impulse, here as elsewhere, has only made use of
knowledge (and mistaken knowledge!) as an instrument.
But whoever considers the fundamental impulses of man
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with a view to determining how far they may have here
acted as INSPIRING GENII (or as demons and cobolds),
will find that they have all practiced philosophy at one
time or another, and that each one of them would have
been only too glad to look upon itself as the ultimate end
of existence and the legitimate LORD over all the other
impulses. For every impulse is imperious, and as SUCH,
attempts to philosophize. To be sure, in the case of
scholars, in the case of really scientific men, it may be
otherwise—‘better,’ if you will; there there may really be
such a thing as an ‘impulse to knowledge,’ some kind of
small, independent clock-work, which, when well wound
up, works away industriously to that end, WITHOUT the
rest of the scholarly impulses taking any material part
therein. The actual ‘interests’ of the scholar, therefore, are
generally in quite another direction—in the family,
perhaps, or in money-making, or in politics; it is, in fact,
almost indifferent at what point of research his little
machine is placed, and whether the hopeful young worker
becomes a good philologist, a mushroom specialist, or a
chemist; he is not CHARACTERISED by becoming this
or that. In the philosopher, on the contrary, there is
absolutely nothing impersonal; and above all, his morality
furnishes a decided and decisive testimony as to WHO HE
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IS,—that is to say, in what order the deepest impulses of
his nature stand to each other.
7. How malicious philosophers can be! I know of
nothing more stinging than the joke Epicurus took the
liberty of making on Plato and the Platonists; he called
them Dionysiokolakes. In its original sense, and on the
face of it, the word signifies ‘Flatterers of Dionysius’—
consequently, tyrants’ accessories and lick-spittles; besides
this, however, it is as much as to say, ‘They are all
ACTORS, there is nothing genuine about them’ (for
Dionysiokolax was a popular name for an actor). And the
latter is really the malignant reproach that Epicurus cast
upon Plato: he was annoyed by the grandiose manner, the
mise en scene style of which Plato and his scholars were
masters—of which Epicurus was not a master! He, the old
school-teacher of Samos, who sat concealed in his little
garden at Athens, and wrote three hundred books, perhaps
out of rage and ambitious envy of Plato, who knows!
Greece took a hundred years to find out who the garden-
god Epicurus really was. Did she ever find out?
8. There is a point in every philosophy at which the
‘conviction’ of the philosopher appears on the scene; or,
to put it in the words of an ancient mystery:
Adventavit asinus, Pulcher et fortissimus.
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9. You desire to LIVE ‘according to Nature’? Oh, you
noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a
being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly
indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity
or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain:
imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—
how COULD you live in accordance with such
indifference? To live—is not that just endeavouring to be
otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing,
preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be
different? And granted that your imperative, ‘living
according to Nature,’ means actually the same as ‘living
according to life’—how could you do DIFFERENTLY?
Why should you make a principle out of what you
yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite
otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with
rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want
something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-
players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate
your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to
incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature
‘according to the Stoa,’ and would like everything to be
made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification
and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth,
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you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and
with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that
is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it
otherwise— and to crown all, some unfathomable
superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that
BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over yourselves—
Stoicism is self-tyranny—Nature will also allow herself to
be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART of Nature? …
But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in
old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as
ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always
creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise;
philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most
spiritual Will to Power, the will to ‘creation of the world,’
the will to the causa prima.
10. The eagerness and subtlety, I should even say
craftiness, with which the problem of ‘the real and the
apparent world’ is dealt with at present throughout
Europe, furnishes food for thought and attention; and he
who hears only a ‘Will to Truth’ in the background, and
nothing else, cannot certainly boast of the sharpest ears. In
rare and isolated cases, it may really have happened that
such a Will to Truth—a certain extravagant and
adventurous pluck, a metaphysician’s ambition of the
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forlorn hope—has participated therein: that which in the
end always prefers a handful of ‘certainty’ to a whole
cartload of beautiful possibilities; there may even be
puritanical fanatics of conscience, who prefer to put their
last trust in a sure nothing, rather than in an uncertain
something. But that is Nihilism, and the sign of a
despairing, mortally wearied soul, notwithstanding the
courageous bearing such a virtue may display. It seems,
however, to be otherwise with stronger and livelier
thinkers who are still eager for life. In that they side
AGAINST appearance, and speak superciliously of
‘perspective,’ in that they rank the credibility of their own
bodies about as low as the credibility of the ocular
evidence that ‘the earth stands still,’ and thus, apparently,
allowing with complacency their securest possession to
escape (for what does one at present believe in more
firmly than in one’s body?),—who knows if they are not
really trying to win back something which was formerly
an even securer possession, something of the old domain
of the faith of former times, perhaps the ‘immortal soul,’
perhaps ‘the old God,’ in short, ideas by which they could
live better, that is to say, more vigorously and more
joyously, than by ‘modern ideas’? There is DISTRUST of
these modern ideas in this mode of looking at things, a
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disbelief in all that has been constructed yesterday and
today; there is perhaps some slight admixture of satiety and
scorn, which can no longer endure the BRIC-A-BRAC
of ideas of the most varied origin, such as so-called
Positivism at present throws on the market; a disgust of
the more refined taste at the village-fair motleyness and
patchiness of all these reality-philosophasters, in whom
there is nothing either new or true, except this
motleyness. Therein it seems to me that we should agree
with those skeptical anti-realists and knowledge-
microscopists of the present day; their instinct, which
repels them from MODERN reality, is unrefuted … what
do their retrograde by-paths concern us! The main thing
about them is NOT that they wish to go ‘back,’ but that
they wish to get AWAY therefrom. A little MORE
strength, swing, courage, and artistic power, and they
would be OFF—and not back!
