No More Learning

Do you really believe yourself able to
reckon up history like an addition sum, and do you
consider your common intellect and your mathe-
matical education good enough for that? How it
must vex you to hear, that others narrate things,
out of the best known periods, which you will never
conceive, never!
If now to this "education,"calling itself historic but
destitute of enthusiasm, and to the hostile Philistine
activity, foaming with rage against all that is great,
is added that third brutal and excited company of
those who race after " Fortune"—then that in summa
results in such a confused shrieking and such a limb-
dislocating turmoil that the thinker with stopped-up
ears and blindfolded eyes flees into the most solitary
wilderness,—where he may see, what those never will
see, where he must hear sounds which rise to him out
of all the depths of nature and come down to him
from the stars. Here he confers with the great prob-
lems floating towards him, whose voices of course
sound just as comfortless-awful,as unhistoric-eternal.
The feeble person flees back from their cold breath,
and the calculating one runs right through them
without perceiving them. They deal worst, however,
with the "educated man" who at times bestows great
pains upon them. To him these phantoms transform
themselves into conceptual cobwebs and hollow


## p. 69 (#107) #############################################

SCHOPENHAUER'S PHILOSOPHY 69
sound-figures. Grasping after them he imagines he
has philosophy; in order to search for them he climbs
about in the so-called history of philosophy—and
when at last he has collected and piled up quite a
cloud of such abstractions and stereotyped patterns,
then it may happen to him that a real thinker crosses
his path and—puffs them away. What a desperate
annoyance indeed to meddle with philosophy as an
—" educated person "! From time to time it is
true it appears to him as if the impossible connection
of philosophy with that which nowadays gives itself
airs as "German Culture" has become possible;
some mongrel dallies and ogles between the two
spheres and confuses fantasy on this side and on the
other. Meanwhile however one piece of advice is to
be given to the Germans, if they do not wish to let
themselves be confused. They may put to them-
selves the question about everything that they now
call Culture: is this the hoped-for German Culture,
so serious and creative, so redeeming for the German
mind, so purifying for the German virtues that their
only philosopher in this century, Arthur Schopen-
hauer, should have to espouse its cause?
Here you have the philosopher—now search for
the Culture proper to him! And if you are able to
divine what kind of culture that would have to be,
which would correspond to such a philosopher, then
you have, in this divination, already passed sentence
on all your culture and on yourselves!


## p. 69 (#108) #############################################

68 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
consequuntur. (Dialogus deoratoribus,cap. 2$. ) His-
tory has not thought fit to tell you anything that is
essential, but scorning and invisible she stood by
your side, slipping into this one's hand some state
proceedings, into that one's an ambassadorial report,
into another's a date or an etymology or a pragmatic
cobweb. Do you really believe yourself able to
reckon up history like an addition sum, and do you
consider your common intellect and your mathe-
matical education good enough for that? How it
must vex you to hear, that others narrate things,
out of the best known periods, which you will never
conceive, never!
If now to this "education,"calling itself historic but
destitute of enthusiasm, and to the hostile Philistine
activity, foaming with rage against all that is great,
is added that third brutal and excited company of
those who race after "Fortune"—then that in sum ma
results in such a confused shrieking and such a limb-
dislocating turmoil that the thinker with stopped-up
ears and blindfolded eyes flees into the most solitary
wilderness,—where he may see, what those never will
see, where he must hear sounds which rise to him out
of all the depths of nature and come down to him
from the stars. Here he confers with the great prob-
lems floating towards him, whose voices of course
sound just as comfortless-awful,as unhistoric-eternal.
The feeble person flees back from their cold breath,
and the calculating one runs right through them
without perceiving them. They deal worst, however,
with the "educated man" who at times bestows great
pains upon them. To him these phantoms transform
themselves into conceptual cobwebs and hollow
1


## p. 69 (#109) #############################################

SCHOPENHAUER'S PHILOSOPHY 69
sound-figures. Grasping after them he imagines he
has philosophy; in order to search for them he climbs
about in the so-called history of philosophy—and
when at last he has collected and piled up quite a
cloud of such abstractions and stereotyped patterns,
then it may happen to him that a real thinker crosses
his path and—puffs them away. What a desperate
annoyance indeed to meddle with philosophy as an
—"educated person"! From time to time it is
true it appears to him as if the impossible connection
of philosophy with that which nowadays gives itself
airs as "German Culture" has become possible;
some mongrel dallies and ogles between the two
spheres and confuses fantasy on this side and on the
other. Meanwhile however one piece of advice is to
be given to the Germans, if they do not wish to let
themselves be confused. They may put to them-
selves the question about everything that they now
call Culture: is this the hoped-for German Culture,
so serious and creative, so redeeming for the German
mind, so purifying for the German virtues that their
only philosopher in this century, Arthur Schopen-
hauer, should have to espouse its cause?
Here you have the philosopher—now search for
the Culture proper to him! And if you are able to
divine what kind of culture that would have to be,
which would correspond to such a philosopher, then
you have, in this divination, already passed sentence
on all your culture and on yourselves!


## p. 70 (#110) #############################################

y


## p. 71 (#111) #############################################

Philosophy during the Tragic Age
of the Greeks
(1873)


## p. 72 (#112) #############################################

^


## p. 73 (#113) #############################################

PREFACE
{Probably 1874)
If we know the aims of men who are strangers to
us, it is sufficient for us to approve of or condemn
them as wholes. Those who stand nearer to us w?
judge according to the means by which they further
their aims; we often disapprove of their aims, but
love them for the sake of their means and the style
of their volition. Now philosophical systems arej
absolutely true only to their founders, to all later
philosophers they are usually one big mistake, and
to feebler minds a sum of mistakes and truths; at
any rate if regarded as highest aim they are an
error, and in so far reprehensible. Therefore many
disapprove of every philosopher, because his aim is
not theirs; they are those whom I called "strangers
to us. " Whoever on the contrary finds any pleasure
at all in great men finds pleasure also in such
systems, be they ever so erroneous, for they all
have in them one point which is irrefutable, a
personal touch, and colour; one can use them in
order to form a picture of the philosopher, just as
from a plant growing in a certain place one can
form conclusions as to the soil. That mode of life, of
viewing human affairs at any rate, has existed once
and is therefore possible; the "system" is the growth
in this soil or at least a part of this system. . . .


## p. 74 (#114) #############################################

74 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
I narrate the history of those philosophers simpli-
fied: I shall bring into relief only that point in
every system which is a little bit of personality, and
belongs to that which is irrefutable, and indiscus-
sable, which history has to preserve: it is a first
attempt to regain and recreate those natures by
comparison, and to let the polyphony of Greek nature
at least resound once again: the task is, to bring to
light that which we must always love and revere and
of which no later knowledge can rob us: the great
man.
LATER PREFACE
(Towards the end of 1879)
This attempt to relate the history of the earlier
Greek philosophers distinguishes itself from similar
attempts by its brevity. This has been accomplished
by mentioning but a small number of the doctrines
of every philosopher, i. e. , by incompleteness. Those
doctrines, however, have been selected in which the
personal element of the philosopher re-echoes most
strongly; whereas a complete enumeration of all pos-
sible propositions handed down to us—as is the cus-
tom in text-books—merely brings about one thing,
the absolute silencing of the personal element. It is
through this that those records become so tedious;
for in systems which have been refuted it is only this
personal element that can still interest us, for this
alone is eternally irrefutable. It is possible to
shape the picture of a man out of three anecdotes. I
endeavour to bring into relief three anecdotes out of
every system and abandon the remainder.


