Untimely Meditations

By: F. Nietzche

Third Part - 1874
Schopenhauer as Educator

Selected Text

I

A traveler who had seen many countries, peoples and several of the earth's continents was asked what attribute he had found in men everywhere. He said: "They have a propensity for laziness." To others, it seems that he should have said: "They are all fearful. They hide themselves behind customs and opinions." In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that there will be no second chance for his oneness to coalesce from the strangely variegated assortment that he is: he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience—why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conformity and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that forces the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. For the majority it is idleness, inertia, in short that propensity for laziness of which the traveler spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than they are fearful, and fear most of all the burdensome nuisance of absolute honesty and nakedness. Artists alone hate this lax procession in borrowed manners and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone's secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle; they dare to show us man as he is, to himself unique in each movement of his muscles, even more, that by being strictly consistent in uniqueness, he is beautiful, and worth regarding, as a work of nature, and never boring. When the great thinker despises human beings, he despises their laziness: for it is on account of their laziness that men seem like manufactured goods, unimportant, and unworthy to be associated with or instructed. Human beings who do not want to belong to the mass need only to stop being comfortable; follow their conscience, which cries out: "Be yourself! All that you are now doing, thinking, and desiring is not really yourself."

Every youthful soul hears this call day and night and trembles throughout; because, thinking of its liberation, it suspects that its measure of happiness is determined from all eternity: a happiness it can never achieve so long as it lies in the chains of fear and convention. And how bleak and senseless life can be without this liberation! There is no more unpleasant and barren a creature in this world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks askance left and right, squinting behind him and all about. In the end, one cannot grasp such a man, since he is completely exterior, without core, a tattered, painted sack of clothes, a ragtag ghost that cannot provoke even fear and certainly not sympathy. And if it is true to say of the lazy that they kill time, then it follows that an era which sees its welfare in public opinion, that is to say private laziness, is a time that really will be killed: I mean that it will be erased from the history of the true liberation of life. How adverse later generations will be to deal with the inheritance of an era ruled, not by living men, but by pseudo-men governed by public opinion; why perhaps our age may be to some distant posterity the darkest and least known—because least human—period of history. I go along the new streets of our cities and think how, of all these horrific houses which the generation of public opinion has built, not one will be standing in a century, and how the opinions of these house-builders will no doubt by then likewise have collapsed. How hopeful are all who do not feel themselves to be citizens of this time; since they are so, it would be useless to serve to kill their time—their desire is rather to arouse their time to life in order to live on themselves in this life.

In addition, if the future gave us no hope for anything—our own existence now must encourage us most strongly to live according to our own laws and standards: it is an inexplicable fact that we live precisely today, and had an infinite time to develop—nevertheless, we possess only a short-lived today to show why and to what end we evolved. We have only ourselves to answer for our existence; consequently we want to be the real helmsman of this existence and not permit our existence to be a thoughtless accident. One must take it somewhat boldly and dangerously: especially, in any case, since one will always lose it. Why cling to this clod of earth, this way of life, why pay attention to what your neighbor says? It is so provincial to oblige oneself to opinions which, just a couple of hundred miles away, are no longer binding. Orient and Occident are chalklines drawn before us to fool our timidity. I want to make an attempt to reach freedom, the youthful soul says to itself; and it will be prevented by the fact that, coincidentally, two nations hate and fight one another, or that two continents are separated by an ocean, or that all around it a religion is taught which, nevertheless, did not exist a few thousand years ago. All that is not you, it says to itself. Nobody can build the bridge for you to walk across the river of life, no one but you yourself alone. There are, to be sure, countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would carry you across this river; but only at the cost of yourself; you would pawn yourself and lose. There is in the world only one way, on which nobody can go, except you: where does it lead? Do not ask, go along with it. Who was it who said: "a man never rises higher than when he does not know where his way can still lead him"? [Oliver Cromwell]

But how can we find ourselves again? How can man know himself? He is a dark and veiled thing; and if the hare has seven skins, man can shed seventy times seven and still not be able to say: "this is really you, this is no longer slough." In addition, it is a painful and dangerous mission to tunnel into oneself and make a forced descent into the shaft of one's being by the nearest path. Doing so can easily cause damage that no physician can heal. And besides: what need should there be for it, when given all the evidence of our nature, our friendships and enmities, our glance and the clasp of our hand, our memory and that which we forget, our books and our handwriting. This, however, is the means to plan the most important inquiry. Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has elevated your soul, what has mastered it and at the same time delighted it? Place these venerated objects before you in a row, and perhaps they will yield for you, through their nature and their sequence, a law, the fundamental law of your true self. Compare these objects, see how one complements, expands, surpasses, transfigures another, how they form a stepladder upon which you have climbed up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies, not hidden deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you normally take to be yourself. Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you what the real raw material of your being is, something quite ineducable, yet in any case accessible only with difficulty, bound, paralyzed: your educators can be only your liberators. And that is the secret of all education: it does not lend artificial limbs, wax noses or spectacled eyes—rather, what can give these things is only the afterimage of education. But liberation is: the clearing away of all weeds, debris, vermin—that want to infringe upon the tender buds of the plant—an effusion of light and warmth, the gentle, quiet rustling of nocturnal rain, it is imitation and worship of nature, where nature is disposed to being motherly and merciful, it is the perfecting of nature when it prevents her cruel and merciless attacks and turns them to good, when it draws a veil over the expressions of nature's stepmotherly disposition and her sad lack of understanding.

Certainly, there may be other means of finding oneself, of coming around to oneself out of the daze in which one usually strays as in a gloomy cloud, but I know of none better than to reflect upon one's true educators and formative teachers. And so today I shall remember one of the teachers and taskmasters of whom I can boast, Arthur Schopenhauer—and later on I shall recall others.