(c) Nagzi

(c) Nagzi

Article: Douglas W. Yacek (November, 2013) Going to School with Friedrich Nietzsche: The Self in Service of Noble Culture. Studies in Philosophy and Education.

This article by Douglas Yacek may or may not get some pulses racing, but you can’t go wrong with a bit of Nietzche in my opinion – it’s more a question of how big the bit is when it comes to education theory. Here’s the abstract:

To understand Nietzsche’s pedagogy of self-overcoming and to determine its true import for contemporary education, it is necessary to understand Nietzsche’s view of the self that is to be overcome. Nevertheless, previous interpretations of self-overcoming in the journals of the philosophy of education have lacked serious engagement with the Nietzschean self. I devote the first part of this paper to redressing this neglect and arguing for a view of the Nietzschean self as an assemblage of ontologically basic affects which have been guided and modulated by the incorporation of perspectives. This interpretation has important consequences for self-overcoming, for it constrains the individual’s conscious agency to operations on perspectives. In light of this view I then advance a competing conception of self-overcoming and discuss some of the shortcomings of antecedent interpretations. Although previous interpreters have done their part to exhaust the characteristic actions of self-overcoming, I argue that they have either exaggerated the deleteriousness of social influence in the formation of the authentic individual, or else ignore it altogether. In the final part I reconsider the debate over the democratic or aristocratic nature of Nietzsche’s pedagogy of self-overcoming. Interestingly, self-overcoming cannot be labeled strictly as either, and out of this ambiguity grows the role of the school as an agent of cultural transformation.

There’s plenty in this article to argue with, such as this sentence:

the school determines who has the right to lose the chains of obedience

I don’t know how many Nietzscheans are out there, but this article might convince some to join their number. Maybe.