BERT LAMBEIR and PAUL SMEYERS

NIHILISM: BEYOND OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM

Threat or Blessing for Education at the Turn of the Century
ABSTRACT. Is the youth culture, or more precisely a particular kind of it, to be charac-
terized as nihilistic? And is this a threat or a blessing for education? To deal with this
nihilism is rst characterized generally and following particular attention is paid to Niet-
zsches own version and revaluation of values. Then Foucaults concept of life as a work
of art is brought to the forefront as a particular manner to give shape to ones life. It is
argued that some of the more popular forms of pleasure nowadays may contrarily to what is
generally believed, be reminiscent of a revaluation thus to overcome nihilism. Implications
for education include for the educator to realize the unavoidability to offer herself as who
she is, furthermore to be fully aware of the fact that many boundaries in the educational
process are arbitrary, and last but not least the acceptance of the need to create the room
for the child to develop an image of herself which she can live with.
KEY WORDS: Foucault, identity, Nihilism, Nietzsche, pleasure, values education
KEEP ON ROCKING IN A FREE WORLD
The coachwork glows, the hubcaps glitter, the surround sound system has
passed the nal test in just a moment the weekend can start. For many
youth this creates the peak of the week, an exquisite opportunity to make
ones way, surrounded by companions and a fair amount of decibels. All
excited they drive to the weekly oasis to take a dip in a cocktail of drumm
n base, alcohol, drugs, dancing and irting. This mix is so much appre-
ciated that they may want to drink it for twenty four or even for forty eight
hours, perhaps even longer, and such with a steady routine weekend after
weekend. Quite a few will even literally shift some boundaries when they
skim off the country from one disco to another or when they have a break
just to party Ibiza here we come!
Have these youngsters found what they were looking for when they
return home after sunrise, not quite sober, or were they not really looking
for something and is the hangover just physical? They will be there again
next Friday. Much more than a pilgrimage, on ones way to a greater
truth, this nocturnal mobilization looks like a collective escape from a
disappointing reality. Existence has only temporary things on offer which
are easy to get and can painlessly exchanged. Life presents a cheerless
Studies in Philosophy and Education 22: 183194, 2003.
2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
184 BERT LAMBEIR AND PAUL SMEYERS
prospect, almost worthless, now that it has lost its grip on certainty and
permanence, moreover as the power of institutions and the social control
that goes with it have retired. The loss of ultimate values and norms has put
its mark almost on every aspect of ones existence: nor a job, neither a rela-
tionship is for the rest of ones natural life, it is just one of the alternatives
there is nothing more on offer, to hold on than one demands or permits;
a succession of temporary, never really satisfactory stops. One practices
life shopping, hoping that one will nd what one is looking for on the
shelves, in the knowledge that hoping in vain too is of this world.
The motor starts, its time to leave and to deal with the frustration of the
search, time to forget the meaninglessness of the past few days. They are
expelled by the compelling rhythms of the dance-music to stop dancing
is only an option when one is sure that what needs to be gone is gone, and
even then one may want to continue for another hour or so, accompanied
by some amphetamines. The intensity and this surrendering make going
out more than a game of seduction, more than just recreation. Is it a case
of defying physical limits, looking for peak experiences which lose every
signicance after some hours of sleep? Is it an escape as if the basses of
the dancing can shout down the resignation, the disinterestedness? Is it a
dance around the re of nihilism that now burns ercely?
A line of vodka tears inside
A shot of boredom helps my mind
Staring through a thousand dead eyes
I guess my nerves are brutalised . . .
Theres nothing I want to see
Theres nowhere I wanna go
Condemned to rock n roll
1
NIHILISM
It is not until the late eighteenth century and thus with the emergence
of the Enlightenment, that the term nihilism appears on the philosoph-
ical scene (Cf. Carr, 1992), partly as a result of the implicit tendency of
transcendental idealism to dissolve the reality of the external world in the
nothingness of consciousness, by focusing on the subjective conditions for
the possibility of knowledge. The literary realm too had its own version,
a poetic nihilism which was attacked as the romantic fascination with the
privacy of individual consciousness. In these discussions the term used to
signify the loss or dissolution of an independently existing world external
1
James, R. & Wire, N. (1991). Condemned to rock n roll [Manic Street Preachers].
On Generation Terrorists [CD]. Sony Music Entertainment.
NIHILISM: BEYOND OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM 185
to consciousness. In the second half of the nineteenth century nihilism
tended to be linked to moral, religious, and political anarchism, usually
grounded in loss of belief in God.
