, they can be
perceived, although they are without definite con-
tents.
perceived, although they are without definite con-
tents.
Nietzsche - v02 - Early Greek 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. When has sacrilege, when
has apostasy manifested itself in inviolable forms,
in laws esteemed sacred? Where injustice sways,
there is caprice, disorder, irregularity, contradiction;
where however Law and Zeus' daughter, Dike, rule
alone, as in this world, how could the sphere of guilt,
of expiation, of judgment, and as it were the place
of execution of all condemned ones be there? "
7
## p. 98 (#152) #############################################
98 VARIOUS PKOSE ESSAYS
From this intuition Heraclitus took two coherent
negations, which are put into the right light only
by a comparison with the propositions of his prede-
cessor. Firstly, he denied the duality of two quite
diverse worlds, into the assumption of which Anaxi-
mander had been pushed; he no longer distinguished
a physical world from a metaphysical, a realm of
definite qualities from a realm of indefinable inde-
finiteness. Now after this first step he could neither
be kept back any longer from a still greater audacity
of denying: he denied "Being" altogether. For
this one world which was left to him,—shielded all
round by eternal, unwritten laws, flowing up and
down in the brazen beat of rhythm,—shows nowhere
persistence,indestructibility, a bulwark in the stream.
Louder than Anaximander, Heraclitus exclaimed:
"I see nothing but Becoming. Be not deceived!
It is the fault of your limited outlook and not the
fault of the essence of things if you believe that
you see firm land anywhere in the ocean of Becom-
ing and Passing. You need names for things, just
as if they had a rigid permanence, but the very river
in which you bathe a second time is no longer the
same one which you entered before. "
Heraclitus has as his royal property the highest
power of intuitive conception, whereas towards the
other mode of conception which is consummated
by ideas and logical combinations, that is towards
reason, he shows himself cool, apathetic, even hos-
tile, and he seems to derive a pleasure when he is
able to contradict reason by means of a truth gained
intuitively, and this he does in such propositions as:
"Everything has always its opposite within itself,"
^
## p. 99 (#153) #############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 99
so fearlessly that Aristotle before the tribunal of
Reason accuses him of the highest crime, of having
sinned against the law of opposition. Intuitive repre-
sentation however embraces two things: firstly, the
present, motley, changing world, pressing on us in
all experiences, secondly, the conditions by means
of which alone any experience of this world becomes
possible : time and space. For these are able to be
intuitively apprehended, purely in themselves and
independent of any experience; i. e.
, they can be
perceived, although they are without definite con-
tents. If now Heraclitus considered time in thisj
fashion, dissociated from all experiences, he had in
it the most instructive monogram of all that which
falls within the realm of intuitive conception. Just
as he conceived of time, so also for instance did
Schopenhauer, who repeatedly says of it: that in it
every instant exists only in so far as it has anni-
hilated the preceding one, its father, in order to be
itself effaced equally quickly; that past and future
are as unreal as any dream ; that the present is only
the dimensionless and unstable boundary between
the two ; that however, like time, so space, and again
like the latter, so also everything that is simultan-
eously in space and time, has only a relative exist-
ence, only through and for the sake of a something
else, of the same kind as itself, i. e. , existing only
under the same limitations. This truth is in the
highest degree self-evident, accessible to everyone,
and just for that very reason, abstractly and ration-
ally, it is only attained with great difficulty. Who-
ever has this truth before his eyes must however also
proceed at once to the next Heraclitean consequence
## p. 100 (#154) ############################################
IOO VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
and say that the whole essence of actuality is in fact
activity, and that for actuality there is no other kind
of existence and reality, as Schopenhauer has like-
wise expounded (" The World As Will And Idea,"
Vol. I. , Bk. i, sec. 4): "Only as active does it fill
space and time: its action upon the immediate object
determines the perception in which alone it exists:
the effect of the action of any material object upon
any other, is known only in so far as the latter acts
upon the immediate object in a different way from
that in which it acted before; it consists in this alone.
