No More Learning

Thus the Greeks, the most humane men of ancient
times, have in themselves a trait of cruelty, of tiger-
like pleasure in destruction: a trait, which in the
grotesquely magnified image of the Hellene, in
Alexander the Great, is very plainly visible, which,
however, in their whole history, as well as in their
mythology, must terrify us who meet them with
the emasculate idea of modern humanity. When
Alexander has the feet of Batis, the brave defender
of Gaza, bored through, and binds the living body to
his chariot in order to drag him about exposed to
the scorn of his soldiers, that is a sickening^ cari-
cature of Achilles, who at night ill-uses Hector's
corpse by a similar trailing; but even this trait has
for us something offensive, something which inspires


## p. 52 (#90) ##############################################

52 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
horror. It gives us a peep into the abysses of hatred.
With the same sensation perhaps we stand before
the bloody and insatiable self-laceration of two
Greek parties, as for example in the Corcyrean
revolution. When the victor, in a fight of the cities,
according to the law of warfare, executes the whole
male population and sells all the women and children
into slavery, we see, in the sanction of such a law,
that the Greek deemed it a positive necessity to
allow his hatred to break forth unimpeded; in such
moments the compressed and swollen feeling re-
lieved itself; the tiger bounded forth, a voluptuous
cruelty shone out of his fearful eye. Why had the
Greek sculptor to represent again and again war and
fights in innumerable repetitions, extended human
bodies whose sinews are tightened through hatred
or through the recklessness of triumph, fighters
wounded and writhing with pain, or the dying with
the last rattle in their throat? Why did the whole
Greek world exult in the fighting scenes of the
"Iliad"? I am afraid, we do not understand them
enough in "Greek fashion," and that we should
even shudder, if for once we did understand them
thus.
But what lies, as the mother-womb of the Hellenic,
behind the Homeric world? In the latter, by the
extremely artistic definiteness, and the calm and
purity of the lines we are already lifted far above
the purely material amalgamation: its colours, by
an artistic deception, appear lighter, milder, warmer;
its men, in this coloured, warm illumination, appear
better and more sympathetic—but where do we look,
if, no longer guided and protected by Homer's hand,


## p. 53 (#91) ##############################################

homer's contest 53
we step backwards into the pre-Homeric world?
Only into night and horror, into the products of a
fancy accustomed to the horrible. What earthly
existence is reflected in the loathsome-awful theo-
gonian lore : a life swayed only by the children of the
night, strife, amorous desires, deception, age and
death. Let us imagine the suffocating atmosphere
of Hesiod's poem, still thickened and darkened and
without all the mitigations and purifications, which
poured over Hellas from Delphi and the numerous
seats of the gods! If we mix this thickened Boeotian
air with the grim voluptuousness of the Etruscans,
then such a reality would extort from us a world of
myths within which Uranos, Kronos and Zeus and
the struggles of the Titans would appear as a relief.
Combat in this brooding atmosphere is salvation and \
safety; the cruelty of victory is the summit of life's
glories. And just as in truth the idea of Greek law
has developed from murder and expiation of murder,
so also nobler Civilisation takes her first wreath of
victory from the altar of the expiation of murder.
Behind that bloody age stretches a wave-furrow deep
into Hellenic history. The names of Orpheus, of
Musseus, and their cults indicate to what conse-
quences the uninterrupted sight of a world of warfare
and cruelty led—to the loathing of existence, to the
conception of this existence as a punishment to be
borne to the end, to the belief in the identity of ex-
istence and indebtedness. But these particular con-
clusions are not specifically Hellenic; through them
Greece comes into contact with India and the Orient
generally. The Hellenic genius had ready yet an-
other answer to the question: what does a life of


