After all it seems to
me quite accidental that in the same place in Elea
two men lived together for a time, each of whom
carried in his head a conception of unity; they
formed no school and had nothing in common which
perhaps the one might have learned from the other
and then might have handed on.
me quite accidental that in the same place in Elea
two men lived together for a time, each of whom
carried in his head a conception of unity; they
formed no school and had nothing in common which
perhaps the one might have learned from the other
and then might have handed on.
Nietzsche - v02 - Early Greek Philosophy
And
- similarly, just as the child and the artist play, the
eternally living fire plays, builds up and destroys, in
innocence—and this game the JEon plays with him-
self. Transforming himself into water and earth,
like a child he piles heaps of sand by the sea, piles
up and demolishes; from time to time he recom-
mences the game. A moment of satiety, then again
desire seizes him, as desire compels the artist to
create. Not wantonness, but the ever newly awaken-
ing impulse to play, calls into life other worlds. The
child throws away his toys ; but soon he starts again
in an innocent frame of mind. As soon however as
the child builds he connects, joins and forms law-
fully and according to an innate sense of order.
Thus only is the world contemplated by the
aesthetic man, who has learned from the artist and
the genesis of the latter's work, how the struggle of
plurality can yet bear within itself law and justice,
how the artist stands contemplative above, and
working within the work of art, how necessity and
play, antagonism and harmony must pair themselves
for the procreation of the work of art.
Who now will still demand from such a philosophy
a system of Ethics with the necessary imperatives
N
## p. 109 (#167) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 109
—Thou Shalt,—or even reproach Heraclitus with
such a deficiency. Man down to his last fibre is
Necessity and absolutely "unfree "—if by freedom
one understands the foolish claim to be able to
change at will one's essentia like a garment, a claim,
which up to the present every serious philosophy
has rejected with due scorn. That so few human
beings live with consciousness in the Logos and in
accordance with the all-overlooking artist's eye
originates from their souls being wet and from the
fact that men's eyes and ears, their intellect in general
is a bad witness when "moist ooze fills their souls. "
Why that is so, is not questioned any more than
why fire becomes water and earth. Heraclitus is
not compelled to prove (as Leibnitz was) that this
world was even the best of all; it was sufficient for
him that the world is the beautiful, innocent play of
the iEon. Man on the whole is to him even an
irrational being, with which the fact that in all his
essence the law of all-ruling reason is fulfilled does
not clash. He does not occupy a specially favoured
position in nature, whose highest phenomenon is
not simple-minded man, but fire, for instance, as
stars. In so far as man has through necessity re-
ceived a share of fire, he is a little more rational;
as far as he consists of earth and water it stands
badly with his reason. He is not compelled to take
cognisance of the Logos simply because he is a
human being. Why is there water, why earth?
This to Heraclitus is a much more serious problem
than to ask, why men are so stupid and bad. In
the highest and the most perverted men the same
inherent lawfulness and justice manifest themselves.
## p. 109 (#168) ############################################
108 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
hensible to him who like Heraclitus resembles the
contemplative god. Before his fiery eye no drop of
injustice is left in the world poured out around him,
and even that cardinal obstacle—how pure fire can
take up its quarters in forms so impure—he masters
by means of a sublime simile. A Becoming and
Passing, a building and destroying, without any
moral bias, in perpetual innocence is in this world
only the play of the artist and of the child. And
i — similarly, just as the child and the artist play, the
eternally living fire plays, builds up and destroys, in
innocence—and this game the JEon plays with him-
self. Transforming himself into water and earth,
like a child he piles heaps of sand by the sea, piles
up and demolishes; from time to time he recom-
mences the game. A moment of satiety, then again
desire seizes him, as desire compels the artist to
create. Not wantonness, but the ever newly awaken-
ing impulse to play, calls into life other worlds. The
child throws away his toys ; but soon he starts again
in an innocent frame of mind. As soon however as
the child builds he connects, joins and forms law-
fully and according to an innate sense of order.
Thus only is the world contemplated by the
aesthetic man, who has learned from the artist and
the genesis of the latter's work, how the struggle of
plurality can yet bear within itself law and justice,
how the artist stands contemplative above, and
working within the work of art, how necessity and
play, antagonism and harmony must pair themselves
for the procreation of the work of art.
Who now will still demand from such a philosophy
a system of Ethics with the necessary imperatives
## p. 109 (#169) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 109
—Thou Shalt,—or even reproach Heraclitus with
such a deficiency. Man down to his last fibre is
Necessity and absolutely "unfree "—if by freedom
one understands the foolish claim to be able to
change at will one's essentia like a garment, a claim,
which up to the present every serious philosophy
has rejected with due scorn. That so few human
beings live with consciousness in the Logos and in
accordance with the all-overlooking artist's eye
originates from their souls being wet and from the
fact that men's eyes and ears, their intellect in general
is a bad witness when "moist ooze fills their souls. "
Why that is so, is not questioned any more than
why fire becomes water and earth. Heraclitus is
not compelled to prove (as Leibnitz was) that this
world was even the best of all; it was sufficient for
him that the world is the beautiful, innocent play of
the /Eon. Man on the whole is to him even an
irrational being, with which the fact that in all his
essence the law of all-ruling reason is fulfilled does
not clash. He does not occupy a specially favoured
position in nature, whose highest phenomenon is
not simple-minded man, but fire, for instance, as
stars. In so far as man has through necessity re-
ceived a share of fire, he is a little more rational;
as far as he consists of earth and water it stands
badly with his reason. He is not compelled to take
cognisance of the Logos simply because he is a
human being. Why is there water, why earth?
This to Heraclitus is a much more serious problem
than to ask, why men are so stupid and bad. In
the highest and the most perverted men the same
inherent lawfulness and justice manifest themselves.
## p. 110 (#170) ############################################
110 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
If however one would ask Heraclitus the question
"Why is fire not always fire, why is it now water,
now earth? " then he would only just answer: "It
is a game, don't take it too pathetically and still less,
morally. " Heraclitus describes only the existing
world and has the same contemplative pleasure in
it which the artist experiences when looking at his
growing work. Only those who have cause to be
discontented with his natural history of man find
him gloomy, melancholy, tearful, sombre, atrabil-
arious, pessimistic and altogether hateful. He how-
ever would take these discontented people, together
with their antipathies and sympathies, their hatred
and their love, as negligible and perhaps answer
them with some such comment as : " Dogs bark at
anything they do not know," or, " To the ass chaff
is preferable to gold. "
With such discontented persons also originate
the numerous complaints as to the obscurity of the
Heraclitean style; probably no man has ever
written clearer and more illuminatingly; of course,
- very abruptly, and therefore naturally obscure to the
racing readers. But why a philosopher should in-
tentionally write obscurely—a thing habitually said
about Heraclitus—is absolutely inexplicable; unless
he has some cause to hide his thoughts or is suffici-
ently a rogue to conceal his thoughtlessness under-
neath words. One is, as Schopenhauer says, indeed
compelled by lucid expression to prevent misunder-
standings even in affairs of practical every-day life,
how then should one be allowed to express oneself
indistinctly, indeed puzzlingly in the most difficult,
most abstruse, scarcely attainable object of thinking,
## p. 111 (#171) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY III
the tasks of philosophy? With respect to brevity
however Jean Paul gives a good precept: "On the
whole it is right that everything great—of deep
meaning to a rare mind—should be uttered with
brevity and (therefore) obscurely so that the paltry
mind would rather proclaim it to be nonsense than
translate it into the realm of his empty-headedness.
For common minds have an ugly ability to perceive
in the deepest and richest saying nothing but their
own every-day opinion. " Moreover and in spite of
it Heraclitus has not escaped the "paltry minds";
already the Stoics have " re-expounded" him into the
shallow and dragged down his aesthetic fundamental-
perception as to the play of the world to the miser-
able level of the common regard for the practical
ends of the world and more explicitly for the advan-
tages of man, so that out of his Physics has arisen
in those heads a crude optimism, with the continual
invitation to Dick, Tom, and Harry, "Plaudite
amid! "
8
Heraclitus was proud; and if it comes to pride
with a philosopher then it is a great pride. His work
never refers him to a " public," the applause of the
masses and the hailing chorus of contemporaries.
To wander lonely along his path belongs to the nature
of the philosopher. His talents are the most rare, in
a certain sense the most unnatural and at the same
time exclusive and hostile even toward kindred
talents. The wall of his self-sufficiency must be of
diamond, if it is not to be demolished and broken,
for everything is in motion against him. His journey
to immortality is more cumbersome and impeded
## p. 112 (#172) ############################################
112 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
than any other and yet nobody can believe more
firmly than the philosopher that he will attain the
goal by that journey—because he does not know
where he is to stand if not on the widely spread wings
of all time; for the disregard of everything present
and momentary lies in the essence of the great philo-
sophic nature. He has truth; the wheel of time
may roll whither it pleases, never can it escape from
truth. It is important to hear that such men have
lived. Never for example would one be able to
imagine the pride of Heraclitus as an idle possibility.
In itself every endeavour after knowledge seems by
its nature to be eternally unsatisfied and unsatis-
factory. Therefore nobody unless instructed by
history will like to believe in such a royal self-
esteem and conviction of being the only wooer of
truth. Such men live in their own solar-system—
one has to look for them there. A Pythagoras, an
Empedocles treated themselves too with a super-
human esteem, yea, with almost religious awe; but
the tie of sympathy united with the great conviction
of the metempsychosis and the unity of everything
living, led them back to other men, for their welfare
and salvation. Of that feeling of solitude, however,
which permeated the Ephesian recluse of the Artemis
Temple, one can only divine something, when grow-
ing benumbed in the wildest mountain desert. No
paramount feeling of compassionate agitation, no
desire to help, heal and save emanates from him.
He is a star without an atmosphere. His eye,
directed blazingly inwards, looks outward, for ap-
pearance's sake only, extinct and icy. All around
him, immediately upon the citadel of his pride beat
## p. 113 (#173) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 113
the waves of folly and perversity: with loathing he
turns away from them. But men with a feeling
heart would also shun such a Gorgon monster as cast
out of brass; within an out-of-the-way sanctuary,
among the statues of gods, by the side of cold com-
posedly-sublime architecture such a being may ap-
pear more comprehensible. As man among men
Heraclitus was incredible; and though he was seen
paying attention to the play of noisy children, even
then he was reflecting upon what never man thought
of on such an occasion: the play of the great world-
child, Zeus. He had no need of men, not even for
his discernments. He was not interested in all that
which one might perhaps ascertain from them, and
in what the other sages before him had been en-
deavouring to ascertain. He spoke with disdain of
such questioning, collecting, in short "historic" men.
"I sought and investigated myself," he said, with a
word by which one designates the investigation of
an oracle; as if he and no one else were the true
fulfiller and achiever of the Delphic precept: "Know
thyself. "
What he learned from this oracle, he deemed
immortal wisdom, and eternally worthy of explana-
tion, of unlimited effect even in the distance, after
the model of the prophetic speeches of the Sibyl.
It is sufficient for the latest mankind: let the latter
have that expounded to her, as oracular sayings,
which he like the Delphic god "neither enunciates
nor conceals. " Although it is proclaimed by him,
"without smiles, finery and the scent of ointments,"
but rather as with "foaming mouth," it must force
its way through the millenniums of the future. For
8
## p. 114 (#174) ############################################
114 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
the world needs truth eternally, therefore she needs
also Heraclitus eternally; although he has no need
of her. What does his fame matter to him ? —fame
with "mortals ever flowing on! " as he exclaims
scornfully. His fame is of concern to man, not to
himself; the immortality of mankind needs him, not
he the immortality of the man Heraclitus. That
which he beheld, the doctrine of the Law in the Be-
coming, and of the Play in the Necessity, must hence-
forth be beheld eternally; he has raised the curtain
of this greatest stage-play.
9
Whereas in every word of Heraclitusareexpressed
the pride and the majesty of truth, but of truth
caught by intuitions, not scaled by the rope-ladder
of Logic, whereas in sublime ecstasy he beholds but
does not espy, discerns but does not reckon, he is
contrasted with his contemporary Parmenides, a
man likewise with the type of a prophet of truth,
but formed as it were out of ice and not out of fire,
and shedding around himself cold, piercing light.
Parmenides once had, probably in his later years,
a moment of the very purest abstraction, undimmed
by any reality, perfectly lifeless; this moment—un-
Greek, like no other in the two centuries of the
Tragic Age—the product of which is the doctrine of
"Being," became a boundary-stone for his own life,
which divided it into two periods; at the same time
however the same moment divides the pre-Socratic
thinking into two halves, of which the first might be
called the Anaximandrian, the second the Parmen-
idean. The first period in Parmenides' own philoso-
## p. 115 (#175) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 115
phising bears still the signature of Anaximander;
this period produced a detailed philosophic-physical
system as answer to Anaximander's questions. When
later that icy abstraction-horror caught him, and the
simplest proposition treating of " Being " and " Not-
Being" was advanced by him, then among the many
older doctrines thrown by him upon the scrap heap
was also his own system. However he does not
appear to have lost all paternal piety towards the
strong and well-shapen child of his youth, and he
saved himself therefore by saying: "It is true there
is only one right way; if one however wants at any
time to betake oneself to another, then my earlier
opinion according to its purity and consequence
alone is right. " Sheltering himself with this phrase
he has allowed his former physical system a worthy
and extensive space in his great poem on Nature,
which really was to proclaim the new discernment as
the only signpost to truth. This fatherly regard,
even though an error should have crept in through
it, is a remainder of human feeling, in a nature quite
petrified by logical rigidity and almost changed into
a thinking-machine.
