Nietzsche and the Stoic Concept of Recentes Opinions (original) (raw)

**Nietzsche and the Stoic Concept of *Recentes Opinions***

Frank Chouraqui, Leiden University

f.chouraqui@phil.leidenuniv.nl

All comments welcome

Abstract:

In the context of the well-established importance of Nietzsche’s engagement with Stoic thought for his work as a whole, this paper seeks to make two claims: First, that the Mausoleum reference in Lecture 4 of “On the Future of Our Educational institutions” constitutes a substantial engagement with the Stoic doctrine of Recentes Opiniones as presented in Cicero’s *Tusculan Meditations* and second, that this reference taken in its textual and intertextual context, constitutes a critique of the Stoic view of time and of the relations of nature and culture. In so doing, the paper hopes to make a contribution to the wider issues of Nietzsche’s views on naturalism, fatalism, desirability and culture.

Keywords:

Nietzsche, Stoicism, Time, Culture, Agency.

**Introduction:**

Nietzsche’s relationship with Stoicism has been the subject of lively debate since the early days of Nietzsche scholarship. This is a relationship so important that in a recent chapter devoted to Nietzsche’s stoicism, Nuno Nabais, who reviews both Nietzsche’s comments on Stoicism and the host of Nietzsche scholars who discussed it^{[1]} declares that Nietzsche’s attacks on the Stoics is also an attack on himself. He attributes this attitude to some sort of narcissism of small differences, and he decides that those texts in which Nietzsche rejects stoicism express a ‘desperate search for differences.’^{[2]} He pursues, ‘on the line now is the very foundation of his whole affinity with the sage’s notion as to the necessity of nature,’^{[3]} and Nabais claims that when all is said and done, Nietzsche falls into line with the Stoics in his account of natural necessity. This should suffice to motivate further investigation, and it should arouse our interest in Nietzschean passages hitherto left out of the debate.^{ ^{[4]}}

This paper has therefore the following two very modest aims: the first is to introduce and investigate one such hitherto entirely ignored reference to stoicism in one of Nietzsche’s early (and under-studied) texts, 1872’s, “Ueber die Zukunft
unserer Bildungsanstalten” (ZB). I argue that in fact this text constitutes Nietzsche’s only *technical* engagement with the Stoics, one which should direct our attention towards the Stoic doctrine of fresh opinions or *recentes opiniones.* The second aim of this paper is to probe the philosophical implications of this new piece of textual evidence for understanding Nietzsche’s relationship to Stoicism. Although this can only be sketched out here, it constitutes the philosophical horizon of the textual discussion that follows. Nabais’ remarks suggest that the evidence surrounding Nietzsche’s relationships with stoicism is contradictory. It allows for three kinds of interpretations: Nietzsche is either a “bad faith Stoic” (Nabais’ view), an anti-stoic through and through (e.g.: Gaasterland), or his attitude to Stoicism is ambivalent or ambiguous. My general reading privileges the ambivalence thesis, and it constitutes the broader context of this paper. Nietzsche’s ambivalence is not a sign of confusion however. Rather, it tracks the fact that Nietzsche fully agrees with one of the key stoic tenets whilst fully disagreeing with another (in so doing, he also rejects the implicit stoic thesis that the two are interdependent): the Stoics hold *both* that all meanings and valuations (they call them representations) are *added* on to events, facts or objects (this is why they are subject to temperance, and of the order of “that which depends on us”) and therefore not metaphysically grounded *and* that therefore we must refrain from attributing meanings or living according to said meanings. Nietzsche agrees with the first—indeed, one could argue that the *Genealogy of Morality* is an attack on asceticism defined precisely as the thesis that meaning and value are *discovered* and therefore metaphysically grounded (whereas the aristocratic worldview regards meanings as *created*). However, he disagrees with the second, because on his view, refraining from meaning-making contradicts the nature of life: from the fact that specific meanings are not to be found in nature it doesn’t follow that it is not natural to make meaning. In the later writings, this is expressed in the thesis that all is will to power and that will to power is essentially an interpreting force. On this basis, trying to repress meaning-making involves going against life as it is. This is why in the famous paragraph 9 of *Beyond Good and Evil* Nietzsche rejects the stoic ideal of living according to nature: this would involve living according to an *indifferent* nature, that is to say, one would be living without valuing and interpreting, and therefore, this would involve living against life now defined as interest, value-attribution and meaning-making.^{[5]} Living according to nature, that aphorism tells us, is therefore a contradiction.^{[6]} What the Bildungsanstalten text shows is that the early Nietzsche already rejected the second thesis, or at least, one of its direct implications: the view that we should refrain from meaning-creating and value-attribution. As we shall see, in this early text, Nietzsche objects to the Stoics’ rejection of the figure of Artemisia. Artemisia famously resisted the healing power of time and refused for her grief at the death of her Mausolus, her husband, to go away. On the contrary, she committed to the view that the loss of Mausolus was an ill. Nietzsche’s point is that when the stoics reject Artemisia’s attitude, they do so on the basis that she, in their view, ignores the fact that the meaning she attributes to the death of Mausolus (according to which it is an ill) was a mere representation. For the stoics, if she were aware of that fact, she would no longer mourn him. But, Nietzsche objects, Artemisia’s wisdom is superior, for she doesn’t allow the validitiy of her interpretation of Mausolus’death to be undermined by the fact that this meaning is not intrinsic to the event: she applies what Nietzsche will later regard as the aristocratic form of meaning-making, whereby one doesn’t believe that interpretations need to be grounded in their object, but rather, which embraces the fact that interpretations are free creations.

It is in this context that I argue that a proper understanding of the passage from the Bildungsanstalten text allows us to shed light on Nietzsche’s distinctively non-stoic understanding of nature. Although, as I have suggested, such an investigation is not without consequences for understanding Nietzsche’s work as a whole, I shall make no attempt in this paper to investigate it. This is necessary work but it will require a separate study.

1. **The Lectures**

In the 1872 ZB Lectures Nietzsche complains about a misunderstanding about the notion of education that is at the root of an impoverished educational system in Western Europe in general, and Germany in particular. Namely, education has come to be understood either as a preparation for coping with life or as a purely gratuitous enterprise, not as an edifying enterprise for both the genius and their nation. David Cooper gives an admirably crisp, if simplified, model for Nietzsche’s position: The Bildung ideal of Humboldt and Schleiermacher, Cooper’s story goes, got degraded along two lines in the wake of the Prussian victory over France: along the first line, education became regarded as a purely utilitarian enterprise. This is the ‘realist’ view which Nietzsche attacks directly in Lecture 3. Along another line, we see the retreat of the scholars away from the realists and their narrow pragmatism, into a view of scholarship for the sake of it. Caught between such ‘breadwinners’ and ‘old maids,’ Nietzsche’s endeavour is to restore the Bildung ideal (in spite of some sizeable disagreements with Humboldt, Schleiermacher etc.).^{[7]} One great virtue of Cooper’s account is that it shows that the usual (and often dismissive) readings of the lectures as defending a Schopenhauerian ideal of the genius as unconcerned with worldly matters, is untenable (this would make Nietzsche into an ‘old maid’). One might even radicalize Cooper’s view by adding that Nietzsche did not only complain that educational institutions did not fulfill their purported cultural role, he also complained that they had come to stand as an obstacle to this fulfillment. This is because they make cultural agency impossible, that is to say, even when geniuses are produced (which is the result of pure chance and not in itself, culture), their cultural development may be stifled: they may not be allowed to fulfill their destiny, or as Nietzsche says, to ‘redeem [erlösen] the people [Volk]’ (Lecture 3). The main function of the lectures therefore, I claim, is to establish a hierarchy between three views of education. The lowest, which he associates with the stoics, is informed by the principle of necessity: education teaches us to live according to necessity and to satisfy the necessities of life. The second, which nietzsche associates with Artemisia is informed by the prinicple of individual self-aggrandizement: education is a way of making oneself more important and more dominant. Its advantage over the first is that it recognizes the insight that life naturally seeks increase and devleopment. The third, which alone constitutes true culture (“der wahren Bildung”) is informed y the principle of collective aggrandizement. As we shall see below, this suggests that Nietzsche’s overarching project is not only negative, but it is also to positively ascertain the conditions under which cultural agency may be made possible again. In order to make sense of the cryptic discussion of the Stoics which this paper is about, the context will be instrumental. Let me therefore begin with a few remarks about the text as a whole.

