The Erziehung of the Human Soul: An Interpretation of Nietzsche's Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen

This dissertation is an interpretation of the four essays that comprise Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen as a single, coherent whole. Its four chapters are each a close reading of one of these essays; in them, Nietzsche’s theoretical understanding of human life in general, as well as of the best possible kind of life, is progressively unfolded – as well as his practical project of effecting a large-scale cultural reform in conjunction with Wagner’s Bayreuth project. The focal point of my interpretation is the complex understanding of nature of the human soul contained within the Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen: its constitutive parts and their interactions, the process of its growth or unfolding, the ways in which education (as both Bildung and Er-ziehung) can help or hinder this growth, and the basic types of human ways of life into which it tends to crystallize. I call this the erotic-historic soul after its two main constituent parts, desiring and memory. I argue that this is, at its core, the same model that we find in Nietzsche’s mature works. Moreover, Nietzsche’s understanding of the soul is central not just to the thinking behind the Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, but also to their rhetorical structure: both the primary audience of these essays (the “young souls”) and the way in which Nietzsche addresses them – starting from their contempt for contemporary German culture and then leading them to a new, constructive project to which they can devote themselves – can be fruitfully analyzed in terms of the erotic-historic soul. The main goals of this dissertation are to shed new light on Nietzsche’s intellectual development, as well as to point attention to the highly original form of ethical understanding that the Considerations exhibit, centered on the quintessentially Nietzschean injunction to “become what one is”, understood as a way of cultivating the soul’s natural powers