August 1, 2025 • 52 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Chapter six we Scholars two hundred four. At the risk
that moralizing may also reveal itself here as that which
it has always been, namely resolutely Montreur ses pays. According
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to Balzac, I would venture to protest against an improper
and injurious alteration of rank, which, quite unnoticed, and as
if with the best conscience, threatens nowadays to establish itself
in the relations of science and philosophy. I mean to
say that one must have the right out of one's
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own experience. Experience, as it seems to me, always implies
unfortunate experience to treat of such an important question of rank,
so as not to speak of color like the blind,
or against science like women and artists. Ah, this dreadful
science sigh their instinct and their shame. It always finds
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things out. The declaration of independence of the scientific man,
his emancipation from philosophy is one of the subtler after
effects of democratic organization and disorganization. The self glorification and
self conceitedness of the learned man is now everywhere in
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full bloom and in its best springtime. Which does not
mean to imply that in this case self praise smells sweet.
Here also the instinct of the populace cries freedom from
all masters. And after science has, with the happiest results,
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resisted theology, whose handmaid it had been too long, it
now proposes, in its wantonness and indiscretion, to lay down
laws for philosophy, and in its turn to play the master.
What am I saying to play the philosopher on its
own account? My memory, the memory of a scientific man.
(02:16):
If you please, teams with the naivetes of insolence which
I have heard about philosophy and philosophers from young naturalists
and old physicians, not to mention the most cultured and
most conceited of all learned men, the philologists and schoolmasters,
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who are both the one and the other by profession.
On one occasion, it was the specialist and the jack
horner who instinctively stood on the defensive against all synthetic
tasks and capabilities. At another time, it was the industrious
worker who had got a scent of otium and refined
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love uxuriousness in the internal economy of the philosopher, and
felt himself aggrieved and belittled thereby. On another occasion, it
was the color blindness of the utilitarian who sees nothing
in philosophy but a series of refuted systems and an
extravagant expenditure, which does nobody any good. At another time,
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the fear of disguised mysticism and of the boundary adjustment
of knowledge became conspicuous. At another time the disregard of
individual philosophers, which had involuntarily extended to disregard of philosophy
generally in fine I found most frequently behind the proud
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disdain of philosophy in young scholars, the evil after effect
of some particular philosopher to whom on the whole obedience
had been forsworn, without, however, the spell of his scornful
estimates of other philosophers having been got rid of, the
result of being a general ill will to all philosophy.
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Such seems to me, for instance, the after effect of
Schopenhauer on the most modern Germany. By his unintelligent rage
against Hegel, he has succeeded in severing the whole of
the last generation of Germans from its connection with German culture,
which culture, all things considered, has been an elevation and
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a divining refinement of the historical sense. But precisely at
this point Schopenhauer himself was poor, irreceptive and un German
to the extent of ingeniousness. On the whole. Speaking generally,
it may just have been the humanness, all too humanness
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of the modern philosophers themselves, in short, their contemptibleness, which
has injured most radically the reverence for philosophy and opened
the doors to the instinct of the populace. Let It
but be acknowledged to what an extent our modern world
diverges from the whole style of the world of Heraclitis, Plato, Empedocles,
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and whatever else all the royal and magnificent anchorites of
the spirit were called, And with what justice an honest
man of science may feel himself of a better family
and origin in view of such representatives of philosophy, who,
owing to the fashion of the present day, are just
as much aloft as they are down below. In Germany,
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for instance, the two lions of Berlin, the anarchist eugen
During and the amalgamist Edouard von Hartmann. It is especially
the site of those hotchpotch philosophers who call themselves realists
or positivists, which is calculated to implant a dangerous distrust
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in the soul of a young and ambitious scholar. Those
philosophers at the best are themselves but scholars and specialists.
That is very evident. All of them are persons who
have been vanquished and brought back again under the dominion
of science, who at one time or another claimed more
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from themselves without having a right to the more and
its responsibility, and who now creditably, rancorously and vindictively represent
in word and deed, disbelief in the master task and
supremacy of philosophy. After all, how could it be otherwise?
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Science flourishes nowadays and has the good conscience clearly visible
on its countenance, while that to which the entire modern
philosophy has gradually sunk, the remnant of philosophy of the
present day, excites distrust and displeasure, if not scorn and pity.
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Philosophy reduced to a theory of knowledge no more in
fact than a diffident science of epochs and doctrine of forbearance,
a philosophy that never even gets beyond the threshold and
rigorously denies itself the right to enter. That is philosophy
in its last throes an end, an agony, something that
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awakens pity. How could such a philosophy Rule two hundred five.
The dangers that beset the evolution of the philosopher are
in fact so manifold nowadays that one might doubt whether
this fruit could still come to maturity. The extent and
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towering structure of the sciences have increased enormously, and therewith
also the probability that the philosopher will grow tired even
as a learner, or will attach himself somewhere and specialize,
so that he will no longer attain to his elevation,
that is to say, to his superspection, his circumspection, and
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his despection. Or he gets aloft too late when the
best of his maturity and strength is past, or when
he is impaired, coarsened, and deteriorated, so that his view,
his general estimate of things, is no longer of much importance.
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It is perhaps just the refinement of his intellectual conscience
that makes him hesitate and linger on the way he
dreads the tempt to become a dilettante, a millipede, a
milla antenna. He knows too well that as a discerner,
one who has lost his self respect no longer commands,
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no longer leads, unless he should aspire to become a
great play actor, a philosophical cagliostro and spiritual rat catcher,
in short, a misleader. This is, in the last instance,
a question of taste, if it has not really been
a question of conscience. To double once more the philosopher's difficulties.
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There is also the fact that he demands from himself
a verdict a yea or nay, not concerning science, but
concerning life and the worth of life. He learns unwillingly
to believe that it is his right and even his
duty to obtain this verdict, and he has to seek
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his way to the right and the belief only through
the most extensive, perhaps disturbing, and destroying experiences, often hesitating, doubting,
and dumbfounded. In fact, the philosopher has long been mistaken
and confused by the multitude, either with the scientific man
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and ideal scholar, or with the religiously elevated, de sensualised, desecularised,
visionary and god intoxicated man. And even yet when one
hears anybody praised because he lives wisely or as a philosopher,
it hardly means anything more than prudently, and a part
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wisdom that seems to the populace to be a kind
of flight, a means and artifice for withdrawing successfully from
a bad game. But the genuine philosopher, does it not
seem so to us, my friends, lives unphilosophically and unwisely,
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above all imprudently, and feels the obligation and burden of
a hundred attempts and temptations of life. He risks himself constantly.
He plays this bad game two hundred six in relation
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to the genius, that is to say, a being who
either engenders or produces both words understood in their fullest sense,
the man of learning, the scientific average man has always
something of the old maid about him, for like her,
he is not conversant with the two principal functions of man.
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To both, of course, to the scholar and to the
old Maid, one concedes respectability as if by way of indemnification.
In these cases one emphasizes the respectability, and yet in
the compulsion of this concession one has the same admixture
of vexation. Let us examine more closely what is the
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scientific man. Firstly, a commonplace type of man, with commonplace virtues,
that is to say, a non ruling, non authoritative, and
non self sufficient type of man. He possesses industry, patient
adaptableness to rank and file, equability and moderation in capacity
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and requirement. He has the instinct for people like himself
and for that which they require, for instance, the portion
of independence and green meadow, without which there is no
rest from labor. The claim to honor and consideration, which
first and foremost presupposes recognition and recognizability, the sunshine of
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a good name, the perpetual ratification of his value and usefulness,
with which the inward distrust which lies at the bottom
of the heart of all dependent men and gregarious animals,
has again and again to be overcome. The learned man,
as is appropriate, has also maladies and faults of an
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ignoble kind. He is full of petty envy, and has
a lynx eye for the weak points in those natures
to whose elevations he cannot attain. He is confiding, yet
only as one who lets himself go but does not flow,
and precisely before the man of the great current, he
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stands all the colder and more reserved. His eye is
then like a smooth and irresponsive lake, which is no
longer moved by a rapture or sympathy. The worst and
most dangerous thing of which a scholar is capable results
from the instinct of mediocrity of his type, from the
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Jesuitism of mediocrity, which labors instinctively for the destruction of
the exceptional man, and endeavors to break, or still better,
to relax every bent bow, To relax, of course, with consideration,
and naturally with an indulgent hand, to relax with confiding sympathy.
