01 - Prejudices of Philosophers - Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. Beyond Good and Evil by Frederic Nietzsche,
Chapter one, Prejudices of Philosophers, read by Hugh Maguire one.

(00:24):
The will to truth, which is to tempt us to
many a hazardous enterprise, the famous truthfulness of which all
philosophers have hitherto spoken with respect. What questions has this
will to truth not laid before us? What strange, perplexing,
questionable questions? It is already a long story, yet it

(00:46):
seems as if it were hardly commenced. Is it any
wonder if we at last grow distrustful, lose patience, and
turn impatiently away, that the Sphinx teaches us at last
to ask questions ourselves. Who is it really that puts
questions to us here? What really is this will to truth?

(01:07):
In us? In fact, we made a long halt at
the questions as to the origin of this will, until
at last we came to an absolute standstill before a
yet more fundamental question. We inquired about the value of
this will. Granted that we want the truth, why not

(01:28):
rather untruth and uncertainty, even ignorance. The problem of the
value of truth presented itself before us? Or was it
we who presented ourselves before the problem? Which of us
is the Oedipus? Here which the sphinx? It would seem

(01:52):
to be a rendezvous of questions and notes of interrogation.
And could it be believed that it at last seems
to us as if the problem had never been propounded before,
as if we were the first to discern it, Get
a sight of it, and risk raising it, For there
is risk in raising it, perhaps there is no greater risk. Two,

(02:14):
How could anything originate out of its opposite? For example,
truth out of error, or the will to truth out
of the will to deception, or the generous deed out
of selfishness, or the pure sun bright vision of the
wise man out of covetousness. Such genesis is impossible. Whoever

(02:36):
dreams of it is a fool, nay worse than a fool.
Things of the highest value must have a different origin,
an origin of their own. In this transitory, seductive, illusory,
paltry world, in this turmoil of delusion and cupidity, they
cannot have their source, but rather in the lap of being,

(02:57):
in the intransitory, in the concealed God, in the thing
in itself, there must be their source, and nowhere else.
This mode of reasoning discloses the typical prejudice by which
metaphysicians of all times can be recognized. This mode of
valuation is at the back of all their logical procedure.

(03:20):
Through this belief of theirs, they exert themselves for their
knowledge for something that is, in the end solemnly christened
the truth. The fundamental belief of metaphysicians is the belief
in antithesis of values. It never occurred even to the
wariest of them to doubt here, on the very threshold

(03:41):
where doubt, however, was most necessary, though they had made
a solemn vow de omnibus dubitundum. For it may be
doubted firstly whether antithesis exists at all, and secondly, whether
the popular valuations and antithesis of value upon which metaphysicians

(04:01):
have set their seal are not perhaps merely superficial estimates,
merely provisional perspectives, besides being probably made from some corner,
perhaps from below frog perspectives, as it were, to borrow
an expression current among painters. In spite of all the
value which may belong to the true, the positive, and

(04:22):
the unselfish, it might be possible that a higher and
more fundamental value for life generally should be assigned to pretense,
to the will, to delusion, to selfishness and cupidity. It
might even be possible that what constitutes the value of
those good and respected things consists precisely in their being

(04:43):
insidiously related, natted, and crotcheted to these evil and apparently
opposed things, perhaps even in being essentially identical with them. Perhaps,
But who wishes to concern himself with such dangerous perhapses
that investigation One must await the advent of a new

(05:03):
order of philosophers, such as will have other tastes and inclinations,
the reverse of those hitherto prevalent philosophers of the dangerous,
perhaps in every sense of the term, and to speak,
in all seriousness, I see such new philosophers beginning to appear. Three.

(05:23):
Having kept a sharp eye on philosophers, and having read
between their lines long enough, I now say to myself
that the greater part of conscious thinking must be counted
among the instinctive functions, and it is so even in
the case of philosophical thinking, one has here to learn
anew as one learned new about heredity and innateness. As

(05:45):
little as the act of birth comes into consideration in
the whole process and procedure of heredity, just as little
is being conscious opposed the instinctive in any decisive sense.
The greater part of the conscious thinking of a philosopher
is secretly influenced by his instincts and forced into definite channels.

