Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationsevent is a joke- and pseudo-philosophy. Many states have beenfounded since the world began; that is an old story. How should apolitical innovation suffice to turn men once and for all into contentedinhabitants of the earth? But if anyone really does believe inthis possibility he ought to come fo rward, for he truly deserves tobecome a professor of philosophy at a German university, likeHarms in Berlin Jiirgen Meyer in Bonn and Carriere in Munich.Here, however, we are experiencing the consequences of the doctrine,lately preached from all the rooftops, that the state is thehighest goal of mankind and that a man has no higher duty than toserve the state: in which doctrine I recognize a relapse not intopaganism but into stupidity. It may be that a man who sees hishighest duty in serving the state really knows no higher duties; butthere are men and duties existing beyond this - and one of the dutiesthat seems, at least to me, to be higher than serving the statedemands that one destroys stupidity in every form, and therefore inthis fo rm too. That is why I am concerned here with a species of manwhose teleology extends somewhat beyond the welfare of a state,with philosophers, and with these only in relation to a world which isagain fairly independent of the welfare of a state, that of culture. Ofthe many rings which, interlocked together, make up the humancommunity, some are of gold and others of pinchbeck.N ow, how does the philosopher view the culture of our time? Verydifferently, to be sure, from how it is viewed by those professors ofphilosophy who are so well contented with their new state. When hethinks of the haste and hurry now universal, of the increasing. velocity oflife, of the cessation of all contemplativeness and simplicity,he almost thinks that what he is seeing are the symptoms of a totalextermination and uprooting of culture. The waters of religion areebbing away and leaving behind swamps or stagnant pools; thenations are again drawing away from one another in the most hostilefashion and long to tear one another to pieces. The sciences, pursuedwithout any restraint and in a spirit of the blindest laissez. ta iTe,are shattering and dissolving all firmly held belief; the educatedclasses and states are being swept along by a hugely contemptiblemoney economy. The world has never been more worldly, neverpoorer in love and goodness. The educated classes are no longerlighthouses or refuges in the midst of this turmoil of secularization;they themselves grow daily more restless, thoughtless and loveless.Everything, contemporary art and science included, serves the coming. barbarism. The cultured man has degenerated to the greatest enemy148