Chapter 52 twilight of idols what the germans are missing

dusk of idols what the seven germans lack 1 Among the Germans today it is no longer enough to have the spirit, it must be appropriated and abused... Maybe I know the Germans, maybe I can at least tell them the truth.The new Germany represented such a mass of inherited and learned talents that it could squander for an age the accumulated wealth of power.There is no high culture by which it reigns, much less refined taste, a noble instinct of "beauty"; but a more manly virtue than any European country.Much fine courage and self-respect, much faith in association and mutual obligation, much industry, much perseverance,--and an inherited temperance which needs more stimulation than hindrance.I would add: here one still obeys, and obedience does not humiliate one...no one despises his opponent...

It is seen that I am willing to be just to the Germans: I do not want to be untrue to myself on this point,—so I must raise my objections to them too.Power comes at a high price: power makes people stupid... Do the Germans, once called a nation of thinkers, think at all these days? —The Germans are now weary of the spirit, the Germans are now suspicious of the spirit, politics swallows up any seriousness about really spiritual things—"Germany, Germany above all,"1 I fear, this is the end of German philosophy..." Are there any philosophers in Germany? Are there poets in Germany? Are there good books in Germany?" Someone asked me abroad.I blush, but answer with the courage I have even in disappointment: "Yes, Bismarck!"—how can I also admit what people are reading today? ...Damn mediocre instincts!

① A line from the German national anthem during the Second Empire. 2 Who has not brooded sadly on what the German spirit could be!Yet for nearly a thousand years this people has fooled itself at will, and nowhere have the two great narcotics of Europe—alcohol and Christianity—been so criminally abused as here.Lately a third has been added, which alone would have suffocated all the delicate and brave agility of the spirit, namely music, our choked and choked German music. —how much depressingly lumbering, dragging, damp, pajamas, how much beer in the German intellect!How is it possible that a young man devoted to the highest spiritual purpose should lack the first instinct of spirituality, the spiritual instinct of self-preservation--and drink his beer? ... The drunkenness of learned youth does not, perhaps, put a question mark on their erudition, since even a great scholar can be dull, but it puts a question mark on everything else. —where is the slow degradation of the spirit that beer does not seen!In a case that is now well known, I mentioned the fall of our first free thinker in Germany, the wise David Strauss, who became the author of the Gospel of the Gospel and the "New Faith" ...he didn't swear to the "brown beauty" in the poem - he swore to die....

3 I said that the German spirit has become coarser and shallower.Is that enough? —to put it bluntly, it is something beyond recognition that horrifies me, that German seriousness, German profundity, German enthusiasm in spiritual things is going from bad to worse.Not only the intellect but also the passions are changing. ——I have come into contact with German universities everywhere, what kind of atmosphere prevails among scholars, how desolate, how satisfied and indifferent is the spirit of today!It would be a great misunderstanding if anyone brought German science against me--and proves that he has not read a word of me.For seventeen years I have worked tirelessly to expose the despiritualizing effects of our contemporary scientific pursuits.The harsh slavery which the vast scope of science imposes upon every human being today is the first reason why the fuller, richer, deeper nature finds no corresponding education and educator.Our culture suffers more from nothingness than from the excess of self-important short-sightedness and fragmentary humanity; our universities are, against their will, authentic workshops for the degeneration of this spiritual instinct.And the whole of Europe already has an idea—Great politics does not deceive anyone.... Germany is increasingly seen as the lowlands of Europe①—I am still looking for a German with whom I can be serious in my own way,— — more urgently looking for a German with whom I can have a good time!Twilight of Idols: Ah, who can comprehend now, with what seriousness a hermit recuperates here! ——

Joy is the most incomprehensible thing in us... ①.The original text is Flachland, a pun, and can be translated as a shallow country. 4 Not only is the decline of German culture well known, if one calculates it, but there are good reasons for it.In the last analysis no one can spend more than what he has, neither the individual nor the nation.A man who expends himself in power, big politics, economics, world trade, parliamentary, military interests, and who devotes to these the energy of understanding, earnestness, will, self-transcendence (which he is), then, in There will be shortages elsewhere.Culture and state - do not deceive yourself on this point - are antagonistic: "cultural state" is a purely modern idea.Separated from each other, the two grow by sacrificing the other.All great cultural epochs have been apolitical, even antipolitical. —Goethe's mind was opened to the Napoleonic phenomenon, but closed to the "War of Liberation"... Just as Germany rose as a great power, France acquired a different importance as a cultural power.Today many new seriousnesses, many new passions of the mind have been relocated to Paris; for example, the problems of pessimism, Wagner, almost all psychological and artistic problems, are thought out in infinitely finer detail there than in Germany, —The Germans are fundamentally incapable of such seriousness. ——In the history of European culture, the rise of the "Empire" first means one thing: the shift of the center of gravity.It is already known everywhere: in the main thing (and this is always culture) the Germans are no longer worth mentioning.People ask: do you want to supply Europe with even one thinker who is worthy, like your Goethe, your Hegel, your Heinrich Heine, your Schopenhauer? —It is astonishing that there is no longer a German philosopher.

