For seventeen years I have never tired of
calling attention to the despiritualizing
influence of our current science-industry.
The hard helotism to which the tremendous
range of the sciences condemns every scholar
today is a main reason why those with a fuller,
richer, profounder disposition no longer find
a congenial education and congenial educators.
There is nothing of which our culture suffers
more than of the superabundance of pretentious
jobbers and fragments of humanity; our universities
are, against their will, the real hothouses
for this kind of withering of the spirit.
Culture and the state—one should not deceive
oneself about this—are anatagonists….
One lives off the other, one thrives at the
expense of the other.
All great ages of culture are ages of political
decline: what is great culturally has always
been unpolitical, even anti-political.
The entire system of higher education in Germany
has lost what matters most: the end as well
as the means to the end.
That education… is itself an end—and not
“the Reich”—and that educators are needed
to that end, and not secondary-school teachers
and university scholars—that has been forgotten.
Educators are needed who have themselves been
educated, superior, noble spirits, proved
at every moment, proved by words and silence,
representing culture which has grown ripe
and sweet—not the learned louts whom secondary
schools and universities today offer our youth
as “higher wet nurses.”
What the “higher schools” in Germany really
achieve is a brutal training, designed to
prepare huge numbers of young men, with as
little loss of time as possible, to become
usable, abusable, in government service.
