Part 20

_Or_ our world is imperfect; evil and guilt are real, determined, and are absolutely inherent to its being; in that case it cannot be the _real_ world: consequently knowledge can only be a way of denying the world, for the latter is error which may be recognised as such. This is Schopenhauer's opinion, based upon Kantian first principles. Pascal was still more desperate: he thought that even knowledge must be corrupt and false--that _revelation_ is a necessity if only in order to recognise that the world should be denied....

412.

Owing to our habit of believing in unconditional authorities, we have grown to feel a profound need for them: indeed, this feeling is so strong that, even in an age of criticism such as Kant's was, it showed itself to be superior to the need for criticism, and, in a certain sense, was able to subject the whole work of critical acumen, and to convert it to its own use. It proved its superiority once more in the generation which followed, and which, owing to its historical instincts, naturally felt itself drawn to a relative view of all authority, when it converted even the Hegelian philosophy of evolution (history rechristened and called philosophy) to its own use, and represented history as being the self-revelation and self-surpassing of moral ideas. Since Plato, philosophy has lain under the dominion of morality. Even in Plato's predecessors, moral interpretations play a most important rôle (Anaximander declares that all things are made to perish as a punishment for their departure from pure being; Heraclitus thinks that the regularity of phenomena is a proof of the morally correct character of evolution in general).

413.

The progress of philosophy has been hindered most seriously hitherto through the influence of moral _arrières-pensées._

414.

In all ages, "fine feelings" have been regarded as arguments, "heaving breasts" have been the bellows of godliness, convictions have been the "criteria" of truth, and the need of opposition has been the note of interrogation affixed to wisdom. This falseness and fraud permeates the whole history of philosophy. But for a few respected sceptics, no instinct for intellectual Uprightness is to be found anywhere. Finally, _Kant_ guilelessly sought to make this thinker's corruption scientific by means of his concept, "_practical reason_". He expressly invented a reason which, in certain cases, would allow one _not_ to bother about reason--that is to say, in cases where the heart's desire, morality, or "duty" are the motive power.

415.

_Hegel_: his popular side, the doctrine of war and of great men. Right is on the side of the victorious: he (the victorious man) stands for the progress of mankind. His is an attempt at proving the dominion of morality by means of history.

Kant: a kingdom of moral values withdrawn from us, invisible, real.

Hegel: a demonstrable process of evolution, the actualisation of the kingdom of morality.

We shall not allow ourselves to be deceived either in Kant's or Hegel's way:--We no longer _believe,_ as they did, in morality, and therefore have no philosophies to found with the view of justifying morality. Criticism and history have no charm for us _in this_ respect: what is their charm, then?

416.

The importance of German philosophy (_Hegel,_) the thinking out of a kind of _pantheism_ which would not reckon evil, error, and suffering as arguments against godliness. _This grand initiative_ was misused by the powers that were (State, etc.) to sanction the rights of the people that happened to be paramount.

_Schopenhauer_ appears as a stubborn opponent of this idea; he is a moral man who, in order to keep in the right concerning his moral valuation, finally becomes a _denier of the world._ Ultimately he becomes a "mystic."

I myself have sought an _æsthetic_ justification of the ugliness in this world. I regarded the desire for beauty and for the persistence of certain forms as a temporary preservative and recuperative measure: what seemed to me to be fundamentally associated with pain, however, was the eternal lust of creating and the _eternal compulsion to destroy._

We call things ugly when we look at them with the desire of attributing some sense, some _new_ sense, to what has become senseless: it is the accumulated power of the creator which compels him to regard what has existed hitherto as no longer acceptable, botched, worthy of being suppressed--ugly!

417.

_My first solution of the problem: Dionysian wisdom. The joy in the destruction of the most noble thing,_ and at the sight of its gradual undoing, regarded as the joy over what is _coming and what lies in the future,_ which triumphs over _actual things, however good they may be._ Dionysian: temporary identification with the principle of life (voluptuousness of the martyr included).

