This blog post recollects a lecture given as a Dean's List address at Fordham University, titled Who do you think you are? just because the thematic question is associated with Arthur Schopenhauer who was said (in probably the most famous of the popular anecdotes) to have been walking in the Botanical Gardens in Dresden, gesticulating dramatically — and talking to himself. 

Now this was before cell phones, yet he must not have seemed completely insane but rather perhaps as if he were a famous actor, possibly rehearsing his lines, because one of those watching him came up to him and asked 

"Who are you?" 

Not such an unusual question given the circumstances, it got an unusual reply: 

"—Yes! If you could tell me who I am, then I'd be multiply indebted to you . . ."

Schopenhauer is also famous for his sardonic moral theory, we are all, he says, like certain porcupines: we'd like to be close to one another, but nature endows us with so many spines and bristles...

In Schopenhauer as Educator, Nietzsche highlights the relevance of identifying an exemplar or a model for one’s formation, as he also raises the issue of self-formation.

“I believed that, when the time came, I would discover a philosopher to educate me, a true philosopher whom one could follow without any misgiving because one would have more faith in him than one had in oneself” (SE §2).

The project of educating oneself is not easy; also difficult is the task of finding for oneself an educator of the right kind: yet both undertakings presuppose the almost impossible pre-requisite of self-knowledge.

To work out this path towards finding oneself (again and to begin with) Nietzsche proposes a very pragmatic or tactical exercise, or technique, “the secret” of education, if there is such a thing — and this fantastic quote contains the technical virtues describing a memory palace (how to make one, how to use one) together with  Aristotle's practical philosophy of self-perfection, that is, theory and method, all in one:

 “Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has elevated your soul, what has mastered it and at the same time delighted it? Place these venerated objects before you in a row, and perhaps they will yield for you, through their nature and their sequence, a law, the fundamental law of your true self. Compare these objects, see how one complements, expands, surpasses, transfigures another, how they form a stepladder upon which you have climbed up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies, not hidden deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you normally take to be yourself” (Ibid.).

As with any comparison of different aspects, bracketing prejudices and societal convictions, the point is to find a common aspect that does not change, what mathematicians, physicists and philosophers call the invariant. Here Nietzsche is in accord with the wisdom of the Delphic oracle — gnothi se auton, know thyself — a point that is at the heart of Pindar’s poetic challenge, keep true to yourself, now that you have learned, as you on the Dean’s list have learned who you are, what you are capable of.  

Nietzsche offers the task of education, cultivation, yet not for its own sake as if the point of education were solely to learn for the sake of pure learning, although and as you know that is an extraordinary delight, but as Nietzsche puts it for the sake of becoming free for life itself.

In this way education for Nietzsche is always a liberation, a genuine emancipation:

“Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you what the real raw material of your being is, something quite ineducable, yet in any case accessible only with difficulty, bound, paralyzed: your educators can be only your liberators” (Ibid.).

 Given this, what Nietzsche finds in Schopenhauer is nothing less than a friend, a spiritual and affective or intimate and friendly connection with an author who seemed indeed to be speaking, up close and personal, very directly to him.

This intrigued Nietzsche for by taking what Schopenhauer wrote, however “foolish and immodest a way of putting it, as though it were for me he had written” (Ibid.), Nietzsche discovered not that he was seduced to become Schopenhauer’s disciple, as it might have seemed, but that Schopenhauer permitted Nietzsche to discover himself instead. And Nietzsche realized that such a perceived personal affinity was only possible because of Schopenhauer's rare quality as an author, That is, he wasn't popular (though people read his books and he was quite famous). 
But  he never wrote in a popular fashion, never repeated the clichés of the day, the memes of the day. In other words, Schopenhauer, who took extraordinary care with his writing, did not try to write in such a way that would have ensured his literary or scholarly fame. Instead he wrote for himself and thus he wrote not about Schopenhauer and not only for Schopenhauer. 
Here we are back to the element of seduction essential for every kind of pedagogic undertaking. For what is needed is love and what love always needs is forbearance (that is, putting up with one another).

And Nietzsche himself tells us that Schopenhauer is in the company of the New Testament itself. Detailing this analysis in the second volume of Human, All-too-Human, writing of “the book that speaks of Christ” (HH II §98), Nietzsche explains that there is no other book that “expresses so candidly or contains such an abundance of that which does everybody good [at least] once in a while” (Ibid.). Addressed to everyone, a book for everyone is accordingly universal but to have value it must be specifically, uniquely addressed to each individual. How can such a contradictory style of writing be achieved; how would this, how could this work? For Nietzsche, for the New Testament itself, the answer is love: the “subtlest device which Christianity has over the other religions is a word: it speaks of love” (HH II §95). In turn, the word “love”  works by way of its uncannily metonymic allure:

“There is in the word love something so ambiguous and suggestive, something which speaks to the memory and to future hope, that even the meanest intelligence and the coldest heart still feels something of the luster of this word” (Ibid.).