(06:09):
And behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement,
there are valuations, or, to speak more plainly, physiological demands
for the maintenance of a definite mode of life, for example,
that the certain is worth more than the uncertain, that
the illusion is less valuable than the truth. Such valuations,

(06:31):
in spite of their regulative importance for us, might notwithstanding,
be only superficial valuations, special kinds of mayiseri, such as
may be necessary for the maintenance of beings such as ourselves.
Supposing in effect, that man is not just the measure
of things. Four, the falseness of an opinion is not

(06:57):
for us any objection to it. It is here, perhaps
that our new language sounds most strangely, the question is
how far an opinion is life furthering, life, persevering, species persevering,
perhaps species rearing. And we are fundamentally inclined to maintain
that the falsest opinions to which the synthetic judgments a

(07:20):
priority belong, are the most indispensable to us. That without
a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality
with the purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable,
without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers,
man could not live. That the renunciation of false opinions

(07:42):
would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life.
To recognize untruth as a condition of life, that is
certainly to impunge the traditional ideas of value in a
dangerous manner. And a philosophy which ventures to do so,
has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil. Five.

(08:04):
That which causes philosophers to be regarded half distrustfully and
half mockingly is not the oft repeated discovery, how innocent
they are, how often and easily they make mistakes and
lose their way. In short, how childish and childlike they are.
But that there is not enough honest dealing with them,
whereas they all raise a loud and virtuous outcry when

(08:25):
the problem of truthfulness is even hinted at in the
remotest manner. They all pose as though their real opinions
had been discovered and attained through the self evolving of
a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic. In contrast to all
sorts of mystics, who fairer and foolisher talk of inspiration,

(08:47):
whereas in fact a prejudice, proposition, idea, or suggestion, which
is generally their heart's desire, abstracted and refined, is defended
by them, with arguments sought out after the event. They
are all advocates who do not wish to be regarded
as such, generally astute defenders also of their prejudices, which

(09:09):
they dub truths, and very far from having the conscience
which bravely admits this to itself, very far from having
the good taste of the courage, which goes so far
as to let this be understood, perhaps to warm friend
or foe, or in ch cheerful confidence and self grecule.

(09:32):
The spectacle of the tartufery of old Kant, equally stiff
and decent with which he entices us into the dialectic
byways that lead more correctly mislead to his categorical imperative.
Makes us fasidious ones smile, we who find no small
amusement in spying out the subtle tricks of old moralists

(09:55):
and ethical preachers, or still more so the hocus pocus
in mathematical form, by means of which Spinoza has, as
it were, clad his philosophy in male and mask in
fact the love of his wisdom to translate the term
fairly and squarely, in order thereby to strike terror at

(10:15):
once into the heart of the assailant, who should dare
to cast a glance on the invincible maiden that pallis athene.
How much of personal timidity and vulnerability does this masquerade
of a sickly recluse betray six It has gradually become
clear to me what every great philosophy up till now

(10:37):
has consisted of, namely the confession of its originator and
a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography. And moreover that
the moral or immoral purpose in every philosophy has constituted
the true vital germ, out of which the entire plant
has always grown. Indeed, to understand how the abstrusist metaphysical

(11:00):
assertions of a philosopher have been arrived at, it is
always well and wise to first ask oneself what morality
do they or does he aim at? Accordingly, I do
not believe that an impulse to knowledge is the father
of philosophy, but that another impulse here is elsewhere, has

(11:22):
only made use of knowledge, and mistaken knowledge as an instrument.
But whoever considers the fundamental impulses of man with a
view to determining how far they may have here acted
as inspiring Jenny or as demons and Cobald's, will find
that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another,

(11:44):
and that each one of them would have been only
too glad to look upon itself as the ultimate end
of existence and the legitimate lord over all other impulses.
For every impulse is imperious, and as such attempts to philosophye.
To be sure, in the case of scholars, in the

(12:04):
case of really scientific men, it may be otherwise better
if you will there there may really be such a
thing as an impulse to knowledge, some kind of small,
independent clockwork which when well wound up, works away industriously
to that end, without the rest of the scholarly impulses
taking any material part therein. The actual interests of the scholar, therefore,

(12:29):
are generally in quite another direction, in the family, perhaps,
or in money making, or in politics. It is in
fact almost indifferent at what point of research his little
machine is placed, and whether the hopeful young worker becomes
a good philologist, a mushroom specialist, or a chemist. He
is not characterized by becoming this or that. In the philosopher,

(12:53):
on the contrary, there is absolutely nothing impersonal, and above
all his morality furnishes a decide and decisive testimony as
to who he is. That is to say, in what
order the deepest impulses of his nature stand to each other.
Seven How malicious philosophers can be, I know of nothing

(13:13):
more stinging than the joke Epicurius took the liberty of
making on Plato and Platonists. He called them Dionysio colakes
in its original sense, and on the face of it,
the word signifies flatterers of Dionysius. Consequently, tyrants, accessories, and lickspittles.
Besides this, however, it is as much to say they

(13:36):
are all actors. There is nothing genuine about them. For
Dionysio Collas was a popular name for an actor, and
the latter is really the malignant reproach that Epicurius cast
upon Plato. He was annoyed by the grandiose manner the
Mesoncene's style, of which Plato and his scholars were masters,

(13:57):
of which Epicurius was not a master. He the old
school teacher of Samos, who sat concealed in his little
garden at Athens and wrote three hundred books, perhaps out
of rage and ambitious envy of Plato. Who knows Greece
took a hundred years to find out who the garden
god Epicurius really was. Did she ever find out? Eight?

