Our destiny exercises
its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature:
it is our future that lays down the law to our to-day.
its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature:
it is our future that lays down the law to our to-day.
Nietzsche - Human, All Too Human
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
A BOOK FOR FREE SPIRITS
BY FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
TRANSLATED BY ALEXANDER HARVEY
CHICAGO
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
1908
Copyright 1908
By Charles H. Kerr & Company
CONTENTS
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
OF THE FIRST AND LAST THINGS
HISTORY OF THE MORAL FEELINGS
THE RELIGIOUS LIFE
PREFACE.
1
It is often enough, and always with great surprise, intimated to me that
there is something both ordinary and unusual in all my writings, from
the "Birth of Tragedy" to the recently published "Prelude to a
Philosophy of the Future": they all contain, I have been told, snares
and nets for short sighted birds, and something that is almost a
constant, subtle, incitement to an overturning of habitual opinions and
of approved customs. What! ? Everything is merely--human--all too human?
With this exclamation my writings are gone through, not without a
certain dread and mistrust of ethic itself and not without a disposition
to ask the exponent of evil things if those things be not simply
misrepresented. My writings have been termed a school of distrust, still
more of disdain: also, and more happily, of courage, audacity even. And
in fact, I myself do not believe that anybody ever looked into the world
with a distrust as deep as mine, seeming, as I do, not simply the timely
advocate of the devil, but, to employ theological terms, an enemy and
challenger of God; and whosoever has experienced any of the consequences
of such deep distrust, anything of the chills and the agonies of
isolation to which such an unqualified difference of standpoint condemns
him endowed with it, will also understand how often I must have sought
relief and self-forgetfulness from any source--through any object of
veneration or enmity, of scientific seriousness or wanton lightness;
also why I, when I could not find what I was in need of, had to fashion
it for myself, counterfeiting it or imagining it (and what poet or
writer has ever done anything else, and what other purpose can all the
art in the world possibly have? ) That which I always stood most in need
of in order to effect my cure and self-recovery was faith, faith enough
not to be thus isolated, not to look at life from so singular a point of
view--a magic apprehension (in eye and mind) of relationship and
equality, a calm confidence in friendship, a blindness, free from
suspicion and questioning, to two sidedness; a pleasure in externals,
superficialities, the near, the accessible, in all things possessed of
color, skin and seeming. Perhaps I could be fairly reproached with much
"art" in this regard, many fine counterfeitings; for example, that,
wisely or wilfully, I had shut my eyes to Schopenhauer's blind will
towards ethic, at a time when I was already clear sighted enough on the
subject of ethic; likewise that I had deceived myself concerning Richard
Wagner's incurable romanticism, as if it were a beginning and not an
end; likewise concerning the Greeks, likewise concerning the Germans and
their future--and there may be, perhaps, a long list of such likewises.
Granted, however, that all this were true, and with justice urged
against me, what does it signify, what can it signify in regard to how
much of the self-sustaining capacity, how much of reason and higher
protection are embraced in such self-deception? --and how much more
falsity is still necessary to me that I may therewith always reassure
myself regarding the luxury of my truth. Enough, I still live; and life
is not considered now apart from ethic; it _will_ [have] deception; it
thrives (lebt) on deception . . . but am I not beginning to do all over
again what I have always done, I, the old immoralist, and bird
snarer--talk unmorally, ultramorally, "beyond good and evil"?
2
Thus, then, have I evolved for myself the "free spirits" to whom this
discouraging-encouraging work, under the general title "Human, All Too
Human," is dedicated. Such "free spirits" do not really exist and never
did exist. But I stood in need of them, as I have pointed out, in order
that some good might be mixed with my evils (illness, loneliness,
strangeness, _acedia_, incapacity): to serve as gay spirits and
comrades, with whom one may talk and laugh when one is disposed to talk
and laugh, and whom one may send to the devil when they grow wearisome.
They are some compensation for the lack of friends. That such free
spirits can possibly exist, that our Europe will yet number among her
sons of to-morrow or of the day after to-morrow, such a brilliant and
enthusiastic company, alive and palpable and not merely, as in my case,
fantasms and imaginary shades, I, myself, can by no means doubt. I see
them already coming, slowly, slowly. May it not be that I am doing a
little something to expedite their coming when I describe in advance the
influences under which I see them evolving and the ways along which they
travel?
3
It may be conjectured that a soul in which the type of "free spirit" can
attain maturity and completeness had its decisive and deciding event in
the form of a great emancipation or unbinding, and that prior to that
event it seemed only the more firmly and forever chained to its place
and pillar. What binds strongest? What cords seem almost unbreakable? In
the case of mortals of a choice and lofty nature they will be those of
duty: that reverence, which in youth is most typical, that timidity and
tenderness in the presence of the traditionally honored and the worthy,
that gratitude to the soil from which we sprung, for the hand that
guided us, for the relic before which we were taught to pray--their
sublimest moments will themselves bind these souls most strongly. The
great liberation comes suddenly to such prisoners, like an earthquake:
the young soul is all at once shaken, torn apart, cast forth--it
comprehends not itself what is taking place. An involuntary onward
impulse rules them with the mastery of command; a will, a wish are
developed to go forward, anywhere, at any price; a strong, dangerous
curiosity regarding an undiscovered world flames and flashes in all
their being. "Better to die than live _here_"--so sounds the tempting
voice: and this "here," this "at home" constitutes all they have
hitherto loved. A sudden dread and distrust of that which they loved, a
flash of contempt for that which is called their "duty," a mutinous,
wilful, volcanic-like longing for a far away journey, strange scenes and
people, annihilation, petrifaction, a hatred surmounting love, perhaps a
sacrilegious impulse and look backwards, to where they so long prayed
and loved, perhaps a flush of shame for what they did and at the same
time an exultation at having done it, an inner, intoxicating,
delightful tremor in which is betrayed the sense of victory--a victory?
over what? over whom? a riddle-like victory, fruitful in questioning and
well worth questioning, but the _first_ victory, for all--such things of
pain and ill belong to the history of the great liberation. And it is at
the same time a malady that can destroy a man, this first outbreak of
strength and will for self-destination, self-valuation, this will for
free will: and how much illness is forced to the surface in the frantic
strivings and singularities with which the freedman, the liberated seeks
henceforth to attest his mastery over things! He roves fiercely around,
with an unsatisfied longing and whatever objects he may encounter must
suffer from the perilous expectancy of his pride; he tears to pieces
whatever attracts him. With a sardonic laugh he overturns whatever he
finds veiled or protected by any reverential awe: he would see what
these things look like when they are overturned. It is wilfulness and
delight in the wilfulness of it, if he now, perhaps, gives his approval
to that which has heretofore been in ill repute--if, in curiosity and
experiment, he penetrates stealthily to the most forbidden things. In
the background during all his plunging and roaming--for he is as
restless and aimless in his course as if lost in a wilderness--is the
interrogation mark of a curiosity growing ever more dangerous. "Can we
not upset every standard? and is good perhaps evil? and God only an
invention and a subtlety of the devil? Is everything, in the last
resort, false? And if we are dupes are we not on that very account
dupers also? _must_ we not be dupers also? " Such reflections lead and
mislead him, ever further on, ever further away. Solitude, that dread
goddess and mater saeva cupidinum, encircles and besets him, ever more
threatening, more violent, more heart breaking--but who to-day knows
what solitude is?