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That is the real art of Jesuitism, which has always
understood how to introduce itself as the religion of sympathy
two hundred seven. However, gratefully one may welcome the objective spirit,
and who has not been sick to death of all
subjectivity and its confounded ipsisimosity. In the end, however, one
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must learn caution, even with regard to one's gratitude, and
put a stop to the exaggeration with which the unselfing
and depersonalizing of the spirit has recently been celebrated, as
if it were the goal in itself, as if it
were salvation and glorification, as is especially accustomed to happen
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in the pessimist school, which has also in its turn
good reasons for paying the highest honors to disinterested knowledge.
The objective man, who no longer curses and scolds like
the pessimist, the ideal man of learning, in whom the
scientific instinct blossoms forth fully after a thousand complete and
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partial failures, is assuredly one of the most costly instruments
that exist. But his place is in the hand of
one who is more powerful. He is only an instrument.
We may say he is a mirror. He is no
purpose in himself. The objective man is, in truth a mirror,
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accustomed to prostration. Before everything that wants to be known,
with such desires only as knowing or reflecting implies, he
waits until something comes, and then expands himself sensitively, so
that even the light footsteps and gliding past of spiritual
beings may not be lost on his surface and film.
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Whatever personality he still possesses seems to him accidental, arbitrary,
or still oftener disturbing. So much has he come to
regard himself as the passage and reflection of outside forms
and events. He calls up the recollection of himself with
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an effort, and not infrequently wrongly. He read confounds himself
with other persons. He makes mistakes with regard to his
own needs, and here only is he unrefined and negligent.
Perhaps he is troubled about the health, or the pettiness
and confined atmosphere of wife and friend, or the lack
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of companions and society. Indeed he sets himself to reflect
on his suffering, but in vain his thoughts already rove
away to the more general case. And tomorrow he knows
as little as he knew yesterday how to help himself.
He does not now take himself seriously and devote time
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to himself. He is serene not from lack of trouble,
but from lack of capacity for grasping and dealing with
his trouble. The habitual complaisance with respect to all objects
and experiences, the radiant and impartial hospitality with which he
receives everything that comes his way, his habit of inconsiderate
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good nature, of dangerous indifference. As to yea and nay
alas there are enough of cases in which he has
to atone for these virtues of his and as man
generally he becomes far too easily the Coppet mortuum of
such virtues. Should one wish love or hatred from him?
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I mean love and hatred as God, woman and animal
understand them. He will do what he can and furnish
what he can. But one must not be surprised if
it should not be much, if he should show himself
just at this point, to be false, fragile, questionable, and deteriorated.
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His love is constrained, his hatred is artificial and rather
unto de force a slight ostentation and exaggeration. He is
only genuine so far as he can be objective. Only
in his serene totality is he still nature and natural,
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His mirroring and eternally self polishing soul no longer knows
how to affirm, no longer how to deny. He does
not command, neither does he destroy Genet Mepri's press green.
He says with Leibniz, let us not overlook nor undervalue
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the pressue. Neither is he a model man. He does
not go in advance of anyone nor after either. He
places himself generally too far off to have any reason
for espousing the cause of either good or evil. If
he has been so long confounded with the philosopher, with
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the caesarean trainer and dictator of civil vilization. He has
had far too much honor, and what is more essential
in him has been overlooked. He is an instrument, something
of a slave, though certainly the sublimest sort of slave,
but nothing in himself Presque rheienne. The objective man is
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an instrument, a costly, easily injured, easily tarnished measuring instrument
and mirroring apparatus, which is to be taken care of
and respected. But he is no goal, not outgoing nor upgoing,
no complimentary man in whom the rest of existence justifies itself,
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no termination, and still less a commencement, an engendering or
primary cause. Nothing hardy, powerful, self centered that wants to
be master, but rather only a soft, inflated, delicate, movable
potter's form that must wait for some kind of content
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and frame to shape itself. There too, for the most part,
a man without frame and content, a selfless man, consequently,
also nothing for women. In Parenthesy two hundred eight, When
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a philosopher nowadays makes it known that he is not
a skeptic, I hope that has been gathered from the
foregoing description of the objective spirit. People all hear it impatiently.
They regard him on that account with some apprehension. They
would like to ask so many many questions. Indeed, among
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timid hearers, of whom there are now so many, he
is henceforth said to be dangerous with his repudiation of skepticism.
It seems to them as if they heard some evil,
threatening sound in the distance, as if a new kind
of explosive were being tried somewhere, a dynamite of the spirit,
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perhaps a newly discovered Russian nihilinae, a pessimism bonnay voluntatis,
that not only denies means denial, but dreadful thought practices
denial against this kind of good will, a will to
the veritable actual negation of life. There is, as is
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generally acknowledged nowadays, no better soporific and sedative than skepticism.
The mild, pleasing, lulling poppy of skepticism, and Hamlet himself
is now prescribed by the doctors of the day as
an antidote to the spirit and its underground noises. Are
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not our ears already full of bad sounds, say the
skeptics as lovers of repose, and almost as a kind
of safety police. This subterranean nay is terrible. Be still,
ye pessimistic moles. The skeptic, in effect, that delicate creature
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is far too easily frightened. His conscience is schooled so
as to start at every nay, and even at that
sharp decided yea, and feel something like a bite. Thereby
yea and nay they seem to him opposed to morality.
He loves, on the contrary, to make a festival to
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his virtue by a noble aloofness. While perhaps he says
with Montaigne what do I know? Or with Socrates, I
know that I know nothing? Or here I do not
trust myself. No door is open to me, Or even
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if the door were open, why should I enter mediately?
Or what is the use of any hasty hypotheses? It
might quite well be in good taste to make no
hypotheses at all? Are you absolutely obliged to straighten at once?
What is crooked? To stuff every hole with some kind
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of oakum? Is there not time enough for that? Has
not the time leisure? Oh? Ye, demons, can ye not
at all? Weight? The uncertain also has its charms. The
sphinx too is a Circe, and Circe too was a philosopher.
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Thus does a skeptic console himself, and in truth he
needs some consolation, for skepticism is the most spiritual expression
of a certain, many sided physiological temperament, which in ordinary
language is called nervous debility and sickliness. It arises whenever
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classes which have been long separated decisively and suddenly blend
with one another. In the new generation, which has inherited,
as it were, different standards and valuations in its blood,
everything is disquiet, derangement, doubt, and tentativeness. The best powers
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operate restrictively. The very virtues prevent each other growing and
becoming strong. Equilibrium, ballast and perpendicular stability are lacking in
body and soul. That, however, which is most diseased and
degenerated in such nondescripts is the will. They are no
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longer familiar with independence of decision or the courageous feeling
of pleasure in willing. They are doubtful of the freedom
of the will even in their dreams. Our present day
Europe the scene of as senseless precipitate attempt at a
racial blending of classes and consequently of races, is therefore
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skeptical in all its heights and depths, sometimes exhibiting the
mobile skepticism which springs impatiently and wantonly from branch to branch,
sometimes with gloomy aspect, like a cloud overcharged with interrogative signs,
and often sick unto death of its will, paralysis of will?
