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
In such an age, that suffers from its "liberal education," how
unnatural, artificial and unworthy will be the conditions under which
the sincerest of all sciences, the holy naked goddess Philosophy,
must exist! She remains, in such a world of compulsion and outward
conformity, the subject of the deep monologue of the lonely wanderer
or the chance prey of any hunter, the dark secret of the chamber or
the daily talk of the old men and children at the university. No one
dare fulfil the law of philosophy in himself; no one lives
philosophically, with that single-hearted virile faith that forced
one of the olden time to bear himself as a Stoic, wherever he was and
whatever he did, if he had once sworn allegiance to the Stoa. All
modern philosophising is political or official, bound down to be a
mere phantasmagoria of learning by our modern governments, churches,
universities, moralities and cowardices: it lives by sighing "if
only...." and by knowing that "it happened once upon a time...."
Philosophy has no place in historical education, if it will be more
than the knowledge that lives indoors, and can have no expression in
action. Were the modern man once courageous and determined, and not
merely such an indoor being even in his hatreds, he would banish
philosophy. At present he is satisfied with modestly covering her
nakedness. Yes, men think, write, print, speak and teach
philosophically: so much is permitted them. It is only otherwise in
action, in "life." Only one thing is permitted there, and everything
else quite impossible: such are the orders of historical education.
"Are these human beings," one might ask, "or only machines for
thinking, writing and speaking?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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