying degrees, because the key force is our irrationality.

It is with all that in mind we come to the last lines of this passage. The idols are in retreat because of modern science, and whatever the pieties of the people are, they are dependent on the illusion that secularism actually exists, that if they do not designate a holy they are beyond worshipping anything blindly. The hermit – he who in previous ages would be most spiritual – now can play, can be free to think fully and with an intensity once reserved only for saintliness. Society’s loss of goals means, ironically enough, the ability for a newly empowered individual to arise. This need not be a turn to tyranny, as the reevaluation of all values, which only the greatest of men can perform, presupposes a sentiment which only the greatest of men have. The counter to empire in politics, empire being manifest in our desire for science to produce technology, need not be defined by simple piety anymore, but rather by a genuine love of freedom that characterizes the searching for the divine, the mark of the most spiritual.

• Nietzsche on the Opposition
• Notes on Nietzsche, “Thus Spake Zarathustra” – “On the New Idol”
• Preliminary Thoughts on Body, Soul and Morality: Xenophon, Memorabilia I 2.19-20
• Democracy’s Mysticism: Thoughts on "All Religions are One," by Blake
• Notes on “Mathemata” in Heidegger’s “Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics”

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