1. **Synopsis of the lectures**

The lectures were delivered between January 16^{th} and March 23^{rd}, 1872, before about 300 audience members in the Aula of the City Museum of Basel, where Nietzsche had moved in April 1869 to join the University and the local Pädagogium, as a professor of Philology and holder of the chair of Greek.^{[8]} One might note that the date of the first lecture coincided almost exactly with the publication of Nietzsche’s first book, *The Birth of Tragedy* (January 2^{nd}). Stylistically, the text is unusual, as it Platonically takes the form of a dialogue wrapped in an autobiographical narrative.

As students, Nietzsche and his friend (probably Romundt) go on a pilgrimage to the place where they first took the solemn oath of starting a community of independent scholars. The place is high in the forested mountains overlooking the Rhine, and to celebrate their oath, the two friends practice shooting, when a philosopher (identified as Wagner by some scholars including Cooper) and his young friend interrupt them. They have come here themselves for a rendez-vous with an unnamed friend. Nietzsche and his friend then agree to keep quiet and share the space with the philosophers, and they overhear their discussion about the sorry state of education and culture. Their friend, who is announced through several markers, never makes an appearance, although by the end of the fifth lecture, his appearance seems imminent, and the projected, but never delivered (or written) sixth lecture, may have introduced him.

The first half of the first lecture mostly possesses a dramatic purpose, setting up the context for the two friends’ pilgrimage, their arrival and the encounter with the two philosophers. The second half focuses on stating the thesis of the work, namely, that current educational institutions are not institutions of culture [Bildung], and in developing the resulting elitism of the piece, including the views that current education combines education for the greatest number with the democratization of culture, and that this combination culminates in journalism and therefore in a fetishization of the present at the expense of the past or the future.

Nietzsche argues that the project of Bildung is the exact opposite of this: it is to provide to the greatest number the opportunity for cultivation so that a very small number become fully men of culture. Between the greatest number of students and the minimal number of accomplished men, there stands selection by way of an ethos of subjection: once educated, even the mediocre will naturally recognize greatness and place themselves in the service of it.

Lecture 2 develops further the project of such an aristocratic education. It begins with a discussion of German public schools. There, the main purpose should be to develop respect for and sensitivity to the German language just like the Greeks and Romans did for their own languages. This leads the old philosopher to draw a distinction between culture and scholarship, and to discuss the relations between ‘knowing’ and ‘doing’ (Lecture 2). Nietzsche’s suggestion there is that those who think that scholarship equals culture tend to ignore the necessary connection between knowing and doing, whilst true culture is always an attempt at cultivating this bond precisely. As a result, the philosopher’s first concrete proposal is to revise or scrap the practice of ‘German composition’ for young students, for it only teaches students to take their own opinions seriously before they are ripe and prevents the development of their thought, as it develops the youth’s attachment to their youthful ideas: the youth that take themselves too seriously become unable to allow their views to evolve naturally (ibid.). In order to counteract this tendency, the philosopher pursues, one must follow severe training and discipline, ‘obedience and habituation’ (ibid.) under the guidance of ‘the appropriate mystagogues of classical culture [Bildung]’ (he cites Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and Wincklemann) whose function is to stand as a bridge between modern Germans and ancient Greeks (ibid.).

Lecture Three thus develops the thought announced in lecture One concerning the question of selection and obedience. The purpose of culture it declares, is to be informed by ‘the sacred hierarchy of nature [heilige Naturordnung]’, which is understood as a force that resists the ‘education of the masses [Bildung der Masse]’ (lecture 3). Here, Nietzsche inaugurates his monumental notion of culture, for the alternative to the ‘education of the masses’ is the ‘education of a few men picked for great and lasting works’ through which the great individuals ‘redeem’ their entire ‘Völker’ in the eyes of history and make their Volk ‘eternal.’ (ibid.) This emphasis is meant to reiterate the contrast of culture and scholarship. For now, Nietzsche declares, scholarship lives in culture like a parasitic bird lives in a temple: ‘how much more coolly and fearlessly than ourselves, did that young brood build its measly nests in the magnificent temple! [grossartigsten Tempeln!]’ (Ibid.)

The second half of the lecture consists in a more subtle discussion about the place of these redemptive works and figures in history, and therefore, the proper relationship that men of culture should have towards their own ego [Subjekt]. Here, Nietzsche recognizes such men as culminations of culture. However, their greatness and value is not individualistic, rather it is derived from their ability to redeem their own nations. They should therefore never take themselves to be the goals of history (this is where Nietzsche argues that Artemisia falls short). This is first because there is no such goals (Nietzsche dispatches Hegel in a few brutal formulas), but also, because such goals presuppose a reference to the end of history, and therefore, a trivialisation of time (seen as an accident to be overcome) which ultimately shall lead into the promotion of a ‘German culture of the present [deutsche Kultur der Jetztzeit].’ (ibid.) In short, the great men will be driven by their nature to the ‘noblest ends’ (ibid.), but they shall not identify such ends with themselves. This leads Nietzsche into an effort to conceptualize the difference between the democratic ego which leads to cheap individualism (it considers itself as an end), and the noble ego which finds its fulfillment beyond itself. In Lecture Four, he will call the former a certain kind of ‘egotism’ based on the ‘subjekt’, and the latter ‘personality’ based on ‘subjektfreiheit’.

Lecture Four begins with the discussion of the Stoics (which I shall examine below) and it develops the critique of egoism by distinguishing two forms of it. The first, Stoic one, is reductive and isolationist, and the second, personified by Artemisia, is self-aggrandizing. Each of them is connected to a certain relation to time, where the former aims for instantaneousness and the other for eternity. Both are illusions however, and as such, they both fail to achieve culture. For as long as living in the instant or living in eternity are the aim, Nietzsche declares, the project remains remote from culture, for culture involves transformation, and therefore a combination of the instant and the eternal. The result, Nietzsche declares, is that such a vision of culture, although it demands that we shed our egoistic self-concerns, corresponds to a ‘restitution of our personality.’ (Ibid.)

