Friedrich Nietzsche
What Germans Lack (link)
page 6 on,
I put forward at once--lest I break with my style, which is affirmative and deals with contradiction and criticism only as a means, only involuntarily--the three tasks for which educators are required.
One must
learn to see, one must
learn to think, one must
learn to speak and write: the goal in all three is a noble culture.
Learning to see--accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience, to letting things come up to it;
postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides.
That is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality:
not to react at once to a stimulus, but to gain control of all the , inhibiting, excluding instincts.
Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what, unphilosophically speaking, is called a
strong will: the essential feature is precisely not to "will"--
to be able to suspend decision.
All unspirituality, all vulgar commonness, depend on the inability to resist a stimulus: one must react, one follows every impulse.
In many cases, such a compulsion is already pathology, decline, a symptom of exhaustion--almost everything that unphilosophical crudity designates with the word "vice" is merely
this physiological inability not to react.
A practical application of having learned to see: as a learner, one will have become altogether slow, mistrustful, recalcitrant.
One will let strange, new things of every kind come up to oneself, inspecting them with hostile calm and withdrawing one's hand.
To have all doors standing open, to lie servilely on one's stomach before every little fact, always to be prepared for the leap of putting oneself into the place of, or of plunging into, others and other things--
in short, the famous modern "objectivity"--is bad taste, is ignoble par excellence. (!)
Learning to think: in our schools one no longer has any idea of this.
Even in the universities, even among the real scholars of philosophy, logic as a theory, as a practice, as a craft, is beginning to die out.
One need only read German books: there is no longer the remotest recollection that thinking requires a technique, a teaching curriculum, a will to mastery--that thinking wants to be learned like dancing, as a kind of dancing.
Who among Germans still knows from experience the delicate shudder which light feet in spiritual matters send into every muscle?
The stiff clumsiness of the spiritual gesture, the bungling hand at grasping--that is German to such a degree that abroad one mistakes it for the German character as such.
The German has no fingers for nuances.
That the Germans have been able to stand their philosophers at all, especially that most deformed concept-cripple of all time, the great Kant, provides not a bad notion of German grace.
For
one cannot subtract dancing in every form from a noble education--to be able to dance with one's feet, with concepts, with words:
need I still add that one must be able to dance with the pen too--that one must learn to write?
But at this point I should become completely enigmatic for German readers. (!²)
)
