Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationsthe same as that which in another place Strauss calls a 'refutation tothe loud rejoicing of the higher spheres', then I do not understandthis theatrical expression, which he once employed against an opponent.Optimism has here for once deliberately made things tooeasy for itself. But the trick of the thing was precisely to make it lookas though refuting Schopenhauer was no bother at all and to castone's burden off with such playful ease that the three muses wouldtake continual delight in the dallying optimist. This is to be achievedby showing that there is no need whatever to take a pessimistseriously: the vainest sophistries will do for dealing with so'unhealthy and unprofitable' a philosophy as Schopenhauer's, uponwhich one needs to expend, not reasons, but at the most jokes andphrases. In the light of such passages as this, one comprehendsSchopenhauer's solemn assertion that, where it is not the thoughtlesschatter of those beneath whose flat cranium there are nothoughts but only words, optimism seems to him not merely anabsurd but also a truly infamous mode of thinking, a bitter mockery of thenameless sufferings of mankind. When the philistine reduces it to asystem, as Strauss does, he also reduces it to an infamous mode ofthinking, that is to say to an inordinately stupid ease-andcontentmentdoctrine for the benefit of the 'ego', or of his 'we', andhe arouses indignation.Who, for example, could read the fo llowing psychologicalelucidation without feeling indignation, since it can quite clearlyhave sprung only from the stem of this infamous ease-andcontentmenttheory: 'Beethoven said he would never have been ableto compose such a text as Figaro or Don Giovanni. Life had not smiledupon him to the extent that he could have adopted so cheerful a view of it as totake the weaknesses of mankind so lightly' (p. 361). But the worst exampleof this infamous vulgarity of mind is supplied in the fact that Straussknows no other way of explaining to himself the whole dreadfullyserious drive to self-abnegation and to salvation in asceticismevidenced in the first centuries of Christianity than by supposing itto have originated in a preceding surfeit of sexual indulgence of allkinds and the disgust and nausea that resulted:'The Persians call it bidamag buden,The Gennans say Katz.enjammer.' *Strauss himself quotes these lines and is not ashamed. We, however,turn aside for a moment to overcome our disgust.« Katzenjammer: a hangover; remorse for the previous night's debauch. The coupletis from Goethe's West-iistlicher Divan.28