No More Learning

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


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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


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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. "—


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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


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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-


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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-


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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


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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.


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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


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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.


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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,


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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


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112 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
than any other and yet nobody can believe more
firmly than the philosopher that he will attain the
goal by that journey—because he does not know
where he is to stand if not on the widely spread wings
of all time; for the disregard of everything present
and momentary lies in the essence of the great philo-
sophic nature. He has truth; the wheel of time
may roll whither it pleases, never can it escape from
truth. It is important to hear that such men have
lived. Never for example would one be able to
imagine the pride of Heraclitus as an idle possibility.
In itself every endeavour after knowledge seems by
its nature to be eternally unsatisfied and unsatis-
factory. Therefore nobody unless instructed by
history will like to believe in such a royal self-
esteem and conviction of being the only wooer of
truth. Such men live in their own solar-system—
one has to look for them there. A Pythagoras, an
Empedocles treated themselves too with a super-
human esteem, yea, with almost religious awe; but
the tie of sympathy united with the great conviction
of the metempsychosis and the unity of everything
living, led them back to other men, for their welfare
and salvation. Of that feeling of solitude, however,
which permeated the Ephesian recluse of the Artemis
Temple, one can only divine something, when grow-
ing benumbed in the wildest mountain desert. No
paramount feeling of compassionate agitation, no
desire to help, heal and save emanates from him.
He is a star without an atmosphere. His eye,
directed blazingly inwards, looks outward, for ap-
pearance's sake only, extinct and icy. All around
him, immediately upon the citadel of his pride beat


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EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 113
the waves of folly and perversity: with loathing he
turns away from them. But men with a feeling
heart would also shun such a Gorgon monster as cast
out of brass; within an out-of-the-way sanctuary,
among the statues of gods, by the side of cold com-
posedly-sublime architecture such a being may ap-
pear more comprehensible. As man among men
Heraclitus was incredible; and though he was seen
paying attention to the play of noisy children, even
then he was reflecting upon what never man thought
of on such an occasion: the play of the great world-
child, Zeus. He had no need of men, not even for
his discernments. He was not interested in all that
which one might perhaps ascertain from them, and
in what the other sages before him had been en-
deavouring to ascertain. He spoke with disdain of
such questioning, collecting, in short "historic" men.
"I sought and investigated myself," he said, with a
word by which one designates the investigation of
an oracle; as if he and no one else were the true
fulfiller and achiever of the Delphic precept: "Know
thyself. "
What he learned from this oracle, he deemed
immortal wisdom, and eternally worthy of explana-
tion, of unlimited effect even in the distance, after
the model of the prophetic speeches of the Sibyl.
It is sufficient for the latest mankind: let the latter
have that expounded to her, as oracular sayings,
which he like the Delphic god "neither enunciates
nor conceals. " Although it is proclaimed by him,
"without smiles, finery and the scent of ointments,"
but rather as with "foaming mouth," it must force
its way through the millenniums of the future. For
8


## p. 114 (#174) ############################################

114 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
the world needs truth eternally, therefore she needs
also Heraclitus eternally; although he has no need
of her. What does his fame matter to him ? —fame
with "mortals ever flowing on! " as he exclaims
scornfully. His fame is of concern to man, not to
himself; the immortality of mankind needs him, not
he the immortality of the man Heraclitus. That
which he beheld, the doctrine of the Law in the Be-
coming, and of the Play in the Necessity, must hence-
forth be beheld eternally; he has raised the curtain
of this greatest stage-play.
9
Whereas in every word of Heraclitusareexpressed
the pride and the majesty of truth, but of truth
caught by intuitions, not scaled by the rope-ladder
of Logic, whereas in sublime ecstasy he beholds but
does not espy, discerns but does not reckon, he is
contrasted with his contemporary Parmenides, a
man likewise with the type of a prophet of truth,
but formed as it were out of ice and not out of fire,
and shedding around himself cold, piercing light.
Parmenides once had, probably in his later years,
a moment of the very purest abstraction, undimmed
by any reality, perfectly lifeless; this moment—un-
Greek, like no other in the two centuries of the
Tragic Age—the product of which is the doctrine of
"Being," became a boundary-stone for his own life,
which divided it into two periods; at the same time
however the same moment divides the pre-Socratic
thinking into two halves, of which the first might be
called the Anaximandrian, the second the Parmen-
idean. The first period in Parmenides' own philoso-


