modern man

Hard by the pride of modern man we find his irony about himself, his awareness that he must live in a histocizing and, as it were, evening mood, his fear of being unable to save for the future any of his youthufl hopes and youthful strenght. Here and there one goes furhter, into cynicism, and justifies the course of history, of the totald development of the workd, essenctially for the everyday use of modern man according to the cynical cancon: exactly this moment had to come just as it is, man had to become what men are now and nothing else, no one may oppose this "must". He who cannot endure irony flees into the comfort of cynicism of this kind; the last decade, moreover, offers to make him a present of one of its most beautiful inventions, a well rounded and full phrase for that cynicism: it calls his way of living in step with the times and quite unreflectively "the total surrender of his personality to the world process".

...admittedly you climb th e sunbeams of your knowledge upwards to heaven, but also downards to chaos. your manner of moving, that is, of cimbing as a knower, is your doom; foundation and solid earth retreat into uncertanty for you; there are no more supports for your life, only gossamer threads which every new grip of your knowledge tears apart.

for StrauB - "manhood" is sterling mediocrity" and art is "perhaps what an evening performance of a farce is to a Berlin financier" in which "geniuses are no longer a requirement of the times because that would be to throw pearls before swine, or again because the times have advanced beyond the stage which deserves geniuses to a more important one", i.e., to that stage of social development in which each woerker "leads a comfortable life wit ha workday which leaves sufficient leisure time to cultivate his intellect."

...leads to yearning (selfishness)

...leads to 'intellectual eductaion'

...leads to sterling mediocrity

...leads to disgust (with all of existence)...

Nietzsche cites Von Hartman in reference to modern man...

"...He has nothing to do but to continue to live as he has lived, to continue to to love what he has loved, to continue to hate what he has hated, and to continue to read the newspaper which he has read; for him there is only one sin- to live differently than he has lived. But how he has lived we are told, with the exaggerated distinctness of writing carved in stone, by that famous page with the sentences printed large which has transported the whole contemporary educational ferment into blind ecstacy and ecstatic rage because it believed it read in these sentences its own justification in an apocalyptic light. For of each individual the unwitting parodist demanded "the total surrender of personality to the world process for the sake of its goal, the redemtpion of the world." (Von Hartman, op. cit., p. 638)