Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Sclwpenhauer as educatormelted away and whose life of suffering is no longer felt as his ownlife - or is hardly so fe lt - but as a profound feeling of oneness andidentity with all living things: the saint in whom there appears thatmiracle of transformation which the game of becoming never hitsupon, that final and supreme becoming-human after which allnature presses and urges for its redemption from itself. It is incontestablethat we are all related and allied to the saint, just as we arerelated to the philosopher and artist; there are moments and as itwere bright sparks of the fire of love in whose light we cease tounderstand the word 'I', there lies something beyond our beingwhich at these moments moves across into it, and we are thuspossessed of a heartfelt longing for bridges between here and there.I t is true that, as we usually are, we can contribute nothing to the productionof the man of redemption: that is why we hate ourselves as weusually are, and it is this hatred which is the root of that pessimismwhich Schopenhauer had again to teach our age, though it has existedfor as long as the longing for culture has existed. Its root, not itsflower; its bottom floor, so to speak, not its roof; the commencementof its course, not its goal: for at some time or other we shall have tolearn to hate something else, something more universal, and ceaseto hate our own individuality and its wretched limitations,changeableness and restlessness: it will be in that elevated conditionin which we shall also love something else, something we are nowunable to love. Only when, in our present or in some future incarnation,we ourselves have been taken into that exalted - order ofphilosophers, artists and saints, shall we also be given a new goal forour love and hate - in the meantime we have our task and our circleof duties, our hate and our love. For we know what culture is.Applied to the Schopenhauerean man, it demands that we prepareand promote his repeated production by getting to know what isinimical to it and removing it - in short, that we unwearyingly combatthat which would deprive us of the supreme fulfilment of ourexistence by preventing us from becoming such Schopenhauereanmen ourselves. -6Sometimes it is harder to accede to a thing than it is to see its truth;and that is how most people may feel when they reflect on the proposition:'Mankind must work continually at the production ofindividual great men that and nothing else is its task.' How much161