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EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 115
phising bears still the signature of Anaximander;
this period produced a detailed philosophic-physical
system as answer to Anaximander's questions. When
later that icy abstraction-horror caught him, and the
simplest proposition treating of " Being " and " Not-
Being" was advanced by him, then among the many
older doctrines thrown by him upon the scrap heap
was also his own system. However he does not
appear to have lost all paternal piety towards the
strong and well-shapen child of his youth, and he
saved himself therefore by saying: "It is true there
is only one right way; if one however wants at any
time to betake oneself to another, then my earlier
opinion according to its purity and consequence
alone is right. " Sheltering himself with this phrase
he has allowed his former physical system a worthy
and extensive space in his great poem on Nature,
which really was to proclaim the new discernment as
the only signpost to truth. This fatherly regard,
even though an error should have crept in through
it, is a remainder of human feeling, in a nature quite
petrified by logical rigidity and almost changed into
a thinking-machine.
Parmenides, whose personal intercourse with An-
aximander does not seem incredible to me, and
whose starting from Anaximander's doctrine is not
only credible but evident, had the same distrust for
the complete separation of a world which only is,
and a world which only becomes, as had also caught
Heraclitus and led to a denying of " Being" alto-
gether. Both sought a way out from that contrast
and divergence of a dual order of the world. That
leap into the Indefinite, Indefinable, by which once


## p. 116 (#176) ############################################

Il6 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
for all Anaximander had escaped from the realm of
Becoming and from the empirically given qualities
of such realm, that leap did not become an easy-
matter to minds so independently fashioned as those
of Heraclitus and Parmenides; first they endea-
voured to walk as far as they could and reserved
to themselves the leap for that place, where the
foot finds no more hold and one has to leap, in
order not to fall. Both looked repeatedly at that
very world, which Anaximander had condemned in
so melancholy a way and declared to be the place
of wanton crime and at the same time the peni-
tentiary cell for the injustice of Becoming. Contem-
plating this world Heraclitus, as we know already,
had discovered what a wonderful order, regularity
and security manifest themselves in every Becom-
ing; from that he concluded that the Becoming
could not be anything evil and unjust. Quite a
different outlook had Parmenides; he compared
the qualities one with another, and believed that
they were not all of the same kind, but ought to be
classified under two headings. If for example he
compared bright and dark, then the second quality
was obviously only the negation of the first; and
thus he distinguished positive and negative qualities,
seriously endeavouring to rediscover and register that
fundamental antithesis in the whole realm of Nature.
His method was the following: He took a few anti-
theses, e. g. , light and heavy, rare and dense, active
and passive, and compared them with that typical
antithesis of bright and dark: that which corre-
sponded with the bright was the positive, that which
corresponded with the dark the negative quality. If
^


## p. 117 (#177) ############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 117
he took perhaps the heavy and light, the light fell
to the side of the bright, the heavy to the side of
the dark; and thus "heavy" was to him only the
negation of " light," but the " light" a positive quality.
This method alone shows that he had a defiant apti-
tude for abstract logical procedure, closed against
the suggestions of the senses. The " heavy" seems
indeed to offer itself very forcibly to the senses as
a positive quality; that did not keep Parmenides
from stamping it as a negation. Similarly he placed
the earth in opposition to the fire, the "cold" in
opposition to the "warm," the "dense" in opposi-
tion to the " rare," the "female" in opposition to the
"male," the " passive " in opposition to the " active,"
merely as negations: so that before his gaze our em-
piric world divided itself into two separate spheres,
into that of the positive qualities—with a bright,
fiery, warm, light, rare, active-masculine character—
and into that of the negative qualities. The latter
express really only the lack, the absence of the
others, the positive ones. He therefore described
the sphere in which the positive qualities are absent
as dark, earthy, cold, heavy, dense and altogether as
of feminine-passive character. Instead of the expres-
sions "positive" and "negative" he used the standing
term "existent" and "non-existent" and had arrived
with this at the proposition, that, in contradiction to
Anaximander, this our world itself contains some-
thing "existent," and of course something "non-
existent. " One is not to seek that "existent" out-
side the world and as it were above our horizon; but
before us, and everywhere in every Becoming, some-
thing " existent" and active is contained.



## p. 117 (#178) ############################################

Il6 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
for all Anaximander had escaped from the realm of
Becoming and from the empirically given qualities
of such realm, that leap did not become an easy
matter to minds so independently fashioned as those
of Heraclitus and Parmenides; first they endea-
voured to walk as far as they could and reserved
to themselves the leap for that place, where the
foot finds no more hold and one has to leap, in
order not to fall. Both looked repeatedly at that
very world, which Anaximander had condemned in
so melancholy a way and declared to be the place
of wanton crime and at the same time the peni-
tentiary cell for the injustice of Becoming. Contem-
plating this world Heraclitus, as we know already,
had discovered what a wonderful order, regularity
and security manifest themselves in every Becom-
ing; from that he concluded that the Becoming
could not be anything evil and unjust. Quite a
different outlook had Parmenides; he compared
the qualities one with another, and believed that
they were not all of the same kind, but ought to be
classified under two headings. If for example he
compared bright and dark, then the second quality
was obviously only the negation of the first; and
thus he distinguished positive and negative qualities,
seriously endeavouring to rediscover and register that
fundamental antithesis in the whole realm of Nature.
His method was the following: He took a few anti-
theses, e. g. , light and heavy, rare and dense, active
and passive, and compared them with that typical
antithesis of bright and dark: that which corre-
sponded with the bright was the positive, that which
corresponded with the dark the negative quality. If