(14:20):
There is a point in every philosophy at which the
conviction of the philosopher appears on the scene. Or, to
put it in the words of the ancient mystery aventavit
Asinos pulker A fortissimus. Nine you desire to live according
to nature, Oh, you noble stoics, What fraud of words?

(14:45):
Imagine to yourselves indifference as a power? How could you
live in accordance with such indifference? To live, is not
that just endeavoring to be otherwise than this? Nature is
not living valuing, preferring being unjust being limited, endeavoring to
be different. And granted that your imperative living according to

(15:06):
nature means actually the same as living according to life,
how could you do differently? Why should you make a
principle out of what you yourselves are and must be
in reality? However, it is quite otherwise with you. While
you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your
law and nature, you want something quite contrary. You extraordinary

(15:30):
stage players and self deluds in your pride. You wish
to dictate your morals and ideals to nature, to nature herself,
and to incorporate them therein. You insist that it shall
be nature according to the Stoa, and would like everything
to be made after your own image, as a vast
eternal glorification and generalism of stoicism. With all your love

(15:54):
for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently,
and with hypnotic rigidity, to see nature falsely, that is
to say, stoically, that you are no longer able to
see it otherwise, and to crown all some unfathomable superciliousness
gives you the belamite hope that because you are able

(16:17):
to tyrannize over yourselves, stoicism is self tyranny. Nature will
also allow herself to be tyrannized over. Is not the
stoic a part of nature? But this is an old
and everlasting story. What happened in old times with the
stoic still happens today. As soon as ever a philosophy

(16:38):
begins to believe in itself, it always creates the world
in its own image. It cannot do otherwise. Philosophy is
this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual will to power,
the will to creation of the world, the will to
cause a prima ten, the eerness and subtle, I should

(17:01):
even say, craftiness with which the problem of the real
and the apparent world is dealt with. At present, throughout
Europe furnishes food for thought and attention, And he who
hears only a will to truth in the background and
nothing else cannot certainly boast of the sharpest ears. In
rare and isolated cases, it may really have happened that

(17:22):
such a will to truth a certain extravagant and adventurous pluck,
a metaphysician's ambition of the forlorn hope has participated therein
that which, in the end always prefers a handful of
certainty to a whole cartload of beautiful possibilities. There may
even be puritanical fanatics of conscience who prefer to put

(17:45):
their last trust in assure nothing rather than in an
uncertain something. But that is nihilism and the sign of
a despairing, morally wearied soul, notwithstanding the courageous bearing such
a virtue made as say. It seems, however, to be
otherwise with stronger and livelier thinkers, who are still eager

(18:07):
for life, in that they side against appearance and speak
superciliously of perspective, in that they rank the credibility of
their own bodies about as low as the credibility of
the ocular evidence that the earth stands still, and thus
apparently allowing with complacency their securest possession to escape. For

(18:29):
what does one at present believe in more firmly than
in one's body. Who knows if they are not really
trying to win back something which was formerly an even
securer possession, something of the old domain of the faith
of former times. Perhaps the immortal soul, perhaps the old God,

(18:50):
in short, ideas by which they could live better, that
is to say, more vigorously and more joyously than by
modern ideas. There is distrust of these modern ideas in
this mode of looking at things, a disbelief in all
that has been constructed yesterday and today. There is perhaps
some slight admixture of satiety and scorn which can no

(19:13):
longer endure the BRITA bract of ideas of the most
varied origin, such as so called positivism at present throws
on the market a disgust at the more refined taste,
at the village fair motliness and patchiness of all these
reality philosophasters in whom there is nothing either new or

(19:34):
true except this motleliness. Therein, it seems to me that
we should agree with those skeptical anti realists and knowledge
microscopists of the present day. Their instinct which repels them
from modern reality is unrefuted. What do their retrograde bypaths
concern us? The main thing about them is not that

(19:55):
they wish to go back, but that they wish to
get away therefrom little more strength, swing, courage, and artistic power,
and they would be off and not back eleven. It
seems to me that there is everywhere an attempt at
present to divert attention from the actual influence which Kant

