,,early ,,greek ,,philosophy ,,other ,,essays ,by ,,friedrich ,,nietzsche ,,translated ,,by ,,maximilian ,a4 ,m,,gge ,,author ,,of ,,fr4 ,,nietzsche1 ,,his ,,life ,,and ,,work1 ,,etc4 ,the ,complete ,works of ,friedrich ,nietzsche ,the ,first ,complete and ,authorised ,english ,translation ,edited by ,dr ,oscar ,levy ,volume ,two ,t4,n4 ,,foulis #ac #ae ,,frederick ,,street ,,edinburgh3 ,,and ,,london #aiaa ,,contents ,,translator',s ,,preface #a4 ,,the ,,greek ,,state--,preface to an unwritten book 7#ahga7 #b4 ,,the ,,greek ,,woman--,fragment 7#ahga7 #c4 ,,on ,,music ,,and ,,words--,fragment 7#ahga7 #d4 ,,homer',s ,,contest--,preface to an unwritten book 7#ahgb7 #e4 ,,the ,,relation ,,of ,,schopenhauer',s ,,philosophy ,,to ,a ,,german ,,culture --,preface to an unwritten book 7#ahgb7 #f4 ,,philosophy ,,during ,,the ,,tragic ,,age ,,of ,,the ,,greeks 7#ahgc7 #g4 ,,on ,,truth ,,and ,,falsity ,,in ,,their ,,ultramoral ,,sense 7#ahgc7 ,,translator',s ,,preface ,the essays contained in this volume treat of various subjects4 ,with the exception of perhaps one we must consider all these papers as fragments4 ,written during the early ,seventies1 and intended mostly as prefaces1 they are extremely interesting1 since traces of ,nietzsche's later tenets--like ,slave and ,master morality1 the ,superman--can be found everywhere4 ,but they are also very valuable on account of the young philosopher's daring and able handling of difficult and abstruse subjects4 ,truth and ,falsity1 and ,the ,greek ,woman are probably the two essays which will prove most attractive to the average reader4 ,in the essay on ,,the ,,greek ,,state the two tenets mentioned above are clearly discernible1 though the ,superman still goes by the ,schopenhauerian label genius4 ,our philosopher attacks the modern ideas of the dignity of man and of the dignity of labour1 because ,existence seems to be without worth and dignity4 ,the preponderance of such illusory ideas is due to the political power nowadays vested in the slaves4 ,the ,greeks saw no dignity in labour4 ,they saw the necessity of it1 and the necessity of slavery1 but felt ashamed of both4 ,not even the labour of the artist did they admire1 although they praised his completed work4 ,if the ,greeks perished through their slavery1 one thing is still more certain3 we shall perish through the lack of slavery4 ,to the essence of ,culture slavery is innate4 ,it is part of it4 ,a vast multitude must labour and slave in order that a few may lead an existence devoted to beauty and art4 ,strife and war are necessary for the welfare of the ,state4 ,war consecrates and purines the ,state4 ,the purpose of the military ,state is the creating of the military genius1 the ruthless conqueror1 the ,war-lord4 ,there also exists a mysterious connection between the ,state in general and the creating of the genius4 ,in ,,the ,,greek ,,woman1 ,nietzsche1 the man who said1 ,one cannot think highly enough of women1 delineates his ideal of woman4 ,penelope1 ,antigone1 ,electra are his ideal types4 ,plato's dictum that in the perfect ,state the family would cease to exist1 belongs to the most intimate things uttered about the relation between women and the ,state4 ,the ,greek woman as mother had to vegetate in obscurity1 to lead a kind of ,cranfordian existence for the greater welfare of the body politic4 ,only in ,greek antiquity did woman occupy her proper position1 and for this reason she was more honoured than she has ever been since4 ,pythia was the mouthpiece1 the symbol of ,greek unity4 ,,on ,,music ,,and ,,words4 ,music is older1 more fundamental than language4 ,music is an expression of cosmic consciousness4 ,language is only a gesture-symbolism4 ,it is true the music of every people was at first allied to lyric poetry2 absolute music always appeared much later4 ,but that is due to the double nature in the essence of language4 ,the tone of the speaker expresses the basic pleasure- and displeasure-sensations of the individual4 ,these form the tonal subsoil common to all languages2 they are comprehensible everywhere4 ,language itself is a super-structure on that subsoil2 it is a gesture-symbolism for all the other conceptions which man adds to that subsoil4 ,the endeavour to illustrate a poem by music is futile4 ,the text of an opera is therefore quite negligible4 ,modern opera in its music is therefore often only a stimulant or a remembrancer for set1 stereotyped feelings4 ,great music1 i4e41 ,dionysean music1 makes us forget to listen to the words4 ,,homer',s ,,contest4 ,the ,greek genius acknowledged strife1 struggle1 contest to be necessary in this life4 ,only through competition and emulation will the ,common-,wealth thrive4 ,yet there was no unbridled ambition4 ,everyone's individual endeavours were subordinated to the welfare of the community4 ,the curse of present-day contest is that it does not do the same4 ,in ,,the ,,relation ,,of ,,schopenhauer',s ,,philosophy ,,to ,a ,,german ,,culture an amusing and yet serious attack is made on the hollow would-be culture of the ,german ,philistines who after the ,franco-,prussian war were swollen with self-conceit1 self-sufficiency1 and were a great danger to real ,culture4 ,nietzsche points out ,schopenhauer's great philosophy as the only possible means of escaping the humdrum of ,philistia with its hypocrisy and intellectual ostrichisation4 ,the essay on ,,greek ,,philosophy ,,during ,,the ,,tragic ,,age is a performance of great interest to the scholar4 ,it brims with ideas4 ,the ,hegelian ,school1 especially ,zeller1 has shown what an important place is held by the earlier thinkers in the history of ,greek thought and how necessary a knowledge of their work is for all who wish to understand ,plato and ,aristotle4 ,diels' great book3 ,die ,fragmente der ,vorsokratiker1 ,benn's1 ,burnet's and ,fairbanks' books we may regard as the peristyle through which we enter the temple of ,early ,greek ,philosophy4 ,nietzsche's essay then is like a beautiful festoon swinging between the columns erected by ,diels and the others out of the marble of facts4 ,beauty and the personal equation are the two leitmotive of ,nietzsche's history of the pre-,socratian philosophers4 ,especially does he lay stress upon the personal equation1 since that is the only permanent item of interest1 considering that every ,system crumbles into nothing with the appearance of a new thinker4 ,in this way ,nietzsche treats of ,thales1 ,anaximander1 ,heraclitus1 ,parmenides1 ,xenophanes1 ,anaxagoras4 ,there are also some sketches of a draft for an intended but never accomplished continuation1 in which ,empedocles1 ,democritus and ,plato were to be dealt with4 ,probably the most popular of the ,essays in this book will prove to be the one on ,,truth ,,and ,,falsity4 ,it is an epistemological rhapsody on the relativity of truth1 on ,appearance and ,reality1 on perceptual flux versus--conceptual conceit4 ,man's intellect is only a means in the struggle for existence1 a means taking the place of the animal's horns and teeth4 ,it adapts itself especially to deception and dissimulation4 ,there are no absolute truths4 ,truth is relative and always imperfect4 ,yet fictitious values fixed by convention and utility are set down as truth4 ,the liar does not use these standard coins of the realm4 ,he is hated2 not out of love for truth1 no1 but because he is dangerous4 ,our words never hit the essence1 the ,x of a thing1 but indicate only external characteristics4 ,language is the columbarium of the ideas1 the cemetery of perceptions4 ,truths are metaphors1 illusions1 anthropomorph isms about which one has forgotten that they are such4 ,there are different truths to different beings4 ,like a spider man sits in the web of his truths and ideas4 ,he wants to be deceived4 ,by means of error he mostly lives2 truth is often fatal4 ,when the liar1 the story-teller1 the poet1 the rhapsodist lie to him without hurting him he--loves them6-- ,the text underlying this translation is that of ,vol4 ,i4 of the ,taschenausgabe4 ,one or two obscure passages ,i hope my conjectures may have elucidated4 ,the dates following the titles indicate the year when these essays were written4 ,in no other work have ,i felt so deeply the great need of the science of ,signifies with its ultimate international standardisation of terms1 as attempted by ,eisler and ,baldwin4 ,i hope1 however1 ,i have succeeded in conveying accurately the meaning of the author in spite of a certain looseness in his philosophical terminology4 ,the ,english language is somewhat at a disadvantage through its lack of a ,noun-,infinitive4 ,i can best illustrate this by a passage from ,parmenides3 ' 1 ' ' 4 ,in his usual masterly manner ,diels translates these lines with3 ,das ,sagen und ,denken musz ein ,seiendes sein4 ,denn das ,sein existiert1 das ,nichts existiert nicht2 das heisz ich dich wohl zu beherzigen4 ,on the other hand in ,fairbanks' version we read3 ,it is necessary both to say and to think that being is2 for it is possible that being is1 and it is impossible that not being is2 this is what ,i bid thee ponder4 ,in order to avoid a similar obscurity1 throughout the paper on ,,early ,,greek ,,philosophy ,i have rendered das ,seiende 7 7 with ,existent1 das ,nicht-,seiende with ,non-,existent2 das ,sein 77 with ,being and das ,nicht-,sein with ,not-,being4 ,i am directly or indirectly indebted for many suggestions to several friends of mine1 especially to two of my colleagues1 ,j4 ,charlton ,hipkins1 ,m4,a41 and ,r4 ,miller1 ,b4,a41 for their patient revision of the whole of the proofs4 ,m4 ,a4 ,m,,gge4 ,,london1 ,july #aiaa4 ,,the ,,greek ,,state ,preface to an ,unwritten ,book 7#ahga7 ,we moderns have an advantage over the ,greeks in two ideas1 which are given as it were as a compensation to a world behaving thoroughly slavishly and yet at the same time anxiously eschewing the word slave3 we talk of the dignity of man and of the dignity of labour4 ,everybody worries in order miserably to perpetuate a miserable existence2 this awful need compels him to consuming labour2 man 7or1 more exactly1 the human intellect7 seduced by the ,will now occasionally marvels at labour as something dignified4 ,however in order that labour might have a claim on titles of honour1 it would be necessary above all1 that ,existence itself1 to which labour after all is only a painful means1 should have more dignity and value than it appears to have had1 up to the present1 to serious philosophies and religions4 ,what else may we find in the labour-need of all the millions but the impulse to exist at any price1 the same all-powerful impulse by which stunted plants stretch their roots through earthless rocks6 ,out of this awful struggle for existence only individuals can emerge1 and they are at once occupied with the noble phantoms of artistic culture1 lest they should arrive at practical pessimism1 which ,nature abhors as her exact opposite4 ,in the modern world1 which1 compared with the ,greek1 usually produces only abnormalities and centaurs1 in which the individual1 like that fabulous creature in the beginning of the ,horatian ,art of ,poetry1 is jumbled together out of pieces1 here in the modern world in one and the same man the greed of the struggle for existence and the need for art show themselves at the same time3 out of this unnatural amalgamation has originated the dilemma1 to excuse and to consecrate that first greed before this need for art4 ,therefore2 we believe in the ,dignity of man and the ,dignity of labour4 ,the ,greeks did not require such conceptual hallucinations1 for among them the idea that labour is a disgrace is expressed with startling frankness2 and another piece of wisdom1 more hidden and less articulate1 but everywhere alive1 added that the human thing also was an ignominious and piteous nothing and the dream of a shadow4 ,labour is a disgrace1 because existence has no value in itself2 but even though this very existence in the alluring embellishment of artistic illusions shines forth and really seems to have a value in itself1 then that proposition is still valid that labour is a disgrace--a disgrace indeed by the fact that it is impossible for