On the Origin of Scholars: A Selection from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Joyful Wisdom (1887)

“The sons of all types of clerks and office workers, whose main task was always to organize various different kinds of material, to compartmentalize and in general to schematize, when they become scholars, show a tendency to consider a problem practically solved when they have merely schematized it. There are philosophers who are basically just schematizers—for them, the formal aspect of their fathers’ occupation has become content. The talent for classifications, for tables of categories, reveals something: one pays the price for being the child of one’s parents. The son of a lawyer will also, as a researcher, have to be a lawyer; he primarily wants his cause to win; secondarily perhaps also for it to be right. The sons of Protestant ministers and schoolteachers one recognizes by the naive certainty with which, as scholars, they take their case already to have been proven when they have merely stated it heartily and warmly; they are thoroughly used to being believed . . . . A Jew, by contrast . . . is least of all accustomed to people believing him. Observe Jewish scholars with regard to this matter, they all lay great stress on logic, that is to say, on compelling assent by means of reasons. They know that they must conquer thereby, even when race and class prejudice is against them, even where people are unwilling to believe them. For in fact, nothing is more democratic than logic: it knows no respect of persons . . . . Europe is deeply indebted to the Jews; nobody more so than the Germans who are a lamentably unreasonable race . . . . Wherever the Jews have won influence they have taught men how to analyze more subtly, to argue more acutely, and to write more clearly and purely.”—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom (1887)