What the Germans Lack

 

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Among Germans today it is not enough to possess spirit: one must also possess the presumption to possess it ...

      Perhaps I know the Germans, perhaps I might even venture to address a few words to them.  The new Germany represents a great quantity of inherited and inculcated ability, so that it may for a time be allowed even a lavish expenditure of its accumulated store of energy.  It is not a high culture that has here gained ascendancy, even less a fastidious taste, a noble 'beauty' of the instincts, but more manly virtues than any other country of Europe can exhibit.  A good deal of courage and respect for oneself, a good deal of self-confidence in social dealings and in the performance of reciprocal duties, a good deal of industriousness, a good deal of endurance - and an inherited moderation which requires the goad rather than the brake.  I also add that here people can still obey without being humiliated by obeying.... And no-one despises his adversary ...

      You will see I want to be just to the Germans: I would not like to be untrue to myself in this - so I must also tell them what I object to.  Coming to power is a costly business: power makes stupid.... The Germans - once they were called the nation of thinkers: do they still think at all?  Nowadays the Germans are bored with intellect, the Germans mistrust intellect, politics devours all seriousness for really intellectual things - Deutschland, Deutschland über alles was, I fear, the end of German philosophy.... 'Are there any German philosophers? are there are German poets? are there any good German books?' - people ask me abroad.  I blush; but with the courage which is mine even in desperate cases I answer: 'Yes, Bismarck!' - Dare I go so far as to confess which books are read nowadays? ... Confounded instinct of mediocrity! -

 

 

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- Who has not pondered sadly over what the German spirit could be!  But this nation has deliberately made itself stupid, for practically a thousand years: nowhere else are the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, so viciously abused.  Lately even a third has been added, one which is capable by itself of completely obstructing all delicate and audacious flexibility of spirit: music, our constipated, constipating German music. - How much dreary heaviness, lameness, dampness, sloppiness, how much beer there is in the German intellect!  How can it possibly happen that young men who dedicated their existence to the most spiritual goals lack all sense of the first instinct of spirituality, the spirit's instinct for self-preservation - and drink beer? ... The alcoholism of scholarly youth perhaps does not constitute a question-mark in regard to their erudition - one can be even a great scholar without possessing any spirit at all - but from any other point of view it remains a problem. - Where does one not find that bland degeneration which beer produces in the spirit!  Once, in a case that has become almost famous, I laid my finger on such an instance of degeneration - the degeneration of our first German freethinker, the shrewd David Strauss, into the author of an ale-house gospel and a 'new faith'.... It was no vain vow he made in verse to the 'gracious brunette' [beer] - fidelity unto death ...

 

 

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- I have said of the German spirit that it is growing coarser, that it is growing shallow.  Is that sufficient? - Fundamentally, it is something quite different which appals me: how German seriousness, German profundity, German passion in spiritual things is more and more on the decline.  It is the pathos and not merely the intellectual aspect which has altered. - I come in contact now and then with German universities: what an atmosphere prevails among its scholars, what a barren spirituality, grown how contented and lukewarm!  It would be a profound misunderstanding to adduce German science as an objection here, as well as being proof one had not read a word I have written.  For seventeen years I have not wearied of exposing the despiritualizing influence of our contemporary scientific pursuits.  The harsh Helot condition to which the tremendous extent of science has condemned every single person today is one of the main reasons why education and educators appropriate to fuller, richer, deeper natures are no longer forthcoming.  Our culture suffers from nothing more than it suffers from the superabundance of presumptuous journeymen and fragments of humanity; our universities are, against their will, the actual forcing-houses for this kind of spiritual instinct-atrophy.  And all Europe already has an idea of this - grand politics deceives no-one.... Germany counts more and more as Europe's flatland. - I am still looking for a German with whom I could be serious after my fashion - how much more for one with whom I might be cheerful! - Twilight of the Idols: ah, who today could grasp from how profound a seriousness a hermit is here relaxing! - The most incomprehensible thing about us is our cheerfulness ...

 

 

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If one makes a reckoning, it is obvious not only that German culture is declining, the sufficient reason [A philosophical term meaning an explanation of something adequate to explaining it fully. Schopenhauer's doctoral thesis was ON THE FOURFOLD ROOT OF THE PRINCIPLE OF SUFFICIENT REASON, and Nietzsche sometimes (as here) uses the term in a humorously inappropriate context.] for it is obvious too.  After all, no-one can spend more than he has - that is true of individuals, it is also true of nations.  If one spends oneself on power, grand politics, economic affairs, world commerce, parliamentary institutions, military interests - if one expends in this direction the quantum of reason, seriousness, will, self-overcoming that one is, then there will be a shortage in the other direction.  Culture and the state - one should not deceive oneself over this - are antagonists: the 'cultural state' is merely a modern idea.  The one lives off the other, the one thrives at the expense of the other.  All great cultural epochs are epochs of political decline: that which is great in the cultural sense has been unpolitical, even anti-political.... Goethe's heart opened up at the phenomenon Napoleon - it closed up to the 'Wars of Liberation'.... The moment Germany rises as a great power, France gains a new importance as a cultural power.  A great deal of current spiritual seriousness and passion has already emigrated to Paris; the question of pessimism, for instance, the Wagner question, virtually every psychological and artistic question, is speculated on with incomparably more subtlety and thoroughness there than in Germany - the Germans are even incapable of this kind of seriousness. - In the history of European culture the rise of the 'Reich' signifies one thing above all: a displacement of the centre of gravity.  The fact is known everywhere: in the main thing - and that is still culture - the Germans no longer come into consideration.  The question is asked: haven't you so much as one spirit who means something to Europe? in the way your Goethe, your Hegel, you Heinrich Heine, your Schopenhauer meant something?  That there is no longer a single German philosopher - there is no end of astonishment at that. -