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Where do we not find this cripple sitting nowadays? And
yet how bedecked, oftentimes how seductively ornamented. There are the
finest gala dresses and disguises for this disease, And that,
for instance, most of what places itself nowadays in the
showcases as objectiveness, the scientific spirit, lart, poor lart and
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pure voluntary mines is only decked out skepticism and paralysis
of will. I am ready to answer for this diagnosis
of the European disease. The disease of the will is
diffused unequally over Europe. It is worst and most varied
where civilisation has longest prevailed. It decreases, according as the
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barbarian still or again asserts his claims, under the loose
drapery of Western culture. It is therefore in the France
of today, as can be readily disclosed and comprehended, that
the will is most infirm. And France, which has always
had a masterly aptitude for converting even the portentous crisis
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of its spirit into something charming and seductive, now manifests
emphatically its intellectual ascendency over Europe by being the school
and exhibition of all the charms of skepticism. The power
to will and to persist moreover, in a resolution, is
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already somewhat stronger in Germany, and again in the north
of Germany. It is stronger than in central Germany. It
is considerably stronger in England, Spain and Corsica, associated with
phlegm in the former and with hard skulls in the latter,
Not to mention Italy, which is too young yet to
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know what it wants and must first show whether it
can exercise will. But it is strongest and most surprising
of all in that immense Middle Empire, where Europe, as
it were, flows back to Asia, namely in Russia. There
the power to will has been long stored up and accumulated. There,
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the will, uncertain whether to be negative or affirmative, waits
threateningly to be discharged. To borrow their pet phrase from
our physicists. Perhaps not only Indian wars and complications in
Asia would be necessary to free Europe from its greatest danger,
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but also internal subversion, the shattering of the empire into
small states, and above all the introduction of parliamentary imbecility,
together with the obligation of every one to read his
newspaper at breakfast. I do not say this as one
who desires it in my heart. I should rather prefer
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the contrary. I mean such an increase in the threatening
attitude of Russia that Europe would have to make up
its mind to become equally threatening, namely to acquire one
will by means of a new caste to rule over
the continent, a persistent, dreadful will of its own, that
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can set its aims thousands of years ahead, so that
the long spun out comedy of its petty statism and
its dynastic as well as its democratic, many willedness might
finally be brought to a close. The time for petty
politics is past. The next century will bring the struggle
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for the dominion of the world, the compulsion to great
politics two hundred nine. As to how far the new
warlike age on which we Europeans have evidently entered may
perhaps favour the growth of another and stronger kind of skepticism.
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I should like to express myself preliminarily merely by a
parable which the lovers of German history will already understand,
that unscrupulous enthusiast for big, handsome grenadiers, who as King
of Russia brought into being a military and skeptical genius,
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and therewith in reality the new and now triumphantly emerged
type of German. The problematic, crazy father of Frederick the
Great had on one point the very knack and lucky
grasp of the genius. He knew what was then lacking
in Germany, the want of which was a hundred times
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more alarming and serious than any lack of culture and
social form. His ill will to the young Frederick resulted
from the anxiety of a profound instinct men were lacking,
and he suspected, to his bitterest regret that his own
son was not man enough. There, however, he deceived himself.
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But who would not have deceived himself in his place?
He saw his son lapsed to atheism, to the esprie,
to the pleasant frivolity of clever Frenchman. He saw in
the background the great blood sucker, the spider skepticism. He
suspected the incurable wretchedness of a heart no longer hard
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enough either for evil or good, and of a broken
will that no longer commands, is no longer able to command. Meanwhile, however,
there grew up in his son that new kind of
harder and more dangerous skepticism. Who knows to what extent
It was encouraged just by his father's hatred and the
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icy melancholy of a will condemned to solitude. The skepticism
of daring manliness, which is closely related to the genius
for war and conquest, and made its first entrance into
Germany in the person of the Great Frederick. This skepticism
despises and nevertheless grasps, It undermines, and takes possession. It
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does not believe, but it does not thereby lose itself.
It gives the spirit a dangerous liberty, but it keeps
strict guard over the heart. It is the German form
of skepticism, which, as a continued fredericianism, risen to the
highest spirituality, has kept Europe for a considerable time under
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the dominion of the German spirit and its critical and
historical distrust. Owing to the insuperably strong and tough masculine
character of the great German philologists and historical critics, who
rightly estimated were also all of them artists of destruction
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and dissolution. A new conception of the German spirit gradually
established itself, in spite of all Romanticism in music and philosophy,
in which the leaning towards masculine skepticism was decidedly prominent,
whether for instance as fearlessness of gaze, as courage and
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sternness of the dissecting hand, or as resolute will to
dangerous voyages of discovery two spiritualized North Pole expeditions under
barren and dangerous skies. There may be good grounds for
it when warm blooded and superficial humanitarians crossed themselves before
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this spirit se esprit fetaliste ieronique mephistophiliq, as Michelais calls
it not without a shudder. But if one would realize
how characteristic is the sphere of the man in the
German spirit which awakened Europe out of its dogmatic slumber,
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let us call to mind the former conception which had
to be overcome by this new one, and that it
is not so very long ago that a masculinized woman
could dare with unbridled presumption to recommend the Germans to
the interest of Europe as gentle, good hearted, weak willed,
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and poetical fools. Finally, let us only understand profoundly enough
Napoleon's astonishment when he saw Gertha. It reveals what had
been regarded for centuries as the German spirit. Voila unom.
That was as much to say, but this is a man,
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and I only expected to see a German two hundred ten.
Supposing then that in the picture of the philosophers of
the future, some trait suggests the question whether they must
not perhaps be skeptics in the last mentioned sense. Something
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in them would only be designated thereby, and not they themselves.
With equal right, they might call themselves critics, and assuredly
they will be men of experiments. By the name with
which I ventured to baptize them, I have already expressly
emphasized their attempting and their love of attempting. Is this
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because as critics in body and soul, they will love
to make use of experiments in a new and perhaps
wider and more dangerous sense. In their passion for knowledge,
will they have to go further in daring and painful
attempts than the sensitive and pampered taste of a democratic
century can approve of. There is no doubt these coming
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ones will be least able to dispense with the serious
and not unscrupulous qualities which distinguish the critic from the skeptic.
I mean the certainty as to standards of worth, the
councious employment of a unity of method, though wary courage,
the standing alone, and the capacity for self responsibility. Indeed,
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they will avow among themselves a delight in denial and dissection,
and a certain considerate cruelty which knows how to handle
the knife surely and deftly, even when the heart bleeds.
They will be sterner, and perhaps not always towards themselves.
Only then humane people may desire. They will not deal
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with the truth in order that it may please them
or elevate and inspire them. They will rather have little
faith in truth, bringing with it such revels for the feelings.
They will smile those rigorous spirits when anyone says in
their presence. That thought elevates me, why should it not
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be true? Or that work enchance me? Why should it
not be beautiful? Or that artist enlarges me? Why should
he not be great? Perhaps they will not only have
a smile, but a genuine disgust for all that is
thus rapturous, idealistic, feminine, and hermaphroditic. And if any one
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could look into their inmost hearts, he would not easily
find therein the intention to reconcile Christian sentiments with antique taste,
or even with modern parliamentarism, the kind of reconciliation necessarily
found even among philosophers in our very uncertain and consequently
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very conciliatory century. Critical discipline and every habit that conduces
to purity and rigor in intellectual matters will not only
be demanded from themselves by these philosophers of the future.
They may even make a display thereof as their special adornment. Nevertheless,
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they will not want to be called critics. On that account.
It will seem to them no small indignity to philosophy
to have it decreed, as is so welcome nowadays, that
philosophy itself is criticism and critical science and nothing else whatever.
Though this estimate of philosophy may enjoy the approval of
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all the positivists of France and Germany, and possibly it
even flattered the heart and taste of Kant, let us
call to mind the titles of his principal works. Our
new philosophers will say, notwithstanding, that critics are instruments of
the philosopher, and just on that account, as instruments, they
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are far from being philosophers themselves. Even the great Chinaman
of Konigsberg was only a great critic two hundred eleven.
I insist upon it that people finally cease confounding philosophical
workers and in general, scientific men with philosophers, that precisely
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here one should strictly give each his own, and not
give those far too much these far too little. It
may be necessary for the education of the real philosopher
that he himself should have once stood upon all those
steps upon which his servants, the scientific workers of philosophy,
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remain standing and must remain standing. He himself must perhaps
have been critic and dogmatist and historian, and besides poet
and collector and traveler and riddle reader and moralist and
seer and free spirit, and almost everything in order to
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traverse the whole range of human values and estor, and
that he may be able, with a variety of eyes
and consciences to look from a height to any distance,
from a depth up to any height, from a knook
into any expanse. But all these are only preliminary conditions
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for his task. This task itself demands something else. It
requires him to create values. The philosophical workers, after the
excellent pattern of Kant and Hegel, have to fix and
formalize some great existing body of valuations, that is to say,
(41:40):
former determinations of value, creations of value which have become
prevalent and are for a time called truths, whether in
the domain of the logical, the political, moral, or the artistic.
