The Portable Nietzsche (60 page)

 

5

The entire system of higher education in Germany has lost what matters most: the end as well as the means to the end. That education, that
Bildung
, is itself an end—and
not
“the
Reich
”—and that
educators
are needed to that end, and not secondary-school teachers and university scholars—that has been forgotten. Educators are needed who have themselves been educated, superior, noble spirits, proved at every moment, proved by words and silence, representing culture which has grown ripe and sweet—not the learned louts whom secondary schools and universities today offer our youth as “higher wet nurses.” Educators are lacking, not counting the most exceptional of exceptions, the very first condition of education: hence the decline of German culture. One of this rarest of exceptions is my venerable friend, Jacob Burckhardt in Basel: it is primarily to him that Basel owes its pre-eminence in humaneness.

What the “higher schools” in Germany really achieve is a brutal training, designed to prepare huge numbers of young men, with as little loss of time as possible, to become usable, abusable, in government service. “Higher education” and huge numbers—that is a contradiction to start with. All higher education belongs only to the exception: one must be privileged to have a right to so high a privilege. All great, all beautiful things can never be common property:
pulchrum est paucorum hominum
. What conditions the decline of German culture? That “higher education” is no longer a privilege—the democratism of
Bildung
, which has become “common”—too common. Let it not be forgotten that military privileges really compel an all-too-great attendance in the higher schools, and thus their downfall.

In present-day Germany no one is any longer free to give his children a noble education: our “higher schools” are all set up for the most ambiguous mediocrity, with their teachers, curricula, and teaching aims. And everywhere an indecent haste prevails, as if something would be lost if the young man of twenty-three were not yet “finished,” or if he did not yet know the answer to the “main question”:
which
calling? A higher kind of human being, if I may say so, does not like “callings,” precisely because he knows himself to be called. He has time, he takes time, he does not even think of “finishing”: at thirty one is, in the sense of high culture, a beginner, a child. Our overcrowded secondary schools, our overworked, stupefied secondary-school teachers, are a scandal: for one to defend such conditions, as the professors at Heidelberg did recently, there may perhaps be
causes
—reasons there are none.

 

6

I put forward at once—lest I break with my style, which is
affirmative
and deals with contradiction and criticism only as a means, only involuntarily—the three tasks for which educators are required. One must learn to
see
, one must learn to
think
, one must learn to
speak
and
write
: the goal in all three is a noble culture. Learning to
see
—accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides. That is the
first
preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the inhibiting, excluding instincts. Learning to
see
, as I understand it, is almost what, unphilosophically speaking, is called a strong will: the essential feature is precisely
not
to “will” —to
be able
to suspend decision. All un-spirituality, all vulgar commonness, depend on the inability to resist a stimulus: one
must
react, one follows every impulse. In many cases, such a compulsion is already pathology, decline, a symptom of exhaustion—almost everything that unphilosophical crudity designates with the word “vice” is merely this physiological inability
not
to react. A practical application of having learned to see: as a learner, one will have become altogether slow, mistrustful, recalcitrant. One will let strange, new things of every kind come up to oneself, inspecting them with hostile calm and withdrawing one's hand. To have all doors standing open, to lie servilely on one's stomach before every little fact, always to be prepared for the leap of putting oneself into the place of, or of
plunging
into, others and other things—in short, the famous modern “objectivity” is bad taste, is
ignoble
par excellence.

 

7

Learning to
think
: in our schools one no longer has any idea of this. Even in the universities, even among the real scholars of philosophy, logic as a theory, as a practice, as a
craft
, is beginning to die out. One need only read German books: there is no longer the remotest recollection that thinking requires a technique, a teaching curriculum, a will to mastery—that thinking wants to be learned like dancing, as a kind of dancing. Who among Germans still knows from experience the delicate shudder which light feet in spiritual matters send into every muscle? The stiff clumsiness of the spiritual gesture, the bungling hand at grasping—that is German to such a degree that abroad one mistakes it for the German character as such. The German has no fingers for nuances.

That the Germans have been able to stand their philosophers at all, especially that most deformed concept-cripple of all time, the
great
Kant, provides not a bad notion of German grace. For one cannot subtract dancing in every form from a noble education—to be able to dance with one's feet, with concepts, with words: need I still add that one must be able to do it with the pen too—that one must learn to
write
? But at this point I should become completely enigmatic for German readers.

1

My impossible ones. Seneca
: or the toreador of virtue.
Rousseau
: or the return to nature
in impuris naturalibus
.
Schiller:
or the Moral-Trumpeter of Säckingen. Dante: or the hyena who
writes poetry
in tombs.
cant
: or cant as an intelligible character.
Victor Hugo
: or the pharos at the sea of nonsense.
Liszt
: or the school of smoothness—with women.
George Sand
: or
lactea ubertas
—in translation, the milk cow with “a beautiful style.”
Michelet
: or the enthusiasm which takes off its coat.
Carlyle
: or pessimism as a poorly digested dinner. John
Stuart Mill
: or insulting clarity.
Les frères de Goncourt:
or the two Ajaxes in battle with Homer—music by Offenbach. Zola: or “the delight in stinking.”