## p. 75 (#115) #############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 75
There are opponents of philosophy, and one does
well to listen to them; especially if they dissuade the
distempered heads of Germans from metaphysics
and on the other hand preach to them purification
through the Physis, as Goethe did,or healing through
Music, as Wagner. The physicians of the people
condemn philosophy; he, therefore, who wants to
justify it, must show to what purpose healthy nations
use and have used philosophy. If he can show that,
perhaps even the sick people will benefit by learning
why philosophy is harmful just to them. There are
indeed good instances of a health which can exist .
without any philosophy or with quite a moderate,
almost a toying use of it; thus the Romans at their
best period lived without philosophy. But where is
to be found theinstance of a nation becoming diseased
whom philosophy had restored to health? When-
ever philosophy showed itself helping, saving, pro-
phylactic, it was with healthy people; it made sick
people still more ill. If ever a nation was disinteg-
rated and but loosely connected with the individ-
uals, never has philosophy bound these individuals
closer to the whole. If ever an individual was will-
ing to stand aside and plant around himself the hedge
of self-sufficiency, philosophy was always ready to
isolate him still more and to destroy him through
isolation. She is dangerous where she is not in
her full right, and it is only the health of a nation
but not that of every nation which gives her this
right.
Let us now look around for the highest authority


## p. 76 (#116) #############################################

76 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
as to what constitutes the health of a nation. The
Greeks, as the truly healthy nation, have justified
philosophy once for all by having philosophised;
and that indeed more than all other nations. They
could not even stop at the right time, for still in their
withered age they comported themselves as heated
votaries of philosophy, although they understood by
it only the pious sophistries and the sacrosanct hair-
splittings of Christian dogmatics. They themselves
have much lessened their merit for barbarian pos-
terity by not being able to stop at the right time,
because that posterity in its uninstructed and im-
petuous youth necessarily became entangled in those
artfully woven nets and ropes.
On the contrary, the Greek knew how to begin at
the right time, and this lesson, when one ought to
begin philosophising,they teach more distinctly than
any other nation. For it should not be begun when
trouble comes as perhaps some presume who derive
philosophy from moroseness; no, but in good fortune,
in mature manhood, out of the midst of the fervent
serenity of a brave and victorious man's estate. The
fact that the Greeks philosophised at that timethrows
light on the nature of philosophy and her task as
well as on the nature of the Greeks themselves. Had
they at that time been such commonsense and pre-
cocious experts and gayards as the learned Philis-
tine of our days perhaps imagines, or had their life
been only a state of voluptuous soaring, chiming,
breathing and feeling, as the unlearned visionary is
pleased to assume, then the spring of philosophy
would not have come to light among them. At the
best there would have come forth a brook soon


## p. 77 (#117) #############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY J?
trickling away in the sand or evaporating into fogs,
but never that broad river flowing forth with the
proud beat of its waves, the river which we know as
Greek Philosophy.
True, it has been eagerly pointed out how much
the Greeks could find and learn abroad, in the Orient,
and how many different things they may easily have
brought from there. Of course an odd spectacle re-
sulted, when certain scholars brought together the
alleged masters from the Orient and the possible dis-
ciples from Greece, and exhibited Zarathustra near
Heraclitus, the Hindoos near the Eleates, the Egyp-
tians near Empedocles, or even Anaxagoras among
the Jews and Pythagoras among the Chinese. In
detail little has been determined; but we should in
no way object to the general idea, if people did
not burden us with the conclusion that therefore
Philosophy had only been imported into Greece
and was not indigenous to the soil, yea, that she, as
something foreign, had possibly ruined rather than
improved the Greek. Nothing is more foolish than
to swear by the fact that the Greeks had an abori-
ginal culture; no, they rather absorbed all the culture
flourishing among other nations, and they advanced
so far, just because they understood how to hurl
the spear further from the very spot where another
nation had let it rest. They were admirable in the
art of learning productively, and so, like them, we
ought to learn from our neighbours, with a view to.
Life not to pedantic knowledge, using everything
learnt as a foothold whence to leap high and still
higher than our neighbour. The questions as to the
beginning of philosophy are quite negligible, for


## p. 77 (#118) #############################################

j6 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
as to what constitutes the health of a nation. The
Greeks, as the truly healthy nation, have justified
philosophy once for all by having philosophised;
and that indeed more than all other nations. They
could not even stop at the right time, for still in their
withered age they comported themselves as heated
votaries of philosophy, although they understood by
it only the pious sophistries and the sacrosanct hair-
splittings of Christian dogmatics. They themselves
have much lessened their merit for barbarian pos-
terity by not being able to stop at the right time,
because that posterity in its uninstructed and im-
petuous youth necessarily became entangled in those
artfully woven nets and ropes.
On the contrary, the Greek knew how to begin at
the right time, and this lesson, when one ought to
begin philosophising,they teach more distinctly than
any other nation. For it should not be begun when
trouble comes as perhaps some presume who derive
philosophy from moroseness; no, but in good fortune,
in mature manhood, out of the midst of the fervent
serenity of a brave and victorious man's estate. The
fact that the Greeksphilosophised at that timethrows
light on the nature of philosophy and her task as
well as on the nature of the Greeks themselves. Had
they at that time been such commonsense and pre-
cocious experts and gayards as the learned Philis-
tine of our days perhaps imagines, or had their life
been only a state of voluptuous soaring, chiming,
breathing and feeling, as the unlearned visionary is
pleased to assume, then the spring of philosophy
would not have come to light among them. At the
best there would have come forth a brook soon


## p. 77 (#119) #############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 77
trickling away in the sand or evaporating into fogs,
but never that broad river flowing forth with the
proud beat of its waves, the river which we know as
Greek Philosophy.
True, it has been eagerly pointed out how much
the Greeks could find and learn abroad, in the Orient,
and how many different things they may easily have
brought from there. Of course an odd spectacle re-
sulted, when certain scholars brought together the
alleged masters from the Orient and the possible dis-
ciples from Greece, and exhibited Zarathustra near
Heraclitus, the Hindoos near the Eleates, the Egyp-
tians near Empedocles, or even Anaxagoras among
the Jews and Pythagoras among the Chinese. In
detail little has been determined; but we should in
no way object to the general idea, if people did
not burden us with the conclusion that therefore
Philosophy had only been imported into Greece
and was not indigenous to the soil, yea, that she, as
something foreign, had possibly ruined rather than
improved the Greek. Nothing is more foolish than
to swear by the fact that the Greeks had an abori-
ginal culture; no, they rather absorbed all the culture
flourishing among other nations, and they advanced
so far, just because they understood how to hurl
the spear further from the very spot where another
nation had let it rest. They were admirable in the
art of learning productively, and so, like them, we
ought to learn from our neighbours, with a view to.
Life not to pedantic knowledge, using everything
learnt as a foothold whence to leap high and still
higher than our neighbour. The questions as to the
beginning of philosophy are quite negligible, for


