This paper furthers the understanding of Nietzsche's project of increasing the prevalence of higher individuals. I do this by opposing the dominant tendency in Nietzschean scholarship of constructing a single ideal-type. I argue that Nietzsche actually describes multiple higher types, with incommensurable physiological and psychological characteristics, and that attempts to collapse these into one type obscure the nuance and richness of his thought. Furthermore, I claim that higher types are not ahistorical ideals; instead, their emergence relates closely to existing psychological (...) and physiological conditions in society. The artistic-genius type, for example, is characterised by his sensitivity to stimuli and plays a vital role in injecting creativity into culturally uniform societies. He is, however, a counter-productive role model for diverse modern societies, characterised by an abundance of stimuli and widespread reactivity. In response to such conditions, Nietzsche extols the virtue of a peculiarly anti-modern type, who cultivates independence from stimuli. Interpreting higher types as multiple and historically situated is vital to carrying out the normative aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy. This role is performed by the philosophical-physician, who surveys the physiological and psychological conditions of his own age and attempts to exploit these conditions to produce future higher individuals. (shrink)

This essay argues that much can be gained from a close examination of Nietzsche’s work with respect to education. In order to contextualise my argument, I provide a brief critique of Nietzsche’s thinking on aesthetics, educators and education. I then turn my attention to the work of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the figures Zarathustra and the Übermensch, and other Nietzschean works with a view to outline what I mean by a Nietzschean education. My central thesis being that a Nietzschean education is (...) primarily concerned with the cultivation of the self. This is certainly not an easy undertaking as it requires both an educator and education that can reveal to students “what one is” now, and who they could become. In order to bring this about, Nietzsche employs the use of an aesthetic model in the form of an exemplar for students to aspire to become. Here, the exemplar plays an important educative function in Nietzsche’s thinking because the role of the ideal type is to unsettle the student so that they are inspired to attain their unattained self that they recognise in the other. Consequently, what makes my account of a Nietzschean education significant is due to its concern with fostering timeless educational aims, such as learning to see, think, speak, write, and feel, by unsettling students with an ideal educator and true education so that students can get a sense of who they are now and who they could become. (shrink)

In this study, it will be my concern to examine the argument for a discontinuity between Nietzsche’s early and ‘middle’ period writings. Specifically, I will address the notion that these earlier works represent something that had, by 1878, become intolerable for Nietzsche: life-denial. The typical reading of The Birth of Tragedy presents it as a work of Schopenhauerian pessimism, which offers the art of beautifying illusion as the only possible means to escape the relentless horror of existence. Scholarship in the (...) last 20 years has worked against this interpretation, and yet no scholar – perhaps with the exception of Michele Haar5 - has been able to fully endorse the claim made by Nietzsche in his 1886 preface to the work, “An Attempt at Self Criticism”: that Birth offered aesthetics as a remedy to life-denial. It was in the name of opposing this ethos – which Nietzsche most famously aligned with Christian and Buddhist asceticism – that the Free Spirit works were to wage their war against metaphysics and to denounce the ‘afterworldsmen’ who turn their back on life and seek for meaning in the Beyond. Through a reading of Birth, as well as its draft texts – “The Dionysian Worldview” and “The Greek Music Drama”-, the works’ proposed follow up Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, and the lectures series this latter was based on I will argue for an alternative interpretation. From a Naturalist reading of these early texts and their ‘Aesthetic interpretation of Life’, I seek to trace a line of continuity that extends into the Free Spirit works. (shrink)