It is sometimes harder to agree to a thing than to understand it;
many will feel this when they consider the proposition--"Mankind must
toil unceasingly to bring forth individual great men: this and
nothing else is its task." One would like to apply to society and its
ends a fact that holds universally in the animal and vegetable world;
where progress depends only on the higher individual types, which are
rarer, yet more persistent, complex and productive. But traditional
notions of what the end of society is, absolutely bar the way. We can
easily understand how in the natural world, where one species passes
at some point into a higher one, the aim of their evolution cannot be
held to lie in the high level attained by the mass, or in the latest
types developed;--but rather in what seem accidental beings produced
here and there by favourable circumstances. It should be just as easy
to understand that it is the duty of mankind to provide the
circumstances favourable to the birth of the new redeemer, simply
because men can have a consciousness of their object. But there is
always something to prevent them. They find their ultimate aim in the
happiness of all, or the greatest number, or in the expansion of a
great commonwealth. A man will very readily decide to sacrifice his
life for the state; he will be much slower to respond if an
individual, and not a state, ask for the sacrifice. It seems to be
out of reason that one man should exist for the sake of another: "Let
it be rather for the sake of every other, or, at any rate, of as many
as possible!" O upright judge! As if it were more in reason to let
the majority decide a question of value and significance! For the
problem is--"In what way may your life, the individual life, retain
the highest value and the deepest significance? and how may it least
be squandered?" Only by your living for the good of the rarest and
most valuable types, not for that of the majority,--who are the most
worthless types, taken as individuals. This way of thinking should be
implanted and fostered in every young man's mind: he should regard
himself both as a failure of Nature's handiwork and a testimony to
her larger ideas. "She has succeeded badly," he should say; "but I
will do honour to her great idea by being a means to its better
success."
With these thoughts he will enter the circle of culture, which is the
child of every man's self-knowledge and dissatisfaction. He will
approach and say aloud: "I see something above me, higher and more
human than I: let all help me to reach it, as I will help all who
know and suffer as I do, that the man may arise at last who feels his
knowledge and love, vision and power, to be complete and boundless,
who in his universality is one with nature, the critic and judge of
existence." It is difficult to give any one this courageous
self-consciousness, because it is impossible to teach love; from love
alone the soul gains, not only the clear vision that leads to
self-contempt, but also the desire to look to a higher self which is
yet hidden, and strive upward to it with all its strength. And so he
who rests his hope on a future great man, receives his first
"initiation into culture." The sign of this is shame or vexation at
one's self, a hatred of one's own narrowness, a sympathy with the
genius that ever raises its head again from our misty wastes, a
feeling for all that is struggling into life, the conviction that
Nature must be helped in her hour of need to press forward to the
man, however ill she seem to prosper, whatever success may attend her
marvellous forms and projects: so that the men with whom we live are
like the débris of some precious sculptures, which cry out--"Come and
help us! Put us together, for we long to become complete."
I called this inward condition the "first initiation into culture." I
have now to describe the effects of the "second initiation," a task
of greater difficulty. It is the passage from the inner life to the
criticism of the outer life. The eye must be turned to find in the
great world of movement the desire for culture that is known from the
immediate experience of the individual; who must use his own
strivings and aspirations as the alphabet to interpret those of
humanity. He cannot rest here either, but must go higher. Culture
demands from him not only that inner experience, not only the
criticism of the outer world surrounding him, but action too to crown
them all, the fight for culture against the influences and
conventions and institutions where he cannot find his own aim,--the
production of genius.
Any one who can reach the second step, will see how extremely rare
and imperceptible the knowledge of that end is, though all men busy
themselves with culture and expend vast labour in her service. He
asks himself in amazement--"Is not such knowledge, after all,
absolutely necessary? Can Nature be said to attain her end, if men
have a false idea of the aim of their own labour?" And any one who
thinks a great deal of Nature's unconscious adaptation of means to
ends, will probably answer at once: "Yes, men may think and speak
what they like about their ultimate end, their blind instinct will
tell them the right road." It requires some experience of life to be
able to contradict this: but let a man be convinced of the real aim
of culture--the production of the true man and nothing else;--let him
consider that amid all the pageantry and ostentation of culture at
the present time the conditions for his production are nothing but a
continual "battle of the beasts": and he will see that there is great
need for a conscious will to take the place of that blind instinct.
