Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

David Strauss, the confessor and the writerto the German spirit seeking and thirsting for new life. For it seeks,this German spirit! and you hate it because it seeks and refuses tobelieve you when you say you have already found what it is seeking.How is it possible that a type such as the cultural philistine couldhave come into existence and, once extant, could a(;quire · theauthority of supreme arbiter over all the problems of German culture;how is this possible, after there has filed past us a whole line ofgreat heroic figures whose every movement, every feature, whosequestioning voice, whose burning eye, betrayed but one thing: thatthey were seekers, and that what they were seeking with such perseverencewas precisely that which the cultural philistine fancied healready possessed: a genuine, original German culture. Is there aground, they seemed to ask, so pure, so untouched, of such virginalholiness, that the German spirit may raise its house upon thisground and upon no other? Questioning thus, they made their waythrough the wilderness and thorns of wretched and meagre ages,and as seekers they passed from our sight: so that one of them,speaking for all, could say in his old age; 'I have toiled fo r half a centuryand allowed myself no rest, but have continually striven andsought and worked as well and as hard as I could.'*But what view does our philistine culture take of these seekers? Itassumes them to be finders, not seekers, and seems to forget that itwas as seekers that they regarded themselves. 'We have our culture,do we not?' they say, 'for we have our classics, do we not? Not onlyhave the foundations been laid, but the building itself stands alreadyupon them -we ourselves are this building.' And the philistine raiseshis hand to his own brow.Thus to misjudge our classics, however, and in thinking to honourthem thus to damn them, it is necessary not to know them: and this isindeed the universal fact. For ctherwise it would be known that thereis only one way of honouring them, and that is to go on seeking intheir spirit and with their courage, and not to grow weary of doingso. On the other hand, to affix to them the suspect word 'classic' andfrom time to time to 'edify' oneself with their works is to resign oneselfto those feeble and egoistic sensations promised by our concerthalls and theatres to anyone who can pay for them; the same appliesto the erection of statues of them and the naming of festivals andsocieties after them - all these things are merely cash payments bymeans of which the cultural philistine settles accounts with them so"'Goethe to Eckennann, 14 March 1830.9