4
From this morbid solitude, from the deserts of such trial years, the way
is yet far to that great, overflowing certainty and healthiness which
cannot dispense even with sickness as a means and a grappling hook of
knowledge; to that matured freedom of the spirit which is, in an equal
degree, self mastery and discipline of the heart, and gives access to
the path of much and various reflection--to that inner comprehensiveness
and self satisfaction of over-richness which precludes all danger that
the spirit has gone astray even in its own path and is sitting
intoxicated in some corner or other; to that overplus of plastic,
healing, imitative and restorative power which is the very sign of
vigorous health, that overplus which confers upon the free spirit the
perilous prerogative of spending a life in experiment and of running
adventurous risks: the past-master-privilege of the free spirit. In the
interval there may be long years of convalescence, years filled with
many hued painfully-bewitching transformations, dominated and led to the
goal by a tenacious will for health that is often emboldened to assume
the guise and the disguise of health. There is a middle ground to this,
which a man of such destiny can not subsequently recall without emotion;
he basks in a special fine sun of his own, with a feeling of birdlike
freedom, birdlike visual power, birdlike irrepressibleness, a something
extraneous (Drittes) in which curiosity and delicate disdain have
united. A "free spirit"--this refreshing term is grateful in any mood,
it almost sets one aglow. One lives--no longer in the bonds of love and
hate, without a yes or no, here or there indifferently, best pleased to
evade, to avoid, to beat about, neither advancing nor retreating. One is
habituated to the bad, like a person who all at once sees a fearful
hurly-burly _beneath_ him--and one was the counterpart of him who
bothers himself with things that do not concern him. As a matter of fact
the free spirit is bothered with mere things--and how many
things--which no longer _concern_ him.
5
A step further in recovery: and the free spirit draws near to life
again, slowly indeed, almost refractorily, almost distrustfully. There
is again warmth and mellowness: feeling and fellow feeling acquire
depth, lambent airs stir all about him. He almost feels: it seems as if
now for the first time his eyes are open to things _near_. He is in
amaze and sits hushed: for where had he been? These near and immediate
things: how changed they seem to him! He looks gratefully back--grateful
for his wandering, his self exile and severity, his lookings afar and
his bird flights in the cold heights. How fortunate that he has not,
like a sensitive, dull home body, remained always "in the house" and "at
home! " He had been beside himself, beyond a doubt. Now for the first
time he really sees himself--and what surprises in the process. What
hitherto unfelt tremors! Yet what joy in the exhaustion, the old
sickness, the relapses of the convalescent! How it delights him,
suffering, to sit still, to exercise patience, to lie in the sun! Who so
well as he appreciates the fact that there comes balmy weather even in
winter, who delights more in the sunshine athwart the wall? They are
the most appreciative creatures in the world, and also the most humble,
these convalescents and lizards, crawling back towards life: there are
some among them who can let no day slip past them without addressing
some song of praise to its retreating light. And speaking seriously, it
is a fundamental cure for all pessimism (the cankerous vice, as is well
known, of all idealists and humbugs), to become ill in the manner of
these free spirits, to remain ill quite a while and then bit by bit grow
healthy--I mean healthier. It is wisdom, worldly wisdom, to administer
even health to oneself for a long time in small doses.
6
About this time it becomes at last possible, amid the flash lights of a
still unestablished, still precarious health, for the free, the ever
freer spirit to begin to read the riddle of that great liberation, a
riddle which has hitherto lingered, obscure, well worth questioning,
almost impalpable, in his memory. If once he hardly dared to ask "why so
apart? so alone? renouncing all I loved? renouncing respect itself? why
this coldness, this suspicion, this hate for one's very virtues? "--now
he dares, and asks it loudly, already hearing the answer, "you had to
become master over yourself, master of your own good qualities. Formerly
they were your masters: but they should be merely your tools along with
other tools. You had to acquire power over your aye and no and learn to
hold and withhold them in accordance with your higher aims. You had to
grasp the perspective of every representation (Werthschatzung)--the
dislocation, distortion and the apparent end or teleology of the
horizon, besides whatever else appertains to the perspective: also the
element of demerit in its relation to opposing merit, and the whole
intellectual cost of every affirmative, every negative. You had to find
out the _inevitable_ error[1] in every Yes and in every No, error as
inseparable from life, life itself as conditioned by the perspective and
its inaccuracy. [1] Above all, you had to see with your own eyes where
the error[1] is always greatest: there, namely, where life is littlest,
narrowest, meanest, least developed and yet cannot help looking upon
itself as the goal and standard of things, and smugly and ignobly and
incessantly tearing to tatters all that is highest and greatest and
richest, and putting the shreds into the form of questions from the
standpoint of its own well being. You had to see with your own eyes the
problem of classification, (Rangordnung, regulation concerning rank and
station) and how strength and sweep and reach of perspective wax upward
together: You had"--enough, the free spirit knows henceforward which
"you had" it has obeyed and also what it now can do and what it now, for
the first time, _dare_.
[1] Ungerechtigkeit, literally wrongfulness, injustice, unrighteousness.
7
Accordingly, the free spirit works out for itself an answer to that
riddle of its liberation and concludes by generalizing upon its
experience in the following fashion: "What I went through everyone must
go through" in whom any problem is germinated and strives to body itself
forth. The inner power and inevitability of this problem will assert
themselves in due course, as in the case of any unsuspected
pregnancy--long before the spirit has seen this problem in its true
aspect and learned to call it by its right name. Our destiny exercises
its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature:
it is our future that lays down the law to our to-day. Granted, that it
is the problem of classification[2] of which we free spirits may say,
this is _our_ problem, yet it is only now, in the midday of our life,
that we fully appreciate what preparations, shifts, trials, ordeals,
stages, were essential to that problem before it could emerge to our
view, and why we had to go through the various and contradictory
longings and satisfactions of body and soul, as circumnavigators and
adventurers of that inner world called "man"; as surveyors of that
"higher" and of that "progression"[3] that is also called
"man"--crowding in everywhere, almost without fear, disdaining nothing,
missing nothing, testing everything, sifting everything and eliminating
the chance impurities--until at last we could say, we free spirits:
"Here--a _new_ problem! Here, a long ladder on the rungs of which we
ourselves have rested and risen, which we have actually been at times.
