Nietzsche reflects on humanity & philosophy

Selections from 'Schopenhauer as Educator' (1874)

A traveler who had seen many countries, peoples and several continents was asked what human traits he had found everywhere; and he answered: [Humans] are inclined to laziness. Some will feel that he might have said with greater justice: They are all timorous. They hide behind customs and opinions. At bottom every human being knows very well that he is in the world just once, as something unique, and that no accident, however strange, will throw together a second time into a unity such a curious and defuse plurality; he knows it, but hides it like a bad conscience: why? From fear of his neighbor, who insists on convention and veils himself with it. But what is it that compels the individual human being to fear his neighbor, to think and act herd-fashion and to be glad of himself? A sense of shame, perhaps, in a few rare cases. In the vast majority it is the desire for comfort, inertia, in short, that inclination to laziness of which the traveler spoke. He is right: [humans] are even lazier than they are timorous, and what they fear most is the troubles with which any unconditional honesty and nudity would burden them. Only artists hate this slovenly life in borrowed manners and loosely fitting opinions and unveil the secret, everybody's bad conscience, the principle that every human being is a unique wonder; they dare to show us the human being as he is, down to his last muscle, himself and himself alone ---- even more, that in this rigorous consistency of his uniqueness, he is beautiful, and worth contemplating, as a work of nature, and by no means dull. When a great thinker despises human beings, it is their laziness that he despises: for it is on account of this that they have the appearance of factory products and seem indifferent and unworthy of companionship or instruction. The human being who does not wish to belong to the mass must merely stop being comfortable with himself; let him follow his conscience which shouts at him: "Be yourself! What you are at present doing, opining, and desiring is not really you."
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I care for a philosopher only to the extent that he can be an example. . . . Kant clung to his university, submitted himself to governments, remained within the appearance of religious belief, and endured colleagues and students: it is small wonder that his example produced in the main university professors and professors' philosophy. Schopenhauer had no consideration for the scholars' caste, stands apart, strives for independence of state and society ---this is his example, his model ---to begin with the most external features.
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He was an out and out solitary; there was not one really congenial friend to console him, and between one and none there gapes, as always between something and nothing, an infinity. No one who has true friends can know what true solitude means, even if the whole world surrounding him should consist of adversaries. ---Alas I can see that you do not know what it means to be alone. Wherever there have been powerful societies, governments, religions, public opinions, in short, wherever there has been tyranny, it has hated the lonely philosopher; for philosophy opens up a refuge for man where no tyranny can reach: the cave of inwardness, the labyrinth of the breast; and that annoys all tyrants. That is where the lonely hide; but there too they encounter their greatest danger. . .

This was the first danger that overshadowed Schopenhauer's development: isolation. The second danger is to despair of truth. This danger confronts every thinker who begins with Kant's philosophy, assuming that he is a vigorous and whole human being in his suffering and aspiration and not merely a clacking thinking- or calculating machine. . .