(20:16):
exercised on German philosophy, and especially to ignore prudently the
value which he set upon himself. Kant was first and
foremost proud of his table of categories. With it in
his hand, he said, this is the most difficult thing
that could ever be undertaken on behalf of metaphysics. Let

(20:37):
us only understand this could be. He was proud of
having discovered a new faculty in Man, the faculty of
synthetic judgment, a priory granting that he deceived himself in
this matter. The development and rapid flourishing of German philosophy
depended nevertheless on his pride and on the eager rivalry

(20:58):
of the younger generation to discover, if possible, something at
all events, new faculties of which to be still prouder.
But let us reflect for a moment it is high
time to do so. How are synthetic judgments a priority possible?
Kant asks himself, and what is really his answer by

(21:21):
means of a means faculty, But unfortunately not in five words,
but so circumstantially, imposingly, and with such display of German
profundity and verbal flourishes, that one altogether loses sight of
the comical niazeri a lamande involved in such an answer.

(21:42):
People were beside themselves with delight over this new faculty,
and the jubilation reached its climax when Kant further discovered
a moral faculty in Man, for at that time Germans
were still moral, not yet dabbling in the politics of
hard fact. Then came the honeymoon of German philosophy. All

(22:02):
the young theologians of the Tubigene Institution went immediately into
the groves, all seeking for faculties. And what did they
not find in that innocent, rich and still youthful period
of the German spirit to which Romanticism the malicious fairy
piped and sang when one could not yet distinguish between

(22:24):
finding and inventing. Above all a faculty for the transcendental
shell ichristened it intellectual intuition and thereby gratified the most
earnest longings of the naturally pious incline Germans. One can
do no greater wrong to the whole of this exuberant

(22:45):
and ecstatic movement, which was really youthfulness, notwithstanding that it
disguised itself so boldly in hoary and senile conceptions than
to take it seriously or even treat it with moral indignation. However,
the world grew older and the dream vanished. A time
came when people rubbed their foreheads, and they still rubbed today.

(23:09):
People had been dreaming, and first and foremost old kant
by means of a means faculty, he had said, or
at least meant to say. But is that an answer,
an explanation, or is it not rather merely a repetition
of the question, how does opium induce sleep? By means

(23:33):
of a faculty? Namely, the virtuous dormitiva, replies the doctor
in moliere kia s in eovitrus dormitiva kujus s natura
census asuper. But such replies belong to the realm of comedy,
and it is high time to replace the Kantian question,

(23:56):
how are synthetic judgments a priori possible? By another question,
why is belief in such judgments necessary? In effect, it
is high time that we should understand that such judgments
must be believed to be true for the sake of
the preservation of creatures like ourselves. Though they still might
naturally be false judgments or more plainly spoken and roughly

(24:20):
and readily synthetic judgments, a priority should not be possible
at all. We have no right to them in our mouths.
They are nothing but false judgments. Only, of course, the
belief in their truth is necessary, as plausible belief and
ocular evidence belonging to the prospective view of life. And finally,

(24:41):
to call to mind the enormous influence which German philosophy
I hope you understand its right to inverted commas goose feet,
has exercised throughout the whole of Europe. There is no
doubt that a certain virtuous dormitiva had a share in
it thanks to German philosophy. It was a delight to

(25:02):
the noble, idlers, the virtuous, the mystics, the artiste, the
three fourths Christians, and the political obscurantists of all nations
to find an antidote to the still overwhelming sensualism which
overflowed from the last centrally into this in short census

(25:22):
asupire twelve. As regards materialistic atomism, It is one of
the best refuted theories that have been advanced, and in
Europe there is now perhaps no one in the learned
world so unscholarly as to attach serious signification to it,
except for convenient everyday use as an abbreviation of the

(25:44):
means of expression. Thanks chiefly to the pole Boskovich, he
and the pole Copernicus have hitherto been the greatest and
most successful opponents of ocular evidence. For while Copernicus has
persuaded us to believe, contrary to all the senses, that
the Earth does not stand fast, Boskovich has taught us

(26:07):
to abjure the belief in the last thing that stood
fast of the Earth, the belief in substance in matter,
in the earth residum and particle atom. It is the
greatest triumph over the senses that has hitherto been gained
on Earth. One must, however, go still further and also
declare war, relentless war to the knife against the atomistic requirements,

(26:32):
which still lead a dangerous after life in places where
no one suspects them, Like the more celebrated metaphysical requirements.
One must also, above all give the finishing stroke to
that other more portentous atomism, which Christianity has taught best
and longest, the soul atomism. Let it be permitted to

(26:55):
designate by this expression the belief which regards the soul
as something in destruction, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as
an atomon. This belief ought to be expelled from science
between ourselves. It is not at all necessary to get
rid of the soul thereby, and thus renounce one of
the oldest and most venerated hypotheses. Has happened frequently to