This associative power, Nietzsche goes on to observe, affects both body and soul, however the listener may be sensually or else spiritually attuned. This metonymic conviction “proceeds from the idea that God could demand of man, his creature and likeness, only that which it is possible for the latter to accomplish” (HH II §96). Because God loves you (and whole metaphysical dominions, levels, and degrees of the same are involved in this faith), the believer is able to believe that “the commandment ‘be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect’ ” can “in fact become a life of bliss come true” (Ibid.). The New Testament enables this confident conviction by way of nothing less than its language and its style. It speaks to the heart. As Beethoven himself set over the Kyrie in his Missa Solemnis, 

“From the Heart, 

and may it reach the heart.” 

Thus and with sufficient perspicacity, Nietzsche reflects, one can learn from the New Testament

“all the expedients by which a book can be made into a universal book, a friend of everyone, and especially that master expedient of representing everything as having already been discovered, with nothing still on the way and as yet uncertain” (HH II §98).

I, the reader, am the intended addressee of this good news, as are you, and you, and you. Where religious and self-help tracts follow the gospel, writing for and to everyone, Schopenhauer writes for himself, so Nietzsche says, and we get the sense that Nietzsche’s subtitle to his Zarathustra, A Book for All and None is meant to go Schopenhauer one better. 

“This is my way, where is yours?”

Writing Schopenhauer as Educator, Nietzsche invokes an author who would seem to have written for Nietzsche as reader, as learner. But such an affinity, such a connection is possible because Schopenhauer’s directed interlocutor is not the reader but includes Schopenhauer himself, qua excluded from the academy, that is, from the received scholarly mainstream of his day. Nietzsche’s reflective point is that Schopenhauer benefits from his isolation (and we may recall by contrast that the theologian Strauss suffers in the context of the Untimely Meditations from his popularity, and so too, as Nietzsche will later argue, does Wagner). 

This is not unlike the pop singer kd lang who claims (on schedule, in the middle of each of her concerts) that everyone there is a freak, everyone there is unique.

This is a common, and beloved, tactic for many performers in concert, be it the Boss himself, Lady Gaga or Adele or, for old folk, Neil Young or Mick Jagger and so on — and you can just add your favorite musician here.

When Nietzsche undertakes his Schopenhauer as Educator, he points to a series of difficulties in coming to know for ourselves and in ourselves whether we have this rareness of character as well as the illusions and the obstacles that stand in the way of finding ourselves even when, perhaps especially when, we have such a rare nature. For it is not easy to reflect on ourselves, and reflection (or meditation or observation) out of time, untimely reflection, is not a neutral affair: “How easy it is” thereby, Nietzsche says,

“to do damage to yourself that no doctor can heal. And moreover, why should it be necessary, since everything—our friendships and enmities, our look and our handshake, our memory and what we forget, our books and our handwriting— bears witness to our being” (SE §2; emphasis added).

It is in this sense that we will conclude our brief reflection on the substance of Nietzsche’s reflections on the value of the thinker as educator for life, precisely “as one who has educated himself and who thus knows how it is done” (SE §1). 

As Nietzsche writes here and throughout his reflections on education as a thinker:

“one should speak only of self-education.” (HH, The Wanderer and his Shadow, §267).

We are hardly beyond the imperative need, as Ivan Illich had once identified it, to “de-school society,” by which he meant an attention to the schooling practices of our schools, as Illich also carefully illustrates in his beautiful book about education (and taking the occasion of the Didascalicon of Hugh of St Victor for this purpose), In the Vineyard of the Text.

Illich reflects, as we have seen that Nietzsche also does, on the physio-motor associations of a memory palace and the praxis of setting one up and of using one, as indeed of a visceral relationship to texts and the physicality of the page (by no means abolished when we have to do with a text illuminated with the backlighting of a screen rather than the colored inks and solid arabesques of a medieval manuscript) and the physiological relationship to memory and to reading characteristic of other times and other peoples, all as the need to go beyond sheer indoctrination, and all for the sake of the possible experiment of drawing youth beyond itself and what it knows about itself.

And this drawing and going beyond is of course the meaning, the perfected meaning of education.

Do not hide your light. 

As students you still have to overspring the shadow of tradition: you still have not yet begun to leap into your own light.

I hope you will continue to risk that leap.