Exemplars, Institutions, and Self-Knowledge in Schopenhauer as Educator

This article provides a new analysis of Nietzsche's vision of pedagogy in Schopenhauer as Educator. I examine the institutional threats faced by education as he sees them from 1872 onward, focusing on how his account of conformity moves beyond Enlightenment treatments of that topic. I next consider the role exemplars might play in combatting those threats, arguing that Nietzsche develops a distinctive affective and epistemological model of exemplarity and its role in the learning process. I show how this tracks his own engagement with Schopenhauer from the first encounter to Schopenhauer as Educator. I close with the question of how an exemplar is to be identified: this links closely, I suggest, to Nietzsche's changing views on love.