Family education is not that important

(translated from my Chinese blog)

This is my new project, “Nietzschean Philology”. In each installment, I’ll read a passage from Nietzsche’s original writings. By practicing text analysis, we can enhance our ability to understand the world.

The reading of "We Philologists" continues. Section 11 continues the discussion of external factors hindering genius individuals from the previous section, shifting from professional education (unqualified philologists) to family education. It's no surprise that Nietzsche views the importance of family education very lowly; ultimately, there are too few cases where families can provide the life possibilities for geniuses.

Let it be considered how differently a science is propagated from the way in which any special talent in a family is transmitted. The bodily transmission of an individual science is something very rare. Do the sons of philologists easily become philologists? Dubito. Thus there is no such accumulation of philological capacity as there was, let us say, in Beethoven's family of musical capacity. Most philologists begin from the beginning, and even then they learn from books, and not through travels, &c. They get some training, of course.

"We Philologists" 11, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by J. M. Kennedy 

Nietzsche's line of thought is as expected, after the previous section discusses the incompetence of teachers as the greatest obstacle, this section immediately analyzes the impact of the family on the individual genius, at least in the field of philology, Nietzsche believes that this impact is negligible.

There are two questions (or three): firstly, what is the difference between philology, or more broadly, academia, and music or other arts, that prevents the former from producing geniuses through generational accumulation like the latter? Secondly, what is it that is accumulated in generational accumulation or family education, according to Nietzsche? (What is it that cannot be accumulated and can only be cultivated through reading and training for academic geniuses?)

The key to answering these questions lies in noticing Nietzsche's unusual choice of words: "bodily transmission." This implies that Nietzsche believed Beethoven's musical talent was more due to good genes being passed down through generations than to postnatal training. Some professions are highly related to physical factors, such as sports, dance, acting, and music. But generally speaking, isn't academia also related to intelligence? The question is whether intelligence can be passed down like height or appearance. We often hear about cases where both parents are postdocs but their child is of average intelligence. If intelligence cannot be inherited, it is clearly not a simple physical factor but a complex concept that integrates a large number of sensory thinking and language abilities.

Imagine a child with academic talent, born into an ordinary family, and compare that to a child born into an academic family. What are the differences? Indeed, the child from the latter family is more likely to achieve success in academia. However, according to Nietzsche, this is not primarily due to the parents' genes or their teachings, but rather because the parents' network of resources can help the child find sufficiently excellent mentors.

Taking philology as an example, the object of study is ancient texts and the lives of ancient people, which are things of the past. However, in a sense, all academic disciplines carry a historical attribute, and the natural sciences such as mathematics, physics, computer science, or materials science are no exception. Humanities are even more obvious in this regard. This is likely the greatest distinction between academic work and artistic work. Artistic work is always present, directly colliding with the surrounding world (political work is also like this); but academic work is always in hindsight, indirectly engaging with the world, better understanding the modern world by observing the lives of ancient people. No one can have firsthand experience of history, so teaching by example is ineffective. Parents can help their children form many life habits conducive to academic study, can make children more sensitive to some academic issues, but that's about it, because any academic issue is just as distant from parents as it is from children, and we are all strangers to the ancients. This indirectness, this sense of distance, means that the development of academic skills can only rely on spontaneous impulses; without such impulses, one cannot engage in academic work, unlike art or sports, where a lack of extra impulses but sufficient talent can still achieve a certain level of success.

The academic impulse cannot be accumulated intergenerationally. It pertains to an individual's overall sense of the world and cannot be reduced to any single biological factor. It stems from an individual's life experience, and parents cannot possibly pass on their life experiences to their children. This is what Nietzsche referred to as "begin from the beginning": academic abilities and academic impulses develop alongside an individual's life experiences. In this process, the vast texts left by the ancients provide countless life possibilities, far exceeding what can be offered by the parents and their social networks. Potential geniuses seek resonance in the ocean of the past, and this "life factor" is more important than any biological or technical factor. The social network of highly educated families is more about finding someone who knows what books to read rather than finding a good teacher for their children, as they have read enough books and have wandered in the ocean of the past long enough to have known numerous life possibilities.

The previous section's discussion of Nietzsche's "bad representation of philology by the unqualified philologist" stems from the fact that the lives of these philologists were failures, and they became bad examples for potential geniuses. The reason an individual is considered a genius is that their ultimate goal is not the development of any discipline, not the progress of all humanity or the improvement of society, but simply to achieve their own life, making their life a new standard of value.