Dissertation, Unicamp (
2008)
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Abstract
The purpose of this thesis is to make explicit the specificity of the following
themes: the Bildung (formation/cultivation), education (Erziehung) and experimentation
[Experimentieren – Erlebnis (experience)] in Nietzsche’s thought. As for that, it sustains
that Nietzsche’s abandonment movement of the formation concept in favor of the notion of
education and the subsequent substitution of education by the theme of experimentation,
revealed a wide process of conceptual modification through which the author develops a
radical theory of the constitution of the human being. There are three distinct, although
connected, moments of this process: the first one (chapters 1 and 2) in which the formation
theme, not only in Nietzsche’s but in all the German tradition of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, is linked to discussions on the educational and formative value of art.
For this reason, after presenting a contextualization of the relation between art and
formation in the German tradition (chapter 1), it is presented (chapter 2) Nietzsche’s
relation – the way it happens in his first important piece of writing The Birth of Tragedy –
with the German aesthetic theories that reflected on the Greek culture, more specifically, on
the problem of tragedy. Besides showing the influence of these theories on Nietzsche’s idea
of formation, it is also shown the particularity of this idea and the elements that enabled the
author to criticize the image of Greek serenity. Such critique happened due to the
acknowledgement of an irretrievable split between public, art and culture in the Germany of
the nineteenth century; the second one, (chapter 3), situated between his first important
piece of writing, The Birth of Tragedy, and the extraordinary change of his thought,
represented by the work Human, All too Human, is concerned about the problem of the
authentic personality formation. In this period, the reflection on the authentic personality
formation or the genius formation occurs in two distinct, although complimentary,
registers: the first one, of analysis and critique of German teaching institutions, carried out
in the five conferences delivered by him in the University of Basileia; and a second one, in
which Nietzsche, based on his own experience with Schopenhauer, shows the dangers, the
difficulties as well as the peculiarities of the formative experience to which one is
submitted in the presence of a true philosopher. At last, the third moment (chapter 4), in
which, based on the works produced after Human, All too human, the transformations of
Nietzsche’s idea concerning the constitution of the human being are presented,
characterized by the abandonment of the notion of formation, by the temporary use of the
notion of education and by the choice of the experimentation notion as the most adequate to
express the radicalism of the human being constitution process. The experimentation theme
is presented in two registers: in the first one (in the first three items of chapter 4), based on
Human, All too human; The Dawn and The Gay Science, it is shown the relation between
the formation theme and the metaphysics critique based on the valorization of history,
psychology and moral analysis; in the second one (in the last two items of chapter 4), it is
reached the most advanced and radical formulation of Nietzsche’s thought on the theme of
the human being constitution. Since the breach of the novel of self-cultivation
(Bildungsroman) in Thus Spoke Zaratustra, dealing with the training and selection theme in
On the Genealogy of Morality, to the establishment of figures of the overman and the
sovereign individual, it is always focused an imperious obligation, which is to refer the
theme of the human being constitution to the notion of experimentation that shows up under
the sign of the concept of time and the solitude experience.