Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

David Strauss, the confessor and the writerfirmitas,. on conciseness, on fiery energy of movement, on abundantand delicate play of the muscles. They have agreed together to invertthe nature and names of things and henceforth to speak of healthwhere we see weakness, of sickness and tension where we encountertrue health. That is how David Strauss comes to be accounted a'classic'.If only this sobriety were at least a stricdy logical sobriety: but simplicityand rigour in thinking is precisely what these weaklings lack,and in their hands language itself becomes a logical tangle. Just trytranslating this Straussian style into Latin - which can be done evenwith Kant, and with Schopenhauer is pleasurable and easy. Thereason Strauss's German is altogether unamenable to it is probablynot that his German is more German than Kant's or Schopenhauers,but that his German is confused and illogical while theirs isinformed with grandeur and simplicity. He who knows the effort theancients expended on learning to speak and write, and how themoderns make no such effort, feels, as Schopenhauer once said, areal sense of relief when, having been compelled to wade through aGerman book like this one, he turns to those other ancient yet evernew languages: 'for with these', he says, 'I have before me a languagewith fixed rules and a firmly established and faithfully observedgrammar and orthography and can devote myself wholly to thethought expressed in it; while with German I am continually distractedby the impudence of the writer seeking to obtrude his owngrammatical and orthographical whims and eccentricities: a piece ofswaggering folly I find repellent. It is truly an agony to see a fair andancient language possessing a classical literature mishandled byignoramuses and asses.'Thus Schopenhauer's holy wrath cries out to you, so you cannotsay you were not warned. But he who absolutely refuses to heed thiswarning, and insists on continuing in his belief that Strauss is aclassic, should, as a final word of advice, be recommended to imitatehim. If you do try this, though, it will be at your peril: you will have topay for it, in your style and, eventually, in your head, that the dictumof Indian wisdom may be fulfilled in you too: 'To gnaw at the horn ofa cow is useless and shortens life: you grind down your teeth and yetyou get no nourishment.'12In conclusion we shall now place before our classic prose-writer thepromised collection of examples of his style; perhaps Schopenhauer