There is another reason also;--to prevent the possibility of turning
this obscure impulse to quite different ends, in a direction where
our highest aim can no longer be attained. For we must beware of a
certain kind of misapplied and parasitical culture; the powers at
present most active in its propagation have other casts of thought
that prevent their relation to culture from being pure and
disinterested.
The first of these is the self-interest of the business men. This
needs the help of culture, and helps her in return, though at the
price of prescribing her ends and limits. And their favourite sorites
is: "We must have as much knowledge and education as possible; this
implies as great a need as possible for it, this again as much
production, this again as much material wealth and happiness as
possible."--This is the seductive formula. Its preachers would define
education as the insight that makes man through and through a "child
of his age" in his desires and their satisfaction, and gives him
command over the best means of making money. Its aim would be to make
"current" men, in the same sense as one speaks of the "currency" in
money; and in their view, the more "current" men there are, the
happier the people. The object of modern educational systems is
therefore to make each man as "current" as his nature will allow him,
and to give him the opportunity for the greatest amount of success
and happiness that can be got from his particular stock of knowledge.
He is required to have just so much idea of his own value (through
his liberal education) as to know what he can ask of life; and he is
assured that a natural and necessary connection between "intelligence
and property" not only exists, but is also a _moral_ necessity. All
education is detested that makes for loneliness, and has an aim above
money-making, and requires a long time: men look askance on such
serious education, as mere "refined egoism" or "immoral
Epicureanism." The converse of course holds, according to the
ordinary morality, that education must be soon over to allow the
pursuit of money to be soon begun, and should be just thorough enough
to allow of much money being made. The amount of education is
determined by commercial interests. In short, "man has a necessary
claim to worldly happiness; only for that reason is education
necessary."
There is, secondly, the self-interest of the state, which requires
the greatest possible breadth and universality of culture, and has
the most effective weapons to carry out its wishes. If it be firmly
enough established not only to initiate but control education and
bear its whole weight, such breadth will merely profit the
competition of the state with other states. A "highly civilised
state" generally implies, at the present time, the task of setting
free the spiritual forces of a generation just so far as they may be
of use to the existing institutions,--as a mountain stream is split
up by embankments and channels, and its diminished power made to
drive mill-wheels, its full strength being more dangerous than useful
to the mills. And thus "setting free" comes to mean rather "chaining
up." Compare, for example, what the self-interest of the state has
done for Christianity. Christianity is one of the purest
manifestations of the impulse towards culture and the production of
the saint: but being used in countless ways to turn the mills of the
state authorities, it gradually became sick at heart, hypocritical
and degenerate, and in antagonism with its original aim. Its last
phase, the German Reformation, would have been nothing but a sudden
flickering of its dying flame, had it not taken new strength and
light from the clash and conflagration of states.
In the third place, culture will be favoured by all those people who
know their own character to be offensive or tiresome, and wish to
draw a veil of so-called "good form" over them. Words, gestures,
dress, etiquette, and such external things, are meant to produce a
false impression, the inner side to be judged from the outer. I
sometimes think that modern men are eternally bored with each other
and look to the arts to make them interesting. They let their artists
make savoury and inviting dishes of them; they steep themselves in
the spices of the East and West, and have a very interesting aroma
after it all. They are ready to suit all palates: and every one will
be served, whether he want something with a good or bad taste,
something sublime or coarse, Greek or Chinese, tragedy or
gutter-drama. The most celebrated chefs among the moderns who wish to
interest and be interested at any price, are the French; the worst
are the Germans. This is really more comforting for the latter, and
we have no reason to mind the French despising us for our want of
interest, elegance and politeness, and being reminded of the Indian
who longs for a ring through his nose, and then proceeds to tattoo
himself.