Carr (1992) distinguishes four strands of nihilism. Epistemologically
it is characterized by the denial of the possibility of knowledge with the
result that All knowledge claims are equal or equally (un)justied and
no standards exist for distinguishing warranted from unwarranted belief, or
knowledge from error. Alethiological nihilism denies the reality of truth, of
an (independently existing) world. In ethical or moral nihilism the reality
of these values is disclaimed. It is not denied that people use ethical or
moral terms, rather it is claimed that these refer to nothing more than
the bias or taste of the agent making the assertion. Finally, existential or
axiological nihilism refers to the feeling of emptiness and pointlessness
that follows from the judgment Life has no meaning probably this is
the most commonplace sense of the word. In practice the various senses
tend to overlap and intermingle. They are all related to the last kind, since
we describe life as pointless, meaningless, or our existence as without
value, precisely because we believe that there is no truth, that knowledge
is mere illusion, or that there is no moral fabric in the universe. It is worth
pointing to the fact that nihilism which makes a negative assertation about
the nature of the world, is different as well from the related position of
scepticism as from some forms of relativism.
NIETZSCHEAN NIHILISM
Indeed, we philosophers and free spirits feel, when we hear the news that the old god
is dead, as if a new dawn shone upon us; our heart overows with gratitude, amazement,
premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it
should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any
danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies
open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an open sea (Nietzsche, 1887, # 343).
The author par excellence to whom nihilism is ascribed is of course
Friedrich Nietzsche, who violently proclaimed that God is dead, which
he calls in the above quoted section the greatest recent event. The nihilist
despairs because she longs to value something but in good faith cannot,
for she believes that only values believed to be objective can in good faith
be professed (and she no longer believes in objective values). The partic-
ular form of nihilism in which Nietzsche is interested should however be
understood as the state one may be in when nothing truly matters to one.
Overcoming this nihilism is not so much a matter of replacing old values
with new ones, as it is coming to value something where previously one
186 BERT LAMBEIR AND PAUL SMEYERS
valued nothing. Roughly what he means is, that we must take a certain
sort of responsibility for what we say about the world and accept that we
cannot lean on something else when values are concerned. Sense can no
longer be made of the idea that the ways in which we view the world are
justied by something standing above, beyond or behind the world itself.
Neither nature, nor reason, nor revelation can provide the moral standards
for the governance of life. He holds that as there are no objective values, as
all values are the creation of human beings, they typically serve the needs
of their creators understanding why they were created requires therefore
an historical or psychological investigation of these needs. What is most
important for us is not in our power.
Nietzsche teaches that we are free to adopt the perspective that pro-
claims the value of creating subjective value. This creation should not be
understood as a kind of subjectivism, as if the subject could create values ex
nihilo, could impose upon or project some into the world. What Nietzsche
means is that we have to take responsibility for having to take responsi-
bility, rather than trying to deny the fact of such responsibility by means of
a fantasy of access to the worlds nature that would be wholly independent
of our human, all too human interests and aims. His interest lies in the
loss of the world more specically how humans create, not nd a world.
Rather than claiming that we should take responsibility for the meaning
we impose on the world, Nietzsche seems to show us how we can resist
the meaning we nd in the world but how we are inclined to hide in the
herd. Thus he seeks to replace the Socratic notion of responsibility, with a
notion of responsiveness understood in terms of the notion of commitment,
a form of passivity, an openness to what matters to us.
Nietzsches antipathy toward what he calls moral values is aimed at
those ways of life that seek to deny life. To afrm life means to afrm ones
membership of a culture, but this is simply to make sense, to speak intelli-
gibly; for him it is about afrming those passions, affects, and drives that
are condemned by conventional morality. One should be careful, however,
not to step outside the achievement of intelligibility; that is to say that ones
perspective on the things around one cannot be but from the perspective of
the culture to which one belongs which is at the same time partly afrmed.
Nietzsches revaluation of values is carried out from a naturalistic view-
point. Living in accordance with nature is living a life that afrms what
nature is in us, without dressing it up through morality. It consists of
instincts and inclinations, the body, sexuality and so forth. Consequently,
customs, institutions and moralities are natural when they afrm the
instincts of what is nature in some group of human beings. At a deeper
level living in accordance with nature prescribes an ideal of human perfect-
NIHILISM: BEYOND OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM 187
ibility. The return to nature is not a return to an unbridled, instinctual beast
of prey, rather it is a rising up to a harmonized existence that focuses on an
achievement, afrms what is, and creates the values according to which it
operates.
