"Nobody can build the bridge for you to walk across the river of life, no one but you yourself alone."
On Nietzsche's Essay "Schopenhauer as Educator"
A traveler who had seen many countries, peoples and several of the earth's continents was asked what attribute he had found in men everywhere. He said: "They have a propensity for laziness." To others, it seems that he should have said: "They are all fearful. They hide themselves behind customs and opinions."
Thus begins Nietzsche’s excellent early essay, “Schopenhauer as Educator.” A clever made-up anecdote in which to couch for us Nietzsche’s first point. Humans are lazy and fearful.
In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that there will be no second chance for his oneness to coalesce from the strangely variegated assortment that he is: he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience—why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conformity and cloaks himself with it.
I like that. You are unique is translated into you are a oneness. But that oneness cannot be achieved if you don’t bring together all the great varied little bits of you pushing and pulling in different directions and by no means toward unity. We know deep down that all we have is this one life and this one chance to optimize our “assortment” of contingencies in our personality and experience; but we hide this from ourselves like a bad conscience. Why? Because of our fear of disapproval of our neighbor.
But what is it that forces the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself?
For a very few among whom you would mistake to place yourself it is modesty—a double mistake. Immodesty twice. No, what prevents us from embracing our uniqueness is our laziness and fear with respect to the opinions of others which we have made the opinions of ourselves—how? Via laziness. The reason you have no joy in yourself is:
…idleness, inertia, in short that propensity for laziness of which the traveler spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than they are fearful, and fear most of all the burdensome nuisance of absolute honesty and nakedness.
That is key. It is a burden, it is difficult, it is not for the lazy to live with absolute honesty and nakedness about oneself with oneself and with others and about others and with others. We ended up valuing things other than ourselves out of laziness; and we do not attempt to find ourselves for fear of our neighbors who demand conformity.
Artists and great thinkers…
… hate this lax procession in borrowed manners and appropriated opinions…
Artists and great thinkers, through their work…
… reveal everyone's secret bad conscience…
Which can be uncomfortable. Artists and great thinkers also show…
… the law that every man is a unique miracle; they dare to show us man as he is, to himself unique in each movement of his muscles, even more, that by being strictly consistent in uniqueness, he is beautiful, and worth regarding, as a work of nature, and never boring.
Artists and great thinkers are not necessarily misanthropes. When an artist or great thinker…
… despises human beings, he despises their laziness: for it is on account of their laziness that men seem like manufactured goods, unimportant, and unworthy to be associated with or instructed.
In order to break free from conformity, which is a violation of your true self, all you need to do is…
… stop being comfortable.
Follow your conscience…
… which cries out: "Be yourself! All that you are now doing, thinking, and desiring is not really yourself."
That’s a hell of a first paragraph, I think.
The still young tremble with the awesomeness of their situation, of their task to become themselves. A young person…
… suspects that its measure of happiness is determined from all eternity: a happiness it can never achieve so long as it lies in the chains of fear and convention. And how bleak and senseless life can be without this liberation!
A person who has forsaken their individuality is an affront.
There is no more unpleasant and barren a creature in this world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks askance left and right, squinting behind him and all about. In the end, one cannot grasp such a man, since he is completely exterior, without core, a tattered, painted sack of clothes, a ragtag ghost that cannot provoke even fear and certainly not sympathy.
That is the lazy and fearful individual’s outrageous terribleness. What happens when an entire society consists of such lost individuals?
If it is true to say of the lazy that they kill time, then it follows that an era which sees its welfare in public opinion, that is to say private laziness, is a time that really will be killed…
The equivalence of public opinion and private laziness is a wonderful and surprising insight even though it is a direct implication of what Nietzsche had already said—which gained our acceptance and eager approval—namely that conformity derives from laziness (and fear). A lazy individual kills time and a lazy society kills its epoch.
I mean that it will be erased from the history of the true liberation of life. How adverse later generations will be to deal with the inheritance of an era ruled, not by living men, but by pseudo-men governed by public opinion; why perhaps our age may be to some distant posterity the darkest and least known—because least human—period of history.
An era ruled by conformity will be an era with nothing to offer the future. It occurs to me that Nietzsche here is reflecting his era’s worries about mass communication.
I go along the new streets of our cities and think how, of all these horrific houses which the generation of public opinion has built, not one will be standing in a century, and how the opinions of these house-builders will no doubt by then likewise have collapsed.
But were we not a cluster of conformists? But were you a person out of step with the conformists?
How hopeful are all who do not feel themselves to be citizens of this time; since they are so, it would be useless to serve to kill their time—their desire is rather to arouse their time to life in order to live on themselves in this life.
Our existential situation demands we arouse ourselves to the adventure of being ourselves.
We possess only a short-lived today to show why and to what end we evolved. We have only ourselves to answer for our existence; consequently we want to be the real helmsman of this existence and not permit our existence to be a thoughtless accident…
One must grab one’s own existence…
One must take it somewhat boldly and dangerously: especially, in any case, since one will always lose it. Why cling to this clod of earth, this way of life, why pay attention to what your neighbor says? It is so provincial to oblige oneself to opinions which, just a couple of hundred miles away, are no longer binding. Orient and Occident are chalklines drawn before us to fool our timidity. I want to make an attempt to reach freedom, the youthful soul says to itself; and it will be prevented by the fact that, coincidentally, two nations hate and fight one another, or that two continents are separated by an ocean, or that all around it a religion is taught which, nevertheless, did not exist a few thousand years ago. All that is not you, it says to itself. There are, to be sure, countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would carry you across this river; but only at the cost of yourself; you would pawn yourself and lose. There is in the world only one way, on which nobody can go, except you: where does it lead? Do not ask, go along it.