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2 The Major Philosophical Influences on Nietzsche’s Thinking Introduction Nietzsche was educated as a classical philologist and had a very limited philosophical education in the conventional sense. As a philosopher he was largely an autodidact. He never had a living philosophical teacher or mentor who could help him develop. He therefore developed late, and almost all of his philosophical development came in response to reading. Contrary to common assumption, Nietzsche’s education even in classical philosophy was minimal during his time at school and at the university. At Schulpforta there was almost no teaching of philosophy, and even ancient philosophy seems to have been almost completely absent from the curriculum. As a university student, he took three courses in philosophy during his first year at Bonn (of a total of the twenty-nine courses he attended between 1864 and 1867), two on Plato and one general introduction to the history of philosophy. One was given by the philologist Otto Jahn and two by the philosopher Karl Schaarschmidt, but none of them seems to have been of much importance to Nietzsche.1 Emerson Nietzsche’s very first important encounter with philosophy (before both Plato and Schopenhauer) was with the American philosopher and writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, who probably stimulated both Nietzsche’s break with Christianity and his discovery of philosophical thinking. Although Nietzsche rarely referred to Emerson in his published writings, he continued to read and be stimulated by Emerson almost every year of his life and annotated books by him (in German translation) more heavily than perhaps any other books in his library. And Major Philosophical Influences 23 in letters and notes he highly praised Emerson with such comments as “the author richest in thought this century.”2 Nietzsche seems to have begun to read Emerson in 1861–62, for Emerson was one of six authors mentioned in a list of Nietzsche’s most important reading that year.3 More importantly, Nietzsche’s earliest philosophical writings are two essays from April 1862 with the titles “Fatum und Geschichte” (“Fate and History”) and “Willensfreiheit und Fatum” (“Freedom of the Will and Fate”)—of six and three printed pages, respectively—both of which were strongly influenced by Emerson.4 Both essays are surprisingly interesting and contain much that foreshadows Nietzsche’s future philosophy.5 Nietzsche wrote the subtitle “Thoughts” to the first essay “Fatum und Geschichte,” and the best description of these essays is probably that they constitute Nietzsche’s thoughts inspired by his reading of Emerson’s essay “Fate” in Die Führung des Lebens (The Conduct of Life). It is not known how Nietzsche discovered Emerson, but a chance discovery in a bookshop is possible, for Die Führung des Lebens appeared in 1862. Nietzsche continued to read Emerson’s Die Führung des Lebens intensively in 1863 and copied extensive excerpts from it. In early 1864 he listed Emerson first among his most important reading during 1863.6 In 1863 Nietzsche wrote excerpts from the essay “Schönheit” in Die Führung des Lebens and planned to write more extensive excerpts from other essays for his friends. We know that Nietzsche also had read and probably acquired Emerson’s collection titled Versuche (Essays) in 1864 or earlier.7 Nietzsche seems to have continued to read Emerson in the ensuing years. In a letter from 1866 Nietzsche referred to and paraphrased Emerson’s essay “Nature” (published in the second part of the German translation of Essays) and in late 1867 or early 1868 wrote a short quotation with a page reference to Versuche into his notebook.8 In 1874 Nietzsche brought Versuche with him to Bergün, where he spent the second half of July and the early part of August, and read it there while finishing and revising his Schopenhauer as Educator (1874), which contains two important references, in the first and the last sections, to Emerson.9 On the return journey to Basel, Nietzsche’s copy of Versuche was stolen from him, but he quickly bought a new copy, which is the heavily annotated copy in his library today. With the possible exception of the period 1869 to 1873, Nietzsche appears to have read Emerson almost every year from 1862 until his mental collapse in 1889. This makes it likely that Emerson was the most read and reread author of all those Nietzsche read.10 His library contained four titles in 1942 (of which two have since been lost) and an issue of the Atlantic Monthly with...

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