I’ve always wondered why Nietzsche went from an academic, classical philologist to what can best be described as the anti-academic philosopher. Was this a gradual evolution, a pivot, or a radical change?
Well, there may be some clues to be found in his Untimely Meditations, the essays he wrote during the time of this change.
The early tone, especially in David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer, comes across as vehemently anti-academic and anti-philistine, initially leading me to believe his path changed in response to the academic rejection of his brilliant creative philosophical work The Birth of Tragedy. This was a turning away from academia.
However, by the time of his third essay, Schopenhauer as Educator, he was defining to himself what it meant to be a philosopher. This was an act of being pulled towards, becoming a philosopher. And for Nietzsche, perhaps one can study philosophy in the confines of an academic institution, but one cannot be a philosopher within those same constraints.
I suspect this is one of the reasons many academic philosophers dismiss Nietzsche: It’s because Nietzsche has already dismissed them as original thinkers.
Even now, his dismissal of philosophy’s academia is a radical idea, and it suggests that Nietzsche’s shift from philologist to philosopher was equally radical.