## p. 54 (#92) ##############################################

54 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
fighting and of victory mean? and gives this answer
in the whole breadth of Greek history.
In order to understand the latter we must start
from the fact that the Greek genius admitted the
existing fearful impulse, and deemed it justified;
whereas in the Orphic phase of thought was con-
tained the belief that life with such an impulse as
its root would not be worth living. Strife and the
pleasure of victory were acknowledged; and nothing
separates the Greek world more from ours than the
colouring, derived hence, of some ethical ideas, e. g. , of
Eris and of Envy.
When the traveller Pausanius during his wander-
ings through Greece visited the Helicon, a very old
copy of the first didactic poem of the Greeks," The
Works and Days " of Hesiod, was shown to him, in-
scribed upon plates of lead and severely damaged
by time and weather. However he recognised this
much, that, unlike the usual copies, it had not at its
head that little hymnus on Zeus, but began at once
with the declaration: "Two Eris-goddesses are on
earth. " This is one of the most noteworthy Hellenic
thoughts and worthy to be impressed on the new-
comer immediately at the entrance-gate of Greek
ethics. "One would like to praise the one Eris, just
as much as to blame the other, if one uses one's
reason. For these two goddesses have quite different
dispositions. For the one, the cruel one, furthers the
evil war and feud! No mortal likes her, but under
the yoke of need one pays honour to the burdensome
Eris, according to the decree of the immortals. She,
as the elder, gave birth to black night. Zeus the high-
ruling one, however, placed the other Eris upon the


## p. 55 (#93) ##############################################

homer's contest 55
roots of the earth and among men as a much better
one. She urges even the unskilled man to work, and
if one who lacks property beholds another who is
rich, then he hastens to sow in similar fashion and to
plant and to put his house in order; the neighbour
vies with the neighbour who strives after fortune.
Good is this Eris to men. The potter also has a
grudge against the potter, and the carpenter against
the carpenter; the beggar envies the beggar, and the
singer the singer. "
The two last verses which treat of the odium figu-
linum appear to our scholars to be incomprehensible
in this place. According to their judgment the pre-
dicates: "grudge " and " envy " fit only the nature of
the evil Eris, and for this reason they do not hesitate
to designate these verses as spurious or thrown by
chance into this place. For that judgment however
a system of Ethics other than the Hellenic must have
inspired these scholars unawares; for in these verses
to the good Eris Aristotle finds no offence. And not
only Aristotle but the whole Greek antiquity thinks
of spite and envy otherwise than we do and agrees
with Hesiod, who first designates as an evil one that
Eris who leads men against one another to a hostile
war of extermination, and secondly praises another
Eris as the good one, who as jealousy, spite, envy, in-
cites men to activity but not to the action of war to
the knife but to the action of contest. The Greek is
envious and conceives of this quality not as a blemish,
but as the effect of a beneficent deity. What a gulf
of ethical judgment between us and him? Because
he is envious he also feels, with every superfluity of
honour, riches, splendour and fortune, the envious


## p. 56 (#94) ##############################################

$6 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
eye of a god resting on himself, and he fears this
envy; in this case the latter reminds him of the
transitoriness of every human lot; he dreads his
very happiness and, sacrificing the best of it, he bows
before the divine envy. This conception does not
perhaps estrange him from his gods; their signifi-
cance on the contrary is expressed by the thought
that with them man in whose soul jealousy is en-
kindled against every other living being, is never
allowed to venture into contest. In the fight of
Thamyris with the Muses, of Marsyas with Apollo,
in the heart-moving fate of Niobe appears the hor-
rible opposition of the two powers, who must never
fight with one another, man and god.
The greater and more sublime however a Greek
is, the brighter in him appears the ambitious flame,
devouring everybody who runs with him on the same
track. Aristotle once made a list of such contests
on a large scale; among them is the most striking
instance how even a dead person can still incite a
living one to consuming jealousy; thus for example
Aristotle designates the relation between the Kolo-
phonian Xenophanes and Homer. We do not under-
stand this attack on the national hero of poetry in
all its strength, if we do not imagine, as later on also
with Plato, the root of this attack to be the ardent
desire to step into the place of the overthrown poet
and to inherit his fame. Every great Hellene hands
^on the torch of the contest; at every great virtue a
newlight is kindled. If the young Themistocles could
not sleep at the thought of the laurels of Miltiades so
his early awakened bent released itself only in the
long emulation with Aristides in that uniquely note-