Here is a something higher, a something deeper, a something below us, a
vastly extensive order, (Ordnung) a comparative classification
(Rangordnung), that we perceive: here--_our_ problem! "
[2] Rangordnung: the meaning is "the problem of grasping the relative
importance of things. "
[3] Uebereinander: one over another.
8
To what stage in the development just outlined the present book belongs
(or is assigned) is something that will be hidden from no augur or
psychologist for an instant. But where are there psychologists to-day?
In France, certainly; in Russia, perhaps; certainly not in Germany.
Grounds are not wanting, to be sure, upon which the Germans of to-day
may adduce this fact to their credit: unhappily for one who in this
matter is fashioned and mentored in an un-German school! This _German_
book, which has found its readers in a wide circle of lands and
peoples--it has been some ten years on its rounds--and which must make
its way by means of any musical art and tune that will captivate the
foreign ear as well as the native--this book has been read most
indifferently in Germany itself and little heeded there: to what is that
due? "It requires too much," I have been told, "it addresses itself to
men free from the press of petty obligations, it demands fine and
trained perceptions, it requires a surplus, a surplus of time, of the
lightness of heaven and of the heart, of otium in the most unrestricted
sense: mere good things that we Germans of to-day have not got and
therefore cannot give. " After so graceful a retort, my philosophy bids
me be silent and ask no more questions: at times, as the proverb says,
one remains a philosopher only because one says--nothing!
Nice, Spring, 1886.
OF THE FIRST AND LAST THINGS.
1
=Chemistry of the Notions and the Feelings. =--Philosophical problems, in
almost all their aspects, present themselves in the same interrogative
formula now that they did two thousand years ago: how can a thing
develop out of its antithesis? for example, the reasonable from the
non-reasonable, the animate from the inanimate, the logical from the
illogical, altruism from egoism, disinterestedness from greed, truth
from error? The metaphysical philosophy formerly steered itself clear of
this difficulty to such extent as to repudiate the evolution of one
thing from another and to assign a miraculous origin to what it deemed
highest and best, due to the very nature and being of the
"thing-in-itself. " The historical philosophy, on the other hand, which
can no longer be viewed apart from physical science, the youngest of all
philosophical methods, discovered experimentally (and its results will
probably always be the same) that there is no antithesis whatever,
except in the usual exaggerations of popular or metaphysical
comprehension, and that an error of the reason is at the bottom of such
contradiction. According to its explanation, there is, strictly
speaking, neither unselfish conduct, nor a wholly disinterested point of
view. Both are simply sublimations in which the basic element seems
almost evaporated and betrays its presence only to the keenest
observation. All that we need and that could possibly be given us in the
present state of development of the sciences, is a chemistry of the
moral, religious, aesthetic conceptions and feeling, as well as of those
emotions which we experience in the affairs, great and small, of society
and civilization, and which we are sensible of even in solitude. But
what if this chemistry established the fact that, even in _its_ domain,
the most magnificent results were attained with the basest and most
despised ingredients? Would many feel disposed to continue such
investigations? Mankind loves to put by the questions of its origin and
beginning: must one not be almost inhuman in order to follow the
opposite course?
2
=The Traditional Error of Philosophers. =--All philosophers make the
common mistake of taking contemporary man as their starting point and of
trying, through an analysis of him, to reach a conclusion. "Man"
involuntarily presents himself to them as an aeterna veritas as a
passive element in every hurly-burly, as a fixed standard of things. Yet
everything uttered by the philosopher on the subject of man is, in the
last resort, nothing more than a piece of testimony concerning man
during a very limited period of time. Lack of the historical sense is
the traditional defect in all philosophers. Many innocently take man in
his most childish state as fashioned through the influence of certain
religious and even of certain political developments, as the permanent
form under which man must be viewed. They will not learn that man has
evolved,[4] that the intellectual faculty itself is an evolution,
whereas some philosophers make the whole cosmos out of this intellectual
faculty. But everything essential in human evolution took place aeons
ago, long before the four thousand years or so of which we know
anything: during these man may not have changed very much. However, the
philosopher ascribes "instinct" to contemporary man and assumes that
this is one of the unalterable facts regarding man himself, and hence
affords a clue to the understanding of the universe in general. The
whole teleology is so planned that man during the last four thousand
years shall be spoken of as a being existing from all eternity, and
with reference to whom everything in the cosmos from its very inception
is naturally ordered. Yet everything evolved: there are no eternal facts
as there are no absolute truths. Accordingly, historical philosophising
is henceforth indispensable, and with it honesty of judgment.
[4] geworden.
3
=Appreciation of Simple Truths. =--It is the characteristic of an
advanced civilization to set a higher value upon little, simple truths,
ascertained by scientific method, than upon the pleasing and magnificent
errors originating in metaphysical and aesthetical epochs and peoples. To
begin with, the former are spoken of with contempt as if there could be
no question of comparison respecting them, so rigid, homely, prosaic and
even discouraging is the aspect of the first, while so beautiful,
decorative, intoxicating and perhaps beatific appear the last named.
Nevertheless, the hardwon, the certain, the lasting and, therefore, the
fertile in new knowledge, is the higher; to hold fast to it is manly and
evinces courage, directness, endurance. And not only individual men but
all mankind will by degrees be uplifted to this manliness when they are
finally habituated to the proper appreciation of tenable, enduring
knowledge and have lost all faith in inspiration and in the miraculous
revelation of truth. The reverers of forms, indeed, with their standards
of beauty and taste, may have good reason to laugh when the appreciation
of little truths and the scientific spirit begin to prevail, but that
will be only because their eyes are not yet opened to the charm of the
utmost simplicity of form or because men though reared in the rightly
appreciative spirit, will still not be fully permeated by it, so that
they continue unwittingly imitating ancient forms (and that ill enough,
as anybody does who no longer feels any interest in a thing). Formerly
the mind was not brought into play through the medium of exact thought.
Its serious business lay in the working out of forms and symbols. That
has now changed. Any seriousness in symbolism is at present the
indication of a deficient education. As our very acts become more
intellectual, our tendencies more rational, and our judgment, for
example, as to what seems reasonable, is very different from what it was
a hundred years ago: so the forms of our lives grow ever more
intellectual and, to the old fashioned eye, perhaps, uglier, but only
because it cannot see that the richness of inner, rational beauty always
spreads and deepens, and that the inner, rational aspect of all things
should now be of more consequence to us than the most beautiful
externality and the most exquisite limning.