Parmenides, whose personal intercourse with An-
aximander does not seem incredible to me, and
whose starting from Anaximander's doctrine is not
only credible but evident, had the same distrust for
the complete separation of a world which only is,
and a world which only becomes, as had also caught
Heraclitus and led to a denying of " Being" alto-
gether. Both sought a way out from that contrast
and divergence of a dual order of the world. That
leap into the Indefinite, Indefinable, by which once
## p. 116 (#176) ############################################
Il6 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
for all Anaximander had escaped from the realm of
Becoming and from the empirically given qualities
of such realm, that leap did not become an easy-
matter to minds so independently fashioned as those
of Heraclitus and Parmenides; first they endea-
voured to walk as far as they could and reserved
to themselves the leap for that place, where the
foot finds no more hold and one has to leap, in
order not to fall. Both looked repeatedly at that
very world, which Anaximander had condemned in
so melancholy a way and declared to be the place
of wanton crime and at the same time the peni-
tentiary cell for the injustice of Becoming. Contem-
plating this world Heraclitus, as we know already,
had discovered what a wonderful order, regularity
and security manifest themselves in every Becom-
ing; from that he concluded that the Becoming
could not be anything evil and unjust. Quite a
different outlook had Parmenides; he compared
the qualities one with another, and believed that
they were not all of the same kind, but ought to be
classified under two headings. If for example he
compared bright and dark, then the second quality
was obviously only the negation of the first; and
thus he distinguished positive and negative qualities,
seriously endeavouring to rediscover and register that
fundamental antithesis in the whole realm of Nature.
His method was the following: He took a few anti-
theses, e. g. , light and heavy, rare and dense, active
and passive, and compared them with that typical
antithesis of bright and dark: that which corre-
sponded with the bright was the positive, that which
corresponded with the dark the negative quality. If
^
## p. 117 (#177) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 117
he took perhaps the heavy and light, the light fell
to the side of the bright, the heavy to the side of
the dark; and thus "heavy" was to him only the
negation of " light," but the " light" a positive quality.
This method alone shows that he had a defiant apti-
tude for abstract logical procedure, closed against
the suggestions of the senses. The " heavy" seems
indeed to offer itself very forcibly to the senses as
a positive quality; that did not keep Parmenides
from stamping it as a negation. Similarly he placed
the earth in opposition to the fire, the "cold" in
opposition to the "warm," the "dense" in opposi-
tion to the " rare," the "female" in opposition to the
"male," the " passive " in opposition to the " active,"
merely as negations: so that before his gaze our em-
piric world divided itself into two separate spheres,
into that of the positive qualities—with a bright,
fiery, warm, light, rare, active-masculine character—
and into that of the negative qualities. The latter
express really only the lack, the absence of the
others, the positive ones. He therefore described
the sphere in which the positive qualities are absent
as dark, earthy, cold, heavy, dense and altogether as
of feminine-passive character. Instead of the expres-
sions "positive" and "negative" he used the standing
term "existent" and "non-existent" and had arrived
with this at the proposition, that, in contradiction to
Anaximander, this our world itself contains some-
thing "existent," and of course something "non-
existent. " One is not to seek that "existent" out-
side the world and as it were above our horizon; but
before us, and everywhere in every Becoming, some-
thing " existent" and active is contained.
## p. 117 (#178) ############################################
Il6 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
for all Anaximander had escaped from the realm of
Becoming and from the empirically given qualities
of such realm, that leap did not become an easy
matter to minds so independently fashioned as those
of Heraclitus and Parmenides; first they endea-
voured to walk as far as they could and reserved
to themselves the leap for that place, where the
foot finds no more hold and one has to leap, in
order not to fall. Both looked repeatedly at that
very world, which Anaximander had condemned in
so melancholy a way and declared to be the place
of wanton crime and at the same time the peni-
tentiary cell for the injustice of Becoming. Contem-
plating this world Heraclitus, as we know already,
had discovered what a wonderful order, regularity
and security manifest themselves in every Becom-
ing; from that he concluded that the Becoming
could not be anything evil and unjust. Quite a
different outlook had Parmenides; he compared
the qualities one with another, and believed that
they were not all of the same kind, but ought to be
classified under two headings. If for example he
compared bright and dark, then the second quality
was obviously only the negation of the first; and
thus he distinguished positive and negative qualities,
seriously endeavouring to rediscover and register that
fundamental antithesis in the whole realm of Nature.
His method was the following: He took a few anti-
theses, e. g. , light and heavy, rare and dense, active
and passive, and compared them with that typical
antithesis of bright and dark: that which corre-
sponded with the bright was the positive, that which
corresponded with the dark the negative quality. If
## p. 117 (#179) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 117
he took perhaps the heavy and light, the light fell
to the side of the bright, the heavy to the side of
the dark; and thus " heavy" was to him only the
negation of " light," but the " light" a positive quality.
This method alone shows that he had a defiant apti-
tude for abstract logical procedure, closed against
the suggestions of the senses. The "heavy" seems
indeed to offer itself very forcibly to the senses as
a positive quality; that did not keep Parmenides
from stamping it as a negation. Similarly he placed
the earth in opposition to the fire, the "cold" in
opposition to the "warm," the "dense" in opposi-
tion to the "rare," the "female" in opposition to the
"male," the " passive " in opposition to the " active,"
merely as negations: so that before his gaze our em-
piric world divided itself into two separate spheres,
into that of the positive qualities—with a bright,
fiery, warm, light, rare, active-masculine character—
and into that of the negative qualities. The latter
express really only the lack, the absence of the
others, the positive ones. He therefore described
the sphere in which the positive qualities are absent
as dark, earthy, cold, heavy, dense and altogether as
of feminine-passive character. Instead of the expres-
sions "positive" and "negative" he used the standing
term "existent" and "non-existent" and had arrived
with this at the proposition, that, in contradiction to
Anaximander, this our world itself contains some-
thing "existent," and of course something "non-
existent. " One is not to seek that "existent" out-
side the world and as it were above our horizon; but
before us, and everywhere in every Becoming, some-
thing " existent" and active is contained.
## p. 117 (#180) ############################################
Il6 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
for all Anaximander had escaped from the realm of
Becoming and from the empirically given qualities
of such realm, that leap did not become an easy
matter to minds so independently fashioned as those
of Heraclitus and Parmenides; first they endea-
voured to walk as far as they could and reserved
to themselves the leap for that place, where the
foot finds no more hold and one has to leap, in
order not to fall. Both looked repeatedly at that
very world, which Anaximander had condemned in
so melancholy a way and declared to be the place
of wanton crime and at the same time the peni-
tentiary cell for the injustice of Becoming. Contem-
plating this world Heraclitus, as we know already,
had discovered what a wonderful order, regularity
and security manifest themselves in every Becom-
ing; from that he concluded that the Becoming
could not be anything evil and unjust . Quite a
different outlook had Parmenides; he compared
the qualities one with another, and believed that
they were not all of the same kind, but ought to be
classified under two headings. If for example he
compared bright and dark, then the second quality
was obviously only the negation of the first; and
thus he distinguished positive and negative qualities,
seriously endeavouring to rediscover and register that
fundamental antithesis in the whole realm of Nature.
His method was the following: He took a few anti-
theses, e. g. , light and heavy, rare and dense, active
and passive, and compared them with that typical
antithesis of bright and dark: that which corre-
sponded with the bright was the positive, that which
corresponded with the dark the negative quality. If
## p. 117 (#181) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 117
he took perhaps the heavy and light, the light fell
to the side of the bright, the heavy to the side of
the dark; and thus "heavy" was to him only the
negation of " light," but the " light" a positive quality.
This method alone shows that he had a defiant apti-
tude for abstract logical procedure, closed against
the suggestions of the senses. The "heavy" seems
indeed to offer itself very forcibly to the senses as
a positive quality; that did not keep Parmenides
from stamping it as a negation. Similarly he placed
the earth in opposition to the fire, the "cold" in
opposition to the "warm," the "dense" in opposi-
tion to the " rare,"the "female" in opposition to the
"male," the " passive " in opposition to the " active,"
merely as negations: so that before his gaze our em-
piric world divided itself into two separate spheres,
into that of the positive qualities—with a bright,
fiery, warm, light, rare, active-masculine character—
and into that of the negative qualities. The latter
express really only the lack, the absence of the
others, the positive ones. He therefore described
the sphere in which the positive qualities are absent
as dark, earthy, cold, heavy, dense and altogether as
of feminine-passive character. Instead of the expres-
sions "positive" and "negative" he used the standing
term "existent" and "non-existent" and had arrived
with this at the proposition, that, in contradiction to
Anaximander, this our world itself contains some-
thing "existent," and of course something "non-
existent. " One is not to seek that "existent" out-
side the world and as it were above our horizon ; but
before us, and everywhere in every Becoming, some-
thing "existent" and active is contained.
## p. 117 (#182) ############################################
Il6 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
for all Anaximander had escaped from the realm of
Becoming and from the empirically given qualities
of such realm, that leap did not become an easy
matter to minds so independently fashioned as those
of Heraclitus and Parmenides; first they endea-
voured to walk as far as they could and reserved
to themselves the leap for that place, where the
foot finds no more hold and one has to leap, in
order not to fall. Both looked repeatedly at that
very world, which Anaximander had condemned in
so melancholy a way and declared to be the place
of wanton crime and at the same time the peni-
tentiary cell for the injustice of Becoming. Contem-
plating this world Heraclitus, as we know already,
had discovered what a wonderful order, regularity
and security manifest themselves in every Becom-
ing; from that he concluded that the Becoming
could not be anything evil and unjust. Quite a
different outlook had Parmenides; he compared
the qualities one with another, and believed that
they were not all of the same kind, but ought to be
classified under two headings. If for example he
compared bright and dark, then the second quality
was obviously only the negation of the first; and
thus he distinguished positive and negative qualities,
seriously endeavouring to rediscover and register that
fundamental antithesis in the whole realm of Nature.
His method was the following: He took a few anti-
theses, e. g. , light and heavy, rare and dense, active
and passive, and compared them with that typical
antithesis of bright and dark: that which corre-
sponded with the bright was the positive, that which
corresponded with the dark the negative quality. If
## p. 117 (#183) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 117
he took perhaps the heavy and light, the light fell
to the side of the bright, the heavy to the side of
the dark; and thus "heavy" was to him only the
negation of "light," but the "light" a positive quality.
This method alone shows that he had a defiant apti-
tude for abstract logical procedure, closed against
the suggestions of the senses. The " heavy " seems
indeed to offer itself very forcibly to the senses as
a positive quality; that did not keep Parmenides
from stamping it as a negation. Similarly he placed
the earth in opposition to the fire, the "cold" in
opposition to the "warm," the "dense" in opposi-
tion to the " rare," the "female" in opposition to the
"male," the " passive " in opposition to the " active,"
merely as negations: so that before his gaze our em-
piric world divided itself into two separate spheres,
into that of the positive qualities—with a bright,
fiery, warm, light, rare, active-masculine character—
and into that of the negative qualities. The latter
express really only the lack, the absence of the
others, the positive ones. He therefore described
the sphere in which the positive qualities are absent
as dark, earthy, cold, heavy, dense and altogether as
of feminine-passive character. Instead of the expres-
sions "positive" and "negative" he used the standing
term "existent" and "non-existent" and had arrived
with this at the proposition, that, in contradiction to
Anaximander, this our world itself contains some-
thing "existent," and of course something "non-
existent. " One is not to seek that "existent" out-
side the world and as it were above our horizon; but
before us, and everywhere in every Becoming, some-
thing " existent" and active is contained.
## p. 118 (#184) ############################################
Il8 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
With that however still remained to him the task of
giving the more exact answer to the question: What
is the Becoming? and here was the moment where he
had to leap, in order not to fall, although perhaps to
such natures as that of Parmenides, even any leaping
means a falling. Enough 1 we get into fog, into the
mysticism of qualitates occulta, and even a little into
mythology. Parmenides, like Heraclitus, looks at the
general Becoming and Not-remaining and explains
to himself a Passing only thus, that the "Non-Exist-
ent" bore the guilt. For how should the "Existent"
bear the guilt of Passing? Likewise, however, the Ori-
ginating,/'. ^. , the Becoming, must come about through
the assistance of the " Non-Existent"; for the "Ex-
istent" is always there and could not of itself first ori-
ginate and it could not explain any Originating, any
Becoming. Therefore the Originating, the Becom-
ing as well as the Passing and Perishing have been
brought about by the negative qualities. But that
the originating "thing" has a content,and the passing
"thing" loses a content, presupposes that the posi-
tive qualities—and that just means that very content
—participate likewise in both processes. In short the
proposition results: "For the Becoming the 'Exist-
ent' as well as the 'Non-Existent' is necessary; when
they co-operate then a Becoming results. " But how
come the "positive" and the "negative" to one an-
other? Should they not on the contrary eternally flee
one another as antitheses and thereby make every
Becoming impossible? Here Parmenides appeals to
a qualitas occulta, to a mystic tendency of the anti-
thetical pairs to approach and attract one another,
and he allegorises that peculiar contrariety by the
## p. 119 (#185) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 119
name of Aphrodite, and by the empirically known
relation of the male and female principle. It is the
power of Aphrodite which plays the matchmaker
between the antithetical pair, the "Existent" and
the "Non-Existent. " Passion brings together the
antagonistic and antipathetic elements: the result
is a Becoming. When Desire has become satiated,
Hatred and the innate antagonism again drive
asunder the "Existent" and the "Non-Existent"—
then man says: the thing perishes, passes.