(27:20):
the clumsiness of naturalists, who can hardly touch on the
soul without immediately losing it. But the way is open
for new acceptations and refinements of the soul hypothesis, and
such conceptions as mortal soul and soul of subjective multiplicity,
and soul as social structure of the instincts and passions

(27:42):
want henceforth to have legitimate rights in science. In that
new psychologist is about to put an end to the
superstitions which have hitherto flourished with almost tropical luxuriance around
the idea of the soul. He is really, as it were,
thrusting himself into a new desert and a new distrust,

(28:04):
it is possible that the older psychologists had a merrier
and more comfortable time of it. Eventually, however, he finds
that precisely thereby he is also condemned to invent, and
who knows, perhaps to discover the new thirteen Psychologists should
bethink themselves before putting down the instinct of self preservation,

(28:27):
As the cardinal instinct of an organic being, a living
thing seeks above all to discharge its strength. Life itself
is will to power. Self preservation is only one of
the indirect and most frequent results thereof. In short, here
as everywhere else, let us beware of superfluous teleological principles,

(28:51):
one of which is the instinct of self preservation. We
owe it to Spinosa's inconsistency. It is thus, in effect
that method ordains, which must be essentially economy of principles fourteen.
It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds
that natural philosophy is only a world exposition and world

(29:14):
arrangement according to us if I may say so, and
not a world explanation. But in so far as it
is based on belief in the senses, it is regarded
as more and for a long time to come must
be regarded as more namely, as an explanation. It has
eyes and fingers of its own. It has ocular evidence

(29:37):
and palpableness of its own. This operates fascinatingly, persuasively, and
convincingly upon an age with fundamentally plebeian tastes. In fact,
it follows instinctively the canon of truth of eternal popular sensualism.
What is clear, what is explained, only that which can

(29:57):
be seen and felt. One must peruse a every problem
thus far. Aversely, however, the charm of the Platonic mode
of thought, which was an aristocratic mode, consisted precisely in
resistance to obvious sense evidence, perhaps among men who enjoyed
even stronger and more fastidious senses than our contemporaries, but

(30:20):
who knew how to find a higher triumph in remaining
masters of them, and this by means of pale, cold,
gray conceptual networks, which they threw over the motley whirl
of the senses, the mob of the senses. As Plato said,
in this Overcoming of the World and interpreting of the World.

(30:42):
In the manner of Plato, there was an enjoyment different
from that which the physicist of today offer us, and
likewise the Darwinists and anti teleologists among the physiological workers,
with their principle of the smallest possible effort and the
greatest possible blunder. Where there is nothing more to see

(31:04):
or grasp, there is also nothing more for men to do.
That is certainly an imperative different from the platonic one,
but it may notwithstanding be the right imperative for a hardy,
laborious race of machinists and bridge builders of the future,
who have nothing but rough work to perform. Fifteen. To

(31:27):
study physiology with a clear conscience, one must insist on
the fact that the sense organs are not phenomena in
the sense of the idealistic philosophy. As such, they certainly
could not be causes sensualism therefore, at least as regulative hypothesis,

(31:48):
if not as euristic principle. What and others say even
that the external world is the work of our organs,
but then our body, as a part of this external world,
would be the work of our organs. But then our
organs themselves would be the work of our organs. It

(32:08):
seems to me that this is a complete reductio ad absurdum.
If the conception causa sui is something fundamentally absurd. Consequently,
the external world is not the work of our organs. Sixteen.
There are still harmless self observers who believe that there

(32:31):
are immediate certainties. For instance, I think, or as a
superstition of Schopenhauer puts it, I will, as though cognition
here got hold of its object purely and simply as
the thing in itself, without any falsification taking place, either
on the part of the subject or the object. I

(32:51):
would repeat it, however a hundred times that immediate certainty,
as well as absolute knowledge and the thing in its
involve a contradictio in adjecto. We really ought to free
ourselves from the misleading significance of words. The people, on
their part, may think that cognition is knowing all about things,

(33:16):
But the philosopher must say to himself, when I analyze
the process that is expressed in the sentence, I think,
I find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative
proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible. For instance,
that it is I who think that there must necessarily

(33:39):
be something that thinks that thinking is an activity and
an operation on the part of a being who is
thought of as a cause, that there is an ego,
and finally, that it is already determined what is to
be designated by thinking? That I know what thinking is.
For if I had not already done sided within myself

