Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

On the uses and disadvantages of history for lifeinstinct for what we call poetry. Is it supposed that the generationsbefore them and contemporary with them had failed even to mentionthat art, even though it was strange to them? The opposite is, of course,the case: they reflected, wrote and argued about 'poetry' with greatvigour, producing words about words about words as they did so.This awakening to life of a word did not imply the death of those whoawoke it; in a certain sense they are still living, for if, as Gibbon says,it requires only time, though a great deal of time, for a world toperish, so it requires only time, though in Germany, the 'land ofgradualness', it requires very much more time, for a false idea toperish. Nonetheless, there are now perhaps a hundred more peoplethan there were a hundred years ago who know what poetry is;perhaps a hundred years hence there will be a fu rther hundred whoby then will also have learned what culture is and that the Germanshave up to now possessed no culture, however much they may talkand puff themselves up about it. To these people the Germans'universal contentment with their 'culture' will appear as incredibleand silly as the once acclaimed classicism of Gottsched or Ramler'sreputation as the German Pindar appear to us. They will perhapsthink that this culture has been only a kind of knowledge about culture,and false and superficial knowledge at that. False and superficial,that is, because one endured the contradiction between lifeand knowledge and completely failed to see what characterized theculture of genuinely cultured peoples: that culture can grow andflourish only out of life; while among the Germans it was stuck onlike a paper flower or poured over like icing-sugar, and was thus condemnedto remain forever deceitful and unfruitful. The education ofGerman youth, however, proceeds from precisely this false andunfruitful conception of culture: its goal, viewed in its essence, is notat all the free cultivated man but the scholar, the man of science, andindeed the most speedily employable man of science, who standsaside from life so as to know it unobstructedly; its result, observedempirically, is the historical-aesthetic cultural philistine, the precociousand up-to-the-minute babbler about state, church and art,the man who appreciates everything, the insatiable stomach whichnonetheless does not know what honest hunger and thirst are. Thatan education with this goal and this result is an anti-natural one isapprehensible only to one who has not yet been fully processed by it;>it is apprehensible only to the instinct of youth, fo r youth stillpossesses that instinct of nature which remains intact until artificiallyand forcibly shattered by this education. He who wants, on the con-117