Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationsappearance is sufficiently infantile and dwarfish for us t'o be remindedof the Indian saying: 'Men are born, in accordance with their deeds,stupid, dumb, deaf, misshapen.' Their fathers deserved such aprogeny by virtue of their 'deeds', as the saying has it. That is why it isquite indisputable that academic youth will very soon be able tomanage without the philosophy taught: at their universities, and thatunacademic men are already able to manage without it. One hasonly to recall one's own student days; in my case, fo r example,academic philosophers were men towards whom I was perfectlyindifferent: I counted them as people who raked together somethingfo r themselves out of the results of the other sciences and employedtheir leisure time in reading newspapers and going to concerts, andfor the rest were treated by their own academic comrades with apolitely masked contempt. They were credited with knowing littleand with never being at a loss for some obscure expression withwhich to conceal this lack of knowledge. They thus preferred todwell in gloomy places where the clear-eyed cannot endure to be forlong. One of them urged it against thj natural sciences: none ofthem can completely explain to me the simplest process of becoming,so what have any of them to do with me? Another said of history: tohim who has ideas it has nothing new to say - in short, they alwaysdiscovered reasons why it was more philosophical to know nothingthan to learn something. If they did engage in learning, their secretmotive in doing so was to elude science and to found a dark domainin one or other of its lacunae. Thus they went on ahead of the sciencesonly in the sense that the deer is ahead of the huntsmen who are afterit. Lately they have been content to assert that they are really no morethan the frontier guards and spies of the sciences; to which end theyare especially served by the teachings of Kant, out of which they areintent upon fashioning an idle scepticism that will soon be of nointerest to anybody. Only now and then does one of them still hoisthimself up to a little system of metaphysics, with the consequencesthat usually follow, namely dizziness, headache and nosebleed.After having so often enjoyed no success on this trip into the mistand clouqs, after some rude, hard-headed disciple of the real scienceshas again and again seized them by the pigtail and pulled them backdown, their face habitually assumes an expression of primness andof having been found out. They have lost their confidence, so thatnone of them lives even a moment for the sake of his philosophy.Formerly some of them believed themselves capable of inventingnew religions or of replacing old ones with their philosophical sys-188