Spiritual Exercises
Nietzsche’s third Untimely Meditation, composed in 1874, Schopenhauer as Educator (Nietzsche 1983a), reflects upon and describes a “spiritual exercise” not unlike the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, detailing tactics and including practical advice. Thus Nietzsche’s “spiritual exercises” correspond to the traditional practice of self-cultivation, self-education, characteristic of the Stoic philosophers but also influential for the Hellenistic neo-Platonic tradition, the church fathers, and St. Augustine, author of De Magistro and the Confessions. Beyond antiquity, spiritual exercises refer to a theological practice of self-cultivation and self-discipline. As a classist by training, Nietzsche notably offered a series of reflections on self-cultivation usually associated with the phrase he adopted as his own from the 7thCentury BCE lyric poet, Pindar: “Become the one you are!” emphasizing that one only assumes but does not know oneself and must...
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Babich, B. (2016). Nietzsche’s Spiritual Exercises. In: Peters, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_458-1
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