4
=Astrology and the Like. =--It is presumable that the objects of the
religious, moral, aesthetic and logical notions pertain simply to the
superficialities of things, although man flatters himself with the
thought that here at least he is getting to the heart of the cosmos. He
deceives himself because these things have power to make him so happy
and so wretched, and so he evinces, in this respect, the same conceit
that characterises astrology. Astrology presupposes that the heavenly
bodies are regulated in their movements in harmony with the destiny of
mortals: the moral man presupposes that that which concerns himself most
nearly must also be the heart and soul of things.
5
=Misconception of Dreams. =--In the dream, mankind, in epochs of crude
primitive civilization, thought they were introduced to a second,
substantial world: here we have the source of all metaphysic. Without
the dream, men would never have been incited to an analysis of the
world. Even the distinction between soul and body is wholly due to the
primitive conception of the dream, as also the hypothesis of the
embodied soul, whence the development of all superstition, and also,
probably, the belief in god. "The dead still live: for they appear to
the living in dreams. " So reasoned mankind at one time, and through many
thousands of years.
6
=The Scientific Spirit Prevails only Partially, not Wholly. =--The
specialized, minutest departments of science are dealt with purely
objectively. But the general universal sciences, considered as a great,
basic unity, posit the question--truly a very living question--: to what
purpose? what is the use? Because of this reference to utility they are,
as a whole, less impersonal than when looked at in their specialized
aspects. Now in the case of philosophy, as forming the apex of the
scientific pyramid, this question of the utility of knowledge is
necessarily brought very conspicuously forward, so that every philosophy
has, unconsciously, the air of ascribing the highest utility to itself.
It is for this reason that all philosophies contain such a great amount
of high flying metaphysic, and such a shrinking from the seeming
insignificance of the deliverances of physical science: for the
significance of knowledge in relation to life must be made to appear as
great as possible. This constitutes the antagonism between the
specialties of science and philosophy. The latter aims, as art aims, at
imparting to life and conduct the utmost depth and significance: in the
former mere knowledge is sought and nothing else--whatever else be
incidentally obtained. Heretofore there has never been a philosophical
system in which philosophy itself was not made the apologist of
knowledge [in the abstract]. On this point, at least, each is optimistic
and insists that to knowledge the highest utility must be ascribed. They
are all under the tyranny of logic, which is, from its very nature,
optimism.
7
=The Discordant Element in Science. =--Philosophy severed itself from
science when it put the question: what is that knowledge of the world
and of life through which mankind may be made happiest? This happened
when the Socratic school arose: with the standpoint of _happiness_ the
arteries of investigating science were compressed too tightly to permit
of any circulation of the blood--and are so compressed to-day.
8
=Pneumatic Explanation of Nature. =[5]--Metaphysic reads the message of
nature as if it were written purely pneumatically, as the church and its
learned ones formerly did where the bible was concerned. It requires a
great deal of expertness to apply to nature the same strict science of
interpretation that the philologists have devised for all literature,
and to apply it for the purpose of a simple, direct interpretation of
the message, and at the same time, not bring out a double meaning. But,
as in the case of books and literature, errors of exposition are far
from being completely eliminated, and vestiges of allegorical and
mystical interpretations are still to be met with in the most cultivated
circles, so where nature is concerned the case is--actually much worse.
[5] Pneumatic is here used in the sense of spiritual. Pneuma being the
Greek word in the New Testament for the Holy Spirit. --Ed.
9
=Metaphysical World. =--It is true, there may be a metaphysical world;
the absolute possibility of it can scarcely be disputed. We see all
things through the medium of the human head and we cannot well cut off
this head: although there remains the question what part of the world
would be left after it had been cut off. But that is a purely abstract
scientific problem and one not much calculated to give men uneasiness:
yet everything that has heretofore made metaphysical assumptions
valuable, fearful or delightful to men, all that gave rise to them is
passion, error and self deception: the worst systems of knowledge, not
the best, pin their tenets of belief thereto. When such methods are once
brought to view as the basis of all existing religions and metaphysics,
they are already discredited. There always remains, however, the
possibility already conceded: but nothing at all can be made out of
that, to say not a word about letting happiness, salvation and life hang
upon the threads spun from such a possibility. Accordingly, nothing
could be predicated of the metaphysical world beyond the fact that it is
an elsewhere,[6] another sphere, inaccessible and incomprehensible to
us: it would become a thing of negative properties. Even were the
existence of such a world absolutely established, it would nevertheless
remain incontrovertible that of all kinds of knowledge, knowledge of
such a world would be of least consequence--of even less consequence
than knowledge of the chemical analysis of water would be to a storm
tossed mariner.
[6] Anderssein.
10
=The Harmlessness of Metaphysic in the Future. =--As soon as religion,
art and ethics are so understood that a full comprehension of them can
be gained without taking refuge in the postulates of metaphysical
claptrap at any point in the line of reasoning, there will be a complete
cessation of interest in the purely theoretical problem of the "thing in
itself" and the "phenomenon. " For here, too, the same truth applies: in
religion, art and ethics we are not concerned with the "essence of the
cosmos". [7] We are in the sphere of pure conception. No presentiment [or
intuition] can carry us any further. With perfect tranquility the
question of how our conception of the world could differ so sharply from
the actual world as it is manifest to us, will be relegated to the
physiological sciences and to the history of the evolution of ideas and
organisms.
[7] "Wesen der Welt an sich. "
11
=Language as a Presumptive Science. =--The importance of language in the
development of civilization consists in the fact that by means of it
man placed one world, his own, alongside another, a place of leverage
that he thought so firm as to admit of his turning the rest of the
cosmos on a pivot that he might master it. In so far as man for ages
looked upon mere ideas and names of things as upon aeternae veritates,
he evinced the very pride with which he raised himself above the brute.
He really supposed that in language he possessed a knowledge of the
cosmos. The language builder was not so modest as to believe that he was
only giving names to things. On the contrary he thought he embodied the
highest wisdom concerning things in [mere] words; and, in truth,
language is the first movement in all strivings for wisdom. Here, too,
it is _faith in ascertained truth_[8] from which the mightiest fountains
of strength have flowed. Very tardily--only now--it dawns upon men that
they have propagated a monstrous error in their belief in language.
Fortunately, it is too late now to arrest and turn back the evolutionary
process of the reason, which had its inception in this belief. Logic
itself rests upon assumptions to which nothing in the world of reality
corresponds. For example, the correspondence of certain things to one
another and the identity of those things at different periods of time
are assumptions pure and simple, but the science of logic originated in
the positive belief that they were not assumptions at all but
established facts. It is the same with the science of mathematics which
certainly would never have come into existence if mankind had known from
the beginning that in all nature there is no perfectly straight line, no
true circle, no standard of measurement.
