The main objection to the 'scientistic' claim that physics describes the world as it is in itself is that you 'can't weed out' the human contribution. That is, the scientific image of the world, like any other, is indelibly shaped by our interests, practices and prejudices.

In all great civilizations, garden discourses have belonged to larger discourses about beauty, the good life, the relation of humankind to nature, and so on.

The garden is as good a symbol as you can find of a dialectic between spheres of experience - of culture and nature - that presuppose one another.

What impressed me about Plato and Sartre was their conviction that we should live our lives in the light of big truths about reality and human existence.

I rather shared Nietzsche's conception of the kind of individual that an ideal education should be cultivating. 'Authenticity' is not Nietzsche's term, but as used by some existentialists, it nicely captures what Nietzsche admired - the resolve of an individual person to forge his or her own 'table of values', to be emancipated from strait-jacketing conventions, traditions, and ideologies. As embodied in the 'Overman', authenticity is the antidote to 'bad' nihilism.

To recognize that you are radically free, in Sartre's sense, but then to live as if you weren't, is to live in bad faith, in denial of what you know to be true. And that's not something anyone can sensibly want to do.

It would be through individual effort, inspired perhaps by reading Nietzsche's books, that the Overman might emerge, not through social or educational engineering.