It is for these investigators to make whatever has happened
(42:00):
and been esteemed hitherto conspicuous, conceivable, intelligible, and manageable, to
shorten everything long, even time itself, and to subjugate the
entire past, an immense and wonderful task, in the carrying
out of which all refined pride, all tenacious will can
(42:23):
surely find satisfaction. The real philosophers, however, are commanders and
law givers, They say, thus shall it be? They determine
first the whither and the why of mankind, and thereby
set aside the previous labor of all philosophical workers and
(42:46):
all subjugators of the past. They grasp at the future
with a creative hand, and whatever is and was becomes
for them thereby a means, an instrument, and a hammer.
Their knowing is creating. There creating is a law. Giving
(43:06):
Their will to truth is will to power. Are there
at present such philosophers? Have there ever been such philosophers?
Must there not be such philosophers some day? Two hundred twelve?
It is always more obvious to me that the philosopher,
(43:29):
as a man indispensable for the morrow and the day
after the morrow, has ever found himself, and has been
obliged to find himself in contradiction to the day in
which he lives. His enemy has always been the ideal
of his day. Hitherto all those extraordinary furtherers of humanity,
(43:51):
whom one calls philosophers, who rarely regarded themselves as lovers
of wisdom, but rather as disagreeable fools and dangerous interrogators,
have found their mission. Their hard involuntary imperative mission. In
the end, however, the greatness of their mission in being
(44:12):
the bad conscience of their age. In putting the vivisector's
knife to the breast of the very virtues of their age,
they have betrayed their own secret. It has been for
the sake of a new greatness of man, a new
untrodden path to his aggrandizement. They have always disclosed how
(44:32):
much hypocrisy, indolence, self indulgence, and self neglect, how much
falsehood was concealed under the most venerated types of contemporary morality,
how much virtue was outlived. They have always said, we
must remove, hence to where you are least at home.
(44:53):
In the face of a world of modern ideas which
would like to confine every one in a corner in
a specialty, a philosopher, if there could be philosophers nowadays,
would be compelled to place the greatness of man, the
conception of greatness, precisely in his comprehensiveness and multifariousness, in
(45:15):
his all roundness. He would even determine worth and rank
according to the amount and variety of that which a
man could bear, and take upon himself, according to the
extent to which a man could stretch his responsibility. Nowadays,
the taste and virtue of the age weaken and attenuate
(45:38):
the will. Nothing is so adapted to the spirit of
the age as weakness of will. Consequently, in the ideal
of the philosopher, strength of will, sternness, and capacity for
prolonged resolution must specially be included in the conception of
greatness with as good a right as the opposite doctrine,
(46:00):
with its ideal of a silly, renouncing, humble, selfless humanity,
was suited to an opposite age, such as the sixteenth century,
which suffered from its accumulated energy of will and from
the wildest torrents and floods of selfishness. In the time
(46:20):
of Socrates, among men only of worn out instincts, old
conservative Athenians, who let themselves go for the sake of happiness,
as they said, for the sake of pleasure, as their
conduct indicated, and who had continually on their lips the
old pompous words to which they had long forfeited. The
(46:42):
right by the life they led. Irony was perhaps necessary
for greatness of soul. The wicked Socratic assurance of the
old physician and plebeian who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh,
as into the flesh and heart of the noble, with
a look that said, plainly enough, do not dissemble before me.
(47:03):
Here we are equal at present. On the contrary, when
throughout Europe the herding animal alone attains to honors and
dispenses honors, when equality of right can too readily be
transformed into equality and wrong, I mean to say, into
general war against everything rare, strange and privileged, against the
(47:27):
higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility,
the creative plenipotence, and lordliness. At present, it belongs to
the conception of greatness to be noble, to wish to
be a part, to be capable of being different, to
stand alone, to have to live by personal initiative. And
(47:49):
the philosopher will betray something of his own ideal when
he asserts he shall be the greatest, who can be
the most solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent, the
man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues
and of superabundance of will. Precisely this shall be called greatness,
(48:12):
as diversified as can be, entire as ample as can
be full, and to ask once more the question, is
greatness possible? Nowadays? Two hundred thirteen. It is difficult to
learn what a philosopher is, because it cannot be taught.
(48:36):
One must know it by experience, or one should have
the pride not to know it. The fact that at
present people all talk of things of which they cannot
have any experience is true. More especially, and unfortunately, as
concerns the philosopher and philosophical matters. The very few know
(48:59):
them are permitted to know them, and all popular ideas
about them are false. Thus, for instance, the truly philosophical
combination of a bold, exuberant spirituality which runs at presto pace,
and a dialectic rigor and necessity which makes no false step,
(49:19):
is unknown to most thinkers and scholars from their own experience,
and therefore should anyone speak of it in their presence,
it is incredible to them. They conceive of every necessity
as troublesome, as a painful, compulsory obedience and state of constraint.
(49:40):
Thinking itself is regarded by them as something slow and hesitating,
almost as a trouble, and often enough as worthy of
the sweat of the noble. But not at all as
something easy and divine, closely related to dancing and exuberance.
To think and to take a matter seriously arduously, that
(50:05):
is one and the same thing to them. Such only
has been their experience. Artists have here perhaps a finer intuition,
they who know only too well that precisely, when they
no longer do anything arbitrarily and everything of necessity, their
feeling of freedom, of subtlety, of power of creatively fixing, disposing,
(50:30):
and shaping reaches its climax. In short, that necessity and
freedom of will are then the same thing with them.
There is in fine a graduation of rank in psychical states,
to which the graduation of rank in the problems corresponds.
(50:50):
And the highest problems repel ruthlessly everyone who ventures to
near them without being predestined for their solution by the
loftiness and power of his spirituality. Of what use is
it for nimble every day intellects, or clumsy honest mechanics
and empiricists to press, in their Plebeian ambition close to
(51:14):
such problems, and, as it were, into this holy of holies,
as so often happens nowadays. But coarse feet must never
tread upon such carpets. This is provided for in the
primary law of things. The doors remain closed to those intruders,
though they may dash and break their heads. Thereon. People
(51:38):
have always to be born to a high station, or
more definitely, they have to be bred for it. A
person has only a right to philosophy, taking the word
in its higher significance, in virtue of his descent. The
ancestors the blood decide here. Also, many generations must have
(52:01):
prepared the way for the coming of the philosopher. Each
of his virtues must have been separately acquired, nurtured, transmitted,
and embodied. Not only the bold, easy, delicate course and
current of his thoughts, but above all, the readiness for
great responsibilities, the majesty of ruling, glance and contemning look,
(52:26):
the feeling of separation from the multitude with their duties
and virtues. The kindly patronage and defense of whatever is
misunderstood and calumated, be it God or devil. The delight
and practice of supreme justice, the art of commanding, the
amplitude of will, The lingering eye, which rarely admires, rarely
(52:49):
looks up, rarely loves. End of Chapter six
Chapter six we Scholars two hundred four. At the risk
that moralizing may also reveal itself here as that which
it has always been, namely resolutely Montreur ses pays. According
(00:22):
to Balzac, I would venture to protest against an improper
and injurious alteration of rank, which, quite unnoticed, and as
if with the best conscience, threatens nowadays to establish itself
in the relations of science and philosophy. I mean to
say that one must have the right out of one's
(00:44):
own experience. Experience, as it seems to me, always implies
unfortunate experience to treat of such an important question of rank,
so as not to speak of color like the blind,
or against science like women and artists. Ah, this dreadful
science sigh their instinct and their shame. It always finds
(01:09):
things out. The declaration of independence of the scientific man,
his emancipation from philosophy is one of the subtler after
effects of democratic organization and disorganization. The self glorification and
self conceitedness of the learned man is now everywhere in
(01:31):
full bloom and in its best springtime. Which does not
mean to imply that in this case self praise smells sweet.
