ニーチェ『反教育論』（メモ） - Living, Loving, Thinking, Again

John Gray *1 “Anti-Education by Friedrich Nietzsche review – why mainstream culture, not the universities, is doing our best thinking” http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/08/anti-education-on-the-future-of-our-educational-institutions-friedrich-nietzsche-review

ニーチェの『反教育論』の新しい英訳本が上梓されたという*2。1872年に瑞西のバーゼル市博物館で行われた全６回の連続講演（但し、第６講は実際には行われなかった）。ここで「教育（education）」と呼ばれているのは元の独逸語ではBildung。教育というより教養と訳した方がいいかも知れない。ニーチェが論じているのは、独逸の教育（ギムナジウムと大学）はその本来の目的が他の目的に従属させられているということ。批判的な態度や独立的な思考の養成という目標は「万人の所謂「個性（individual personality）」の偏在的な鼓舞（“the ubiquitous encouragement of everyone’s so-called ‘individual personality’”）」のために放棄されている。結果として、教育は矛盾するようだがどちらも破滅的で最終的には一致するような２つの傾向によって支配されている。ひとつは「教育を可能な限り拡大・拡散しようとする動き（the drive for the greatest possible expansion and dissemination of education）」（社会の学校化？）、もうひとつは「教育を狭隘化し・弱体化しようとする動き」である。Gray氏は、このニーチェの洞察は19世紀の独逸だけでなく現代の英国においてもレリヴァントであるという*3。
それから、 Gray氏はニーチェによる自由主義（ジョン・スチュアート・ミル）批判を評価する（「ヒューマニティ」の普遍性に対する懐疑）；

There will be some who say this is a sign that liberal values have been abandoned. For those who think like this there is a simple remedy for the maladies of higher education. We must return to John Stuart Mill: let any idea however offensive be freely expressed, so that it can be challenged and where necessary rationally rebutted. But at this point Nietzsche poses some awkward questions. Mill believed everybody gained from freedom of expression, including those who wanted to shut it down: all human beings want the benefits that come from growing knowledge. But what if many are happy to relinquish these benefits for the sake of values they consider more important and want to impose on others? Mill’s answer is that what matters is the continuing advance of the species. But as Nietzsche understood, the idea of “humanity” as a collective agent with universal goals that it pursues in the course of history is a secular residue of a religious faith in providence. If you stick to empirical observation, all you will find is the human animal with its many conflicting values and ways of life.
Nietzsche’s achievement was as a genealogist of morality, and his observations on the origins of liberal values are peculiarly resonant today. As a pioneering classical scholar, he knew there was nothing liberal about ancient Greek culture. Emerging in a long and difficult process that included Europe’s wars of religion, a liberal way of life was an offspring from Jewish and Christian monotheism – a fact our “new atheists” prefer to ignore. One can value this way of life without being religious, but that doesn’t mean all human beings want to live it. If people lose interest in free expression – as seems to have happened in some sections of higher education – there is no argument that can persuade them of its importance. What they want may be freedom from the dangerous business of thinking.

最後はニーチェは「ハイ・カルチャー」に期待したけれど、批判的思考への希望は「学園の壁の向こう」にこそあるよという話。フリードリッヒちゃん、映画館に行こうよ、ということか。

The editors of Anti-Education, Paul Reitter*4 and Chad Wellmon*5, describe Nietzsche as “an anti-academic philosopher of modernity and its ills”, and conclude that answering the questions he asked about education “might bring us little comfort” today. Anti-academic Nietzsche may have been, but his mistake was in pinning his hopes on “high culture”. If you look beyond the walls of the academy, you will find a scene that is remarkably vital. Justin Kurzel’s film of Macbeth presents an uncompromisingly truthful vision of the human situation unlike anything in the academic study of the humanities at the present time*6 . The Wire*7 and Breaking Bad*8 explored the contradictions of ethics with a rigour and realism that is lacking in the baroque disquisitions on justice and altruism that occupy philosophers. Amazon’s version of Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle*9 is a more compelling rendition of the slipperiness of consensus reality than you will find in any number of turgid volumes of critical theory. Plenty of other examples could be cited. Many educational institutions may be enmeshed in bureaucracy and self-censorship, but the good news is that they are not forming our culture.