(34:01):
what it is, by what standard could I determine whether
that which is just happening is not perhaps willing or feeling?
In short, the assertion I think assumes that I compare
my state at the present moment with other states of
myself which I know, in order to determine what it is.
On account of this retrospective connection with further knowledge, it

(34:23):
has at any rate no immediate certainty for me, in
place of the immediate certainty in which the people may
believe in the special case. The philosopher thus finds a
series of metaphysical questions presented to him, veritable conscience questions

(34:44):
of the intellect, to wit, whence did I get this
notion of thinking? Why do I believe in cause and effect?
What gives me the right to speak of an ego
and even of an ego as cause, and finally of
an ego as cause of thought? He who ventures to
answer these metaphysical questions at once by an appeal to

(35:06):
a sort of intuitive perception, like the person who says,
I think and I know that this at least is true, actual,
and certain, will encounter a smile and two notes of
interrogation in a philosopher. Nowadays, sir, the philosopher will perhaps
given to understand, it is improbable that you are not mistaken,

(35:29):
But why should it be the truth? Seventeen With regard
to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of
emphasizing a small, terse fact which is unwillingly recognized by
these credulous minds, namely, that a thought comes when it wishes,
and not when I wish. So that it is a

(35:52):
perversion of the facts of the case to say that
the subject I is the condition of the predicate think
one thinks, but that this one is precisely the famous
old ego is to put it, mildly, only a supposition,
an assertion, and assuredly not an immediate certainty. After all,

(36:16):
one has even gone too far with this, one thinks,
even the one contains an interpretation of the process and
does not belong to the process itself. One infers here,
according to the usual grammatical formula to think is an activity.
Every activity requires an agency that is active. Consequently, it

(36:39):
was pretty much the same lines that the older atomists sought.
Besides the operating power the material particle wherein it resides
and out of which it operates the atom. More rigorous minds, however,
learned it last to get along without this earth residium.
And perhaps someday we shall accusts to ourselves, even from

(37:01):
the logician's point of view, to get along without the
little one to which the worthy old ego has refined itself. Eighteen.
It is certainly not the least charm of a theory
that it is refutable. It is precisely thereby that it
attracts the more subtle minds. It seems that the hundred

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times refuted theory of the free will owes its persistence
to this charm alone. Someone is always appearing who feels
himself strong enough to refute it. Nineteen. Philosophers are accustomed
to speak of the will as though it were the
best known thing in the world. Indeed, Schopenhauer has given

(37:45):
us to understand that the will alone is really known
to us, absolutely and completely known, without deduction or addition.
But it again and again seems to me that in
this case Schopenhauer also only did what philosophers are in
the habit of doing. He seems to have adopted a
popular prejudice and exaggerated it. Willing seems to me to

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be above all something complicated, something that is a unity
only in name. And it is precisely in a name
that popular prejudice lurks, which has got the mastery over
the inadequate precautions of philosophers in all ages. So let
us for once be more cautious. Let us be unphilosophical.

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Let us say that in all willing there is firstly
a plurality of sensations, namely the sensation of the condition
away from which we go, the sensation of the condition
towards which we go, the sensation of this from and
towards itself. And then besides an accompanying muscular sensation, which,

(38:56):
even without our putting in motion arms and legs, commences
its action by force of habit. Directly we will anything therefore,
just as sensations, and indeed many kinds of sensations are
to be recognized as ingredients of the will. So in
the second place, thinking is also to be recognized in

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every act of the will, there is a ruling thought.
And let us not imagine it possible to sever this
thought from the willing, as if the will would then
remain over. In the third place, the will is not
only a complex of sensation and thinking, but it is

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above all an emotion, and in fact the emotion of
the command, that which is termed freedom of the will
is essentially the emotion of supremacy and respect. To him
who must obey, I am free, he must obey. This
consciousness is inherent in every will will, and equally so
the straining of the attention, the straight look, which fixes

(40:05):
itself exclusively on one thing, the unconditional judgment that this
and nothing else is necessary now, the inward certainty that
obedience will be rendered, and whatever else pertains to the
position of the commander. A man who wills commands something
within himself which renders obedience, or which he believes renders obedience.