Here also the instinct of the populace cries freedom from
all masters. And after science has, with the happiest results,
(01:53):
resisted theology, whose handmaid it had been too long, it
now proposes, in its wantonness and indiscretion, to lay down
laws for philosophy, and in its turn to play the master.
What am I saying to play the philosopher on its
own account? My memory, the memory of a scientific man.
(02:16):
If you please, teams with the naivetes of insolence which
I have heard about philosophy and philosophers from young naturalists
and old physicians, not to mention the most cultured and
most conceited of all learned men, the philologists and schoolmasters,
(02:37):
who are both the one and the other by profession.
On one occasion, it was the specialist and the jack
horner who instinctively stood on the defensive against all synthetic
tasks and capabilities. At another time, it was the industrious
worker who had got a scent of otium and refined
(02:59):
love uxuriousness in the internal economy of the philosopher, and
felt himself aggrieved and belittled thereby. On another occasion, it
was the color blindness of the utilitarian who sees nothing
in philosophy but a series of refuted systems and an
extravagant expenditure, which does nobody any good. At another time,
(03:25):
the fear of disguised mysticism and of the boundary adjustment
of knowledge became conspicuous. At another time the disregard of
individual philosophers, which had involuntarily extended to disregard of philosophy
generally in fine I found most frequently behind the proud
(03:46):
disdain of philosophy in young scholars, the evil after effect
of some particular philosopher to whom on the whole obedience
had been forsworn, without, however, the spell of his scornful
estimates of other philosophers having been got rid of, the
result of being a general ill will to all philosophy.
(04:10):
Such seems to me, for instance, the after effect of
Schopenhauer on the most modern Germany. By his unintelligent rage
against Hegel, he has succeeded in severing the whole of
the last generation of Germans from its connection with German culture,
which culture, all things considered, has been an elevation and
(04:33):
a divining refinement of the historical sense. But precisely at
this point Schopenhauer himself was poor, irreceptive and un German
to the extent of ingeniousness. On the whole. Speaking generally,
it may just have been the humanness, all too humanness
(04:55):
of the modern philosophers themselves, in short, their contemptibleness, which
has injured most radically the reverence for philosophy and opened
the doors to the instinct of the populace. Let It
but be acknowledged to what an extent our modern world
diverges from the whole style of the world of Heraclitis, Plato, Empedocles,
(05:19):
and whatever else all the royal and magnificent anchorites of
the spirit were called, And with what justice an honest
man of science may feel himself of a better family
and origin in view of such representatives of philosophy, who,
owing to the fashion of the present day, are just
as much aloft as they are down below. In Germany,
(05:43):
for instance, the two lions of Berlin, the anarchist eugen
During and the amalgamist Edouard von Hartmann. It is especially
the site of those hotchpotch philosophers who call themselves realists
or positivists, which is calculated to implant a dangerous distrust
(06:05):
in the soul of a young and ambitious scholar. Those
philosophers at the best are themselves but scholars and specialists.
That is very evident. All of them are persons who
have been vanquished and brought back again under the dominion
of science, who at one time or another claimed more
(06:28):
from themselves without having a right to the more and
its responsibility, and who now creditably, rancorously and vindictively represent
in word and deed, disbelief in the master task and
supremacy of philosophy. After all, how could it be otherwise?
(06:53):
Science flourishes nowadays and has the good conscience clearly visible
on its countenance, while that to which the entire modern
philosophy has gradually sunk, the remnant of philosophy of the
present day, excites distrust and displeasure, if not scorn and pity.
(07:14):
Philosophy reduced to a theory of knowledge no more in
fact than a diffident science of epochs and doctrine of forbearance,
a philosophy that never even gets beyond the threshold and
rigorously denies itself the right to enter. That is philosophy
in its last throes an end, an agony, something that
(07:38):
awakens pity. How could such a philosophy Rule two hundred five.
The dangers that beset the evolution of the philosopher are
in fact so manifold nowadays that one might doubt whether
this fruit could still come to maturity. The extent and
(08:03):
towering structure of the sciences have increased enormously, and therewith
also the probability that the philosopher will grow tired even
as a learner, or will attach himself somewhere and specialize,
so that he will no longer attain to his elevation,
that is to say, to his superspection, his circumspection, and
(08:28):
his despection. Or he gets aloft too late when the
best of his maturity and strength is past, or when
he is impaired, coarsened, and deteriorated, so that his view,
his general estimate of things, is no longer of much importance.
(08:51):
It is perhaps just the refinement of his intellectual conscience
that makes him hesitate and linger on the way he
dreads the tempt to become a dilettante, a millipede, a
milla antenna. He knows too well that as a discerner,
one who has lost his self respect no longer commands,
(09:12):
no longer leads, unless he should aspire to become a
great play actor, a philosophical cagliostro and spiritual rat catcher,
in short, a misleader. This is, in the last instance,
a question of taste, if it has not really been
a question of conscience. To double once more the philosopher's difficulties.
(09:38):
There is also the fact that he demands from himself
a verdict a yea or nay, not concerning science, but
concerning life and the worth of life. He learns unwillingly
to believe that it is his right and even his
duty to obtain this verdict, and he has to seek
(09:59):
his way to the right and the belief only through
the most extensive, perhaps disturbing, and destroying experiences, often hesitating, doubting,
and dumbfounded. In fact, the philosopher has long been mistaken
and confused by the multitude, either with the scientific man
(10:22):
and ideal scholar, or with the religiously elevated, de sensualised, desecularised,
visionary and god intoxicated man. And even yet when one
hears anybody praised because he lives wisely or as a philosopher,
it hardly means anything more than prudently, and a part
(10:48):
wisdom that seems to the populace to be a kind
of flight, a means and artifice for withdrawing successfully from
a bad game. But the genuine philosopher, does it not
seem so to us, my friends, lives unphilosophically and unwisely,
(11:08):
above all imprudently, and feels the obligation and burden of
a hundred attempts and temptations of life. He risks himself constantly.
He plays this bad game two hundred six in relation
(11:28):
to the genius, that is to say, a being who
either engenders or produces both words understood in their fullest sense,
the man of learning, the scientific average man has always
something of the old maid about him, for like her,
he is not conversant with the two principal functions of man.
(11:53):
To both, of course, to the scholar and to the
old Maid, one concedes respectability as if by way of indemnification.
In these cases one emphasizes the respectability, and yet in
the compulsion of this concession one has the same admixture
of vexation. Let us examine more closely what is the
(12:17):
scientific man. Firstly, a commonplace type of man, with commonplace virtues,
that is to say, a non ruling, non authoritative, and
non self sufficient type of man. He possesses industry, patient
adaptableness to rank and file, equability and moderation in capacity
(12:41):
and requirement. He has the instinct for people like himself
and for that which they require, for instance, the portion
of independence and green meadow, without which there is no
rest from labor. The claim to honor and consideration, which
first and foremost presupposes recognition and recognizability, the sunshine of
(13:07):
a good name, the perpetual ratification of his value and usefulness,
with which the inward distrust which lies at the bottom
of the heart of all dependent men and gregarious animals,
has again and again to be overcome. The learned man,
as is appropriate, has also maladies and faults of an
(13:29):
ignoble kind. He is full of petty envy, and has
a lynx eye for the weak points in those natures
to whose elevations he cannot attain. He is confiding, yet
only as one who lets himself go but does not flow,
and precisely before the man of the great current, he
(13:50):
stands all the colder and more reserved. His eye is
then like a smooth and irresponsive lake, which is no
longer moved by a rapture or sympathy. The worst and
most dangerous thing of which a scholar is capable results
from the instinct of mediocrity of his type, from the
(14:12):
Jesuitism of mediocrity, which labors instinctively for the destruction of
the exceptional man, and endeavors to break, or still better,
to relax every bent bow, To relax, of course, with consideration,
and naturally with an indulgent hand, to relax with confiding sympathy.