_My innovations._ The Development of Pessimism: intellectual pessimism; _moral_ criticism, the dissolution of the last comfort. Knowledge, a sign of _decay,_ veils by means of an illusion all strong action; isolated culture is unfair and therefore strong.

(1) My _fight_ against decay and the increasing weakness of personality. I sought a new _centrum._

(2) The impossibility of this endeavour is _recognised._

(3) _I therefore travelled farther along the road of dissolution--and along it I found new sources of strength for individuals._ We _must be destroyers_!--I perceived that the state of _dissolution is one in which individual beings are able to arrive at a kind of perfection not possible hitherto, it is an image and isolated example of life in general._ To the paralysing feeling of general dissolution and imperfection, I opposed the _Eternal Recurrence._

418.

People naturally seek the picture of life in _that_ philosophy which makes them most cheerful--that is to say, in that philosophy which gives the highest sense of freedom to _their strongest instinct._ This is probably the case with me.

419.

German philosophy, as a whole,--Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, to mention the greatest,--is the most out-and-out _form of romanticism_ and home-sickness that has ever yet existed: it is a yearning for the best that has ever been known on earth. One is at home nowhere; that which is ultimately yearned after is a place where one can somehow feel at home; because one has been at home there before, and that place is the _Greek_ world! But it is precisely in that direction that airbridges are broken down_--save,_ of course, the rainbow of concepts! And the latter lead everywhere, to all the homes and "fatherlands" that ever existed for Greek souls! Certainly, one must be very light and thin in order to cross these bridges! But what happiness lies even in this desire for spirituality, almost for ghostliness! With it, how far one is from the "press and bustle" and the mechanical boorishness of the natural sciences, how far from the vulgar din of "modern ideas"! One wants to get back to the Greeks _via_ the Fathers of the Church, from North to South, from formulæ to forms; the passage out of antiquity--Christianity--is still a source of joy as a means of access to antiquity, as a portion of the old world itself, as a glistening mosaic of ancient concepts and ancient valuations. Arabesques, scroll-work, rococo of scholastic abstractions--always better, that is to say, finer and more slender, than the peasant and plebeian reality of Northern Europe, and still a protest on the part of higher intellectuality against the peasant war and insurrection of the mob which have become master of the intellectual taste of Northern Europe, and which had its leader in a man as great and unintellectual as Luther:--in this respect German philosophy belongs to the Counter-Reformation, it might even be looked upon as related to the Renaissance, or at least to the will to Renaissance, the will to get ahead with the discovery of antiquity, with the excavation of ancient philosophy, and above all of pre-Socratic philosophy--the most thoroughly dilapidated of all Greek temples! Possibly, in à few hundred years, people will be of the opinion that all German philosophy derived its dignity from this fact, that step by step it attempted to reclaim the soil of antiquity, and that therefore all demands for "originality" must appear both petty and foolish when compared with Germany's higher claim to having refastened the bonds which seemed for ever rent--the bonds which bound us to the Greeks, the highest type of "men" ever evolved hitherto. To-day we are once more approaching all the fundamental principles of the cosmogony which the Greek mind in Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Democritus, and Anaxagoras, was responsible for. Day by day we are growing more _Greek_; at first, as is only natural, the change remains confined to concepts and valuations, and we hover around like Greasing spirits: but it is to be hoped that some day our _body_ will also be involved! Here lies (and has always lain) my hope for the German nation.

420.

I do not wish to convert anybody to philosophy: it is both necessary and perhaps desirable that the philosopher should be a _rare_ plant. Nothing is more repugnant to me than the scholarly praise of philosophy which is to be found in Seneca and Cicero. Philosophy has not much in common with virtue. I trust I may be allowed to say that even the scientific man is a fundamentally different person from the philosopher. What I most desire is, that the genuine notion "philosopher" should not completely perish in Germany. There are so many incomplete creatures in Germany already who would fain conceal their ineptitude beneath such noble names.