The values Nietzsche envisages arise out of the creative process itself,
involving an ever renewed engagement with the ux of phenomena, with
perpetual birth and death. Thus we look for the ways we overcome nihilism
which enable us to afrm this world. The restoration of the integrity of
the phenomena is in his opinion only possible through art, which does
not harden and solidify the phenomena into new metaphysical determ-
inations. Images, symbols, and metaphors can afrm and enhance the
presencing of the phenomena in ever new and renewed congurations.
Nietzsches concept of self-overcoming is therefore a revision of the
traditional concept of autonomy or self-control. The latter is based on
the idea that as humans are hybrid, it is their duty to subjugate the rival
and opposing powers to the highest (the sublime). For Nietzsche, on the
contrary, a human is rst an individual, the essence of which is precisely
his uniqueness and singularity. The human has to liberate herself from all
that represses her true nature and from what opposes her freedom. This
authentic conquering of the wrong idea of autonomy, opposed by the polit-
ical and religious establishment, asks for a constant readiness to criticize
what is institutionalized.
TAKING UP THE NIHILISTIC HERITAGE:
FOUCAULTS LIFE AS A WORK OF ART
In the same vein Foucault radicalizes the modernist liberation by indic-
ating how ethical reection depends on knowledge. His concern is with
what knowledge does, what power constructs (rather than represents) and
how a relationship of the self to the self is invented rather than discovered.
He thought of ethics as that component of morality that concerns the
selfs relationship to itself. Histories of morality should not be exclusively
focused on the history of codes of moral behaviour. We must also pay
careful attention to the history of what Foucault calls the forms of moral
subjectivation, of the ways we constitute ourselves as moral subjects of our
own actions. His interest in relations to oneself focuses on the government
of the self by the self in connection with its relations to others, a relation-
ship described in pedagogy, advice for conduct, spiritual direction, and the
prescription of models of life, for instance how our culture made sexuality
into a moral experience and the moral subject forms itself and is formed
by the bodys desires. The Foucauldian position describes an ethos and
a self-relation that is constituted by a complex historical inheritance, but
188 BERT LAMBEIR AND PAUL SMEYERS
an ethos without a normative core: an ethos based on the observation that
one can always detach oneself from oneself, thanks to the fragmentation
of the elements that constitute the self. The identities of human beings
are unsteady then, not because we repress our true natures, nor because
our true natures are repressed by our parents, our leaders, or our culture,
but because we do not have true natures. Each of us is a nexus of rela-
tions formed in response to ever-shifting problems. A subject will nd
freedom in the ability to reverse or to resist a situation. It is because she
has no essence that the subject enjoys this freedom, which is a freedom
of fragmentation: a freedom that arises in the constellation of differences
that constitute a lineage of loose alliances, relations of resistance and
mastery, and congurations of uid interests. The result is an ethic of
responsibility for the truths one speaks, for the political strategies which
these truths inform, and for those ways of relating to ourselves that make
us either conformists or dissidents. For Foucault ethics involves under-
standing oneself as the subject of a critical practice of freedom which is
not outside the games of truth. With such an understanding, we are able to
oppose political institutions, states of domination and juridical notions of
the subject.
Over a long history, the ancient preoccupation with the self became
a morality of asceticism whose maxim was that the self is that which
one can reject. This asceticism tried to determine what one must sacri-
ce of oneself to know what is good or right. Further, the ancient task of
taking care of or being concerned with oneself was obscured and replaced
by knowing oneself. But to take care of oneself, to regard oneself as a
work (of art) to be accomplished could, according to Foucault, sustain an
ethics that is no longer supported by either tradition or reason. As creator
of itself, the self could enjoy that autonomy that modern man cannot do
without a position reminiscent of Nietzsches aesthetics of existence.
One result of this conversion is the experience of a pleasure that one takes
in oneself. Furthermore, the characterization of how one lives, ones style
of life, indicates what aspect of oneself one puts under judgment, how one
relates oneself to moral obligations, what one does to transform oneself
into an ethical subject and what mode of being one aims to realize. And as
the selfs relationship to itself undergoes modication in every historical
period, as the way in which one cares for oneself changes, so too will ones
style of life change.
The ethical in relation to others, that kind which shows the highest
virtues and which elicits from the subject the attitude which generates
a maximum of self-realization, Foucault nds in (intimate) friendship.
