The Scholar's Trap — Beyond Good and Evil

Nietzsche opens with a quarrel about rank. Science has declared its independence from philosophy, and he calls that declaration one of the quieter effects of democracy. The specialist no longer wants a master. He looks at the weak philosophers of the day, men who have shrunk philosophy to a theory of knowledge, and decides that philosophy itself is finished. Nietzsche thinks the scholar has drawn the wrong lesson from bad examples.

The danger for a real philosopher, he says, is that the sciences have grown so vast. He may tire as a student, settle into one corner, and reach his judgement of life too late. Next to the genius, the ordinary scholar looks respectable and hard-working but small. He wants recognition and a quiet routine, and he distrusts anyone higher. His worst danger, Nietzsche says, is the instinct of mediocrity, which works patiently against the exceptional person and tries to break every bent bow, or better still to slacken it. Even the objective man, whom the age praises for having no self, is only a fine instrument. He is a mirror that waits for something to reflect. He can say neither yes nor no, so he cannot be a goal or a model. Someone has to use him.

From the scholar the argument widens to Europe. Scepticism has become a sedative, a way to keep quiet and avoid deciding. Nietzsche names the condition paralysis of will, and he finds it everywhere in a Europe whose classes and peoples have mixed too quickly. The will is strongest, he says, in Russia, where it has long been stored up and waits to be discharged. He even hopes that this pressure might force Europe to grow a single will of its own. Against the soft sceptic he sets a harder kind, the daring, manly scepticism he finds in Frederick the Great. It despises and still takes hold. It does not believe, yet it does not lose itself in doubt. The philosophers of the future may share some of that hardness. They will be critics and experimenters, but criticism will be their tool, not their goal.

The final sections draw his line. Kant and Hegel were philosophical workers. They organised past judgements of value and made them easy to handle. Real philosophers command and make laws. They say how things shall be. "Their knowing is creating," he writes, and their will to truth is will to power. Such a person has always been the bad conscience of his own time, because his enemy is the ideal of his day. Greatness, now, means being able to stand apart, to be as many-sided as a person is whole, and to carry a range of responsibility nobody else would accept. Nietzsche ends by insisting that none of this can be taught. A person must be born for it, prepared by generations, and even then may never know it.