Cause and effect thus constitute the whole nature of
matter; its true being is its action. The totality
of everything material is therefore very appropri-
ately called in German Wirklichkeit (actuality)—
a word which is far more expressive than Realitcit
(reality). * That upon which actuality acts is always
matter; actuality's whole' Being' and essence there-
fore consist only in the orderly change, which one
part of it causes in another, and is therefore wholly
relative, according to a relation which is valid only
within the boundary of actuality, as in the case of
time and space. "
The eternal and exclusive Becoming, the total in-
stability of all reality and actuality, which continu-
ally works and becomes and never is, as Heraclitus
teaches—is an awful and appalling conception, and
in its effects most nearly related to that sensation, by
which during an earthquake one loses confidence in
the firmly-grounded earth. It required anastonishing
* Mira in quibusdam rebus verborum proprietas est, et
consuetudo sermonis antiqui quaedam cfficacissimis notis
signat (Seneca, Epist. 81). —Tr.
## p. 101 (#155) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY IOI
strength to translate this effect into its opposite, into
the sublime, into happy astonishment. Heraclitus
accomplished this through an observation of the
proper course of all Becoming and Passing, which
he conceived of under the form of polarity, as the
divergence of a force into two qualitatively different,
opposite actions, striving after reunion. A quality
is set continually at variance with itself and separ-
ates itself into its opposites: these opposites con-
tinually strive again one towards another. The
common people of course think to recognise some-
thing rigid, completed, consistent; but the fact of
the matter is that at any instant, bright and dark,
sour and sweet are side by side and attached to one
another like two wrestlers of whom sometimes the
one succeeds, sometimes the other. According to
Heraclitus honey is at the same time sweet and
bitter, and the world itself an amphora whose
contents constantly need stirring up. Out of the
war of the opposites all Becoming originates; the
definite and to us seemingly persistent qualities
express only the momentary predominance of the
one fighter, but with that the war is not at an end;
the wrestling continues to all eternity. Everything
happens according to this struggle, and this very
struggle manifests eternal justice. It is a wonder-
ful conception, drawn from the purest source of
Hellenism, which considers the struggle as the con-
tinual sway of a homogeneous, severe justice bound
by eternal laws. Only a Greek was able to consider
this conception as the fundament of a Cosmodicy; it
is Hesiod's good Eris transfigured into the cosmic
principle, it is the idea of a contest, an idea held by
## p. 101 (#156) ############################################
IOO VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
and say that the whole essence of actuality is in fact
activity, and that for actuality there is no other kind
of existence and reality, as Schopenhauer has like-
wise expounded ("The World As Will And Idea,"
Vol. I. , Bk. I, sec. 4): "Only as active does it fill
space and time: its action upon the immediate object
determines the perception in which alone it exists:
the effect of the action of any material object upon
any other, is known only in so far as the latter acts
upon the immediate object in a different way from
that in which it acted before; it consists in this alone.
Cause and effect thus constitute the whole nature of
matter; its true being is its action. The totality
of everything material is therefore very appropri-
ately called in German Wirklichkcit (actuality)—
a word which is far more expressive than Realitdt
(reality). * That upon which actuality acts is always
matter; actuality's whole' Being' and essence there-
fore consist only in the orderly change, which one
part of it causes in another, and is therefore wholly
relative, according to a relation which is valid only
within the boundary of actuality, as in the case of
time and space. "
The eternal and exclusive Becoming, the total in-
stability of all reality and actuality, which continu-
ally works and becomes and never is, as Heraclitus
teaches—is an awful and appalling conception, and
in its effects most nearly related to that sensation, by
which during an earthquake one loses confidence in
thefirmly-groundedearth. It required anastonishing
* Mira in quibusdam rebus verborum proprietas est, et
consuetudo sermonis antiqui quaedam cfficacissimis notis
signat (Seneca, Epist. 81). —Tk.