Here I must digress a little. Many things in Germany have evidently
been altered since the late war with France, and new requirements for
German culture brought over. The war was for many their first venture
into the more elegant half of the world: and what an admirable
simplicity the conqueror shows in not scorning to learn something of
culture from the conquered! The applied arts especially will be
reformed to emulate our more refined neighbours, the German house
furnished like the French, a "sound taste" applied to the German
language by means of an Academy on the French model, to shake off the
doubtful influence of Goethe--this is the judgment of our new Berlin
Academician, Dubois-Raymond. Our theatres have been gradually moving,
in a dignified way, towards the same goal, even the elegant German
savant is now discovered--and we must now expect everything that does
not conform to this law of elegance, our music, tragedy and
philosophy, to be thrust aside as un-German. But there were no need
to raise a finger for German culture, did German culture (which the
Germans have yet to find) mean nothing but the little amenities that
make life more decorative--including the arts of the dancing-master
and the upholsterer;--or were they merely interested in academic
rules of language and a general atmosphere of politeness. The late
war and the self-comparison with the French do not seem to have
aroused any further desires, and I suspect that the German has a
strong wish for the moment to be free of the old obligations laid on
him by his wonderful gifts of seriousness and profundity. He would
much rather play the buffoon and the monkey, and learn the arts that
make life amusing. But the German spirit cannot be more dishonoured
than by being treated as wax for any elegant mould.
And if, unfortunately, a good many Germans will allow themselves to
be thus moulded, one must continually say to them, till at last they
listen:--"The old German way is no longer yours: it was hard, rough,
and full of resistance; but it is still the most valuable
material--one which only the greatest modellers can work with, for
they alone are worthy to use it. What you have in you now is a soft
pulpy stuff: make what you will out of it,--elegant dolls and
interesting idols--Richard Wagner's phrase will still hold good, 'The
German is awkward and ungainly when he wishes to be polite; he is
high above all others, when he begins to take fire.'" All the elegant
people have reason to beware of this German fire; it may one day
devour them with all their wax dolls and idols.--The prevailing love
of "good form" in Germany may have a deeper cause in the breathless
seizing at what the moment can give, the haste that plucks the fruit
too green, the race and the struggle that cut the furrows in men's
brows and stamp the same mark on all their actions. As if there were
a poison in them that would not let them breathe, they rush about in
disorder, anxious slaves of the "three m's," the moment, the mode and
the mob: they see too well their want of dignity and fitness, and
need a false elegance to hide their galloping consumption. The
fashionable desire of "good form" is bound up with a loathing of
man's inner nature: the one is to conceal, the other to be concealed.
Education means now the concealment of man's misery and wickedness,
his wild-beast quarrels, his eternal greed, his shamelessness in
fruition. In pointing out the absence of a German culture, I have
often had the reproach flung at me: "This absence is quite natural,
for the Germans have been too poor and modest up to now. Once rich
and conscious of themselves, our people will have a culture too."
Faith may often produce happiness, yet _this_ particular faith makes
me unhappy, for I feel that the culture whose future raises such
hopes--the culture of riches, politeness, and elegant concealments--
is the bitterest foe of that German culture in which I believe. Every
one who has to live among Germans suffers from the dreadful grayness
and apathy of their lives, their formlessness, torpor and clumsiness,
still more their envy, secretiveness and impurity: he is troubled by
their innate love of the false and the ignoble, their wretched
mimicry and translation of a good foreign thing into a bad German
one. But now that the feverish unrest, the quest of gain and success,
the intense prizing of the moment, is added to it all, it makes one
furious to think that all this sickness can never be cured, but only
painted over, by such a "cult of the interesting." And this among a
people that has produced a Schopenhauer and a Wagner! and will
produce others, unless we are blindly deceiving ourselves; for should
not their very existence be a guarantee that such forces are even now
potential in the German spirit? Or will they be exceptions, the last
inheritors of the qualities that were once called German? I can see
nothing to help me here, and return to my main argument again, from
which my doubts and anxieties have made me digress. I have not yet
enumerated all the forces that help culture without recognising its
end, the production of genius. Three have been named; the
self-interest of business, of the state, and of those who draw the
cloak of "good form" over them. There is fourthly the self-interest
of science, and the peculiar nature of her servants--the learned.
Science has the same relation to wisdom as current morality to
holiness: she is cold and dry, loveless, and ignorant of any deep
feeling of dissatisfaction and yearning. She injures her servants in
helping herself, for she impresses her own character on them and
dries up their humanity. As long as we actually mean by culture the
progress of science, she will pass by the great suffering man and
harden her heart, for science only sees the problems of knowledge,
and suffering is something alien and unintelligible to her
world--though no less a problem for that!
