The Closing of the German Mind ‘Where is it written in stone that there have to be so many schools, and hence ever more teachers?’ By James K.A. Smith
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-closing-of-the-german-mind-1450897817
The university generates more invective than paeans. In Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind,” the author’s etiology of the university’s malaise was a German invasion of Marx, Weber and Freud, smuggled in through works by French authors. But while we might remember Bloom deriding “the Nietzschean left,” in fact what he lambastes is the left’s misappropriation of Nietzsche. “Nietzsche’s call to revolt against liberal democracy,” Bloom commented, is a call “from the Right.” Few today would be comfortable with his answers to the nihilism he diagnosed.
The record might be set straight with the publication of this curious little volume, “Anti-Education.” It might have just as easily been titled, “The Closing of the German Mind.” Billed as lectures “On the Future of Our Educational Institutions,” this is instead a dramatic dialogue. A renegade group of students take flight from their “pleasure-loving” confrères” into the woods, where they happen to overhear a conversation between a great philosopher (who sounds a lot like Schopenhauer) and his assistant about what constitutes “true education.”
Anti-Education
By Friedrich Nietzsche
New York Review, 124 pages, $14.95
Already in 1872 Nietzsche is criticizing a twofold tendency: toward expansion and dissemination on the one hand and narrowing and weakening on the other. As education aims to reach everyone, it gives up its “highest, noblest, loftiest claims” and contents itself “with serving some other form of life, for instance, the state.”
“Where is it written in stone,” the Philosopher asks, “that there have to be so many schools, and hence ever more teachers? After all, we are all aware that the demand for more schools comes from a sphere inimical to true education, and that it results in nothing but anti-education. . . . The modern state is in the habit of making its views on these matters known and accompanying its educational demands with saber rattling.” Anyone who’s heard election campaign proposals for expanding education will be familiar with such refrains. Nothing is more “anti-education” than the justification of the university by utility.
The schools that result, the Philosopher opines, are merely institutions of survival: “No course of instruction that ends in a career, in breadwinning, leads to culture or true education in our sense; it merely shows how one can save and secure the self in the struggle for survival.” This is potent catnip for those who love to hate the university. But, of course, we good democrats shrink from the elitist, aristocratic trajectory that Nietzsche’s critique takes—namely, his advocacy for the cultivation of genius, a nationalist cult of the German Spirit, and the valorization of noble purpose. Lest there be any doubt, he is explicit about the goal of our anti-educational institutions: nothing less than “the emancipation of the masses from the rule of the great individuals.”
Reaching this point in “Anti-Education” is like being stopped short during polite conversation when a respected mentor tells an off-color joke. You’ve been nodding along enthusiastically with everything so far, and then an elephant walks into the room. “How long do you think today’s schools will persist in the educational practices that weigh so heavily upon you?,” the Philosopher asks his despondent protégé. “Their time is past,” he counsels, “their days are numbered.”
But the timeliness of this book proves the Philosopher a false prophet. Is it because of our timidity? Would we rather have anti-education with the luxury of our laments than embrace exclusivity of “true” education? Nietzsche’s lectures end prematurely. The characters are left anticipating the arrival of a leader who never shows up.
—Mr. Smith is a professor of philosophy at Calvin College and the editor of Comment magazine.
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