## p. 57 (#95) ##############################################

homer's contest 57
worthy, purely instinctive genius of his political
activity, which Thucydides describes. How charac-
teristic are both question and answer, when a notable
opponent of Pericles is asked, whether he or Pericles
was the better wrestler in the city, and he gives the
answer: "Even if I throw him down he denies that
he has fallen, attains his purpose and convinces those
who saw him fall. "
If one wants to see that sentiment unashamed in
its naive expressions, the sentiment as to the neces-
sity of contest lest the State's welfare be threatened,
one should think of the original meaning of Ostra-
cism, as for example the Ephesians pronounced it at
the banishment of Hermodor. "Among us nobody
shall be the best; if however someone is the best, then
let him be so elsewhere and among others. " Why v
should not someone be the best? Because with that )
the contest would fail, and the eternal life-basis of I
the Hellenic State would be endangered. Later on
Ostracism receives quite another position with regard
tp the contest; it is applied, when the danger be-
comes obvious that one of the great contesting poli-
ticians and party-leaders feels himself urged on in
the heat of the conflict towards harmful and destruc-
tive measures and dubious coups a"Mat. The original
sense of this peculiar institution however is not that
of a safety-valve but that of a stimulant. The all-
excelling individual was to be removed in order that
the contest of forces might re-awaken, a thought
which is hostile to the "exclusiveness" of genius
in the modern sense but which assumes that in
the natural order of things there are always several
geniuses which incite one another to action, as much
r


## p. 58 (#96) ##############################################

58 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
also as they hold one another within the bounds
of moderation. That is the kernel of the Hellenic
contest-conception: it abominates autocracy, and
fears its dangers; it desires as a preventive against
the genius—a second genius.
- Every natural gift must develop itself by contest.
Thus the Hellenic national pedagogy demands,
whereas modern educators fear nothing as much as,
the unchaining of the so-called ambition. Here one
fears selfishness as the "evil in itself"—with the ex-
ception of the Jesuits, who agree with the Ancients
and who, possibly, for that reason, are the most effi-
cient educators of our time. They seem to believe
that Selfishness, i. e. , the individual element is only
the most powerful agens but that it obtains its char-
acter as " good " and "evil" essentially from the aims
towards which it strives. To the Ancients however
the aim of the agonistic education was the welfare
of the whole, of the civic society. Every Athenian
for instance was to cultivate his Ego in contest, so
far that it should be of the highest service to Athens
and should do the least harm. It was not unmea-
sured and immeasurable as modern ambition gener-
ally is; the youth thought of the welfare of his native
town when he vied with others in running, throwing
or singing; it was her glory that he wanted to in-
crease with his own; it was to his town's gods that
he dedicated the wreaths which the umpires as a
mark of honour set upon his head. Every Greek
from childhood felt within himself the burning wish
to be in the contest of the towns an instrument for
the welfare of his own town; in this his selfishness
was kindled into flame, by this his selfishness was


## p. 59 (#97) ##############################################

homer's contest 59
bridled and restricted. Therefore the individuals in
antiquity were freer, because their aims were nearer
and more tangible. Modern man, on the contrary,
is everywhere hampered by infinity, like the fleet-
footed Achilles in the allegory of the Eleate Zeno:
infinity impedes him, he does not even overtake the
tortoise.
But as the youths to be educated were brought
up struggling against one another, so their educators
were in turn in emulation amongst themselves. Dis-
trustfully jealous, the great musical masters, Pindar
and Simonides, stepped side by side; in rivalry
the sophist, the higher teacher of antiquity meets
his fellow-sophist; even the most universal kind
of instruction, through the drama, was imparted to
the people only under the form of an enormous
wrestling of the great musical and dramatic artists.
How wonderful! " And even the artist has a grudge
against the artist! " And the modern man dislikes
in an artist nothing so much as the personal battle-
feeling, whereas the Greek recognises the artist
only in such a personal struggle. There where the
modern suspects weakness of the work of art, the
Hellene seeks the source of his highest strength I
That, which by way of example in Plato is of special
artistic importance in his dialogues, is usually the
result of an emulation with the art of the orators,
of the sophists, of the dramatists of his time, in-
vented deliberately in order that at the end he
could say: "Behold, I can also do what my great
rivals can; yea I can do it even better than they.
No Protagoras has composed such beautiful myths
as I, no dramatist such a spirited and fascinating


