Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Schopenhauer as educatorwill do so too, that the scholar will one day direct in his last will andtestament that his corpse shall be buried surrounded by his booksand especially by his own writings. And ifit is true that the fo rests aregoing to get thinner and thinner, may the time not come one daywhen the libraries should be used for timber, straw and brushwood?Since most books are born out of smoke and vapour of the brain,they ought to return to smoke and vapour. And if they have no fire oftheir own in them, fire should punish them for it. It is thus possiblethat a later century will regard our era as a saeculum obscurum, *because its productions have been used most abundantly for heatingthe stoves. How fo rtunate we are, therefo re, that we are still able toknow this age. For if concerning oneself with one's own age makesany sense at all, then it is a good thing to concern oneself with it asthoroughly as possible, so as to leave absolutely no doubt as to itsnature: and it is precisely this that Schopenhauer enables us todo.Of course, it would be a hundred times better if this investigationshould reveal that nothing so proud and full of hope as our own agehas ever before existed. And there are indeed at this moment naivepeople in this and that corner of the earth, in Germany for instance,who are prepared to believe such a thing, and even go so far as toassert in all seriousness that the world was put to rights a couple ofyears agot and thatthose who persist in harbouring dark misgivingsabout the nature of existence are refuted by the 'facts'. The chief factis that the fo unding of the new German Reich is a decisive andannihilating blow to all 'pessimistic' philosophizing that is supposedto be firm and certain. - Whoever is seeking to answer thequestion of what the philosopher as educator can mean in our timehas to contest this view, which is very widespread and is propagatedespecially in our universities; he must declare: it is a downright scandalthat such nauseating, idolatrous flattery can be rendered to our timeby supposedly thinking and honourable men - a proof that one nolonger has the slightest notion how different the seriousness ofphilosophy is from the seriousness of a newspaper. Such men havelost the last remnant not only of a philosophical but also of areligious mode of thinking, and in their place have acquired noteven optimism but journalism, the spirit and spiritlessness of ourday and our daily papers. Every philosophy which believes that theproblem of existence is touched on, not to say solved, by a political"" Saeculum obscurum :. dark age ti.e. with the founding of the Reich in 187 1.147