[8] Glaube an die gefundene Wahrheit, as distinguished from faith in
what is taken on trust as truth.
12
=Dream and Civilization.
Our destiny exercises
its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature:
it is our future that lays down the law to our to-day. Granted, that it
is the problem of classification[2] of which we free spirits may say,
this is _our_ problem, yet it is only now, in the midday of our life,
that we fully appreciate what preparations, shifts, trials, ordeals,
stages, were essential to that problem before it could emerge to our
view, and why we had to go through the various and contradictory
longings and satisfactions of body and soul, as circumnavigators and
adventurers of that inner world called "man"; as surveyors of that
"higher" and of that "progression"[3] that is also called
"man"--crowding in everywhere, almost without fear, disdaining nothing,
missing nothing, testing everything, sifting everything and eliminating
the chance impurities--until at last we could say, we free spirits:
"Here--a _new_ problem! Here, a long ladder on the rungs of which we
ourselves have rested and risen, which we have actually been at times.
Here is a something higher, a something deeper, a something below us, a
vastly extensive order, (Ordnung) a comparative classification
(Rangordnung), that we perceive: here--_our_ problem! "
[2] Rangordnung: the meaning is "the problem of grasping the relative
importance of things. "
[3] Uebereinander: one over another.
8
To what stage in the development just outlined the present book belongs
(or is assigned) is something that will be hidden from no augur or
psychologist for an instant. But where are there psychologists to-day?
In France, certainly; in Russia, perhaps; certainly not in Germany.
Grounds are not wanting, to be sure, upon which the Germans of to-day
may adduce this fact to their credit: unhappily for one who in this
matter is fashioned and mentored in an un-German school! This _German_
book, which has found its readers in a wide circle of lands and
peoples--it has been some ten years on its rounds--and which must make
its way by means of any musical art and tune that will captivate the
foreign ear as well as the native--this book has been read most
indifferently in Germany itself and little heeded there: to what is that
due? "It requires too much," I have been told, "it addresses itself to
men free from the press of petty obligations, it demands fine and
trained perceptions, it requires a surplus, a surplus of time, of the
lightness of heaven and of the heart, of otium in the most unrestricted
sense: mere good things that we Germans of to-day have not got and
therefore cannot give. " After so graceful a retort, my philosophy bids
me be silent and ask no more questions: at times, as the proverb says,
one remains a philosopher only because one says--nothing!
Nice, Spring, 1886.
OF THE FIRST AND LAST THINGS.
1
=Chemistry of the Notions and the Feelings. =--Philosophical problems, in
almost all their aspects, present themselves in the same interrogative
formula now that they did two thousand years ago: how can a thing
develop out of its antithesis? for example, the reasonable from the
non-reasonable, the animate from the inanimate, the logical from the
illogical, altruism from egoism, disinterestedness from greed, truth
from error? The metaphysical philosophy formerly steered itself clear of
this difficulty to such extent as to repudiate the evolution of one
thing from another and to assign a miraculous origin to what it deemed
highest and best, due to the very nature and being of the
"thing-in-itself. " The historical philosophy, on the other hand, which
can no longer be viewed apart from physical science, the youngest of all
philosophical methods, discovered experimentally (and its results will
probably always be the same) that there is no antithesis whatever,
except in the usual exaggerations of popular or metaphysical
comprehension, and that an error of the reason is at the bottom of such
contradiction. According to its explanation, there is, strictly
speaking, neither unselfish conduct, nor a wholly disinterested point of
view. Both are simply sublimations in which the basic element seems
almost evaporated and betrays its presence only to the keenest
observation. All that we need and that could possibly be given us in the
present state of development of the sciences, is a chemistry of the
moral, religious, aesthetic conceptions and feeling, as well as of those
emotions which we experience in the affairs, great and small, of society
and civilization, and which we are sensible of even in solitude. But
what if this chemistry established the fact that, even in _its_ domain,
the most magnificent results were attained with the basest and most
despised ingredients? Would many feel disposed to continue such
investigations? Mankind loves to put by the questions of its origin and
beginning: must one not be almost inhuman in order to follow the
opposite course?
2
=The Traditional Error of Philosophers. =--All philosophers make the
common mistake of taking contemporary man as their starting point and of
trying, through an analysis of him, to reach a conclusion. "Man"
involuntarily presents himself to them as an aeterna veritas as a
passive element in every hurly-burly, as a fixed standard of things. Yet
everything uttered by the philosopher on the subject of man is, in the
last resort, nothing more than a piece of testimony concerning man
during a very limited period of time. Lack of the historical sense is
the traditional defect in all philosophers. Many innocently take man in
his most childish state as fashioned through the influence of certain
religious and even of certain political developments, as the permanent
form under which man must be viewed. They will not learn that man has
evolved,[4] that the intellectual faculty itself is an evolution,
whereas some philosophers make the whole cosmos out of this intellectual
faculty. But everything essential in human evolution took place aeons
ago, long before the four thousand years or so of which we know
anything: during these man may not have changed very much. However, the
philosopher ascribes "instinct" to contemporary man and assumes that
this is one of the unalterable facts regarding man himself, and hence
affords a clue to the understanding of the universe in general. The
whole teleology is so planned that man during the last four thousand
years shall be spoken of as a being existing from all eternity, and
with reference to whom everything in the cosmos from its very inception
is naturally ordered. Yet everything evolved: there are no eternal facts
as there are no absolute truths. Accordingly, historical philosophising
is henceforth indispensable, and with it honesty of judgment.
[4] geworden.
3
=Appreciation of Simple Truths. =--It is the characteristic of an
advanced civilization to set a higher value upon little, simple truths,
ascertained by scientific method, than upon the pleasing and magnificent
errors originating in metaphysical and aesthetical epochs and peoples. To
begin with, the former are spoken of with contempt as if there could be
no question of comparison respecting them, so rigid, homely, prosaic and
even discouraging is the aspect of the first, while so beautiful,
decorative, intoxicating and perhaps beatific appear the last named.
Nevertheless, the hardwon, the certain, the lasting and, therefore, the
fertile in new knowledge, is the higher; to hold fast to it is manly and
evinces courage, directness, endurance. And not only individual men but
all mankind will by degrees be uplifted to this manliness when they are
finally habituated to the proper appreciation of tenable, enduring
knowledge and have lost all faith in inspiration and in the miraculous
revelation of truth. The reverers of forms, indeed, with their standards
of beauty and taste, may have good reason to laugh when the appreciation
of little truths and the scientific spirit begin to prevail, but that
will be only because their eyes are not yet opened to the charm of the
utmost simplicity of form or because men though reared in the rightly
appreciative spirit, will still not be fully permeated by it, so that
they continue unwittingly imitating ancient forms (and that ill enough,
as anybody does who no longer feels any interest in a thing). Formerly
the mind was not brought into play through the medium of exact thought.