10
But no one with impunity lays his profane hands
on such awful abstractions as the "Existent" and
the "Non-Existent"; the blood freezes slowly as
one touches them. There was a day upon which an
odd idea suddenly occurred to Parmenides, an idea
which seemed to take all value away from his former
combinations, so that he felt inclined to throw them
aside, like a money bag with old worn-out coins.
It is commonly believed that an external impres-
sion, in addition to the centrifugal consequence of
such ideas as "existent" and "non-existent," has
also been co-active in the invention of that day; this
impression was an acquaintance with the theology
of the old roamer and rhapsodist, the singer of a
mystic deification of Nature, the Kolophonian
Xenophanes. Throughout an extraordinary life
Xenophanes lived as a wandering poet and became
through his travels a well-informed and most in-
structive man who knew how to question and
how to narrate, for which reason Heraclitus reck-
oned him amongst the polyhistorians and above
## p. 120 (#186) ############################################
120 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
all amongst the "historic" natures, in the sense men-
tioned. Whence and when came to him the mystic
bent into the One and the eternally Resting, nobody
will be able to compute; perhaps it is only the con-
ception of the finally settled old man, to whom, after
the agitation of his erratic wanderings, and after
the restless learning and searching for truth, the
vision of a divine rest, the permanence of all things
within a pantheistic primal peace appears as the
highest and greatest ideal.
After all it seems to
me quite accidental that in the same place in Elea
two men lived together for a time, each of whom
carried in his head a conception of unity; they
formed no school and had nothing in common which
perhaps the one might have learned from the other
and then might have handed on. For, in the case
of these two men, the origin of that conception of
unity is quite different, yea opposite; and if either of
them has become at all acquainted with the doctrine
of the other then, in order to understand it at all, he
had to translate it first into his own language. With
this translation however the very specific element of
the other doctrine was lost. Whereas Parmenides
arrived at the unity of the "Existent" purely through
an alleged logical consequence and whereas he span
that unity out of the ideas "Being" and "Not-Being,"
Xenophanes was a religious mystic and belonged,
with that mystic unity, very properly to the Sixth
Century. Although he was no such revolutionising
personality as Pythagoras he had nevertheless in his
wanderings the same bent and impulse to improve,
purify, and cure men. He was the ethical teacher,
but still in the stage of the rhapsodist; in a later time
## p. 121 (#187) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 121
he would have been a sophist. In the daring dis-
approval of the existing customs and valuations he
had not his equal in Greece; moreover he did not,
like Heraclitus and Plato, retire into solitude but
placed himself before the very public, whose exult-
ing admiration of Homer, whose passionate pro-
pensity for the honours of the gymnastic festivals,
whose adoration of stones in human shape, he criti-
cised severely with wrath and scorn, yet not as a
brawling Thersites. The freedom of the individual
was with him on its zenith; and by this almost limit-
less stepping free from all conventions he was more
closely related to Parmenides than by that last divine
unity, which once he had beheld, in a visionary state
worthy of that century. His unity scarcely had ex-
pression and word in common with the one "Being"
of Parmenides, and certainly had not the same origin.
It was rather an opposite state of mind in which
Parmenides found his doctrine of" Being. " On that
day and in that state he examined his two co-oper-
ating antitheses, the "Existent" and the "Non-
Existent," the positive and the negative qualities, of
which Desire and Hatred constitute the world and
the Becoming. He was suddenly caught up, mis-
trusting, by the idea of negative quality, of the "Non-
Existent. " For can something which does not exist
be a quality? or to put the question in a broader sense:
can anything indeed which does not exist, exist?
The only form of knowledge in which we at once put
unconditional trust and the disapproval of which
amounts to madness, is the tautology A = A. But
this very tautological knowledge called inexorably
to him: what does not exist, exists not! What is, is!
r
## p. 122 (#188) ############################################
122 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
Suddenly he feels upon his life the load of an enor-
mous logical sin; for had he not always without
hesitation assumed that there were existing negative
qualities, in short a "Non-Existent," that therefore,
to express it by a formula, A = Not-A, which indeed
could only be advanced by the most out and out
perversity of thinking. It is true, as he recollected,
the whole great mass of men judge with the same
perversity; he himself has only participated in the
general crime against logic. But the same moment
which charges him with this crime surrounds him
with the light of the glory of an invention, he has
found, apart from all human illusion, a principle,
the key to the world-secret, he now descends into
the abyss of things, guided by the firm and fearful
hand of the tautological truth as to " Being. "
On the way thither he meets Heraclitus—an un-
fortunate encounter! Just now Heraclitus' play with
antinomies was bound to be very hateful to him,
who placed the utmost importance upon the severest
separation of "Being" and "Not- Being"; propositions
like this : "We are and at the same time we are not"
—"'Being' and 'Not-Being' is at the same time the
same thing and again not the same thing," proposi-
tions through which all that he had just elucidated
and disentangled became again dim and inextric-
able, incited him to wrath. "Away with the men,"
he exclaimed, "who seem to have two heads and
yet know nothing! With them truly everything is
in flux, even their thinking! They stare at things
stupidly, but they must be deaf as well as blind so
to mix up the opposites"! The want of judgment
on the part of the masses, glorified by playful anti-
## p. 123 (#189) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 123
nomies and praised as the acme of all knowledge was
to him a painful and incomprehensible experience.
Now he dived into the cold bath of his awful ab-
stractions. That which is true must exist in eternal
presence, about it cannot be said "it was," "it will
be. " The "Existent" cannot have become; for out of
what should it have become? Out of the " Non-Ex-
istent"? But that does not exist and can produce
nothing. Out of the " Existent"? This would not
produce anything but itself. The same applies to
the Passing, it is just as impossible as the Becoming,
as any change, any increase, any decrease. On the
whole the proposition is valid: Everything about
which it can be said: "it has been " or " it will be"
does not exist; about the "Existent" however it can
never be said "it does not exist. " The "Existent" is
indivisible, for where is the second power, which
should divide it? It is immovable, for whither should
it move itself? It cannot be infinitely great nor in-
finitely small, for it is perfect and a perfectly given
infinitude is a contradiction. Thus the "Existent" is
suspended,delimited, perfect, immovable, everywhere
equally balanced and suchequilibriumequallyperfect
at any point, like a globe, but not in a space, for
otherwise this space would be a second "Existent. "
But there cannot exist several "Existents," for in
order to separate them, something would have to exist
which was not existing, an assumption which neutral-
ises itself. Thus there exists only the eternal Unity.
If now, however, Parmenides turned back his gaze
to the world of Becoming, the existence of which he
had formerly tried to understand by such ingenious
conjectures, he was wroth at his eye seeing the
## p. 123 (#190) ############################################
122 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
Suddenly he feels upon his life the load of an enor-
mous logical sin; for had he not always without
hesitation assumed that tliere were existing negative
qualities, in short a "Non-Existent," that therefore,
to express it by a formula, A = Not-A, which indeed
could only be advanced by the most out and out
perversity of thinking. It is true, as he recollected,
the whole great mass of men judge with the same
perversity; he himself has only participated in the
general crime against logic. But the same moment
which charges him with this crime surrounds him
with the light of the glory of an invention, he has
found, apart from all human illusion, a principle,
the key to the world-secret, he now descends into
the abyss of things, guided by the firm and fearful
hand of the tautological truth as to " Being. "
On the way thither he meets Heraclitus—an un-
fortunate encounter! Just now Heraclitus' play with
antinomies was bound to be very hateful to him,
who placed the utmost importance upon the severest
separation of "Being" and "Not- Being"; propositions
like this : "We arc and at the same time we are not"
—"'Being' and 'Not-Being' is at the same time the
same thing and again not the same thing," proposi-
tions through which all that he had just elucidated
and disentangled became again dim and inextric-
able, incited him to wrath. "Away with the men,"
he exclaimed, "who seem to have two heads and
yet know nothing! With them truly everything is
in flux, even their thinking! They stare at things
stupidly, but they must be deaf as well as blind so
to mix up the opposites"! The want of judgment
on the part of the masses, glorified by playful anti-
"
n
## p. 123 (#191) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 123
nomies and praised as the acme of all knowledge was
to him a painful and incomprehensible experience.
Now he dived into the cold bath of his awful ab-
stractions. That which is true must exist in eternal
presence, about it cannot be said "it was," "it will
be. " The "Existent" cannot have become; for out of
what should it have become? Out of the " Non-Ex-
istent "? But that does not exist and can produce
nothing. Out of the " Existent"? This would not
produce anything but itself. The same applies to
the Passing, it is just as impossible as the Becoming,
as any change, any increase, any decrease. On the
whole the proposition is valid: Everything about
which it can be said: "it has been " or " it will be"
does not exist; about the "Existent" however it can
never be said "it does not exist. " The " Existent" is
indivisible, for where is the second power, which
should divide it? It is immovable, for whither should
it move itself? It cannot be infinitely great nor in-
finitely small, for it is perfect and a perfectly given
infinitude is a contradiction. Thus the " Existent" is
suspended, delimited, perfect,immovable, every where
equally balanced and suchequilibriumequallyperfect
at any point, like a globe, but not in a space, for
otherwise this space would be a second "Existent. "
But there cannot exist several "Existents," for in
order to separate them, something would have to exist
which was notexisting, an assumption which neutral-
ises itself. Thus there exists only the eternal Unity.
If now, however, Parmenides turned back his gaze
to the world of Becoming, the existence of which he
had formerly tried to understand by such ingenious
conjectures, he was wroth at his eye seeing the
## p. 124 (#192) ############################################
124 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
Becoming at all, his ear hearing it. "Do not follow
the dim-sighted eyes," now his command runs, " not
the resounding ear nor the tongue, but examine
only by the power of the thought. " Therewith he
accomplished the extremely important first critique
of the apparatus of knowledge, although this critique
was still inadequate and proved disastrous in its
consequences. By tearing entirely asunder the
senses and the ability to think in abstractions, i. e.
reason, just as if they were two thoroughly separate
capacities, he demolished the intellect itself, and
incited people to that wholly erroneous separation
of" mind " and "body" which, especially since Plato,
lies like a curse on philosophy. All sense percep-
tions, Parmenides judges, cause only illusions and
their chief illusion is their deluding us to believe that
even the "Non-Existent" exists, that even the Be-
coming has a " Being. " All that plurality, diversity
and variety of the empirically known world, the
change of its qualities, the order in its ups and downs,
is thrown aside mercilessly as mere appearance and
delusion; from there nothing is to be learnt, there-
fore all labour is wasted which one bestows upon
this false, through-and-through futile world, the con-
ception of which has been obtained by being hum-
bugged by the senses. He who judges in such
generalisations as Parmenides did, ceases therewith
to be an investigator of natural philosophy in detail;
his interest in phenomena withers away; there de-
velops even a hatred of being unable to get rid of
this eternal fraud of the senses. Truth is now to
dwell only in the most faded, most abstract gener-
alities, in the empty husks of the most indefinite
## p. 125 (#193) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 125
words, as in a maze of cobwebs; and by such a
"truth" now the philosopher sits, bloodless as an
abstraction and surrounded by a web of fprmulae.
The spider undoubtedly wants the blood of its vic-
tims; but the Parmenidean philosopher hates the
very blood of his victims, the blood of Empiricism
sacrificed by him.