## p. 77 (#120) #############################################

76 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
as to what constitutes the health of a nation. The
Greeks, as the truly healthy nation, have justified
philosophy once for all by having philosophised;
and that indeed more than all other nations. They
could not even stop at the right time, for still in their
withered age they comported themselves as heated
votaries of philosophy, although they understood by
it only the pious sophistries and the sacrosanct hair-
splittings of Christian dogmatics. They themselves
have much lessened their merit for barbarian pos-
terity by not being able to stop at the right time,
because that posterity in its uninstructed and im-
petuous youth necessarily became entangled in those
artfully woven nets and ropes.
On the contrary, the Greek knew how to begin at
the right time, and this lesson, when one ought to
begin philosophising,thcy teach more distinctly than
any other nation. For it should not be begun when
trouble comes as perhaps some presume who derive
philosophy from moroseness; no, but in good fortune,
in mature manhood, out of the midst of the fervent
serenity of a brave and victorious man's estate. The
fact that the Greeks philosophised at that timethrows
light on the nature of philosophy and her task as
well as on the nature of the Greeks themselves. Had
they at that time been such commonsense and pre-
cocious experts and gayards as the learned Philis-
tine of our days perhaps imagines, or had their life
been only a state of voluptuous soaring, chiming,
breathing and feeling, as the unlearned visionary is
pleased to assume, then the spring of philosophy
would not have come to light among them. At the
best there would have come forth a brook soon


## p. 77 (#121) #############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 77
trickling away in the sand or evaporating into fogs,
but never that broad river flowing forth with the
proud beat of its waves, the river which we know as
Greek Philosophy.
True, it has been eagerly pointed out how much
the Greeks could find and learn abroad,in the Orient,
and how many different things they may easily have
brought from there. Of course an odd spectacle re-
sulted, when certain scholars brought together the
alleged masters from the Orient and the possible dis-
ciples from Greece, and exhibited Zarathustra near
Heraclitus, the Hindoos near the Eleates, the Egyp-
tians near Empedocles, or even Anaxagoras among
the Jews and Pythagoras among the Chinese. In
detail little has been determined; but we should in
no way object to the general idea, if people did
not burden us with the conclusion that therefore
Philosophy had only been imported into Greece
and was not indigenous to the soil, yea, that she, as
something foreign, had possibly ruined rather than
improved the Greek. Nothing is more foolish than
to swear by the fact that the Greeks had an abori-
ginal culture; no, they rather absorbed all the culture
flourishing among other nations, and they advanced
so far, just because they understood how to hurl
the spear further from the very spot where another
nation had let it rest. They were admirable in the
art of learning productively, and so, like them, we
ought to learn from our neighbours, with a view to.
Life not to pedantic knowledge, using everything
learnt as a foothold whence to leap high and still
higher than our neighbour. The questions as to the
beginning of philosophy are quite negligible, for


## p. 77 (#122) #############################################

76 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
as to what constitutes the health of a nation. The
Greeks, as the truly healthy nation, have justified
philosophy once for all by having" philosophised;
and that indeed more than all other nations. They
could not even stop at the right time, for still in their
withered age they comported themselves as heated
votaries of philosophy, although they understood by
it only the pious sophistries and the sacrosanct hair-
splittings of Christian dogmatics. They themselves
have much lessened their merit for barbarian pos-
terity by not being able to stop at the right time,
because that posterity in its uninstructed and im-
petuous youth necessarily became entangled in those
artfully woven nets and ropes.
On the contrary, the Greek knew how to begin at
the right time, and this lesson, when one ought to
begin philosophising,they teach more distinctly than
any other nation. For it should not be begun when
trouble comes as perhaps some presume who derive
philosophy from moroseness; no, but in good fortune,
in mature manhood, out of the midst of the fervent
serenity of a brave and victorious man's estate. The
fact that the Greeksphilosophised at that timethrows
light on the nature of philosophy and her task as
well as on the nature of the Greeks themselves. Had
they at that time been such commonsense and pre-
cocious experts and gayards as the learned Philis-
tine of our days perhaps imagines, or had their life
been only a state of voluptuous soaring, chiming,
breathing and feeling, as the unlearned visionary is
pleased to assume, then the spring of philosophy
would not have come to light among them. At the
best there would have come forth a brook soon


## p. 77 (#123) #############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 'J7
trickling away in the sand or evaporating into fogs,
but never that broad river flowing forth with the
proud beat of its waves, the river which we know as
Greek Philosophy.
True, it has been eagerly pointed out how much
the Greeks could find and learn abroad, in the Orient,
and how many different things they may easily have
brought from there. Of course an odd spectacle re-
sulted, when certain scholars brought together the
alleged masters from the Orient and the possible dis-
ciples from Greece, and exhibited Zarathustra near
Heraclitus, the Hindoos near the Eleates, the Egyp-
tians near Empedocles, or even Anaxagoras among
the Jews and Pythagoras among the Chinese. In
detail little has been determined; but we should in
no way object to the general idea, if people did
not burden us with the conclusion that therefore
Philosophy had only been imported into Greece
and was not indigenous to the soil, yea, that she, as
something foreign, had possibly ruined rather than
improved the Greek. Nothing is more foolish than
to swear by the fact that the Greeks had an abori-
ginal culture; no, they rather absorbed all the culture
flourishing among other nations, and they advanced
so far, just because they understood how to hurl
the spear further from the very spot where another
nation had let it rest. They were admirable in the
art of learning productively, and so, like them, we
ought to learn from our neighbours, with a view to.
Life not to pedantic knowledge, using everything
learnt as a foothold whence to leap high and still
higher than our neighbour. The questions as to the
beginning of philosophy are quite negligible, for


## p. 77 (#124) #############################################

76 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
as to what constitutes the health of a nation. The
Greeks, as the truly healthy nation, have justified
philosophy once for all by having" philosophised;
and that indeed more than all other nations. They
could not even stop at the right time, for still in their
withered age they comported themselves as heated
votaries of philosophy, although they understood by
it only the pious sophistries and the sacrosanct hair-
splittings of Christian dogmatics. They themselves
have much lessened their merit for barbarian pos-
terity by not being able to stop at the right time,
because that posterity in its uninstructed and im-
petuous youth necessarily became entangled in those
artfully woven nets and ropes.
On the contrary, the Greek knew how to begin at
the right time, and this lesson, when one ought to
begin philosophising,they teach more distinctly than
any other nation. For it should not be begun when
trouble comes as perhaps some presume who derive
philosophy from moroseness; no, but in good fortune,
in mature manhood, out of the midst of the fervent
serenity of a brave and victorious man's estate. The
fact that the Greeks philosophised at that timethrows
light on the nature of philosophy and her task as
well as on the nature of the Greeks themselves. Had
they at that time been such commonsense and pre-
cocious experts and gayards as the learned Philis-
tine of our days perhaps imagines, or had their life
been only a state of voluptuous soaring, chiming,
breathing and feeling, as the unlearned visionary is
pleased to assume, then the spring of philosophy
would not have come to light among them. At the
best there would have come forth a brook soon


## p. 77 (#125) #############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 77
trickling away in the sand or evaporating into fogs,
but never that broad river flowing forth with the
proud beat of its waves, the river which we know as
Greek Philosophy.
True, it has been eagerly pointed out how much
the Greeks could find and learn abroad,in the Orient,
and how many different things they may easily have
brought from there. Of course an odd spectacle re-
sulted, when certain scholars brought together the
alleged masters from the Orient and the possible dis-
ciples from Greece, and exhibited Zarathustra near
Heraclitus, the Hindoos near the Eleates, the Egyp-
tians near Empedocles, or even Anaxagoras among
the Jews and Pythagoras among the Chinese. In
detail little has been determined; but we should in
no way object to the general idea, if people did
not burden us with the conclusion that therefore
Philosophy had only been imported into Greece
and was not indigenous to the soil, yea, that she, as
something foreign, had possibly ruined rather than
improved the Greek. Nothing is more foolish than
to swear by the fact that the Greeks had an abori-
ginal culture; no, they rather absorbed all the culture
flourishing among other nations, and they advanced
so far, just because they understood how to hurl
the spear further from the very spot where another
nation had let it rest. They were admirable in the
art of learning productively, and so, like them, we
ought to learn from our neighbours, with a view to -
Life not to pedantic knowledge, using everything
learnt as a foothold whence to leap high and still
higher than our neighbour. The questions as to the
beginning of philosophy are quite negligible, for