man1 fighting for the continuance of bare existence1 to become an artist4 ,in modern times it is not the art-needing man but the slave who determines the general conceptions1 the slave who according to his nature must give deceptive names to all conditions in order to be able to live4 ,such phantoms as the dignity of man1 the dignity of labour1 are the needy products of slavedom hiding itself from itself4 ,woful time1 in which the slave requires such conceptions1 in which he is incited to think about and beyond himself6 ,cursed seducers1 who have destroyed the slave's state of innocence by the fruit of the tree of knowledge6 ,now the slave must vainly scrape through from one day to another with transparent lies recognisable to every one of deeper insight1 such as the alleged equal rights of all or the so-called fundamental rights of man1 of man as such1 or the dignity of labour4 ,indeed he is not to understand at what stage and at what height dignity can first be mentioned--namely1 at the point1 where the individual goes wholly beyond himself and no longer has to work and to produce in order to preserve his individual existence4 ,and even on this height of labour the ,greek at times is overcome by a feeling1 that looks like shame4 ,in one place ,plutarch with earlier ,greek instinct says that no nobly born youth on beholding the ,zeus in ,pisa would have the desire to become himself a ,phidias1 or on seeing the ,hera in ,argos1 to become himself a ,polyklet2 and just as little would he wish to be ,anacreon1 ,philetas or ,archilochus1 however much he might revel in their poetry4 ,to the ,greek the work of the artist falls just as much under the undignified conception of labour as any ignoble craft4 ,but if the compelling force of the artistic impulse operates in him1 then he must produce and submit himself to that need of labour4 ,and as a father admires the beauty and the gift of his child but thinks of the act of procreation with shamefaced dislike1 so it was with the ,greek4 ,the joyful astonishment at the beautiful has not blinded him as to its origin which appeared to him1 like all ,becoming in nature1 to be a powerful necessity1 a forcing of itself into existence4 ,that feeling by which the process of procreation is considered as something shamefacedly to be hidden1 although by it man serves a higher purpose than his individual preservation1 the same feeling veiled also the origin of the great works of art1 in spite of the fact that through them a higher form of existence is inaugurated1 just as through that other act comes a new generation4 ,the feeling of shame seems therefore to occur where man is merely a tool of manifestations of will infinitely greater than he is permitted to consider himself in the isolated shape of the individual4 ,now we have the general idea to which are to be subordinated the feelings which the ,greek had with regard to labour and slavery4 ,both were considered by them as a necessary disgrace1 of which one feels ashamed1 as a disgrace and as a necessity at the same time4 ,in this feeling of shame is hidden the unconscious discernment that the real aim needs those conditional factors1 but that in that need lies the fearful and beast-of-prey-like quality of the ,sphinx ,nature1 who in the glorification of the artistically free culture-life so beautifully stretches forth her virgin-body4 ,culture1 which is chiefly a real need for art1 rests upon a terrible basis3 the latter however makes itself known in the twilight sensation of shame4 ,in order that there may be a broad1 deep1 and fruitful soil for the development of art1 the enormous majority must1 in the service of a minority1 be slavishly subjected to life's struggle1 to a greater degree than their own wants necessitate4 ,at their cost1 through the surplus of their labour1 that privileged class is to be relieved from the struggle for existence1 in order to create and to satisfy a new world of want4 ,accordingly we must accept this cruel sounding truth1 that slavery is of the essence of ,culture2 a truth of course1 which leaves no doubt as to the absolute value of ,existence4 ,this truth is the vulture1 that gnaws at the liver of the ,promethean promoter of ,culture4 ,the misery of toiling men must still increase in order to make the production of the world of art possible to a small number of ,olympian men4 ,here is to be found the source of that secret wrath nourished by ,communists and ,socialists of all times1 and also by their feebler descendants1 the white race of the ,liberals1 not only against the arts1 but also against classical antiquity4 ,if ,culture really rested upon the will of a people1 if here inexorable powers did not rule1 powers which are law and barrier to the individual1 then the contempt for ,culture1 the glorification of a poorness in spirit1 the iconoclastic annihilation of artistic claims would be more than an insurrection of the suppressed masses against drone-like individuals2 it would be the cry of compassion tearing down the walls of ,culture2 the desire for justice1 for the equalization of suffering1 would swamp all other ideas4 ,in fact here and there sometimes an exuberant degree of compassion has for a short time opened all the flood gates of ,culture-life2 a rainbow of compassionate love and of peace appeared with the first radiant rise of ,christianity and under it was born ,christianity's most beautiful fruit1 the gospel according to ,st ,john4 ,but there are also instances to show that powerful religions for long periods petrify a given degree of ,culture1 and cut off with inexorable sickle everything that still grows on strongly and luxuriantly4 ,for it is not to be forgotten that the same cruelty1 which we found in the essence of every ,culture1 lies also in the essence of every powerful religion and in general in the essence of power1 which is always evil2 so that we shall understand it just as well1 when a ,culture is shattering1 with a cry for liberty or at least justice1 a too highly piled bulwark of religious claims4 ,that which in this sorry scheme of things will live 7i4e41 must live71 is at the bottom of its nature a reflex of the primal-pain and primal-contradiction1 and must therefore strike our eyes--an organ fashioned for this world and earth--as an insatiable greed for existence and an eternal self-contradiction1 within the form of time1 therefore as ,becoming4 ,every moment devours the preceding one1 every birth is the death of innumerable beings2 begetting1 living1 murdering1 all is one4 ,therefore we may compare this grand ,culture with a blood-stained victor1 who in his triumphal procession carries the defeated along as slaves chained to his chariot1 slaves whom a beneficent power has so blinded that1 almost crushed by the wheels of the chariot1 they nevertheless still exclaim3 ,dignity of labour6 ,dignity of ,man6 ,the voluptuous ,cleopatra-,culture throws ever again the most priceless pearls1 the tears of compassion for the misery of slaves1 into her golden goblet4 ,out of the emasculation of modern man has been born the enormous social distress of the present time1 not out of the true and deep commiseration for that misery2 and if it should be true that the ,greeks perished through their slavedom then another fact is much more certain1 that we shall perish through the lack of slavery4 ,slavedom did not appear in any way objectionable1 much less abominable1 either to early ,christianity or to the ,germanic race4 ,what an uplifting effect on us has the contemplation of the medival bondman1 with his legal and moral relations1--relations that were inwardly strong and tender1--towards the man of higher rank1 with the profound fencing-in of his narrow existence--how uplifting6--and how reproachful6 ,he who cannot reflect upon the position of affairs in ,society without melancholy1 who has learnt to conceive of it as the continual painful birth of those privileged ,culture-men1 in whose service everything else must be devoured--he will no longer be deceived by that false glamour1 which the moderns have spread over the origin and meaning of the ,state4 ,for what can the ,state mean to us1 if not the means by which that social-process described just now is to be fused and to be guaranteed in its unimpeded continuance8 ,be the sociable instinct in individual man as strong as it may1 it is only the iron clamp of the ,state that constrains the large masses upon one another in such a fashion that a chemical decomposition of ,society1 with its pyramid-like super-structure1 is bound to take place4 ,whence however originates this sudden power of the ,state1 whose aim lies much beyond the insight and beyond the egoism of the individual8 ,how did the slave1 the blind mole of ,culture1 originate8 ,the ,greeks in their instinct relating to the law of nations have betrayed it to us1 in an instinct1 which even in the ripest fulness of their civilisation and humanity never ceased to utter as out of a brazen mouth such words as3 to the victor belongs the vanquished1 with wife and child1 life and property4 ,power gives the first right and there is no right1 which at bottom is not presumption1 usurpation1 violence4 ,here again we see with what pitiless inflexibility ,nature1 in order to arrive at ,society1 forges for herself the cruel tool of the ,state--namely1 that conqueror with the iron hand1 who is nothing else than the objectivation of the instinct indicated4 ,by the indefinable greatness and power of such conquerors the spectator feels1 that they are only the means of an intention manifesting itself through them and yet hiding itself from them4 ,the weaker forces attach themselves to them with such mysterious speed1 and transform themselves so wonderfully1 in the sudden swelling of that violent avalanche1 under the charm of that creative kernel1 into an affinity hitherto not existing1 that it seems as if a magic will were emanating from them4 ,now when we see how little the vanquished trouble themselves after a short time about the horrible origin of the ,state1 so that history informs us of no class of events worse than the origins of those sudden1 violent1 bloody and1 at least in one point1 inexplicable usurpations3 when hearts involuntarily go out towards the magic of the growing ,state with the presentiment of an invisible deep purpose1 where the calculating intellect is enabled to see an addition of forces only2 when now the ,state is even contemplated with fervour as the goal and ultimate aim of the sacrifices and duties of the individual3 then out of all that speaks the enormous necessity of the ,state1 without which ,nature might not succeed in coming1 through ,society1 to her deliverance in semblance1 in the mirror of the genius4 ,what discernments does the instinctive pleasure in the ,state not overcome6 ,one would indeed feel inclined to think that a man who looks into the origin of the ,state will henceforth seek his salvation at an awful distance from it2 and where can one not see the monuments of its origin--devastated lands1 destroyed cities1 brutalised men1 devouring hatred of nations6 ,the ,state1 of ignominiously low birth1 for the majority of men a continually flowing source of hardship1 at frequently recurring periods the consuming torch of mankind--and yet a word1 at which we forget ourselves1 a battle cry1 which has filled men with enthusiasm for innumerable really heroic deeds1 perhaps the highest and most venerable object for the blind and egoistic multitude which only in the tremendous moments of ,state-life has the strange expression of greatness on its face6 ,we have1 however1 to consider the ,greeks1 with regard to the unique sun-height of their art1 as the political men in themselves1 and certainly history knows of no second instance of such an awful unchaining of the political passion1 such an unconditional immolation of all other interests in the service of this ,state-instinct2 at the best one might distinguish the men of the ,renascence in ,italy with a similar title for like reasons and by way of comparison4 ,so overloaded is that passion among the ,greeks that it begins ever anew to rage against itself and to strike its teeth into its own flesh4 ,this bloody jealousy of city against city1 of party against party1 this murderous greed of those little wars1 the tiger-like triumph over the corpse of the slain enemy1 in short1 the incessant renewal of those ,trojan scenes of struggle and horror1 in the spectacle of which1 as a genuine ,hellene1 ,homer stands before us absorbed with delight--whither does this nave barbarism of the ,greek ,state point8 ,what is its excuse before the tribunal of eternal justice8 ,proud and calm1 the ,state steps before this tribunal and by the hand it leads the flower of blossoming womanhood3 ,greek society4 ,for this ,helena the ,state waged those wars--and what grey-bearded judge could here condemn8-- ,under this mysterious connection1 which we here divine between ,state and art1 political greed and artistic creation1 battlefield and work of art1 we understand by the ,state1 as already remarked1 only the cramp-iron1 which compels the ,social process2 whereas without the ,state1 in the natural bellum omnium contra omnes ,society cannot strike root at all on a larger scale and beyond the reach of the family4 ,now1 after ,states have been established almost everywhere1 that bent of the bellum omnium contra omnes concentrates itself from time to time into a terrible gathering of war-clouds and discharges itself as it were in rare but so much the more violent shocks and lightning flashes4 ,but in consequence of the effect of that bellum1--an effect which is turned inwards and compressed1--,society is given time during the intervals to germinate and burst into leaf1 in order1 as soon as warmer days come1 to let the shining blossoms of genius sprout forth4 ,in face of the political world of the ,hellenes1 ,i will not hide those phenomena of the present in which ,i believe ,i discern dangerous atrophies of the political sphere equally critical for art and society4 ,if there should exist men1 who as it were through birth are placed outside the national-and ,state-instincts1 who consequently have to esteem the ,state only in so far as they conceive that it coincides with their own interest1 then such men will necessarily imagine as the ultimate political aim the most undisturbed collateral existence of great political communities possible1 which they might be permitted to pursue their own purposes without restriction4 ,with this idea in their heads they will promote that policy which will offer the greatest security to these purposes2 whereas it is unthinkable1 that they1 against their intentions1 guided perhaps by an unconscious instinct1 should sacrifice themselves for the ,state-tendency1 unthinkable because they lack that very instinct4 ,all other citizens of the ,state are in the dark about what ,nature intends with her ,state-instinct within them1 and they follow blindly2 only those who stand outside this instinct know what they want from the ,state and what the ,state is to grant them4 ,therefore it is almost unavoidable that such men should gain great influence in the ,state because they are allowed to consider it as a means1 whereas all the others under the sway of those unconscious purposes of the ,state are themselves only means for the fulfilment of the ,state-purpose4 ,in order now to attain1 through the medium of the ,state1 the highest furtherance of their selfish aims1 it is above all necessary1 that the ,state be wholly freed from those awfully incalculable war-convulsions so that it may be used rationally2 and thereby they strive with all their might for a condition of things in which war is an impossibility4 ,for that purpose the thing to do is first to curtail and to enfeeble the political separatisms and factions and through the establishment of large equipoised ,state-bodies and the mutual safeguarding of them to make the successful result of an aggressive war and consequently war itself the greatest improbability2 as on the other hand they will endeavour to wrest the question of war and peace from the decision of individual lords1 in order to be able rather to appeal to the egoism of the masses or their representatives2 for which purpose they again need slowly to dissolve the monarchic instincts of the nations4 ,this purpose they attain best through the most general promulgation of the liberal optimistic view of the world1 which has its roots in the doctrines of ,french ,rationalism and the ,french ,revolution1 i4e41 in a wholly un-,germanic1 genuinely neo-,latin shallow and unmetaphysical philosophy4 ,i cannot help seeing in the prevailing international movements of the present day1 and the simultaneous promulgation of universal suffrage1 the effects of the fear of war above everything else1 yea ,i behold behind these movements1 those truly international homeless money-hermits1 as the really alarmed1 who1 with their natural lack of the ,state-instinct1 have learnt to abuse politics as a means of the ,exchange1 and ,state and ,society as an apparatus for their own enrichment4 ,against the deviation of the ,state-tendency into a money-tendency1 to be feared from this side1 the only remedy is war and once again war1 in the emotions of which this at least becomes obvious1 that the ,state is not founded upon the fear of the war-demon1 as a protective institution for egoistic individuals1 but in love to fatherland and prince1 it produces an ethical impulse1 indicative of a much higher destiny4 ,if ,i therefore designate as a dangerous and characteristic sign of the present political situation the application of revolutionary thought in the service of a selfish ,state-less money-aristocracy1 if at the same time ,i conceive of the enormous dissemination of liberal optimism as the result of modern financial affairs fallen into strange hands1 and if ,i imagine all evils of social conditions together with the necessary decay of the arts to have either germinated from that root or grown together with it1 one will have to pardon my occasionally chanting a ,pan on war4 ,horribly clangs its silvery bow2 and although it comes along like the night1 war is nevertheless ,apollo1 the true divinity for consecrating and purifying the ,state4 ,first of all1 however1 as is said in the beginning of the ,iliad1 he lets fly his arrow on the mules and dogs4 ,then he strikes the men themselves1 and everywhere pyres break into flames4 ,be it then pronounced that war is just as much a necessity for the ,state as the slave is for society1 and who can avoid this verdict if he honestly asks himself about the causes of the never-equalled ,greek art-perfection8 ,he who contemplates war and its uniformed possibility1 the soldier's profession1 with respect to the hitherto described nature of the ,state1 must arrive at the conviction1 that through war and in the profession of arms is placed before our eyes an image1 or even perhaps the prototype of the ,state4 ,here we see as the most general effect of the war-tendency an immediate decomposition and division of the chaotic mass into military castes1 out of which rises1 pyramid-shaped1 on an exceedingly broad base of slaves the edifice of the martial society4 ,the unconscious purpose of the whole movement constrains every individual under its yoke1 and produces also in heterogeneous natures as it were a chemical transformation of their qualities until they are brought into affinity with that purpose4 ,in the highest castes one perceives already a little more of what in this internal process is involved at the bottom1 namely the creation of the military genius--with whom we have become acquainted as the original founder of states4 ,in the case of many ,states1 as1 for example1 in the ,lycurgian constitution of ,sparta1 one can distinctly perceive the impress of that fundamental idea of the ,state1 that of the creation of the military genius4 ,if we now imagine the military primal ,state in its greatest activity1 at its proper labour1 and if we fix our glance upon the whole technique of war1 we cannot avoid correcting our notions picked up from everywhere1 as to the dignity of man and the dignity of labour by the question1 whether the idea of dignity is applicable also to that labour1 which has as its purpose the destruction of the dignified man1 as well as to the man who is entrusted with that dignified labour1 or whether in this warlike task of the ,state those mutually contradictory ideas do not neutralise one another4 ,i should like to think the warlike man to be a means of the military genius and his labour again only a tool in the hands of that same genius2 and not to him1 as absolute man and non-genius1 but to him as a means of the genius--whose pleasure also can be to choose his tool's destruction as a mere pawn sacrificed on the strategist's chessboard--is due a degree of dignity1 of that dignity namely1 to have been deemed worthy of being a means of the genius4 ,but what is shown here in a single instance is valid in the most general sense2 every human being1 with his total activity1 only has dignity in so far as he is a tool of the genius1 consciously or unconsciously2 from this we may immediately deduce the ethical conclusion1 that man in himself1 the absolute man possesses neither dignity1 nor rights1 nor duties2 only as a wholly determined being serving unconscious purposes can man excuse his existence4 ,plato's perfect ,state is according to these considerations certainly something still greater than even the warm-blooded among his admirers believe1 not to mention the smiling mien of superiority with which our historically educated refuse such a fruit of antiquity4 ,the proper aim of the ,state1 the ,olympian existence and ever-renewed procreation and preparation of the genius1--compared with which all other things are only tools1 expedients and factors towards realisation--is here discovered with a poetic intuition and painted with firmness4 ,plato saw through the awfully devastated ,herma of the then-existing ,state-life and perceived even then something divine in its interior4 ,he believed that one might be able to take out this divine image and that the grim and barbarically distorted outside and shell did not belong to the essence of the ,state3 the whole fervour and sublimity of his political passion threw itself upon this belief1 upon that desire--and in the flames of this fire he perished4 ,that in his perfect ,state he did not place at the head the genius in its general meaning1 but only the genius of wisdom and of knowledge1 that he altogether excluded the inspired artist from his ,state1 that was a rigid consequence of the ,socratian judgment on art1 which ,plato1 struggling against himself1 had made his own4 ,this more external1 almost incidental gap must not prevent our recognising in the total conception of the ,platonic ,state the wonderfully great hieroglyph of a profound and eternally to be interpreted esoteric doctrine of the connection between ,state and ,genius4 ,what we believed we could divine of this cryptograph we have said in this preface4 ,,the ,,greek ,,woman 7,fragment1 #ahga7 ,just as ,plato from disguises and obscurities brought to light the innermost purpose of the ,state1 so also he conceived the chief cause of the position of the ,hellenic ,woman with regard to the ,state2 in both cases he saw in what existed around him the image of the ideas manifested to him1 and of these ideas of course the actual was only a hazy picture and phantasmagoria4 ,he who according to the usual custom considers the position of the ,hellenic ,woman to be altogether unworthy and repugnant to humanity1 must also turn with this reproach against the ,platonic conception of this position2 for1 as it were1 the existing forms were only precisely set forth in this latter conception4 ,here therefore our question repeats itself3 should not the nature and the position of the ,hellenic ,woman have a necessary relation to the goals of the ,hellenic ,will8 ,of course there is one side of the ,platonic conception of woman1 which stands in abrupt contrast with ,hellenic custom3 ,plato gives to woman a full share in the rights1 knowledge and duties of man1 and considers woman only as the weaker sex1 in that she will not achieve remarkable success in all things1 without however disputing