5 The whole of German higher education has lost the main thing: the end as well as the means to the end, people have forgotten that education, culture itself (not the "Empire") is the end, and that what is needed to achieve this end are educators (not the liberal arts schoolteachers and university scholars)...the educators in desperate need of self-education, with excellence and nobility of soul, who at every moment embody by example and precept a culture that is ripening and sweetening,—not the liberal arts schools and universities that are "higher class" today. "Nurses" are such learned rough men for the youth.With very few exceptions, there was a lack of educators, this first prerequisite of education: and thus the decline of German culture. —My venerable friend, Jakob of Basle.Burckhardt is one of the rare exceptions to whom Basel's human superiority is first attributed. —What the German "universities" do in fact is a brutal training to make countless young men fit, thoroughly fit for the service of the state in as little time as possible. "Higher education" and infinity—the two have been at odds with each other from the start.All higher education is of the mere exception, and one must be chartered to be entitled to such high privileges.All that is great, all that is beautiful has never been public property: Pulch-rum estpaucorum hominum ②—What caused the decline of German culture? "Higher education" is no longer a privilege—the "universal," popularized democracy of education...

①Jokob Burckhardt (1818-1897): Swiss cultural historian, friend of Nietzsche. ②Latin: Beauty belongs to the few. Don't forget that military privilege rigidly imposes high enrollment rates in institutions of higher learning, which means the decline of institutions of higher learning. —In today's Germany, no one is free to give his children a noble education. Our "higher schools", including their teachers, courses, and educational goals, have all arranged the most ambiguous moderation.There is an impertinent haste everywhere, if the young man of twenty-three is not "ready" and does not know the "main question"--what is the profession? ——The answer seems to delay something. ——Please allow me to say that a higher type of person does not like "professions" precisely because he knows how to call himself... He has time, he dominates time, ②Latin: beauty belongs to the few.

He doesn't think at all about "being ready"—in the sense of high culture, one is still a starter, a child at thirty. —Our overcrowded liberal arts schools, our numerous liberal arts teachers bred to be extremely dull, are a scandal, and there may be reasons for trying to defend the state, as the professors of Heidelberg have recently done, — but there is no reason for doing so. 6 In order not to lose my nature, which tends toward the affirmative, and which opposes and criticizes only indirectly and reluctantly, I present at once three tasks for the fulfillment of which a man needs an educator.One must learn to see, one must learn to think, one must learn to speak and write: the end of all three is a noble culture—to learn to see is to learn to accustom the eye to stillness, to patience, to letting things come closer Self; learn not to rush to make judgments, observe and grasp individual cases from various angles.Not reacting immediately to a stimulus, but possessing a blocking, isolating instinct, is the first preparatory education towards spirituality.Learn to see, as I understand it, something close to what non-philosophical terms call a strong will, the essential thing of which happens to be not "willing" but being able to make a decision.All nonspirituality, all vulgarity is based on the inability to resist a stimulus—he is bound to react, he obeys every impulse.Such an "inevitability" is already on many occasions pathology and decay, a symptom of exhaustion—almost everything that is called "evil" in unphilosophical rough terms is purely a response to this physiological incapacity. . —Learning to see has one payoff: as a learner, one will become slow, suspicious, resistant.In the end, with a hostile calm he will allow every strange and new thing to approach him--he will stand by them.Opening all doors, obscenely indulging in every trivial matter, throwing oneself at any time, rushing into the arms and things of others, in short, the famous modern "objectivity" is a bad taste, a typical lowly.

7 Learn to think: This concept no longer exists in our schools.Even in the universities, among the genuine scholars of philosophy, logic as theory, practice, craft has begun to die out.One reads German books and no longer vaguely remembers that thinking requires a technique, a course, a will to acquire technique—no longer vaguely remembers that learning to think is like learning to dance, that thinking is a dance... …Who among the Germans has ever experienced that subtle tremor that the light feet of the spirit bring to the muscles of the whole body! —The rigidity of the air, the clumsiness of the movements, have become so characteristic of the Germans that abroad they are entirely regarded as German nature.The Germans did not touch nuance's fingers... The Germans also supported their philosophers, especially the unprecedented deformed conceptual disability, the great Kant, which does not show the grace of the Germans at all. —For all forms of dance, the faculty of dancing with feet, concepts, words, cannot be excluded from a noble education; and shall I say that one must also be able to dance with a pen, one must learn to write? —But in this respect I am afraid I am a complete mystery to the German reader. . . .

①French: nuances