## p. 78 (#126) #############################################

78 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
everywhere in the beginning there is the crude, the
unformed, the empty and the ugly; and in all things
only the higher stages come into consideration. He
who in the place of Greek philosophy prefers to
concern himself with that of Egypt and Persia,
because the latter are perhaps more "original" and
certainly older, proceeds just as ill-advisedly as
those who cannot be at ease before they have traced
back the Greek mythology, so grand and profound,
to such physical trivialities as sun, lightning, weather
and fog, as its prime origins, and who fondly imagine
they have rediscovered for instance in the restricted
worship of the one celestial vault among the other
Indo-Germans a purer form of religion than the poly-
theistic worship of the Greek had been. The road
towards the beginning always leads into barbarism,
and he who is concerned with the Greeks ought
always to keep in mind the fact that the unsubdued
thirst for knowledge in itself always barbarises just
as much as the hatred of knowledge, and that the
Greeks have subdued their inherently insatiable
thirst for knowledge by their regard for Life, by an
ideal need of Life,—since they wished to live imme-
diately that which they learnt. The Greeks also
philosophised as men of culture and with the aims
of culture, and therefore saved themselves the trouble
of inventing once again the elements of philosophy
and knowledge out of some autochthonous conceit,
and with a will they at once set themselves to fill
out, enhance, raise and purify these elements they
had taken over in such a way, that only now in a
higher sense and in a purer sphere they became
inventors. For they discovered the typical philo-


## p. 79 (#127) #############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY ? g
sopher's genius, and the inventions of all posterity
have added nothing essential.
Every nation is put to shame if one points out
such a wonderfully idealised company of philoso-
phers as that of the early Greek masters, Thales,
Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras,
Empedocles, Democritus and Socrates. All those
men are integral, entire and self-contained,* and hewn
out of one stone. Severe necessity exists between i
their thinking and their character. They are not
bound by any convention, because at that time no
professional class of philosophers and scholars ex-
isted. They all stand before us in magnificent soli-
tude as the only ones who then devoted their life
exclusively to knowledge. They all possess the
virtuous energy of the Ancients, whereby they excel
all the later philosophers in finding their own form
and in perfecting it by metamorphosis in its most
minute details and general aspect. For they were
met by no helpful and facilitating fashion. Thus
together they form what Schopenhauer, in opposi-
tion to the Republic of Scholars, has called a Re-
public of Geniuses ; one giant calls to another across
the arid intervals of ages, and, undisturbed by a
wanton, noisy race of dwarfs, creeping about beneath
them, the sublime intercourse of spirits continues.
Of this sublime intercourse of spirits I have re-
solved to relate those items which our modern hard-
ness of hearing might perhaps hear and understand;
that means certainly the least of all. It seems to
* Cf. Napoleon's word about Goethe : "Voila un homme! "
-Tr.


## p. 80 (#128) #############################################

80 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
me that those old sages from Thales to Socrates have
discussed in that intercourse, although in its most
general aspect, everything that constitutes for our
contemplation the peculiarly Hellenic. In their
intercourse, as already in their personalities, they
express distinctly the great features of Greek genius
of which the whole of Greek history is a shadowy
impression, a hazy copy, which consequently speaks
less clearly. If we could rightly interpret the total
life of the Greek nation, we should ever find reflected
only that picture which in her highest geniuses
shines with more resplendent colours. Even the
first experience of philosophy on Greek soil, the
sanction of the Seven Sages is a distinct and un-
forgettable line in the picture of the Hellenic. Other
nations have their Saints, the Greeks have Sages.
Rightly it has been said that a nation is characterised
not only by her great men but rather by the manner in
which she recognises and honours them. In other
ages the philosopher is an accidental solitary wan-
derer in the most hostile environment, either slinking
through or pushing himself through with clenched
fists. With the Greek however the philosopher is
not accidental; when in the Sixth and Fifth centuries
amidst the most frightful dangers and seductions of
secularisation he appears and as it were steps forth
from the cave of Trophonios into the very midst of
luxuriance, the discoverers' happiness, the wealth
and the sensuousness of the Greek colonies, then we
divine that he comes as a noble warner for the same
purpose for which in those centuries Tragedy was
born and which the Orphic mysteries in their
grotesque hieroglyphics give us to understand. The


## p. 81 (#129) #############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 81
opinion of those philosophers on Life and Existence
altogether means so much more than a modern
opinion because they had before themselves Life in
a luxuriant perfection, and because with them, un-
like us, the sense of the thinker was not muddled by
the disunion engendered by the wish for freedom,
beauty, fulness of life and the love for truth that
only asks: What is the good of Life at all? The
mission which the philosopher has to discharge with-
in a real Culture, fashioned in a homogeneous style,"
cannot be clearly conjectured out of our circum-
stances and experiences for the simple reason that
we have no such culture. No, it is only a Culture
like the Greek which can answer the question as to
that task of the philosopher, only such a Culture can,
as I said before, justify philosophy at all; because
such a Culture alone knows and can demonstrate
why and how the philosopher is not an accidental,
chance wanderer driven now hither, now thither.
There is a steely necessity which fetters the philo-
sopher to a true Culture: but what if this Culture
does not exist? Then the philosopher is an incal-
culable and therefore terror-inspiring comet, whereas
in the favourable case, he shines as the central star
in the solar-system of culture. It is for this reason
that the Greeks justify the philosopher, because with
them he is no comet.
After such contemplations it will be accepted with-
out offence if I speak of the pre-Platonic philoso-
phers as of a homogeneous company, and devote
this paper to them exclusively. Something quite
6


## p. 82 (#130) #############################################

S2 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
new begins with Plato; or it might be said with
equal justice that in comparison with that Republic
of Geniuses from Thales to Socrates, the philoso-
phers since Plato lack something essential.
Whoever wants to express himself unfavourably
about those older masters may call them one-sided,
and their Epigones, with Plato as head, many-sided.
Yet it would be more just and unbiassed to conceive
of the latter as philosophic hybrid-characters, of the
former as the pure types. Plato himself is the first
magnificent hybrid-character, and as such finds ex-
pression as well in his philosophy as in his personality.
In his ideology are united Socratian, Pythagorean,
and Heraclitean elements, and for this reason it is
no typically pure phenomenon. As man, too, Plato
mingles the features of the royally secluded, all-
sufficing Heraclitus, of the melancholy-compassion-
ate and legislatory Pythagoras and of the psycho-
expert dialectician Socrates. All later philosophers
'are such hybrid-characters; wherever something
one-sided does come into prominence with them
as in the case of the Cynics, it is not type but cari-
cature.
Much more important however is the fact
that they are founders of sects and that the sects
founded by them are all institutions in direct op-
position to the Hellenic culture and the unity of its
style prevailing up to that time. In their way they
seek a redemption, but only for the individuals or at
the best for groups of friends and disciples closely
connected with them. The activity of the older
philosophers tends, although they were unconscious
of it, towards a cure and purification on a large
scale; the mighty course of Greek culture is not to


