Whoever wishes to serve the modern must hate the ancient

(translated from my Chinese blog)

This is my new project, “Nietzschean Philology”. In each installment, I’ll read a passage from Nietzsche’s original writings. By practicing text analysis, we can enhance our ability to understand the world.

The reading of "We Philologists" continues. Nietzsche uses Section 20 as a summary of 17-20, presenting an ultimate demand to the philologist: they must be aware of the irreconcilable hostility between our current "culture" and the ancient one. This puts the philologist's life situation on the edge of a cliff: either endure the pain of being out of place and turn it into creative motivation, or comfortably accept and support the status quo, tucking the responsibility of creation away.

My aim is to bring about a state of complete enmity between our present "culture" and antiquity. Whoever wishes to serve the former must hate the latter.

"We Philologists" 20, Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by J. M. Kennedy 

Nietzsche's hostility towards modern culture is palpable even when not explicitly stated: modern professional societies and expert groups are the greatest obstacles to individual genius; the theological foundation of the modern world, namely Weber's Protestant ethic as the spiritual root of capitalism, is a "slave morality" that inverts the natural order of values; the rise of modern populism has led to the "tyranny" and "training" of genius by the masses; modern people hardly read slowly anymore, yet they avoid the challenges of their own times by "busying themselves with the culture-epochs of the past" ... But is it necessary for Nietzsche to explicitly state the opposition between ancient and modern cultures in this section, or is this sentence too deliberate and too much like a propaganda slogan?

Go back to the context. Section 17 marks a shift from criticism to the prescriptive, and the theme of the prescriptive continues through this section. In Sections 17 to 19, Nietzsche's first three requirements for how philologists should engage in the study of antiquity are as follows:

17: Read slowly, overcoming "overstraining of the memory" to develop judgment.

18: Look back at history to explain the present. The study of antiquity must start from the present predicament.

19: The ability to enter the symbolic world. Overcome the analytical thinking of modern man.

Philologists are modern people who study the ancients, and the most annoying requirement imposed on such a group is to make their work inherently contradictory and inconsistent, which is exactly what Section 20 demands: you must choose between ancient culture and modern "culture," and these are incompatible. If philologists take the side of the ancients, they will be hostile to the modern and out of touch with their surroundings, becoming "out of place"; if they take the side of the moderns, their work becomes redundant. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that Section 20 is a new summary section, and "ancient-modern opposition" is Nietzsche's ultimate demand for philologists.

Why are they incompatible? Philologists, historians, anthropologists, in short, all researchers related to ancient cultures, don't they study well? The reason is in the former three sections: compatibility is an illusion, a result of modern culture standing on its own value scale, embellishing and altering ancient culture. If all these embellishments are removed and the true faces of the ancients are revealed (which is exactly what Nietzsche wanted to do), this illusion of compatibility between ancient and modern times will be shattered, and the weak, defensive, dogmatic, clique-like, and superficially knowledgeable appearance of philologists will be exposed.

But to think that Nietzsche was "restoring the natural order" is a gross misunderstanding. The previous section just mentioned that Nietzsche believed "man is the symbolic animal," not a purely natural being, so there is no such thing as truth and falsehood, essence and appearance, or rather, everything is appearance (early Nietzsche was a follower of Schopenhauer), and the idea that there is a truth behind the world is childish. Appearance is symbol, whether it is artificially fabricated or man must create, it is everything we can have. The obsession with truth is also a myth created by humans. In the end, man can only live in myths, the difference being that some myths are stronger than others.

Friedrich Nietzsche's aim to establish a contrast between ancient and modern cultures was not to challenge "authentic ancient culture" against "modern culture/decorative ancient culture" as stated in section 7 on the "antinomy of philology." Instead, we can only reconstruct an "amount of ancient life," not the whole picture. Nietzsche's intention was to use a more powerful set of ancient myths to challenge and replace the weak modern culture, hoping that these myths would become the value standards of the new era. This also explains Nietzsche's seemingly contradictory attitude when discussing modern predicaments (7, 9, 15, 18): advocating that ancient is superior to modern while emphasizing that modern must be the starting point. In essence, Nietzsche's point is that the perspectives or narratives we can have are only possible based on our actual life experiences, either imitated from the previous generation or created by ourselves, and one of the sources of creation is ancient culture, but this "ancient culture" is also just a result of decoration and embellishment. It is a representation constructed by modern people, through the switching of value coordinates, constructing a new "ancient culture." In other words, proposing a new imagination of the ancient is a basic mode of cultural innovation. Therefore, in a certain sense, the ancient is always higher than the modern, just like art is always higher than life.

I interpret, at the end, of Nietzsche's words "must" not as "必须"(must) but as "必然"(necessary), indicating that this is no longer a question of should but a question of is: after Nietzsche has revealed the various embellishments of modern people on ancient times, we can no longer look at the ancients straight in the eye, so the choice left for us is only to choose one and stick to it. But the choice here is not between ancient and modern times, all choices are made in the present facing the future, and the choice here is actually: I should either maintain the status quo, that is, to identify and support the modern world and everything it represents (increment, comfort, risk avoidance, docility, compassion, equality, non-offense), or break the status quo, that is, to turn to the opposite of modern values (cycle, difficulty, adventure, prickly, competitive, strength-oriented). The latter is not necessarily the "truth" of the ancients, we will never know that "truth," in the end there is no truth, because the ancients also lived in their own symbolic world, and that world can never be completely open to us, just as my world can never be completely open to another person. This natural necessity forces us to constantly seek new world narratives to accommodate our common life.

"Our present 'culture'" – the word "culture" is in quotation marks by Nietzsche, hinting that today's culture is false in some sense – but isn't that everything is just appearance, with no falsehood or truth? – Falsehood or truth only hold in one sense: history. Because culture creations become rigid and ineffective over time, each era has the duty to innovate for itself (and for posterity), otherwise the vitality of an entire nation or even all of humanity will gradually wither and die. When Ortega says "man has no essence ... all he has is history," he is, of course, Nietzsche's most loyal follower.