There the other becomes part of oneself: the dreams, aspirations, desires
and interests are treated as ones own far from manipulation or exploit-
NIHILISM: BEYOND OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM 189
ation. Here is a whole area of (power) relations, hardly conscated by
a scientic game of truth and institutionalized rules and where pleasure
(as different from desire) plays an important role. The actual regime of
power and knowledge has primordially emphasized desire through which
sexual identity has become an element of a political exercise of power.
Foucault himself gives two examples where the play of rules and iden-
tities can deal creatively with shaping the self in her relation to others: the
sadomasochistic game and good drugs.
For Foucault, to reinvent ethical thought is to ask again the ancient
question of how to speak truly of our lives. In stressing subjectivity he does
not intend to abandon a social or collective ethic in favour of an individual
or private one. He wanted to rethink the great questions of community:
how and why people bond together, the question of passion, and of the
eros of our identity. Foucaults subject is therefore not an individuality, an
indivisible unit in which we locate our identity, neither is it a particularity,
the exemplication of a common nature. It is not a single thing. Rather,
there are as many subjectivities as there are accepted forms of self-relation.
Human beings each have more than one kind of subjectivity, more than
one kind of social being. Individual and society are not opposed to one
another as absolute entities; they are instead linked together in a common
history, the forms of one being able to survive a change in the forms of the
other. In a critical community the self-sufciency of its taken-for-granted
is problematized. Freedom is not a state one achieves once and for all, but
a condition of undened work of thought, action and self-invention.
Is the present experience of existence which has been illustrated in the
opening section similar to what has been put forward by Nietzsche and
Foucault? In some sense the answer to this question is yes. Nietzsche wants
to stress the positive nothing should hinder us. In our over-regulated
society his criticism surely still hits the right tone. So does Foucaults
reaction against rusted patterns of behaviour. We will look at two examples
to place their critique in the present-day lived experiences.
POPULAR FORMS OF PLEASURE NOWADAYS:
LOSING ONESELF?
Since the second half of the twentieth century other stimulants than alcohol
and tobacco, have become more and more popular. Soft drugs
2
seem to
2
The case of amphetamines is different. Extasy ts rather well in the present climate
of performativity. Though it may underscore and intensify particular experiences, by
pushing the boundaries of ones limits it foremost creates a kick and increases ones
endurance.
190 BERT LAMBEIR AND PAUL SMEYERS
answer particular needs: they offer new kinds of (physical) pleasure and
may intensify other experiences; they help people coping with the demands
of life, i.e., being high pushes ones daily worries at least for a while to
the background; they make it possible to throw away ones inhibitions,
encourage to do things one would normally not do (because one does not
dare, or deeply wanting them one fears to be ashamed afterwards); it can
also be an expression of making fun of society and what is seen by most to
be necessary to keep it going. The sixties utterance peace man, expresses
the attitude to be tolerated for what one is, does, wants. Above all one
wants to enjoy life, instead of being preoccupied with output and perfor-
mance to gain a place on the social ladder, or doing, even against ones
better judgment, just what one is expected to do. Seen like this drugs carry
the germs for criticism, for new modes of relationships and behaviour.
Indeed, it is not impossible that having said something (even perhaps a
well kept secret) or acted in particular ways in this heightened state of
consciousness, one truly nds oneself in this new dimension, values this
new aspect one has come to terms with now. Discussions nowadays about
the legalisation of soft drugs in some countries, put indeed the bourgeois
often hypocritical morality of many in the picture. Accepting that cannabis
for instance does not lead to physical dependency (and thus cannot be
banned on this basis), some point now to a psychical dependency (and
addiction) that may be the result of being a user. Perhaps their reaction
rationalizes their fear that people at another conscience level might want
to question what they are supposed to do, how to live, what kind of life is
worthwhile, what kind of society is desirable, so that their option is only
to defend what they have, thus abusing the law to prevent its change.
The self-creating subject looking for new, for different dimensions
of her identity, for unconstrained pleasure, has got an unexplored play-
ground where she can be herself to her hearts content. Foucault argues
for bending the corroded patterns of experiencing ones body and ones
sexuality. There is more pleasure on offer than what can be found in the
common and tolerated practices. We have to transgress our limits and ques-
tion our deviant hesitations though the latter will inhibit us less as a
new space announces itself where traditions until now not yet frustrate;
cyberspace. Many of our wants, desires, and kinks stem from early exper-
iences. When it comes to cyber sex, a whole arena opens up. We can act out
the sexual fantasies wed never consider doing in real life, the fantasies we
wouldnt want to do in real life. We can switch gender and switch gender
preferences. Everything is possible . . . (Odzer, 1997, p. 11).
