take of your jackets or be what you seem

And now back to our first proposition: modern man suffers from a weakened personality. As the Roman of the Empire ceased to be Romans with regard to the region of the world which was at his service, as he lost himself in the influx of the foreign and degenerated in the cosmopolitan carnival of gods, customs, and arts, so it must go with modern man who continuously has the feast of a world exhibition prepared for him by his historical artists; he has become a spectator merely enjoying himself and strolling around and brought to a condition which can hardly be altered for a moment even by great wars and great revolutions. The war is not yet over and already it has been transformed a hundred thousandfold into printed paper, already it is being served up as a new stimulant for the weary palates of those greedy for history. It appears almost impossible to elicit a strong full sound even with the mightiest sweep of the strings: it fades away immediately, and in the next moment it already echoes away strenghless in historically subdued vapours. In moral language: you no longer succeed in holding fast the sublime, your deeds are sudden claps, not rolling thunder. Achieve the greatest and most wonderful: it must nevertheless go to Orcus unsung. For art flees if you immediately spread the historical awning over your deeds. Whoever wants to understand, calculate, comprehend in a moment where with profoundly sustained emotion he ought to hold fast the unintelligible as the sublime, may be called rational, but only in the sense in which Schiller speaks of the reason of reasonable men: he fails to see something which is yet seen by the child, he fails to hear something which is yet heard by the child; this something is exactly the most important: because he does not understand this his understanding is more childish than the child and more simpler than simplicity—despite the many clever wrinkles on his parchment face and the masterly skill his fingers have unraveling tangles. It comes to this: he has annihilated and lost his instinct; when his reason wavers and his way leads through deserts he can no longer let go the reins and trust in the “divine animal”. So the individual becomes timid and unsure and may no longer believe in himself: he sinks into himself, into his inner being, which here only means: into the heaped up chaos of knowledge which fails to have an external effect, of teaching which does not become life. If we regard their outside we notice how the expulsion of the instincts by history has almost transformed men into downright abstractists and shadows: no one dares to show his person but masks himself as an educated man, as a scholar, a poet, a politician. If one takes hold of such masks believing them to be real and not just a puppet show—for they all pretend to be real—one suddenly has hold of nothing but rags and multi-coloured patches. Therefore one ought no longer to allow oneself to be deceived. Therefore on ought to address them imperiously: “take off your jackets or be what you seem!” No longer shall everyone who is serious by nature become a Don Quixote. , for they have better things to do than fight with such presumed realities. At least each ought to look closely, call his “Halt! Who goes there?” to each mask and tear it off, How strange! One should think that history would above al, encourage men to be honest—even if it were to be an honest fool; and it has always had this effect, but no longer! Historical education and the universal frock of the citizen rule at the same time. While there has never been such sonorous talk of the “free personality” one does not even see personalities, not to speak of free ones, rather nothing but timidly disguised universal men. The individual has withdrawn into his inner being : externally on discerns nothing of him anymore whereby one may doubt whether there can be any causes without effects. Or is a race of eunuchs required to guard the great historical world-harem? Pure objectivity is most becoming in such men, of course e. It almost seems as though the task were to guard history so that nothing could come of it but stories. But by no means history-making events!—to prevent its making personalities “free”, that is sincere toward themselves, sincere towards others, and that in word and deed. Only through this sincerity will the distimidly hidden convention and masquerade can then be replaced by art and religion as true helpers, together to plant a culture which is adequate to true needs and not like contemporary general education, only teach to lie to oneself about these needs and thus to become a walking lie.

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