Lecture Five returns to the inappropriateness of the current school system and addresses the very Platonic worry that its members and students do not know *that they do not know* what culture is. In short, they engage in ‘pseudo-culture.’ (Lecture 5.) This is precisely signposted by the anti-Greek relation between teachers and students at work in the current system, which separates neatly the active and contemplative elements in education: the teachers speaks, the student listens. Doing and knowing are now divorced, Nietzsche argues, and as long as they remain divorced, our education will fall short of culture, which is concerned with their unity. Here, the emphasis returns on the initial (Stoic) strategy of the forgetting of the self: this comes from the confinement of the student in passivity, and it is an attempt that fails: we cannot forget ourselves. Here, Nietzsche initiates one of the fruitful paradoxes that pervade his work: left to our own devices, we are hell-bent on alienation, and freedom leads to passivity. On the contrary, we need cultural figures that dominate us and force us to become ourselves again. And domination no longer goes on a par with passivity, but rather with the unity of contemplation and action, ‘great leaders are necessary’ (as leaders they are active, as necessary, they are necessitated by forces that transcend them) ‘all culture [Bildung] begins with the very opposite of that which is now highly praised as academic freedom [akademische Freiheit]: with obedience [Gehorsam], with subordination [Unterordnung], with breeding [Zucht], with subservience [Dienstbarkeit].’ (Ibid.)

**B. Themes and Argument**

Having briefly outlined the lectures as a whole, I now propose a reading framework for them, which will serve as a guide for a detailed reading of the discussion of the Stoics. Nietzsche harshly criticized his own text for ‘ending up losing itself in pure negativity.’ (December 20, to Malwida von Meysenbug), and Derrida made much (perhaps too much) of this recognition when he declares that ‘in the lectures *On the Future of Our Educational Institutions*, it is disgust that controls everything.’^{[9]} For this would be ignoring that this negativity is for the sake of promoting aristocratic taste.^{^{[10]}} In any case, the text is shot through with tensions and apparent contradictions. Even a generous reader will have to contend with Nietzsche’s very inconsistent, sometimes contradictory, word uses. I will have to return to this point in some specific cases.

Without forcing the text into positive statements which it doesn’t directly warrant therefore, we can outline the aristocratic project that motivates the negative tone. Broadly speaking, the project is to establish the conditions that will make cultural agency possible again. It is relatively uncontroversial, for example, that the paramount opposition that the text is built upon is the opposition of training and culture. They rely on opposite values, the former being aimed at utility (including survival) and the latter being aimed at greatness. But it plays out through a number of fruitful oppositions that deserve closer attention.

For our purposes, one should focus on the following three such oppositions: knowing versus doing, the temporal versus the a-temporal, and the personal versus the impersonal. Nietzsche’s attitude, in each case, is not to pick a side but to reject the oppositions themselves as fallacious. The result, as intimated above, is a ‘monumental’ vision of culture. My argument is simple: Nietzsche sets up an opposition between two general attitudes: the democratic attitude takes for granted (or results in—this is hard to decide based on the text) that the pairs are mutually exclusive. The aristocratic attitude expresses the intuition that they are not and that a true culture should develop out of the ground that unifies these seeming opposites (this ground, admittedly, remains philosophically undeveloped, but Nietzsche already provides some hints). Only such an attitude can restore cultural agency. Cultural agency involves two dimensions: First it must lead to greatness, and second, this greatness must be redemptive collectively and historically. The democratic opposition of ‘knowing and doing’ makes agency that is cultural in the sense of “greatness-building” impossible; the opposition of the temporal and the a-temporal makes agency impossible *tout court*, and the opposition of the personal and the impersonal makes agency in the sense of collective redemption impossible.

Let me first develop how Nietzsche rejects these oppositions. I will then try to outline what the unified ground which stands behind each of these false oppositions might be. This should provide some context for entering into more detail into the discussion of the Stoics.

*Nietzsche rejects the opposition between knowing and doing* because it prevents the possibility of what he terms ‘fighting.’ Nietzsche’s idea is that this opposition leaves us with ‘doers’ whom he calls ‘breadwinners’ and with scholars, whom he calls ‘old maids’ (lecture 4). Breadwinners act in the world blindly and uninformed by culture, and therefore they will only produce everyday actions, but no truly cultural action. On the other hand, the old maids of gratuitous scholarship will retreat from the world and their knowledge, disconnected from practice, will be stumped knowledge too: Nietzsche’s presupposition here is that knowledge is incomplete until it is effective. What concerns Nietzsche is the assumption that knowledge and action are neatly distinct and independent. This sharp separation is at the core of the democratic view. Nietzsche considers the relations of what he calls ‘knowing’ (or ‘learning,’ ‘thinking’ ‘understanding,’ or ‘listening’)^{[11]} and ‘doing’ (or sometimes ‘inventing’ or ‘creating,’ or ‘living’) (Lectures 1 and 4) as the center of the tension between the modern, democratic and utilitarian education he abhors and the noble culture he seeks to promote. In her account of *Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne* (another text from 1872), Neymeyr makes use of a quick allusion to stoicism to suggest that this distinction is exactly a distinction between “intuitive man” (on the side of “life”) and the Stoic man (on the side of “reason”).^{[12]} Beyond the fact that this confirms the view that Stoicism was in the background of Nietzsche’s work in 1872, it also confirms the view that Nietzsche regarded Stoicism as opposed to life seen as “doing.” Neymeyr adds that the Stoic attitude threatens “art” and creation.^{[13]}

Not only is modern education deluded in its belief in the distinction between knowing and doing, it is also guilty of enforcing the opposition of the active and the contemplative principle by way of a series of institutions, including exercises, customs and pedagogical techniques that distribute them neatly. As mentioned above, this is a duality which one can see at work in the duality of teacher (the active principle) and student (the passive/contemplative one). (Lecture 5) More importantly, this view is particularly disastrous because it contributes to the institutional and systematic removal of the genius (who operates the union of thought and action) from the world, and prevents geniuses from even developing. As we shall see, Nietzsche attributes this genius-stifling view to Stoicism, and as early as the preface to the lectures, Nietzsche declares that one might wish to ‘in despair’ decide ‘not to fight any longer: all one requires is to give himself up to solitude in order to be alone as soon as possible’ (Preface). This looks like (a caricature of) Stoicism indeed. Against this desperate move into passivity, Nietzsche argues that the very ground for culture is fighting: ‘between those who take everything for granted and those anchorites, there stand the *fighters*—that is to say, those who still have hope.’ (Preface). For Nietzsche, the notion of hope, connected to fighting, is in straight opposition to the resignation of isolation (we shall return to this in our discussion of egoism) and to the fatalistic view of life as something to be dealt with, and not something to be transformed. In lecture 2, Nietzsche already declares that his vision for education opposes ‘struggle for life’ education. This will become a major theme in the fourth lecture (where ‘struggle for life’ is mentioned and rejected five times).

The theorist whom Nietzsche has in mind here is the Adolph Diesterweg who in his *Pädagogisches Wollen und Sollen,*(1857) proposed a struggle for life education (see in particular paragraph 33). In a preparatory note to the lectures, (8[107])^{^{[14]}}, Nietzsche envisages four lectures, the second of which is focused on Diesterweg, and the fourth to be entitled ‘hopes’ [Hoffnungen]. This might suggest that the attack on fatalism (in its opposition to ‘hope’) is indeed an attack on Diesterweg, and this is confirmed in a note in which Nietzsche presents the entire lecture project as dramatizing the opposition between Diesterweg’s ‘adoration of the real’ and ‘classical cultivation [zucht]’ (8[113]).^{[15]} In short, the appeal to ‘hope’ and ‘fighting’ is Nietzsche’s way of suggesting that culture is active (far from the ‘adoration of the real’ which prevents our interference), that men of culture and geniuses are transformers of their nations, and therefore, that culture is not the same as ‘scholarship.’

