Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

On the uses and disadvantages of history for lifeagainst a past of this sort! Impossible to go against the work of thegods! It was to count as an inviolable law of nature: he who is born aphilosopher has gold in his body, he who is born a soldier has onlysilver, he who is born a worker has iron and bronze. As it is impossibleto blend these metals together, Plato explained; so it shouldbe impossible ever to mingle or confound the order of castes; beliefin theaeterna veritas of this order is the foundation of the new educationand therewith of the new state. - Now, this is how the modern Germanbelieves in theaeterna veritas of his system of education, of his kind ofculture: and yet this belief would crumble away, as the Platonic statewould have crumbled away, if the necessary lie were for once counteredwith a necessary troth: the truth that the German possesses noculture because his education provides no basis for one. He wantsthe flower without the root and the stem: consequently he wants it invain. That is the simple truth, a coarse and unpleasant truth, truly anecessary truth.It is in this necessary truth, however, that our first generation must beeducated; they will certainly suffer the most from it, for through itthey will have to educate themselves, and in opposition to themselvesmoreover, to a new custom and nature and out of an old andfirst nature and custom: so that they could say to themselves in oldSpanish: Defienda me Dios de my, God guard me from myself, that is tosay from the nature already educated into me. It must taste this truthdrop by drop, like a fierce and bitter medicine, and each one of thisgeneration must overcome himself to the extent of being able to sayof himself what he would find it easier to endure if it were said of anentire age: we are without culture, more, we are ruined for living, fo rright and simple seeing and hearing, for happily seizing what isnearest and most natural to us, and do not yet possess even the basisof a culture, because we are not even convinced we have genuine lifein us. Fragmented ' and in pieces, dissociated almost mechanicallyinto an inner and an outer, sown with concepts as with dragon'steeth, bringing fo rth conceptual dragons, suffering from the maladyof words and mistrusting any feeling of our own which has not yetbeen stamped with words: being such an unliving and yet uncannilyactive concept- and word-factory, perhaps I still have the right to sayof myself cogUoJ ergo sum, but not vivo, ergo cogito. Empty 'being' is grantedme, but not full and green 'life' ; the feeling that tells me I existwarrants to me only that I am a thinking creature, not that I am a livingone, not that I am an animal but at most a cogital. Only give me life,119