(14:35):
That is the real art of Jesuitism, which has always
understood how to introduce itself as the religion of sympathy
two hundred seven. However, gratefully one may welcome the objective spirit,
and who has not been sick to death of all
subjectivity and its confounded ipsisimosity. In the end, however, one
(15:02):
must learn caution, even with regard to one's gratitude, and
put a stop to the exaggeration with which the unselfing
and depersonalizing of the spirit has recently been celebrated, as
if it were the goal in itself, as if it
were salvation and glorification, as is especially accustomed to happen
(15:24):
in the pessimist school, which has also in its turn
good reasons for paying the highest honors to disinterested knowledge.
The objective man, who no longer curses and scolds like
the pessimist, the ideal man of learning, in whom the
scientific instinct blossoms forth fully after a thousand complete and
(15:48):
partial failures, is assuredly one of the most costly instruments
that exist. But his place is in the hand of
one who is more powerful. He is only an instrument.
We may say he is a mirror. He is no
purpose in himself. The objective man is, in truth a mirror,
(16:12):
accustomed to prostration. Before everything that wants to be known,
with such desires only as knowing or reflecting implies, he
waits until something comes, and then expands himself sensitively, so
that even the light footsteps and gliding past of spiritual
beings may not be lost on his surface and film.
(16:35):
Whatever personality he still possesses seems to him accidental, arbitrary,
or still oftener disturbing. So much has he come to
regard himself as the passage and reflection of outside forms
and events. He calls up the recollection of himself with
(16:56):
an effort, and not infrequently wrongly. He read confounds himself
with other persons. He makes mistakes with regard to his
own needs, and here only is he unrefined and negligent.
Perhaps he is troubled about the health, or the pettiness
and confined atmosphere of wife and friend, or the lack
(17:19):
of companions and society. Indeed he sets himself to reflect
on his suffering, but in vain his thoughts already rove
away to the more general case. And tomorrow he knows
as little as he knew yesterday how to help himself.
He does not now take himself seriously and devote time
(17:41):
to himself. He is serene not from lack of trouble,
but from lack of capacity for grasping and dealing with
his trouble. The habitual complaisance with respect to all objects
and experiences, the radiant and impartial hospitality with which he
receives everything that comes his way, his habit of inconsiderate
(18:06):
good nature, of dangerous indifference. As to yea and nay
alas there are enough of cases in which he has
to atone for these virtues of his and as man
generally he becomes far too easily the Coppet mortuum of
such virtues. Should one wish love or hatred from him?
(18:28):
I mean love and hatred as God, woman and animal
understand them. He will do what he can and furnish
what he can. But one must not be surprised if
it should not be much, if he should show himself
just at this point, to be false, fragile, questionable, and deteriorated.
(18:52):
His love is constrained, his hatred is artificial and rather
unto de force a slight ostentation and exaggeration. He is
only genuine so far as he can be objective. Only
in his serene totality is he still nature and natural,
(19:14):
His mirroring and eternally self polishing soul no longer knows
how to affirm, no longer how to deny. He does
not command, neither does he destroy Genet Mepri's press green.
He says with Leibniz, let us not overlook nor undervalue
(19:36):
the pressue. Neither is he a model man. He does
not go in advance of anyone nor after either. He
places himself generally too far off to have any reason
for espousing the cause of either good or evil. If
he has been so long confounded with the philosopher, with
(19:57):
the caesarean trainer and dictator of civil vilization. He has
had far too much honor, and what is more essential
in him has been overlooked. He is an instrument, something
of a slave, though certainly the sublimest sort of slave,
but nothing in himself Presque rheienne. The objective man is
(20:18):
an instrument, a costly, easily injured, easily tarnished measuring instrument
and mirroring apparatus, which is to be taken care of
and respected. But he is no goal, not outgoing nor upgoing,
no complimentary man in whom the rest of existence justifies itself,
(20:40):
no termination, and still less a commencement, an engendering or
primary cause. Nothing hardy, powerful, self centered that wants to
be master, but rather only a soft, inflated, delicate, movable
potter's form that must wait for some kind of content
(21:02):
and frame to shape itself. There too, for the most part,
a man without frame and content, a selfless man, consequently,
also nothing for women. In Parenthesy two hundred eight, When
(21:23):
a philosopher nowadays makes it known that he is not
a skeptic, I hope that has been gathered from the
foregoing description of the objective spirit. People all hear it impatiently.
They regard him on that account with some apprehension. They
would like to ask so many many questions. Indeed, among
(21:44):
timid hearers, of whom there are now so many, he
is henceforth said to be dangerous with his repudiation of skepticism.
It seems to them as if they heard some evil,
threatening sound in the distance, as if a new kind
of explosive were being tried somewhere, a dynamite of the spirit,
(22:06):
perhaps a newly discovered Russian nihilinae, a pessimism bonnay voluntatis,
that not only denies means denial, but dreadful thought practices
denial against this kind of good will, a will to
the veritable actual negation of life. There is, as is
(22:30):
generally acknowledged nowadays, no better soporific and sedative than skepticism.
The mild, pleasing, lulling poppy of skepticism, and Hamlet himself
is now prescribed by the doctors of the day as
an antidote to the spirit and its underground noises. Are
(22:53):
not our ears already full of bad sounds, say the
skeptics as lovers of repose, and almost as a kind
of safety police. This subterranean nay is terrible. Be still,
ye pessimistic moles. The skeptic, in effect, that delicate creature
(23:14):
is far too easily frightened. His conscience is schooled so
as to start at every nay, and even at that
sharp decided yea, and feel something like a bite. Thereby
yea and nay they seem to him opposed to morality.
He loves, on the contrary, to make a festival to
(23:36):
his virtue by a noble aloofness. While perhaps he says
with Montaigne what do I know? Or with Socrates, I
know that I know nothing? Or here I do not
trust myself. No door is open to me, Or even
(23:57):
if the door were open, why should I enter mediately?
Or what is the use of any hasty hypotheses? It
might quite well be in good taste to make no
hypotheses at all? Are you absolutely obliged to straighten at once?
What is crooked? To stuff every hole with some kind
(24:18):
of oakum? Is there not time enough for that? Has
not the time leisure? Oh? Ye, demons, can ye not
at all? Weight? The uncertain also has its charms. The
sphinx too is a Circe, and Circe too was a philosopher.
(24:38):
Thus does a skeptic console himself, and in truth he
needs some consolation, for skepticism is the most spiritual expression
of a certain, many sided physiological temperament, which in ordinary
language is called nervous debility and sickliness. It arises whenever
(25:00):
classes which have been long separated decisively and suddenly blend
with one another. In the new generation, which has inherited,
as it were, different standards and valuations in its blood,
everything is disquiet, derangement, doubt, and tentativeness. The best powers
(25:22):
operate restrictively. The very virtues prevent each other growing and
becoming strong. Equilibrium, ballast and perpendicular stability are lacking in
body and soul. That, however, which is most diseased and
degenerated in such nondescripts is the will. They are no
(25:44):
longer familiar with independence of decision or the courageous feeling
of pleasure in willing. They are doubtful of the freedom
of the will even in their dreams. Our present day
Europe the scene of as senseless precipitate attempt at a
racial blending of classes and consequently of races, is therefore
(26:08):
skeptical in all its heights and depths, sometimes exhibiting the
mobile skepticism which springs impatiently and wantonly from branch to branch,
sometimes with gloomy aspect, like a cloud overcharged with interrogative signs,
and often sick unto death of its will, paralysis of will?