*Nietzsche rejects the opposition between the instantaneous and the timeless.* In spite of the strongly Schopenhauerian undertones of the lectures, which many readers have emphasized^{[16]}, Nietzsche’s future departure from Schopenhauer is prefigured in the context of this theme in particular. For unlike Schopenhauer who emphasizes that the genius evolves in timelessness, Nietzsche seeks a kind of cultural agency which reconciles the eternal and the immediate (see Cooper above). According to Nietzsche, the mutual exclusion of the temporal and the timeless trivializes any notion of history. The opposition is expressed through a variety of terms: it may be an opposition between ‘the instant’ and the ‘future,’ between the ‘present’ and the ‘future,’ between ‘today’ and ‘always’ (Lecture 4). It is not, however, the opposition between ‘modern’ or ‘fashionable’ and ‘unmodern’ and ‘unfashionable’ (Lecture 2 see also lecture 5). For this is an opposition that Nietzsche endorses: what is, therefore, modern or fashionable? Precisely the commitment to the discontinuity of time, the commitment to the instant as opposed to the movement from the past to the present to the future, which is necessary for cultural agency. The modern denies change out of concern for the present. Nietzsche’s response is an appeal for us to be ‘unmodern.’ Here Nietzsche’s thinking is subtle: first, the rejection of the continuity of time can be equally achieved with reference to the present instant, *or* to timelessness. Notice how in both cases, the temporal *flow*, becoming, is denied. Further, Nietzsche points out, the appeal to the instant and the appeal to the eternal equally imply a self-fulfilment which requires no change and appeals to no agency. As a result, it is only by embracing becoming that cultural agency can take place.^{[17]}

The alternative between the instantaneous and the timeless presupposes the impossibility of history proper. By ‘history,’ we must think of a temporality that combines change and continuity. Nietzsche insists on continuity in his example of the ‘haruspex’ and of the ‘hyphen’ (lecture 4) and he insists on transformation in his concept of agency, described above. We can therefore see how both timelessness and the instant fail the requirements; timelessness precludes transformation and the instant precludes continuity.

Further, they also both lead into one of two form of passivism (one might speculate: passivism of the nihilistic kind for the ‘sons of the present’ (Lecture 5) and of the quietistic kind for Diesterweg’s ‘worshippers of eternity’). As such, they also both lead to what Nietzsche calls ‘egoism’ that is, the absence of concern for culture in general. This can take the form of an absence of concern for our contemporaries—as when one pursues studies for the sake of one’s own comfort and survival, but most often Nietzsche insists that such egoism is a neglect of the future (including the ‘redemption’ of future generations), and for one’s own post-mortem status in the eyes of future generations (lecture 3). The continuity of time on the contrary allows for the present to be productive of future, and it therefore allows for cultural projects to take place in historical time, across individuals and generations (Preface).

*Nietzsche rejects the opposition of the personal and the impersonal*. For Nietzsche, of course, the solution is not to oppose egoism with selflessness. Here his argument is analogous to the argument against timelessness: there is a way of using one’s unique personality to transcend our own ego. In this sense, Nietzsche operates with two senses of the self, leading to several ambiguous passages. First, the self is understood in a narrow sense, as isolated from the rest and temporally located in one’s lifespan. One might call this the ‘ego.’ In the second sense, the self is regarded as a means to access the collective and the transgenerational level. In this sense, cultivating one’s self means recognizing the stake we hold in collective, cultural and historical developments. This is why Nietzsche insists that the education of his time teaches bad egoism and *at the same time*, that ‘false culture robs us of our own individuality.’ Similarly, false culture asks us to ‘forget ourselves’ (Lecture 5) and high culture demands that we ‘purify ourselves from subjectiveness’ (Lecture 4). This seems paradoxical: it seems that ‘forgetting ourselves’ is opposed to ‘purifying ourselves from subjectiveness.’ ‘Subjectiveness,’ it seems, attaches us to our natural passivity and to our struggle for existence. It seeks survival. Our ‘individuality,’ on the contrary, experiences the ‘personal necessity of culture’ (lecture 1). As noted above, the prospect of the replacement of democratic education with aristocratic culture, Nietzsche declares, is experienced as ‘restitution of our personality’ (lecture 4). When caught within the struggle between the subjective and the individual, Nietzsche declares, we cannot achieve the restitution of our personality on our own. For this sort of self-reliance will deliver the initiative over to the current dominant part of our self, and in modern times, this is the (bad) ‘subjective.’ On the contrary, Nietzsche declares, this restitution can only take place via an external authority (he will later, famously call this an ‘educator,’ [Erzieher] in the *Untimely Meditation* on Schopenhauer): ‘all culture begins with obedience’ (lecture 5). Against the Schopenhauerian readings of this text therefore, Nietzsche doesn’t seek to overcome the personal through the impersonal, but he aims at overcoming this mutual oppposition itself: one must find the connection between the personal and the cultural. The possibility of both culture and personal flourishing depends on it.

Four points have now come to light: Firstly, Nietzsche rejects the oppositional pairings above; secondly, these oppositions, taken together, constitute the democratic worldview that he opposes; thirdly Nietzsche’s rejection of these false oppositions leads him into their counter-measures (‘Fighting’ is a counter-measure to the alternative of ‘doing’ and ‘knowing’; ‘History’ is a counter-measure to the alternative of timelessness and instantaneity; ‘Personality’ is a counter-measure to the alternative of egoism and selflessness); and fourthly, Nietzsche sees the convergence of these three concepts as the backbone of the aristocratic worldview he proposes. Culture is a process enabled by the unity between theoretical knowledge and the ability for transformation, through which the cultural agent follows their own personal need for transcending their subjectivity and therefore exercises their natural connection with the past and the future of their ‘nation’.

**II. The Mausoleum Text**

It is lecture four that contains an allusion to the Stoics, but indeed, the Stoic theme has been running throughout. As we shall discuss below this is so not only, in the broad terms of the relations of the ego and the world and of nature and agency, but also more technically, in the framing of the entire problem of culture in terms of contraction and expansion. The lecture begins with the announcement that we are now ‘proceeding on the second-half of our journey’ (Nietzsche had planned 2 more lectures in addition to the 5 delivered^{^{[18]}}). This makes these passages literally central. The lecture opens with a quick recap of the previous lecture; then, Nietzsche announces that ‘the philosopher once more began to speak’.

*1. The Mausoleum Text and Cicero’s Text*

The philosopher declares: ‘I for my own part, know only two exact contraries: institutions for teaching culture and institutions for teaching how to succeed in life.’ He continues:

A man must learn a great deal in order to live and in order to fight the fight towards one’s existence [um seinen Kampf um’s Dasein zu kämpfen]; but everything that he as an individual learns and does as part of this endeavor still has nothing to do with culture [Bildung]. This [Bildung] takes its initial start in an atmosphere [Luftschicht] that lies far above the world of necessity [Noth], struggle for existence [Existenzkampfes] and need [Bedürftigkeit]. The question now is to what extent a man values his ego [subjekt] in comparison with other egos [subjekten], how much of his strength he invests in the struggle to make a living [Lebenskampf]. Many a one, by **stoically** shrinking the scope of their needs [bei einer stoisch-engen Umschränkung seiner Bedürfnisse], will swiftly and easily reach the sphere in which he may forget his ego [Subjekt], and, as it were, shed it, in order to enjoy perpetual youth in a solar system home to the timeless and impersonal [einem Sonnensystem zeitloser und unpersönlicher]. Another **increases the breadth of the effects and the needs of his ego [**Ein Anderer dehnt die Wirkung und die Bedürfnisse seines Subjekts**]** as much as possible, and **builds the mausoleum** of this ego [Mausoleum dieses seines Subjekts] so greatly that he seems to prepare for entering the arena in which he shall conquer **that monstrous adversary, Time [**den ungeheuren Gegner, die Zeit, zu überwinden]**.** Even in this impulse [Treib] we detect a longing for immortality [Verlangen nach Unsterblichkeit]: **wealth and power, wisdom, presence of mind, eloquence, a flourishing outward aspect, a renowned name**—all these are merely turned into the means by which an insatiable, personal will to live longs for new life der unersättliche persönliche Lebenswille nach neuem Leben verlangt] a longing for a final, illusory, eternity [mit denen er nach einer, zuletzt illusorischen Ewigkeit lechzt]. ‘But even in this highest form of the subject, in the enhanced needs of such a distended and as it were collective individual [gleichsam collektivenErratum:collectiven
lies:collektiven
*Nach KGW/KGB Nachberichte* Individuums], true culture [der wahren Bildung] is never truly reached. [bold added]

