1.08 - THINGS THE GERMANS LACK

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object:1.08 - THINGS THE GERMANS LACK
book class:Twilight of the Idols
class:chapter
author class:Friedrich Nietzsche
subject class:Philosophy

THINGS THE GERMANS LACK

1

Among Germans at the present day it does not suffice to have intellect;
one is actually forced to appropriate it, to lay claim to it.

Maybe I know the Germans, perhaps I may tell them a few home-truths.
Modern Germany represents such an enormous store of inherited and
acquired capacity, that for some time it might spend this accumulated
treasure even with some prodigality. It is no superior culture that has
ultimately become prevalent with this modern tendency, nor is it by any
means delicate taste, or noble beauty of the instincts; but rather a
number of virtues more manly than any that other European countries can
show. An amount of good spirits and self-respect, plenty of firmness
in human relations and in the reciprocity of duties; much industry and
much perseverance--and a certain inherited soberness which is much more
in need of a spur than of a brake. Let me add that in this country
people still obey without feeling that obedience humiliates. And no one
despises his opponent.

You observe that it is my desire to be fair to the Germans: and in this
respect I should not like to be untrue to myself,--I must therefore
also state my objections to them. It costs a good deal to attain to a
position of power; for power _stultifies._ The Germans--they were once
called a people of thinkers: do they really think at all at present?
Nowadays the Germans are bored by intellect, they mistrust intellect;
politics have swallowed up all earnestness for really intellectual
things--"Germany, Germany above all."[1] I fear this was the death-blow
to German philosophy. "Are there any German philosophers? Are there any
German poets? Are there any good German books?" people ask me abroad. I
blush; but with that pluck which is peculiar to me, even in moments of
desperation, I reply: "Yes, Bismarck!"--Could I have dared to confess
what books _are_ read to-day? Cursed instinct of mediocrity!--

2

What might not German intellect have been!--who has not thought sadly
upon this question! But this nation has deliberately stultified itself
for almost a thousand years: nowhere else have the two great European
narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been so viciously abused as in
Germany. Recently a third opiate was added to the list, one which in
itself alone would have sufficed to complete the ruin of all subtle
and daring intellectual animation, I speak of music, our costive and
constipating German music. How much peevish ponderousness, paralysis,
dampness, dressing-gown languor, and beer is there not in German
intelligence!

How is it really possible that young men who consecrate their whole
lives to the pursuit of intellectual ends, should not feel within them
the first instinct of intellectuality, the _self-preservative instinct
of the intellect_--and should drink beer? The alcoholism of learned
youths does not incapacitate them for becoming scholars--a man quite
devoid of intellect may be a great scholar,--but it is a problem in
every other respect. Where can that soft degeneracy not be found, which
is produced in the intellect by beer! I once laid my finger upon a case
of this sort, which became almost famous,--the degeneration of our
leading German free-spirit, the _clever_ David Strauss, into the author
of a suburban gospel and New Faith. Not in vain had he sung the praises
of "the dear old brown liquor" in verse--true unto death.

3

I have spoken of German intellect. I have said that it is becoming
coarser and shallower. Is that enough?--In reality something very
different frightens me, and that is the ever steady decline of
German earnestness, German profundity, and German passion in things
intellectual. Not only intellectuality, but also pathos has altered.
From time to time I come in touch with German universities; what
an extraordinary atmosphere prevails among their scholars! what
barrenness! and what self-satisfied and lukewarm intellectuality! For
any one to point to German science as an argument against me would show
that he grossly misunderstood my meaning, while it would also prove
that he had not read a word of my writings. For seventeen years I
have done little else than expose the de-intellectualising influence
of our modern scientific studies. The severe slavery to which every
individual nowadays is condemned by the enormous range covered by the
sciences, is the chief reason why fuller, richer and profounder natures
can find no education or educators that are fit for them. Nothing
is more deleterious to this age than the superfluity of pretentious
loafers and fragmentary human beings; our universities are really
the involuntary forcing houses for this kind of withering-up of the
instincts of intellectuality. And the whole of Europe is beginning
to know this--politics on a large scale deceive no one. Germany is
becoming ever more and more the Flat-land of Europe. I am still in
search of a German with whom I could be serious after my own fashion.
And how much more am I in search of one with whom I could be cheerful
_--The Twilight of the Idols:_ ah! what man to-day would be capable
of understanding the kind of seriousness from which a philosopher is
recovering in this work! It is our cheerfulness that people understand
least.

4

Let us examine another aspect of the question: it is not only obvious
that German culture is declining, but adequate reasons for this decline
are not lacking. After all, nobody can spend more than he has:--this
is true of individuals, it is also true of nations. If you spend
your strength in acquiring power, or in politics on a large scale,
or in economy, or in universal commerce, or in parliamentarism, or
in military interests--if you dissipate the modicum of reason, of
earnestness, of will, and of self-control that constitutes your nature
in one particular fashion, you cannot dissipate it in another. Culture
and the state--let no one be deceived on this point--are antagonists:
A "culture-state "[2] is merely a modern idea. The one lives upon
the other, the one flourishes at the expense of the other. All great
periods of culture have been periods of political decline; that which
is great from the standpoint of culture, was always unpolitical--even
anti-political. Goethe's heart opened at the coming of Napoleon--it
closed at the thought of the "Wars of Liberation." At the very moment
when Germany arose as a great power in the world of politics, France
won new importance as a force in the world of culture. Even at this
moment a large amount of fresh intellectual earnestness and passion
has emigrated to Paris; the question of pessimism, for instance,
and the question of Wagner; in France almost all psychological and
artistic questions are considered with incomparably more subtlety and
thoroughness than they are in Germany,--the Germans are even incapable
of this kind of earnestness. In the history of European culture the
rise of the Empire signifies, above all, a displacement of the centre
of gravity. Everywhere people are already aware of this: in things that
really matter--and these after all constitute culture,--the Germans
are no longer worth considering. I ask you, can you show me one single
man of brains who could be mentioned in the same breath with other
European thinkers, like your Goethe, your Hegel, your Heinrich Heine,
and your Schopenhauer?--The fact that there is no longer a single
German philosopher worth mentioning is an increasing wonder.