## p. 101 (#157) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY IOI
strength to translate this effect into its opposite, into
the sublime, into happy astonishment. Heraclitus
accomplished this through an observation of the
proper course of all Becoming and Passing, which
he conceived of under the form of polarity, as the
divergence of a force into two qualitatively different,
opposite actions, striving after reunion. A quality
is set continually at variance with itself and separ-
ates itself into its opposites: these opposites con-
tinually strive again one towards another. The
common people of course think to recognise some-
thing rigid, completed, consistent; but the fact of
the matter is that at any instant, bright and dark,
sour and sweet are side by side and attached to one
another like two wrestlers of whom sometimes the
one succeeds, sometimes the other. According to
Heraclitus honey is at the same time sweet and
bitter, and the world itself an amphora whose
contents constantly need stirring up. Out of the
war of the opposites all Becoming originates; the
definite and to us seemingly persistent qualities
express only the momentary predominance of the
one fighter, but with that the war is not at an end;
the wrestling continues to all eternity. Everything
happens according to this struggle, and this very
struggle manifests eternal justice. It is a wonder-
ful conception, drawn from the purest source of
Hellenism, which considers the struggle as the con-
tinual sway of a homogeneous, severe justice bound
by eternal laws. Only a Greek was able to consider
this conception as the fundament of a Cosmodicy; it
is Hesiod's good Eris transfigured into the cosmic
principle, it is the idea of a contest, an idea held by
## p. 101 (#158) ############################################
IOO VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
and say that the whole essence of actuality is in fact
activity, and that for actuality there is no other kind
of existence and reality, as Schopenhauer has like-
wise expounded ("The World As Will And Idea,"
Vol. I. , Bk. I, sec. 4): "Only as active does it fill
space and time: its action upon the immediate object
determines the perception in which alone it exists:
the effect of the action of any material object upon
any other, is known only in so far as the latter acts
upon the immediate object in a different way from
that in which it acted before; it consists in this alone.
Cause and effect thus constitute the whole nature of
matter; its true being is its action. The totality
of everything material is therefore very appropri-
ately called in German Wirklichkeit (actuality)—
a word which is far more expressive than Realitdt
(reality). * That upon which actuality acts is always
matter; actuality's whole ' Being' and essence there-
fore consist only in the orderly change, which one
part of it causes in another, and is therefore wholly
relative, according to a relation which is valid only
within the boundary of actuality, as in the case of
time and space. "
The eternal and exclusive Becoming, the total in-
stability of all reality and actuality, which continu-
ally works and becomes and never is, as Heraclitus
teaches—is an awful and appalling conception, and
in its effects most nearly related to that sensation, by
which during an earthquake one loses confidence in
thefirmly-groundedearth. It required anastonishing
* Mira in quibusdam rebus verborum proprietas est, et
consuetudo sermonis antiqui quaedam efficacissimis notis
signat (Seneca, Epist. 81). —Tr.
## p. 101 (#159) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY IOI
strength to translate this effect into its opposite, into
the sublime, into happy astonishment. Heraclitus
accomplished this through an observation of the
proper course of all Becoming and Passing, which
he conceived of under the form of polarity, as the
divergence of a force into two qualitatively different,
opposite actions, striving after reunion. A quality
is set continually at variance with itself and separ-
ates itself into its opposites: these opposites con-
tinually strive again one towards another. The
common people of course think to recognise some-
thing rigid, completed, consistent; but the fact of
the matter is that at any instant, bright and dark,
sour and sweet are side by side and attached to one
another like two wrestlers of whom sometimes the
one succeeds, sometimes the other. According to
Heraclitus honey is at the same time sweet and
bitter, and the world itself an amphora whose
contents constantly need stirring up. Out of the
war of the opposites all Becoming originates; the
definite and to us seemingly persistent qualities
express only the momentary predominance of the
one fighter, but with that the war is not at an end;
the wrestling continues to all eternity. Everything
happens according to this struggle, and this very
struggle manifests eternal justice. It is a wonder-
ful conception, drawn from the purest source of
Hellenism, which considers the struggle as the con-
tinual sway of a homogeneous, severe justice bound
by eternal laws. Only a Greek was able to consider
this conception as the fundament of a Cosmodicy; it
is Hesiod's good Eris transfigured into the cosmic
principle, it is the idea of a contest, an idea held by
## p. 102 (#160) ############################################
102 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
individual Greeks and by their State, and translated
out of the gymnasia and palaestra, out of the artistic
agonistics, out of the struggle of the political parties
and of the towns into the most general principle, so
that the machinery of the universe is regulated by
it. Just as every Greek fought as though he alone
were in the right, and as though an absolutely
sure standard of judicial opinion could at any in-
stant decide whither victory is inclining, thus the
qualities wrestle one with another, according to in-
violable laws and standards which are inherent in
the struggle. The Things themselves in the per-
manency of which the limited intellect of man and
animal believes, do not "exist" at all; they are as the
fierce flashing and fiery sparkling of drawn swords,
as the stars of Victory rising with a radiant re-
splendence in the battle of the opposite qualities.