This is a complex text, but we can already note that Nietzsche’s point became famous later (largely because of other early texts, especially UM II and III of 1874). It relies on four arguments: firstly, survival is not the same as life. On the side of survival there is a certain notion of nature and on the side of life, culture. Secondly, culture only arises when the necessities of survival are met, but it also constitutes the only justification for it: survival is not an end in itself. Third, life includes increase and a will to exceed the strict necessary. As such, increase and culture both stand as factors that distinguish life from survival (we can already see that Nietzsche’s attack on the stoics relies on their ignoring this distinction, and therefore ignoring the importance of increase and of culture). Finally, both life and survival have an ambiguous relationship to the ego.

In order to go further into the implications of this text, let us look at the relationship to Stoicism involved here. Of course, Nietzsche says explicitly that the view that stakes everything on survival at the expense of culture is ‘Stoic.’ This is, indeed, the only *explicit* piece of textual evidence suggesting that in this passage, Nietzsche has the Stoics in mind, but there is plenty that’s implicit. In the rest of this paper, I shall attempt to corroborate it with such implicit, but I think, persuasive, factors. One of them lies in the reference to the mausoleum.

Understanding the mausoleum reference requires that we take the Stoic theme seriously for it is hard to understand unless connected to the mention of Stoicism. In this connection, it points to Cicero’s *Tusculanes Disputationes* (TD)*,* a text largely devoted to discussing the Stoic views on emotions. Nietzsche’s text presents many echoes of Cicero’s passage, and displays a deep understanding of it.

Here is Cicero’s text:

[G]rief arises from an opinion of some present evil, which includes this belief that it is incumbent on us to grieve. To this definition Zeno has added, very justly, that the opinion of this present evil should be recent. Now this word recent they explain thus: those are not the only recent things which happened a little while ago; but as long as there shall be any force, or vigor, or freshness in that imagined evil, so long it is entitled to the name of recent. Take the case of Artemisia, the wife of Mausolus, King of Caria, who made that noble sepulcher at Halicarnassus; while she lived, she lived in grief, and died of it, being worn out by it, for that opinion was always recent with her: but you cannot call that recent which has already begun to decay through time. Now the duty of a comforter is, to remove grief entirely. (TD, III, 31 lines 71-76)

Before I confront it to Nietzsche’s text on the one hand, and to the general theory of recent or fresh opinions as Nietzsche may have found it in other sources, let me substantiate my hypothesis that this Ciceronian text is indeed Nietzsche’s source in this passage, by making four remarks.

First of all, it is documented that at the time he delivered his lectures, Nietzsche had just finished teaching a year-long course on Cicero’s *Academica* (1871) (see the letter of 30^{th} Dec. 1871 to Ritschl) and his list of readings included Cicero’s complete works. We also know that he read the *Tusculanes* in 1865 and Brobjer claims that “in the period before 1865, the philosophical author whom Nietzsche read most was Cicero” and that “Nietzsche continued to read him well into the 1870s and gave university courses on him.”^{[19]} In addition, we have one published allusion to section 80 of the fourth Tusculan disputation, (about one page after the passage at hand) in 1888’s TI.^{^{[20]}} Barbara Neymeyr takes for granted that the *Tusculan Disputations* are a major source for Nietzsche’s engagement with Stoicism.^{[21]} Nietzsche could not have ignored this passage.^{[22]}

Secondly, in this passage, Cicero returns to the legendary case of Artemisia, who was held up as a model of a loyal wife for her refusal to overcome her grief at the death of Mausolus, her husband and brother. The Stoics, as the context makes clear, consider that the procedures practiced by those that regard grieving as their duty count as a resistance to the natural action of time, and they reject it as impious. What such mourners do is to refresh the opinion that grieving is appropriate and that their loss was bad. From a stoic perspective, this means that such mourners lack the knowledge that nothing is intrinsically “evil”. Interestingly, Nietzsche interprets mourners such as Artemisia differently: they know (like Nietzsche himself but unlike the stoics) that there are good reasons to interpret some events in this or that way regardless of their intrinsic nature. This suggests a second clue: the reference to a Mausoleum—the name of Mausolus’s sepulcher built by Artemisia—points to this text, especially if it is placed alongside the remarks that those who build Mausoleums are trying to ‘fight and conquer this terrible adversary, Time’ (lecture 4) (which is what Cicero’s passage is about).

Thirdly, Nietzsche’s reference to the Mausoleum-builders as valuing and achieving ‘wealth and power, wisdom, presence of mind, eloquence, a flourishing outward aspect, a renowned name’ recalls the figure of Artemisia as she’s portrayed in Vitruvius, Demosthenes and Polyaenus. She was in the habit of building monuments, for her dead husband of course, as well as for commemorating her own military victories (eg.: Vitruvius, *De Architectura*). The point here is that the fact that Artemisia built the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in memory of Mausolus should not count against the view that Nietzsche has her in mind when he talks of self-aggrandizing endeavours.

Finally and more importantly, Nietzsche’s use of the odd metaphor of the cultural agent’s ‘widening the scope and needs of their ego’ seems an allusion to the Stoic doctrine of emotions in general (discussed in such terms in the *Tusculan Meditations* and eslewhere), which are meant to coincide with a dilatation or a contraction of one’s mind (*pneuma*). Keeping the emotions of appetite and pleasure fresh amounts to keeping one’s mind dilated (distress and fear involve contraction).^{^{[23]}} Note that Nietzsche doesn’t interpret Artemisia as building her husband’s Mausoleum out of distress (if he had, he would talk of a “contraction” of the ego) but out of pride. Indeed, the Mausoleum, in Nietzsche’s version, is not for Mausolus, it is for the Ego of the builder herself. Note also that this interpretation seems corroborated by *Human, All-Too Human* I, 22, entitled ‘Disbelief in the “*monumentum aere perennius*”,’ where Nietzsche explicitly connects Mausoleum-building to the ideas discussed above, namely by arguing that egoism is a characteristically ‘modern’ neglect of historical time which is opposed to a non-egotistical, Ancient and ‘historical’ concern for oneself which demands that we undertake action for the ages. This is why, in *Human, All-Too Human*, Nietzsche regards mausoleum-building as a mark of high culture, and something to restore *as long as* we build them not for our own sake, but for the sake of culture 9this is one step beyond Artemisia, which explain why Nietzsche argues that even she hasn’t reached “der wahren Bildung”. This is confirmed by Neymeyr’s reading of the Stoic man as an enemy of artistic creation, in *Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne*.^{[24]}

*2. The doctrine of fresh opinions (as per Cicero and the authors Nietzsche had access to).^{[25]}*

Although it is not our purpose here to enter into the *details* of the Stoic doctrine of fresh (recent) emotions, I might point to a few basic and well-known facts (facts that Nietzsche himself would have been familiar with). This will be useful to investigate further what Nietzsche’s intentions were in making this allusion.

