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What a philosopher is, that's difficult to learn because it cannot be taught: one must "know" it out of experience - or one should have the pride not to know it. But the fact that these days the whole world talks of things about which they cannot have any experience holds true above all and in the worst way for philosophers and philosophical situations: - very few people are acquainted with them and are allowed to know them, and all popular opinions about them are false. And so, for example, that genuine philosophical association of a bold, exuberant spirituality, which speeds along presto, with a dialectical strictness and necessity which takes no false steps are unknown to most thinkers and scholars from their own experience, and hence, if someone wishes to talk about it in front of them, they find it implausible. They take the view that every necessity is a need, an awkward requirement to follow and to be compelled, and for them thinking itself is considered something slow, hesitant, almost labourious, and often enough "worth the sweat of the noble" - but under no circumstances something light, divine, closely related to dancing and high spirits! "Thinking" and "taking an issue seriously," "considering it gravely" - among them these belong together: that's the only way they have "experienced" thinking. - In such matters artists may have a more subtle sense of smell. They know only too well that at the very moment when they no longer create "arbitrarily" and make everything by necessity, their sense of freedom, refinement, authority, of creative setting up, disposing, and shaping is at its height - in short, that necessity and the "freedom of the will" are then one thing for them. Ultimately there is a rank ordering of spiritual conditions, with which the rank ordering of problems is consistent, and the highest problems shove back without mercy anyone who dares to approach them without having been predestined to solve them with the loftiness and power of his spirituality. What help is it if nimble heads of nondescript people or, as happens so often these days, clumsy honest mechanics and empiricists with their plebeian ambition press forward into the presence of such problems and, as it were, up to the "court of courts"! But on such a carpet crude feet may never tread: there's still a primeval law of things to look after that: the doors remain closed to these people who push against them, even if they bang or crush their heads against them! One must be born for every lofty world: to put the matter more clearly, one must be cultivated for it: one has a right to philosophy - taking the word in its grand sense - only thanks to one's descent, one's ancestors; here, as well, "blood" decides. For a philosopher to arise, many generations must have done the preparatory work. Every single one of his virtues must have been acquired, cared for, passed on, assimilated, and not just the bold, light, delicate walking and running of his thoughts, but above all the willingness to take on great responsibilities, the loftiness of the look which dominates and gazes down, the feeling of standing apart from the crowd and its duties and virtues, the affable protecting and defending what is misunderstood and slandered, whether that is God or the devil, the desire for and practice of great justice, the art of commanding, the breadth of will, the slow eye that seldom admires, seldom looks upward, seldom loves. . . .