ii
And that was a Greek who " flourished " about the
time of the outbreak of the Ionic Revolution. At
that time it was possible for a Greek to flee out of
the superabundant reality, as out of a mere delusive
schematism of the imaginative faculties—not perhaps
like Plato into the land of the eternal ideas, into the
workshop of the world-creator, in order to feast the
eyes on unblemished, unbreakable primal-forms of
things—but into the rigid death-like rest of the cold-
est and emptiest conception, that of the " Being. " We
will indeed beware of interpreting such a remarkable
fact by false analogies. That flight was not a world-
flight in the sense of Indian philosophers ; no deep
religious conviction as to the depravity, transitori-
ness and accursedness of Existence demanded that
flight—that ultimate goal, the rest in the " Being,"
was not striven after as the mystic absorption in
one all-sufficing enrapturing conception which is a
puzzle and a scandal to common men. The thought
of Parmenides bears in itself not the slightest trace
of the intoxicating mystical Indian fragrance, which
is perhaps not wholly imperceptible in Pythagoras
and Empedocles; the strange thing in that fact, at
this period, is rather the very absence of fragrance,
## p. 126 (#194) ############################################
126 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
colour, soul, form, the total lack of blood, religiosity
and ethical warmth, the abstract-schematic—in a
Greek ! —above all however our philosopher's awful
energy of striving after Certainty, in a mythically
thinking and highly emotional - fantastic age is
quite remarkable. "Grant me but a certainty, ye
gods! " is the prayer of Parmenides, "and be it, in
the ocean of Uncertainty, only a board, broad enough
to lie on! Everything becoming, everything lux-
uriant, varied, blossoming, deceiving, stimulating,
living, take all that for yourselves, and give to me
but the single poor empty Certainty! "
In the philosophy of Parmenides the theme of
ontology forms the prelude. Experience offered
him nowhere a "Being" as he imagined it to himself,
but from the fact that he could conceive of it he
concluded that it must exist; a conclusion which
rests upon the supposition that we have an organ of
knowledge which reaches into the nature of things
and is independent of experience. The material of
our thinking according to Parmenides does not exist
in perception at all but is brought in from somewhere
else, from an extra-material world to which by
thinking we have a direct access. Against all simi-
lar chains of reasoning Aristotle has already asserted
that existence never belongs to the essence, never
belongs to the nature of a thing. For that very
reason from the idea of "Being"—of which the
essentia precisely is only the "Being "—cannot be
inferred an existentia of the "Being" at all. The
logical content of that antithesis "Being" and "Not-
Being" is perfectly nil, if the object lying at the
bottom of it, if the precept cannot be given from
## p. 127 (#195) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 127
which this antithesis has been deduced by abstrac-
tion; without this going back to the precept the
antithesis is only a play with conceptions, through
which indeed nothing is discerned. For the merely
logical criterion of truth, as Kant teaches, namely the
agreement of a discernment with the general and
the formal laws of intellect and reason is, it is true,
the conditio sine qua non, consequently the negative
condition of all truth; further however logic cannot
go, and logic cannot discover by any touchstone the
error which pertains not to the form but to the
contents. As soon, however, as one seeks the con-
tent for the logical truth of the antithesis: "That
which is, is; that which is not, is not," one will find
indeed not a simple reality, which is fashioned
rigidly according to that antithesis: about a tree I
can say as well "it is" in comparison with all the
other things, as well "it becomes" in comparison
with itself at another moment of time as finally also
"it is not," e. g. , "it is not yet tree," as long as I per-
haps look at the shrub. Words are only symbols for
the relations of things among themselves and to us,
and nowhere touch absolute truth; and now to crown
all, the word "Being" designates only the most
general relation, which connects all things, and so
does the word " Not-Being. " If however the Exist-
ence of the things themselves be unprovable, then the
relation of the things among themselves, the so-called
"Being" and "Not-Being," will not bring us any
nearer to the land of truth. By means of words and
ideas we shall never get behind the wall of the rela-
tions, let us say into some fabulous primal cause of
things, and even in the pure forms of the sensitive
## p. 128 (#196) ############################################
128 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
faculty and of the intellect, in space, time and
causality we gain nothing, which might resemble a
"veritas cBterna. " It is absolutely impossible for
the subject to see and discern something beyond
himself, so impossible that Cognition and "Being"
are the most contradictory of all spheres. And if in
the uninstructed naivete of the then critique of the in-
tellect Parmenides was permitted to fancy that out of
the eternally subjective idea he had come to a "Being-
In-itself," then it is to-day, after Kant, a daring
ignorance, if here and there, especially among badly
informed theologians who want to play the philoso-
pher, is proposed as the task of philosophy: "to
conceive the Absolute by means of consciousness,"
perhaps even in the form: "the Absolute is already
extant,else how could it be sought? " as Hegel has ex-
pressed himself, or with the saying of Beneke: "that
the' Being' must be given somehow, must be attain-
able for us somehow, since otherwise we could not
even have the idea of Being. '" The idea of "Being "!
As though that idea did not indicate the most miser-
able empiric origin already in the etymology of the
word. For esse means at the bottom: "to breathe,"
if man uses it of all other things, then he transmits
the conviction that he himself breathes and lives by
means of a metaphor, i. e. , by means of something
illogical to the other things and conceives of their
Existence as a Breathing according to human ana-
logy. Now the original meaning of the word soon
becomes effaced ; so much however still remains that
man conceives of the existence of other things ac-
cording to the analogy of his own existence, there-
fore anthropomorphically, and at any rate by means
## p. 129 (#197) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 129
of an illogical transmission. Even to man, therefore
apart from that transmission, the proposition: "I
breathe, therefore a 'Being' exists" is quite insuf-
ficient since against it the same objection must be
made, as against the ambulo, ergo sum, or ergo est.
12
The other idea, of greater import than that of the
"Existent," and likewise invented already by Par-
menides, although not yet so clearly applied as by
his disciple Zeno is the idea of the Infinite. Nothing
Infinite can exist; for from such an assumption the
contradictory idea of a perfect Infinitude would
result. Since now our actuality, our existing world
everywhere shows the character of that perfect
Infinitude, our world signifies in its nature a contra-
diction against logic and therewith also against
reality and is deception, lie, fantasma. Zeno especi-
ally applied the method of indirect proof; he said
for example, " There can be no motion from one
place to another; for if there were such a motion,
then an Infinitude would be given as perfect, this
however is an impossibility. " Achilles cannot catch
up the tortoise which has a small start in a race,
for in order to reach only the point from which the
tortoise began, he would have had to run through
innumerable, infinitely many spaces, viz. , first half
of that space, then the fourth, then the sixteenth,
and so on ad infinitum. If he does in fact overtake
the tortoise then this is an illogical phenomenon,
and therefore at any rate not a truth, not a reality,
not real "Being," but only a delusion. For it is never
possible to finish the infinite. Another popular ex-
9
## p. 130 (#198) ############################################
130 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
pression of this doctrine is the flying and yet resting
arrow. At any instant of its flight it has a position;
in this position it rests. Now would the sum of the
infinite positions of rest be identical with motion?
Would now the Resting, infinitely often repeated,
be Motion, therefore its own opposite? The Infinite
is here used as the aquafortis of reality, through it
the latter is dissolved. If however the Ideas are
fixed, eternal and entitative—and for Parmenides
"Being" and Thinking coincide—if therefore the In-
finite can never be perfect, if Rest can never become
Motion, then in fact the arrow has not flown at all;
it never left its place and resting position; no
moment of time has passed. Or expressed in an-
other way: in this so-called yet only alleged Actuality
there exists neither time, nor space, nor motion.
Finally the arrow itself is only an illusion; for it
originates out of the Plurality, out of the phantas-
magoria of the " Non-One" produced by the senses.
Suppose the arrow had a "Being," then it would be
immovable, timeless, increate, rigid and eternal—an
impossible conception! Supposing that Motion
was truly real, then there would be no rest, there-
fore no position for the arrow, therefore no space—
an impossible conception! Supposing that time were
real, then it could not be of an infinite divisibility;
the time which the arrow needed, would have to
consist of a limited number of time-moments, each
of these moments would have to be an Atomon—an
impossible conception! All our conceptions, as soon
as their empirically-given content, drawn out of this
concrete world, is taken as a veritas aterna, lead to
contradictions. If there is absolute motion, then
## p. 131 (#199) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 131
there is no space; if there is absolute space then
there is no motion; if there is absolute "Being," then
there is no Plurality; if there is an absolute Plurality,
then there is no Unity. It should at least become
clear to us how little we touch the heart of things or
untie the knot of reality with such ideas, whereas
Parmenides and Zeno inversely hold fast to the
truth and omnivalidity of ideas and condemn the
perceptible world as the opposite of the true and
omnivalid ideas, as an objectivation of the illogical
and contradictory. With all their proofs they start
from the wholly undemonstrable, yea improbable
assumption that in that apprehensive faculty we
possess the decisive, highest criterion of "Being" and
"Not-Being," i. e. ,of objective reality and its opposite;
those ideas are not to prove themselves true, to
correct themselves by Actuality, as they are after
all really derived from it, but on the contrary they
are to measure and to judge Actuality, and in case
of a contradiction with logic, even to condemn.
In order to concede to them this judicial competence
Parmenides had to ascribe to them the same" Being,"
which alone he allowed in general as the "Being ";
Thinking and that one increate perfect ball of the
"Existent" were now no longer to be conceived as
two different kinds of " Being," since there was not
permitted a duality of" Being. " Thus the over-risky
flash of fancy had become necessaryto declare Think-
ing and " Being" identical. No form of perceptibility,
no symbol, no simile could possibly be of any help
here; the fancy was wholly inconceivable, but it
was necessary, yea in the lack of every possibility
of illustration it celebrated the highest triumph over
## p. 132 (#200) ############################################
132 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
the world and the claims of the senses. Thinking
and that clod-like, ball-shaped,through-and-through
dead-massive, and rigid-immovable "Being," must,
according to the Parmenidean imperative, dissolve
into one another and be the same in every respect,
to the horror of fantasy. What does it matter that
this identity contradicts the senses! This contra-
diction is just the guarantee that such an identity
is not borrowed from the senses.
13
Moreover against Parmenides could be produced
a strong couple of argumenta ad hominem or ex con-
cessis, by which, it is true, truth itself could not be
brought to light, but at any rate the untruth of that
absolute separation of the world of the senses and
the world of the ideas, and the untruth of the iden-
tity of" Being" and Thinking could be demonstrated.
Firstly, if the Thinking of Reason in ideas is real,
then also Plurality and Motion must have reality, for
rational Thinking is mobile; and more precisely, it is
a motion from idea to idea, therefore within a plur-
ality of realities. There is no subterfuge against
that; it is quite impossible to designate Thinking
as a rigid Permanence, as an eternally immobile,
intellectual Introspection of Unity. Secondly, if
only fraud and illusion come from the senses, and if in
reality there exists only the real identity of " Being"
and Thinking, what then are the senses themselves?
They too are certainly Appearance only since they
do not coincide with the Thinking, and their pro-
duct, the world of senses, does not coincide with
"Being. " If however the senses themselves are
## p. 133 (#201) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 133
Appearance to whom then are they Appearance?
How can they, being unreal, still deceive? The
"Non-Existent" cannot even deceive. Therefore
the Whence? of deception and Appearance remains
an enigma, yea, a contradiction. We call these argu-
menta ad hominem: The Objection Of The Mobile
Reason and that of The Origin Of Appearance.
From the first would result the reality of Motion
and of Plurality, from the second the impossibility
of the Parmenidean Appearance, assuming that the
chief-doctrine of Parmenides on the "Being" were
accepted as true. This chief-doctrine however only
says: The "Existent" only has a "Being," the "Non-
Existent" does not exist. If Motion however has
such a " Being," then to Motion applies what applies
to the " Existent" in general: it is increate, eternal,
indestructible, without increase or decrease. But if
the " Appearance" is denied and a belief in it made
untenable, by means of that question as to the
Whence? of the "Appearance," if the stage of the
so-called Becoming, of change, our many-shaped,
restless, coloured and rich Existence is protected
from the Parmenidean rejection, then it is necessary
to characterise this world of change and alteration
as a sum of such really existing Essentials, existing
simultaneously into all eternity. Of a change in
the strict sense, of a Becoming there cannot natur-
ally be any question even with this assumption.
But now Plurality has a real "Being," all qualities
have a real "Being" and motion not less; and of any
moment of this world—although these moments
chosen at random lie at a distance of millenniums
from one another—it would have to be possible to
## p. 134 (#202) ############################################
134 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
say: all real Essentials extant in this world are with-
out exception co-existent, unaltered, undiminished,
without increase, without decrease. A millennium
later the world is exactly the same. Nothing has
altered. If in spite of that the appearance of the
world at the one time is quite different from that at
the other time, then that is no deception, nothing
merely apparent, but the effect of eternal motion.
The real "Existent" is moved sometimes thus, some-
times thus: together, asunder, upwards, downwards,
into one another, pell-mell.
14
With this conception we have already taken a step
into the realm of the doctrine of Anaxagoras. By
him both objections against Parmenides are raised
in full strength; that of the mobile Thinking and
that of the Whence? of " Appearance "; but in the
chief proposition Parmenides has subjugated him
as well as all the younger philosophers and nature-
explorers. They all deny the possibility of Becom-
ing and Passing, as the mind of the people conceives
them and as Anaximander and Heraclitus had as-
sumed with greater circumspection and yet still heed-
lessly. Such a mythological Originating out of the
Nothing, such a Disappearing into the Nothing, such
an arbitrary Changing of the Nothing into the Some-
thing, such a random exchanging, putting on and
putting off of the qualities was henceforth considered
senseless ; but so was, and for the same reasons, an
originating of the Many out of the One, of the mani-
fold qualities out of the one primal-quality, in short
the derivation ofthe world outof a primary substance,
## p. 135 (#203) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 135
as argued by Thales and Heraclitus. Ratherwas now
the real problem advanced of applying the doctrineof
increate imperishable " Being" to this existing world,
without taking one's refuge in the theory of appear-
ance and deception. But if the empiric world is not
to be Appearance, if the things are not to be derived
out of Nothing and j ust as little out of the one Some-
thing, then these things must contain in themselves a
real "Being," their matter and content must be uncon-
ditionally real, and all change can refer only to the
form, i. e. , to the position, order, grouping, mixing,
separation of these eternally co-existing Essentials.
It is just as in a game of dice; they are ever the
same dice; but falling sometimes thus, sometimes
thus, they mean to us something different. All older
theories had gone back to a primal element, as womb
and cause of Becoming, be this water, air, fire or the
Indefinite of Anaximander. Against that Anaxa-
goras now asserts that out of the Equal the Unequal
could never come forth, and that out of the one
"Existent" the change could never be explained.
Whether now one were to imagine that assumed
matter to be rarefied or condensed, one would never
succeed by such a condensation or rarefaction in
explaining the problem one would like to explain:
the plurality of qualities. But if the world in fact
is full of the most different qualities then these must,
in case they are not appearance, have a " Being," i. e. ,
must be eternal, increate, imperishable and ever co-
existing. Appearance, however, they cannot be,
since the question as to the Whence? of Appearance
remains unanswered, yea answers itself in the nega-
tive! The earlier seekers after Truth had intended
## p. 136 (#204) ############################################
136 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
to simplify the problem of Becoming by advancing
only one substance, which bore in its bosom the
possibilities of all Becoming; now on the contrary
it is asserted: there are innumerable substances,
but never more, never less, and never new ones.
