Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationsl.11}!lI·,:":,\ 'i!: ;antithesis between barbarism and fine style; what is' meant is that apeople to whom one attributes a culture has to be in all reality asingle living unity and not fall wretchedly apart into inner and outer,content and form. He who wants to strive fo r and promote the cultureof a people should strive for and promote this higher unity andjoin in the destruction of modern bogus cultivated ness fo r the sakeof a true culture; he should venture to reflect how the health of a peopleundermined by the study of history may be again restored, how itmay rediscover its instincts and therewith its honesty.I may as well speak directly of ourselves, we Germans of the presentday who are more afflicted than other nations by that weakness ofpersonality and that contradiction between form and content. Formgenerally counts with us as a convention, as a vestment and disguise,and it is therefore, if not exactly hated, at any rate not loved; it wouldbe even more correct to say that we have an extraordinary fear of theword 'convention' and, no doubt, also of the thing. It was this fearwhich led the German to desert the school of France: he wanted tobecome more natural and thereby mOJie German. But this 'thereby'seems to have been a miscalculation: escaped from the school ofconvention, he then let himself go in whatever manner his fancyhappened to suggest to him, and at bottom did no more than imitatein a slovenly and half-forgetful way what he had formerly imitatedwith scrupulous care and often with success. So it is that, comparedwith past ages, we dwell even today in a carelessly inaccurate copy ofFrench convention: a fact to which all our comings and goings, conversations,clothing and habitations bear witness. We thought wewere retreating into naturalness, but what we were really doing wasletting ourselves go and electing fo r ease and comfort and thesmallest possible degree of self-discipline. Take a stroll through aGerman city - compared with the distinct national qualities displayedin fo reign cities, all the conventions here are negative ones,everything is colourless, worn out, badly copied, negligent,everyone does as he likes but what he likes is never fo rceful and wellconsidered but follows the rules laid down first by universal haste,then by the universal rage for ease and comfort. A garment whichcosts no intelligence to design and no time to put on, that is to say agarment borrowed from abroad and imitated in the most easygoingway possible, at once counts with the Germans as a contribution toGerman national dress. The sense of form is rejected without theslightest misgiving - for we possess the sense of the content: for the80