421.

I must _set up the highest ideal of a philosopher._ Learning is not everything! The scholar is the sheep in the kingdom of learning; he studies because he is told to do so, and because others have done so before him.

422.

The superstition concerning _philosophers_: They are confounded with men _of science._ As if the value of things were inherent in them and required only to be held on to tightly! To what extent are their researches carried on under the influence of values which already prevail (their hatred of appearance of the body, etc.)? Schopenhauer concerning morality (scorn of Utilitarianism). Ultimately the confusion goes so far that Darwinism is regarded as philosophy, and thus at the present day power has gone over to the men of _science._ Even Frenchmen like Taine prosecute research, or mean to prosecute research, _without_ being already in possession of a standard of valuation. Prostration before "facts" of a kind of cult. As a matter of fact, they _destroy_ the existing valuations.

The _explanation_ of this misunderstanding. The man who is able to command is a rare phenomenon; he misinterprets himself. What one _wants_ to do, above all, is to disclaim all authority and to attribute it to _circumstances._ In Germany the critic's estimations belong to the history of awakening _manhood._ Lessing, etc. (Napoleon concerning Goethe). As a matter of fact, the movement is again made retrograde owing to German romanticism: and the _fame_ of German philosophy relies upon it as if it dissipated the danger of scepticism and could _demonstrate faith._ Both tendencies culminate in Hegel: at bottom, what he did was to generalise the fact of German criticism and the fact of German romanticism,--a kind of dialectical fatalism, but to the honour of intellectuality, with the actual submission of the philosopher to reality. _The critic prepares the way_: that is all!

With Schopenhauer the philosopher's mission dawns; it is felt that the object is to determine _values_; still under the dominion of eudemonism. The ideal of Pessimism.

423.

_Theory and practice._--This is a pernicious distinction, as if there were an _instinct of knowledge,_ which, without inquiring into the utility or harmfulness of a thing, blindly charged at the truth; and then that, apart from this instinct, there were the whole world of _practical_ interests.

In contradiction of this, I try to show what instincts are active behind all these _pure_ theorists,--and how the latter, as a whole, under the dominion of their instincts, fatally make for something which _to their minds_ is "truth," to their minds and _only_ to their minds. The struggle between systems, together with the struggle between epistemological scruples, is one which involves very special instincts (forms of vitality, of decline, of classes, of races, etc.).

The so-called _thirst for knowledge_ may be traced to the _lust of appropriation_ and of _conquest_: in obedience to this lust the senses, memory, and the instincts, etc., were developed. The quickest possible reduction of the phenomena, economy, the accumulation of spoil from the world of knowledge (_i.e._ that portion of the world which has been appropriated and made manageable)....

Morality is therefore such a curious science, because it is in the highest degree _practical_: the purely scientific position, scientific uprightness, is thus immediately abandoned, as soon as morality calls for replies to its questions. Morality says: I _require_ certain answers--reasons, arguments; scruples may come afterwards, or they may not come at all.

"How must one act?" If one considers that one is dealing with a supremely evolved type--a type which has been "dealt with" for countless thousands of years, and in which everything has become instinct, expediency, automatism, fatality, the _urgency_ of this moral question seems rather funny.

"How must one act?" Morality has always been a subject of misunderstanding: as a matter of fact, a certain species, which was constituted to act in a certain way, wished to justify itself by _making_ its norm paramount.

"How must one act?" this is not a cause, but an _effect._ Morality follows, the ideal comes first....

On the other hand, the appearance of moral scruples (or in other words, _the coming to consciousness of the values_ which guide action) betray a certain _morbidness_; strong ages and people do not ponder over their rights, nor over the principles of action, over instinct or over reason. _Consciousness_ is a sign that the real morality--that is to say, the certainty of instinct which leads to a definite course of action--is going to the dogs.... Every time a new _world of consciousness_ is created, the moralists are signs of a lesion, of impoverishment and of disorganisation. Those who are _deeply instinctive_ fear bandying words over duties: among them are found pyrrhonic opponents of dialectics and of knowableness in general.... A virtue is _refuted_ with a "for." ...