Only Motion, playing dice with them throws them
into ever new combinations. That Motion however
is a truth and not Appearance, Anaxagoras proved
in opposition to Parmenides by the indisputable
succession of our conceptions in thinking. We have
therefore in the most direct fashion the insight into
the truth of motion and succession in the fact that
we think and have conceptions.
- similarly, just as the child and the artist play, the
eternally living fire plays, builds up and destroys, in
innocence—and this game the JEon plays with him-
self. Transforming himself into water and earth,
like a child he piles heaps of sand by the sea, piles
up and demolishes; from time to time he recom-
mences the game. A moment of satiety, then again
desire seizes him, as desire compels the artist to
create. Not wantonness, but the ever newly awaken-
ing impulse to play, calls into life other worlds. The
child throws away his toys ; but soon he starts again
in an innocent frame of mind. As soon however as
the child builds he connects, joins and forms law-
fully and according to an innate sense of order.
Thus only is the world contemplated by the
aesthetic man, who has learned from the artist and
the genesis of the latter's work, how the struggle of
plurality can yet bear within itself law and justice,
how the artist stands contemplative above, and
working within the work of art, how necessity and
play, antagonism and harmony must pair themselves
for the procreation of the work of art.
Who now will still demand from such a philosophy
a system of Ethics with the necessary imperatives
N
## p. 109 (#167) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 109
—Thou Shalt,—or even reproach Heraclitus with
such a deficiency. Man down to his last fibre is
Necessity and absolutely "unfree "—if by freedom
one understands the foolish claim to be able to
change at will one's essentia like a garment, a claim,
which up to the present every serious philosophy
has rejected with due scorn. That so few human
beings live with consciousness in the Logos and in
accordance with the all-overlooking artist's eye
originates from their souls being wet and from the
fact that men's eyes and ears, their intellect in general
is a bad witness when "moist ooze fills their souls. "
Why that is so, is not questioned any more than
why fire becomes water and earth. Heraclitus is
not compelled to prove (as Leibnitz was) that this
world was even the best of all; it was sufficient for
him that the world is the beautiful, innocent play of
the iEon. Man on the whole is to him even an
irrational being, with which the fact that in all his
essence the law of all-ruling reason is fulfilled does
not clash. He does not occupy a specially favoured
position in nature, whose highest phenomenon is
not simple-minded man, but fire, for instance, as
stars. In so far as man has through necessity re-
ceived a share of fire, he is a little more rational;
as far as he consists of earth and water it stands
badly with his reason. He is not compelled to take
cognisance of the Logos simply because he is a
human being. Why is there water, why earth?
This to Heraclitus is a much more serious problem
than to ask, why men are so stupid and bad. In
the highest and the most perverted men the same
inherent lawfulness and justice manifest themselves.
## p. 109 (#168) ############################################
108 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
hensible to him who like Heraclitus resembles the
contemplative god. Before his fiery eye no drop of
injustice is left in the world poured out around him,
and even that cardinal obstacle—how pure fire can
take up its quarters in forms so impure—he masters
by means of a sublime simile. A Becoming and
Passing, a building and destroying, without any
moral bias, in perpetual innocence is in this world
only the play of the artist and of the child. And
i — similarly, just as the child and the artist play, the
eternally living fire plays, builds up and destroys, in
innocence—and this game the JEon plays with him-
self. Transforming himself into water and earth,
like a child he piles heaps of sand by the sea, piles
up and demolishes; from time to time he recom-
mences the game. A moment of satiety, then again
desire seizes him, as desire compels the artist to
create. Not wantonness, but the ever newly awaken-
ing impulse to play, calls into life other worlds. The
child throws away his toys ; but soon he starts again
in an innocent frame of mind. As soon however as
the child builds he connects, joins and forms law-
fully and according to an innate sense of order.
Thus only is the world contemplated by the
aesthetic man, who has learned from the artist and
the genesis of the latter's work, how the struggle of
plurality can yet bear within itself law and justice,
how the artist stands contemplative above, and
working within the work of art, how necessity and
play, antagonism and harmony must pair themselves
for the procreation of the work of art.
Who now will still demand from such a philosophy
a system of Ethics with the necessary imperatives
## p. 109 (#169) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 109
—Thou Shalt,—or even reproach Heraclitus with
such a deficiency. Man down to his last fibre is
Necessity and absolutely "unfree "—if by freedom
one understands the foolish claim to be able to
change at will one's essentia like a garment, a claim,
which up to the present every serious philosophy
has rejected with due scorn. That so few human
beings live with consciousness in the Logos and in
accordance with the all-overlooking artist's eye
originates from their souls being wet and from the
fact that men's eyes and ears, their intellect in general
is a bad witness when "moist ooze fills their souls. "
Why that is so, is not questioned any more than
why fire becomes water and earth. Heraclitus is
not compelled to prove (as Leibnitz was) that this
world was even the best of all; it was sufficient for
him that the world is the beautiful, innocent play of
the /Eon. Man on the whole is to him even an
irrational being, with which the fact that in all his
essence the law of all-ruling reason is fulfilled does
not clash. He does not occupy a specially favoured
position in nature, whose highest phenomenon is
not simple-minded man, but fire, for instance, as
stars. In so far as man has through necessity re-
ceived a share of fire, he is a little more rational;
as far as he consists of earth and water it stands
badly with his reason. He is not compelled to take
cognisance of the Logos simply because he is a
human being. Why is there water, why earth?
This to Heraclitus is a much more serious problem
than to ask, why men are so stupid and bad. In
the highest and the most perverted men the same
inherent lawfulness and justice manifest themselves.
## p. 110 (#170) ############################################
110 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
If however one would ask Heraclitus the question
"Why is fire not always fire, why is it now water,
now earth? " then he would only just answer: "It
is a game, don't take it too pathetically and still less,
morally. " Heraclitus describes only the existing
world and has the same contemplative pleasure in
it which the artist experiences when looking at his
growing work. Only those who have cause to be
discontented with his natural history of man find
him gloomy, melancholy, tearful, sombre, atrabil-
arious, pessimistic and altogether hateful. He how-
ever would take these discontented people, together
with their antipathies and sympathies, their hatred
and their love, as negligible and perhaps answer
them with some such comment as : " Dogs bark at
anything they do not know," or, " To the ass chaff
is preferable to gold. "
With such discontented persons also originate
the numerous complaints as to the obscurity of the
Heraclitean style; probably no man has ever
written clearer and more illuminatingly; of course,
- very abruptly, and therefore naturally obscure to the
racing readers. But why a philosopher should in-
tentionally write obscurely—a thing habitually said
about Heraclitus—is absolutely inexplicable; unless
he has some cause to hide his thoughts or is suffici-
ently a rogue to conceal his thoughtlessness under-
neath words. One is, as Schopenhauer says, indeed
compelled by lucid expression to prevent misunder-
standings even in affairs of practical every-day life,
how then should one be allowed to express oneself
indistinctly, indeed puzzlingly in the most difficult,
most abstruse, scarcely attainable object of thinking,
## p. 111 (#171) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY III
the tasks of philosophy? With respect to brevity
however Jean Paul gives a good precept: "On the
whole it is right that everything great—of deep
meaning to a rare mind—should be uttered with
brevity and (therefore) obscurely so that the paltry
mind would rather proclaim it to be nonsense than
translate it into the realm of his empty-headedness.
For common minds have an ugly ability to perceive
in the deepest and richest saying nothing but their
own every-day opinion. " Moreover and in spite of
it Heraclitus has not escaped the "paltry minds";
already the Stoics have " re-expounded" him into the
shallow and dragged down his aesthetic fundamental-
perception as to the play of the world to the miser-
able level of the common regard for the practical
ends of the world and more explicitly for the advan-
tages of man, so that out of his Physics has arisen
in those heads a crude optimism, with the continual
invitation to Dick, Tom, and Harry, "Plaudite
amid! "
8
Heraclitus was proud; and if it comes to pride
with a philosopher then it is a great pride. His work
never refers him to a " public," the applause of the
masses and the hailing chorus of contemporaries.
To wander lonely along his path belongs to the nature
of the philosopher. His talents are the most rare, in
a certain sense the most unnatural and at the same
time exclusive and hostile even toward kindred
talents. The wall of his self-sufficiency must be of
diamond, if it is not to be demolished and broken,
for everything is in motion against him. His journey
to immortality is more cumbersome and impeded
## p. 112 (#172) ############################################
112 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
than any other and yet nobody can believe more
firmly than the philosopher that he will attain the
goal by that journey—because he does not know
where he is to stand if not on the widely spread wings
of all time; for the disregard of everything present
and momentary lies in the essence of the great philo-
sophic nature. He has truth; the wheel of time
may roll whither it pleases, never can it escape from
truth. It is important to hear that such men have
lived. Never for example would one be able to
imagine the pride of Heraclitus as an idle possibility.
In itself every endeavour after knowledge seems by
its nature to be eternally unsatisfied and unsatis-
factory. Therefore nobody unless instructed by
history will like to believe in such a royal self-
esteem and conviction of being the only wooer of
truth. Such men live in their own solar-system—
one has to look for them there. A Pythagoras, an
Empedocles treated themselves too with a super-
human esteem, yea, with almost religious awe; but
the tie of sympathy united with the great conviction
of the metempsychosis and the unity of everything
living, led them back to other men, for their welfare
and salvation. Of that feeling of solitude, however,
which permeated the Ephesian recluse of the Artemis
Temple, one can only divine something, when grow-
ing benumbed in the wildest mountain desert. No
paramount feeling of compassionate agitation, no
desire to help, heal and save emanates from him.
He is a star without an atmosphere. His eye,
directed blazingly inwards, looks outward, for ap-
pearance's sake only, extinct and icy. All around
him, immediately upon the citadel of his pride beat
## p. 113 (#173) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 113
the waves of folly and perversity: with loathing he
turns away from them. But men with a feeling
heart would also shun such a Gorgon monster as cast
out of brass; within an out-of-the-way sanctuary,
among the statues of gods, by the side of cold com-
posedly-sublime architecture such a being may ap-
pear more comprehensible. As man among men
Heraclitus was incredible; and though he was seen
paying attention to the play of noisy children, even
then he was reflecting upon what never man thought
of on such an occasion: the play of the great world-
child, Zeus. He had no need of men, not even for
his discernments. He was not interested in all that
which one might perhaps ascertain from them, and
in what the other sages before him had been en-
deavouring to ascertain. He spoke with disdain of
such questioning, collecting, in short "historic" men.
"I sought and investigated myself," he said, with a
word by which one designates the investigation of
an oracle; as if he and no one else were the true
fulfiller and achiever of the Delphic precept: "Know
thyself. "
What he learned from this oracle, he deemed
immortal wisdom, and eternally worthy of explana-
tion, of unlimited effect even in the distance, after
the model of the prophetic speeches of the Sibyl.
It is sufficient for the latest mankind: let the latter
have that expounded to her, as oracular sayings,
which he like the Delphic god "neither enunciates
nor conceals. " Although it is proclaimed by him,
"without smiles, finery and the scent of ointments,"
but rather as with "foaming mouth," it must force
its way through the millenniums of the future. For
8
## p. 114 (#174) ############################################
114 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
the world needs truth eternally, therefore she needs
also Heraclitus eternally; although he has no need
of her. What does his fame matter to him ? —fame
with "mortals ever flowing on! " as he exclaims
scornfully. His fame is of concern to man, not to
himself; the immortality of mankind needs him, not
he the immortality of the man Heraclitus. That
which he beheld, the doctrine of the Law in the Be-
coming, and of the Play in the Necessity, must hence-
forth be beheld eternally; he has raised the curtain
of this greatest stage-play.
9
Whereas in every word of Heraclitusareexpressed
the pride and the majesty of truth, but of truth
caught by intuitions, not scaled by the rope-ladder
of Logic, whereas in sublime ecstasy he beholds but
does not espy, discerns but does not reckon, he is
contrasted with his contemporary Parmenides, a
man likewise with the type of a prophet of truth,
but formed as it were out of ice and not out of fire,
and shedding around himself cold, piercing light.
Parmenides once had, probably in his later years,
a moment of the very purest abstraction, undimmed
by any reality, perfectly lifeless; this moment—un-
Greek, like no other in the two centuries of the
Tragic Age—the product of which is the doctrine of
"Being," became a boundary-stone for his own life,
which divided it into two periods; at the same time
however the same moment divides the pre-Socratic
thinking into two halves, of which the first might be
called the Anaximandrian, the second the Parmen-
idean. The first period in Parmenides' own philoso-
## p. 115 (#175) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 115
phising bears still the signature of Anaximander;
this period produced a detailed philosophic-physical
system as answer to Anaximander's questions. When
later that icy abstraction-horror caught him, and the
simplest proposition treating of " Being " and " Not-
Being" was advanced by him, then among the many
older doctrines thrown by him upon the scrap heap
was also his own system. However he does not
appear to have lost all paternal piety towards the
strong and well-shapen child of his youth, and he
saved himself therefore by saying: "It is true there
is only one right way; if one however wants at any
time to betake oneself to another, then my earlier
opinion according to its purity and consequence
alone is right. " Sheltering himself with this phrase
he has allowed his former physical system a worthy
and extensive space in his great poem on Nature,
which really was to proclaim the new discernment as
the only signpost to truth. This fatherly regard,
even though an error should have crept in through
it, is a remainder of human feeling, in a nature quite
petrified by logical rigidity and almost changed into
a thinking-machine.