## p. 60 (#98) ##############################################

60 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
whole as the Symposion, no orator penned such an
oration as I put up in the Georgias—and now I
reject all that together and condemn all imitative
art! Only the contest made me a poet, a sophist,
an orator! " What a problem unfolds itself there
. . before us, if we ask about the relationship between
the contest and the conception of the work of art! —
If on the other hand we remove the contest from
Greek life, then we look at once into the pre-Homeric
abyss of horrible savagery, hatred, and pleasure in
destruction. This phenomenon alas! shows itself
frequently when a great personality was, owing to an
enormously brilliant deed, suddenly withdrawn from
the contest and became hors de concours according
to his, and his fellow-citizens' judgment. Almost
without exception the effect is awful; and if one
usually draws from these consequences the conclu-
sion that the Greek was unable to bear glory and
fortune, one should say more exactly that he was
unable to bear fame without further struggle, and
fortune at the end of the contest. There is no more
distinct instance than the fate of Miltiades. Placed
upon a solitary height and lifted far above every
fellow-combatant through his incomparable success
at Marathon, he feels a low thirsting for revenge
awakened within himself against a citizen of Para,
with whom he had been at enmity long ago. To
satisfy his desire he misuses reputation, the public
exchequer and civic honour and disgraces himself.
Conscious of his ill-success he falls into unworthy
machinations. He forms a clandestine and godless
connection with Timo a priestess of Demeter, and
enters at night the sacred temple, from which every


## p. 61 (#99) ##############################################

homer's contest 61
man was excluded. After he has leapt over the
wall and comes ever nearer the shrine of the goddess,
the dreadful horror of a panic-like terror suddenly
seizes him; almost prostrate and unconscious he
feels himself driven back and leaping the wall once
more, he falls down paralysed and severely injured.
The siege must be raised and a disgraceful death
impresses its seal upon a brilliant heroic career, in
order to darken it for all posterity. After the battle
at Marathon the envy of the celestials has caught
him. And this divine envy breaks into flames when
it beholds man without rival, without opponent, on
the solitary height of glory. He now has beside him
only the gods—and therefore he has them against
him. These however betray him into a deed of the
Hybris, and under it he collapses.
Let us well observe that just as Miltiades perishes
so the noblest Greek States perish when they, by
merit and fortune, have arrived from the racecourse
at the temple of Nike. Athens, which had de-
stroyed the independence of her allies and avenged
with severity the rebellions of her subjected foes,
Sparta, which after the battle of jEgospotamoi used
her preponderance over Hellas in a still harsher and
more cruel fashion, both these, as in the case of Milti-
ades, brought about their ruin through deeds of the
Hybris, as a proof that without envy, jealousy, and
contesting ambition the Hellenic State like the Hel-
lenic man degenerates. He becomes bad and cruel,
thirsting for revenge, and godless; in short, he be-
comes" pre-Homeric"—and then it needs only a
panic in order to bring about his fall and to crush
him. Sparta and Athens surrender to Persia, as


## p. 62 (#100) #############################################

62 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
Themistocles and Alcibiades have done; they betray
Hellenism after they have given up the noblest Hel-
lenic fundamental thought, the contest, and Alex-
ander, the coarsened copy and abbreviation of Greek
history, now invents the cosmopolitan Hellene, and
the so-called " Hellenism. "


## p. 63 (#101) #############################################

The Relation of Schopenhauer's
Philosophy to a German Culture
Preface to an Unwritten Book (1872)


