An Agonistic Education. A commentary on the conception of education in Nietzsche’s early work

The New Oxford Dictionary of English includes an acceptation of the adjective “agonistic” that makes it appropriate to describe the conception of education in Nietzsche ́s writings from the so called “period of youth” or “first period”, that is, the period which ended in 1876 with the publication of the fourth and last untimely meditation, entitled Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. This acceptation, which is used in Biochemistry, is the following: “of relating to, or acting as an agonist”, which is “a substance which initiates a physiological response when combined with a receptor”. Or more accurately, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, an agonist is “ any ligand, especially a drug or hormone, that binds to receptors and thereby alters the proportion of them that are in active form, resulting in a biological response. A conventional agonist increases this proportion, whereas an inverse agonist reduces it.” Used in a figurative sense, this term serves to synthesize Goethe ́s words that Nietzsche placed as a motto at the beginning of the second untimely meditation, entitled On the uses and disadvantages of history for life (1874): “In my case, I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity.”. That is to say, if anything does not augment or invigorate our activity then it does not educate us truly. Or, which is logically equivalent, if anything truly educates us then it augments or invigorates our activity; that is to say, it acts as a conventional agonist on us. To sum up, everything that truly educates us is agonistic. It seems to me that the adjective “agonistic”, in the figurative sense of “relating to or acting as an agonist on us”, and where the noun “agonist” means “all that increases our activity”, expresses an outstanding feature of true education as young Nietzsche conceived it. Next I will try to argue for this.