Parmenides, whose personal intercourse with An-
aximander does not seem incredible to me, and
whose starting from Anaximander's doctrine is not
only credible but evident, had the same distrust for
the complete separation of a world which only is,
and a world which only becomes, as had also caught
Heraclitus and led to a denying of " Being" alto-
gether. Both sought a way out from that contrast
and divergence of a dual order of the world. That
leap into the Indefinite, Indefinable, by which once
## p. 116 (#176) ############################################
Il6 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
for all Anaximander had escaped from the realm of
Becoming and from the empirically given qualities
of such realm, that leap did not become an easy-
matter to minds so independently fashioned as those
of Heraclitus and Parmenides; first they endea-
voured to walk as far as they could and reserved
to themselves the leap for that place, where the
foot finds no more hold and one has to leap, in
order not to fall. Both looked repeatedly at that
very world, which Anaximander had condemned in
so melancholy a way and declared to be the place
of wanton crime and at the same time the peni-
tentiary cell for the injustice of Becoming. Contem-
plating this world Heraclitus, as we know already,
had discovered what a wonderful order, regularity
and security manifest themselves in every Becom-
ing; from that he concluded that the Becoming
could not be anything evil and unjust. Quite a
different outlook had Parmenides; he compared
the qualities one with another, and believed that
they were not all of the same kind, but ought to be
classified under two headings. If for example he
compared bright and dark, then the second quality
was obviously only the negation of the first; and
thus he distinguished positive and negative qualities,
seriously endeavouring to rediscover and register that
fundamental antithesis in the whole realm of Nature.
His method was the following: He took a few anti-
theses, e. g. , light and heavy, rare and dense, active
and passive, and compared them with that typical
antithesis of bright and dark: that which corre-
sponded with the bright was the positive, that which
corresponded with the dark the negative quality. If
^
## p. 117 (#177) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 117
he took perhaps the heavy and light, the light fell
to the side of the bright, the heavy to the side of
the dark; and thus "heavy" was to him only the
negation of " light," but the " light" a positive quality.
This method alone shows that he had a defiant apti-
tude for abstract logical procedure, closed against
the suggestions of the senses. The " heavy" seems
indeed to offer itself very forcibly to the senses as
a positive quality; that did not keep Parmenides
from stamping it as a negation. Similarly he placed
the earth in opposition to the fire, the "cold" in
opposition to the "warm," the "dense" in opposi-
tion to the " rare," the "female" in opposition to the
"male," the " passive " in opposition to the " active,"
merely as negations: so that before his gaze our em-
piric world divided itself into two separate spheres,
into that of the positive qualities—with a bright,
fiery, warm, light, rare, active-masculine character—
and into that of the negative qualities. The latter
express really only the lack, the absence of the
others, the positive ones. He therefore described
the sphere in which the positive qualities are absent
as dark, earthy, cold, heavy, dense and altogether as
of feminine-passive character. Instead of the expres-
sions "positive" and "negative" he used the standing
term "existent" and "non-existent" and had arrived
with this at the proposition, that, in contradiction to
Anaximander, this our world itself contains some-
thing "existent," and of course something "non-
existent. " One is not to seek that "existent" out-
side the world and as it were above our horizon; but
before us, and everywhere in every Becoming, some-
thing " existent" and active is contained.
## p. 117 (#178) ############################################
Il6 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
for all Anaximander had escaped from the realm of
Becoming and from the empirically given qualities
of such realm, that leap did not become an easy
matter to minds so independently fashioned as those
of Heraclitus and Parmenides; first they endea-
voured to walk as far as they could and reserved
to themselves the leap for that place, where the
foot finds no more hold and one has to leap, in
order not to fall. Both looked repeatedly at that
very world, which Anaximander had condemned in
so melancholy a way and declared to be the place
of wanton crime and at the same time the peni-
tentiary cell for the injustice of Becoming. Contem-
plating this world Heraclitus, as we know already,
had discovered what a wonderful order, regularity
and security manifest themselves in every Becom-
ing; from that he concluded that the Becoming
could not be anything evil and unjust. Quite a
different outlook had Parmenides; he compared
the qualities one with another, and believed that
they were not all of the same kind, but ought to be
classified under two headings. If for example he
compared bright and dark, then the second quality
was obviously only the negation of the first; and
thus he distinguished positive and negative qualities,
seriously endeavouring to rediscover and register that
fundamental antithesis in the whole realm of Nature.
His method was the following: He took a few anti-
theses, e. g. , light and heavy, rare and dense, active
and passive, and compared them with that typical
antithesis of bright and dark: that which corre-
sponded with the bright was the positive, that which
corresponded with the dark the negative quality. If
## p. 117 (#179) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 117
he took perhaps the heavy and light, the light fell
to the side of the bright, the heavy to the side of
the dark; and thus " heavy" was to him only the
negation of " light," but the " light" a positive quality.
This method alone shows that he had a defiant apti-
tude for abstract logical procedure, closed against
the suggestions of the senses. The "heavy" seems
indeed to offer itself very forcibly to the senses as
a positive quality; that did not keep Parmenides
from stamping it as a negation. Similarly he placed
the earth in opposition to the fire, the "cold" in
opposition to the "warm," the "dense" in opposi-
tion to the "rare," the "female" in opposition to the
"male," the " passive " in opposition to the " active,"
merely as negations: so that before his gaze our em-
piric world divided itself into two separate spheres,
into that of the positive qualities—with a bright,
fiery, warm, light, rare, active-masculine character—
and into that of the negative qualities. The latter
express really only the lack, the absence of the
others, the positive ones. He therefore described
the sphere in which the positive qualities are absent
as dark, earthy, cold, heavy, dense and altogether as
of feminine-passive character. Instead of the expres-
sions "positive" and "negative" he used the standing
term "existent" and "non-existent" and had arrived
with this at the proposition, that, in contradiction to
Anaximander, this our world itself contains some-
thing "existent," and of course something "non-
existent. " One is not to seek that "existent" out-
side the world and as it were above our horizon; but
before us, and everywhere in every Becoming, some-
thing " existent" and active is contained.
## p. 117 (#180) ############################################
Il6 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
for all Anaximander had escaped from the realm of
Becoming and from the empirically given qualities
of such realm, that leap did not become an easy
matter to minds so independently fashioned as those
of Heraclitus and Parmenides; first they endea-
voured to walk as far as they could and reserved
to themselves the leap for that place, where the
foot finds no more hold and one has to leap, in
order not to fall. Both looked repeatedly at that
very world, which Anaximander had condemned in
so melancholy a way and declared to be the place
of wanton crime and at the same time the peni-
tentiary cell for the injustice of Becoming. Contem-
plating this world Heraclitus, as we know already,
had discovered what a wonderful order, regularity
and security manifest themselves in every Becom-
ing; from that he concluded that the Becoming
could not be anything evil and unjust . Quite a
different outlook had Parmenides; he compared
the qualities one with another, and believed that
they were not all of the same kind, but ought to be
classified under two headings. If for example he
compared bright and dark, then the second quality
was obviously only the negation of the first; and
thus he distinguished positive and negative qualities,
seriously endeavouring to rediscover and register that
fundamental antithesis in the whole realm of Nature.
His method was the following: He took a few anti-
theses, e. g. , light and heavy, rare and dense, active
and passive, and compared them with that typical
antithesis of bright and dark: that which corre-
sponded with the bright was the positive, that which
corresponded with the dark the negative quality. If
## p. 117 (#181) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 117
he took perhaps the heavy and light, the light fell
to the side of the bright, the heavy to the side of
the dark; and thus "heavy" was to him only the
negation of " light," but the " light" a positive quality.
This method alone shows that he had a defiant apti-
tude for abstract logical procedure, closed against
the suggestions of the senses. The "heavy" seems
indeed to offer itself very forcibly to the senses as
a positive quality; that did not keep Parmenides
from stamping it as a negation. Similarly he placed
the earth in opposition to the fire, the "cold" in
opposition to the "warm," the "dense" in opposi-
tion to the " rare,"the "female" in opposition to the
"male," the " passive " in opposition to the " active,"
merely as negations: so that before his gaze our em-
piric world divided itself into two separate spheres,
into that of the positive qualities—with a bright,
fiery, warm, light, rare, active-masculine character—
and into that of the negative qualities. The latter
express really only the lack, the absence of the
others, the positive ones. He therefore described
the sphere in which the positive qualities are absent
as dark, earthy, cold, heavy, dense and altogether as
of feminine-passive character. Instead of the expres-
sions "positive" and "negative" he used the standing
term "existent" and "non-existent" and had arrived
with this at the proposition, that, in contradiction to
Anaximander, this our world itself contains some-
thing "existent," and of course something "non-
existent. " One is not to seek that "existent" out-
side the world and as it were above our horizon ; but
before us, and everywhere in every Becoming, some-
thing "existent" and active is contained.
## p. 117 (#182) ############################################
Il6 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
for all Anaximander had escaped from the realm of
Becoming and from the empirically given qualities
of such realm, that leap did not become an easy
matter to minds so independently fashioned as those
of Heraclitus and Parmenides; first they endea-
voured to walk as far as they could and reserved
to themselves the leap for that place, where the
foot finds no more hold and one has to leap, in
order not to fall. Both looked repeatedly at that
very world, which Anaximander had condemned in
so melancholy a way and declared to be the place
of wanton crime and at the same time the peni-
tentiary cell for the injustice of Becoming. Contem-
plating this world Heraclitus, as we know already,
had discovered what a wonderful order, regularity
and security manifest themselves in every Becom-
ing; from that he concluded that the Becoming
could not be anything evil and unjust. Quite a
different outlook had Parmenides; he compared
the qualities one with another, and believed that
they were not all of the same kind, but ought to be
classified under two headings. If for example he
compared bright and dark, then the second quality
was obviously only the negation of the first; and
thus he distinguished positive and negative qualities,
seriously endeavouring to rediscover and register that
fundamental antithesis in the whole realm of Nature.
His method was the following: He took a few anti-
theses, e. g. , light and heavy, rare and dense, active
and passive, and compared them with that typical
antithesis of bright and dark: that which corre-
sponded with the bright was the positive, that which
corresponded with the dark the negative quality. If
## p. 117 (#183) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 117
he took perhaps the heavy and light, the light fell
to the side of the bright, the heavy to the side of
the dark; and thus "heavy" was to him only the
negation of "light," but the "light" a positive quality.
This method alone shows that he had a defiant apti-
tude for abstract logical procedure, closed against
the suggestions of the senses. The " heavy " seems
indeed to offer itself very forcibly to the senses as
a positive quality; that did not keep Parmenides
from stamping it as a negation. Similarly he placed
the earth in opposition to the fire, the "cold" in
opposition to the "warm," the "dense" in opposi-
tion to the " rare," the "female" in opposition to the
"male," the " passive " in opposition to the " active,"
merely as negations: so that before his gaze our em-
piric world divided itself into two separate spheres,
into that of the positive qualities—with a bright,
fiery, warm, light, rare, active-masculine character—
and into that of the negative qualities. The latter
express really only the lack, the absence of the
others, the positive ones. He therefore described
the sphere in which the positive qualities are absent
as dark, earthy, cold, heavy, dense and altogether as
of feminine-passive character. Instead of the expres-
sions "positive" and "negative" he used the standing
term "existent" and "non-existent" and had arrived
with this at the proposition, that, in contradiction to
Anaximander, this our world itself contains some-
thing "existent," and of course something "non-
existent. " One is not to seek that "existent" out-
side the world and as it were above our horizon; but
before us, and everywhere in every Becoming, some-
thing " existent" and active is contained.
## p. 118 (#184) ############################################
Il8 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
With that however still remained to him the task of
giving the more exact answer to the question: What
is the Becoming? and here was the moment where he
had to leap, in order not to fall, although perhaps to
such natures as that of Parmenides, even any leaping
means a falling. Enough 1 we get into fog, into the
mysticism of qualitates occulta, and even a little into
mythology. Parmenides, like Heraclitus, looks at the
general Becoming and Not-remaining and explains
to himself a Passing only thus, that the "Non-Exist-
ent" bore the guilt. For how should the "Existent"
bear the guilt of Passing? Likewise, however, the Ori-
ginating,/'. ^. , the Becoming, must come about through
the assistance of the " Non-Existent"; for the "Ex-
istent" is always there and could not of itself first ori-
ginate and it could not explain any Originating, any
Becoming. Therefore the Originating, the Becom-
ing as well as the Passing and Perishing have been
brought about by the negative qualities. But that
the originating "thing" has a content,and the passing
"thing" loses a content, presupposes that the posi-
tive qualities—and that just means that very content
—participate likewise in both processes. In short the
proposition results: "For the Becoming the 'Exist-
ent' as well as the 'Non-Existent' is necessary; when
they co-operate then a Becoming results. " But how
come the "positive" and the "negative" to one an-
other? Should they not on the contrary eternally flee
one another as antitheses and thereby make every
Becoming impossible? Here Parmenides appeals to
a qualitas occulta, to a mystic tendency of the anti-
thetical pairs to approach and attract one another,
and he allegorises that peculiar contrariety by the
## p. 119 (#185) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 119
name of Aphrodite, and by the empirically known
relation of the male and female principle. It is the
power of Aphrodite which plays the matchmaker
between the antithetical pair, the "Existent" and
the "Non-Existent. " Passion brings together the
antagonistic and antipathetic elements: the result
is a Becoming. When Desire has become satiated,
Hatred and the innate antagonism again drive
asunder the "Existent" and the "Non-Existent"—
then man says: the thing perishes, passes.
