Thus Spoke Zarathustra

judges, he sees the lack of insight and the power of delusion—and concludes from this lack the internal perversity and worthlessness of what exists. From this one point, Socrates believed he had to correct existence.” — Antiquity came down to us in the Socratic-Alexandrian impoverishment. The scholar is to be considered the representative of Alexandrian culture, the man of annihilated instincts, the man who, above all, eradicates the artistic, orgiastic drives within himself, who wants to silence feelings (the heritage of the ancestors) altogether and make every matter one of the head alone. “The more sober, the closer to the truth”: the withered man now becomes the measure of all things. That the wisdom of a healthy, flourishing human being must necessarily be different from his own no longer occurs to him; the discouraged man no longer understands the bold, the exhausted and doubting no longer understand the strong and the victory-conscious. The scholar, a form of declining, impoverished life, is a kind of ascetic: to him, all things that aim at the enhancement of vital force are almost incomprehensible—e.g., art. He has broken off the tip and ultimate purpose of his own activity: he works at science only “for its own sake.” He seems to harbor only one intention seriously, although he would deny even this: he wants, by means of his occupation, to get away from himself, and above all not to arrive at himself; he wants to become entirely the object he is researching; he wants to be “objective,” a “pure (hollowed-out) subject of knowledge,” he wants to become zero. With such nihilistic, ascetic, life-extinguishing purposes and secondary purposes, the operation of science is a symptom of sickness—and the philosopher of the last two millennia (as the quintessence of this scholar) was also merely a creature of décadence decline/decay.

The drying up of the national spirit by the mind of the scholar and the scholarly philosopher is now being taken care of, to an unprecedented extent, by the school and the press. Only one estate still defends itself against this with a healthy instinct: the agricultural people—while the other “people,” which no longer deserves this title of honor, the industrial proletariat, has long since succumbed to that barren spirit. As the next consequence of the sobering of the mind, there appears a diminution of the fullness of life: first the breadth of feelings decreases, then also their directional certainty.