5

Everything that matters has been lost sight of by the whole of the
higher educational system of Germany: the end quite as much as the
means to that end. People forget that education, the process of
cultivation itself, is the end--and not "the Empire"--they forget that
the _educator_ is required for this end--and not the public-school
teacher and university scholar. Educators are needed who are themselves
educated, superior and noble intellects, who can prove that they are
thus qualified, that they are ripe and mellow products of culture
at every moment of their lives, in word and in gesture;--not the
learned louts who, like "superior wet-nurses," are now thrust upon the
youth of the land by public schools and universities. With but rare
exceptions, that which is lacking in Germany is the first prerequisite
of education--that is to say, the educators; hence the decline of
German culture. One of those rarest exceptions is my highly respected
friend Jacob Burckhardt of Ble: to him above all is Ble indebted
for its foremost position in human culture What the higher schools
of Germany really do accomplish is this, they brutally train a vast
crowd of young men, in the smallest amount of time possible, to become
useful and exploitable servants of the state. "Higher education"
and a vast crowd--these terms contradict each other from the start
All superior education can only concern the exception: a man must be
privileged in order to have a right to such a great privilege. All
great and beautiful things cannot be a common possession: _pulchrum
est paucorum hominum._--What is it that brings about the decline of
German culture? The fact that "higher education" is no longer a special
privilege--the democracy of a process of cultivation that has become
"general," _common._ Nor must it be forgotten that the privileges of
the military profession by urging many too many to attend the higher
schools, involve the downfall of the latter. In modern Germany nobody
is at liberty to give his children a noble education: in regard to
their teachers, their curricula, and their educational aims, our higher
schools are one and all established upon a fundamentally doubtful
mediocre basis. Everywhere, too, a hastiness which is unbecoming rules
supreme; just as if something would be forfeited if the young man were
not "finished" at the age of twenty-three, or did not know how to
reply to the most essential question, "which calling to choose?"--The
superior kind of man, if you please, does not like "callings,"
precisely because he knows himself to be called. He has time, he takes
time, he cannot possibly think of becoming "finished,"--in the matter
of higher culture, a man of thirty years is a beginner, a child. Our
overcrowded public-schools, our accumulation of foolishly manufactured
public-school masters, are a scandal: maybe there are very serious
_motives_ for defending this state of affairs, as was shown quite
recently by the professors of Heidelberg; but there can be no reasons
for doing so.

6

In order to be true to my nature, which is affirmative and which
concerns itself with contradictions and criticism only indirectly
and with reluctance, let me state at once what the three objects
are for which we need educators. People must learn to see; they
must learn to think, and they must learn to speak and to write: the
object of all three of these pursuits is a noble culture. To learn
to see--to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow
things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit
of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This
is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not
respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a comm and of the
obstructing and isolating instincts. To learn to see, as I understand
this matter, amounts almost to that which in popular language is
called "strength of will": its essential feature is precisely _not_
to _wish_ to see, to be able to postpone one's decision. All lack of
intellectuality, all vulgarity, arises out of the inability to resist
a stimulus:--one must respond or react, every impulse is indulged. In
many cases such necessary action is already a sign of morbidity, of
decline, and a symptom of exhaustion. Almost everything that coarse
popular language characterises as vicious, is merely that physiological
inability to refrain from reacting.--As an instance of what it means
to have learnt to see, let me state that a man thus trained will as a
learner have become generally slow, suspicious, and refractory. With
hostile calm he will first allow every kind of strange and _new_ thing
to come right up to him,--he will draw back his hand at its approach.
To stand with all the doors of one's soul wide open, to He slavishly
in the dust before every trivial fact, at all times of the day to be
strained ready for the leap, in order to deposit one's self, to plunge
one's self, into other souls and other things, in short, the famous
"objectivity" of modern times, is bad taste, it is essentially vulgar
and cheap.

7

As to learning how to think--our schools no longer have any notion
of such a thing. Even at the universities, among the actual scholars
in philosophy, logic as a theory, as a practical pursuit, and as a
business, is beginning to die out. Turn to any German book: you will
not find the remotest trace of a realisation that there is such a
thing as a technique, a plan of study, a will to mastery, in the
matter of thinking,--that thinking insists upon being learnt, just
as dancing insists upon being learnt, and that thinking insists upon
being learnt as a form of dancing. What single German can still say he
knows from experience that delicate shudder which _light footfalls_
in matters intellectual cause to pervade his whole body and limbs!
Stiff awkwardness in intellectual attitudes, and the clumsy fist in
grasping--these things are so essentially German, that outside Germany
they are absolutely confounded with the German spirit. The German
has no fingers for delicate _nuances. _ The fact that the people of
Germany have actually tolerated their philosophers, more particularly
that most deformed cripple of ideas that has ever existed--the great
Kant, gives one no inadequate notion of their native elegance. For,
truth to tell, dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the
curriculum of all noble education: dancing with the feet, with ideas,
with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with
the pen--that one must learn how to write?--But at this stage I should
become utterly enigmatical to German readers.

[1] The German national hymn: "_Deutschland, Deutschl and ber
alles.--_" TR.

[2] The word _Kultur-Staat_ "culture-state" has become a standard
expression in the German language, and is applied to the leading
European States.--TR.

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