## p. 83 (#131) #############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 83
be stopped; awful dangers are to be removed out
of the way of its current; the philosopher protects
and defends his native country. Now, since Plato,
he is in exile and conspires against his fatherland.
It is a real misfortune that so very little of those
older philosophic masters has come down to us and
that all complete works of theirs are withheld from
us. Involuntarily,on account of that loss, we measure
them according to wrong standards and allow our-
selves to be influenced unfavourably towards them
by the mere accidental fact that Plato and Aristotle
never lacked appreciatorsand copyists. Some people
presuppose a special providence for books, a fatum
libellorum; such a providence however would at any
rate be a very malicious one if it deemed it wise to
withhold from us the works of Heraclitus, Empe-
docles' wonderful poem, and the writings of Demo-
critus, whom the ancients put on a par with Plato,
whom he even excels as far as ingenuity goes, and
as a substitute put into our hand Stoics, Epicureans
and Cicero. Probably the most sublime part of Greek
thought and its expression in words is lost to us; a
fate which will not surprise the man who remembers
the misfortunes of Scotus Erigena or of Pascal, and
who considers that even in this enlightened century
the first edition of Schopenhauer's " The World As
Will And Idea" became waste-paper. If somebody
will presuppose a special fatalistic power with respect
to such things he may do so and say with Goethe:
"Let no one complain about and grumble at things
vile and mean, they are the real rulers,—however
much this be gainsaid! " In particular they are more
powerful than the power of truth. Mankind very


## p. 84 (#132) #############################################

84 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
rarely produces a good book in which with daring
freedom is intonated the battle-song of truth, the
song of philosophic heroism; and yet whether it is
to live a century longer or to crumble and moulder
into dust and ashes, depends on the most miserable
accidents, on the sudden mental eclipse of men's
heads, on superstitious convulsions and antipathies,
finally on fingers not too fond of writing or even
on eroding bookworms and rainy weather. But we
will not lament but rather take the advice of the
reproving and consolatory words which Hamann
addresses to scholars who lament over lost works.
"Would not the artist who succeeded in throwing a
lentil through the eye of a needle have sufficient, with
a bushel of lentils, to practise his acquired skill? One
would like to put this question to all scholars who
do not know how to use the works of the Ancients
any better than that man used his lentils. " It might
be added in our case that not one more word, anec-
dote, or date needed to be transmitted to us than
has been transmitted, indeed that even much less
might have been preserved for us and yet we should
have been able to establish the general doctrine that
the Greeks justify philosophy.
A time which suffers from the so-called "general
education" but has no culture and no unity of style
in her life hardly knows what to do with philosophy,
even if the latter were proclaimed by the very Genius
of Truth in the streets and market-places. She rather
remains at such a time the learned monologue of the
solitary rambler, the accidental booty of the indi-
vidual, the hidden closet-secret or the innocuous
chatter between academic senility and childhood.


## p. 85 (#133) #############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 85
Nobody dare venture to fulfil in himself the law of
philosophy, nobody lives philosophically, with that
simple manly faith which compelled an Ancient,
wherever he was, whatever he did, to deport him-
self as a Stoic, when he had once pledged his faith
to the Stoa. All modern philosophising is limited
politically and regulated by the police to learned
semblance. Thanks to governments, churches, aca-
demies, customs, fashions, and the cowardice of man,
it never gets beyond the sigh: " If only! . . . " or be-
yond the knowledge: "Once upon a time there was
. . . " Philosophy is without rights; therefore modern
man, if he were at all courageous and conscientious,
ought to condemn her and perhaps banish her with
words similar to those by which Plato banished
the tragic poets from his State. Of course there
would be left a reply for her, as there remained to
those poets against Plato. If one once compelled
her to speak out she might say perhaps: "Miserable
Nation! Is it my fault if among you I am on the
tramp, like a fortune teller through the land, and
must hide and disguise myself, as if I were a great
sinner and ye my judges? Just look at my sister,
Art! It is with her as with me; we have been cast -
adrift among the Barbarians and no longer know
how to save ourselves. Here we are lacking, it is
true, every good right; but the judges before whom
we find justice judge you also and will tell you:
First acquire a culture; then you shall experience
what Philosophy can and will do. "—


## p. 86 (#134) #############################################

86 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
Greek philosophy seems to begin with a prepos-
terous fancy, with the proposition that water is the
origin and mother-womb of all things. Is it really
necessary to stop there and become serious? Yes,
and for three reasons: Firstly, because the proposi-
tion does enunciate something about the origin of
things; secondly, because it does so without figure
and fable; thirdly and lastly, because in it is con-
tained, although only in the chrysalis state, the idea:
Everything is one. The first mentioned reason leaves
Thales still in the company of religious and super-
stitious people, the second however takes him out
of this company and shows him to us as a natural
philosopher, but by virtue of the third, Thales be-
comes the first Greek philosopher. If he had said:
"Out of water earth is evolved," we should only have
a scientific hypothesis; a false one, though never-
theless difficult to refute. But he went beyond the
scientific. In his presentation of this concept of
unity through the hypothesis of water, Thales has
not surmounted the low level of the physical dis-
cernments of his time, but at the best overleapt
them. The deficient and unorganised observations
of an empiric nature which Thales had made as to
the occurrence and transformations of water, or to
be more exact, of the Moist, would not in the least
have made possible or even suggested such an im-
mense generalisation. That which drove him to this
generalisation was a metaphysical dogma, which had
its origin in a mystic intuition and which together
with the ever renewed endeavours to express it better,


## p. 87 (#135) #############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 87
we find in all philosophies,—the proposition: Every-
thing is one!
How despotically such a faith deals with all em-
piricism is worthy of note; with Thales especially
one can learn how Philosophy has behaved at all
times, when she wanted to get beyond the hedges
of experience to her magically attracting goal. On
light supports she leaps in advance; hope and divina-
tion wing her feet. Calculating reason too, clumsily
pants after her and seeks better supports in its
attempt to reach that alluring goal, at which its
divine companion has already arrived. One sees in
imagination two wanderers by a wild forest-stream
which carries with it rolling stones; the one, light-
footed, leaps over it using the stones and swinging
himself upon them ever further and further, though
they precipitously sink into the depths behind him.
The other stands helpless there most of the time;
he has first to build a pathway which will bear his
heavy, weary step; sometimes that cannot be done
and then no god will help him across the stream.
What therefore carries philosophical thinking so
quickly to its goal? Does it distinguish itself from
calculating and measuring thought only by its more
rapid flight through large spaces? No, for a strange
illogical power wings the foot of philosophical think-
ing; and this power is Fancy. Lifted by the latter,""
philosophical thinking leaps from possibility to pos-
sibility, and these for the time being are taken as
certainties; and now and then even whilst on the
wing it gets hold of certainties. An ingenious pre-
sentiment shows them to the flier; demonstrable
certainties are divined at a distance to be at this