The new communications technology offer the subject the possibility
to experiment with her multiple identities, with modes of sexuality, with
NIHILISM: BEYOND OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM 191
forms of pleasure, just because cybersex is only to some extent submitted
to explicit rules and conventions. Together with its less regulated and
moralising character, cybersex is in each of its capacities safe sex (prob-
ably one of the reasons why it is practised at such a large scale): who
connects for cybersex does not have to admit to a particular sex which she
accepts in cyberspace nor to a particular sexual preference; not even to
the actual practices. This refers as well to the anonymity (cyberspace as
a masked orgy) as to the possibility to withdraw at each moment from
the affair (to log out). The habit to terminate a particular relationship
frequented in cyberspace by many persons reminds one of the role of the
sadist in the sado-masochistic game (a game that incidentally any way in
itself is often virtually materialized). Nothing restrains the freedom as a
condition for the development of oneself (in the way Foucault speaks of
it), as far as cybersex goes as is clear from the following testimony: With
the freedom to be and do anything, I had sex with three men at once. I had
sex with a woman. I had sex with three men and a woman at once. Posing
as a man, I had sex with a woman. Posing as a gay man, I had sex with a
man. Posing as a man, I had sex with a man who was posing as a woman.
I learned all about S&M, as the sadist and as the masochist. I had all sorts
of sex in every new way I could think of (Odzer, 1997, p. 43).
What does being responsible for ones own work of art (or life), for
the pleasure of creating oneself, for the fragmented subject, mean when
the educational relationship is at stake?
AND FOR EDUCATION: POINTING TO THE BEYOND
According to standard educational theory, children grow up by the grace
of the care of others. Their parents and teachers carry the responsibility for
instilling the difference between right and wrong. The power and violence
which is implied by this initiation, is justied by the necessity to raise the
ignorance of the child, as the subjugation to what is objectively good is
the only true way to freedom. The experience of human existence that is
presupposed by this way of becoming human is however no longer ours.
Being human is a project in which man has to give shape to his own exist-
ence. Since Nietzsches radical criticism concerning values, elaborated by
him as a self-overcoming Beyond good and evil, man will no longer
ignore himself, but takes full responsibility for his life. All philosophy,
he holds furthermore, originated and was carried out in the service of
education and all education in the end should pass into self-education.
What does this mean for the educator? Can one still educate and to what
end?
192 BERT LAMBEIR AND PAUL SMEYERS
One cannot not educate: the care for oneself, the way in which one
lives, in which one afrms oneself and is afrmed by the other, in which
one walks upon new paths and explores the pleasant sides of life, bears
witness by what one does and, by speaking about ones personal exper-
iences, of what life can be. Moreover, it entices one to live in such a
way too, to accept what is evident only provisionally, to make questioning
and exploring a way of life. Indeed, there are always more, unreclaimed
areas which still may be experienced, because the point is to enjoy life for
oneself. Evidently there is initiation in what we, together with others, nd
worthwhile thus the educator cannot avoid reprimanding and prescribing
what has to be done; of course one will have to learn to earn ones place,
accept challenges in order to realise something that is worthwhile. But in
the end what it comes down to is to experience the way life is shaped as
an answer to the question about existence itself. The child has to be able
to say yes to what she does as a mode of what she really wants to be,
to what permits her to undergo existence and to enjoy thoroughly and
really experience life. Examples of this are for instance, the choice for
a particular kind of education or training which is not self-evident one
can think of a 15 year old girl trained to become a construction worker,
to decide suddenly to become a vegetarian, or to express ones political
opinions if those happen to be of the extreme right.
One has to be who one is. The good educator is rstly therefore a real
human, a person of esh and blood, with nice and tiresome aspects, with
particular qualities and rough edges. She who sets her own aspirations
aside confers upon the child a bad service. Thus the educator should not
feel guilty for the fact that she enjoys her life. This enjoyment is of course
no alibi for whimsical behaviour that takes no one into account, but instead
is a realistic way of looking at what might be expected from people who,
though they have not chosen each other, live together. To fully live up to
this implies for education different, more realistic criteria: airy castles keep
us in thin air concerning what is out of reach.