## p. 117 (#179) ############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 117
he took perhaps the heavy and light, the light fell
to the side of the bright, the heavy to the side of
the dark; and thus " heavy" was to him only the
negation of " light," but the " light" a positive quality.
This method alone shows that he had a defiant apti-
tude for abstract logical procedure, closed against
the suggestions of the senses. The "heavy" seems
indeed to offer itself very forcibly to the senses as
a positive quality; that did not keep Parmenides
from stamping it as a negation. Similarly he placed
the earth in opposition to the fire, the "cold" in
opposition to the "warm," the "dense" in opposi-
tion to the "rare," the "female" in opposition to the
"male," the " passive " in opposition to the " active,"
merely as negations: so that before his gaze our em-
piric world divided itself into two separate spheres,
into that of the positive qualities—with a bright,
fiery, warm, light, rare, active-masculine character—
and into that of the negative qualities. The latter
express really only the lack, the absence of the
others, the positive ones.
He therefore described
the sphere in which the positive qualities are absent
as dark, earthy, cold, heavy, dense and altogether as
of feminine-passive character. Instead of the expres-
sions "positive" and "negative" he used the standing
term "existent" and "non-existent" and had arrived
with this at the proposition, that, in contradiction to
Anaximander, this our world itself contains some-
thing "existent," and of course something "non-
existent. " One is not to seek that "existent" out-
side the world and as it were above our horizon; but
before us, and everywhere in every Becoming, some-
thing " existent" and active is contained.


## p. 117 (#180) ############################################

Il6 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
for all Anaximander had escaped from the realm of
Becoming and from the empirically given qualities
of such realm, that leap did not become an easy
matter to minds so independently fashioned as those
of Heraclitus and Parmenides; first they endea-
voured to walk as far as they could and reserved
to themselves the leap for that place, where the
foot finds no more hold and one has to leap, in
order not to fall. Both looked repeatedly at that
very world, which Anaximander had condemned in
so melancholy a way and declared to be the place
of wanton crime and at the same time the peni-
tentiary cell for the injustice of Becoming. Contem-
plating this world Heraclitus, as we know already,
had discovered what a wonderful order, regularity
and security manifest themselves in every Becom-
ing; from that he concluded that the Becoming
could not be anything evil and unjust . Quite a
different outlook had Parmenides; he compared
the qualities one with another, and believed that
they were not all of the same kind, but ought to be
classified under two headings. If for example he
compared bright and dark, then the second quality
was obviously only the negation of the first; and
thus he distinguished positive and negative qualities,
seriously endeavouring to rediscover and register that
fundamental antithesis in the whole realm of Nature.
His method was the following: He took a few anti-
theses, e. g. , light and heavy, rare and dense, active
and passive, and compared them with that typical
antithesis of bright and dark: that which corre-
sponded with the bright was the positive, that which
corresponded with the dark the negative quality. If


## p. 117 (#181) ############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 117
he took perhaps the heavy and light, the light fell
to the side of the bright, the heavy to the side of
the dark; and thus "heavy" was to him only the
negation of " light," but the " light" a positive quality.
This method alone shows that he had a defiant apti-
tude for abstract logical procedure, closed against
the suggestions of the senses. The "heavy" seems
indeed to offer itself very forcibly to the senses as
a positive quality; that did not keep Parmenides
from stamping it as a negation. Similarly he placed
the earth in opposition to the fire, the "cold" in
opposition to the "warm," the "dense" in opposi-
tion to the " rare,"the "female" in opposition to the
"male," the " passive " in opposition to the " active,"
merely as negations: so that before his gaze our em-
piric world divided itself into two separate spheres,
into that of the positive qualities—with a bright,
fiery, warm, light, rare, active-masculine character—
and into that of the negative qualities. The latter
express really only the lack, the absence of the
others, the positive ones. He therefore described
the sphere in which the positive qualities are absent
as dark, earthy, cold, heavy, dense and altogether as
of feminine-passive character. Instead of the expres-
sions "positive" and "negative" he used the standing
term "existent" and "non-existent" and had arrived
with this at the proposition, that, in contradiction to
Anaximander, this our world itself contains some-
thing "existent," and of course something "non-
existent. " One is not to seek that "existent" out-
side the world and as it were above our horizon ; but
before us, and everywhere in every Becoming, some-
thing "existent" and active is contained.