That struggle which is peculiar to all Becoming,
that eternal interchange of victory is again described
by Schopenhauer: (" The World As Will And Idea,"
Vol. i. , Bk. 2, sec. 27) " The permanent matter must
constantly change its form; for under the guid-
ance of causality, mechanical, physical, chemical,
and organic phenomena, eagerly striving to appear,
wrest the matter from each other, for each desires
to reveal its own Idea. This strife may be followed
up through the whole of nature; indeed nature
exists only through it. " The following pages give
the most noteworthy illustrations of this struggle,
only that the prevailing tone of this description ever
remains other than that of Heraclitus in so far as
to Schopenhauer the struggle is a proof of the Will
to Life falling out with itself; it is to him a feasting
## p. 103 (#161) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 103
on itself on the part of this dismal, dull impulse, as
a phenomenon on the whole horrible and not at all
making for happiness. The arena and the object
of this struggle is Matter,—which some natural forces
alternately endeavour to disintegrate and build up
again at the expense of other natural forces,—as
also Space and Time, the union of which through
causality is this very matter.
Whilst the imagination of Heraclitus measured the
restlessly moving universe, the "actuality" (Wirk-
lichkeii), with the eye of the happy spectator, who
sees innumerable pairs wrestling in joyous combat
entrusted to the superintendence of severe umpires,
a still higher presentiment seized him, he no longer
could contemplate the wrestling pairs and the um-
pires, separated one from another ; the very umpires
seemed to fight, and the fighters seemed to be their
own judges—yea, since at the bottom he conceived
only of the one Justice eternally swaying, he dared
to exclaim: "The contest of The Many is itself pure
justice. And after all: The One is The Many. For
what are all those qualities according to their nature?
Are they immortal gods? Are they separate beings
working for themselves from the beginning and with-
out end? And if the world which we see knows
only Becoming and Passing but no Permanence,
should perhaps those qualities constitute a differently
fashioned metaphysical world, true, not a world of
unity as Anaximander sought behind the fluttering
veil of plurality, but a world of eternal and essential
pluralities? " Is it possible that however violently
## p. 104 (#162) ############################################
104 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
he had denied such duality, Heraclitus has after all
by a round-about way accidentally got into the dual
cosmic order, an order with an Olympus of numerous
immortal gods and demons,—viz. , many realities,—
and with a human world, which sees only the dust-
cloud of the Olympic struggle and the flashing of
divine spears,—i. e. , only a Becoming? Anaximander
had fled just from these definite qualities into the
lap of the metaphysical " Indefinite "; because the
former became and passed, he had denied them a
true and essential existence; however should it not
seem now as if the Becoming is only the looming-
into-view of a struggle of eternal qualities? When
we speak of the Becoming, should not the original
cause of this be sought in the peculiar feebleness of
human cognition—whereas in the nature of things
there is perhaps no Becoming, but only a co-existing
of many true increate indestructible realities?
These are Heraclitean loop-holes and labyrinths;
he exclaims once again : " The 'One' is the 'Many'. "
The many perceptible qualities are neither eternal
entities, nor phantasmata of our senses (Anaxagoras
conceives them later on as the former, Parmenides
as the latter), they are neither rigid, sovereign "Being"
nor fleeting Appearance hovering in human minds.
The third possibility which alone was left to Hera-
clitus nobody will be able to divine with dialectic
sagacity and as it were by calculation, for what he
invented here is a rarity even in the realm of mystic
incredibilities and unexpected cosmic metaphors. —
The world is the Game of Zeus, or expressed more
physically, the game of fire with itself, the "One"
is only in this sense at the same time the " Many. "—
## p. 105 (#163) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 105
In order to elucidate in the first place the intro-
duction of fire as a world-shaping force, I recall
how Anaximander had further developed the theory
of water as the origin of things. Placing confi-
dence in the essential part of Thales' theory, and
strengthening and adding to the latter's observa-
tions, Anaximander however was not to be con-
vinced that before the water and, as it were, after
the water there was no further stage of quality: no,
to him out of the Warm and the Cold the Moist
seemed to form itself, and the Warm and the Cold
therefore were supposed to be the preliminary
stages, the still more original qualities. With their
issuing forth from the primordial existence of the
"Indefinite," Becoming begins. Heraclitus who as
physicist subordinated himself to the importance
of Anaximander, explains to himself this Anaxi-
mandrian "Warm" as the respiration, the warm
breath, the dry vapours, in short as the fiery element:
about this fire he now enunciates the same as Thales
and Anaximander had enunciated about the water:
that in innumerable metamorphoses it was passing
along the path of Becoming, especially in the three
chief aggregate stages as something Warm, Moist,
and Firm. For water in descending is transformed
into earth, in ascending into fire: or as Heraclitus
appears to have expressed himself more exactly:
from the sea ascend only the pure vapours which
serve as food to the divine fire of the stars, from
the earth only the dark, foggy ones, from which
the Moist derives its nourishment. The pure
vapours are the transitional stage in the passing
of sea into fire, the impure the transitional stage
## p. 106 (#164) ############################################
106 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
in the passing of earth into water. Thus the
two paths of metamorphosis of the fire run con-
tinuously side by side, upwards and downwards, to
and fro, from fire to water, from water to earth,
from earth back again to water, from water to fire.
