Individuality, honesty, culture, education, anyone? Schopenhauer as Educator, published in 1876, is a short, very lively, accessible, thought-provoking philosophical work by Friedrich Nietzsche. To provide a modest rasa of what a reader will find contained in its pages, here are several quotes along with my brief comments.

"Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone’s secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle; they dare to show to man as he is, uniquely himself to every last movement of his muscles, more, that in being thus strictly consistent in uniqueness he is beautiful, and worth regarding, and in no way tedious." --------- Thus the core of education for Nietzsche: to nurture the uniqueness and beauty of each individual. Such educated individuals will be worth regarding and in no way boring.

"How reluctant later generations will be to have anything to do with the relics of an era ruled, not by living men, but by pseudo-men dominated by public opinion; for which reason our age may be to some distant posterity the darkest and least known, because least human, portion of human history." ---------- You would think Nietzsche wrote this after a stop at one of our local convenience stores, observing the dull-eyed misshapen standing in line to buy their candy bars and soda. Six million years of human evolution for this?

"We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true helmsman of this existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a mindless act of chance. One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence, especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it. Why go on clinging to this clod of earth, this way of life, why pay heed to what your neighbor says?" ------------ Eddie Addis once told me he wished he could play his guitar during his lunch break but wouldn’t dare bring his guitar to work because ‘What would people think?’ I told him that people don’t give a fig about you, Eddie. Matter of fact, you could drop dead and half the people wouldn’t even notice. After reflecting on my words, the next week Eddie started playing his guitar at lunchtime. Nietzsche would have smiled.

"No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone. . . . There exists in the world a single path along which no one can go except you: whither does it lead? Do not ask, go it alone." ---------- Lesson to last a lifetime. For example, I do not read reviews or overviews of a book until I have reviewed the book myself. I don't want my intuitions, feeling or my own creative juices in any way blocked or interfered with. I sense many other Goodreads reviewers approach their reviews similarly. Thank goodness: freshness and uniqueness all round.

Nietzsche speaks here of his reading Schopenhauer: "The joy of living on this earth is increased by the existence of such a man. The effect on myself since my first acquaintance with that strong and masterful spirit, has been, that I can say of him as he of Plutarch – “As soon as I open him, I seem to grow a pair of wings.” ---------- If you would like to gauge where you are on your life’s journey, a great question to ask: What have you truly loved up to now, what has drawn your soul aloft?

Nietzsche speaks with sarcasm about a culture so focused on money: “Education must be soon over to allow the pursuit of money to be soon begun, and should be just thorough enough to allow of much money being made. The amount of education is determined by commercial interests. In short, "man has a necessary claim to worldly happiness; only for that reason is education necessary." ---------- My goodness. Money, money, money. Some things never change!

This is one book where Nietzsche wrote with a lively sense of humor, as per below, Of course, since this is a review of a work by Nietzsche, Fritz gets the last word: “I sometimes amuse myself with the idea that men may soon grow tired of books and their authors, and the savant of tomorrow come to leave direction in his will that his body be burned in the midst of his books, including of course his own writings. And in the gradual clearing of the forests, might not our libraries be very reasonably used for straw and brushwood? Most books are born from the smoke and vapor of the brain, and to vapor and smoke may they well return. For having no fire within themselves, they shall be visited with fire. And possibly to later century our own may count as the ‘Dark Age’, because our productions heated the furnace hotter and more continuously than ever before.”

This work is available on-line: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Schopenhauer_as_Educator ( )

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