AN NYRB Classics Original
In 1869, at the age of twenty-four, the precociously brilliant Friedrich Nietzsche was appointed to a professorship of classical philology at the University of Basel. He seemed marked for a successful and conventional academic career. Then the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the music of Wagner transformed his ambitions. The genius of such thinkers and makers--the kind of genius that had emerged in ancient Greece--this alone was the touchstone for true understanding. But how was education to serve genius, especially in a modern society marked more and...