this sex's title to all those things4 ,we must not attach more value to2 this strange notion than to the expulsion of the artist out of the ideal ,state2 these are side-lines daringly mis-drawn1 aberrations as it were of the hand otherwise so sure and of the so calmly contemplating eye which at times under the influence of the deceased master becomes dim and dejected2 in this mood he exaggerates the master's paradoxes and in the abundance of his love gives himself satisfaction by very eccentrically intensifying the latter's doctrines even to foolhardiness4 ,the most significant word however that ,plato as a ,greek could say on the relation of woman to the ,state1 was that so objectionable demand1 that in the perfect ,state1 the ,family was to cease4 ,at present let us take no account of his abolishing even marriage1 in order to carry out this demand fully1 and of his substituting solemn nuptials arranged by order of the ,state1 between the bravest men and the noblest women1 for the attainment of beautiful offspring4 ,in that principal proposition however he has indicated most distinctly--indeed too distinctly1 offensively distinctly--an important preparatory step of the ,hellenic ,will towards the procreation of the genius4 ,but in the customs of the ,hellenic people the claim of the family on man and child was extremely limited3 the man lived in the ,state1 the child grew up for the ,state and was guided by the hand of the ,state4 ,the ,greek ,will took care that the need of culture could not be satisfied in the seclusion of a small circle4 ,from the ,state the individual has to receive everything in order to return everything to the ,state4 ,woman accordingly means to the ,state1 what sleep does to man4 ,in her nature lies the healing power1 which replaces that which has been used up1 the beneficial rest in which everything immoderate confines itself1 the eternal ,same1 by which the excessive and the surplus regulate themselves4 ,in her the future generation dreams4 ,woman is more closely related to ,nature than man and in all her essentials she remains ever herself4 ,culture is with her always something external1 a something which does not touch the kernel that is eternally faithful to ,nature1 therefore the culture of woman might well appear to the ,athenian as something indifferent1 yea--if one only wanted to conjure it up in one's mind1 as something ridiculous4 ,he who at once feels himself compelled from that to infer the position of women among the ,greeks as unworthy and all too cruel1 should not indeed take as his criterion the culture of modern woman and her claims1 against which it is sufficient just to point out the ,olympian women together with ,penelope1 ,antigone1 ,elektra4 ,of course it is true that these are ideal figures1 but who would be able to create such ideals out of the present world8--,further indeed is to be considered what sons these women have borne1 and what women they must have been to have given birth to such sons6 ,the ,hellenic woman as mother had to live in obscurity1 because the political instinct together with its highest aim demanded it4 ,she had to vegetate like a plant1 in the narrow circle1 as a symbol of the ,epicurean wisdom 4 ,again1 in more recent times1 with the complete disintegration of the principle of the ,state1 she had to step in as helper2 the family as a makeshift for the ,state is her work2 and in this sense the artistic aim of the ,state had to abase itself to the level of a domestic art4 ,thereby it has been brought about1 that the passion of love1 as the one realm wholly accessible to women1 regulates our art to the very core4 ,similarly1 home-education considers itself so to speak as the only natural one and suffers ,state-education only as a questionable infringement upon the right of home-education3 all this is right as far as the modern ,state only is concerned4--,with that the nature of woman withal remains unaltered1 but her power is1 according to the position which the ,state takes up with regard to women1 a different one4 ,women have indeed really the power to make good to a certain extent the deficiencies of the ,state--ever faithful to their nature1 which ,i have compared to sleep4 ,in ,greek antiquity they held that position1 which the most supreme will of the ,state assigned to them3 for that reason they have been glorified as never since4 ,the goddesses of ,greek mythology are their images3 the ,pythia and the ,sibyl1 as well as the ,socratic ,diotima are the priestesses out of whom divine wisdom speaks4 ,now one understands why the proud resignation of the ,spartan woman at the news of her son's death in battle can be no fable4 ,woman in relation to the ,state felt herself in her proper position1 therefore she had more dignity than woman has ever had since4 ,plato who through abolishing family and marriage still intensifies the position of woman1 feels now so much reverence towards them1 that oddly enough he is misled by a subsequent statement of their equality with man1 to abolish again the order of rank which is their due3 the highest triumph of the woman of antiquity1 to have seduced even the wisest6 ,as long as the ,state is still in an embryonic condition woman as mother preponderates and determines the grade and the manifestations of ,culture3 in the same way as woman is destined to complement the disorganised ,state4 ,what ,tacitus says of ,german women3 inesse quin etiam sanctum aliquid et providum putant1 nec aut consilia earum aspernantur aut responsa neglegunt1 applies on the whole to all nations not yet arrived at the real ,state4 ,in such stages one feels only the more strongly that which at all times becomes again manifest1 that the instincts of woman as the bulwark of the future generation are invincible and that in her care for the preservation of the species ,nature speaks out of these instincts very distinctly4 ,how far this divining power reaches is determined1 it seems1 by the greater or lesser consolidation of the ,state3 in disorderly and more arbitrary conditions1 where the whim or the passion of the individual man carries along with itself whole tribes1 then woman suddenly comes forward as the warning prophetess4 ,but in ,greece too there was a never slumbering care that the terribly overcharged political instinct might splinter into dust and atoms the little political organisms before they attained their goals in any way4 ,here the ,hellenic ,will created for itself ever new implements by means of which it spoke1 adjusting1 moderating1 warning3 above all it is in the ,pythia1 that the power of woman to compensate the ,state manifested itself so clearly1 as it has never done since4 ,that a people split up thus into small tribes and municipalities1 was yet at bottom whole and was performing the task of its nature within its faction1 was assured by that wonderful phenomenon the ,pythia and the ,delphian oracle3 for always1 as long as ,hellenism created its great works of art1 it spoke out of one mouth and as one ,pythia4 ,we cannot hold back the portentous discernment that to the ,will individuation means much suffering1 and that in order to reach those individuals ,it needs an enormous step-ladder of individuals4 ,it is true our brains reel with the consideration whether the ,will in order to arrive at ,art1 has perhaps effused ,itself out into these worlds1 stars1 bodies1 and atoms3 at least it ought to become clear to us then1 that ,art is not necessary for the individuals1 but for the ,will itself3 a sublime outlook at which we shall be permitted to glance once more from another position4 ,,on ,,music ,,and ,,words 7,fragment1 #ahga7 ,what we here have asserted of the relationship between language and music must be valid too1 for equal reasons concerning the relationship of ,mime to ,music4 ,the ,mime too1 as the intensified symbolism of man's gestures1 is1 measured by the eternal significance of music1 only a simile1 which brings into expression the innermost secret of music but very superficially1 namely on the substratum of the passionately moved human body4 ,but if we include language also in the category of bodily symbolism1 and compare the drama1 according to the canon advanced1 with music1 then ,i venture to think1 a proposition of ,schopenhauer will come into the clearest light1 to which reference must be made again later on4 ,it might be admissible1 although a purely musical mind does not demand it1 to join and adapt words or even a clearly represented action to the pure language of tones1 although the latter1 being self-sufficient1 needs no help2 so that our perceiving and reflecting intellect1 which does not like to be quite idle1 may meanwhile have light and analogous occupation also4 ,by this concession to the intellect man's attention adheres even more closely to music1 by this at the same time1 too1 is placed underneath that which the tones indicate in their general metaphorless language of the heart1 a visible picture1 as it were a schema1 as an example illustrating a general idea 444 indeed such things will even heighten the effect of music4 7,schopenhauer1 ,parerga1 ,,ii41 ,on the ,metaphysics of the ,beautiful and sthetics1 #bbd47 ,if we disregard the naturalistic external motivation according to which our perceiving and reflecting intellect does not like to be quite idle when listening to music1 and attention led by the hand of an obvious action follows better--then the drama in relation to music has been characterised by ,schopenhauer for the best reasons as a schema1 as an example illustrating a general idea3 and when he adds indeed such things will even heighten the effect of music then the enormous universality and originality of vocal music1 of the connection of tone with metaphor and idea guarantee the correctness of this utterance4 ,the music of every people begins in closest connection with lyricism and long before absolute music can be thought of1 the music of a people in that connection passes through the most important stages of development4 ,if we understand this primal lyricism of a people1 as indeed we must1 to be an imitation of the artistic typifying ,nature1 then as the original prototype of that union of music and lyricism must be regarded3 the duality in the essence of language1 already typified by ,nature4 ,now1 after discussing the relation of music to metaphor we will fathom deeper this essence of language4 ,in the multiplicity of languages the fact at once manifests itself1 that word and thing do not necessarily coincide with one another completely1 but that the word is a symbol4 ,but what does the word symbolise8 ,most certainly only conceptions1 be these now conscious ones or as in the greater number of cases1 unconscious2 for how should a word-symbol correspond to that innermost nature of which we and the world are images8 ,only as conceptions we know that kernel1 only in its metaphorical expressions are we familiar with it2 beyond that point there is nowhere a direct bridge which could lead us to it4 ,the whole life of impulses1 too1 the play of feelings1 sensations1 emotions1 volitions1 is known to us--as ,i am forced to insert here in opposition to ,schopenhauer--after a most rigid self-examination1 not according to its essence but merely as conception2 and we may well be permitted to say1 that even ,schopenhauer's ,will is nothing else but the most general phenomenal form of a ,something otherwise absolutely indecipherable4 ,if therefore we must acquiesce in the rigid necessity of getting nowhere beyond the conceptions we can nevertheless again distinguish two main species within their realm4 ,the one species manifest themselves to us as pleasure-and-displeasure-sensations and accompany all other conceptions as a never-lacking fundamental basis4 ,this most general manifestation1 out of which and by which alone we understand all ,becoming and all ,willing and for which we will retain the name ,will has now too in language its own symbolic sphere3 and in truth this sphere is equally fundamental to the language1 as that manifestation is fundamental to all other conceptions4 ,all degrees of pleasure and displeasure--expressions of one primal cause unfathomable