Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationsas not to have to follow after them and to go on seeking. For 'All seekingis at an end' is the motto of the philistines.There was a time when this motto was to some extent sensible: thetime when, during the first decade of the present century, so muchconfused seeking, experimenting, wrecking, promising, surmising,hoping was going on in Germany that the spiritual middle class wasright to fear for its own safety. At that time it was right to reject with ashrug of the shoulders the brew of fantastic and language-twistingphilosophies and tendentious historiographies, a carnival of all thegods and myths, which the Romantics had mixed together, and torej ect too the current poetic fashions and follies dreamed up in astate of intoxication - right, that is, because the philistine does nothave the right even to a debauch. With the craftiness pertaining tobaser natures, however, he took the opportunity thus afforded tocast suspicion on seeking as such and to promote a comfortable consciousnessof having already found. His eyes were opened to the joysof philistinism: he saved himself from all the wild experimentationgoing on by a flight into the idyllic, and to the resdessly creative driveof the artist he opposed a certain easy complacency, a selfcontentmentin one's own limitations, one's own placidity, even inone's own narrow-mindedness. His attenuated finger pointed,without any false modesty, to the hidden and secret corners of hislife, to the many moving and naive pleasures which sprang up likeblushing flowers in the most wretched depths of the uncultivatedexistence and as it were mire of the philistine world.There were a number of representational talents who, with agende brush, depicted the happiness, the cosiness, the prosaicness,the bucolic health, the ease and contentment to be found in the nursery,the scholar's study and the farmhouse. With such picturebooksof reality in their hands, these self-satisfied people thensought to come to terms once and fo r all with the classics they foundso unsetding and with the demand for further seeking which proceededfrom them; they devised the concept of the epigone-age withthe object of obtaining peace and quiet and so as to meet everyuncomfortable innovation with the condemnatory verdict 'epigonework'. It was these same self-contented people who, with the sameend in view of guaranteeing their own peace, took charge of historyand sought to transform every science which might be expected todisturb their complacency into an historical discipline, especially soin the case of philosophy and classical philology. Through historicalawareness they saved themselves from enthusiasm for history was10