First of all, this doctrine of fresh emotions, which Cicero attributes to Zeno—but which more recent scholars claim to have been written out only by Chrysippus^{[26]}—was the subject of an interesting debate involving three generations of Stoics; chiefly, Zeno, Chrysippus and Posidonius. All agree that Zeno established the principle that emotions are judgments and that therefore they fall within the scope of what ‘depends on us.’ In doing so, Zeno may or may not have engaged directly with the objection to his view according to which emotions fade independently of judgments: when I lose a friend, my grief might fade over time even if I maintain my judgment that this loss is bad for me. The response to this objection, apparently formulated by Chrysippus, was to appeal to a new criterion: recentness. Vivid emotions should be seen as ‘*recent* opinions’. Although the sources differ, we can say that later Stoics have taken this to mean one of two things, depending on whether one thinks of recentness as extrinsic or intrinsic to a judgment: Either recentness is seen as an *added* judgment (Zeno and Posidonius): when I grieve, I judge, *first*, that the loss of my friend is bad for me, *second*, that it is recent, and *third*, that a recent undesirable event is worse than an old one. Alternately, it could mean that recentness affects the psycho-physical nature of the judgment itself (Chrysippus): recentness is not a separate judgment. My judgment that the loss of my friend is bad *is* a fresh judgment. If it changes through time, it becomes another judgment.^{[27]}

Both views have problems, all related to the idea of “fading”: in the first, it is hard to see why a recent undesirable event is deemed worse than an old one, except *assuming* that that’s how we generally feel. But of course, this would give the initiative to the emotional aspect of our experience, and therefore defeat the whole Stoic effort of reducing emotions to judgments and commit the stoics to a circle (this is an objection along the lines of Posidonius’ critique of Chrysippus^{[28]}). In the second, one must explain how this unified judgment belongs to two temporalities so that recentness is affected through time but the judgment of undesirability isn’t.

According to Sorabji, this debate was settled by Posidonius, and according to Nussbaum, it was solved by herself. Both agree on the solution however, which lies in denying the objection itself: it is not true, they claim, that our judgment remains through time. On the contrary we find the loss of a friend less undesirable for us as time passes, because our being is less involved with their existence as the years of their absence accumulate. The judgment ‘this is bad for me’ has changed because the person referred to as ‘me’ has changed, over time.

This might return us to the point of importance for Cicero: there are two notions of recentness at work here. The first one is objective: things are recent if ‘they happened a little while ago.’ However, there is a second sense: they can also be recent ‘as long as there shall be any force, or vigor, or freshness in that imagined evil.’ In that case too, ‘they are entitled the name of recent.’ Between the two, of course, stands agency: the ability to refresh our emotions and therefore, to separate the two temporal lines between the chronological age of the event and its emotional age. Operating this separation, which splits the natural from the psychological, is rejected by the stoics as an act of hubris. This is precisely what Nietzsche calls the Mausoleum-builder’s attempt ‘to fight and conquer that terrible adversary, Time,’

**III. Nietzsche’s Position Towards the Doctrine of Fresh Opinions**

We may now sketch out some more general consequences for the Nietzsche scholarship. They surround the notion of cultural agency. All the oppositions which Nietzsche rejects are rejected because they relegate cultural agency to the status of an anomaly. In another text from 1872, Nietzsche criticizes Stoic philosophy for making agency impossible and praises the Stoic philosophers for violating their own dictates for the sake of “Willensfreiheit.” (19 [108] 1872). This is relevant to the doctrine of fresh opinions; if refreshing our opinions is a sin, it is because it opposes the natural order of nature. This means that the agency involved in doing so is not recognized as part of nature, although it is recognized as *real*. Therefore, the Stoics’ notion of nature is insufficient to account for all of that there is, and it presupposes but it doesn’t justify the inferiority of this kind of refreshing agency to a nature seen as deterministic. In order to justify it, a Stoic would have to show that one is deterministic nature is more natural than natural agency, but this is made impossible by the Stoic identification of nature and reality: nothing is real unless it’s natural. As a result, Nietzsche shows that the narrow sense of nature which he attributes to the Stoics involves a rejection of cultural agency and a commitment to the metaphysical prejudice that culture is neither natural nor continuous with nature. The idea of recent opinions was introduced in order to settle clearly the demarcation between nature and non-nature in the context of emotional life. The stigma attached to the deliberate *refreshing* of opinions (objectionable as hubristic and counter-natural) leads into a stigma on culture whereby culture becomes regarded as unnatural as well. As mentioned earlier, Diesterweg (whom Nietzsche throws in the same basket as the Stoics) regards this hubris as a breach of the adoration for the real.

According to Nussbaum, the doctrine of recent opinions is meant to separate truth-judgments from value-judgments^{[29]} and therefore to ensure that valuations cannot be attributed to nature, so that happiness can be said to depend entirely on us. Without it, emotions would not be entirely reducible to judgment, and the Stoic identification of the alternative of nature and judgment with the alternative of ‘what doesn’t depend on us’ (i.e.: nature) and ‘what depends on us’ (i.e.: judgment) would be endangered. In such a situation, our normative emotions would be irreducible to judgments, and therefore would have to be attributed to nature; happiness would no longer depend on us. There is reason to believe that Nietzsche worries about the Stoics’ efforts to avoid this insofar as this avoidance is meant to maintain a reductionist notion of nature which excludes cultural agency.

Secondly, the doctrine of recent opinions involves that culture (the realm of collective aggrandizement) should be placed on the side of judgment and of ‘what depends on us,’ and therefore that it would either need to be reduced to nature or count as impious, counter-natural and hurtful: culture would be stigmatized as perversion. The strict alternative of nature and culture leads to a Stoic rejection of culture, and thus, to cultural impoverishment.^{[30]}

We can now apply these further interpretive tools to Nietzsche’s Mausoleum text:

There Nietzsche contrasted two possible forms of egoism. The first one is stoic, and the second is anti-stoic (Artemisian). This is made clearer with reference to the Ciceronian text in which Artemisia’s Mausoleum-building is used as a contrastive scenario to the Stoic doctrine. What the two forms of egoism have in common is that they both identify the world with the ego. In this sense, they both qualify as forms of the egoism that Nietzsche rejects. One might note that even that contrast between them is laid out in Stoic terms, since Nietzsche suggests that Stoic egoism reduces the world to the ego (hinting at the famous stoic metaphor of the ‘citadel of the self’) whilst Artemisia’s anti-stoic egoism is an expansion that inflates the ego to the dimensions of the whole world (the Mausoleum).