to us--symbolise themselves in the tone of the speaker3 whereas all the other conceptions are indicated by the gesture-symbolism of the speaker4 ,in so far as that primal cause is the same in all men1 the tonal subsoil is also the common one1 comprehensible beyond the difference of language4 ,out of it now develops the more arbitrary gesture-symbolism which is not wholly adequate for its basis3 and with which begins the diversity of languages1 whose multiplicity we are permitted to consider--to use a simile--as a strophic text to that primal melody of the pleasure-and-displeasure-language4 ,the whole realm of the consonantal and vocal we believe we may reckon only under gesture-symbolism3 consonants and vowels without that fundamental tone which is necessary above all else1 are nothing but positions of the organs of speech1 in short1 gestures--2 as soon as we imagine the word proceeding out of the mouth of man1 then first of all the root of the word1 and the basis of that gesture-symbolism1 the tonal subsoil1 the echo of the pleasure-and-displeasure-sensations originate4 ,as our whole corporeality stands in relation to that original phenomenon1 the ,will1 so the word built out of its consonants and vowels stands in relation to its tonal basis4 ,this original phenomenon1 the ,will1 with its scale of pleasure-and-displeasure-sensations attains in the development of music an ever more adequate symbolic expression3 and to this historical process the continuous effort of lyric poetry runs parallel1 the effort to transcribe music into metaphors3 exactly as this double-phenomenon1 according to the just completed disquisition1 lies typified in language4 ,he who has followed us into these difficult contemplations readily1 attentively1 and with some imagination--and with kind indulgence where the expression has been too scanty or too unconditional--will now have the advantage with us1 of laying before himself more seriously and answering more deeply than is usually the case some stirring points of controversy of present-day sthetics and still more of contemporary artists4 ,let us think now1 after all our assumptions1 what an undertaking it must be1 to set music to a poem2 i4e41 to illustrate a poem by music1 in order to help music thereby to obtain a language of ideas4 ,what a perverted world6 ,a task that appears to my mind like that of a son wanting to create his father6 ,music can create metaphors out of itself1 which will always however be but schemata1 instances as it were of her intrinsic general contents4 ,but how should the metaphor1 the conception1 create music out of itself6 ,much less could the idea1 or1 as one has said1 the poetical idea do this4 ,as certainly as a bridge leads out of the mysterious castle of the musician into the free land of the metaphors--and the lyric poet steps across it--as certainly is it impossible to go the contrary way1 although some are said to exist who fancy they have done so4 ,one might people the air with the phantasy of a ,raphael1 one might see ,st4 ,cecilia1 as he does1 listening enraptured to the harmonies of the choirs of angels--no tone issues from this world apparently lost in music3 even if we imagined that that harmony in reality1 as by a miracle1 began to sound for us1 whither would ,cecilia1 ,paul and ,magdalena disappear from us1 whither even the singing choir of angels6 ,we should at once cease to be ,raphael3 and as in that picture the earthly instruments lie shattered on the ground1 so our painter's vision1 defeated by the higher1 would fade and die away4--,how nevertheless could the miracle happen8 ,how should the ,apollonian world of the eye quite engrossed in contemplation be able to create out of itself the tone1 which on the contrary symbolises a sphere which is excluded and conquered just by that very ,apollonian absorption in ,appearance8 ,the delight at ,appearance cannot raise out of itself the pleasure at ,non-appearance2 the delight of perceiving is delight only by the fact that nothing reminds us of a sphere in which individuation is broken and abolished4 ,if we have characterised at all correctly the ,apollonian in opposition to the ,dionysean1 then the thought which attributes to the metaphor1 the idea1 the appearance1 in some way the power of producing out of itself the tone1 must appear to us strangely wrong4 ,we will not be referred1 in order to be refuted1 to the musician who writes music to existing lyric poems2 for after all that has been said we shall be compelled to assert that the relationship between the lyric poem and its setting must in any case be a different one from that between a father and his child4 ,then what exactly8 ,here now we may be met on the ground of a favourite sthetic notion with the proposition1 ,it is not the poem which gives birth to the setting but the sentiment created by the poem4 ,i do not agree with that2 the more subtle or powerful stirring-up of that pleasure-and-displeasure-subsoil is in the realm of productive art the element which is inartistic in itself2 indeed only its total exclusion makes the complete self-absorption and disinterested perception of the artist possible4 ,here perhaps one might retaliate that ,i myself just now predicated about the ,will1 that in music ,will came to an ever more adequate symbolic expression4 ,my answer1 condensed into an sthetic axiom1 is this3 the ,will is the object of music but not the origin of it1 that is the ,will in its very greatest universality1 as the most original manifestation1 under which is to be understood all ,becoming4 ,that1 which we call feeling1 is with regard to this ,will already permeated and saturated with conscious and unconscious conceptions and is therefore no longer directly the object of music2 it is unthinkable then that these feelings should be able to create music out of themselves4 ,take for instance the feelings of love1 fear and hope3 music can no longer do anything with them in a direct way1 every one of them is already so filled with conceptions4 ,on the contrary these feelings can serve to symbolise music1 as the lyric poet does who translates for himself into the simile-world of feelings that conceptually and metaphorically unapproachable realm of the ,will1 the proper content and object of music4 ,the lyric poet resembles all those hearers of music who are conscious of an effect of music on their emotions2 the distant and removed power of music appeals1 with them1 to an intermediate realm which gives to them as it were a foretaste1 a symbolic preliminary conception of music proper1 it appeals to the intermediate realm of the emotions4 ,one might be permitted to say about them1 with respect to the ,will1 the only object of music1 that they bear the same relation to this ,will1 as the analogous morning-dream1 according to ,schopenhauer's theory1 bears to the dream proper4 ,to all those1 however1 who are unable to get at music except with their emotions1 is to be said1 that they will ever remain in the entrance-hall1 and will never have access to the sanctuary of music3 which1 as ,i said1 emotion cannot show but only symbolise4 ,with regard however to the origin of music1 ,i have already explained that that can never lie in the ,will1 but must rather rest in the lap of that force1 which under the form of the ,will creates out of itself a visionary world3 the origin of music lies beyond all individuation1 a proposition1 which after our discussion on the ,dionysean self-evident4 ,at this point ,i take the liberty of setting forth again comprehensively side by side those decisive propositions which the antithesis of the ,dionysean and ,apollonian dealt with has compelled us to enunciate3 ,the ,will1 as the most original manifestation1 is the object of music3 in this sense music can be called imitation of ,nature1 but of ,nature in its most general form4-- ,the ,will itself and the feelings--manifestations of the ,will already permeated with conceptions--are wholly incapable of creating music out of themselves1 just as on the other hand it is utterly denied to music to represent feelings1 or to have feelings as its object1 while ,will is its only object4-- ,he who carries away feelings as effects of music has within them as it were a symbolic intermediate realm1 which can give him a foretaste of music1 but excludes him at the same time from her innermost sanctuaries4-- ,the lyric poet interprets music to himself through the symbolic world of emotions1 whereas he himself1 in the calm of the ,apollonian contemplation1 is exempted from those emotions4-- ,when1 therefore1 the musician writes a setting to a lyric poem he is moved as musician neither through the images nor through the emotional language in the text2 but a musical inspiration coming from quite a different sphere chooses for itself that song-text as allegorical expression4 ,there cannot therefore be any question as to a necessary relation between poem and music2 for the two worlds brought here into connection are too strange to one another to enter into more than a superficial alliance2 the song-text is just a symbol and stands to music in the same relation as the ,egyptian hieroglyph of bravery did to the brave warrior himself4 ,during the highest revelations of music we even feel involuntarily the crudeness of every figurative effort and of every emotion dragged in for purposes of analogy2 for example1 the last quartets of ,beethoven quite put to shame all illustration and the entire realm of empiric reality4 ,the symbol1 in face of the god really revealing himself1 has no longer any meaning2 moreover it appears as an offensive superficiality4 ,one must not think any the worse of us for considering from this point of view one item so that we may speak about it without reserve1 namely the last movement of ,beethoven's ,ninth ,symphony1 a movement which is unprecedented and unanalysable in its charms4 ,to the dithyrambic world-redeeming exultation of this music ,schiller's poem ,to ,joy1 is wholly incongruous1 yea1 like cold moon-light1 pales beside that sea of flame4 ,who would rob me of this sure feeling8 ,yea1 who would be able to dispute that that feeling during the hearing of this music does not find expression in a scream only because we1 wholly impotent through music for metaphor and word1 already hear nothing at all from ,schiller's poem4 ,all that noble sublimity1 yea the grandeur of ,schiller's verses has1 beside the truly nave-innocent folk-melody of joy1 a disturbing1 troubling1 even crude and offensive effect2 only the ever fuller development of the choir's song and the masses of the orchestra preventing us from hearing them1 keep from us that sensation of incongruity4 ,what therefore shall we think of that awful sthetic superstition that ,beethoven himself made a solemn statement as to his belief in the limits of absolute music1 in that fourth movement of the ,ninth ,symphony1 yea that he as it were with it unlocked the portals of a new art1 within which music had been enabled to represent even metaphor and idea and whereby music had been opened to the conscious mind4 ,and what does ,beethoven himself tell us when he has choir-song introduced by a recitative8 ,alas friends1 let us intonate not these tones but more pleasing and joyous ones6 ,more pleasing and joyous ones6 ,for that he needed the convincing tone of the human voice1 for that he needed the music of innocence in the folk-song4 ,not the word1 but the more pleasing sound1 not the idea but the most heartfelt joyful tone was chosen by the sublime master in his longing for the most soul-thrilling ensemble of his orchestra4 ,and how could one misunderstand him6 ,rather may the same be said of this movement as ,richard ,wagner says of the great ,missa ,solemnis which he calls a pure symphonic work of the most genuine ,beethoven-spirit 7,beethoven1 p4 #db74 ,the voices are treated here quite in the sense of human instruments1 in which sense ,schopenhauer quite rightly wanted these human voices to be considered2 the text underlying them is understood by us in these great ,church compositions1 not in its conceptual meaning1 but it serves in the sense of the musical work of art1 merely as material for vocal