Its serious business lay in the working out of forms and symbols. That
has now changed. Any seriousness in symbolism is at present the
indication of a deficient education. As our very acts become more
intellectual, our tendencies more rational, and our judgment, for
example, as to what seems reasonable, is very different from what it was
a hundred years ago: so the forms of our lives grow ever more
intellectual and, to the old fashioned eye, perhaps, uglier, but only
because it cannot see that the richness of inner, rational beauty always
spreads and deepens, and that the inner, rational aspect of all things
should now be of more consequence to us than the most beautiful
externality and the most exquisite limning.
4
=Astrology and the Like. =--It is presumable that the objects of the
religious, moral, aesthetic and logical notions pertain simply to the
superficialities of things, although man flatters himself with the
thought that here at least he is getting to the heart of the cosmos. He
deceives himself because these things have power to make him so happy
and so wretched, and so he evinces, in this respect, the same conceit
that characterises astrology. Astrology presupposes that the heavenly
bodies are regulated in their movements in harmony with the destiny of
mortals: the moral man presupposes that that which concerns himself most
nearly must also be the heart and soul of things.
5
=Misconception of Dreams. =--In the dream, mankind, in epochs of crude
primitive civilization, thought they were introduced to a second,
substantial world: here we have the source of all metaphysic. Without
the dream, men would never have been incited to an analysis of the
world. Even the distinction between soul and body is wholly due to the
primitive conception of the dream, as also the hypothesis of the
embodied soul, whence the development of all superstition, and also,
probably, the belief in god. "The dead still live: for they appear to
the living in dreams. " So reasoned mankind at one time, and through many
thousands of years.
6
=The Scientific Spirit Prevails only Partially, not Wholly. =--The
specialized, minutest departments of science are dealt with purely
objectively. But the general universal sciences, considered as a great,
basic unity, posit the question--truly a very living question--: to what
purpose? what is the use? Because of this reference to utility they are,
as a whole, less impersonal than when looked at in their specialized
aspects. Now in the case of philosophy, as forming the apex of the
scientific pyramid, this question of the utility of knowledge is
necessarily brought very conspicuously forward, so that every philosophy
has, unconsciously, the air of ascribing the highest utility to itself.
It is for this reason that all philosophies contain such a great amount
of high flying metaphysic, and such a shrinking from the seeming
insignificance of the deliverances of physical science: for the
significance of knowledge in relation to life must be made to appear as
great as possible. This constitutes the antagonism between the
specialties of science and philosophy. The latter aims, as art aims, at
imparting to life and conduct the utmost depth and significance: in the
former mere knowledge is sought and nothing else--whatever else be
incidentally obtained. Heretofore there has never been a philosophical
system in which philosophy itself was not made the apologist of
knowledge [in the abstract]. On this point, at least, each is optimistic
and insists that to knowledge the highest utility must be ascribed. They
are all under the tyranny of logic, which is, from its very nature,
optimism.
7
=The Discordant Element in Science. =--Philosophy severed itself from
science when it put the question: what is that knowledge of the world
and of life through which mankind may be made happiest? This happened
when the Socratic school arose: with the standpoint of _happiness_ the
arteries of investigating science were compressed too tightly to permit
of any circulation of the blood--and are so compressed to-day.
8
=Pneumatic Explanation of Nature. =[5]--Metaphysic reads the message of
nature as if it were written purely pneumatically, as the church and its
learned ones formerly did where the bible was concerned. It requires a
great deal of expertness to apply to nature the same strict science of
interpretation that the philologists have devised for all literature,
and to apply it for the purpose of a simple, direct interpretation of
the message, and at the same time, not bring out a double meaning. But,
as in the case of books and literature, errors of exposition are far
from being completely eliminated, and vestiges of allegorical and
mystical interpretations are still to be met with in the most cultivated
circles, so where nature is concerned the case is--actually much worse.
[5] Pneumatic is here used in the sense of spiritual. Pneuma being the
Greek word in the New Testament for the Holy Spirit. --Ed.
9
=Metaphysical World. =--It is true, there may be a metaphysical world;
the absolute possibility of it can scarcely be disputed. We see all
things through the medium of the human head and we cannot well cut off
this head: although there remains the question what part of the world
would be left after it had been cut off. But that is a purely abstract
scientific problem and one not much calculated to give men uneasiness:
yet everything that has heretofore made metaphysical assumptions
valuable, fearful or delightful to men, all that gave rise to them is
passion, error and self deception: the worst systems of knowledge, not
the best, pin their tenets of belief thereto. When such methods are once
brought to view as the basis of all existing religions and metaphysics,
they are already discredited. There always remains, however, the
possibility already conceded: but nothing at all can be made out of
that, to say not a word about letting happiness, salvation and life hang
upon the threads spun from such a possibility. Accordingly, nothing
could be predicated of the metaphysical world beyond the fact that it is
an elsewhere,[6] another sphere, inaccessible and incomprehensible to
us: it would become a thing of negative properties. Even were the
existence of such a world absolutely established, it would nevertheless
remain incontrovertible that of all kinds of knowledge, knowledge of
such a world would be of least consequence--of even less consequence
than knowledge of the chemical analysis of water would be to a storm
tossed mariner.
[6] Anderssein.
10
=The Harmlessness of Metaphysic in the Future. =--As soon as religion,
art and ethics are so understood that a full comprehension of them can
be gained without taking refuge in the postulates of metaphysical
claptrap at any point in the line of reasoning, there will be a complete
cessation of interest in the purely theoretical problem of the "thing in
itself" and the "phenomenon. " For here, too, the same truth applies: in
religion, art and ethics we are not concerned with the "essence of the
cosmos". [7] We are in the sphere of pure conception. No presentiment [or
intuition] can carry us any further. With perfect tranquility the
question of how our conception of the world could differ so sharply from
the actual world as it is manifest to us, will be relegated to the
physiological sciences and to the history of the evolution of ideas and
organisms.
[7] "Wesen der Welt an sich. "
11
=Language as a Presumptive Science. =--The importance of language in the
development of civilization consists in the fact that by means of it
man placed one world, his own, alongside another, a place of leverage
that he thought so firm as to admit of his turning the rest of the
cosmos on a pivot that he might master it. In so far as man for ages
looked upon mere ideas and names of things as upon aeternae veritates,
he evinced the very pride with which he raised himself above the brute.