(26:30):
Where do we not find this cripple sitting nowadays? And
yet how bedecked, oftentimes how seductively ornamented. There are the
finest gala dresses and disguises for this disease, And that,
for instance, most of what places itself nowadays in the
showcases as objectiveness, the scientific spirit, lart, poor lart and
(26:58):
pure voluntary mines is only decked out skepticism and paralysis
of will. I am ready to answer for this diagnosis
of the European disease. The disease of the will is
diffused unequally over Europe. It is worst and most varied
where civilisation has longest prevailed. It decreases, according as the
(27:22):
barbarian still or again asserts his claims, under the loose
drapery of Western culture. It is therefore in the France
of today, as can be readily disclosed and comprehended, that
the will is most infirm. And France, which has always
had a masterly aptitude for converting even the portentous crisis
(27:46):
of its spirit into something charming and seductive, now manifests
emphatically its intellectual ascendency over Europe by being the school
and exhibition of all the charms of skepticism. The power
to will and to persist moreover, in a resolution, is
(28:07):
already somewhat stronger in Germany, and again in the north
of Germany. It is stronger than in central Germany. It
is considerably stronger in England, Spain and Corsica, associated with
phlegm in the former and with hard skulls in the latter,
Not to mention Italy, which is too young yet to
(28:27):
know what it wants and must first show whether it
can exercise will. But it is strongest and most surprising
of all in that immense Middle Empire, where Europe, as
it were, flows back to Asia, namely in Russia. There
the power to will has been long stored up and accumulated. There,
(28:51):
the will, uncertain whether to be negative or affirmative, waits
threateningly to be discharged. To borrow their pet phrase from
our physicists. Perhaps not only Indian wars and complications in
Asia would be necessary to free Europe from its greatest danger,
(29:12):
but also internal subversion, the shattering of the empire into
small states, and above all the introduction of parliamentary imbecility,
together with the obligation of every one to read his
newspaper at breakfast. I do not say this as one
who desires it in my heart. I should rather prefer
(29:34):
the contrary. I mean such an increase in the threatening
attitude of Russia that Europe would have to make up
its mind to become equally threatening, namely to acquire one
will by means of a new caste to rule over
the continent, a persistent, dreadful will of its own, that
(29:56):
can set its aims thousands of years ahead, so that
the long spun out comedy of its petty statism and
its dynastic as well as its democratic, many willedness might
finally be brought to a close. The time for petty
politics is past. The next century will bring the struggle
(30:19):
for the dominion of the world, the compulsion to great
politics two hundred nine. As to how far the new
warlike age on which we Europeans have evidently entered may
perhaps favour the growth of another and stronger kind of skepticism.
(30:43):
I should like to express myself preliminarily merely by a
parable which the lovers of German history will already understand,
that unscrupulous enthusiast for big, handsome grenadiers, who as King
of Russia brought into being a military and skeptical genius,
(31:04):
and therewith in reality the new and now triumphantly emerged
type of German. The problematic, crazy father of Frederick the
Great had on one point the very knack and lucky
grasp of the genius. He knew what was then lacking
in Germany, the want of which was a hundred times
(31:27):
more alarming and serious than any lack of culture and
social form. His ill will to the young Frederick resulted
from the anxiety of a profound instinct men were lacking,
and he suspected, to his bitterest regret that his own
son was not man enough. There, however, he deceived himself.
(31:52):
But who would not have deceived himself in his place?
He saw his son lapsed to atheism, to the esprie,
to the pleasant frivolity of clever Frenchman. He saw in
the background the great blood sucker, the spider skepticism. He
suspected the incurable wretchedness of a heart no longer hard
(32:16):
enough either for evil or good, and of a broken
will that no longer commands, is no longer able to command. Meanwhile, however,
there grew up in his son that new kind of
harder and more dangerous skepticism. Who knows to what extent
It was encouraged just by his father's hatred and the
(32:39):
icy melancholy of a will condemned to solitude. The skepticism
of daring manliness, which is closely related to the genius
for war and conquest, and made its first entrance into
Germany in the person of the Great Frederick. This skepticism
despises and nevertheless grasps, It undermines, and takes possession. It
(33:04):
does not believe, but it does not thereby lose itself.
It gives the spirit a dangerous liberty, but it keeps
strict guard over the heart. It is the German form
of skepticism, which, as a continued fredericianism, risen to the
highest spirituality, has kept Europe for a considerable time under
(33:28):
the dominion of the German spirit and its critical and
historical distrust. Owing to the insuperably strong and tough masculine
character of the great German philologists and historical critics, who
rightly estimated were also all of them artists of destruction
(33:49):
and dissolution. A new conception of the German spirit gradually
established itself, in spite of all Romanticism in music and philosophy,
in which the leaning towards masculine skepticism was decidedly prominent,
whether for instance as fearlessness of gaze, as courage and
(34:11):
sternness of the dissecting hand, or as resolute will to
dangerous voyages of discovery two spiritualized North Pole expeditions under
barren and dangerous skies. There may be good grounds for
it when warm blooded and superficial humanitarians crossed themselves before
(34:32):
this spirit se esprit fetaliste ieronique mephistophiliq, as Michelais calls
it not without a shudder. But if one would realize
how characteristic is the sphere of the man in the
German spirit which awakened Europe out of its dogmatic slumber,
(34:54):
let us call to mind the former conception which had
to be overcome by this new one, and that it
is not so very long ago that a masculinized woman
could dare with unbridled presumption to recommend the Germans to
the interest of Europe as gentle, good hearted, weak willed,
(35:14):
and poetical fools. Finally, let us only understand profoundly enough
Napoleon's astonishment when he saw Gertha. It reveals what had
been regarded for centuries as the German spirit. Voila unom.
That was as much to say, but this is a man,
(35:36):
and I only expected to see a German two hundred ten.
Supposing then that in the picture of the philosophers of
the future, some trait suggests the question whether they must
not perhaps be skeptics in the last mentioned sense. Something
(35:58):
in them would only be designated thereby, and not they themselves.
With equal right, they might call themselves critics, and assuredly
they will be men of experiments. By the name with
which I ventured to baptize them, I have already expressly
emphasized their attempting and their love of attempting. Is this
(36:22):
because as critics in body and soul, they will love
to make use of experiments in a new and perhaps
wider and more dangerous sense. In their passion for knowledge,
will they have to go further in daring and painful
attempts than the sensitive and pampered taste of a democratic
century can approve of. There is no doubt these coming
(36:46):
ones will be least able to dispense with the serious
and not unscrupulous qualities which distinguish the critic from the skeptic.
I mean the certainty as to standards of worth, the
councious employment of a unity of method, though wary courage,
the standing alone, and the capacity for self responsibility. Indeed,
(37:10):
they will avow among themselves a delight in denial and dissection,
and a certain considerate cruelty which knows how to handle
the knife surely and deftly, even when the heart bleeds.
They will be sterner, and perhaps not always towards themselves.
Only then humane people may desire. They will not deal
(37:34):
with the truth in order that it may please them
or elevate and inspire them. They will rather have little
faith in truth, bringing with it such revels for the feelings.
They will smile those rigorous spirits when anyone says in
their presence. That thought elevates me, why should it not
(37:56):
be true? Or that work enchance me? Why should it
not be beautiful? Or that artist enlarges me? Why should
he not be great? Perhaps they will not only have
a smile, but a genuine disgust for all that is
thus rapturous, idealistic, feminine, and hermaphroditic. And if any one
(38:19):
could look into their inmost hearts, he would not easily
find therein the intention to reconcile Christian sentiments with antique taste,
or even with modern parliamentarism, the kind of reconciliation necessarily
found even among philosophers in our very uncertain and consequently
(38:42):
very conciliatory century. Critical discipline and every habit that conduces
to purity and rigor in intellectual matters will not only
be demanded from themselves by these philosophers of the future.
They may even make a display thereof as their special adornment. Nevertheless,
(39:04):
they will not want to be called critics. On that account.
It will seem to them no small indignity to philosophy
to have it decreed, as is so welcome nowadays, that
philosophy itself is criticism and critical science and nothing else whatever.
Though this estimate of philosophy may enjoy the approval of
(39:26):
all the positivists of France and Germany, and possibly it
even flattered the heart and taste of Kant, let us
call to mind the titles of his principal works. Our
new philosophers will say, notwithstanding, that critics are instruments of
the philosopher, and just on that account, as instruments, they
(39:49):
are far from being philosophers themselves. Even the great Chinaman
of Konigsberg was only a great critic two hundred eleven.