## p. 88 (#136) #############################################

88 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
point. Especially powerful is the strength of Fancy
in the lightning-like seizing and illuminating of simi-
larities; afterwards reflection applies its standards
and models and seeks to substitute the similarities
by equalities, that which was seen side by side by
causalities. But though this should never be possible,
even in the case of Thales the indemonstrable philo-
sophising has yet its value; although all supports are
broken when Logic and the rigidity of Empiricism
want to get across to the proposition: Everything is
water; yet still there is always, after the demolition
of the scientific edifice, a remainder, and in this very
remainder lies a moving force and as it were the
hope of future fertility.
Of course I do not mean that the thought in any
restriction or attenuation, or as allegory, still retains
some kind of " truth " ; as if, for instance, one might
imagine the creating artist standing near a waterfall,
and seeing in the forms which leap towards him, an
artistically prefiguring game of thewater with human
and animal bodies, masks, plants, rocks, nymphs,
griffins, and with all existing types in general, so that
to him the proposition : Everything is water, is con-
firmed. The thought of Thales has rather its value
—even after the perception of its indemonstrable-
ness—in the very fact, that it was meant un mythi-
cally and unallegorically. The Greeks among whom
Thales became so suddenly conspicuous were the
anti-type of all realists by only believing essentially
in the reality of men and gods, and by contem-
plating the whole of nature as if it were only a
disguise, masquerade and metamorphosis of these
god-men. Man was to them the truth, and essence


## p. 89 (#137) #############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 89
of things; everything else mere phenomenon and
deceiving play. For that very reason they experi-
enced incredible difficulty in conceiving of ideas as
ideas. Whilst with the moderns the most personal
item sublimates itself into abstractions, with them
the most abstract notions became personified. Thales,
however, said," Not man but water is the reality of
things " ; he began to believe in nature, in so far that
he at least believed in water. As a mathematician
and astronomer he had grown cold towards every-
thing mythical and allegorical, and even if he did
not succeed in becoming disillusioned as to the pure
abstraction, Everything is one, and although he left
off at a physical expression he was nevertheless
among the Greeks of his time a surprising rarity.
Perhaps the exceedingly conspicuous Orpheans pos-
sessed in a still higher degree than he the faculty of
conceiving abstractions and of thinking unplasti-
cally; only they did not succeed in expressing these
abstractions except in the form of the allegory. Also
Pherecydes of Syrus who is a contemporary of
Thales and akin to him in many physical concep-
tions hovers with the expression of the latter in that
middle region where Allegory is wedded to Mythos,
so that he dares, for example, to compare the earth
with a winged oak, which hangs in the air with
spread pinions and which Zeus bedecks, after the
defeat of Kronos, with a magnificent robe of honour,
into which with his own hands Zeus embroiders lands,
water and rivers. In contrast with such gloomy alleg-
orical philosophising scarcely to be translated into the
realm of the comprehensible, Thales' are the works
of a creative master who began to look into Nature's


## p. 90 (#138) #############################################

90 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
depths without fantastic fabling. If as it is true
he used Science and the demonstrable but soon out-
leapt them, then this likewise is a typical character-
istic of the philosophical genius. The Greek word
which designates the Sage belongs etymologically
to sapio, I taste, sapiens, the tasting one, sisyphos,
the man of the most delicate taste; the peculiar
art of the philosopher therefore consists, according
to the opinion of the people, in a delicate selective
judgment by taste, by discernment, by significant
differentiation. He is not prudent, if one calls him
prudent, who in his own affairs finds out the good;
Aristotle rightly says: "That which Thales and
Anaxagoras know, people will call unusual, astound-
ing, difficult, divine but—useless,since human posses-
sions were of no concern to those two. " Through thus
selecting and precipitating the unusual, astounding,
difficult, and divine, Philosophy marks the boundary-
lines dividing her from Science in the same way as
she does it from Frudence by the emphasising of the
useless. Science without thus selecting, without such
delicate taste, pounces upon everything knowable,
in the blind covetousness to know all at any price;
philosophical thinking however is always on the
track of the things worth knowing, on the track of
the great and most important discernments. Now
the idea of greatness is changeable, as well in the
moral as in the aesthetic realm, thus Philosophy
begins with a legislation with respect to greatness,
she becomes a Nomenclator. "That is great,"
she says, and therewith she raises man above
the blind, untamed covetousness of his thirst for
knowledge. By the idea of greatness she assuages


## p. 91 (#139) #############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 91
this thirst: and it is chiefly by this, that she contem-
plates the greatest discernment, that of the essence
1 and kernel of things, as attainable and attained.
When Thales says, " Everything is water," man is
startled up out of his worm-like mauling of and
crawling about among the individual sciences; he
divines the last solution of thingsand masters through
this divination the common perplexity of the lower
grades of knowledge. The philosopher tries to make
the total-chord of the universe re-echo within him-
self and then to project it into ideas outside himself:
whilst he is contemplative like the creating artist,
sympathetic like the religionist, looking out for ends
and causalities like the scientific man, whilst he feels
himself swell up to the macrocosm, he still retains
the circumspection to contemplate himself coldly
as the reflex of the world; he retains that cool-
headedness, which the dramatic artist possesses,
when he transforms himself into other bodies, speaks
out of them, and yet knows how to project this
transformation outside himself into written verses.
What the verse is to the poet, dialectic thinking is
to the philosopher ; he snatches at it in order to hold
fast his enchantment, in order to petrify it. And
just as words and verse to the dramatist are only
stammerings in a foreign language, to tell in it what
he lived, what he saw, and what he can directly
promulgate by gesture and music only, thus the
expression of every deep philosophical intuition by
means of dialectics and scientific reflection is, it is
true, on the one hand the only means to communi-
cate what has been seen, but on the other hand it is
a paltry means, and at the bottom a metaphorical,


## p. 91 (#140) #############################################

90 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
depths without fantastic fabling. If as it is true
he used Science and the demonstrable but soon out-
leapt them, then this likewise is a typical character-
istic of the philosophical genius. The Greek word
which designates the Sage belongs etymologically
to sapio, I taste, sapiens, the tasting one, sisyphos,
the man of the most delicate taste; the peculiar
art of the philosopher therefore consists, according
to the opinion of the people, in a delicate selective
judgment by taste, by discernment, by significant
differentiation. He is not prudent, if one calls him
prudent, who in his own affairs finds out the good;
Aristotle rightly says: "That which Thales and
Anaxagoras know, people will call unusual, astound-
ing,difficult,divine but—useless,since human posses-
sions were of no concern to those two. " Through thus
selecting and precipitating the unusual, astounding,
difficult, and divine, Philosophy marks the boundary-
lines dividing her from Science in the same way as
she does it from Prudence by the emphasising of the
useless. Science without thus selecting, without such
delicate taste, pounces upon everything knowable,
in the blind covetousness to know all at any price;
philosophical thinking however is always on the
track of the things worth knowing, on the track of
the great and most important discernments. Now
the idea of greatness is changeable, as well in the
moral as in the aesthetic realm, thus Philosophy
begins with a legislation with respect to greatness,
she becomes a Nomenclator. "That is great,"
she says, and therewith she raises man above
the blind, untamed covetousness of his thirst for
knowledge. By the idea of greatness she assuages