Educators experience pleasure in educating children, want to risk them-
selves in this project, want to shape children, want to live with them, grow
up and grow old with them. Good educators are those who like to make
time, who do not mind being disturbed, who enjoy passing on some-
thing because life itself is fun; who want to make it possible that others
too experience what is good, what they nd beautiful; who want to share
what they are themselves full of, without forgetting in their enthusiasm
that it is not only about themselves. Lacking pleasure in this, it cannot
be satisfactory as such, but only a fate, a boring task, a job that must be
done the message it then carries with it cannot be but a negative attitude
NIHILISM: BEYOND OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM 193
to life which sties the enjoyment in its birth of each young life. Indeed,
it is about the child who has to learn to enjoy what announces itself. In
xing boundaries thus some modesty is appropriate; in issuing prohib-
itions, some standing back; in looking at how to solve conicts, some
distance. The educational space can thus be seen as the realm in which
all involved may want to explore dimensions of oneself, as exemplied
with case of cybersex. The educator will make her presence felt indirectly,
ironically, reserved, without being however indifferent. She has to confront
the childs wanting something else. She should be fully aware of the fact
that many boundaries are arbitrary, marked by a particular societal context,
a particular period, that much could have been otherwise and that we do not
know what is best, never mind having the right to determine it for someone
else.
Again this does not mean that the educator should be characterized by
a laisser faire attitude, or that she should make things easy for the child.
Learning to live should hurt in order to be fully experienced, but all of
this conscious of the groundlessness of what we are certain of. As Nietz-
sche argued in Beyond Good and Evil, the discipline of suffering and this
alone has created every elevation of mankind hitherto (# 225). Instead of
solving a problem on behalf of the child (or determining its outcome) the
educator will point to the consequences and then rest in her hope. It can
only be about appealing, enticing, charming, as in the end what matters
is the judgment of the child. In the success of a music performer such as
Marilyn Manson one can see a translation of the desire to get the space for
such a judgment: the demand of youth that it has to be about them, about
what they want to experience, a silent protest against the necessary form
that is given to freedom in a particular society. The use of drugs too
may exemplify their deep need to experiment with something else that is
at present not acceptable to those in power in society human life always
and necessarily sets limits. The nihilism is enjoyment for a while, a cry
that that is its point. And the educator, for her the message seems to be rst
to be herself, and to think of herself less as an educator. To reside less in
the illusions she can live with herself, look the child in the eyes and accept
her as a locus of desire which does not necessarily coincide with what she
had imagined about the child previously.
The child must be given the chance to develop an image of herself
which she can live with, an image of how she wants to be seen by signi-
cant others. She must learn to value herself as a valuable object. Only then
can she take on the care for herself as dealt with above, as an emerging
work of art. Education will have to give attention to the different aspects
outlined: the sensorial, the aesthetical, the others, all can comfort and for a
194 BERT LAMBEIR AND PAUL SMEYERS
while counterbalance. Indeed, the person to be educated must learn to deal
with a fundamental loneliness and nd in it a source of enjoyment and not
of frustration. Though being on ones own can never be lifted, it can be
shared and celebrated. The so-called nihilism of youth seems therefore to
repair this enjoyment and underscore its importance. It reprimands society
and shows that it can be different, kicks it a conscience, celebrates life and
makes room for enjoyment beyond optimism and pessimism.
3
But the genuine philosopher as he seems to us, my friends? lives unphilosophically
and unwisely, above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred
attempts and temptations of life he risks himself constantly, he plays the wicked game
(Nietzsche, 1885, # 205).
REFERENCES
Blake, N., Smeyers, P., Smith, R. & Standish, P. (1998). Thinking again: Education after
postmodernism. New York: Bergin & Garvey.
Carr, K.L. (1992). The banalization of nihilism. Twentieth-century responses to meaning-
lessness. Albany: Suny.
Nietzsche, F. (1966). Beyond good and evil (W. Kaufmann, trans.). New York: Vintage
Books. (original publication 1885)
Nietzsche, F. (1974). The gay science (W. Kaufmann, trans.). New York: Vintage Books.
(original publication 1887)
Odzer, C. (1997). Virtual spaces: Sex and the cyber citizen. New York: Berkeley Books.
Centre for Philosophy of Education
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
B-3000 Leuven
Belgium
3
Related aspects are discussed in another jointly written paper: Smeyers, P. &Lambeir,
B. (2001). Carpe diem. Tales of desire and the unexpected. Journal of Philosophy of
Education, 35, 283299.