 

 

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The essential thing has gone out of the entire system of higher education in Germany: the end, as well as the means to the end.  That education, culture, itself is the end - and not 'the Reich' - that educators are required for the attainment of this end - and not grammar-school teachers and university scholars - that too has been forgotten.... There is a need for educators who are themselves educated; superior, noble spirits, who prove themselves every moment by what they say and by what they do not say: cultures grown ripe and sweet - and not the learned boors which grammar school and university offer youth today as 'higher nurses'.  Educators, the first prerequisite of education, are lacking (except for the exceptions of exceptions): hence the decline of German culture. - One of those rarest of exceptions is my honoured friend Jacob Burckhardt of Basel: it is to him above all that Basel owes its pre-eminence in the humanities. - What the 'higher schools' of Germany in fact achieve is a brutal breaking-in with the aim of making, in the least possible time, numberless young men fit to be utilized, utilized to the full and used up, in the state service.  'Higher education' and numberless - that is a contradiction to start with.  All higher education belongs to the exceptions alone: one must be privileged to have a right to so high a privilege.  Great and fine things can never be common property: pulchrum est paucorum hominum. [beauty is for the few] - What is the cause of the decline of German culture?  That 'higher education' is no longer a privilege - the democratism of 'culture' made 'universal' and common.... Not to overlook the fact that military privileges absolutely compel too great attendance at higher schools, which means their ruin. - No-one is any longer free in present-day Germany to give his children a noble education: our 'higher' schools are one and all adjusted - as regards their teachers, their curricula and their instructional aims - to the most dubious mediocrity.  And there reigns everywhere an indecent haste, as if something has been neglected if the young man of twenty-three is not yet 'finished and ready', does not yet know the answer to the 'chief question': which calling? - A higher kind of human being, excuse me for saying, doesn't think much of 'callings', the reason being he knows himself called.... He takes his time, he has plenty of time, he gives no thought whatsoever to being 'finished and ready' - at the age of thirty one is, as regards high culture, a beginner, a child. - Our overcrowded grammar schools, our overloaded, stupefied grammar-school teachers, are a scandal: one may perhaps have motives for defending this state of things, as the professors of Heidelberg recently did - there are no grounds for doing so.

 

 

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To be true to my nature, which is affirmative and has dealings with contradiction and criticism only indirectly and when compelled, I shall straightaway set down the three tasks for the sake of which one requires educators.  One has to learn to see, one has to learn to think, one has to learn to speak and write: the end in all three is a noble culture. - Learning to see - habituating the eye to repose, to patience, to letting things come to it; learning to defer judgement, to investigate and comprehend the individual case in all its aspects.  This is the first preliminary schooling in spirituality: not to react immediately to a stimulus, but to have the restraining, stock-taking instincts in one's control.  Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what is called in unphilosophical language 'strong willpower': the essence of it is precisely not to 'will', the ability to defer decision.  All unspirituality, all vulgarity, is due to the incapacity to resist a stimulus - one has to react, one obeys every impulse.  In many instances, such a compulsion is already morbidity, decline, a symptom of exhaustion - almost everything which unphilosophical crudity designates by the name 'vice' is merely the physiological incapacity not to react. - A practical application of having learned to see: one will have to become slow, mistrustful, resistant as a learner in general.  In an attitude of hostile calm one will allow the strange, the novel of every kind to approach one first - one will draw one's hand back from it.  To stand with all doors open, to prostrate oneself submissively before every petty fact, to be ever itching to mingle with, plunge into other people and other things, in short our celebrated modern 'objectivity', is bad taste, is ignoble par excellence. -

 

 

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Learning to think: our schools no longer have any idea what this means.  Even in our universities, even among students of philosophy themselves, the theory, the practice, the vocation of logic is beginning to die out.  Read German books: no longer the remotest recollection that a technique, a plan of instruction, a will to mastery is required for thinking - that thinking has to be learned in the way dancing has to be learned, as a form of dancing.... Who among Germans still knows from experience that subtle thrill which the possession of intellectual light feet communicates to all the muscles! - A stiffly awkward air in intellectual matters, a clumsy hand in grasping - this is in so great a degree German that foreigners take it for the German nature in general.  The German has no fingers for nuances.... That the Germans have so much endured their philosophers, above all that most deformed conceptual cripple there has ever been, the great Kant, offers a good deal of German amenableness. - For dancing in any form cannot be divorced from a noble education, being able to dance with the feet, with concepts, with words: do I still have to say that one has to be able to dance with the pen - that writing has to be learned? - But at this point I should become a complete enigma to German readers ...