## p. 117 (#182) ############################################

Il6 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
for all Anaximander had escaped from the realm of
Becoming and from the empirically given qualities
of such realm, that leap did not become an easy
matter to minds so independently fashioned as those
of Heraclitus and Parmenides; first they endea-
voured to walk as far as they could and reserved
to themselves the leap for that place, where the
foot finds no more hold and one has to leap, in
order not to fall. Both looked repeatedly at that
very world, which Anaximander had condemned in
so melancholy a way and declared to be the place
of wanton crime and at the same time the peni-
tentiary cell for the injustice of Becoming. Contem-
plating this world Heraclitus, as we know already,
had discovered what a wonderful order, regularity
and security manifest themselves in every Becom-
ing; from that he concluded that the Becoming
could not be anything evil and unjust. Quite a
different outlook had Parmenides; he compared
the qualities one with another, and believed that
they were not all of the same kind, but ought to be
classified under two headings. If for example he
compared bright and dark, then the second quality
was obviously only the negation of the first; and
thus he distinguished positive and negative qualities,
seriously endeavouring to rediscover and register that
fundamental antithesis in the whole realm of Nature.
His method was the following: He took a few anti-
theses, e. g. , light and heavy, rare and dense, active
and passive, and compared them with that typical
antithesis of bright and dark: that which corre-
sponded with the bright was the positive, that which
corresponded with the dark the negative quality. If


## p. 117 (#183) ############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 117
he took perhaps the heavy and light, the light fell
to the side of the bright, the heavy to the side of
the dark; and thus "heavy" was to him only the
negation of "light," but the "light" a positive quality.
This method alone shows that he had a defiant apti-
tude for abstract logical procedure, closed against
the suggestions of the senses. The " heavy " seems
indeed to offer itself very forcibly to the senses as
a positive quality; that did not keep Parmenides
from stamping it as a negation. Similarly he placed
the earth in opposition to the fire, the "cold" in
opposition to the "warm," the "dense" in opposi-
tion to the " rare," the "female" in opposition to the
"male," the " passive " in opposition to the " active,"
merely as negations: so that before his gaze our em-
piric world divided itself into two separate spheres,
into that of the positive qualities—with a bright,
fiery, warm, light, rare, active-masculine character—
and into that of the negative qualities. The latter
express really only the lack, the absence of the
others, the positive ones. He therefore described
the sphere in which the positive qualities are absent
as dark, earthy, cold, heavy, dense and altogether as
of feminine-passive character. Instead of the expres-
sions "positive" and "negative" he used the standing
term "existent" and "non-existent" and had arrived
with this at the proposition, that, in contradiction to
Anaximander, this our world itself contains some-
thing "existent," and of course something "non-
existent. " One is not to seek that "existent" out-
side the world and as it were above our horizon; but
before us, and everywhere in every Becoming, some-
thing " existent" and active is contained.


## p. 118 (#184) ############################################

Il8 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
With that however still remained to him the task of
giving the more exact answer to the question: What
is the Becoming? and here was the moment where he
had to leap, in order not to fall, although perhaps to
such natures as that of Parmenides, even any leaping
means a falling. Enough 1 we get into fog, into the
mysticism of qualitates occulta, and even a little into
mythology. Parmenides, like Heraclitus, looks at the
general Becoming and Not-remaining and explains
to himself a Passing only thus, that the "Non-Exist-
ent" bore the guilt. For how should the "Existent"
bear the guilt of Passing? Likewise, however, the Ori-
ginating,/'. ^. , the Becoming, must come about through
the assistance of the " Non-Existent"; for the "Ex-
istent" is always there and could not of itself first ori-
ginate and it could not explain any Originating, any
Becoming. Therefore the Originating, the Becom-
ing as well as the Passing and Perishing have been
brought about by the negative qualities. But that
the originating "thing" has a content,and the passing
"thing" loses a content, presupposes that the posi-
tive qualities—and that just means that very content
—participate likewise in both processes. In short the
proposition results: "For the Becoming the 'Exist-
ent' as well as the 'Non-Existent' is necessary; when
they co-operate then a Becoming results. " But how
come the "positive" and the "negative" to one an-
other? Should they not on the contrary eternally flee
one another as antitheses and thereby make every
Becoming impossible? Here Parmenides appeals to
a qualitas occulta, to a mystic tendency of the anti-
thetical pairs to approach and attract one another,
and he allegorises that peculiar contrariety by the