(40:29):
But now let us notice what is the strangest thing
about the will, this affair so extremely complex, for which
the people have only one name. Inasmuch as, in the
given circumstances, we are, at the same time the commanding
and the obeying parties, and as the obeying party, we

(40:49):
know the sensations of constraint, impulsion, pressure, resistance, and motion,
which usually commence immediately after the act of wills. Much
as on the other hand, we are accustomed to disregard
this duality and to deceive ourselves about it by means
of the synthetic term I. A whole series of erroneous conclusions,

(41:12):
and consequently of false judgments about the will itself, has
become attached to the act of willing, to such a
degree that he who wills believes firmly that willing suffices
for action. Since in the majority of cases there has
only been exercise of will when the effect of the
command consequently obedience and therefore action was to be expected,

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the appearance has translated itself into sentiment, as if there
were a necessity of effect. In a word, he who
wills believes with a fair amount of certainty that will
and action are somehow won. He ascribes the success the
carrying out of the willing to the will itself, and

(42:00):
thereby enjoys an increase of the sensation of power which
accompanies all success freedom of will, that is the expression
for the complex state of delight of the person exercising volition,
who commands and at the same time identifies himself with
the executor of the order, who as such enjoys also

(42:24):
the triumph over obstacles, but thinks within himself that it
was really his own will that overcame them. In this way,
the person exercising volition adds feelings of delight of his
successful executive instruments, the useful under wills or under souls. Indeed,
our body is but a social structure composed of many souls.

(42:46):
To his feelings of delight, as Commander le fessemis, what
happens here is what happens in every well constructed and
happy commonwealth, namely, that the governing class identifies itself with
the successes of the commonwealth. In all willing. It is
absolutely a question of commanding and obeying on the basis,

(43:08):
as already said, of a social structure composed of many souls,
on which account a philosopher should claim the right to
include willing as such within the sphere of morals regarded
as the doctrine of the relations of supremacy, under which
the phenomenon of life manifests itself. Twenty that the separate

(43:32):
philosophical ideas are not anything optional or autonomously evolving, but
grow up in connection and relationship with each other that,
however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the
history of thought, they nevertheless belong just as much to
a system as the collective members of the fauna of

(43:52):
a continent. Is betrayed in the end by the circumstance.
How unfailingly, the most diverse philosopher always fill in again
a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies under an invisible spell.
They always revolve once more in the same orbit. However,

(44:13):
independent of each other they may feel themselves with their
critical or systematic wills, something within them leads them, something
impels them, in definite order, the one after the other,
to wit the innate methodology and relationship of their ideas.

(44:33):
Their thinking is in fact, far less a discovery than
a re recognizing, a remembering, a return and a homecoming
to far off ancient common household of the soul out
of which those ideas formerly grew. Philosophizing is so far
a kind of activism of the highest order. The wonderful

(44:55):
family resemblance of all Indian, Greek and German philosophizing is
easily enough explained. In fact, where there is affinity of
language owing to the common philosophy of grammar, I mean,
owing to the unconscious domination and guidance of similar grammatical functions,
it cannot but be that everything is prepared at the

(45:17):
outset for a similar development and succession of philosophical systems.
Just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities
of world interpretation, it is highly probable that philosophers within
the domain of the ural altaic languages, where the conception
of the subject is least developed, look otherwise into the world,

(45:42):
and will be found on paths of thought different from
those of the Indo Germans and Mussulmans. The spell of
certain grammatical functions is ultimately also the spell of physiological
valuations and racial conditions. So much by way of daring
Locke superficiality with regard to the origin of ideas twenty one,

(46:06):
the causa sui is the best self contradiction that has
yet been conceived. It is a sort of logical violation
and unnaturalness. But the extravagant pride of man has managed
to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with this very folly.
The desire for freedom of will in the superlative metaphysical sense,

(46:28):
such as still holds sway unfortunately in the minds of
the half educated, the desire to bear the entire and
ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and to absolve God,
the world, ancestors, chance, and society. Therefrom involves nothing less
than to be precisely this causa sui, and with more

(46:51):
than Munchausen daring to pull oneself up into existence by
the hair out of the slough of nothingness. Very one
should find out in this manner the crass stupidity of
the celebrated conception of free will, and put it out
of his head altogether. I beg of him to carry
his enlightenment a step further, and also put out of

(47:14):
his head the contrary of this monstrous conception of free will,
I mean non free will, which is tantamount to a
misuse of cause and effect. One should not wrongly materialize
cause and effect, as the natural philosophers do, and whoever
like them naturalize in thinking at present according to the

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prevailing mechanical doultishness, which makes the cause press and push
until it affects its end. One should use cause and
effect only as pure conceptions, that is to say, as
conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and mutual understanding,
not for explanation. In being in itself there is nothing

(47:57):
of causal connection, of nonses necessity, or of psychological non freedom.
There the effect does not follow the cause, their law
does not obtain. It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, reciprocity, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive,

(48:19):
and purpose. And when we interpret and intermix this symbol
world as being in itself with things, we act once
more as we have always acted. Mythologically, the non free
will is mythology. In real life, it is only a
question of strong and weak wills. It is almost always

