Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationsgrowing compendium of learned opinions on art, literature andphilosophy; it is concerned to constrain the scholar to express hisopinions and then to administer them to the German people,admixed, diluted or systematized, as a medicinal draught. Whatevermay develop outside this circle is listened to with doubt and inattentively,or not listened to at all, until at length a single voice, no matterwhose it may be so long as it bears the firm stamp of the scholarlyspecies, is heard from within those sacred halls where the traditionalinfallibility in matters of taste is supposed to dwell: and from then onpublic opinion possesses one opinion more and repeats this singlevoice with a hundredfold echo. In reality, however, this supposedaesthetic infallibility is very questionable, so questionable indeedthat one may assume that a scholar in fact lacks taste, ideas andaesthetic judgment until he has demonstrated the opposite. Andonly a few will be able to do so. For, after the panting and harassmentof the daily race which the world of the sciences is today, how manyof them will be able to maintain that courageous and steady glancethat characterizes the champion of cttlture even if they everpossessed it - that glance which condemns this daily race itself as asource of barbarism? That is why these few must, moreover, live in astate of opposition: what can they achieve against the uniform beliefof countless thousands who have one and all made of public opiniontheir patron saint and who sustain and support one another in thisbelief? Of what good is it for an individual to declare himself againstStrauss when the many have decided in his favour and the massesthey lead have learned to thirst for repeated draughts of the Master'sphilistine sleeping-potion?If we have herewith assumed without funher ado that the Straussianconfessional book has scored a victory with public opinion and hasbeen welcomed as a victor, its author may perhaps draw our attentionto the fact that the diverse judgments on his book in the publicprints are by no means unanimous and certainly not uniformlyfavourable, and that he himself has had to protest in a postscriptagainst the sometimes extremely hostile tone and impudent andchallenging manner of some of these newspaper warriors. How canthere be one public opinion about my book, he will expostulate,when every journalist regards me as fair game, an outlaw to be mishandledat will! This contradiction is easily resolved as soon as wedistinguish between two aspects of the Strauss ian book, the theologicaland the literary: it is only in the latter aspect that the bookimpinges on German culture. Through its theological colouring it38