Self-Education
The most revealing question is: “What have you really loved till now?” The answer will show you “your true self which does not lie deeply concealed within you but immeasurably high above you, or at least above what you usually take for your ego”. As we contemplate our self-chosen educators and meditate upon the dearest features of those we have elected from millions past and present to help us shape our selves—we envision our true nature which we would realize if we were not too lazy and afraid.
Yet Nietzsche also says in Ecce Homo: “To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion what one is” (EH II 9). Here he condemns singleminded exertion to reach one goal and suggests that some of our detours turn out eventually to have been invaluable.
We might say that his tribute to Schopenhauer was such a detour and that the author of the Untimely Meditations did not yet have any clear notion of what he himself was. When Nietzsche proceeds to consider Schopenhauer’s honesty and integrity and—of all things—his “cheerfulness”; when he meditates on the advantages of Schopenhauer’s “separation” from the universities and on the dangers of “loneliness” and of the “despair in truth” and concludes, “life itself means being in danger”—one will readily believe that this is not meant to be an accurate likeness of Schopenhauer but rather Nietzsche’s description of the character he himself hopes to develop. Here is the kind of life he admires and hopes yet to realize.
Schopenhauer is viewed supra-historically as a symbol, and Nietzsche writes not as an “antiquarian” historian but as a “monumentalistic” artist who emphasizes certain traits at the expense of others because his concern is not at all with the past as such.
“Every great philosophy … as a whole says always only: this is the image of all life, and from this learn the meaning of your life. And conversely: read only your own life and understand from this the hieroglyphs of universal life. This is how Schopenhauer’s philosophy, too, should always be interpreted first: individually, by the single one [Einzelnen] alone for himself, to gain insight into his own misery and need.”