A Nietzschean education: Zarathustra/Zarathustra as educator

In On the Aesthetic Education of Man,2 written as a series of letters a half-century before Nietzsche’s birth, Friedrich Schiller saw “aesthetic education” as the key to the attainment of a richer and more complete humanity than had been attained even by the Greeks-who, however, were seen as showing the way. Through such an education, according to Schiller, the “sensuous” impulses of our natural natures may be transformed, the cultivation of the “formal” impulses of our rational nature is made possible, and then the opposition between them can be overcome as a new impulse comes to the fore: a “play” impulse, joining elements of both of these other impulses as our higher (artistic/authentic) nature emerges, with a sensibility attuned to beauty and abilities employed creatively.