Whereas Heraclitus is a follower of Anaximander
in the most important of these conceptions, e. g. ,
that the fire is kept up by the evaporations, or here-
in, that out of the water is dissolved partly earth,
partly fire; he is on the other hand quite inde-
pendent and in opposition to Anaximander in
excluding the "Cold" from the physical process,
whilst Anaximander had put it side by side with
the "Warm " as having the same rights, so as to let
the " Moist" originate out of both. To do so, was
of course a necessity to Heraclitus, for if everything
is to be fire, then, however many possibilities of its
transformation might be assumed, nothing can exist
that would be the absolute antithesis to fire; he has,
therefore, probably interpreted only as a degree of
the " Warm" that which is called the "Cold," and he
could justify this interpretation without difficulty.
Much more important than this deviation from the
doctrine of Anaximander is a further agreement;
he, like the latter, believes in an end of the world
periodically repeating itself and in an ever-renewed
emerging of another world out of the all-destroying
world-fire. The period during which the world
hastens towards that world-fire and the dissolution
into pure fire is characterised by him most strikingly
as a demand and a need; the state of being com-
pletely swallowed up by the fire as satiety; and
now to us remains the question as to how he under-
## p. 107 (#165) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 107
stood and named the newly awakening impulse for
world-creation, the pouring-out-of-itself into the
forms of plurality. The Greek proverb seems to come
to our assistance with the thought that "satiety gives
birth to crime" (the Hybris) and one may indeed ask
oneself for a minute whether perhaps Heraclitus has
derived that return to plurality out of the Hybris.
Let us just take this thought seriously: in its light the
face of Heraclitus changes before our eyes, the proud
gleam of his eyes dies out, a wrinkled expression of
painful resignation, of impotence becomes distinct, it
seems that we know why later antiquity called him
the "weeping philosopher. " Is not the whole world-
process now an act of punishment of the Hybris?
The plurality the result of a crime? The transforma-
tion of the pure into the impure, the consequence of
injustice? Isnot the guilt nowshiftedintothe essence
of the things and indeed, the world of Becoming and
of individuals accordingly exonerated from guilt;
yet at the same time are they not condemned for
ever and ever to bear the consequences of guilt?
7
That dangerous word, Hybris, is indeed the touch-
stone for every Heraclitean; here he may show
whether he has understood or mistaken his master.
Is there in this world: Guilt, injustice, contradiction,
suffering?
Yes, exclaims Heraclitus, but only for the limited
human being, who sees divergently and not con-
vergently, not for the contuitive god; to him every-
thing opposing converges into one harmony, invisible
it is true to the common human eye, yet compre-
## p. 108 (#166) ############################################
108 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
hensible to him who like Heraclitus resembles the
contemplative god. Before his fiery eye no drop of
injustice is left in the world poured out around him,
and even that cardinal obstacle—how pure fire can
take up its quarters in forms so impure—he masters
by means of a sublime simile. A Becoming and
Passing, a building and destroying, without any
moral bias, in perpetual innocence is in this world
only the play of the artist and of the child. And
- similarly, just as the child and the artist play, the
eternally living fire plays, builds up and destroys, in
innocence—and this game the JEon plays with him-
self. Transforming himself into water and earth,
like a child he piles heaps of sand by the sea, piles
up and demolishes; from time to time he recom-
mences the game. A moment of satiety, then again
desire seizes him, as desire compels the artist to
create. Not wantonness, but the ever newly awaken-
ing impulse to play, calls into life other worlds. The
child throws away his toys ; but soon he starts again
in an innocent frame of mind. As soon however as
the child builds he connects, joins and forms law-
fully and according to an innate sense of order.
