Abstract

The thesis is intended to demonstrate that the 'education' Nietzsche received from Schopenhauer can and must be evaluated from a completely different perspective than that adopted by the expositors of both philosophers who concentrate on Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy as an indication of his initial 'Schopenhauerian' leanings and then proceed to discuss his break with the 'pessimism' of his 'educator.' The 'education' in question, that related by Nietzsche in 'Schopenhauer as Educator' , was permanent because it was not based exclusively upon the teachings contained in Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation. The philosopher who educated Nietzsche was not the youthful metaphysician who believed he had solved the riddle of the universe in his first great metaphysical treatise, but the mature moralist and essayist who published the Parerga and Paralipomena in the last decade of his life. Nietzsche's image of Schopenhauer, as depicted in 'Schopenhauer as Educator,' is not simply an idealized image of Schopenhauer, nor an image of Nietzsche in anticipando as both Nietzsche and all subsequent commentators have claimed, but rather a splendid portrayal of the philosopher, one formulated with an eye to Schopenhauer's most intimate self-reflections and Wilhelm Gwinner's early biographies of the hermit philosopher of Frankfurt. The central issue addressed in the thesis is how and why Nietzsche's image of Schopenhauer in 'Schopenhauer as Educator' is a superb Bild of that philosopher and at the same time a Vorbild of Nietzsche many years prior to his becoming an independent thinker of the first order