_Thesis_: The appearance of moralists belongs to periods when morality is declining.

_Thesis_: The moralist is a dissipator of moral instincts, however much he may appear to be their restorer.

_Thesis_: That which really prompts the action of a moralist is not a moral instinct, but the _instincts of decadence,_ translated into the forms of morality (he regards the growing uncertainty of the instincts as _corruption_).

_Thesis_: The _instincts of decadence_ which, thanks to moralists, wish to become master of the instinctive morality of stronger races and ages, are:--

(1) The instincts of the weak and of the botched;

(2) The instincts of the exceptions, of the anchorites, of the unhinged, of the abortions of quality or of the reverse;

(3) The instincts of the habitually suffering, who require a noble interpretation of their condition, and who therefore require to be as poor physiologists as possible.

424.

The humbug of the _scientific spirit._--One should not affect the spirit of science, when the time to be scientific is not yet at hand; but even the genuine investigator has to abandon vanity, and has to affect a certain kind of method which is not yet seasonable. Neither should we falsify things and thoughts, which we have arrived at differently, by means of a false arrangement of deduction and dialectics. It is thus that Kant in his "morality" falsifies his inner tendency to psychology; a more modern example of the same thing is Herbert Spencer's _Ethics._ A man should neither conceal nor misrepresent the _facts_ concerning the way in which he conceived his thoughts. The deepest and most inexhaustible books will certainly always have something of the aphoristic and impetuous character of Pascal's _Pensées_. The motive forces and valuations have lain long below the surface; that which comes uppermost is their effect.

I guard against all the humbug of a false scientific spirit:--

(1) In respect of the manner of _demonstration,_ if it does not correspond to the genesis of the thoughts;

(2) In respect of the demands for _methods_ which, at a given period in science, may be quite impossible;

(3) In respect of the demand for _objectivity_ for cold impersonal treatment, where, as in the case of all valuations, we describe ourselves and our intimate experiences in a couple of words. There are ludicrous forms of vanity, as, for instance, Sainte-Beuve's. He actually worried himself all his life because he had shown some warmth or passion either "_pro_" or "con," and he would fein have lied that fact out of his life.

425.

"Objectivity" in the philosopher: moral indifference in regard to one's self, blindness in regard to either favourable or fetal circumstances. Unscrupulousness in the use of dangerous means; perversity and complexity of character considered as an advantage and exploited.

My profound indifference to myself: I refuse to derive any advantage from my knowledge, nor do I wish to escape any disadvantages which it may entail.--I include among these disadvantages that which is called the _perversion_ of character; this prospect is beside the point: I use my character, but I try neither to understand it nor to change it--the personal calculation of virtue has not entered my head once. It strikes me that one closes the doors of knowledge as soon as one becomes interested in one's own personal case--or even in the "Salvation of one's soul"!... One should not take one's morality too seriously, nor should one forfeit a modest right to the opposite of morality....

A sort of _heritage of morality_ is perhaps presupposed here: one feels that one can be lavish with it and fling a great deal of it out of the window without materially reducing one's means. One is never tempted to admire "beautiful souls," one always knows one's self to be their superior. The monsters of virtue should be met with inner scorn; _déniaiser la vertu_--Oh, the joy of it!

One should revolve round one's self, have no desire to be "better" or "anything else" at all than one is. One should be too interested to omit throwing the tentacles or meshes of every morality out to things.

426.