Thus only is the world contemplated by the
aesthetic man, who has learned from the artist and
the genesis of the latter's work, how the struggle of
plurality can yet bear within itself law and justice,
how the artist stands contemplative above, and
working within the work of art, how necessity and
play, antagonism and harmony must pair themselves
for the procreation of the work of art.
Who now will still demand from such a philosophy
a system of Ethics with the necessary imperatives
N
## p. 109 (#167) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 109
—Thou Shalt,—or even reproach Heraclitus with
such a deficiency. Man down to his last fibre is
Necessity and absolutely "unfree "—if by freedom
one understands the foolish claim to be able to
change at will one's essentia like a garment, a claim,
which up to the present every serious philosophy
has rejected with due scorn. That so few human
beings live with consciousness in the Logos and in
accordance with the all-overlooking artist's eye
originates from their souls being wet and from the
fact that men's eyes and ears, their intellect in general
is a bad witness when "moist ooze fills their souls. "
Why that is so, is not questioned any more than
why fire becomes water and earth. Heraclitus is
not compelled to prove (as Leibnitz was) that this
world was even the best of all; it was sufficient for
him that the world is the beautiful, innocent play of
the iEon. Man on the whole is to him even an
irrational being, with which the fact that in all his
essence the law of all-ruling reason is fulfilled does
not clash. He does not occupy a specially favoured
position in nature, whose highest phenomenon is
not simple-minded man, but fire, for instance, as
stars. In so far as man has through necessity re-
ceived a share of fire, he is a little more rational;
as far as he consists of earth and water it stands
badly with his reason. He is not compelled to take
cognisance of the Logos simply because he is a
human being. Why is there water, why earth?
This to Heraclitus is a much more serious problem
than to ask, why men are so stupid and bad. In
the highest and the most perverted men the same
inherent lawfulness and justice manifest themselves.
## p. 109 (#168) ############################################
108 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
hensible to him who like Heraclitus resembles the
contemplative god. Before his fiery eye no drop of
injustice is left in the world poured out around him,
and even that cardinal obstacle—how pure fire can
take up its quarters in forms so impure—he masters
by means of a sublime simile. A Becoming and
Passing, a building and destroying, without any
moral bias, in perpetual innocence is in this world
only the play of the artist and of the child. And
i — similarly, just as the child and the artist play, the
eternally living fire plays, builds up and destroys, in
innocence—and this game the JEon plays with him-
self. Transforming himself into water and earth,
like a child he piles heaps of sand by the sea, piles
up and demolishes; from time to time he recom-
mences the game. A moment of satiety, then again
desire seizes him, as desire compels the artist to
create. Not wantonness, but the ever newly awaken-
ing impulse to play, calls into life other worlds. The
child throws away his toys ; but soon he starts again
in an innocent frame of mind. As soon however as
the child builds he connects, joins and forms law-
fully and according to an innate sense of order.
Thus only is the world contemplated by the
aesthetic man, who has learned from the artist and
the genesis of the latter's work, how the struggle of
plurality can yet bear within itself law and justice,
how the artist stands contemplative above, and
working within the work of art, how necessity and
play, antagonism and harmony must pair themselves
for the procreation of the work of art.
Who now will still demand from such a philosophy
a system of Ethics with the necessary imperatives
## p. 109 (#169) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 109
—Thou Shalt,—or even reproach Heraclitus with
such a deficiency. Man down to his last fibre is
Necessity and absolutely "unfree "—if by freedom
one understands the foolish claim to be able to
change at will one's essentia like a garment, a claim,
which up to the present every serious philosophy
has rejected with due scorn. That so few human
beings live with consciousness in the Logos and in
accordance with the all-overlooking artist's eye
originates from their souls being wet and from the
fact that men's eyes and ears, their intellect in general
is a bad witness when "moist ooze fills their souls. "
Why that is so, is not questioned any more than
why fire becomes water and earth. Heraclitus is
not compelled to prove (as Leibnitz was) that this
world was even the best of all; it was sufficient for
him that the world is the beautiful, innocent play of
the /Eon. Man on the whole is to him even an
irrational being, with which the fact that in all his
essence the law of all-ruling reason is fulfilled does
not clash. He does not occupy a specially favoured
position in nature, whose highest phenomenon is
not simple-minded man, but fire, for instance, as
stars. In so far as man has through necessity re-
ceived a share of fire, he is a little more rational;
as far as he consists of earth and water it stands
badly with his reason. He is not compelled to take
cognisance of the Logos simply because he is a
human being. Why is there water, why earth?
