The student teacher relationship is more interesting than it seems on the surface. But to understand this relationship, we need to first understand our individual pursuits.
We all have our personal quests for understanding the world better, because with better understanding comes the mastery of the field that we are pursuing.
We cannot fully pursue every possible field, because there is a never ending abyss to explore in every direction. Our experience i.e. our successes and failures help us pave the path towards pursuits that are worthwhile.
Success is the feedback that says that we are making some headway with progress in our understanding of a particular field. Our ability to endure failures determines the extent to which we are capable of pursuing that particular field. There is an optimal amount of failures that we can endure before we are willing to accept that whatever we are pursuing is not worth our effort.
Failures are significantly more common. Success is a rare exception. Although this might not be obvious while living in a society bubble where the ratio of success and failures are artificially altered, if you go to the edge of any particular field, this is apparent.
You can also observe this with other aspects of life, like the chance of a sperm to fertilize an egg. A normal sperm count per mili-liter of semen is 15 million - 200 million sperm (source). So that means that there is approximately a 1 in 15 million chance for a specific sperm to make it through to the egg, and even then, the actual odds of success when all things are considered is much worse than that.
Another example that depicts this low chance of success is seen in the probability of human existence, which is 1 in 10 billion trillion (source).
Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.
~ Carl Sagan
How can we improve the odds?
There are two primary ways of learning, namely through experience or from others.
Learning from experience is the most valuable to you for a number of reasons. You trust your own experiences more than anyone else’s words. Also, someone else’s experience cannot fully be explained to you, because of the limitations in language and limitations in the understanding of oneself. Any explanation of an experience is by definition a reduced form of that experience.
However, as explained earlier, there is an endless abyss in every direction, and failure is far more common than success, and so to improve your chance of success, it is important to learn from other people’s experiences — specifically their mistakes.
Everyone we learn from is our teacher. We learn from others in many different ways, including mimicry, stories, biographies, lectures, discussions, observations, books on tape, online videos, etc.
The point of the teacher is to make it easier for the student to follow their path. The goal as a student is to learn what the teacher knows, so that the student can make it further along the path than the teacher did. If you only manage to get as far as the teacher did, then that reduces the value that the teacher produced for you.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about this in his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which Zarathustra is the fictional prophet:
Now I go alone, my disciples, You too, go now alone. Thus I want it. Go away from me and resist Zarathustra! And even better: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he deceived you… One pays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil. And why do you not want to pluck at my wreath? You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware lest a statue slay you. You say that you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra? You are my believers — but what matter all believers? You had not yet sought yourselves; and you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all faith amounts to so little. Now I bid you to lose me and find yourselves; and only then when you have all denied me will I return to you… that I may celebrate the great noon with you.
~Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
A teacher finds his value when a student surpasses his teachings. This, as it is explained beautifully in the quote above, includes poking holes in the teacher’s beliefs, and even an outright rejection of their teachings.
Nietzsche displayed this in his own writing, as he criticized everyone he valued.
We do not understand the full strength of Xenophanes’ attack on the national hero of poetry, unless — as again later with Plato — we see that at its root lay an over whelming craving to assume the place of the over thrown poet and to inherit his fame.
~Friedrich Nietzsche, Homer’s Contest
When you are aiming to fully master something, this means that you are aiming to become the best at it. This means that everyone you are learning from, also becomes your competition, and you have to go beyond what they found, to be the best at it. To achieve this, you have to find the weaknesses in their beliefs and exploit them to help you get further.
You learn from your teachers, and when you get to their level, they become your competition. In this same manner, your enemies are also your teachers because they help pave your path to growth.
The greater and more sublime a Greek is, the brighter the flame of ambition that flares out of him, consuming everybody who runs on the same course.
~Friedrich Nietzsche, Homer’s Contest
For example, to be the best chess player in the world, you have to learn from all those who are good at it i.e. consider them as your teachers, and then one day, aim to beat them at their own game. Ultimately, this is what all teachers who love their field would want.
Why become a teacher?
This can also be compared to a gladiator arena. You learn from your competition and aim to be better than them. There is glory to be earned in the battlefield by overcoming your competition. When you lose against your competition, it is because they were ultimately superior to you. They understood the game better than you.
Plato’s dialogues is for the most part the result of a contest with the art of the orators, the sophists, and the dramatists of his time, invented for the purpose of enabling him to say in the end: “Look, I too can do what my great rivals can do; indeed, I can do it better than they.”
~Friedrich Nietzsche, Homer’s Contest
However, a warrior’s greatest purpose is to die in the battlefield, which means dying to something that has proved to be greater than himself. In this manner, a teacher seeks out for students to surpass him.
The individual who towers above the rest is eliminated so that the contest of forces may reawaken.
~Friedrich Nietzsche, Homer’s Contest
A good teacher is someone who loves the game, values the game more than his own ego, and so endlessly seeks for someone greater than himself to both test his worthiness and to surpass his own abilities. By teaching others everything he knows, he makes his own competition far more challenging. He does this because he loves the game i.e. his field above all else.
We all have our individual paths to walk, but when our paths converge, we can learn from one another to help get further down the road than we could alone. However, to get further than anyone else, it requires us to destroy the very thing that got us that far i.e. the ideas and teachers that brought us there.
Wisdom is a woman and never loves anyone but a warrior.
~Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Isn’t this all a bit too cruel?
That which is considered as cruelty then becomes a matter of perspective. When you emerge victorious against your struggles in life, it is something to be happy about. It is the expression of your capabilities and of your ability to overcome hardships. You reveal yourself through your conflicts.
However, when there are winners, there are also losers.
In this brooding atmosphere, combat is salvation; the cruelty of victory is the pinnacle of life’s jubilation.
~Friedrich Nietzsche, Homer’s Contest
The thing that is good for the lion is not the same as that which is good for the deer. Those who cannot view life as a game filled with challenges that call on for a hero — struggle to survive through the cruelty that is forced on them by life.
However, when we remove the contest from Greek life we immediately look into that pre-Homeric abyss of a terrifying savagery of hatred and the lust to annihilate.
~Friedrich Nietzsche, Homer’s Contest
Nietzsche’s concept of Amor Fati requires us to embrace life, and that means we have to learn to love the concept of overcoming our challenges. If we decide to view our challenges as unfair and cruel, rather than as something that can empower us, then we will struggle to improve ourselves.
The Final Boss
But the game does not end when we have surpassed all others. This is when we meet the final boss of the game, which is yourself. Nietzsche mentions this as well in the excerpt that was shared above.
Many of the popular superhero stories have shared this idea as well.
The villain of the story is a reflection of the hero’s greatest weaknesses. In Lion King, this is Scar. In Daredevil, this is Wilson Fisk. In the Batman franchise, this is the Joker.
All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That’s how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day.
~ The Joker, Batman: The Killing Joke
The Joker believes that Batman is one bad day away from becoming the Joker. The conflicts we face test our ability to hold on to our identities. It is the fire that refines and tests our beliefs.
It only takes one day for us to give up and give in to our pessimism i.e. to believe in all the negative things that we think about ourselves and the world.
The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.
~ Carl Jung
So ultimately, when we have defeated all others that share our path, we will have to face ourselves.
Further exploration: