People and education at Nietzsche

The study aims at explaining Nietzsche's conception of education and human being, who confronted the Western philosophies in general and developed a unique style of philosophical criticism. In his works, Nietzsche generally focuses on such subjects as culture, morality, human and existence. The main factor in that motivates him into focusing on these issues is the aim of challenging the historical and cultural grounds that give the human life its meaning. In this context, his philosophy highlights the basic perspective, which covers the value of human beings, their function in life, the haecceity of the emotional and cultural contexts that equip human beings with their humane qualities, and in interpreting all these, his perspective covers the evaluation of whatness and howness of the human beings. According to Nietzsche, throughout all his life, man desires the absolute power and aims at acquiring it. Therefore, life refers to a field where people do and act whereby they create value and themselves become valuable. According to Nietzsche, Platonism and Christianity of the western tradition function in a way to distract people from their existential effort and to alienate them from the life itself. By focusing mainly on the human mind and pain, they attempted to overthrow the dynamics of human beings in their lives. The kind of life as endorsed by Christianity and Platonism ignores the dynamism of life, desires and passions, and the determination to struggle in life. For Nietzsche, these ancient teachings, which passivize man, keep him distant from the reality of life and prevent him from emerging with a personality, need to be overthrown and a new set of values needs to be suggested. The Superhuman (Übermensch), which Nietzsche takes as a model at the highest level in his attempt to suggest a new set of values, constitutes the goal that Nietzsche wants to reach by his ideal human type. Undoubtedly, such a character does not emerge spontaneously. The emergence of such a character is possible through an authentic educational process that Nietzsche describes by his criticisms and views. From this point of view, it is possible to claim that education serves for two main purposes in Nietzsche's thought. The first of these purposes belongs to the ordinary conceptions of education, whereby the education standardizes and turns people into herds by adding nothing new to life, and eventually reducing the quality of life. These conceptions of education are far from revealing the integrity of the human being as they are the education models that completely ignore and blind the aspects that produce vital activity. That is why Nietzsche sees the human type of the ordinary conception of education as a herd person who is far from competence. The second education model is the one that develops and flourishes in the climate of culture and the ideal culture. This model is the education that trains the ideal human type, which Nietzsche endorses as the main output of education. Accordingly, the education model sees human beings in a cultural asset and enables them to pursue all existential efforts and the possibility of self-realization; it is a multi-faceted human development project that makes people active not only with their technical skills, but also with art, aesthetics, science, literature, history, philosophy and as such. The framework that Nietzsche thinks of in the notion of culture is the period whence the ancient Greek philosophy and art were performed, in which culture reached its most ideal form in its historicity. By adapting the success of ancient Greece in human education to modern times, Nietzsche creates a conception of education that is equivalent to that of the Greeks and ideal in his own sense. According to this, he compares the herd people with the Superhuman and the education models that produce them, as they are different from each other in terms of their conceptions of education where one produces the herd while the other treats the human being as cultural beings in essence. The one who are educated via the ideal model of education that Nietzsche specifies in light of his criticisms, will be ready to emerge as persons and will be the people who reveal and establish the world with a different definition. Key Words: Cultural education, non-formal and vocational education, herd people, Christianity, Will to Power, Nihilism, Superhuman, Evaluation of values.