10
But no one with impunity lays his profane hands
on such awful abstractions as the "Existent" and
the "Non-Existent"; the blood freezes slowly as
one touches them. There was a day upon which an
odd idea suddenly occurred to Parmenides, an idea
which seemed to take all value away from his former
combinations, so that he felt inclined to throw them
aside, like a money bag with old worn-out coins.
It is commonly believed that an external impres-
sion, in addition to the centrifugal consequence of
such ideas as "existent" and "non-existent," has
also been co-active in the invention of that day; this
impression was an acquaintance with the theology
of the old roamer and rhapsodist, the singer of a
mystic deification of Nature, the Kolophonian
Xenophanes. Throughout an extraordinary life
Xenophanes lived as a wandering poet and became
through his travels a well-informed and most in-
structive man who knew how to question and
how to narrate, for which reason Heraclitus reck-
oned him amongst the polyhistorians and above
## p. 120 (#186) ############################################
120 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
all amongst the "historic" natures, in the sense men-
tioned. Whence and when came to him the mystic
bent into the One and the eternally Resting, nobody
will be able to compute; perhaps it is only the con-
ception of the finally settled old man, to whom, after
the agitation of his erratic wanderings, and after
the restless learning and searching for truth, the
vision of a divine rest, the permanence of all things
within a pantheistic primal peace appears as the
highest and greatest ideal.
After all it seems to
me quite accidental that in the same place in Elea
two men lived together for a time, each of whom
carried in his head a conception of unity; they
formed no school and had nothing in common which
perhaps the one might have learned from the other
and then might have handed on. For, in the case
of these two men, the origin of that conception of
unity is quite different, yea opposite; and if either of
them has become at all acquainted with the doctrine
of the other then, in order to understand it at all, he
had to translate it first into his own language. With
this translation however the very specific element of
the other doctrine was lost. Whereas Parmenides
arrived at the unity of the "Existent" purely through
an alleged logical consequence and whereas he span
that unity out of the ideas "Being" and "Not-Being,"
Xenophanes was a religious mystic and belonged,
with that mystic unity, very properly to the Sixth
Century. Although he was no such revolutionising
personality as Pythagoras he had nevertheless in his
wanderings the same bent and impulse to improve,
purify, and cure men. He was the ethical teacher,
but still in the stage of the rhapsodist; in a later time
## p. 121 (#187) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 121
he would have been a sophist. In the daring dis-
approval of the existing customs and valuations he
had not his equal in Greece; moreover he did not,
like Heraclitus and Plato, retire into solitude but
placed himself before the very public, whose exult-
ing admiration of Homer, whose passionate pro-
pensity for the honours of the gymnastic festivals,
whose adoration of stones in human shape, he criti-
cised severely with wrath and scorn, yet not as a
brawling Thersites. The freedom of the individual
was with him on its zenith; and by this almost limit-
less stepping free from all conventions he was more
closely related to Parmenides than by that last divine
unity, which once he had beheld, in a visionary state
worthy of that century. His unity scarcely had ex-
pression and word in common with the one "Being"
of Parmenides, and certainly had not the same origin.
It was rather an opposite state of mind in which
Parmenides found his doctrine of" Being. " On that
day and in that state he examined his two co-oper-
ating antitheses, the "Existent" and the "Non-
Existent," the positive and the negative qualities, of
which Desire and Hatred constitute the world and
the Becoming. He was suddenly caught up, mis-
trusting, by the idea of negative quality, of the "Non-
Existent. " For can something which does not exist
be a quality? or to put the question in a broader sense:
can anything indeed which does not exist, exist?
The only form of knowledge in which we at once put
unconditional trust and the disapproval of which
amounts to madness, is the tautology A = A. But
this very tautological knowledge called inexorably
to him: what does not exist, exists not! What is, is!
r
## p. 122 (#188) ############################################
122 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
Suddenly he feels upon his life the load of an enor-
mous logical sin; for had he not always without
hesitation assumed that there were existing negative
qualities, in short a "Non-Existent," that therefore,
to express it by a formula, A = Not-A, which indeed
could only be advanced by the most out and out
perversity of thinking. It is true, as he recollected,
the whole great mass of men judge with the same
perversity; he himself has only participated in the
general crime against logic. But the same moment
which charges him with this crime surrounds him
with the light of the glory of an invention, he has
found, apart from all human illusion, a principle,
the key to the world-secret, he now descends into
the abyss of things, guided by the firm and fearful
hand of the tautological truth as to " Being. "
On the way thither he meets Heraclitus—an un-
fortunate encounter! Just now Heraclitus' play with
antinomies was bound to be very hateful to him,
who placed the utmost importance upon the severest
separation of "Being" and "Not- Being"; propositions
like this : "We are and at the same time we are not"
—"'Being' and 'Not-Being' is at the same time the
same thing and again not the same thing," proposi-
tions through which all that he had just elucidated
and disentangled became again dim and inextric-
able, incited him to wrath. "Away with the men,"
he exclaimed, "who seem to have two heads and
yet know nothing! With them truly everything is
in flux, even their thinking! They stare at things
stupidly, but they must be deaf as well as blind so
to mix up the opposites"! The want of judgment
on the part of the masses, glorified by playful anti-
## p. 123 (#189) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 123
nomies and praised as the acme of all knowledge was
to him a painful and incomprehensible experience.
Now he dived into the cold bath of his awful ab-
stractions. That which is true must exist in eternal
presence, about it cannot be said "it was," "it will
be. " The "Existent" cannot have become; for out of
what should it have become? Out of the " Non-Ex-
istent"? But that does not exist and can produce
nothing. Out of the " Existent"? This would not
produce anything but itself. The same applies to
the Passing, it is just as impossible as the Becoming,
as any change, any increase, any decrease. On the
whole the proposition is valid: Everything about
which it can be said: "it has been " or " it will be"
does not exist; about the "Existent" however it can
never be said "it does not exist. " The "Existent" is
indivisible, for where is the second power, which
should divide it? It is immovable, for whither should
it move itself? It cannot be infinitely great nor in-
finitely small, for it is perfect and a perfectly given
infinitude is a contradiction. Thus the "Existent" is
suspended,delimited, perfect, immovable, everywhere
equally balanced and suchequilibriumequallyperfect
at any point, like a globe, but not in a space, for
otherwise this space would be a second "Existent. "
But there cannot exist several "Existents," for in
order to separate them, something would have to exist
which was not existing, an assumption which neutral-
ises itself. Thus there exists only the eternal Unity.
If now, however, Parmenides turned back his gaze
to the world of Becoming, the existence of which he
had formerly tried to understand by such ingenious
conjectures, he was wroth at his eye seeing the
## p. 123 (#190) ############################################
122 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
Suddenly he feels upon his life the load of an enor-
mous logical sin; for had he not always without
hesitation assumed that tliere were existing negative
qualities, in short a "Non-Existent," that therefore,
to express it by a formula, A = Not-A, which indeed
could only be advanced by the most out and out
perversity of thinking. It is true, as he recollected,
the whole great mass of men judge with the same
perversity; he himself has only participated in the
general crime against logic. But the same moment
which charges him with this crime surrounds him
with the light of the glory of an invention, he has
found, apart from all human illusion, a principle,
the key to the world-secret, he now descends into
the abyss of things, guided by the firm and fearful
hand of the tautological truth as to " Being. "
On the way thither he meets Heraclitus—an un-
fortunate encounter! Just now Heraclitus' play with
antinomies was bound to be very hateful to him,
who placed the utmost importance upon the severest
separation of "Being" and "Not- Being"; propositions
like this : "We arc and at the same time we are not"
—"'Being' and 'Not-Being' is at the same time the
same thing and again not the same thing," proposi-
tions through which all that he had just elucidated
and disentangled became again dim and inextric-
able, incited him to wrath. "Away with the men,"
he exclaimed, "who seem to have two heads and
yet know nothing! With them truly everything is
in flux, even their thinking! They stare at things
stupidly, but they must be deaf as well as blind so
to mix up the opposites"! The want of judgment
on the part of the masses, glorified by playful anti-
"
n
## p. 123 (#191) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 123
nomies and praised as the acme of all knowledge was
to him a painful and incomprehensible experience.
Now he dived into the cold bath of his awful ab-
stractions. That which is true must exist in eternal
presence, about it cannot be said "it was," "it will
be. " The "Existent" cannot have become; for out of
what should it have become? Out of the " Non-Ex-
istent "? But that does not exist and can produce
nothing. Out of the " Existent"? This would not
produce anything but itself. The same applies to
the Passing, it is just as impossible as the Becoming,
as any change, any increase, any decrease. On the
whole the proposition is valid: Everything about
which it can be said: "it has been " or " it will be"
does not exist; about the "Existent" however it can
never be said "it does not exist. " The " Existent" is
indivisible, for where is the second power, which
should divide it? It is immovable, for whither should
it move itself? It cannot be infinitely great nor in-
finitely small, for it is perfect and a perfectly given
infinitude is a contradiction. Thus the " Existent" is
suspended, delimited, perfect,immovable, every where
equally balanced and suchequilibriumequallyperfect
at any point, like a globe, but not in a space, for
otherwise this space would be a second "Existent. "
But there cannot exist several "Existents," for in
order to separate them, something would have to exist
which was notexisting, an assumption which neutral-
ises itself. Thus there exists only the eternal Unity.
If now, however, Parmenides turned back his gaze
to the world of Becoming, the existence of which he
had formerly tried to understand by such ingenious
conjectures, he was wroth at his eye seeing the
## p. 124 (#192) ############################################
124 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
Becoming at all, his ear hearing it. "Do not follow
the dim-sighted eyes," now his command runs, " not
the resounding ear nor the tongue, but examine
only by the power of the thought. " Therewith he
accomplished the extremely important first critique
of the apparatus of knowledge, although this critique
was still inadequate and proved disastrous in its
consequences. By tearing entirely asunder the
senses and the ability to think in abstractions, i. e.
reason, just as if they were two thoroughly separate
capacities, he demolished the intellect itself, and
incited people to that wholly erroneous separation
of" mind " and "body" which, especially since Plato,
lies like a curse on philosophy. All sense percep-
tions, Parmenides judges, cause only illusions and
their chief illusion is their deluding us to believe that
even the "Non-Existent" exists, that even the Be-
coming has a " Being. " All that plurality, diversity
and variety of the empirically known world, the
change of its qualities, the order in its ups and downs,
is thrown aside mercilessly as mere appearance and
delusion; from there nothing is to be learnt, there-
fore all labour is wasted which one bestows upon
this false, through-and-through futile world, the con-
ception of which has been obtained by being hum-
bugged by the senses. He who judges in such
generalisations as Parmenides did, ceases therewith
to be an investigator of natural philosophy in detail;
his interest in phenomena withers away; there de-
velops even a hatred of being unable to get rid of
this eternal fraud of the senses. Truth is now to
dwell only in the most faded, most abstract gener-
alities, in the empty husks of the most indefinite
## p. 125 (#193) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 125
words, as in a maze of cobwebs; and by such a
"truth" now the philosopher sits, bloodless as an
abstraction and surrounded by a web of fprmulae.
The spider undoubtedly wants the blood of its vic-
tims; but the Parmenidean philosopher hates the
very blood of his victims, the blood of Empiricism
sacrificed by him.