If one accustom himself to put down every experience in a dialectical
form of question and answer, and translate it into the language of
"pure reason," he will soon wither up and rattle his bones like a
skeleton. We all know it: and why is it that the young do not shudder
at these skeletons of men, but give themselves blindly to science
without motive or measure? It cannot be the so-called "impulse to
truth": for how could there be an impulse towards a pure, cold and
objectless knowledge? The unprejudiced eye can see the real driving
forces only too plainly. The vivisection of the professor has much to
recommend it, as he himself is accustomed to finger and analyse all
things--even the worthiest! To speak honestly, the savant is a
complex of very various impulses and attractive forces--he is a base
metal throughout.
Take first a strong and increasing desire for intellectual adventure,
the attraction of the new and rare as against the old and tedious.
Add to that a certain joy in nosing the trail of dialectic, and
beating the cover where the old fox, Thought, lies hid; the desire is
not so much for truth as the chase of truth, and the chief pleasure
is in surrounding and artistically killing it. Add thirdly a love of
contradiction whereby the personality is able to assert itself
against all others: the battle's the thing, and the personal victory
its aim,--truth only its pretext. The impulse to discover "particular
truths" plays a great part in the professor, coming from his
submission to definite ruling persons, classes, opinions, churches,
governments, for he feels it a profit to himself to bring truth to
their side.
The following characteristics of the savant are less common, but
still found.--Firstly, downrightness and a feeling for simplicity,
very valuable if more than a mere awkwardness and inability to
deceive, deception requiring some mother-wit.--(Actually, we may be
on our guard against too obvious cleverness and resource, and doubt
the man's sincerity.)--Otherwise this downrightness is generally of
little value, and rarely of any use to knowledge, as it follows
tradition and speaks the truth only in "adiaphora"; it being lazier
to speak the truth here than ignore it. Everything new means
something to be unlearnt, and your downright man will respect the
ancient dogmas and accuse the new evangelist of failing in the
_sensus recti_. There was a similar opposition, with probability and
custom on its side, to the theory of Copernicus. The professor's
frequent hatred of philosophy is principally a hatred of the long
trains of reasoning and artificiality of the proofs. Ultimately the
savants of every age have a fixed limit; beyond which ingenuity is
not allowed, and everything suspected as a conspirator against
honesty.
Secondly, a clear vision of near objects, combined with great
shortsightedness for the distant and universal. The professor's range
is generally very small, and his eye must be kept close to the
object. To pass from a point already considered to another, he has to
move his whole optical apparatus. He cuts a picture into small
sections, like a man using an opera-glass in the theatre, and sees
now a head, now a bit of the dress, but nothing as a whole. The
single sections are never combined for him, he only infers their
connection, and consequently has no strong general impression. He
judges a literary work, for example, by certain paragraphs or
sentences or errors, as he can do nothing more; he will be driven to
see in an oil painting nothing but a mass of daubs.
Thirdly, a sober conventionality in his likes and dislikes. Thus he
especially delights in history because he can put his own motives
into the actions of the past. A mole is most comfortable in a
mole-hill. He is on his guard against all ingenious and extravagant
hypotheses; but digs up industriously all the commonplace motives of
the past, because he feels in sympathy with them. He is generally
quite incapable of understanding and valuing the rare or the
uncommon, the great or the real.
Fourthly, a lack of feeling, which makes him capable of vivisection.
He knows nothing of the suffering that brings knowledge, and does not
fear to tread where other men shudder. He is cold and may easily
appear cruel. He is thought courageous, but he is not,--any more than
the mule who does not feel giddiness.
Fifthly, diffidence, or a low estimate of himself. Though he live in
a miserable alley of the world, he has no sense of sacrifice or
surrender; he appears often to know in his inmost heart that he is
not a flying but a crawling creature. And this makes him seem even
pathetic.
Sixthly, loyalty to his teachers and leaders. From his heart he
wishes to help them, and knows he can do it best with the truth. He
has a grateful disposition, for he has only gained admittance through
them to the high hall of science; he would never have entered by his
own road. Any man to-day who can throw open a new province where his
lesser disciples can work to some purpose, is famous at once; so
great is the crowd that presses after him. These grateful pupils are
certainly a misfortune to their teacher, as they all imitate him; his
faults are exaggerated in their small persons, his virtues
correspondingly diminished.
Seventhly, he will follow the usual road of all the professors, where
a feeling for truth springs from a lack of ideas, and the wheel once
started goes on. Such natures become compilers, commentators, makers
of indices and herbaria; they rummage about one special department
because they have never thought there are others. Their industry has
something of the monstrous stupidity of gravitation; and so they can
often bring their labours to an end.
Eighthly, a dread of ennui. While the true thinker desires nothing
more than leisure, the professor fears it, not knowing how it is to
be used. Books are his comfort; he listens to everybody's different
thoughts and keeps himself amused all day. He especially chooses
books with a personal relation to himself, that make him feel some
emotion of like or dislike; books that have to do with himself or his
position, his political, æsthetic, or even grammatical doctrines; if
he have mastered even one branch of knowledge, the means to flap away
the flies of ennui will not fail him.
Ninthly, the motive of the bread-winner, the "cry of the empty
stomach," in fact. Truth is used as a direct means of preferment,
when she can be attained; or as a way to the good graces of the
fountains of honour--and bread. Only, however, in the sense of the
"particular truth": there is a gulf between the profitable truths
that many serve, and the unprofitable truths to which only those few
people devote themselves whose motto is not _ingenii largitor
venter_.
Tenthly, a reverence for their fellow-professors and a fear of their
displeasure--a higher and rarer motive than the last, though not
uncommon. All the members of the guild are jealously on guard, that
the truth which means so much bread and honour and position may
really be baptized in the name of its discoverer. The one pays the
other reverence for the truth he has found, in order to exact the
toll again if he should find one himself. The Untruth, the Error is
loudly exploded, that the workers may not be too many; here and there
the real truth will be exploded to let a few bold and stiff-necked
errors be on show for a time; there is never a lack of "moral
idiosyncrasies,"--formerly called rascalities.
Eleventhly, the "savant for vanity," now rather rare. He will get a
department for himself somehow, and investigate curiosities,
especially if they demand unusual expenditure, travel, research, or
communication with all parts of the world. He is quite satisfied with
the honour of being regarded as a curiosity himself, and never dreams
of earning a living by his erudite studies.
Twelfthly, the "savant for amusement." He loves to look for knots in
knowledge and to untie them; not too energetically however, lest he
lose the spirit of the game. Thus he does not penetrate the depths,
though he often observes something that the microscopic eyes of the
bread-and-butter scientist never see.
If I speak, lastly, of the "impulse towards justice" as a further
motive of the savant, I may be answered that this noble impulse,
being metaphysical in its nature, is too indistinguishable from the
rest, and really incomprehensible to mortal mind; and so I leave the
thirteenth heading with the pious wish that the impulse may be less
rare in the professor than it seems. For a spark in his soul from the
fire of justice is sufficient to irradiate and purify it, so that he
can rest no more and is driven for ever from the cold or lukewarm
condition in which most of his fellows do their daily work.
All these elements, or a part of them, must be regarded as fused and
pounded together, to form the Servant of Truth. For the sake of an
absolutely inhuman thing--mere purposeless, and therefore motiveless,
knowledge--a mass of very human little motives have been chemically
combined, and as the result we have the professor,--so transfigured
in the light of that pure unearthly object that the mixing and
pounding which went to form him are all forgotten! It is very
curious. Yet there are moments when they must be remembered,--when we
have to think of the professor's significance to culture. Any one
with observation can see that he is in his essence and by his origin
unproductive, and has a natural hatred of the productive; and thus
there is an endless feud between the genius and the savant in idea
and practice. The latter wishes to kill Nature by analysing and
comprehending it, the former to increase it by a new living Nature.
The happy age does not need or know the savant; the sick and sluggish
time ranks him as its highest and worthiest.
Who were physician enough to know the health or sickness of our time?
It is clear that the professor is valued too highly, with evil
consequences for the future genius, for whom he has no compassion,
merely a cold, contemptuous criticism, a shrug of the shoulders, as
if at something strange and perverted for which he has neither time
nor inclination. And so he too knows nothing of the aim of culture.
In fact, all these considerations go to prove that the aim of culture
is most unknown precisely where the interest in it seems liveliest.