11. It seems to me that there is everywhere an attempt
at present to divert attention from the actual influence
which Kant exercised on German philosophy, and
especially to ignore prudently the value which he set upon
himself. Kant was first and foremost proud of his Table of
Categories; with it in his hand he said: ‘This is the most
difficult thing that could ever be undertaken on behalf of
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metaphysics.’ Let us only understand this ‘could be’! He
was proud of having DISCOVERED a new faculty in
man, the faculty of synthetic judgment a priori. Granting
that he deceived himself in this matter; the development
and rapid flourishing of German philosophy depended
nevertheless on his pride, and on the eager rivalry of the
younger generation to discover if possible something—at
all events ‘new faculties’—of which to be still prouder!—
But let us reflect for a moment—it is high time to do so.
‘How are synthetic judgments a priori POSSIBLE?’ Kant
asks himself—and what is really his answer? ‘BY MEANS
OF A MEANS (faculty)’—but unfortunately not in five
words, but so circumstantially, imposingly, and with such
display of German profundity and verbal flourishes, that
one altogether loses sight of the comical niaiserie
allemande involved in such an answer. People were beside
themselves with delight over this new faculty, and the
jubilation reached its climax when Kant further discovered
a moral faculty in man—for at that time Germans were
still moral, not yet dabbling in the ‘Politics of hard fact.’
Then came the honeymoon of German philosophy. All
the young theologians of the Tubingen institution went
immediately into the groves—all seeking for ‘faculties.’
And what did they not find—in that innocent, rich, and
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still youthful period of the German spirit, to which
Romanticism, the malicious fairy, piped and sang, when
one could not yet distinguish between ‘finding’ and
‘inventing’! Above all a faculty for the ‘transcendental";
Schelling christened it, intellectual intuition, and thereby
gratified the most earnest longings of the naturally pious-
inclined Germans. One can do no greater wrong to the
whole of this exuberant and eccentric movement (which
was really youthfulness, notwithstanding that it disguised
itself so boldly, in hoary and senile conceptions), than to
take it seriously, or even treat it with moral indignation.
Enough, however—the world grew older, and the dream
vanished. A time came when people rubbed their
foreheads, and they still rub them today. People had been
dreaming, and first and foremost—old Kant. ‘By means of
a means (faculty)’—he had said, or at least meant to say.
But, is that—an answer? An explanation? Or is it not
rather merely a repetition of the question? How does
opium induce sleep? ‘By means of a means (faculty),
‘namely the virtus dormitiva, replies the doctor in
Moliere,
Quia est in eo virtus dormitiva,
Cujus est natura sensus assoupire.
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But such replies belong to the realm of comedy, and it
is high time to replace the Kantian question, ‘How are
synthetic judgments a PRIORI possible?’ by another
question, ‘Why is belief in such judgments necessary?’—in
effect, it is high time that we should understand that such
judgments must be believed to be true, for the sake of the
preservation of creatures like ourselves; though they still
might naturally be false judgments! Or, more plainly
spoken, and roughly and readily—synthetic judgments a
priori should not ‘be possible’ at all; we have no right to
them; in our mouths they are nothing but false judgments.
Only, of course, the belief in their truth is necessary, as
plausible belief and ocular evidence belonging to the
perspective view of life. And finally, to call to mind the
enormous influence which ‘German philosophy’—I hope
you understand its right to inverted commas
(goosefeet)?—has exercised throughout the whole of
Europe, there is no doubt that a certain VIRTUS
DORMITIVA had a share in it; thanks to German
philosophy, it was a delight to the noble idlers, the
virtuous, the mystics, the artiste, the three-fourths
Christians, and the political obscurantists of all nations, to
find an antidote to the still overwhelming sensualism
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which overflowed from the last century into this, in
short—‘sensus assoupire.’ …
12. As regards materialistic atomism, it is one of the
best- refuted theories that have been advanced, and in
Europe there is now perhaps no one in the learned world
so unscholarly as to attach serious signification to it, except
for convenient everyday use (as an abbreviation of the
means of expression)— thanks chiefly to the Pole
Boscovich: he and the Pole Copernicus have hitherto
been the greatest and most successful opponents of ocular
evidence. For while Copernicus has persuaded us to
believe, contrary to all the senses, that the earth does
NOT stand fast, Boscovich has taught us to abjure the
belief in the last thing that ‘stood fast’ of the earth—the
belief in ‘substance,’ in ‘matter,’ in the earth-residuum,
and particle- atom: it is the greatest triumph over the
senses that has hitherto been gained on earth. One must,
however, go still further, and also declare war, relentless
war to the knife, against the ‘atomistic requirements’
which still lead a dangerous after-life in places where no
one suspects them, like the more celebrated ‘metaphysical
requirements": one must also above all give the finishing
stroke to that other and more portentous atomism which
Christianity has taught best and longest, the SOUL-
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ATOMISM. Let it be permitted to designate by this
expression the belief which regards the soul as something
