The Twilight of the Idols; or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer. The Antichrist: Complete Works, Volume Sixteen — Nietzsche — John Shaqi
The Twilight of the Idols; or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer. The Antichrist: Complete Works, Volume Sixteen
Nietzsche · en
recently by the professors of Heidelberg; but there can be no reasons
for doing so.
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In order to be true to my nature, which is affirmative and which
concerns itself with contradictions and criticism only indirectly
and with reluctance, let me state at once what the three objects
are for which we need educators. People must learn to see; they
must learn to think, and they must learn to speak and to write: the
object of all three of these pursuits is a noble culture. To learn
to see—to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow
things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit
of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This
is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not
respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the
obstructing and isolating instincts. To learn to see, as I understand
this matter, amounts almost to that which in popular language is
called “strength of will”: its essential feature is precisely _not_
to _wish_ to see, to be able to postpone one’s decision. All lack of
intellectuality, all vulgarity, arises out of the inability to resist
a stimulus:—one must respond or react, every impulse is indulged. In
many cases such necessary action is already a sign of morbidity, of
decline, and a symptom of exhaustion. Almost everything that coarse
popular language characterises as vicious, is merely that physiological
inability to refrain from reacting.—As an instance of what it means
to have learnt to see, let me state that a man thus trained will as a
learner have become generally slow, suspicious, and refractory. With
hostile calm he will first allow every kind of strange and _new_ thing
to come right up to him,—he will draw back his hand at its approach.
To stand with all the doors of one’s soul wide open, to lie slavishly
in the dust before every trivial fact, at all times of the day to be
strained ready for the leap, in order to deposit one’s self, to plunge
one’s self, into other souls and other things, in short, the famous
“objectivity” of modern times, is bad taste, it is essentially vulgar
and cheap.
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