I insist upon it that people finally cease confounding philosophical
workers and in general, scientific men with philosophers, that precisely
(40:14):
here one should strictly give each his own, and not
give those far too much these far too little. It
may be necessary for the education of the real philosopher
that he himself should have once stood upon all those
steps upon which his servants, the scientific workers of philosophy,
(40:35):
remain standing and must remain standing. He himself must perhaps
have been critic and dogmatist and historian, and besides poet
and collector and traveler and riddle reader and moralist and
seer and free spirit, and almost everything in order to
(40:56):
traverse the whole range of human values and estor, and
that he may be able, with a variety of eyes
and consciences to look from a height to any distance,
from a depth up to any height, from a knook
into any expanse. But all these are only preliminary conditions
(41:19):
for his task. This task itself demands something else. It
requires him to create values. The philosophical workers, after the
excellent pattern of Kant and Hegel, have to fix and
formalize some great existing body of valuations, that is to say,
(41:40):
former determinations of value, creations of value which have become
prevalent and are for a time called truths, whether in
the domain of the logical, the political, moral, or the artistic.
It is for these investigators to make whatever has happened
(42:00):
and been esteemed hitherto conspicuous, conceivable, intelligible, and manageable, to
shorten everything long, even time itself, and to subjugate the
entire past, an immense and wonderful task, in the carrying
out of which all refined pride, all tenacious will can
(42:23):
surely find satisfaction. The real philosophers, however, are commanders and
law givers, They say, thus shall it be? They determine
first the whither and the why of mankind, and thereby
set aside the previous labor of all philosophical workers and
(42:46):
all subjugators of the past. They grasp at the future
with a creative hand, and whatever is and was becomes
for them thereby a means, an instrument, and a hammer.
Their knowing is creating. There creating is a law. Giving
(43:06):
Their will to truth is will to power. Are there
at present such philosophers? Have there ever been such philosophers?
Must there not be such philosophers some day? Two hundred twelve?
It is always more obvious to me that the philosopher,
(43:29):
as a man indispensable for the morrow and the day
after the morrow, has ever found himself, and has been
obliged to find himself in contradiction to the day in
which he lives. His enemy has always been the ideal
of his day. Hitherto all those extraordinary furtherers of humanity,
(43:51):
whom one calls philosophers, who rarely regarded themselves as lovers
of wisdom, but rather as disagreeable fools and dangerous interrogators,
have found their mission. Their hard involuntary imperative mission. In
the end, however, the greatness of their mission in being
(44:12):
the bad conscience of their age. In putting the vivisector's
knife to the breast of the very virtues of their age,
they have betrayed their own secret. It has been for
the sake of a new greatness of man, a new
untrodden path to his aggrandizement. They have always disclosed how
(44:32):
much hypocrisy, indolence, self indulgence, and self neglect, how much
falsehood was concealed under the most venerated types of contemporary morality,
how much virtue was outlived. They have always said, we
must remove, hence to where you are least at home.
(44:53):
In the face of a world of modern ideas which
would like to confine every one in a corner in
a specialty, a philosopher, if there could be philosophers nowadays,
would be compelled to place the greatness of man, the
conception of greatness, precisely in his comprehensiveness and multifariousness, in
(45:15):
his all roundness. He would even determine worth and rank
according to the amount and variety of that which a
man could bear, and take upon himself, according to the
extent to which a man could stretch his responsibility. Nowadays,
the taste and virtue of the age weaken and attenuate
(45:38):
the will. Nothing is so adapted to the spirit of
the age as weakness of will. Consequently, in the ideal
of the philosopher, strength of will, sternness, and capacity for
prolonged resolution must specially be included in the conception of
greatness with as good a right as the opposite doctrine,
(46:00):
with its ideal of a silly, renouncing, humble, selfless humanity,
was suited to an opposite age, such as the sixteenth century,
which suffered from its accumulated energy of will and from
the wildest torrents and floods of selfishness. In the time
(46:20):
of Socrates, among men only of worn out instincts, old
conservative Athenians, who let themselves go for the sake of happiness,
as they said, for the sake of pleasure, as their
conduct indicated, and who had continually on their lips the
old pompous words to which they had long forfeited. The
(46:42):
right by the life they led. Irony was perhaps necessary
for greatness of soul. The wicked Socratic assurance of the
old physician and plebeian who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh,
as into the flesh and heart of the noble, with
a look that said, plainly enough, do not dissemble before me.
(47:03):
Here we are equal at present. On the contrary, when
throughout Europe the herding animal alone attains to honors and
dispenses honors, when equality of right can too readily be
transformed into equality and wrong, I mean to say, into
general war against everything rare, strange and privileged, against the
(47:27):
higher man, the higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility,
the creative plenipotence, and lordliness. At present, it belongs to
the conception of greatness to be noble, to wish to
be a part, to be capable of being different, to
stand alone, to have to live by personal initiative. And
(47:49):
the philosopher will betray something of his own ideal when
he asserts he shall be the greatest, who can be
the most solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent, the
man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues
and of superabundance of will. Precisely this shall be called greatness,
(48:12):
as diversified as can be, entire as ample as can
be full, and to ask once more the question, is
greatness possible? Nowadays? Two hundred thirteen. It is difficult to
learn what a philosopher is, because it cannot be taught.
(48:36):
One must know it by experience, or one should have
the pride not to know it. The fact that at
present people all talk of things of which they cannot
have any experience is true. More especially, and unfortunately, as
concerns the philosopher and philosophical matters. The very few know
(48:59):
them are permitted to know them, and all popular ideas
about them are false. Thus, for instance, the truly philosophical
combination of a bold, exuberant spirituality which runs at presto pace,
and a dialectic rigor and necessity which makes no false step,
(49:19):
is unknown to most thinkers and scholars from their own experience,
and therefore should anyone speak of it in their presence,
it is incredible to them. They conceive of every necessity
as troublesome, as a painful, compulsory obedience and state of constraint.
(49:40):
Thinking itself is regarded by them as something slow and hesitating,
almost as a trouble, and often enough as worthy of
the sweat of the noble. But not at all as
something easy and divine, closely related to dancing and exuberance.
To think and to take a matter seriously arduously, that
(50:05):
is one and the same thing to them. Such only
has been their experience. Artists have here perhaps a finer intuition,
they who know only too well that precisely, when they
no longer do anything arbitrarily and everything of necessity, their
feeling of freedom, of subtlety, of power of creatively fixing, disposing,
(50:30):
and shaping reaches its climax. In short, that necessity and
freedom of will are then the same thing with them.
There is in fine a graduation of rank in psychical states,
to which the graduation of rank in the problems corresponds.
(50:50):
And the highest problems repel ruthlessly everyone who ventures to
near them without being predestined for their solution by the
loftiness and power of his spirituality. Of what use is
it for nimble every day intellects, or clumsy honest mechanics
and empiricists to press, in their Plebeian ambition close to
(51:14):
such problems, and, as it were, into this holy of holies,
as so often happens nowadays. But coarse feet must never
tread upon such carpets. This is provided for in the
primary law of things. The doors remain closed to those intruders,
though they may dash and break their heads. Thereon. People
(51:38):
have always to be born to a high station, or
more definitely, they have to be bred for it. A
person has only a right to philosophy, taking the word
in its higher significance, in virtue of his descent. The
ancestors the blood decide here. Also, many generations must have
(52:01):
prepared the way for the coming of the philosopher. Each
of his virtues must have been separately acquired, nurtured, transmitted,
and embodied. Not only the bold, easy, delicate course and
current of his thoughts, but above all, the readiness for
great responsibilities, the majesty of ruling, glance and contemning look,
(52:26):
the feeling of separation from the multitude with their duties
and virtues. The kindly patronage and defense of whatever is
misunderstood and calumated, be it God or devil. The delight
and practice of supreme justice, the art of commanding, the
amplitude of will, The lingering eye, which rarely admires, rarely
(52:49):
looks up, rarely loves. End of Chapter six
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