Education in and to a measured individualism is therefore the immediate task of the German people [Volk] in the spiritual realm. This new – and yet so old – cast of mind is as far removed from the scientific specialization that is presently dominant as it is from the abstract idealism that prevailed a hundred years ago. Lessing and Schiller wrote about the education of the human race; Goethe himself simply lived as a man; but the task today is not to educate and attain the latter, but rather the German man. For all the losses, one lasting benefit of the current scientific and political development of the German spirit is that it has moved increasingly away from empty abstractions. Though that does not mean that what is right has been attained, the path to the right has been gained: “Humanity, nationality, tribal uniqueness, family character, and individuality are a pyramid whose tip reaches closer to heaven than its base,” Paul de Lagarde has said. It is hard to fully appreciate the value of this great and far-reaching, this primal and genuinely German maxim. With the pendulum of national education having initially swung from idealism to specialization, it must now stop between these two extremes at a healthy individualism. Goethe already differentiated and most emphatically formulated this tripartite scale of German education in accordance with its real value: “In the meantime, we shall hope and wait to see what we Germans will be like about a century from now, and whether we will have reached the point at which we are no longer abstract scholars and philosophers, but human beings.” The barbarian is set against man, and the barbarian’s nature is one of immoderation, towards one side or another. The transcendental thinking of the Germans of old thus shares certain flaws with the material thinking of the German of today; the former considers itself as far above nature as the later considers itself below nature; there is thus a point where Kant and Büchner meet.
He who is a real German is also a real human, but by no means the reverse. On this, precisely, rests the merit of Germanness, which has been aspired to in this century, just as humanity was in the previous one. The secret lies in binding oneself to one’s individuality, but not letting oneself be bound by it. The German must, in a sense, contradict himself in order to do justice to his higher calling; he must elevate his individuality – that which seems free and devoid of law – into law; he must construct himself. For what is individual is useful only when it is separated from purely personal arbitrariness, when it takes its place in the great edifice of a people and the world, when it serves. Let the German serve Germanness.
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Organization produces, disorganization consumes. It is therefore desirable that the rule of mediocrities comes to an end in Germany, and that these mediocrities subordinate themselves once again to what is truly great, that they become humble, that they allow themselves to be educated. The first step to that end is self-knowledge. He who possesses little personality is only the fragment of a human being, not a human being. He who does not possess or demonstrate a personality at all is a zero. And “all zeros of the world are, as far as their content and value are concerned, equal to a single zero,” Leonardo declared; and this applies, of course, also to the many zeros in Germany today. If the great One of genuine individualism were placed before them, the national spiritual capacity of the Germans would increase quite surprisingly. And it can only be placed before them by having spiritual individuals – be they of the past or the present – return to lead them at the top.
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