 

2

Renan
. Theology: or the corruption of reason by “original sin” (Christianity). Witness Renan who, whenever he risks a Yes or No of a more general nature, scores a miss with painful regularity. He wants, for example, to weld together
la science
and
la noblesse
: but
la science
belongs with democracy; what could be plainer? With no little ambition, he wishes to represent an aristocracy of the spirit: yet at the same time he is on his knees before its very counter-doctrine, the
évangile des humbles
—and not only on his knees. To what avail is all free-spiritedness, modernity, mockery, and wry-neck suppleness, if in one's guts one is still a Christian, a Catholic—in fact, a priest! Renan is most inventive, just like a Jesuit and father confessor, when it comes to seduction; his spirituality does not even lack the broad fat popish smile—like all priests, he becomes dangerous only when he loves. Nobody can equal him when it comes to adoring in a manner endangering life itself. This spirit of Renan's, a spirit which is enervated, is one more calamity for poor, sick, will-sick France.

 

3

Sainte Beuve
. Nothing of virility, full of petty wrath against all virile spirits. Wanders around, cowardly, curious, bored, eavesdropping—a female at bottom, with a female's lust for revenge and a female's sensuality. As a psychologist, a genius of
médisance,
²⁹
inexhaustibly rich in means to that end; no one knows better how to mix praise with poison. Plebeian in the lowest instincts and related to the
ressentiment
of Rousseau: consequently, a romantic—for underneath all
romantisme
lie the grunting and greed of Rousseau's instinct for revenge. A revolutionary, but still pretty well harnessed by fear. Without freedom when confronted with anything strong (public opinion, the Academy, the court, even Port Royal). Embittered against everything great in men and things, against whatever believes in itself. Poet and half-female enough to sense the great as a power; always writhing like the famous worm because he always feels stepped upon. As a critic, without any standard, steadiness, and backbone, with the cosmopolitan libertine's tongue for a medley of things, but without the courage even to confess his
libertinage
. As a historian, without philosophy, without the power of the philosophical eye—hence declining the task of judging in all significant matters, hiding behind the mask of “objectivity.” It is different with his attitude to all things in which a fine, well-worn taste is the highest tribunal: there he really has the courage to stand by himself and delight in himself—there he is a master. In some respects, a preliminary version of Baudelaire.

 

4

De imitatione Christi
is one of those books which I cannot hold in my hand without a physiological reaction: it exudes a perfume of the Eternal-Feminine which is strictly for Frenchmen—or Wagnerians. This saint has a way of talking about love which arouses even Parisian women to curiosity. I am told that that cleverest of Jesuits, A. Comte, who wanted to lead his Frenchmen to Rome via the detour of science, found his inspiration in this book. I believe it: “the religion of the heart.”

 

5

G. Eliot
. They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic females à la Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there.

We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a
whole
view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know,
cannot
know, what is good for him, what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth—it stands and falls with faith in God.

When the English actually believe that they know “intuitively” what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the
effects
of the dominion of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt. For the English, morality is not yet a problem.

 

6

George Sand.
I read the first
Lettres d'un voyageur:
like everything that is descended from Rousseau, false, fabricated, bellows, exaggerated. I cannot stand this motley wallpaper style any more than the mob aspiration for generous feelings. The worst feature, to be sure, is the female's coquetry with male attributes, with the manners of naughty boys. How cold she must have been throughout, this insufferable artist! She wound herself like a clock—and wrote. Cold, like Hugo, like Balzac, like all the romantics as soon as they took up poetic invention. And how self-satisfied she may have lain there all the while, this fertile writing-cow who had in her something German in the bad sense, like Rousseau himself, her master, and who in any case was possible only during the decline of French taste! But Renan reveres her.

 

7

Moral for psychologists
. Not to go in for backstairs psychology. Never to observe in order to observe! That gives a false perspective, leads to squinting and something forced and exaggerated. Experience as the
wish
to experience does not succeed. One
must
not eye oneself while having an experience; else the eye becomes “an evil eye.” A born psychologist guards instinctively against seeing in order to see; the same is true of the born painter. He never works “from nature”; he leaves it to his instinct, to his
camera obscura
, to sift through and express the “case,” “nature,” that which is “experienced.” He is conscious only of what is general, of the conclusion, the result: he does not know arbitrary abstractions from an individual case.

What happens when one proceeds differently? For example, if, in the manner of the Parisian novelists, one goes in for backstairs psychology and deals in gossip, wholesale and retail? Then one lies in wait for reality, as it were, and every evening one brings home a handful of curiosities. But note what finally comes of all this: a heap of splotches, a mosaic at best, but in any case something added together, something restless, a mess of screaming colors. The worst in this respect is accomplished by the Concourts; they do not put three sentences together without really hurting the eye, the psychologist's eye.