The theme of the reduction of the world to the ego is pervasive in Stoicism (although whether Nietzsche interprets it correctly is another question). In the sources Nietzsche verifiably knew, Marcus Aurelius used the citadel analogy to insist on the isolation of the individual from the world and Epictetus, in a no less famous passage, expanded the notion of the self to include everything, as he reduces what ‘doesn’t depend on us’ (i.e.: as per his own definition, what is not ourselves—the ‘world’) to ‘nothing’ (opening of the *Handbook*). Nietzsche rejects both this reduction and this expansion. The reason he rejects the reductive view is that it commits one’s life to a narrow sense of the ego as mere survival and self-protection. Thus, it relates it to money-making (a connection made by the stoics themselves^{[31]}) and a neglect of transgenerational, cultural ambitions. In addition, Nietzsche was well aware of the stoic notion of agency with its two basic principles: (i) agency lies not in creating real events or circumstances but simply in choosing how we live with such realities and (b) that such agency is identical with correct judgment, reducing even this reduced sense of agency to a form of knowledge *as opposed to* a form of action.^{^{[32]}} This visibly goes against the sense of cultural agency outlined above, which involved the *coordination* of knowing and doing. Behind this lies the problem of time. There is the worry that the stoic approach to the ego involves, like Diesterweg’s view, a notion of time as non-transformative, non-historical, and non-cultural. Indeed, it is a matter of subjecting oneself to nature, instead of standing up to nature for the sake of culture. After all, all the sources, including Cicero, converge to regard the doctrine of recent opinions as stating that our duty is to refrain from refreshing these opinions in order to let them fade as nature intends. As such, the stoic view falls on the side of the democratic ideal, which refuses the unity of knowledge and action and the transformative character of time and which subscribes to a narrow understanding of the ego’s aspirations, as self-centered and incompatible with greater, historical and collective aims.

The reason Nietzsche comparatively prefers Artemisia’s approach is that it fulfills the first two requirements: to unify knowledge and action and to think of time as transformative (it’s the time of building, and of the future generations of admirers). High culture involves that the cultivating figure do not identify with their particular ‘subjectiveness,’ but rather with their ‘individuality’: the part of them which aspires to culture. The Artemisian model fulfils the requirements of culture only partially however, for the subject—not culture—remains, in that case, the final end of the cultural action. In the case of the Artemisia, the cultivating activity remains *for the sake of* the builder themselves, to satisfy their ‘longing for survival’ and ‘new life’ and not of culture itself. After emphasizing that the Stoic self-restriction corresponds to a minor form of life, and Artemisian self-expansion is an improvement over it because it fits the desiring dimension of life, Nietzsche adds that even this is insufficient: it needs to be completed by a drive not just for conquest, but for culture. He closes the Mausoleum passage thus:

**‘**‘But even in this highest form of the subject, in the enhanced needs of such a distended and as it were collective individual [gleichsam collektivenErratum:collectiven
lies:collektiven
*Nach KGW/KGB Nachberichte* Individuums], true culture [der wahren Bildung] is never truly reached. […] For in all his sound and fury [Thun und Treiben], however great and special they may seem to the onlooker, he remains bound to his own restless, desiring ego [Subjekt]: that enlightened, ethereal sphere of selfless contemplation continually eludes him—and thus, let him learn, travel, and collect as he may, he is to always be exiled and eternally remote from true culture. For true culture would scornfully refuse to soil itself with the needy and desiring individual; it knows very well how they only want to use it for their own selfish purposes [sich ihrer als eines Mittels zu egoistischen Absichten versichern möchte]; and if anyone believes that they have succeeded in enclosing it for the sake of their own practical needs [seine Lebensnoth], and that they can live off it by exploiting it [sie plötzlich], this is when [Bildung] slips away noiselessly and with an air of mockery.’

**V. Conclusion**:

I have argued that Nietzsche makes a conscious and deliberate reference to the Stoics in his Mausoleum text. Based on a conceptual account of the context of the mausoleum text within the education lectures, and the context of Cicero’s text within the overall Stoic doctrine of fresh opinions (as Nietzsche can reasonably assume to have been acquainted with it), I have argued that Nietzsche, in the Mausoleum text of lecture 4, opposes the Stoics on three grounds: first, their account of agency is faulty; second, their account of time is faulty; third, their account of the self is faulty.

Secondly, he makes the point that such theoretical mistakes lead to dire practical consequences for culture: Stoicism prevents cultural agency for two reasons: firstly it ignores that what distinguishes ‘life’ from ‘nature’ is its involvement with expansion and culture (and therefore ignores the need for culture). Secondly, its concept of nature excludes valuations (and shouldn’t, for it is valuation that motivates cultural agency).

Nietzsche’s view of the Stoics may have been wrong, but his point aims further than a quarrel about the history of philosophy. For him, the importance of these purported flaws of the stoic doctrine lies in their alleged kinship with the modernism of his time (exemplified by Diesterweg among others). As a result—and this is the sticking point for Nietzsche—any account of culture based on the misconceptions listed above will be faulty. For Nietzsche, only the aristocratic view is able to produce culture, and although she is not a perfect exponent of it, Artemisia offers us a glimpse of the Aristocratic pathos. As such, she is rehabilitated by Nietzsche. The aristocratic view he glimpses in Artemisia is based on an exact reversal of these three stoic and modern misconceptions: it begins by affirming the unity of contemplation and action within a historical temporality, therefore it makes room for historical agency on the part of the genius and allows for a convergence between the personal purposes of the genius and supra-individual, transgenerational, and transcendent purposes.

