Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche: Volume 3

This volume gathers Nietzsche's earliest combat engagements with German academic culture, written when he was still a young professor at Basel, twenty-four years old and already ferocious. The five lectures collected as 'On the Future of our Educational Institutions' constitute a blistering attack on the German university system, which Nietzsche saw as producing learned men who were paradoxically hostile to genuine learning, scholars who had sacrificed all intellectual passion on the altar of professionalized philistinism. Here we encounter the philosopher as教育改革者, demanding that education cultivate individuals rather than credentials. The volume also contains 'Homer and Classical Philology,' Nietzsche's inaugural lecture as a professor, in which he argues that classical scholarship must be reimagined as a living encounter with the spirit of antiquity, not the dry antiquarianism that had calcified in the German universities. These early pieces reveal the foundations upon which all his later radical philosophy would be built: the insistence that life and thought cannot be separated, that great culture requires great individuals, and that the enemy of human flourishing is always the herd masquerading as wisdom.