Cross-posted from my LinkedIn posts, where I mostly put stuff these days..

“In these troubled times” is a phrase we hear often, sometimes in a darkly humorous, sarcastic-not-sarcastic tone. At other times it feels like mere rhetorical habit. And yet it persists, because the underlying feeling it gestures towards persists too. The nihilism that Nietzsche feared might follow the twilight of idols seems, at times, to be gaining ground. It becomes harder to say, with any conviction, that some things are better than others, or worth sustained attention—or so it can feel.

Nietzsche diagnosed this condition early. In The Gay Science, he writes: “What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devalue themselves.” The problem is not just that meaning disappears, but that our capacity to experience meaning erodes. We cease to feel that anything is worth the effort of careful attention. Higher education is not outside this condition, but, in ways we do not always immediately notice, it is shaped by it. Systems that prioritise outputs, metrics, and throughput tend, over time, to produce a particular orientation to learning: efficient, responsive, and often thin. Students become adept at producing plausible answers, but less practised in dwelling with questions, testing assumptions, or revising their thinking in the light of difficulty. This is not a flaw of individuals; it is a feature of the environment we have built.

The challenge, then, is not simply to improve teaching techniques or refine assessment design. It is to ask what kind of intellectual and ethical disposition our practices cultivate. What habits of attention do we make possible? What ways of engaging with the world do we quietly reward?

Nietzsche is often read as a critic, a dismantler of illusions. But he is also concerned with the conditions under which new forms of value might emerge. This requires not only critique, but cultivation: the shaping of sensibilities, dispositions, and forms of life. One way of naming this, more concretely, is appetite.

In Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris, A. J. Liebling describes a kind of delighted voracity—a willingness to seek out, taste, compare, and pursue the best that can be found. The first piece in the (remarkable) book is a paean to appetite, and a wry warning of what awaits when it is restricted (medical professionals may not find this chapter wholly convincing as a prescription for bodily health—I would recommend reading it and deciding for yourself). The object, in his case, is food and wine, but the underlying disposition is more general: an eagerness to encounter the world attentively, to care about distinctions, and to refine one’s judgement over time.

This sensibility stands in opposition to nihilism. Where nihilism flattens value, appetite affirms it—not abstractly, but in practice. It expresses the sense that some things are worth attending to, worth pursuing, worth learning to recognise more fully. This kind of appetite for learning cannot be automated. It is not delivered through content, but encountered in people. It is caught, not transferred—through the visible presence of someone who still cares enough to attend closely, to question, to revise, and to keep going. Teaching, at its best, is one such practice.

I had a lecturer as an undergraduate who, though somewhat disorganised and allergic to preparation, spoke with such brightness about his subject (European twentieth-century philosophy) often laughing at how remarkable something he had read was, and expecting us, without doubt or hesitation, to love it as much as he did. For the most part, we did exactly that. I came to know him better later, when I began to teach myself, and would visit his small, book-lined terrace house in Sunderland, where he would almost throw books at me—insisting I take them, because it was unthinkable that I would not find them of inestimable value. I still have at least one of these today, and treasure it.

To teach well is not simply to transmit knowledge or to facilitate the production of correct answers. It is to model a way of being in relation to knowledge: one that is attentive, discriminating, and alive to the possibility that understanding can deepen. It is to show, not just tell, that ideas matter—and that they matter enough to be worked at.

This has implications for how we design learning. If everything is organised around speed, completion, and performance, then appetite has little space to develop. It requires time, iteration, and the possibility of returning to something with greater sensitivity. It depends on encountering resistance—not as failure, but as the condition of refinement.

It also has implications for how we understand the role of the educator. In a system increasingly framed in transactional terms, teaching risks becoming a form of delivery: content provided, outcomes measured. But the more significant work is less visible. It lies in the cultivation of attention—in creating conditions where students come to care about the quality of their own thinking.

This is not something that can be reduced to technique. It is, in part, a matter of presence. Students notice what we attend to, what we dwell on, what we treat as worth the time. They notice whether we ourselves are still engaged in the work of understanding, or whether we have settled into a more mechanical relation to our subject. It matters whether we appear to want to know! In that sense, resisting nihilism in education is not primarily a matter of argument, but of practice and performance. It is about sustaining, within our teaching, the possibility that learning is more than accumulation: that it is a way of relating to the world; an orientation to finding ourselves alive.

This does not sit easily with all aspects of the contemporary university. Practices that are slow, iterative, and relational are not always those most easily scaled or measured. They require time, trust, and a degree of intellectual risk. But if we take seriously the idea that universities are involved in the formation of habits of mind, then these are not optional extras. They are central. The question, is not simply how we adapt to changing conditions, but what we choose to sustain within them. If nihilism names a loss of value, then education, at its best, is one of the places where value can still be enacted – drafted, crafted and remade every time we step in front of students.

We do not do this insisting that everything matters, but by showing, in practice, that some things do – and matter a lot!