This is a great read for anyone interested in Nietzsche’s development. The book covers the first 24 years of Nietzsche’s life, smoothly combining straight biography with intellectual biography. Blue has gone to impressive scholarly depths, reading and interpreting Nietzsche’s student writings, letters, and autobiographies, all in the context of events in his life. This is great stuff.
Nietzsche is pretty high on the uniqueness scale in the history of philosophy. He was not an academic philosopher, either in the technical sense or in the stylistic sense, and he excites strong opinions still within philosophy departments and in the philosophical literature. Blue’s work in telling us the story of how Nietzsche came to be Nietzsche is invaluable.
A key theme throughout the book is the notion of Bildung. Bildung was a key part of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s influential theories of education and self-development during the time of Nietzsche’s education.. The German word “Bildung,” at least as used during this time, connoted both “education” and “self-development.” The job of the student is not only to learn history, skills, and the like, but to take all that is given to him, all he learns, all the circumstances he is born into, all the discipline and skills he acquires, and fashion an individual self from them. This distinctive view of education was built into the structure of the schools Nietzsche attended, from skills and disciplines in the Gymnasium on through to self-directed study and autonomous self-direction at the university level.
Nietzsche himself was very deliberate in taking on this task of self-development. His periodic autobiographical writings, all through his young life, reflect the concern with taking his own environment of forces and influences, and fashioning the person he is to be purposefully from them.
Also, at the early age of 16, in an essay on “Hunters and Fishers,” Nietzsche already raises the question of self-development to the cultural level. How does human civilization itself progress, from primitive and “brutal" hunters and fishers to true civilization? In a world of environmental causation, it’s hard to find an agency to accomplish such a thing.
These questions of self-development, and where the agency for such self-definition comes from, recur throughout Nietzsche’s life and works. We see the very practical origins of that problem here, as well as substantial contributions from Nietzsche’s studies, especially his reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson’s views on individualism and the possibility for an individual to take charge and ownership of his character, in the midst of his influences, resonates with Humboldt’s perspective on education. During his formative teenage years, Nietzsche became an avid reader of Emerson, and Emerson would become a long-lasting influence.
Nietzsche’s rejection of religion is a good instance of this idea of self-development.
Nietzsche’s father was a minister, and Nietzsche was raised to join the clergy himself. His rejection of religion looks to have evolved along lines very fitting to Humboldt’s notion of Bildung, as well as Emersonian individualism. It does not appear to have come about through a direct, theoretical confrontation with the validity of Christian beliefs (or any other religious beliefs). Instead, it grows from the idea of self-development that he adopted. In Nietzsche’s own case, with his family ministerial tradition and his own upbringing with the ministry as a presumed goal, Nietzsche’s rejection then looks more a matter of who he chose to be, from the paths provided by his influences, than a matter of belief or argument per se.
Christianity, in this picture, is an influence to be embraced, or not. Once it has fallen from the status of “Truth” and has become an inheritance, Nietzsche’s attachment to it stands to be either strengthened and impassioned (i.e., embraced as an aspect of his environment to become constitutive of his self), or weakened and possibly even passionately rejected (as it was).
Religion of course has a special status among the influences on Nietzsche. Personally, it was decreed his career, not just his faith. But culturally, Christianity, unlike a trade or the like, makes a special claim on the individual’s self — it requires devotion, not just practice, and arguably a kind of self-abnegation. In embracing autonomous self-development, Nietzsche must have felt compelled to reject anything so pervasively self-defining as Christianity.
This rejection of Christianity from the standpoint of inheritance presages Nietzsche’s historical, “genealogical” treatment of Christianity much later in The Genealogy of Morals. There Christianity may indeed be “false” in some theoretical sense, but more importantly, it is to be rejected as a tradition that weakens rather than strengthens.
Nietzsche’s personal life also seems to fit a theme of acquiring and shedding influences. Blue’s account emphasizes the roles of mentors and close intellectual friendships. In so many of these relationships, Nietzsche is nurtured, to the point at which he rejects the relationship as one no longer taking him in the direction he chooses to go.
His choice of profession itself, philology, is something he embraces and eventually rejects. Philology was something different in the time of Nietzsche’s education. It was foundational to Humboldt’s Bildung — classical philology provided a foundation for wisdom, extending from the Greeks. Nietzsche made contributions of his own to philology early in his career (mostly unread now), before its role in education, and in German intellectual culture in general, began to transition in a more positivist direction, leaving behind its place in self-development and wisdom. When this happens both at the cultural and personal level, Nietzsche works to shed philology from its prominent place in his intellectual life, questioning its value and its validity for the role it had played.
I could go on and on, and maybe I’ve already done that. Blue’s accounts of Nietzsche’s youthful readings of Schopenhauer and Friedrich Lange are especially interesting and provocative. The book altogether is something I know I’ll continue thinking about it for a long time. Really worth the read.