Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationsany such hope grows out of the belief in the genuineness andimmediacy of German feeling, out of the belief in a sound and wholeinwardness. What is there left to hope for or believe in if the sourceof hope and belief is muddied, if inwardness has learned to makeleaps, to dance, to paint itself, to express itself in abstractions andwith calculation and gradually to lose itself1 And how should thegreat productive spirit continue to endure among a people nolonger secure in a unified inwardness and which falls asunder intothe cultivated with a miseducated and misled inwardness on theone hand and the uncultivated with an inaccessible inwardness onthe other! How should that spirit endure if unity of feeling amongthe people has been lost, and if, moreover, it knows that this fe elingis falsified and retouched precisely among that part of the peoplewhich calls itself the cultured part and lays claim to possession of thenational artistic conscience? Even if here and there an individual'staste and judgment has grown more subtle and sublimated, that is noadvantage to him: he is racked by the knowledge that he has to speakas it were to a sect and is no longer neede in the body of his nation.Perhaps he now prefers to bury his treasure rather than suffer thedisgust of being presumptuously patronized by a sect while his heartis full of pity for all. The instinct of the nation no longer comes out tomeet him; it is useless fo r him to stretch out his arms towards themin longing. What is there now left to this spirit but to turn his inspiredhatred against that constraint, against the barriers erected in the socalledculture of his nation, so as to condemn what to him, as a livingbeing and one productive oflife, is destructive and degrading: thushe exchanges a profound insight into his destiny fo r the divine joysof creation and construction, and ends as a solitary man ofknowledge and satiated sage. It is the most painful of spectacles: hewho beholds it will know a sacred compulsion: here, he says to himself,I must render aid, that higher unity in the nature and soul of apeople must agai n be created, that breach between inner and outermust again vanish under the hammer-blows of necessiry. But whatweapons can he employ? What does he have but, again, his profoundinsight: propagating it and sowing it with full hands he hopesto implant a need: and out of a vigorous need there will one day arisea vigorous deed. And so as to leave no doubt of the source of myexample of that need, that necessity, that perception , let me sayexpressly that it is for German unity in that highest sense that we strive,and strive more ardently than we do for political reunification, theunity of German 'spirit and life after the abolition of the antithesis of form andcontent, of inwardness and convention. -