Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

David Strauss) the confessor and the writer2If, however, our public and private life so manifesdy does not bearthe stamp of a productive and stylistically secure culture, if our greatartists, moreover, have admitted and continue to admit this dreadfuland, for a gifted people, profoundly humiliating fact, how is it possiblethat the greatest self-satisfaction nonetheless continues to reignamong educated Germans: a self-satisfaction which since the recentwar has shown itself ready to burst out in cries of jubilation andtriumph? In any event, there exists a steadfast belief that we are inpossession of a genuine culture: the enormous incongruity betweenthis complacent, indeed exultant belief and an in fact notoriouscultural deficiency seems to be apparent only to the select few. Forall those whose views coincide with public opinion have coveredtheir eyes and stopped their ears the incongruity must not beadmitted to exist. How is this possible? What force is so powerful asto dictate such a 'must not' ? What species of man must have come todominate in Germany that such strong and simple feelings can beprohibited and expression of them obstructed? I shall call thispower, this species of man, by its name - it is the · culturalphilistine.The word 'philistine', as is well known, belongs to the studentvocabulary, and signifies, in its wider, popular sense, the antithesisof a son of the muses, of the artist, of the man of genuine culture. Thecultural philistine, however - the study of whom, and the hearing ofwhose confessions when he makes them, has now become a disagreeableduty distinguishes himself from the general idea of thespecies 'philistine' through a superstition: he fancies that he is himselfa son of the muses and man of culture; an incomprehensibledelusion which reveals that he does not even know what a philistine,and the antithesis of a philistine, is: so we shall not be surprised tofind that usually he solemnly denies he is a philistine. With this lackof all self-knowledge, he feels firmly convinced that his 'culture' isthe complete expression of true German culture: , and since heeverywhere discovers cultivated people of his own kind, and finds allpublic institutions, schools and cultural and artistic bodies organizedin accordance with his kind of cultivation and in the service of hisrequirements, he also bears with him everywhere the triumphantfeeling of being the worthy representative of contemporary Germanculture and frames his demands and pretcn'Jions accordingly. If,however, true culture must in any event presuppose unity of style,7