Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Schopenhauer as educatorappears to us to be. If the lattert then the truth we assemble here isnothing' after our death, and all endeavour to acquire a possessionwhich will follow us to the grave is in vain. - If the point of thisthought does not penetrate your heart, do not smile at one who feelswounded by it in the deepest and most sacred part of his being. Myone great aim has failed me and I have no other.'* When, indeed,will men again feel iIi this natural Kleistian fashion, when will theyagain learn to assess the meaning of a philosophy in the 'most sacredpart' of their being? And yet this must be done if we are to understandwhat, after Kant, Schopenhauer can be to us - namely theleader who leads us from the depths of sceptical gloom or criticizingrenunciation up to the heights of tragic contemplation, to the nocturnalsky and its stars extended endlessly above us, and who washimself the first to take his path. His greatness lies in having set upbefore him a picture of life as a whole, in order to interpret it as awhole; while even the most astute heads cannot be dissuaded fromthe error that one can achieve a more perfect interpretation if oneminutely investigates the paint with which this picture is producedand the material upon which it is painted; perhaps with the resultthat one concludes that it is a quite intricately woven canvas withpaint upon it which is chemically inexplicable. To understand thepicture one must divine the painter - that Schopenhatier knew.Nowadays, however, the whole guild of the sciences is occupied inunderstanding the canvas and the paint but not the picture; one cansay, "indeed, that only he who has a clear view of the picture of lifeand existence as a whole can employ the individual sciences withoutharm to himself, for without such a regulatory total picture they arethreads that nowhere come to an end and only render our life moreconfused and labyrinthine. Schopenhauer is, as I said, great in thathe pursues this picture as Hamlet pursues the ghost, without lettinghimself be led aside, as scholars are, or becoming enmeshed inabstract scholasticism, as is the fate of rabid dialecticians. The studyof quarter-philosophers is enticing only so as to recognize that theymake at once for the places in the edifices of great philosophieswhere scholarly for and against, where brooding, doubting, contradictingare permitted, and that they thereby elude the challengeof every great philosophy, which as a whole always says only: this isthe picture of all life, and learn from it the meaning of your own life.And the reverse: only read your own life and comprehend from it°Letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge, 22 March 1801.141