Thoughts Out of Season, Part IINietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Thoughts Out of Season, Part II
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
History -- Study and teaching; Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1788-1860
Sixthly, loyalty to his teachers and leaders. From his heart he
wishes to help them, and knows he can do it best with the truth. He
has a grateful disposition, for he has only gained admittance through
them to the high hall of science; he would never have entered by his
own road. Any man to-day who can throw open a new province where his
lesser disciples can work to some purpose, is famous at once; so
great is the crowd that presses after him. These grateful pupils are
certainly a misfortune to their teacher, as they all imitate him; his
faults are exaggerated in their small persons, his virtues
correspondingly diminished.
Seventhly, he will follow the usual road of all the professors, where
a feeling for truth springs from a lack of ideas, and the wheel once
started goes on. Such natures become compilers, commentators, makers
of indices and herbaria; they rummage about one special department
because they have never thought there are others. Their industry has
something of the monstrous stupidity of gravitation; and so they can
often bring their labours to an end.
Eighthly, a dread of ennui. While the true thinker desires nothing
more than leisure, the professor fears it, not knowing how it is to
be used. Books are his comfort; he listens to everybody's different
thoughts and keeps himself amused all day. He especially chooses
books with a personal relation to himself, that make him feel some
emotion of like or dislike; books that have to do with himself or his
position, his political, æsthetic, or even grammatical doctrines; if
he have mastered even one branch of knowledge, the means to flap away
the flies of ennui will not fail him.
Ninthly, the motive of the bread-winner, the "cry of the empty
stomach," in fact. Truth is used as a direct means of preferment,
when she can be attained; or as a way to the good graces of the
fountains of honour--and bread. Only, however, in the sense of the
"particular truth": there is a gulf between the profitable truths
that many serve, and the unprofitable truths to which only those few
people devote themselves whose motto is not _ingenii largitor
venter_.
Tenthly, a reverence for their fellow-professors and a fear of their
displeasure--a higher and rarer motive than the last, though not
uncommon. All the members of the guild are jealously on guard, that
the truth which means so much bread and honour and position may
really be baptized in the name of its discoverer. The one pays the
other reverence for the truth he has found, in order to exact the
toll again if he should find one himself. The Untruth, the Error is
loudly exploded, that the workers may not be too many; here and there
the real truth will be exploded to let a few bold and stiff-necked
errors be on show for a time; there is never a lack of "moral
idiosyncrasies,"--formerly called rascalities.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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