## p. 91 (#141) #############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 91
this thirst: and it is chiefly by this, that she contem-
plates the greatest discernment, that of the essence
and kernel of things, as attainable and attained.
When Thales says, " Everything is water," man is
startled up out of his worm-like mauling of and
crawling about among the individual sciences; he
divines thelast solution of thingsand masters through
this divination the common perplexity of the lower
grades of knowledge. The philosopher tries to make
the total-chord of the universe re-echo within him-
self and then to project it into ideas outside himself:
whilst he is contemplative like the creating artist,
sympathetic like the religionist, looking out for ends
and causalities like the scientific man, whilst he feels
himself swell up to the macrocosm, he still retains
the circumspection to contemplate himself coldly
as the reflex of the world; he retains that cool-
headedness, which the dramatic artist possesses,
when he transforms himself into other bodies, speaks
out of them, and yet knows how to project this
transformation outside himself into written verses.
What the verse is to the poet, dialectic thinking is
to the philosopher ; he snatches at it in order to hold
fast his enchantment, in order to petrify it. And
just as words and verse to the dramatist are only
stammerings in a foreign language, to tell in it what
he lived, what he saw, and what he can directly
promulgate by gesture and music only, thus the
expression of every deep philosophical intuition by
means of dialectics and scientific reflection is, it is
true, on the one hand the only means to communi-
cate what has been seen, but on the other hand it is
a paltry means, and at the bottom a metaphorical,


## p. 92 (#142) #############################################

92 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
absolutely inexact translation into a different sphere
and language. Thus Thales saw the Unity of the
"Existent," and when he wanted to communicate this
idea he talked of water.
4
Whilst the general type of the philosopher in the
picture of Thales is set off rather hazily, the picture
of his great successor already speaks much more
distinctly to us. Anaximander of Milet, the first
philosophical author of the Ancients, writes in the
very way that the typical philosopher will always
write as long as he is not alienated from ingenuous-
ness and naiveti by odd claims: in a grand lapi-
darian style of writing, sentence for sentence . . . a
witness of a new inspiration, and an expression of
the sojourning in sublime contemplations. The
thought and its form are milestones on the path
towards the highest wisdom. With such a Iapi-
darian emphasis Anaximander once said: "Whence
things originated, thither, according to necessity,
they must return and perish; for they must pay pen-
alty and be judged for their injustices according to
the order of time. " Enigmatical utterance of a true
pessimist, oracular inscription on the boundary-stone
of Greek philosophy, how shall we explain thee?
The only serious moralist of our century in the
Parergis (Vol. ii. , chap. 12, "Additional Remarks on
The Doctrine about the Suffering in the World,
Appendix of Corresponding Passages") urges on us a
similar contemplation: "The right standard by which
to judge every human being is that he really is a
being who ought not to exist at all, but who is ex-


## p. 93 (#143) #############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 93
piating his existence by manifold forms of suffering
and death:—What can oneexpect from such abeing?
Are we not all sinners condemned to death? We
expiate our birth firstly by our life and secondly
by our death. " He who in the physiognomy of
our universal human lot reads this doctrine and
already recognises the fundamental bad quality of
every human life, in the fact that none can stand
a very close and careful contemplation—although
our time, accustomed to the biographical epidemic,
seems to think otherwise and more loftily about the
dignity of man; he who, like Schopenhauer, on "the
heights of the Indian breezes " has heard the sacred
word about the moral value of existence, will be kept
with difficulty from making an extremely anthropo-
morphic metaphor and from generalizing that mel-
ancholy doctrine—at first only limited to human
life—and applying it by transmission to the general
character of all existence. It may not be very logical,
it is however at any rate very human and moreover
quite in harmony with the philosophical leaping de-
scribed above, now with Anaximander to consider
all Becoming as a punishable emancipation from
eternal " Being," as a wrong that is to be atoned for
by destruction. Everything that has once come into
existence also perishes, whether we think of human
life or of water or of heat and cold; everywhere
where definite qualities are to be noticed, we are
allowed to prophesy the extinction of these qualities
—according to the all-embracing proof of experience.
Thus a being that possesses definite qualities and
consists of them, can never be the origin and prin-
ciple of things; the veritable ens, the " Existent," An-


## p. 94 (#144) #############################################

94 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
aximander concluded, cannot possess any definite
qualities, otherwise, like all other things, it would
necessarily have originated and perished. In order
that Becoming may not cease, the Primordial-being
must be indefinite. The immortality and eternity
of the Primordial-being lies not in an infiniteness
and inexhaustibility—as usually the expounders of
Anaximander presuppose—but in this, that it lacks
the definite qualities which lead to destruction, for
which reason it bears also its name: The Indefinite.
The thus labelled Primordial-being is superior to all
Becoming and for this very reason it guarantees the
eternity and unimpeded course of Becoming. This
last unity in that Indefinite, the mother-womb of all
things, can, it is true, be designated only negatively
by man, as something to which no predicate out of
the existing world of Becoming can be allotted, and
might be considered a peer to the Kantian "Thing-
in-itself. "
Of course he who is able to wrangle persistently
with others as to what kind of thing that primordial
substance really was, whether perhaps an intermedi-
ate thing between air and water, or perhaps between
air and fire, has not understood our philosopher at all;
this is likewise to be said about those, who seriously
ask themselves, whether Anaximander had thought
of his primordial substance as a mixture of all exist-
ing substances. Rather we must direct our gaze to
the place where we can learn that Anaximander no
longer treated the question of the origin of the world
as purely physical; we must direct our gaze towards
that first stated lapidarian proposition. When on
the contrary he saw a sum of wrongs to be expiated


## p. 95 (#145) #############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 95
in the plurality of things that have become, then
he, as the first Greek, with daring grasp caught
up the tangle of the most profound ethical problem.
How can anything perish that has a right to exist?
Whence that restless Becoming and giving-birth,
whence that expression of painful distortion on the
face of Nature, whence the never-ending dirge in all
realms of existence? Out of this world of injustice,
of audacious apostasy from the primordial-unity of
things Anaximander flees into a metaphysical castle,
leaning out of which he turns his gaze far and wide
in order at last, after a pensive silence, to address to
all beings this question: "What is your existence
worth? And if it is worth nothing why are you
there? By your guilt, I observe, you sojourn in this
world. You will have to expiate it by death. Look
how your earth fades; the seas decrease and dry up,
the marine-shell on the mountain shows you how
much already they have dried up; fire destroys your
world even now, finally it will end in smoke and
ashes. But again and again such a world of transi-
toriness will ever build itself up; who shall redeem
you from the curse of Becoming? "
Not every kind of life may have been welcome to
a man who put such questions, whose upward-soar-
ing thinking continually broke the empiric ropes,
in order to take at once to the highest, superlunary
flight. Willingly we believe tradition, that he walked
along in especially dignified attire and showed a
truly tragic hauteur in his gestures and habits of
life. He lived as he wrote; he spoke as solemnly as
he dressed himself, he raised his hand and placed
his foot as if this existence was a tragedy, and he


## p. 95 (#146) #############################################

94 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
aximander concluded, cannot possess any definite
qualities, otherwise, like all other things, it would
necessarily have originated and perished. In order
that Becoming may not cease, the Primordial-being
must be indefinite. The immortality and eternity
of the Primordial-being lies not in an infiniteness
and inexhaustibility—as usually the expounders of
Anaximander presuppose—but in this, that it lacks
the definite qualities which lead to destruction, for
which reason it bears also its name: The Indefinite.
The thus labelled Primordial-being is superior to all
Becoming and for this very reason it guarantees the
eternity and unimpeded course of Becoming. This
last unity in that Indefinite, the mother-womb of all
things, can, it is true, be designated only negatively
by man, as something to which no predicate out of
the existing world of Becoming can be allotted, and
might be considered a peer to the Kantian "Thing-
in-itself. "
Of course he who is able to wrangle persistently
with others as to what kind of thing that primordial
substance really was, whether perhaps an intermedi-
ate thing between air and water, or perhaps between
air and fire,has not understood our philosopher at all;
this is likewise to be said about those, who seriously
ask themselves, whether Anaximander had thought
of his primordial substance as a mixture of all exist-
ing substances. Rather we must direct our gaze to
the place where we can learn that Anaximander no
longer treated the question of the origin of the world
as purely physical; we must direct our gaze towards
that first stated lapidarian proposition. When on
the contrary he saw a sum of wrongs to be expiated