music and does not stand to our musically determined sensation in a disturbing position simply because it does not incite in us any rational conceptions but1 as its ecclesiastical character conditions too1 only touches us with the impression of well-known symbolic creeds4 ,besides ,i do not doubt that ,beethoven1 had he written the ,tenth ,symphony--of which drafts are still extant--would have composed just the ,tenth ,symphony4 ,let us now approach1 after these preparations1 the discussion of the opera1 so as to be able to proceed afterwards from the opera to its counterpart in the ,greek tragedy4 ,what we had to observe in the last movement of the ,ninth1 i4e41 on the highest level of modern music-development1 viz41 that the word-content goes down unheard in the general sea of sound1 is nothing isolated and peculiar1 but the general and eternally valid norm in the vocal music of all times1 the norm which alone is adequate to the origin of lyric song4 ,the man in a state of ,dionysean excitement has a listener just as little as the orgiastic crowd1 a listener to whom he might have something to communicate1 a listener as the epic narrator and generally speaking the ,apollonian artist1 to be sure1 presupposes4 ,it is rather in the nature of the ,dionysean art1 that it has no consideration for the listener3 the inspired servant of ,dionysos is1 as ,i said in a former place1 understood only by his compeers4 ,but if we now imagine a listener at those endemic outbursts of ,dionysean excitement then we shall have to prophesy for him a fate similar to that which ,pentheus the discovered eavesdropper suffered1 namely1 to be torn to pieces by the ,mnads4 ,the lyric musician sings as the bird sings1#a alone1 out of innermost compulsion2 when the listener comes to him with a demand he must become dumb4 ,therefore it would be altogether unnatural to ask from the lyric musician that one should also understand the text-words of his song1 unnatural because here a demand is made by the listener1 who has no right at all during the lyric outburst to claim anything4 ,now with the poetry of the great ancient lyric poets in your hand1 put the question honestly to yourself whether they can have even thought of making themselves clear to the mass of the people standing around and listening1 clear with their world of metaphors and thoughts2 answer this serious question with a look at ,pindar and the schylian choir songs4 ,these most daring and obscure intricacies of thought1 this whirl of metaphors1 ever impetuously reproducing itself1 this oracular tone of the whole1 which we1 without the diversion of music and orchestration1 so often cannot penetrate even with the closest attention--was this whole world of miracles transparent as glass to the ,greek crowd1 yea1 a metaphorical-conceptual interpretation of music8 ,and with such mysteries of thought as are to be found in ,pindar do you think the wonderful poet could have wished to elucidate the music already strikingly distinct8 ,should we here not be forced to an insight into the very nature of the lyricist--the artistic man1 who to himself must interpret music through the symbolism of metaphors and emotions1 but who has nothing to communicate to the listener2 an artist who1 in complete aloofness1 even forgets those who stand eagerly listening near him4 ,and as the lyricist his hymns1 so the people sing the folk-song1 for themselves1 out of in-most impulse1 unconcerned whether the word is comprehensible to him who does not join in the song4 ,let us think of our own experiences in the realm of higher art-music3 what did we understand of the text of a ,mass of ,palestrina1 of a ,cantata of ,bach1 of an ,oratorio of ,hndel1 if we ourselves perhaps did not join in singing8 ,only for him who joins in singing do lyric poetry and vocal music exist2 the listener stands before it as before absolute music4 ,but now the opera begins1 according to the clearest testimonies1 with the demand of the listener to understand the word4 ,what8 ,the listener demands8 ,the word is to be understood8 ,but to bring music into the service of a series of metaphors and conceptions1 to use it as a means to an end1 to the strengthening and elucidation of such conceptions and metaphors--such a peculiar presumption as is found in the concept of an opera1 reminds me of that ridiculous person who endeavours to lift himself up into the air with his own arms2 that which this fool and which the opera according to that idea attempt are absolute impossibilities4 ,that idea of the opera does not demand perhaps an abuse from music but--as ,i said--an impossibility4 ,music never can become a means2 one may push1 screw1 torture it2 as tone1 as roll of the drum1 in its crudest and simplest stages1 it still defeats poetry and abases the latter to its reflection4 ,the opera as a species of art according to that concept is therefore not only an aberration of music1 but an erroneous conception of sthetics4 ,if ,i herewith1 after all1 justify the nature of the opera for sthetics1 ,i am of course far from justifying at the same time bad opera music or bad opera-verses4 ,the worst music can still mean1 as compared with the best poetry1 the ,dionysean world-subsoil1 and the worst poetry can be mirror1 image and reflection of this subsoil1 if together with the best music3 as certainly1 namely1 as the single tone against the metaphor is already ,dionysean1 and the single metaphor together with idea and word against music is already ,apollonian4 ,yea1 even bad music together with bad poetry can still inform as to the nature of music and poesy4 ,when therefore ,schopenhauer felt ,bellini's ,norma1 for example1 as the fulfilment of tragedy1 with regard to that opera's music and poetry1 then he1 in ,dionysean-,apollonian emotion and self-forgetfulness1 was quite entitled to do so1 because he perceived music and poetry in their most general1 as it were1 philosophical value1 as music and poetry3 but with that judgment he showed a poorly educated taste1--for good taste always has historical perspective4 ,to us1 who intentionally in this investigation avoid any question of the historic value of an art-phenomenon and endeavour to focus only the phenomenon itself1 in its unaltered eternal meaning1 and consequently in its highest type1 too1--to us the art-species of the opera seems to be justified as much as the folk-song1 in so far as we find in both that union of the ,dionysean and ,apollonian and are permitted to assume for the opera--namely for the highest type of the opera--an origin analogous to that of the folk-song4 ,only in so far as the opera historically known to us has a completely different origin from that of the folk-song do we reject this opera1 which stands in the same relation to that generic notion just defended by us1 as the marionette does to a living human being4 ,it is certain1 music never can become a means in the service of the text1 but must always defeat the text1 yet music must become bad when the composer interrupts every ,dionysean force rising within himself by an anxious regard for the words and gestures of his marionettes4 ,if the poet of the opera-text has offered him nothing more than the usual schematised figures with their ,egyptian regularity1 then the freer1 more unconditional1 more ,dionysean is the development of the music2 and the more she despises all dramatic requirements1 so much the higher will be the value of the opera4 ,in this sense it is true the opera is1 at its best1 good music1 and nothing but music3 whereas the jugglery performed at the same time is1 as it were1 only a fantastic disguise of the orchestra1 above all1 of the most important instruments the orchestra has3 the singers2 and from this jugglery the judicious listener turns away laughing4 ,if the mass is diverted by this very jugglery and only permits the music with it1 then the mob fares as all those do who value the frame of a good picture higher than the picture itself4 ,who treats such nave aberrations with a serious or even pathetic reproach8 ,but what will the opera mean as dramatic music1 in its possibly farthest distance from pure music1 efficient in itself1 and purely ,dionysean8 ,let us imagine a passionate drama full of incidents which carries away the spectator1 and which is already sure of success by its plot3 what will dramatic music be able to add1 if it does not take away something8 ,firstly1 it will take away much3 for in every moment where for once the ,dionysean power of music strikes the listener1 the eye is dimmed that sees the action1 the eye that became absorbed in the individuals appearing before it3 the listener now forgets the drama and becomes alive again to it only when the ,dionysean spell over him has been broken4 ,in so far1 however1 as music makes the listener forget the drama1 it is not yet dramatic music3 but what kind of music is that which is not allowed to exercise any ,dionysean power over the listener8 ,and how is it possible8 ,it is possible as purely conventional symbolism1 out of which convention has sucked all natural strength3 as music which has diminished to symbols of remembrance3 and its effect aims at reminding the spectator of something1 which at the sight of the drama must not escape him lest he should misunderstand it3 as a trumpet signal is an invitation for the horse to trot4 ,lastly1 before the drama commenced and in interludes or during tedious passages1 doubtful as to dramatic effect1 yea1 even in its highest moments1 there would still be permitted another species of remembrance-music1 no longer purely conventional1 namely emotional-music1 music1 as a stimulant to dull or wearied nerves4 ,i am able to distinguish in the so-called dramatic music these two elements only3 a conventional rhetoric and remembrance-music1 and a sensational music with an effect essentially physical3 and thus it vacillates between the noise of the drum and the signal-horn1 like the mood of the warrior who goes into the battle4 ,but now the mind1 regaling itself on pure music and educated through comparison1 demands a masquerade for those two wrong tendencies of music2 ,remembrance and ,emotion are to be played1 but in good music1 which must be in itself enjoyable1 yea1 valuable2 what despair for the dramatic musician1 who must mask the big drum by good music1 which1 however1 must nevertheless have no purely musical1 but only a stimulating effect6 ,and now comes the great ,philistine public nodding its thousand heads and enjoys this dramatic music which is ever ashamed of itself1 enjoys it to the very last morsel1 without perceiving anything of its shame and embarrassment4 ,rather the public feels its skin agreeably tickled1 for indeed homage is being rendered in all forms and ways to the public6 ,to the pleasure-hunting1 dull-eyed sensualist1 who needs excitement1 to the conceited educated person who has accustomed himself to good drama and good music as to good food1 without after all making much out of it1 to the forgetful and absent-minded egoist1 who must be led back to the work of art with force and with signal-horns because selfish plans continually pass through his mind aiming at gain or pleasure4 ,woe-begone dramatic musicians6 ,draw near and view your ,patrons' faces6 ,the half are coarse1 the half are cold4 ,why should you rack1 poor foolish ,bards1 for ends like these the gracious ,muses8#b ,and that the muses are tormented1 even tortured and flayed1 these veracious miserable ones do not themselves deny6 ,we had assumed a passionate drama1 carrying away the spectator1 which even without music would be sure of its effect4 ,i fear that that in it which is poetry and not action proper will stand in relation to true poetry as dramatic music to music in general3 it will be remembrance-and emotional-poetry4 ,poetry will serve as a means1 in order to recall in a conventional fashion feelings and passions1 the expression of which has been found by real poets and has become celebrated1 yea1 normal with them4 ,further1 this poetry will be expected in dangerous moments to assist the proper action1--whether a criminalistic horror-story or an exhibition of witchery mad with shifting the scenes1--and