Concerning the psychology of _philosophers._ They should be psychologists--this was possible only from the nineteenth century onwards--and no longer little Jack Homers, who see three or four feet in front of them, and are almost satisfied to burrow inside themselves. We psychologists of the future are not very intent on self-contemplation: we regard it almost as a sign of degeneration when an instrument endeavours "to know itself":[10] we are instruments of knowledge and we would fain possess all the precision and ingenuousness of an instrument--consequently we may not analyse or "know" ourselves. The first sign of a great psychologist's self-preservative instinct: he never goes in search of himself, he has no eye, no interest, no inquisitiveness where he himself is concerned.... The great egoism of our dominating will insists on our completely shutting our eyes to ourselves, and on our appearing "impersonal," "disinterested"!--Oh to what a ridiculous degree we are the reverse of this!

We are no Pascals, we are not particularly interested in the "Salvation of the soul," in our own happiness, and in our own virtue.--We have neither enough time nor enough curiosity to be so concerned with ourselves. Regarded more deeply, the case is again different, we thoroughly mistrust all men who thus contemplate their own navels: because introspection seems to us a degenerate form of the psychologist's genius, as a note of interrogation affixed to the psychologist's instinct: just as a painter's eye is degenerate which is actuated by the _will_ to see for the sake of seeing.

[Footnote 10: TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.--Goethe invariably inveighed against the "gnoti seauton" of the Socratic school; he was of the opinion that an animal which tries to see its inner self must be sick.]

2. A CRITICISM OF GREEK PHILOSOPHY.

427.

The apparition of Greek philosophers since the time of Socrates is a symptom of decadence; the anti-Hellenic instincts become paramount.

The "_Sophist_" is still quite Hellenic--as are also Anaxagoras, Democritus, and the great Ionians; but only as transitional forms. The _polis_ loses its faith in the unity of its culture, in its rights of dominion over every other _polis...._ Cultures, that is to say, "the gods," are exchanged, and thus the belief in the exclusive prerogative of the _deus autochthonus_ is lost. Good and Evil of whatever origin get mixed: the boundaries separating good from evil gradually _vanish...._ This is the "Sophist." ...

On the other hand, the "philosopher" is the _reactionary_: he insists upon the _old_ virtues. He sees the reason of decay in the decay of institutions: he therefore wishes to revive _old_ institutions;--he sees decay in the decline of authority: he therefore endeavours to find _new_ authorities (he travels abroad, explores foreign literature and exotic religions....);--he will reinstate the _ideal polis,_ after the concept "polis" has become superannuated (just, as the Jews kept themselves together as a "people" after they had fallen into slavery). They become interested in all tyrants: their desire is to re-establish virtue with "_force majeure_".

Gradually everything _genuinely Hellenic_ is held responsible for the state of _decay_ (and Plato is just as ungrateful to Pericles, Homer, tragedy, and rhetoric as the prophets are to David and Saul). _The downfall of Greece is conceived as an objection to the fundamental principles of Hellenic culture: the profound error of philosophers_--Conclusion: the Greek world perishes. The cause thereof: Homer, mythology, ancient morality, etc.

The anti-Hellenic development of philosophers' valuations:--the Egyptian influence ("Life after death" made into law....);--the Semitic influence (the "dignity of the sage," the "Sheik");--the Pythagorean influence, the subterranean cults, Silence, means of terrorisation consisting of appeals to a "Beyond," _mathematics_: the religious valuation consisting of a sort of intimacy with a cosmic entity;--the sacerdotal, ascetic, and transcendental influences;--the _dialectical_ influence,--I am of opinion that even Plato already betrays revolting and pedantic meticulousness in his concepts!--Decline of good intellectual taste: the hateful noisiness of every kind of direct dialectics seems no longer to be felt.

The _two_ decadent tendencies and extremes run side by side: (a) the luxuriant and more charming kind of decadence which shows a love of pomp and art, and (b) the gloomy kind, with its religious and moral pathos, its stoical self-hardening tendency, its Platonic denial of the senses, and its preparation of the soil for the coming of Christianity.

428.