This to Heraclitus is a much more serious problem
than to ask, why men are so stupid and bad. In
the highest and the most perverted men the same
inherent lawfulness and justice manifest themselves.
## p. 110 (#170) ############################################
110 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
If however one would ask Heraclitus the question
"Why is fire not always fire, why is it now water,
now earth? " then he would only just answer: "It
is a game, don't take it too pathetically and still less,
morally. " Heraclitus describes only the existing
world and has the same contemplative pleasure in
it which the artist experiences when looking at his
growing work. Only those who have cause to be
discontented with his natural history of man find
him gloomy, melancholy, tearful, sombre, atrabil-
arious, pessimistic and altogether hateful. He how-
ever would take these discontented people, together
with their antipathies and sympathies, their hatred
and their love, as negligible and perhaps answer
them with some such comment as : " Dogs bark at
anything they do not know," or, " To the ass chaff
is preferable to gold. "
With such discontented persons also originate
the numerous complaints as to the obscurity of the
Heraclitean style; probably no man has ever
written clearer and more illuminatingly; of course,
- very abruptly, and therefore naturally obscure to the
racing readers. But why a philosopher should in-
tentionally write obscurely—a thing habitually said
about Heraclitus—is absolutely inexplicable; unless
he has some cause to hide his thoughts or is suffici-
ently a rogue to conceal his thoughtlessness under-
neath words. One is, as Schopenhauer says, indeed
compelled by lucid expression to prevent misunder-
standings even in affairs of practical every-day life,
how then should one be allowed to express oneself
indistinctly, indeed puzzlingly in the most difficult,
most abstruse, scarcely attainable object of thinking,
## p. 111 (#171) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY III
the tasks of philosophy? With respect to brevity
however Jean Paul gives a good precept: "On the
whole it is right that everything great—of deep
meaning to a rare mind—should be uttered with
brevity and (therefore) obscurely so that the paltry
mind would rather proclaim it to be nonsense than
translate it into the realm of his empty-headedness.
For common minds have an ugly ability to perceive
in the deepest and richest saying nothing but their
own every-day opinion. " Moreover and in spite of
it Heraclitus has not escaped the "paltry minds";
already the Stoics have " re-expounded" him into the
shallow and dragged down his aesthetic fundamental-
perception as to the play of the world to the miser-
able level of the common regard for the practical
ends of the world and more explicitly for the advan-
tages of man, so that out of his Physics has arisen
in those heads a crude optimism, with the continual
invitation to Dick, Tom, and Harry, "Plaudite
amid! "
8
Heraclitus was proud; and if it comes to pride
with a philosopher then it is a great pride. His work
never refers him to a " public," the applause of the
masses and the hailing chorus of contemporaries.
To wander lonely along his path belongs to the nature
of the philosopher. His talents are the most rare, in
a certain sense the most unnatural and at the same
time exclusive and hostile even toward kindred
talents. The wall of his self-sufficiency must be of
diamond, if it is not to be demolished and broken,
for everything is in motion against him. His journey
to immortality is more cumbersome and impeded
## p. 112 (#172) ############################################
112 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
than any other and yet nobody can believe more
firmly than the philosopher that he will attain the
goal by that journey—because he does not know
where he is to stand if not on the widely spread wings
of all time; for the disregard of everything present
and momentary lies in the essence of the great philo-
sophic nature. He has truth; the wheel of time
may roll whither it pleases, never can it escape from
truth. It is important to hear that such men have
lived. Never for example would one be able to
imagine the pride of Heraclitus as an idle possibility.
In itself every endeavour after knowledge seems by
its nature to be eternally unsatisfied and unsatis-
factory. Therefore nobody unless instructed by
history will like to believe in such a royal self-
esteem and conviction of being the only wooer of
truth. Such men live in their own solar-system—
one has to look for them there. A Pythagoras, an
Empedocles treated themselves too with a super-
human esteem, yea, with almost religious awe; but
the tie of sympathy united with the great conviction
of the metempsychosis and the unity of everything
living, led them back to other men, for their welfare
and salvation.