## p. 119 (#185) ############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 119
name of Aphrodite, and by the empirically known
relation of the male and female principle. It is the
power of Aphrodite which plays the matchmaker
between the antithetical pair, the "Existent" and
the "Non-Existent. " Passion brings together the
antagonistic and antipathetic elements: the result
is a Becoming. When Desire has become satiated,
Hatred and the innate antagonism again drive
asunder the "Existent" and the "Non-Existent"—
then man says: the thing perishes, passes.
10
But no one with impunity lays his profane hands
on such awful abstractions as the "Existent" and
the "Non-Existent"; the blood freezes slowly as
one touches them. There was a day upon which an
odd idea suddenly occurred to Parmenides, an idea
which seemed to take all value away from his former
combinations, so that he felt inclined to throw them
aside, like a money bag with old worn-out coins.
It is commonly believed that an external impres-
sion, in addition to the centrifugal consequence of
such ideas as "existent" and "non-existent," has
also been co-active in the invention of that day; this
impression was an acquaintance with the theology
of the old roamer and rhapsodist, the singer of a
mystic deification of Nature, the Kolophonian
Xenophanes. Throughout an extraordinary life
Xenophanes lived as a wandering poet and became
through his travels a well-informed and most in-
structive man who knew how to question and
how to narrate, for which reason Heraclitus reck-
oned him amongst the polyhistorians and above


## p. 120 (#186) ############################################

120 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
all amongst the "historic" natures, in the sense men-
tioned. Whence and when came to him the mystic
bent into the One and the eternally Resting, nobody
will be able to compute; perhaps it is only the con-
ception of the finally settled old man, to whom, after
the agitation of his erratic wanderings, and after
the restless learning and searching for truth, the
vision of a divine rest, the permanence of all things
within a pantheistic primal peace appears as the
highest and greatest ideal. After all it seems to
me quite accidental that in the same place in Elea
two men lived together for a time, each of whom
carried in his head a conception of unity; they
formed no school and had nothing in common which
perhaps the one might have learned from the other
and then might have handed on. For, in the case
of these two men, the origin of that conception of
unity is quite different, yea opposite; and if either of
them has become at all acquainted with the doctrine
of the other then, in order to understand it at all, he
had to translate it first into his own language. With
this translation however the very specific element of
the other doctrine was lost. Whereas Parmenides
arrived at the unity of the "Existent" purely through
an alleged logical consequence and whereas he span
that unity out of the ideas "Being" and "Not-Being,"
Xenophanes was a religious mystic and belonged,
with that mystic unity, very properly to the Sixth
Century. Although he was no such revolutionising
personality as Pythagoras he had nevertheless in his
wanderings the same bent and impulse to improve,
purify, and cure men. He was the ethical teacher,
but still in the stage of the rhapsodist; in a later time


## p. 121 (#187) ############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 121
he would have been a sophist. In the daring dis-
approval of the existing customs and valuations he
had not his equal in Greece; moreover he did not,
like Heraclitus and Plato, retire into solitude but
placed himself before the very public, whose exult-
ing admiration of Homer, whose passionate pro-
pensity for the honours of the gymnastic festivals,
whose adoration of stones in human shape, he criti-
cised severely with wrath and scorn, yet not as a
brawling Thersites. The freedom of the individual
was with him on its zenith; and by this almost limit-
less stepping free from all conventions he was more
closely related to Parmenides than by that last divine
unity, which once he had beheld, in a visionary state
worthy of that century. His unity scarcely had ex-
pression and word in common with the one "Being"
of Parmenides, and certainly had not the same origin.
It was rather an opposite state of mind in which
Parmenides found his doctrine of" Being. " On that
day and in that state he examined his two co-oper-
ating antitheses, the "Existent" and the "Non-
Existent," the positive and the negative qualities, of
which Desire and Hatred constitute the world and
the Becoming. He was suddenly caught up, mis-
trusting, by the idea of negative quality, of the "Non-
Existent. " For can something which does not exist
be a quality? or to put the question in a broader sense:
can anything indeed which does not exist, exist?
The only form of knowledge in which we at once put
unconditional trust and the disapproval of which
amounts to madness, is the tautology A = A. But
this very tautological knowledge called inexorably
to him: what does not exist, exists not! What is, is!
r


## p. 122 (#188) ############################################

122 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
Suddenly he feels upon his life the load of an enor-
mous logical sin; for had he not always without
hesitation assumed that there were existing negative
qualities, in short a "Non-Existent," that therefore,
to express it by a formula, A = Not-A, which indeed
could only be advanced by the most out and out
perversity of thinking. It is true, as he recollected,
the whole great mass of men judge with the same
perversity; he himself has only participated in the
general crime against logic. But the same moment
which charges him with this crime surrounds him
with the light of the glory of an invention, he has
found, apart from all human illusion, a principle,
the key to the world-secret, he now descends into
the abyss of things, guided by the firm and fearful
hand of the tautological truth as to " Being. "
On the way thither he meets Heraclitus—an un-
fortunate encounter! Just now Heraclitus' play with
antinomies was bound to be very hateful to him,
who placed the utmost importance upon the severest
separation of "Being" and "Not- Being"; propositions
like this : "We are and at the same time we are not"
—"'Being' and 'Not-Being' is at the same time the
same thing and again not the same thing," proposi-
tions through which all that he had just elucidated
and disentangled became again dim and inextric-
able, incited him to wrath. "Away with the men,"
he exclaimed, "who seem to have two heads and
yet know nothing! With them truly everything is
in flux, even their thinking! They stare at things
stupidly, but they must be deaf as well as blind so
to mix up the opposites"! The want of judgment
on the part of the masses, glorified by playful anti-