He really supposed that in language he possessed a knowledge of the
cosmos. The language builder was not so modest as to believe that he was
only giving names to things. On the contrary he thought he embodied the
highest wisdom concerning things in [mere] words; and, in truth,
language is the first movement in all strivings for wisdom. Here, too,
it is _faith in ascertained truth_[8] from which the mightiest fountains
of strength have flowed. Very tardily--only now--it dawns upon men that
they have propagated a monstrous error in their belief in language.
Fortunately, it is too late now to arrest and turn back the evolutionary
process of the reason, which had its inception in this belief. Logic
itself rests upon assumptions to which nothing in the world of reality
corresponds. For example, the correspondence of certain things to one
another and the identity of those things at different periods of time
are assumptions pure and simple, but the science of logic originated in
the positive belief that they were not assumptions at all but
established facts. It is the same with the science of mathematics which
certainly would never have come into existence if mankind had known from
the beginning that in all nature there is no perfectly straight line, no
true circle, no standard of measurement.
[8] Glaube an die gefundene Wahrheit, as distinguished from faith in
what is taken on trust as truth.
12
=Dream and Civilization. =--The function of the brain which is most
encroached upon in slumber is the memory; not that it is wholly
suspended, but it is reduced to a state of imperfection as, in primitive
ages of mankind, was probably the case with everyone, whether waking or
sleeping. Uncontrolled and entangled as it is, it perpetually confuses
things as a result of the most trifling similarities, yet in the same
mental confusion and lack of control the nations invented their
mythologies, while nowadays travelers habitually observe how prone the
savage is to forgetfulness, how his mind, after the least exertion of
memory, begins to wander and lose itself until finally he utters
falsehood and nonsense from sheer exhaustion. Yet, in dreams, we all
resemble this savage. Inadequacy of distinction and error of comparison
are the basis of the preposterous things we do and say in dreams, so
that when we clearly recall a dream we are startled that so much idiocy
lurks within us. The absolute distinctness of all dream-images, due to
implicit faith in their substantial reality, recalls the conditions in
which earlier mankind were placed, for whom hallucinations had
extraordinary vividness, entire communities and even entire nations
laboring simultaneously under them. Therefore: in sleep and in dream we
make the pilgrimage of early mankind over again.
13
=Logic of the Dream. =--During sleep the nervous system, through various
inner provocatives, is in constant agitation. Almost all the organs act
independently and vigorously. The blood circulates rapidly. The posture
of the sleeper compresses some portions of the body. The coverlets
influence the sensations in different ways. The stomach carries on the
digestive process and acts upon other organs thereby. The intestines are
in motion. The position of the head induces unaccustomed action. The
feet, shoeless, no longer pressing the ground, are the occasion of other
sensations of novelty, as is, indeed, the changed garb of the entire
body. All these things, following the bustle and change of the day,
result, through their novelty, in a movement throughout the entire
system that extends even to the brain functions. Thus there are a
hundred circumstances to induce perplexity in the mind, a questioning as
to the cause of this excitation. Now, the dream is a _seeking and
presenting of reasons_ for these excitations of feeling, of the supposed
reasons, that is to say. Thus, for example, whoever has his feet bound
with two threads will probably dream that a pair of serpents are coiled
about his feet. This is at first a hypothesis, then a belief with an
accompanying imaginative picture and the argument: "these snakes must be
the _causa_ of those sensations which I, the sleeper, now have. " So
reasons the mind of the sleeper. The conditions precedent, as thus
conjectured, become, owing to the excitation of the fancy, present
realities. Everyone knows from experience how a dreamer will transform
one piercing sound, for example, that of a bell, into another of quite a
different nature, say, the report of cannon. In his dream he becomes
aware first of the effects, which he explains by a subsequent hypothesis
and becomes persuaded of the purely conjectural nature of the sound. But
how comes it that the mind of the dreamer goes so far astray when the
same mind, awake, is habitually cautious, careful, and so conservative
in its dealings with hypotheses? why does the first plausible
hypothesis of the cause of a sensation gain credit in the dreaming
state? (For in a dream we look upon that dream as reality, that is, we
accept our hypotheses as fully established). I have no doubt that as men
argue in their dreams to-day, mankind argued, even in their waking
moments, for thousands of years: the first _causa_, that occurred to the
mind with reference to anything that stood in need of explanation, was
accepted as the true explanation and served as such. (Savages show the
same tendency in operation, as the reports of travelers agree). In the
dream this atavistic relic of humanity manifests its existence within
us, for it is the foundation upon which the higher rational faculty
developed itself and still develops itself in every individual. Dreams
carry us back to the earlier stages of human culture and afford us a
means of understanding it more clearly. Dream thought comes so easily to
us now because we are so thoroughly trained to it through the
interminable stages of evolution during which this fanciful and facile
form of theorising has prevailed. To a certain extent the dream is a
restorative for the brain, which, during the day, is called upon to meet
the many demands for trained thought made upon it by the conditions of a
higher civilization. --We may, if we please, become sensible, even in our
waking moments, of a condition that is as a door and vestibule to
dreaming. If we close our eyes the brain immediately conjures up a
medley of impressions of light and color, apparently a sort of imitation
and echo of the impressions forced in upon the brain during its waking
moments. And now the mind, in co-operation with the imagination,
transforms this formless play of light and color into definite figures,
moving groups, landscapes. What really takes place is a sort of
reasoning from effect back to cause. As the brain inquires: whence these
impressions of light and color? it posits as the inducing causes of such
lights and colors, those shapes and figures. They serve the brain as the
occasions of those lights and colors because the brain, when the eyes
are open and the senses awake, is accustomed to perceiving the cause of
every impression of light and color made upon it. Here again the
imagination is continually interposing its images inasmuch as it
participates in the production of the impressions made through the
senses day by day: and the dream-fancy does exactly the same thing--that
is, the presumed cause is determined from the effect and _after_ the
effect: all this, too, with extraordinary rapidity, so that in this
matter, as in a matter of jugglery or sleight-of-hand, a confusion of
the mind is produced and an after effect is made to appear a
simultaneous action, an inverted succession of events, even. --From
these considerations we can see how _late_ strict, logical thought, the
true notion of cause and effect must have been in developing, since our
intellectual and rational faculties to this very day revert to these
primitive processes of deduction, while practically half our lifetime is
spent in the super-inducing conditions. --Even the poet, the artist,
ascribes to his sentimental and emotional states causes which are not
the true ones. To that extent he is a reminder of early mankind and can
aid us in its comprehension.
14
=Association. =[9]--All strong feelings are associated with a variety of
allied sentiments and emotions. They stir up the memory at the same
time. When we are under their influence we are reminded of similar
states and we feel a renewal of them within us. Thus are formed habitual
successions of feelings and notions, which, at last, when they follow
one another with lightning rapidity are no longer felt as complexities
but as unities. In this sense we hear of moral feelings, of religious
feelings, as if they were absolute unities. In reality they are streams
with a hundred sources and tributaries. Here again, the unity of the
word speaks nothing for the unity of the thing.