to spread a covering veil over the crudeness of the action itself4 ,shamefully conscious1 that the poetry is only masquerade which cannot bear the light of day1 such a dramatic rime-jingle clamours now for dramatic music1 as on the other hand again the poetaster of such dramas is met after one-fourth of the way by the dramatic musician with his talent for the drum and the signal-horn and his shyness of genuine music1 trusting in itself and self-sufficient4 ,and now they see one another2 and these ,apollonian and ,dionysean caricatures1 this par nobile fratrum1 embrace one another6 #a ,a reference to ,goethe's ballad1 ,the ,minstrel1 st4 #e3 ,i sing as sings the bird1 whose note ,the leafy bough is heard on4 ,the song that falters from my throat ,for me is ample guerdon4 ,,tr4 #b ,a quotation from ,goethe's ,faust3 ,part ,i41 lines #ia1 #ib1 and #ie1 #if4--,,tr4 ,,homer',s ,,contest ,preface to an ,unwritten ,book 7#ahgb7 ,when one speaks of humanity the notion lies at the bottom1 that humanity is that which separates and distinguishes man from ,nature4 ,but such a distinction does not in reality exist3 the natural qualities and the properly called human ones have grown up inseparably together4 ,man in his highest and noblest capacities is ,nature and bears in himself her awful twofold character4 ,his abilities generally considered dreadful and inhuman are perhaps indeed the fertile soil1 out of which alone can grow forth all humanity in emotions1 actions and works4 ,thus the ,greeks1 the most humane men of ancient times1 have in themselves a trait of cruelty1 of tiger-like pleasure in destruction3 a trait1 which in the grotesquely magnified image of the ,hellene1 in ,alexander the ,great1 is very plainly visible1 which1 however1 in their whole history1 as well as in their mythology1 must terrify us who meet them with the emasculate idea of modern humanity4 ,when ,alexander has the feet of ,batis1 the brave defender of ,gaza1 bored through1 and binds the living body to his chariot in order to drag him about exposed to the scorn of his soldiers1 that is a sickening caricature of ,achilles1 who at night ill-uses ,hector's corpse by a similar trailing2 but even this trait has for us something offensive1 something which inspires horror4 ,it gives us a peep into the abysses of hatred4 ,with the same sensation perhaps we stand before the bloody and insatiable self-laceration of two ,greek parties1 as for example in the ,corcyrean revolution4 ,when the victor1 in a fight of the cities1 according to the law of warfare1 executes the whole male population and sells all the women and children into slavery1 we see1 in the sanction of such a law1 that the ,greek deemed it a positive necessity to allow his hatred to break forth unimpeded2 in such moments the compressed and swollen feeling relieved itself2 the tiger bounded forth1 a voluptuous cruelty shone out of his fearful eye4 ,why had the ,greek sculptor to represent again and again war and fights in innumerable repetitions1 extended human bodies whose sinews are tightened through hatred or through the recklessness of triumph1 fighters wounded and writhing with pain1 or the dying with the last rattle in their throat8 ,why did the whole ,greek world exult in the fighting scenes of the ,iliad8 ,i am afraid1 we do not understand them enough in ,greek fashion1 and that we should even shudder1 if for once we did understand them thus4 ,but what lies1 as the mother-womb of the ,hellenic1 behind the ,homeric world8 ,in the latter1 by the extremely artistic definiteness1 and the calm and purity of the lines we are already lifted far above the purely material amalgamation3 its colours1 by an artistic deception1 appear lighter1 milder1 warmer2 its men1 in this coloured1 warm illumination1 appear better and more sympathetic--but where do we look1 if1 no longer guided and protected by ,homer's hand1 we step backwards into the pre-,homeric world8 ,only into night and horror1 into the products of a fancy accustomed to the horrible4 ,what earthly existence is reflected in the loathsome-awful theogonian lore3 a life swayed only by the children of the night1 strife1 amorous desires1 deception1 age and death4 ,let us imagine the suffocating atmosphere of ,hesiod's poem1 still thickened and darkened and without all the mitigations and purifications1 which poured over ,hellas from ,delphi and the numerous seats of the gods6 ,if we mix this thickened ,boeotian air with the grim voluptuousness of the ,etruscans1 then such a reality would extort from us a world of myths within which ,uranos1 ,kronos and ,zeus and the struggles of the ,titans would appear as a relief4 ,combat in this brooding atmosphere is salvation and safety2 the cruelty of victory is the summit of life's glories4 ,and just as in truth the idea of ,greek law has developed from murder and expiation of murder1 so also nobler ,civilisation takes her first wreath of victory from the altar of the expiation of murder4 ,behind that bloody age stretches a wave-furrow deep into ,hellenic history4 ,the names of ,orpheus1 of ,musus1 and their cults indicate to what consequences the uninterrupted sight of a world of warfare and cruelty led--to the loathing of existence1 to the conception of this existence as a punishment to be borne to the end1 to the belief in the identity of existence and indebtedness4 ,but these particular conclusions are not specifically ,hellenic2 through them ,greece comes into contact with ,india and the ,orient generally4 ,the ,hellenic genius had ready yet another answer to the question3 what does a life of fighting and of victory mean8 and gives this answer in the whole breadth of ,greek history4 ,in order to understand the latter we must start from the fact that the ,greek genius admitted the existing fearful impulse1 and deemed it justified2 whereas in the ,orphic phase of thought was contained the belief that life with such an impulse as its root would not be worth living4 ,strife and the pleasure of victory were acknowledged2 and nothing separates the ,greek world more from ours than the colouring1 derived hence1 of some ethical ideas1 e4g41 of ,eris and of ,envy4 ,when the traveller ,pausanius during his wanderings through ,greece visited the ,helicon1 a very old copy of the first didactic poem of the ,greeks1 ,the ,works and ,days of ,hesiod1 was shown to him1 inscribed upon plates of lead and severely damaged by time and weather4 ,however he recognised this much1 that1 unlike the usual copies1 it had not at its head that little hymnus on ,zeus1 but began at once with the declaration3 ,two ,eris-goddesses are on earth4 ,this is one of the most noteworthy ,hellenic thoughts and worthy to be impressed on the new-comer immediately at the entrance-gate of ,greek ethics4 ,one would like to praise the one ,eris1 just as much as to blame the other1 if one uses one's reason4 ,for these two goddesses have quite different dispositions4 ,for the one1 the cruel one1 furthers the evil war and feud6 ,no mortal likes her1 but under the yoke of need one pays honour to the burdensome ,eris1 according to the decree of the immortals4 ,she1 as the elder1 gave birth to black night4 ,zeus the high-ruling one1 however1 placed the other ,eris upon the roots of the earth and among men as a much better one4 ,she urges even the unskilled man to work1 and if one who lacks property beholds another who is rich1 then he hastens to sow in similar fashion and to plant and to put his house in order2 the neighbour vies with the neighbour who strives after fortune4 ,good is this ,eris to men4 ,the potter also has a grudge against the potter1 and the carpenter against the carpenter2 the beggar envies the beggar1 and the singer the singer4 ,the two last verses which treat of the odium figulinum appear to our scholars to be incomprehensible in this place4 ,according to their judgment the predicates3 grudge and envy fit only the nature of the evil ,eris1 and for this reason they do not hesitate to designate these verses as spurious or thrown by chance into this place4 ,for that judgment however a system of ,ethics other than the ,hellenic must have inspired these scholars unawares2 for in these verses to the good ,eris ,aristotle finds no offence4 ,and not only ,aristotle but the whole ,greek antiquity thinks of spite and envy otherwise than we do and agrees with ,hesiod1 who first designates as an evil one that ,eris who leads men against one another to a hostile war of extermination1 and secondly praises another ,eris as the good one1 who as jealousy1 spite1 envy1 incites men to activity but not to the action of war to the knife but to the action of contest4 ,the ,greek is envious and conceives of this quality not as a blemish1 but as the effect of a beneficent deity4 ,what a gulf of ethical judgment between us and him8 ,because he is envious he also feels1 with every superfluity of honour1 riches1 splendour and fortune1 the envious eye of a god resting on himself1 and he fears this envy2 in this case the latter reminds him of the transitoriness of every human lot2 he dreads his very happiness and1 sacrificing the best of it1 he bows before the divine envy4 ,this conception does not perhaps estrange him from his gods2 their significance on the contrary is expressed by the thought that with them man in whose soul jealousy is enkindled against every other living being1 is never allowed to venture into contest4 ,in the fight of ,thamyris with the ,muses1 of ,marsyas with ,apollo1 in the heart-moving fate of ,niobe appears the horrible opposition of the two powers1 who must never fight with one another1 man and god4 ,the greater and more sublime however a ,greek is1 the brighter in him appears the ambitious flame1 devouring everybody who runs with him on the same track4 ,aristotle once made a list of such contests on a large scale2 among them is the most striking instance how even a dead person can still incite a living one to consuming jealousy2 thus for example ,aristotle designates the relation between the ,kolophonian ,xenophanes and ,homer4 ,we do not understand this attack on the national hero of poetry in all its strength1 if we do not imagine1 as later on also with ,plato1 the root of this attack to be the ardent desire to step into the place of the overthrown poet and to inherit his fame4 ,every great ,hellene hands on the torch of the contest2 at every great virtue a new light is kindled4 ,if the young ,themistocles could not sleep at the thought of the laurels of ,miltiades so his early awakened bent released itself only in the long emulation with ,aristides in that uniquely noteworthy1 purely instinctive genius of his political activity1 which ,thucydides describes4 ,how characteristic are both question and answer1 when a notable opponent of ,pericles is asked1 whether he or ,pericles was the better wrestler in the city1 and he gives the answer3 ,even if ,i throw him down he denies that he has fallen1 attains his purpose and convinces those who saw him fall4 ,if one wants to see that sentiment unashamed in its nave expressions1 the sentiment as to the necessity of contest lest the ,state's welfare be threatened1 one should think of the original meaning of ,ostracism1 as for example the ,ephesians pronounced it at the banishment of ,hermodor4 ,among us nobody shall be the best2 if however someone is the best1 then let him be so elsewhere and among others4 ,why should not someone be the best8 ,because with that the contest would fail1 and the eternal life-basis of the ,hellenic ,state would be endangered4 ,later on ,ostracism receives quite another position with regard to the contest2 it is applied1 when the danger becomes obvious that one of the great contesting politicians and party-leaders feels himself urged on in the heat of the conflict towards harmful and destructive measures and dubious coups d'tat4 ,the original sense of this peculiar institution however is not that of a safety-valve but that of a stimulant4 ,the all-excelling individual was to be removed in order that the contest of forces might re-awaken1 a thought which is hostile to the exclusiveness of genius in the modern sense but which assumes that in the natural