(48:41):
a symptom of what is lacking in himself. When a thinker,
in every causal connection and psychological necessity, manifests something of compulsion, indigence, obsequiousness, oppression,
and non freedom, it is suspicious to have somes the

(49:01):
person betrays himself. And in general, if I have observed correctly,
the non freedom of the will is regarded as a
problem from two entirely opposite standpoints, but always in a
profoundly personal manner. Some will not give up their responsibility,

(49:21):
their belief in themselves the personal right to their merits
at any price. The vain races belong to this class. Others,
on the contrary, do not wish to be answerable for
anything or blamed for anything, and, owing to an inward
self contempt, seek to get out of the business no

(49:43):
matter how The latter, when they write books, are in
the habit at present of taking the side of criminals.
A sort of socialistic sympathy is their favorite disguise, and
as a matter of fact, the fatalism of the weak
willed embellishes itself surprise when it compose as la religion
de las sufranc umene, that is its good taste. Twenty two.

(50:10):
Let me be pardoned as an old philologist who cannot
desist from the mischief of putting his finger on bad
modes of interpretation. But nature's conformity to law of which
you physicists talk so proudly, as though why it exists
only owing to your interpretation and bad philology, it is

(50:31):
no matter of fact, no text, but rather just naively
humanitarian adjustment and perversion of meeting with which you make
abundant concessions to the democratic instincts of the modern soul.
Everywhere equality before the law. Nature is not different in
that respect, nor better than we a fine instance of

(50:53):
secret motive in which the vulgar antagonism to everything privileged
and autocratic wise a second and more refined atheism, in
which a vulgar antagonism to everything privileged and autocratic. Likewise
a second and more refined atheism is once more disguised.
Ni dieu nimehtre. That also is what you want, and

(51:18):
therefore cheers for natural law? Is it not so? But
as has been said, that is interpretation, not text. And
somebody might come along who, with opposite intentions and modes
of interpretation, could read out of the same nature and
with regard to the same phenomena, just the tyrannically inconsiderate

(51:41):
and relentless enforcement of the claims of power. An interpreter
who should so place the unexceptionalness and unconditionalness of all
will to power before your eyes, that almost every word
and the word tyranny itself would eventually seem unsuitable, or
like a weakening and softening metaphor, as being too human

(52:05):
and who should nevertheless end by asserting the same about
this world as you do, namely, that it has a
necessary and calculable course, not however, because laws obtain in it,
but because they are absolutely lacking, and every power affects
its ultimate consequences every moment. Granted that this also is

(52:29):
only interpretation, and you will be eager enough to make
this objection well, so much the better. Twenty three. All
psychology hitherto has run aground on moral prejudices and timidities.
It has not dared to launch out into the depths.
In so far as it is allowable to recognize in

(52:51):
that which has hitherto been written evidence of that which
has hitherto been kept silent. It seems as if nobody
had yet harbored the notion of psychology as the morphology
and development doctrine of the will to power. As I
conceive of it, the power of moral prejudices has penetrated

(53:12):
deeply into the most intellectual world, the world apparently most
indifferent and unprejudiced, and has obviously operated in an injurious, obstructive, blinding,
and distorting manner. A proper physiopsychology has to contend with
unconscious antagonism in the heart of the investigator, it has

(53:35):
the heart against it. Even a doctrine of the reciprocal
conditionalness of the good and the bad impulses causes as
refined immorality, distress, and aversion in a still strong and
manly conscience. Still more so, a doctrine of the derivation
of all good impulses from bad ones. If, however, a

(53:59):
person should regard even the emotions of hatred, envy, covetousness,
and imperiousness as life conditioning emotions, as factors which must
be present fundamentally and essentially in the general economy of life,
which must therefore be further developed. If life is to
be further developed, he will suffer from such a view

(54:21):
of things as from sea sickness. And yet this hypothesis
is far from being strangest and most painful in this
immense and almost new domain of dangerous knowledge. And there
are in fact a hundred good reasons why everyone should
keep away from it. Who can do so. On the
other hand, if one has once drifted hither with one's bark, well,

(54:47):
very good. Now, let us set our teeth firmly, let
us open our eyes and keep our hands fast on
the helm, we sail away right over morality we crush out,
We destroy, perhaps the remains of our own mortality by
daring to make our voyage thither. But what do we matter?

(55:08):
Never yet did a profounder world of insight reveal itself
to daring travelers and adventurers. And the psychologist who thus
makes a sacrifice it is not the sacrificio del intellecto.
On the contrary, will at least be entitled to demand
in return that psychology shall once more be recognized as

(55:31):
the queen of the sciences, for whose service and equipment
the other sciences exist, For psychology is once more the
path to the fundamental problems. End of Chapter one,