## p. 123 (#189) ############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 123
nomies and praised as the acme of all knowledge was
to him a painful and incomprehensible experience.
Now he dived into the cold bath of his awful ab-
stractions. That which is true must exist in eternal
presence, about it cannot be said "it was," "it will
be. " The "Existent" cannot have become; for out of
what should it have become? Out of the " Non-Ex-
istent"? But that does not exist and can produce
nothing. Out of the " Existent"? This would not
produce anything but itself. The same applies to
the Passing, it is just as impossible as the Becoming,
as any change, any increase, any decrease. On the
whole the proposition is valid: Everything about
which it can be said: "it has been " or " it will be"
does not exist; about the "Existent" however it can
never be said "it does not exist. " The "Existent" is
indivisible, for where is the second power, which
should divide it? It is immovable, for whither should
it move itself? It cannot be infinitely great nor in-
finitely small, for it is perfect and a perfectly given
infinitude is a contradiction. Thus the "Existent" is
suspended,delimited, perfect, immovable, everywhere
equally balanced and suchequilibriumequallyperfect
at any point, like a globe, but not in a space, for
otherwise this space would be a second "Existent. "
But there cannot exist several "Existents," for in
order to separate them, something would have to exist
which was not existing, an assumption which neutral-
ises itself. Thus there exists only the eternal Unity.
If now, however, Parmenides turned back his gaze
to the world of Becoming, the existence of which he
had formerly tried to understand by such ingenious
conjectures, he was wroth at his eye seeing the


## p. 123 (#190) ############################################

122 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
Suddenly he feels upon his life the load of an enor-
mous logical sin; for had he not always without
hesitation assumed that tliere were existing negative
qualities, in short a "Non-Existent," that therefore,
to express it by a formula, A = Not-A, which indeed
could only be advanced by the most out and out
perversity of thinking. It is true, as he recollected,
the whole great mass of men judge with the same
perversity; he himself has only participated in the
general crime against logic. But the same moment
which charges him with this crime surrounds him
with the light of the glory of an invention, he has
found, apart from all human illusion, a principle,
the key to the world-secret, he now descends into
the abyss of things, guided by the firm and fearful
hand of the tautological truth as to " Being. "
On the way thither he meets Heraclitus—an un-
fortunate encounter! Just now Heraclitus' play with
antinomies was bound to be very hateful to him,
who placed the utmost importance upon the severest
separation of "Being" and "Not- Being"; propositions
like this : "We arc and at the same time we are not"
—"'Being' and 'Not-Being' is at the same time the
same thing and again not the same thing," proposi-
tions through which all that he had just elucidated
and disentangled became again dim and inextric-
able, incited him to wrath. "Away with the men,"
he exclaimed, "who seem to have two heads and
yet know nothing! With them truly everything is
in flux, even their thinking! They stare at things
stupidly, but they must be deaf as well as blind so
to mix up the opposites"! The want of judgment
on the part of the masses, glorified by playful anti-
"
n


## p. 123 (#191) ############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 123
nomies and praised as the acme of all knowledge was
to him a painful and incomprehensible experience.
Now he dived into the cold bath of his awful ab-
stractions. That which is true must exist in eternal
presence, about it cannot be said "it was," "it will
be. " The "Existent" cannot have become; for out of
what should it have become? Out of the " Non-Ex-
istent "? But that does not exist and can produce
nothing. Out of the " Existent"? This would not
produce anything but itself. The same applies to
the Passing, it is just as impossible as the Becoming,
as any change, any increase, any decrease. On the
whole the proposition is valid: Everything about
which it can be said: "it has been " or " it will be"
does not exist; about the "Existent" however it can
never be said "it does not exist. " The " Existent" is
indivisible, for where is the second power, which
should divide it? It is immovable, for whither should
it move itself? It cannot be infinitely great nor in-
finitely small, for it is perfect and a perfectly given
infinitude is a contradiction. Thus the " Existent" is
suspended, delimited, perfect,immovable, every where
equally balanced and suchequilibriumequallyperfect
at any point, like a globe, but not in a space, for
otherwise this space would be a second "Existent. "
But there cannot exist several "Existents," for in
order to separate them, something would have to exist
which was notexisting, an assumption which neutral-
ises itself. Thus there exists only the eternal Unity.
If now, however, Parmenides turned back his gaze
to the world of Becoming, the existence of which he
had formerly tried to understand by such ingenious
conjectures, he was wroth at his eye seeing the


