Untimely Meditations 109This orientation applied equally to the bourgeois milieu and the workers'
movement, whose powerful slogan was "Knowledge is power."
Education would bring social mobility and provide resistance to deceit of
any kind: if you know something, you cannot be fooled as easily. The
impressive aspect of knowledge is that we no longer need to be
impressed- The ultimate knowledge would guard against the temptations
of "enthusiasm" (1,169; DS § 2). Effusiveness was discouraged; dry and
sober methods prevailed and assured a gain in sovereignty. There was a
drive to reduce things to one's own lowest common denominator.
It is quite astonishing how, after the idealist flights of the absolute
spirit in the early part of the nineteenth century, the desire suddenly
arose to make people smalL The thought pattern "man is nothing but..
." began its advance. The Romantics had imagined that just by uttering
the magic word, the world would break into song. The breathtaking proj-
ect of poetry and philosophy in the first half of the century was to cre-
ate and re-create new words to evoke magic. That era demanded effusion.
Nietzsche, by criticizing the prosaic attitude of his age, was moving onto
Romantic ground more emphatically here than his later oudook would
allow. Even as a schoolboy, he had defied his schoolmaster and defended
Hölderlin, his favorite Romantic poet The spirit of the second half of
the century was no longer amenable to the matadors on the enchanted
stage of the mind. They seemed like children when the realists appeared
with their penchant for facts, armed with the formula "nothing but."
The idealists and Romantics had had their fun and tossed everything
about, but now it was time to clean up. Life was about to turn serious;
the realists would see to that This realism in the second half of the cen-
tury was able to accomplish the trick of thinking litde of people while
undertaking great things with them, if we should call the modern scien-
tific civilization that has benefited all of us "great." In any case, the final
third of the century ushered in modernism, which was predicated on the
conviction that everything extravagant and fantastic was repugnant.
Nietzsche was one of the few to suspect what monstrosities would
result from the spirit of positivist sobriety.