Sacha Golob

ABSTRACT: As Janaway observed, “the topic of Schopenhauer as Educator is really education rather than Schopenhauer”; indeed, Nietzsche described it as addressing a “problem of education without equal” (EH ‘Books’ UM.3). This article reconstructs the pedagogical challenge and solution presented by Nietzsche in that text. It is obvious that Schopenhauer’s example is meant to underpin Nietzsche’s new pedagogy: what is less obvious is how exactly that exemplary role is meant to work. I concentrate on three issues: the exact nature of the pupil’s relationship to the exemplar, the institutional context of education, and the links of both to self-knowledge. Throughout I use as a foil a thinker who discussed these questions at length and who is in many ways Nietzsche’s unspoken target throughout Schopenhauer as Educator: Immanuel Kant. We need to understand, in short, “what, after Kant, Schopenhauer can be to us” (SE 3).

Irene McMullin’s Existential Flourishing (Cambridge University Press, 2018) weaves together virtue ethics and existential phenomenology: the influence of Heidegger and Levinas, in particular, is clear throughout. This paper provides a summary of McMullin’s elegantly argued position and raises a number of possible concerns, particularly regarding the interaction of  Aristotelian and Phenomenological assumptions. I focus specifically on the role of the 2nd-person perspective, on the links between exemplars and socialisation, and on the problem of those who, as Nietzsche put it, “are both evil and happy – a species on which the moralists are silent”.

This work addresses a question that is simultaneously moral, strategic and ontological: by what process, by what mechanisms, is ethical virtue acquired? The delineation of these terms, 'ethics' and 'virtue', and the shifts in their meaning, will be one of my central concerns, but let us start by hearing the question as one about a specific form of excellence or authority: a robust ability to judge, to choose, to live ethically. By what mechanism is this produced? What fact or development or transformation yields it?