## p. 124 (#192) ############################################

124 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
Becoming at all, his ear hearing it. "Do not follow
the dim-sighted eyes," now his command runs, " not
the resounding ear nor the tongue, but examine
only by the power of the thought. " Therewith he
accomplished the extremely important first critique
of the apparatus of knowledge, although this critique
was still inadequate and proved disastrous in its
consequences. By tearing entirely asunder the
senses and the ability to think in abstractions, i. e.
reason, just as if they were two thoroughly separate
capacities, he demolished the intellect itself, and
incited people to that wholly erroneous separation
of" mind " and "body" which, especially since Plato,
lies like a curse on philosophy. All sense percep-
tions, Parmenides judges, cause only illusions and
their chief illusion is their deluding us to believe that
even the "Non-Existent" exists, that even the Be-
coming has a " Being. " All that plurality, diversity
and variety of the empirically known world, the
change of its qualities, the order in its ups and downs,
is thrown aside mercilessly as mere appearance and
delusion; from there nothing is to be learnt, there-
fore all labour is wasted which one bestows upon
this false, through-and-through futile world, the con-
ception of which has been obtained by being hum-
bugged by the senses. He who judges in such
generalisations as Parmenides did, ceases therewith
to be an investigator of natural philosophy in detail;
his interest in phenomena withers away; there de-
velops even a hatred of being unable to get rid of
this eternal fraud of the senses. Truth is now to
dwell only in the most faded, most abstract gener-
alities, in the empty husks of the most indefinite


## p. 125 (#193) ############################################

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 125
words, as in a maze of cobwebs; and by such a
"truth" now the philosopher sits, bloodless as an
abstraction and surrounded by a web of fprmulae.
The spider undoubtedly wants the blood of its vic-
tims; but the Parmenidean philosopher hates the
very blood of his victims, the blood of Empiricism
sacrificed by him.
ii
And that was a Greek who " flourished " about the
time of the outbreak of the Ionic Revolution. At
that time it was possible for a Greek to flee out of
the superabundant reality, as out of a mere delusive
schematism of the imaginative faculties—not perhaps
like Plato into the land of the eternal ideas, into the
workshop of the world-creator, in order to feast the
eyes on unblemished, unbreakable primal-forms of
things—but into the rigid death-like rest of the cold-
est and emptiest conception, that of the " Being. " We
will indeed beware of interpreting such a remarkable
fact by false analogies. That flight was not a world-
flight in the sense of Indian philosophers ; no deep
religious conviction as to the depravity, transitori-
ness and accursedness of Existence demanded that
flight—that ultimate goal, the rest in the " Being,"
was not striven after as the mystic absorption in
one all-sufficing enrapturing conception which is a
puzzle and a scandal to common men. The thought
of Parmenides bears in itself not the slightest trace
of the intoxicating mystical Indian fragrance, which
is perhaps not wholly imperceptible in Pythagoras
and Empedocles; the strange thing in that fact, at
this period, is rather the very absence of fragrance,


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126 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
colour, soul, form, the total lack of blood, religiosity
and ethical warmth, the abstract-schematic—in a
Greek ! —above all however our philosopher's awful
energy of striving after Certainty, in a mythically
thinking and highly emotional - fantastic age is
quite remarkable. "Grant me but a certainty, ye
gods! " is the prayer of Parmenides, "and be it, in
the ocean of Uncertainty, only a board, broad enough
to lie on! Everything becoming, everything lux-
uriant, varied, blossoming, deceiving, stimulating,
living, take all that for yourselves, and give to me
but the single poor empty Certainty! "
In the philosophy of Parmenides the theme of
ontology forms the prelude. Experience offered
him nowhere a "Being" as he imagined it to himself,
but from the fact that he could conceive of it he
concluded that it must exist; a conclusion which
rests upon the supposition that we have an organ of
knowledge which reaches into the nature of things
and is independent of experience. The material of
our thinking according to Parmenides does not exist
in perception at all but is brought in from somewhere
else, from an extra-material world to which by
thinking we have a direct access. Against all simi-
lar chains of reasoning Aristotle has already asserted
that existence never belongs to the essence, never
belongs to the nature of a thing. For that very
reason from the idea of "Being"—of which the
essentia precisely is only the "Being "—cannot be
inferred an existentia of the "Being" at all. The
logical content of that antithesis "Being" and "Not-
Being" is perfectly nil, if the object lying at the
bottom of it, if the precept cannot be given from


