Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

On the uses and disadvantages of history for lifoAnyone observing this has only one wish, that such a culture shouldnot perish of indigestion. Imagine, for example, a Greek observingsuch a culture: he would perceive that for modern man 'educated'and 'historically educated' seem so to belong together as to meanone and the same thing and to differ only verbally. If h€ then saidthat one can be very educated and yet at the same time altogetheruneducated historically, modern men would think they had failed tohear him aright and would shake their heads. That celebrated littlenation of a not so distant past - I mean these same Greeks duringthe period of their greatest strength kept a tenacious hold on theirunhistorical sense; if a present-day man were magically transportedback to that world he would probably consider the Greeks very'uncultured' - whereby, to be sure, the secret of modern culture, soscrupulously hidden, would be exposed to public ridicule: for wemoderns have nothing whatever of our own; only by replenishingand cramming ourselves with the ages, customs, arts, philosophies,religions, discoveries of others do we become anything worthy ofnotice, that is to say, walking encyclopaedias, which is what anancient Greek transported into our own time would perhaps take usfor. With encyclopaedias, however, all the value lies in what is containedwithin, in the content, not in what stands without, the bindingand cover; so it is that the whole of modern culture is essentiallyinward: on the outside the bookbinder has printed some such thingas 'Handbook of inward culture for outward barbarians' . Thisantithesis of inner and outer, indeed, makes the exterior even morebarbaric than it would be if a rude nation were only to develop out ofitself in accordance with its own uncouth needs. For what means areavailable to nature for overcoming that which presses upon it in toogreat abundance? One alone: to embrace it as lightly as possible soas quickly to expel it again and have done with it. From this comes ahabit of no longer taking real things seriously, from this arises the'weak personality' by virtue of which the real and existent makesonly a slight impression; one becomes ever more negligent of one'souter appearance and, provided the memory is continuallystimulated by a stream of new things worth knowing which can bestored tidily away in its coffers, one finally widens the dubious gulfbetween content and form to the point of complete insensibility tobarbarism. The culture of a people as the antithesis to this barbarismwas once, and as I think with a certain justice, defined as unity ofartistic style in all the expressions of the life of a people; this definitionshould not be misunderstood in the sense of implying an79