[9] Miterklingen: to sound simultaneously with.
15
=No Within and Without in the World. =[10]--As Democritus transferred the
notions above and below to limitless space, where they are destitute of
meaning, so the philosophers do generally with the idea "within and
without," as regards the form and substance (Wesen und Erscheinung) of
the world. What they claim is that through the medium of profound
feelings one can penetrate deep into the soul of things (Innre), draw
close to the heart of nature. But these feelings are deep only in so far
as with them are simultaneously aroused, although almost imperceptibly,
certain complicated groups of thoughts (Gedankengruppen) which we call
deep: a feeling is deep because we deem the thoughts accompanying it
deep. But deep thought can nevertheless be very widely sundered from
truth, as for instance every metaphysical thought. Take from deep
feeling the element of thought blended with it and all that remains is
_strength_ of feeling which is no voucher for the validity of
knowledge, as intense faith is evidence only of its own intensity and
not of the truth of that in which the faith is felt.
[10] Kein Innen und Aussen in der Welt: the above translation may seem
too literal but some dispute has arisen concerning the precise idea the
author means to convey.
16
=Phenomenon and Thing-in-Itself. =--The philosophers are in the habit of
placing themselves in front of life and experience--that which they call
the world of phenomena--as if they were standing before a picture that
is unrolled before them in its final completeness. This panorama, they
think, must be studied in every detail in order to reach some conclusion
regarding the object represented by the picture. From effect,
accordingly is deduced cause and from cause is deduced the
unconditioned. This process is generally looked upon as affording the
all sufficient explanation of the world of phenomena. On the other hand
one must, (while putting the conception of the metaphysical distinctly
forward as that of the unconditioned, and consequently of the
unconditioning) absolutely deny any connection between the unconditioned
(of the metaphysical world) and the world known to us: so that
throughout phenomena there is no manifestation of the thing-in-itself,
and getting from one to the other is out of the question. Thus is left
quite ignored the circumstance that the picture--that which we now call
life and experience--is a gradual evolution, is, indeed, still in
process of evolution and for that reason should not be regarded as an
enduring whole from which any conclusion as to its author (the
all-sufficient reason) could be arrived at, or even pronounced out of
the question. It is because we have for thousands of years looked into
the world with moral, aesthetic, religious predispositions, with blind
prejudice, passion or fear, and surfeited ourselves with indulgence in
the follies of illogical thought, that the world has gradually become so
wondrously motley, frightful, significant, soulful: it has taken on
tints, but we have been the colorists: the human intellect, upon the
foundation of human needs, of human passions, has reared all these
"phenomena" and injected its own erroneous fundamental conceptions into
things. Late, very late, the human intellect checks itself: and now the
world of experience and the thing-in-itself seem to it so severed and so
antithetical that it denies the possibility of one's hinging upon the
other--or else summons us to surrender our intellect, our personal will,
to the secret and the awe-inspiring in order that thereby we may attain
certainty of certainty hereafter. Again, there are those who have
combined all the characteristic features of our world of
phenomena--that is, the conception of the world which has been formed
and inherited through a series of intellectual vagaries--and instead of
holding the intellect responsible for it all, have pronounced the very
nature of things accountable for the present very sinister aspect of the
world, and preached annihilation of existence. Through all these views
and opinions the toilsome, steady process of science (which now for the
first time begins to celebrate its greatest triumph in the genesis of
thought) will definitely work itself out, the result, being, perhaps, to
the following effect: That which we now call the world is the result of
a crowd of errors and fancies which gradually developed in the general
evolution of organic nature, have grown together and been transmitted to
us as the accumulated treasure of all the past--as the _treasure_, for
whatever is worth anything in our humanity rests upon it. From this
world of conception it is in the power of science to release us only to
a slight extent--and this is all that could be wished--inasmuch as it
cannot eradicate the influence of hereditary habits of feeling, but it
can light up by degrees the stages of the development of that world of
conception, and lift us, at least for a time, above the whole spectacle.
Perhaps we may then perceive that the thing-in-itself is a meet subject
for Homeric laughter: that it seemed so much, everything, indeed, and
is really a void--void, that is to say, of meaning.
17
=Metaphysical Explanation. =--Man, when he is young, prizes metaphysical
explanations, because they make him see matters of the highest import in
things he found disagreeable or contemptible: and if he is not satisfied
with himself, this feeling of dissatisfaction is soothed when he sees
the most hidden world-problem or world-pain in that which he finds so
displeasing in himself. To feel himself more unresponsible and at the
same time to find things (Dinge) more interesting--that is to him the
double benefit he owes to metaphysics. Later, indeed, he acquires
distrust of the whole metaphysical method of explaining things: he then
perceives, perhaps, that those effects could have been attained just as
well and more scientifically by another method: that physical and
historical explanations would, at least, have given that feeling of
freedom from personal responsibility just as well, while interest in
life and its problems would be stimulated, perhaps, even more.
18
=The Fundamental Problems of Metaphysics. =--If a history of the
development of thought is ever written, the following proposition,
advanced by a distinguished logician, will be illuminated with a new
light: "The universal, primordial law of the apprehending subject
consists in the inner necessity of cognizing every object by itself, as
in its essence a thing unto itself, therefore as self-existing and
unchanging, in short, as a substance. " Even this law, which is here
called "primordial," is an evolution: it has yet to be shown how
gradually this evolution takes place in lower organizations: how the
dim, mole eyes of such organizations see, at first, nothing but a blank
sameness: how later, when the various excitations of desire and aversion
manifest themselves, various substances are gradually distinguished, but
each with an attribute, that is, a special relationship to such an
organization. The first step towards the logical is judgment, the
essence of which, according to the best logicians, is belief. At the
foundation of all beliefs lie sensations of pleasure or pain in relation
to the apprehending subject. A third feeling, as the result of two
prior, single, separate feelings, is judgment in its crudest form. We
organic beings are primordially interested by nothing whatever in any
thing (Ding) except its relation to ourselves with reference to pleasure
and pain. Between the moments in which we are conscious of this
relation, (the states of feeling) lie the moments of rest, of
not-feeling: then the world and every thing (Ding) have no interest for
us: we observe no change in them (as at present a person absorbed in
something does not notice anyone passing by). To plants all things are,
as a rule, at rest, eternal, every object like itself. From the period
of lower organisms has been handed down to man the belief that there are
like things (gleiche Dinge): only the trained experience attained
through the most advanced science contradicts this postulate. The
primordial belief of all organisms is, perhaps, that all the rest of the
world is one thing and motionless.