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EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 127
which this antithesis has been deduced by abstrac-
tion; without this going back to the precept the
antithesis is only a play with conceptions, through
which indeed nothing is discerned. For the merely
logical criterion of truth, as Kant teaches, namely the
agreement of a discernment with the general and
the formal laws of intellect and reason is, it is true,
the conditio sine qua non, consequently the negative
condition of all truth; further however logic cannot
go, and logic cannot discover by any touchstone the
error which pertains not to the form but to the
contents. As soon, however, as one seeks the con-
tent for the logical truth of the antithesis: "That
which is, is; that which is not, is not," one will find
indeed not a simple reality, which is fashioned
rigidly according to that antithesis: about a tree I
can say as well "it is" in comparison with all the
other things, as well "it becomes" in comparison
with itself at another moment of time as finally also
"it is not," e. g. , "it is not yet tree," as long as I per-
haps look at the shrub. Words are only symbols for
the relations of things among themselves and to us,
and nowhere touch absolute truth; and now to crown
all, the word "Being" designates only the most
general relation, which connects all things, and so
does the word " Not-Being. " If however the Exist-
ence of the things themselves be unprovable, then the
relation of the things among themselves, the so-called
"Being" and "Not-Being," will not bring us any
nearer to the land of truth. By means of words and
ideas we shall never get behind the wall of the rela-
tions, let us say into some fabulous primal cause of
things, and even in the pure forms of the sensitive


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128 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
faculty and of the intellect, in space, time and
causality we gain nothing, which might resemble a
"veritas cBterna. " It is absolutely impossible for
the subject to see and discern something beyond
himself, so impossible that Cognition and "Being"
are the most contradictory of all spheres. And if in
the uninstructed naivete of the then critique of the in-
tellect Parmenides was permitted to fancy that out of
the eternally subjective idea he had come to a "Being-
In-itself," then it is to-day, after Kant, a daring
ignorance, if here and there, especially among badly
informed theologians who want to play the philoso-
pher, is proposed as the task of philosophy: "to
conceive the Absolute by means of consciousness,"
perhaps even in the form: "the Absolute is already
extant,else how could it be sought? " as Hegel has ex-
pressed himself, or with the saying of Beneke: "that
the' Being' must be given somehow, must be attain-
able for us somehow, since otherwise we could not
even have the idea of Being. '" The idea of "Being "!
As though that idea did not indicate the most miser-
able empiric origin already in the etymology of the
word. For esse means at the bottom: "to breathe,"
if man uses it of all other things, then he transmits
the conviction that he himself breathes and lives by
means of a metaphor, i. e. , by means of something
illogical to the other things and conceives of their
Existence as a Breathing according to human ana-
logy. Now the original meaning of the word soon
becomes effaced ; so much however still remains that
man conceives of the existence of other things ac-
cording to the analogy of his own existence, there-
fore anthropomorphically, and at any rate by means


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EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 129
of an illogical transmission. Even to man, therefore
apart from that transmission, the proposition: "I
breathe, therefore a 'Being' exists" is quite insuf-
ficient since against it the same objection must be
made, as against the ambulo, ergo sum, or ergo est.
12
The other idea, of greater import than that of the
"Existent," and likewise invented already by Par-
menides, although not yet so clearly applied as by
his disciple Zeno is the idea of the Infinite. Nothing
Infinite can exist; for from such an assumption the
contradictory idea of a perfect Infinitude would
result. Since now our actuality, our existing world
everywhere shows the character of that perfect
Infinitude, our world signifies in its nature a contra-
diction against logic and therewith also against
reality and is deception, lie, fantasma. Zeno especi-
ally applied the method of indirect proof; he said
for example, " There can be no motion from one
place to another; for if there were such a motion,
then an Infinitude would be given as perfect, this
however is an impossibility. " Achilles cannot catch
up the tortoise which has a small start in a race,
for in order to reach only the point from which the
tortoise began, he would have had to run through
innumerable, infinitely many spaces, viz. , first half
of that space, then the fourth, then the sixteenth,
and so on ad infinitum. If he does in fact overtake
the tortoise then this is an illogical phenomenon,
and therefore at any rate not a truth, not a reality,
not real "Being," but only a delusion. For it is never
possible to finish the infinite. Another popular ex-
9


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130 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
pression of this doctrine is the flying and yet resting
arrow. At any instant of its flight it has a position;
in this position it rests. Now would the sum of the
infinite positions of rest be identical with motion?
Would now the Resting, infinitely often repeated,
be Motion, therefore its own opposite? The Infinite
is here used as the aquafortis of reality, through it
the latter is dissolved. If however the Ideas are
fixed, eternal and entitative—and for Parmenides
"Being" and Thinking coincide—if therefore the In-
finite can never be perfect, if Rest can never become
Motion, then in fact the arrow has not flown at all;
it never left its place and resting position; no
moment of time has passed. Or expressed in an-
other way: in this so-called yet only alleged Actuality
there exists neither time, nor space, nor motion.
Finally the arrow itself is only an illusion; for it
originates out of the Plurality, out of the phantas-
magoria of the " Non-One" produced by the senses.
Suppose the arrow had a "Being," then it would be
immovable, timeless, increate, rigid and eternal—an
impossible conception!