## p. 95 (#147) #############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 95
in the plurality of things that have become, then
he, as the first Greek, with daring grasp caught
up the tangle of the most profound ethical problem.
How can anything perish that has a right to exist?
Whence that restless Becoming and giving-birth,
whence that expression of painful distortion on the
face of Nature, whence the never-ending dirge in all
realms of existence? Out of this world of injustice,
of audacious apostasy from the primordial-unity of
things Anaximander flees into a metaphysical castle,
leaning out of which he turns his gaze far and wide
in order at last, after a pensive silence, to address to
all beings this question: "What is your existence
worth? And if it is worth nothing why are you
there? By your guilt, I observe, you sojourn in this
world. You will have to expiate it by death. Look
how your earth fades; the seas decrease and dry up,
the marine-shell on the mountain shows you how
much already they have dried up; fire destroys your
world even now, finally it will end in smoke and
ashes. But again and again such a world of transi-
toriness will ever build itself up; who shall redeem
you from the curse of Becoming? "
Not every kind of life may have been welcome to
a man who put such questions, whose upward-soar-
ing thinking continually broke the empiric ropes,
in order to take at once to the highest, superlunary
flight. Willingly we believe tradition, that he walked
along in especially dignified attire and showed a
truly tragic hauteur in his gestures and habits of
life. He lived as he wrote; he spoke as solemnly as
he dressed himself, he raised his hand and placed
his foot as if this existence was a tragedy, and he


## p. 95 (#148) #############################################

94 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
aximander concluded, cannot possess any definite
qualities, otherwise, like all other things, it would
necessarily have originated and perished. In order
that Becoming may not cease, the Primordial-being
must be indefinite. The immortality and eternity
of the Primordial-being lies not in an infiniteness
and inexhaustibility—as usually the expounders of
Anaximander presuppose—but in this, that it lacks
the definite qualities which lead to destruction, for
which reason it bears also its name: The Indefinite.
The thus labelled Primordial-being is superior to all
Becoming and for this very reason it guarantees the
eternity and unimpeded course of Becoming. This
last unity in that Indefinite, the mother-womb of all
things, can, it is true, be designated only negatively
by man, as something to which no predicate out of
the existing world of Becoming can be allotted, and
might be considered a peer to the Kantian " Thing-
in-itself. "
Of course he who is able to wrangle persistently
with others as to what kind of thing that primordial
substance really was, whether perhaps an intermedi-
ate thing between air and water, or perhaps between
air and fire, has not understood our philosopher at all;
this is likewise to be said about those, who seriously
ask themselves, whether Anaximander had thought
of his primordial substance as a mixture of all exist-
ing substances. Rather we must direct our gaze to
the place where we can learn that Anaximander no
longer treated the question of the origin of the world
as purely physical; we must direct our gaze towards
that first stated lapidarian proposition. When on
the contrary he saw a sum of wrongs to be expiated


## p. 95 (#149) #############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 95
in the plurality of things that have become, then
he, as the first Greek, with daring grasp caught
up the tangle of the most profound ethical problem.
How can anything perish that has a right to exist?
Whence that restless Becoming and giving-birth,
whence that expression of painful distortion on the
face of Nature, whence the never-ending dirge in all
realms of existence? Out of this world of injustice,
of audacious apostasy from the primordial-unity of
things Anaximander flees into a metaphysical castle,
leaning out of which he turns his gaze far and wide
in order at last, after a pensive silence, to address to
all beings this question: "What is your existence
worth? And if it is worth nothing why are you
there? By your guilt, I observe, you sojourn in this
world. You will have to expiate it by death. Look
how your earth fades; the seas decrease and dry up,
the marine-shell on the mountain shows you how
much already they have dried up; fire destroys your
world even now, finally it will end in smoke and
ashes. But again and again such a world of transi-
toriness will ever build itself up; who shall redeem
you from the curse of Becoming? "
Not every kind of life may have been welcome to
a man who put such questions, whose upward-soar-
ing thinking continually broke the empiric ropes,
in order to take at once to the highest, superlunary
flight. Willingly we believe tradition, that he walked
along in especially dignified attire and showed a
truly tragic hauteur in his gestures and habits of
life. He lived as he wrote; he spoke as solemnly as
he dressed himself, he raised his hand and placed
his foot as if this existence was a tragedy, and he


## p. 96 (#150) #############################################

96 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
had been born in order to co-operate in that tragedy
by playing the rdle of hero. In all that he was the
great model of Empedocles. His fellow-citizens
elected him the leader of an emigrating colony—
perhaps they were pleased at being able to honour
him and at the same time to get rid of him. His
thought also emigrated and founded colonies; in
Ephesus and in Elea they could not get rid of him;
and if they could not resolve upon staying at the spot
where he stood, they nevertheless knew that they
had been led there by him, whence they now pre-
pared to proceed without him.
Thales shows the need of simplifying the empire
of plurality, and of reducing it to a mere expansion
or disguise of the one single existing quality, water.
Anaximander goes beyond him with two steps.
Firstly he puts the question to himself: How, if
there exists an eternal Unity at all, is that Plurality
possible? and he takes the answer out of the con-
tradictory, self-devouring and denying character of
this Plurality. The existence of this Plurality be-
comes a moral phenomenon to him; it is not justi-
fied, it expiates itself continually through destruc-
tion. But then the questions occur to him : Yet why
has not everything that has become perished long
ago, since, indeed, quite an eternity of time has
already gone by? Whence the ceaseless current of
the River of Becoming? He can save himself from
these questions only by mystic possibilities: the
eternal Becoming can have its origin only in the
eternal" Being," the conditions for that apostasy from
that eternal "Being" to a Becoming in injustice are
ever the same, the constellation of things cannot


## p. 97 (#151) #############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 97
help itself being thus fashioned, that no end is to be
seen of that stepping forth of the individual being
out of the lap of the " Indefinite. " At this Anaxi-
mander stayed; that is, he remained within the deep
shadows which like gigantic spectres were lying on
the mountain range of such a world-perception. The
more one wanted to approach the problem of solving
how out of the Indefinite the Definite, out of the
Eternal the Temporal, out of the Just the Unjust
could by secession ever originate, the darker the
night became.
5
Towards the midst of this mystic night, in which
Anaximander's problem of the Becoming was
wrapped up, Heraclitus of Ephesus approached and
illuminated it by adivine flash of lightning. "I contem-
plate the Becoming," he exclaimed,—" and nobody
has so attentively watched this eternal wave-surging
and rhythm of things. And what do I behold? Law-
fulness, infallible certainty, ever equal paths of Jus-
tice, condemning Erinyes behind all transgressions of
the laws, the whole world the spectacle of a govern-
ing justice and of demoniacally omnipresent natural
forces subject to justice's sway. I do not behold the
punishment of that which has become, but the justi-
fication of Becoming.