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1. See for example Andler, *Nietzsche*, Deleuze, *Nietzsche et la Philosophie*, 1962; Granier, *Le problème de la vérité*; Morel, Nietzsche; Magnus, ‘The Connection between Nietzsche’s Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, Heraclitus and the Stoics’; Nussbaum, “Pity and Mercy”; Schatzki ‘Ancient and Naturalistic Themes in Nietzsche’s Ethics’; Brodsky, ‘Nietzsche’s notion of amor fati.’; Elveton, ‘Nietzsche’s Stoicism: The Depths Are Inside’; Groff, ‘Al-Kindī and Nietzsche on the Stoic Art of Banishing Sorrow’; Lane, ‘Honesty as the best policy’; Bertino, ‘Nietzsche und die Hellenistische Philosophie’; Neymeyr, ‘“Selbst-tyrannei” und “Bildsäulenkälte”; Crick, ‘Nietzsche’s Sophist: Rhêtôr, Musician, Stoic.’ ↑
2. Nabais *Nietzsche and the metaphysics of the tragic*, 85. ↑
3. Ibid., 94. ↑
4. Published comments on the Stoics include: *Human all too Human*, II, 386; *Traveller and his Shadow,* 107, 110, *Daybreak*, 131, 139 (on agency and desirability), 251, 425, 450 (on Seneca), 546; *Gay Science* 12 (where scientific naturalism is associated to Stoicism for having the same notion of nature), 34, 123 (on Marcus Aurelius) and 306, 326 *Beyond Good and Evil*, 9 and 247, *Ecce Homo*, ‘Books’, 3 (On Eternal Recurrence). ↑
5. Note that saying that life is interest is different from saying that life is interested. This means that even if the definition of life as indifference, which Nietzsche puts forward in *Beyond Good and Evil* 9, is attributable to Nietzsche and not simply a formulation of the Stoics’ own view on nature, and even if one wishes to identify “life” with “nature” there would be no contradiction between the Nietzschean thesis that life is interest and the view that nature is indifferent. ↑
6. Whether this means that he disagrees with the idea of of *living according to nature* as indifference or that he disagrees with *the idea that nature is indifferent* is left open. ↑
7. Cooper, *Authenticity and Learning*, 28ff. ↑
8. Gossman, *Basel*, 425. ↑
9. Derrida, *Otobiogrpahies*, 23. ↑
10. On the anti-modern animus and elitist ethos of Nietzsche’s lectures see Gossman, *Basel*, 423–424, 427–430. See also Burckhardt cited by Jensen, ‘Geschichte or Historie? 255: ‘The latest thing in our world: the demand for culture [Cultur] as a human right, which is a veiled desire for a life of luxury [Wohlleben].’ On Burckhardt’s anti-democratic conception of Bildung see Schmidt, Der Liberalismus, 18–22. Cited by Ruehl, *Italian Renaissance*, 87. ↑
11. On the first page of the first lecture. Nietzsche insists on this distinction by the use of stresses. ↑
12. Neymeyr, ‘“Selbst-tyrannei” und “Bildsäulenkälte”,’ 67. ↑
13. Ibid. ↑
14. On this entire notebook being a preparation to the lectures, see Ruehl ‘“An uncanny Reawakening”,’ 255. ↑
15. On Nietzsche’s contempt for Diesterweg’s theory of education, see also 14 [21] 1871 and 8 [107]. ↑
16. For example: Baker ‘Existential philosophers on education’; Siemens ‘Nietzsche and the ‘Classical’. For some elements of distance between Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in these early texts, see, Jensen, “Geschichte or Historie?”, 211-26. ↑
17. On ‘modern’ see Introduction: ‘[pupils] should be old and new’ as opposed to ‘modern or up-to-date’ ‘glances of the future in the entrails of existing conditions.’ This is repeated in lecture 1 and lecture 2. On ‘Current’ in the sense of coins, opposition of ‘journalist’ master of the present and Genius, master of ‘all time’ see Lecture 1 and lecture 4 ‘Freeing modern man from the curse of modernity’ and ‘the echo of the present was heard in them.’ For the ‘sons of the present’, see lecture 5. There, students are described as indifferent to time, and later, it is education that is portrayed as indifferent to time: it forgets future generations, this includes a problem of individuation/collective fate, and raises the question of a collective organism. In lecture 2 ‘the present will be a hyphen’ and good pupils will be ‘servants of your own future culture’. See also Jenseninterpretation of Nietzsche’s Second *Untimely*: ‘all too few had developed the capacity for sensing the correct attitude towards the past that would cultivate healthy new growth. Nietzsche’s lectures at Basel ‘On the Future…’ dealt with this theme thoroughly’ Jensen continues: ‘ for these reasons then, the objective endeavor that seeks the value-free and value-neutral truth about a past to which its students are trained to cultivate indifference ruins the study of history, education generally, and as a result represents a major disadvantage for culture: it crushes the personality of an individual, the soul of a culture.’ Jensen, “Geschichte or Historie?” 106. ↑
18. July 25, 1872, to Wagner. ↑
19. Brobjer, *Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context*, 44f., see also 245 and Nietzsche, KSA 32 [2]). ↑
20. TI, ‘The Problem of Socrates, 3. Andreas Urs-Sommer has recently argued that this reference to Cicero comes from the adaptation of Cicero by Lichtenberg and Zeller (Urs-Sommer, *Kommentar*, 270). Further references to Cicero appear in *KSA* 11:26[452], 7:30[11], 7:32[2], 7:32[14]) 7: 754. Cicero also figures in a list of Stoics and Epicureans in *KSA* 1, p. 811). For further references to Cicero in Nietzsche, See Bett, ‘Nietzsche and the Romans’. ↑
21. Neymeyr, ‘“Selbst-tyrannei” und “Bildsäulenkälte”,’ see esp. 69 and with reference to the Fourth Disputation specifically, 71 and 76. ↑
22. Although there are some implicit allusions to it in Kant’s *Anthropology* and his *Third Critique*, none of them mention Cicero, Artemisia, or Mausolus by name (Kant, *Akademieausgabe*, VII, 237 and 262; and *Kritik der Urtheliskraft*, section 54, in *Akademieausgabe* 331.). One might also note that this Ciceronian text constitutes the first use of ‘culture’ in a non-agricultural sense in history, (2.13). This is a fact that had not escaped Nietzsche, who wrote to Gersdorff on 11 Feb 1874 from Basel: ‘Dafür ist vielerlei im Kopfe durchgedacht worden, neuerdings viel Staatlich-Politisches: vorher ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’, wiederum vorher ‘*Cicero* und der romanische Begriff der Cultur’; Alles dies wird zu seiner Zeit wieder lebendig werden.’ ↑
23. Cicero, *Tusculan Disputations* 4:14. See also Long and Sedley *The Hellenistic Philosophers,* vol. 1: Andronicus, *On* *Passions* I (*SVF* 3.391, part) [Reporting Stoic definitions:] ‘(1) Distress is an irrational contraction, or a fresh opinion that something bad is present, at which people think it right to be contracted [i.e. depressed]. (2) Fear is an irrational shrinking [aversion], or avoidance of an expected danger. (3) Appetite is an irrational stretching [desire], or pursuit of an expected good. (4) Pleasure is an irrational swelling, or a fresh opinion that something good is present, at which people think it right co be swollen [i.e. elated].’ Stobaeus 2.88,22-89,3 (= A5; *SVF* 3.378, part) ‘In the case of all the soul’s passions, when they [the Stoics] call them ‘opinions,’ ‘opinion’ *is* used instead of ‘weak supposition,’ and ‘fresh’ instead of ‘the stimulus of an irrational contraction or swelling.’ There is a debate about this theory of swellings, as Sorabji reports that according to Chrysippus and against Zeno, emotions were not contractions or swelling, but rather were the same as the judgments, and that it is the judgments that are the swelling and the contracting. Sorabji, *Emotions and Peace of Mind*, 35. ↑
24. Neymeyr, ‘“Selbst-tyrannei” und “Bildsäulenkälte”,’ 67. ↑
25. Aside from Cicero, Nietzsche’s sources on the stoics in that period were Plutarch’s C*ontradictions of the Stoics* and Diogenes Laertius. Nietzsche’s direct reading of the Stoics is hard to ascertain, although there is no doubt that he was acquainted with the major imperial Stoics (Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius). Seneca and Marcus Aurelius both insisted on the stoic habit of money-making through the king, through friends or through teaching. The relations of teaching, money-making and political authority are two of the ways that the current educational system is bankrupt according to Nietzsche. This suggests an influence of these sources (See Erskine, *The Hellenistic Stoa*, 64 ff.). In addition, Nietzsche must have come across Stoic materials through Alexander of Aphrodisia (whom he read in preparation for his Aristotle course of 1872) There, he will have seen the Stoics portrayed as determinists (therefore, enemies of cultural agency). (See Long “Stoic Determinism”). ↑
26. De Lacy ‘The Four Stoic ‘Personae’; Nussbaum *The Therapy of Desire*; Brennan ‘The Old Stoic Theory of Emotions’; Sorabji, *Emotions and Peace of Mind*. ↑
27. See Sorabji, *Emotions and Peace of Mind*, 35. ↑
28. See Sorabji, *Emotions and Peace of Mind*, 37 ↑
29. Nussbaum, *The Therapy of Desire*. 381f. ↑
30. Note that although the Stoic context helps clarify things, none of the remarks depend on any knowledge of it besides Cicero’s text. In other words, it is reasonable to assume that Nietzsche might have seen things this way, even if he was unaware of the details of Zeno, Chrysippus and Posidonius’ views, as presented by modern scholarship. ↑
31. Erskine, *The Hellenistic Stoa*, 153 ff. ↑
32. The stoics are therefore seen to reduce action to thought. Yet, reduction is not unification, and this is not enough to satisfy Nietzsche’s requirement for a continuity between the two, since such a reduction only forecloses the possibility of external action. See Erskine, *The Hellenistic Stoa,* 153 ff. See also Nussbaum *The Therapy of Desire*. 381 ff. ↑