278

Analogy of the dance.²⁸ Today we should consider it the decisive sign of great culture if someone possesses the strength and flexibility to pursue knowledge purely and rigorously and, at other times, to give poetry, religion, and metaphysics a handicap, as it were; and appreciate their power and beauty. A position of this sort, between two such different claims, is very difficult, for science urges the absolute dominion of its method, and if this is not granted, there exists the other danger of a feeble vacillation between different impulses. Meanwhile (to open up a view to the solution of this difficulty by means of an analogy, at least) one might remember that dancing is not the same thing as staggering wearily back and forth between different impulses. High culture will resemble a daring dance, thus requiring, as we said, much strength and flexibility.

279

On easing life. One principal means to ease life is to idealize all its processes; but from painting one should be well aware what idealization means. The painter requires that the viewer not look too hard or too close; he forces him back to a certain distance to view from there; he is obliged to presuppose that a viewer is at a fixed distance from his picture; indeed, he must even assume an equally fixed amount of visual acuity in his viewer; he may on no account waver about such things. So anyone who wants to idealize his life must not desire to see it too closely, and must keep his sight back at a certain distance. Goethe, for example, knew this trick well.

280

Aggravating as easing,²⁹ and vice versa. Much that aggravates man's life at certain stages eases it at a higher stage because such men have come to know life's more severe aggravations. The reverse also occurs: thus religion, for example, has a double face, depending on whether a man is looking up to it, in order to have his burden and misery taken from him, or whether he is looking down on it, as on a chain laid on him so that he may not rise too high into the air.

281

Higher culture is inevitably misunderstood. A man who has strung his instrument with only two strings (as do scholars who, in addition to the scientific drive, have only an acquired religious drive) does not understand the kind of man who can play on more strings. It is in the nature of the higher, many-stringed and manysided³⁰ culture that it is always misinterpreted by the lower, as happens, for example, when art is taken for a disguised form of religion. Indeed, people who are religious only, understand even science as a search for religious feeling, just as deaf-mutes do not know what music is, if not visible movement.

282

Lament. It is perhaps the advantages of our times that bring with them a decline and occasional underestimation of the vita contemplativa. But one must admit to himself that our age is poor in great moralists, that Pascal, Epictetus, Seneca, and Plutarch are now read but little, that work and industry (formerly attending the great goddess Health) sometimes seem to rage like a disease. Because there is no time for thinking, and no rest in thinking, we no longer weigh divergent views: we are content to hate them. With the tremendous acceleration of life, we grow accustomed to using our mind and eye for seeing and judging incompletely or incorrectly, and all men are like travelers who get to know a land and its people from the train. An independent and cautious scientific attitude is almost thought to be a kind of madness: the free spirit is brought into disrepute, particularly by scholars who miss their own thoroughness and antlike industry in his talent for observation, and would gladly confine him to a single corner of science; while he has the quite different and higher task of commanding the entire arrière-ban³¹ of scientific and learned men from his remote outpost, and showing them the ways and ends of culture.
A lament like this one just sung-will probably have its day and, at some time when the genius of meditation makes a powerful return, cease of itself.