The state may trumpet as it will its services to culture, it merely
helps culture in order to help itself, and does not comprehend an aim
that stands higher than its own well-being or even existence. The
business men in their continual demand for education merely wish
for--business. When the pioneers of "good form" pretend to be the
real helpers of culture, imagining that all art, for example, is
merely to serve their own needs, they are clearly affirming
themselves in affirming culture. Of the savant enough has already
been said. All four are emulously thinking how they can benefit
_themselves_ with the help of culture, but have no thoughts at all
when their own interests are not engaged. And so they have done
nothing to improve the conditions for the birth of genius in modern
times; and the opposition to original men has grown so far that no
Socrates could ever live among us, and certainly could never reach
the age of seventy.
I remember saying in the third chapter that our whole modern world
was not so stable that one could prophesy an eternal life to its
conception of culture. It is likely that the next millennium may
reach two or three new ideas that might well make the hair of our
present generation stand on end. The belief in the metaphysical
significance of culture would not be such a horrifying thing, but its
effects on educational methods might be so.
It requires a totally new attitude of mind to be able to look away
from the present educational institutions to the strangely different
ones that will be necessary for the second or third generation. At
present the labours of higher education produce merely the savant or
the official or the business man or the Philistine or, more commonly,
a mixture of all four; and the future institutions will have a harder
task;--not in itself harder; as it is really more natural, and so
easier; and further, could anything be harder than to make a youth
into a savant against nature, as now happens?--But the difficulty
lies in unlearning what we know and setting up a new aim; it will be
an endless trouble to change the fundamental idea of our present
educational system, that has its roots in the Middle Ages and regards
the mediæval savant as the ideal type of culture. It is already time
to put these objects before us; for some generation must begin the
battle, of which a later generation will reap the victory. The
solitary man who has understood the new fundamental idea of culture
is at the parting of the ways; on the one he will be welcomed by his
age, laurels and rewards will be his, powerful parties will uphold
him, he will have as many in sympathy behind him as in front, and
when the leader speaks the word of deliverance, it will echo through
all the ranks. The first duty is to "fight in line," the second to
treat as foes all who will not "fall in." On the other way he will
find fewer companions; it is steeper and more tortuous. The
travellers on the first road laugh at him, as his way is the more
troublesome and dangerous; and they try to entice him over. If the
two ways cross, he is ill-treated, cast aside or left alone. What
significance has any particular form of culture for these several
travellers? The enormous throng that press to their end on the first
road, understand by it the laws and institutions that enable them to
go forward in regular fashion and rule out all the solitary and
obstinate people who look towards higher and remoter objects. To the
small company on the other road it has quite a different office: they
wish to guard themselves, by means of a strong organisation, from
being swept away by the throng, to prevent their individual members
from fainting on the way or turning in spirit from their great task.
These solitary men must finish their work; that is why they should
all hold together; and those who have their part in the scheme will
take thought to prepare themselves with ever-increasing purity of aim
for the birth of the genius, and ensure that the time be ripe for
him. Many are destined to help on the labour, even among the
second-rate talents, and it is only in submission to such a destiny
that they can feel they are living for a duty, and have a meaning and
an object in their lives. But at present these talents are being
turned from the road their instinct has chosen by the seductive tones
of the "fashionable culture," that plays on their selfish side, their
vanities and weaknesses; and the time-spirit ever whispers in their
ears its flattering counsel:--"Follow me and go not thither! There
you are only servants and tools, over-shadowed by higher natures with
no scope for your own, drawn by threads, hung with fetters, slaves
and automatons. With me you may enjoy your true personality, and be
masters, your talents may shine with their own light, and yourselves
stand in the front ranks with an immense following round you; and the
acclamation of public opinion will rejoice you more than a wandering
breath of approval sent down from the cold ethereal heights of
genius." Even the best men are snared by such allurements, and the
ultimate difference comes not so much from the rarity and power of
their talent, as the influence of a certain heroic disposition at the
base of them, and an inner feeling of kinship with genius. For there
are men who feel it as their own misery when they see the genius in
painful toil and struggle, in danger of self-destruction, or
neglected by the short-sighted selfishness of the state, the
superficiality of the business men, and the cold arrogance of the
professors; and I hope there may be some to understand what I mean by
my sketch of Schopenhauer's destiny, and to what end Schopenhauer can
really educate.