ii
And that was a Greek who " flourished " about the
time of the outbreak of the Ionic Revolution. At
that time it was possible for a Greek to flee out of
the superabundant reality, as out of a mere delusive
schematism of the imaginative faculties—not perhaps
like Plato into the land of the eternal ideas, into the
workshop of the world-creator, in order to feast the
eyes on unblemished, unbreakable primal-forms of
things—but into the rigid death-like rest of the cold-
est and emptiest conception, that of the " Being. " We
will indeed beware of interpreting such a remarkable
fact by false analogies. That flight was not a world-
flight in the sense of Indian philosophers ; no deep
religious conviction as to the depravity, transitori-
ness and accursedness of Existence demanded that
flight—that ultimate goal, the rest in the " Being,"
was not striven after as the mystic absorption in
one all-sufficing enrapturing conception which is a
puzzle and a scandal to common men. The thought
of Parmenides bears in itself not the slightest trace
of the intoxicating mystical Indian fragrance, which
is perhaps not wholly imperceptible in Pythagoras
and Empedocles; the strange thing in that fact, at
this period, is rather the very absence of fragrance,
## p. 126 (#194) ############################################
126 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
colour, soul, form, the total lack of blood, religiosity
and ethical warmth, the abstract-schematic—in a
Greek ! —above all however our philosopher's awful
energy of striving after Certainty, in a mythically
thinking and highly emotional - fantastic age is
quite remarkable. "Grant me but a certainty, ye
gods! " is the prayer of Parmenides, "and be it, in
the ocean of Uncertainty, only a board, broad enough
to lie on! Everything becoming, everything lux-
uriant, varied, blossoming, deceiving, stimulating,
living, take all that for yourselves, and give to me
but the single poor empty Certainty! "
In the philosophy of Parmenides the theme of
ontology forms the prelude. Experience offered
him nowhere a "Being" as he imagined it to himself,
but from the fact that he could conceive of it he
concluded that it must exist; a conclusion which
rests upon the supposition that we have an organ of
knowledge which reaches into the nature of things
and is independent of experience. The material of
our thinking according to Parmenides does not exist
in perception at all but is brought in from somewhere
else, from an extra-material world to which by
thinking we have a direct access. Against all simi-
lar chains of reasoning Aristotle has already asserted
that existence never belongs to the essence, never
belongs to the nature of a thing. For that very
reason from the idea of "Being"—of which the
essentia precisely is only the "Being "—cannot be
inferred an existentia of the "Being" at all. The
logical content of that antithesis "Being" and "Not-
Being" is perfectly nil, if the object lying at the
bottom of it, if the precept cannot be given from
## p. 127 (#195) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 127
which this antithesis has been deduced by abstrac-
tion; without this going back to the precept the
antithesis is only a play with conceptions, through
which indeed nothing is discerned. For the merely
logical criterion of truth, as Kant teaches, namely the
agreement of a discernment with the general and
the formal laws of intellect and reason is, it is true,
the conditio sine qua non, consequently the negative
condition of all truth; further however logic cannot
go, and logic cannot discover by any touchstone the
error which pertains not to the form but to the
contents. As soon, however, as one seeks the con-
tent for the logical truth of the antithesis: "That
which is, is; that which is not, is not," one will find
indeed not a simple reality, which is fashioned
rigidly according to that antithesis: about a tree I
can say as well "it is" in comparison with all the
other things, as well "it becomes" in comparison
with itself at another moment of time as finally also
"it is not," e. g. , "it is not yet tree," as long as I per-
haps look at the shrub. Words are only symbols for
the relations of things among themselves and to us,
and nowhere touch absolute truth; and now to crown
all, the word "Being" designates only the most
general relation, which connects all things, and so
does the word " Not-Being. " If however the Exist-
ence of the things themselves be unprovable, then the
relation of the things among themselves, the so-called
"Being" and "Not-Being," will not bring us any
nearer to the land of truth. By means of words and
ideas we shall never get behind the wall of the rela-
tions, let us say into some fabulous primal cause of
things, and even in the pure forms of the sensitive
## p. 128 (#196) ############################################
128 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
faculty and of the intellect, in space, time and
causality we gain nothing, which might resemble a
"veritas cBterna. " It is absolutely impossible for
the subject to see and discern something beyond
himself, so impossible that Cognition and "Being"
are the most contradictory of all spheres. And if in
the uninstructed naivete of the then critique of the in-
tellect Parmenides was permitted to fancy that out of
the eternally subjective idea he had come to a "Being-
In-itself," then it is to-day, after Kant, a daring
ignorance, if here and there, especially among badly
informed theologians who want to play the philoso-
pher, is proposed as the task of philosophy: "to
conceive the Absolute by means of consciousness,"
perhaps even in the form: "the Absolute is already
extant,else how could it be sought? " as Hegel has ex-
pressed himself, or with the saying of Beneke: "that
the' Being' must be given somehow, must be attain-
able for us somehow, since otherwise we could not
even have the idea of Being. '" The idea of "Being "!
As though that idea did not indicate the most miser-
able empiric origin already in the etymology of the
word. For esse means at the bottom: "to breathe,"
if man uses it of all other things, then he transmits
the conviction that he himself breathes and lives by
means of a metaphor, i. e. , by means of something
illogical to the other things and conceives of their
Existence as a Breathing according to human ana-
logy. Now the original meaning of the word soon
becomes effaced ; so much however still remains that
man conceives of the existence of other things ac-
cording to the analogy of his own existence, there-
fore anthropomorphically, and at any rate by means
## p. 129 (#197) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 129
of an illogical transmission. Even to man, therefore
apart from that transmission, the proposition: "I
breathe, therefore a 'Being' exists" is quite insuf-
ficient since against it the same objection must be
made, as against the ambulo, ergo sum, or ergo est.
12
The other idea, of greater import than that of the
"Existent," and likewise invented already by Par-
menides, although not yet so clearly applied as by
his disciple Zeno is the idea of the Infinite. Nothing
Infinite can exist; for from such an assumption the
contradictory idea of a perfect Infinitude would
result. Since now our actuality, our existing world
everywhere shows the character of that perfect
Infinitude, our world signifies in its nature a contra-
diction against logic and therewith also against
reality and is deception, lie, fantasma. Zeno especi-
ally applied the method of indirect proof; he said
for example, " There can be no motion from one
place to another; for if there were such a motion,
then an Infinitude would be given as perfect, this
however is an impossibility. " Achilles cannot catch
up the tortoise which has a small start in a race,
for in order to reach only the point from which the
tortoise began, he would have had to run through
innumerable, infinitely many spaces, viz. , first half
of that space, then the fourth, then the sixteenth,
and so on ad infinitum. If he does in fact overtake
the tortoise then this is an illogical phenomenon,
and therefore at any rate not a truth, not a reality,
not real "Being," but only a delusion. For it is never
possible to finish the infinite. Another popular ex-
9
## p. 130 (#198) ############################################
130 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
pression of this doctrine is the flying and yet resting
arrow. At any instant of its flight it has a position;
in this position it rests. Now would the sum of the
infinite positions of rest be identical with motion?
Would now the Resting, infinitely often repeated,
be Motion, therefore its own opposite? The Infinite
is here used as the aquafortis of reality, through it
the latter is dissolved. If however the Ideas are
fixed, eternal and entitative—and for Parmenides
"Being" and Thinking coincide—if therefore the In-
finite can never be perfect, if Rest can never become
Motion, then in fact the arrow has not flown at all;
it never left its place and resting position; no
moment of time has passed. Or expressed in an-
other way: in this so-called yet only alleged Actuality
there exists neither time, nor space, nor motion.
Finally the arrow itself is only an illusion; for it
originates out of the Plurality, out of the phantas-
magoria of the " Non-One" produced by the senses.
Suppose the arrow had a "Being," then it would be
immovable, timeless, increate, rigid and eternal—an
impossible conception! Supposing that Motion
was truly real, then there would be no rest, there-
fore no position for the arrow, therefore no space—
an impossible conception! Supposing that time were
real, then it could not be of an infinite divisibility;
the time which the arrow needed, would have to
consist of a limited number of time-moments, each
of these moments would have to be an Atomon—an
impossible conception! All our conceptions, as soon
as their empirically-given content, drawn out of this
concrete world, is taken as a veritas aterna, lead to
contradictions. If there is absolute motion, then
## p. 131 (#199) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 131
there is no space; if there is absolute space then
there is no motion; if there is absolute "Being," then
there is no Plurality; if there is an absolute Plurality,
then there is no Unity. It should at least become
clear to us how little we touch the heart of things or
untie the knot of reality with such ideas, whereas
Parmenides and Zeno inversely hold fast to the
truth and omnivalidity of ideas and condemn the
perceptible world as the opposite of the true and
omnivalid ideas, as an objectivation of the illogical
and contradictory. With all their proofs they start
from the wholly undemonstrable, yea improbable
assumption that in that apprehensive faculty we
possess the decisive, highest criterion of "Being" and
"Not-Being," i. e. ,of objective reality and its opposite;
those ideas are not to prove themselves true, to
correct themselves by Actuality, as they are after
all really derived from it, but on the contrary they
are to measure and to judge Actuality, and in case
of a contradiction with logic, even to condemn.
In order to concede to them this judicial competence
Parmenides had to ascribe to them the same" Being,"
which alone he allowed in general as the "Being ";
Thinking and that one increate perfect ball of the
"Existent" were now no longer to be conceived as
two different kinds of " Being," since there was not
permitted a duality of" Being. " Thus the over-risky
flash of fancy had become necessaryto declare Think-
ing and " Being" identical. No form of perceptibility,
no symbol, no simile could possibly be of any help
here; the fancy was wholly inconceivable, but it
was necessary, yea in the lack of every possibility
of illustration it celebrated the highest triumph over
## p. 132 (#200) ############################################
132 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
the world and the claims of the senses. Thinking
and that clod-like, ball-shaped,through-and-through
dead-massive, and rigid-immovable "Being," must,
according to the Parmenidean imperative, dissolve
into one another and be the same in every respect,
to the horror of fantasy. What does it matter that
this identity contradicts the senses! This contra-
diction is just the guarantee that such an identity
is not borrowed from the senses.
13
Moreover against Parmenides could be produced
a strong couple of argumenta ad hominem or ex con-
cessis, by which, it is true, truth itself could not be
brought to light, but at any rate the untruth of that
absolute separation of the world of the senses and
the world of the ideas, and the untruth of the iden-
tity of" Being" and Thinking could be demonstrated.
Firstly, if the Thinking of Reason in ideas is real,
then also Plurality and Motion must have reality, for
rational Thinking is mobile; and more precisely, it is
a motion from idea to idea, therefore within a plur-
ality of realities. There is no subterfuge against
that; it is quite impossible to designate Thinking
as a rigid Permanence, as an eternally immobile,
intellectual Introspection of Unity. Secondly, if
only fraud and illusion come from the senses, and if in
reality there exists only the real identity of " Being"
and Thinking, what then are the senses themselves?
They too are certainly Appearance only since they
do not coincide with the Thinking, and their pro-
duct, the world of senses, does not coincide with
"Being. " If however the senses themselves are
## p. 133 (#201) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 133
Appearance to whom then are they Appearance?
How can they, being unreal, still deceive? The
"Non-Existent" cannot even deceive. Therefore
the Whence? of deception and Appearance remains
an enigma, yea, a contradiction. We call these argu-
menta ad hominem: The Objection Of The Mobile
Reason and that of The Origin Of Appearance.
From the first would result the reality of Motion
and of Plurality, from the second the impossibility
of the Parmenidean Appearance, assuming that the
chief-doctrine of Parmenides on the "Being" were
accepted as true. This chief-doctrine however only
says: The "Existent" only has a "Being," the "Non-
Existent" does not exist. If Motion however has
such a " Being," then to Motion applies what applies
to the " Existent" in general: it is increate, eternal,
indestructible, without increase or decrease. But if
the " Appearance" is denied and a belief in it made
untenable, by means of that question as to the
Whence? of the "Appearance," if the stage of the
so-called Becoming, of change, our many-shaped,
restless, coloured and rich Existence is protected
from the Parmenidean rejection, then it is necessary
to characterise this world of change and alteration
as a sum of such really existing Essentials, existing
simultaneously into all eternity. Of a change in
the strict sense, of a Becoming there cannot natur-
ally be any question even with this assumption.
But now Plurality has a real "Being," all qualities
have a real "Being" and motion not less; and of any
moment of this world—although these moments
chosen at random lie at a distance of millenniums
from one another—it would have to be possible to
## p. 134 (#202) ############################################
134 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
say: all real Essentials extant in this world are with-
out exception co-existent, unaltered, undiminished,
without increase, without decrease. A millennium
later the world is exactly the same. Nothing has
altered. If in spite of that the appearance of the
world at the one time is quite different from that at
the other time, then that is no deception, nothing
merely apparent, but the effect of eternal motion.
The real "Existent" is moved sometimes thus, some-
times thus: together, asunder, upwards, downwards,
into one another, pell-mell.
14
With this conception we have already taken a step
into the realm of the doctrine of Anaxagoras. By
him both objections against Parmenides are raised
in full strength; that of the mobile Thinking and
that of the Whence? of " Appearance "; but in the
chief proposition Parmenides has subjugated him
as well as all the younger philosophers and nature-
explorers. They all deny the possibility of Becom-
ing and Passing, as the mind of the people conceives
them and as Anaximander and Heraclitus had as-
sumed with greater circumspection and yet still heed-
lessly. Such a mythological Originating out of the
Nothing, such a Disappearing into the Nothing, such
an arbitrary Changing of the Nothing into the Some-
thing, such a random exchanging, putting on and
putting off of the qualities was henceforth considered
senseless ; but so was, and for the same reasons, an
originating of the Many out of the One, of the mani-
fold qualities out of the one primal-quality, in short
the derivation ofthe world outof a primary substance,
## p. 135 (#203) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 135
as argued by Thales and Heraclitus. Ratherwas now
the real problem advanced of applying the doctrineof
increate imperishable " Being" to this existing world,
without taking one's refuge in the theory of appear-
ance and deception. But if the empiric world is not
to be Appearance, if the things are not to be derived
out of Nothing and j ust as little out of the one Some-
thing, then these things must contain in themselves a
real "Being," their matter and content must be uncon-
ditionally real, and all change can refer only to the
form, i. e. , to the position, order, grouping, mixing,
separation of these eternally co-existing Essentials.
It is just as in a game of dice; they are ever the
same dice; but falling sometimes thus, sometimes
thus, they mean to us something different. All older
theories had gone back to a primal element, as womb
and cause of Becoming, be this water, air, fire or the
Indefinite of Anaximander. Against that Anaxa-
goras now asserts that out of the Equal the Unequal
could never come forth, and that out of the one
"Existent" the change could never be explained.
Whether now one were to imagine that assumed
matter to be rarefied or condensed, one would never
succeed by such a condensation or rarefaction in
explaining the problem one would like to explain:
the plurality of qualities. But if the world in fact
is full of the most different qualities then these must,
in case they are not appearance, have a " Being," i. e. ,
must be eternal, increate, imperishable and ever co-
existing. Appearance, however, they cannot be,
since the question as to the Whence? of Appearance
remains unanswered, yea answers itself in the nega-
tive! The earlier seekers after Truth had intended
## p. 136 (#204) ############################################
136 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
to simplify the problem of Becoming by advancing
only one substance, which bore in its bosom the
possibilities of all Becoming; now on the contrary
it is asserted: there are innumerable substances,
but never more, never less, and never new ones.
Only Motion, playing dice with them throws them
into ever new combinations. That Motion however
is a truth and not Appearance, Anaxagoras proved
in opposition to Parmenides by the indisputable
succession of our conceptions in thinking. We have
therefore in the most direct fashion the insight into
the truth of motion and succession in the fact that
we think and have conceptions.