## p. 64 (#102) #############################################

ſ！！！！！！！！！！！：）--~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~ ~~


## p. 65 (#103) #############################################

In dear vile Germany culture now lies so decayed
in the streets, jealousy of all that is great rules so
shamelessly, and the general tumult of those who
race for " Fortune " resounds so deafeningly, that one
must have a strong faith, almost in the sense of credo
quia absurdutn est, in order to hope still for a growing
Culture, and above all—in opposition to the press
with her "public opinion "—to be able to work by
public teaching. With violence must those, in whose
hearts lies the immortal care for the people, free
themselves from all the inrushing impressions of
that which is just now actual and valid, and evoke
the appearance of reckoning them indifferent things.
They must appear so, because they want to think,
and because a loathsome sight and a confused noise,
perhaps even mixed with the trumpet-flourishes of
war-glory, disturb their thinking, and above all,
because they want to believe in the German character
and because with this faith they would lose their
strength. Do not find fault with these believers if
they look from their distant aloofness and from the
heights towards their Promised Land! They fear
those experiences, to which the kindly disposed
foreigner surrenders himself, when he lives among
the Germans, and must be surprised how little
German life corresponds to those great individuals,
works and actions, which, in his kind disposition he
5


## p. 66 (#104) #############################################

66 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
has learned to revere as the true German character.
Where the German cannot lift himself into the
sublime he makes an impression less than the medi-
ocre. Even the celebrated German scholarship, in
which a number of the most useful domestic and
homely virtues such as faithfulness, self-restriction,
industry, moderation, cleanliness appear transposed
into a purer atmosphere and, as it were, transfigured,
is by no means the result of these virtues; looked
at closely, the motive urging to unlimited knowledge
appears in Germany much more like a defect, a gap,
than an abundance of forces, it looks almost like the
consequence of a needy formless atrophied life and
even like a flight from the moral narrow-mindedness
and malice to which the German without such diver-
sions is subjected, and which also in spite of that
scholarship, yea still within scholarship itself, often
break forth. As the true virtuosi of philistinism
the Germans are at home in narrowness of life,
discerning and judging; if any one will carry them
above themselves into the sublime, then they make
themselves heavy as lead, and as such lead-weights
they hang to their truly great men, in order to pull
them down out of the ether to the level of their
own necessitous indigence. Perhaps this Philistine
homeliness may be only the degeneration of a
genuine German virtue—a profound submersion into
the detail, the minute, the nearest and into the
mysteries of the individual—but this virtue grown
mouldy is now worse than the most open vice, espe-
cially since one has now become conscious, with
gladness of the heart, of this quality, even to lite-
rary self-glorification. Now the "Educated" among


## p. 67 (#105) #############################################

SCHOPENHAUER'S PHILOSOPHY 67
the proverbially so cultured Germans and the "Philis-
tines" among the, as everybody knows, so uncul-
tured Germans shake hands in public and agree
with one another concerning the way in which hence-
forth one will have to write, compose poetry, paint,
make music and even philosophise, yea—rule, so as
neither to stand too much aloof from the culture of
the one, nor to give offence to the "homeliness"
of the other. This they call now "The German
Culture of our times. " Well, it is only necessary to
inquire after the characteristic by which that " edu-
cated" person is to be recognised; now that we
know that his foster-brother, the German Philistine,
makes himself known as such to all the world, with-
out bashfulness, as it were, after innocence is lost.
The educated person nowadays is educated above
all "historically" by his historic consciousness he
saves himself from the sublime in which the Philis-
tine succeeds by his "homeliness. " No longer that
enthusiasm which history inspires—as Goethe was
allowed to suppose—but just the blunting of all
enthusiasm is now the goal of these admirers of the
niladmirari, when they try to conceive everything
historically; to them however we should exclaim:
Ye are the fools of all centuries! History will make
to you only those confessions, which you are worthy
to receive. The world has been at all times full of
trivialities and nonentities; to your historic hanker-
ing just these and only these unveil themselves. By
your thousands you may pounce upon an epoch—
you will afterwards hunger as before and be allowed
to boast of your sort of starved soundness. Mam
ipsam quam iactant sanitatem nonfirmitate sed ieiunio


## p. 68 (#106) #############################################

68 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
consequuntur. (Dialogusdeoratoribus,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 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


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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


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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.


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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. "—


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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,


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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


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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.