Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationsapplication. The older generation of men of learning, m oreover, had-good grounds for regarding such a misuse as difficult and burdensome:it is on equally good grounds that the younger generationfinds it easy, for, except in the case of a tiny corner of knowledge,they themselves are very much 'general public' and share its needs.They have only to sit at their ease for once and they are able to opento the curiosity of this general populace even the little realm of theirown special study. This relaxation is afterwards called 'the man oflearning modestly condescending to his people': while in reality theman oflearning has, to the extent that he is not a man oflearning butone of the mob, descended only to his own level. Create for yourselvesthe concept of a 'people': it could never be too exalted or toonoble a concept. If you thought well of the people you would showthem compassion and would guard against offering them your historicalaqua fortis as a refreshing draught of life. But in your heartsyou despise them, for you cannot bring yourself seriously to careabout their future, and your behaviour is that of practical pessimists,by which I mean men directed by a prejentiment of coming disasterand therefore sluggishly indifferent to the wellbeing of others and toyour own as well. If only the ground will go on bearing us! And if itceases to bear us, that too is very well: - that is their feeling and thusthey live an ironic existence.8It may seem strange, though it ought not to seem self-contradictory,when I ascribe a kind of ironic self-awareness to an age accustomed tobreak into such loud and innocent rejoicing at its historical culture,and say that it is infused with a presentiment that there is really nothingto rejoice about and a fear that all the merriment of historicalknowledge will soon be over and done with. Goethe presented to usa comparable enigma in regard to the individual personality in hisnoteworthy account of Newton: he discovers at the foundation (or,more correctly, at the highest point) of his being 'a troubledpresentiment that he is in error', the momentary expression, as itwere, of a superior consciousness that has attained to a certain ironicaloverview of his inherent nature. So it is that we find in precisely thegreatest and more highly developed historical men a suppressedconsciousness, often amounting to a general scepticism, of howgreat an absurdity and superstition it is to believe that the educationof a nation has to be as preponderantly historical as it is now; for pre-100