Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditations3David Strauss makes a twofold confession regarding philistine culture:confession by word and confession by deed - the word of the confessorand the deed of the writer. His book entitled The Old Faith and theNew is, with regard to its content and with regard to its quality as abook and the production of a writer, an uninterrupted confession;and that he should permit himself to make public confession as tohis beliefs at all already constitutes a confession. * - It may be thateveryone over forty has the right to compile an autobiography, foreven the humblest of us may have experienced and seen from closerquarters things which the thinker may find worth noticing. But todepose a confession of one's beliefs must be considered incomparablymore presumptuous, since it presupposes that the writeraccords value, not merely to what he has experienced or discoveredor seen during his life, but even to what he has believed. Now, thelast thing the real thinker will wish to know is what kind of beliefs areagreeable to such natures as Strauss o r; what it is they 'have halfdreamily cobbled together' (p. 10) in regard to things of which onlyhe who knows them at first hand has a right to speak. Who couldneed the confessions of belief of a Ranke or a Mommsen, eventhough they are scholars and historians of an order quite differentfrom David Strauss? As soon as they sought to interest us in theirbeliefs rather than in their knowledge they would be oversteppingtheir bounds in a very annoying fashion. But this is what Straussdoes when he tells us of his beliefs. No one wishes to know anythingabout them, except perhaps certain narrow-minded opponents ofthe Straussian dogmas who feel that there must lie behind them asystem of truly diabolical principles and would no doubt wantStrauss to compromise his learned utterances by betraying thisdiabolical background. Perhaps these uncouth fellows have evenbenefited from Strauss's latest book; the rest of us, however, whohave had no reason to suspect the existence of such a diabolicalbackground, have done no such thing - we would, indeed, havebeen grateful if we had found a little diabolism in these pages. For thevoice of Strauss speaking of his new faith is certainly not the voice ofan evil spirit: it is not the voice of a spirit at all, let alone that of anactual genius.It is the voice of those people whom Straussintroduces to us as his 'we' - they are, he says, 'scholars and artists,* Strauss's Der alte und neue Glaube was published in 1872. Nietzsche's page referencesare to the original edition. An English translation by Mathilde Blind appeared in1873.14