Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

David Strauss, the confessor and the writerinternational journals which stand at its service to proclaim certainindividuals from its midst as the new German classics and modelwriters. One might perhaps have expected that the more thoughtfuland learned among cultivated Germans would have recognized thedangers inherent in such a misuse of success, or at least have felt thisspectacle as painful: for what could be more painful than the sight ofa deformed man pluming himself before the mirror like a cockereland exchanging admiring glances with his reflection? But thelearned classes are happy to let happen what is happening, and havein any case quite enough to do in maintaining themselves withoutthe additional burden of looking after the welfare of the Germanspirit. Its members are, moreover, supremely convinced that theirown culture is the ripest and fairest fruit of the age, indeed of all theages, and cannot comprehend why anyone should need to look afterthe welfare of German culture in general, since they themselves andcountless numbers like them have already gone far, far beyond allsuch considerations. The more cautious observer, however, especiallyif he is a foreigner, cannot help noticing that what the Germanscholar now calls his culture and that jubilant culture of the newGerman classics differ from one another only in the extent of theirknowledge: wherever the question is one not of knowledge andinformation, but of art and ability - wherever, that is to say, life bearswitness to the culture - there is now only one German culture: and isit this that is supposed to have triumphed over France?Such an assertion seems completely incomprehensible: all impartialjudges, and finally the French themselves, have seenGermany's decisive advantage to have lain in the more extensiveknowledge possessed by its officers, in the superior training of itstroops, and in the greater science of its conduct of the war. In whatsense, then, can German culture be said to have triumphed, if onethinks to deduct from it German erudition? In no sense: fo r themoral qualities of stricter discipline and readier obedience havenothing to do with culture - though they distinguished the Macedoniansoldiery from the Greek, for example, the latter were incomparablymore cultured. It can only be the result of confusion if onespeaks of the victory of German culture, a confusion originating inthe fact that in Germany there no longer exists any clear conceptionof what culture is.Culture is, above all, unity of artistic style in all the expressionsof the life of a people. Much knowledge and learning is neitheran essential means to culture nor a sign of it, and if needs be can5