Nietzsche: On "getting oneself a culture"

Nietzsche’s own reflections on
 what is needed for an “education” as such are quite formidable—even as his own education was an extraordinary one. To this extent, we betray something of the limitations of our own formation whenever we find ourselves insisting that Nietzsche took or borrowed  his ideas from other thinkers—what does it mean (and this will be the point here) to “take” or “borrow” an idea?—ranging from Pascal and Spinoza or else Spir and Lange or Emerson, or Gerber, or Stirner or ultimately and of course, from Wagner himself (especially for the Wagnerians for whom no limit to the master’s own cultural prowess can be imagined).  

I am not saying that Nietzsche was not familiar with these thinkers, far from it. I am saying that an education is this familiarity and much, much more. Thus although it is amusing to note that the identity of the supposed origination of (the so-called ‘sources’ for) Nietzsche’s ideas just happens to change in the scholarly literature over time (and not less with the mood and, nota bene!, educational formation of his commentators), it is also noteworthy that the very same set of assumptions applies (negatively speaking) for those who are fond of insisting that Nietzsche could never have read Kant (just to pick one contentious example, contentious given the influence of Kant on the 19^th century, an influence we fail to see in the 20^th as in the 21^st century, at least so far).

The idea that an education, the getting of or the having of one, is a simple affair, and thus that the parallel idea of an upgrade to the more-than-human, that is now: the trans-human would simply be like taking a course, signing up for an instructive module, supposes that one pretend, (as transhumanists do like to pretend) that one can/should set aside questions of cultural inequalities, differences in wealth, “class” differences and so on. In this (an sich inherently optimistic when it is not calculating when it is not deliberately mendacious) regard, the transhumanist movement may be revealed as a humanism, here using the term as Sartre once spoke of Existentialism as a Humanism.

By contrast Heidegger’s “Humanismusbrief” is written against such a presupposition. See Sartre’s L’existentialism est un humanisme and compare both with Sloterdijk’s controversial Elmau lecture: Regeln für den Menschenpark. 

Hence and at least in principle, human enhancement may be regarded, if only for the sake of argument, as corresponding to “enhancement for all,” like “micro-chips for all,” or “airport security searches for all.”