order of things there are always several geniuses which incite one another to action1 as much also as they hold one another within the bounds of moderation4 ,that is the kernel of the ,hellenic contest-conception3 it abominates autocracy1 and fears its dangers2 it desires as a preventive against the genius--a second genius4 ,every natural gift must develop itself by contest4 ,thus the ,hellenic national pedagogy demands1 whereas modern educators fear nothing as much as1 the unchaining of the so-called ambition4 ,here one fears selfishness as the evil in itself--with the exception of the ,jesuits1 who agree with the ,ancients and who1 possibly1 for that reason1 are the most efficient educators of our time4 ,they seem to believe that ,selfishness1 i4e41 the individual element is only the most powerful agens but that it obtains its character as good and evil essentially from the aims towards which it strives4 ,to the ,ancients however the aim of the agonistic education was the welfare of the whole1 of the civic society4 ,every ,athenian for instance was to cultivate his ,ego in contest1 so far that it should be of the highest service to ,athens and should do the least harm4 ,it was not unmeasured and immeasurable as modern ambition generally is2 the youth thought of the welfare of his native town when he vied with others in running1 throwing or singing2 it was her glory that he wanted to increase with his own2 it was to his town's gods that he dedicated the wreaths which the umpires as a mark of honour set upon his head4 ,every ,greek from childhood felt within himself the burning wish to be in the contest of the towns an instrument for the welfare of his own town2 in this his selfishness was kindled into flame1 by this his selfishness was bridled and restricted4 ,therefore the individuals in antiquity were freer1 because their aims were nearer and more tangible4 ,modern man1 on the contrary1 is everywhere hampered by infinity1 like the fleet-footed ,achilles in the allegory of the ,eleate ,zeno3 infinity impedes him1 he does not even overtake the tortoise4 ,but as the youths to be educated were brought up struggling against one another1 so their educators were in turn in emulation amongst themselves4 ,distrustfully jealous1 the great musical masters1 ,pindar and ,simonides1 stepped side by side2 in rivalry the sophist1 the higher teacher of antiquity meets his fellow-sophist2 even the most universal kind of instruction1 through the drama1 was imparted to the people only under the form of an enormous wrestling of the great musical and dramatic artists4 ,how wonderful6 ,and even the artist has a grudge against the artist6 ,and the modern man dislikes in an artist nothing so much as the personal battle-feeling1 whereas the ,greek recognises the artist only in such a personal struggle4 ,there where the modern suspects weakness of the work of art1 the ,hellene seeks the source of his highest strength6 ,that1 which by way of example in ,plato is of special artistic importance in his dialogues1 is usually the result of an emulation with the art of the orators1 of the sophists1 of the dramatists of his time1 invented deliberately in order that at the end he could say3 ,behold1 ,i can also do what my great rivals can2 yea ,i can do it even better than they4 ,no ,protagoras has composed such beautiful myths as ,i1 no dramatist such a spirited and fascinating whole as the ,symposion1 no orator penned such an oration as ,i put up in the ,georgias--and now ,i reject all that together and condemn all imitative art6 ,only the contest made me a poet1 a sophist1 an orator6 ,what a problem unfolds itself there before us1 if we ask about the relationship between the contest and the conception of the work of art6--,if on the other hand we remove the contest from ,greek life1 then we look at once into the pre-,homeric abyss of horrible savagery1 hatred1 and pleasure in destruction4 ,this phenomenon alas6 shows itself frequently when a great personality was1 owing to an enormously brilliant deed1 suddenly withdrawn from the contest and became hors de concours according to his1 and his fellow-citizens' judgment4 ,almost without exception the effect is awful2 and if one usually draws from these consequences the conclusion that the ,greek was unable to bear glory and fortune1 one should say more exactly that he was unable to bear fame without further struggle1 and fortune at the end of the contest4 ,there is no more distinct instance than the fate of ,miltiades4 ,placed upon a solitary height and lifted far above every fellow-combatant through his incomparable success at ,marathon1 he feels a low thirsting for revenge awakened within himself against a citizen of ,para1 with whom he had been at enmity long ago4 ,to satisfy his desire he misuses reputation1 the public exchequer and civic honour and disgraces himself4 ,conscious of his ill-success he falls into unworthy machinations4 ,he forms a clandestine and godless connection with ,timo a priestess of ,demeter1 and enters at night the sacred temple1 from which every man was excluded4 ,after he has leapt over the wall and comes ever nearer the shrine of the goddess1 the dreadful horror of a panic-like terror suddenly seizes him2 almost prostrate and unconscious he feels himself driven back and leaping the wall once more1 he falls down paralysed and severely injured4 ,the siege must be raised and a disgraceful death impresses its seal upon a brilliant heroic career1 in order to darken it for all posterity4 ,after the battle at ,marathon the envy of the celestials has caught him4 ,and this divine envy breaks into flames when it beholds man without rival1 without opponent1 on the solitary height of glory4 ,he now has beside him only the gods--and therefore he has them against him4 ,these however betray him into a deed of the ,hybris1 and under it he collapses4 ,let us well observe that just as ,miltiades perishes so the noblest ,greek ,states perish when they1 by merit and fortune1 have arrived from the racecourse at the temple of ,nike4 ,athens1 which had destroyed the independence of her allies and avenged with severity the rebellions of her subjected foes1 ,sparta1 which after the battle of gospotamoi used her preponderance over ,hellas in a still harsher and more cruel fashion1 both these1 as in the case of ,miltiades1 brought about their ruin through deeds of the ,hybris1 as a proof that without envy1 jealousy1 and contesting ambition the ,hellenic ,state like the ,hellenic man degenerates4 ,he becomes bad and cruel1 thirsting for revenge1 and godless2 in short1 he becomes pre-,homeric--and then it needs only a panic in order to bring about his fall and to crush him4 ,sparta and ,athens surrender to ,persia1 as ,themistocles and ,alcibiades have done2 they betray ,hellenism after they have given up the noblest ,hellenic fundamental thought1 the contest1 and ,alexander1 the coarsened copy and abbreviation of ,greek history1 now invents the cosmopolitan ,hellene1 and the so-called ,hellenism4 ,,the ,,relation ,,of ,,schopenhauer',s ,,philosophy ,,to ,a ,,german ,,culture ,preface to an ,unwritten ,book 7#ahgb7 ,in dear vile ,germany culture now lies so decayed in the streets1 jealousy of all that is great rules so shamelessly1 and the general tumult of those who race for ,fortune resounds so deafeningly1 that one must have a strong faith1 almost in the sense of credo quia absurdum est1 in order to hope still for a growing ,culture1 and above all--in opposition to the press with her public opinion--to be able to work by public teaching4 ,with violence must those1 in whose hearts lies the immortal care for the people1 free themselves from all the inrushing impressions of that which is just now actual and valid1 and evoke the appearance of reckoning them indifferent things4 ,they must appear so1 because they want to think1 and because a loathsome sight and a confused noise1 perhaps even mixed with the trumpet-flourishes of war-glory1 disturb their thinking1 and above all1 because they want to believe in the ,german character and because with this faith they would lose their strength4 ,do not find fault with these believers if they look from their distant aloofness and from the heights towards their ,promised ,land6 ,they fear those experiences1 to which the kindly disposed foreigner surrenders himself1 when he lives among the ,germans1 and must be surprised how little ,german life corresponds to those great individuals1 works and actions1 which1 in his kind disposition he has learned to revere as the true ,german character4 ,where the ,german cannot lift himself into the sublime he makes an impression less than the mediocre4 ,even the celebrated ,german scholarship1 in which a number of the most useful domestic and homely virtues such as faithfulness1 self-restriction1 industry1 moderation1 cleanliness appear transposed into a purer atmosphere and1 as it were1 transfigured1 is by no means the result of these virtues2 looked at closely1 the motive urging to unlimited knowledge appears in ,germany much more like a defect1 a gap1 than an abundance of forces1 it looks almost like the consequence of a needy formless atrophied life and even like a flight from the moral narrow-mindedness and malice to which the ,german without such diversions is subjected1 and which also in spite of that scholarship1 yea still within scholarship itself1 often break forth4 ,as the true virtuosi of philistinism the ,germans are at home in narrowness of life1 discerning and judging2 if any one will carry them above themselves into the sublime1 then they make themselves heavy as lead1 and as such lead-weights they hang to their truly great men1 in order to pull them down out of the ether to the level of their own necessitous indigence4 ,perhaps this ,philistine homeliness may be only the degeneration of a genuine ,german virtue--a profound submersion into the detail1 the minute1 the nearest and into the mysteries of the individual--but this virtue grown mouldy is now worse than the most open vice1 especially since one has now become conscious1 with gladness of the heart1 of this quality1 even to literary self-glorification4 ,now the ,educated among the proverbially so cultured ,germans and the ,philistines among the1 as everybody knows1 so uncultured ,germans shake hands in public and agree with one another concerning the way in which henceforth one will have to write1 compose poetry1 paint1 make music and even philosophise1 yea--rule1 so as neither to stand too much aloof from the culture of the one1 nor to give offence to the homeliness of the other4 ,this they call now ,the ,german ,culture of our times4 ,well1 it is only necessary to inquire after the characteristic by which that educated person is to be recognised2 now that we know that his foster-brother1 the ,german ,philistine1 makes himself known as such to all the world1 without bashfulness1 as it were1 after innocence is lost4 ,the educated person nowadays is educated above all historically1 by his historic consciousness he saves himself from the sublime in which the ,philistine succeeds by his homeliness4 ,no longer that enthusiasm which history inspires--as ,goethe was allowed to suppose--but just the blunting of all enthusiasm is now the goal of these admirers of the nil admirari1 when they try to conceive everything historically2 to them however we should exclaim3 ,ye are the fools of all centuries6 ,history will make to you only those confessions1 which you are worthy to receive4 ,the world has been at all times full of trivialities and nonentities2 to your historic hankering just these and only these unveil themselves4 ,by your thousands you may pounce upon an epoch--you will afterwards hunger as before and be allowed to boast of your sort of starved soundness4 ,illam ipsam quam iactant sanitatem non firmitate sed iciunio consequuntur4 7,dialogus de oratoribus1 cap4 #be47 ,history has not thought fit to tell you anything that is essential1 but scorning and invisible she stood by your side1 slipping into this one's hand some state proceedings1 into that one's an ambassadorial report1 into another's a date or an etymology or a pragmatic cobweb4 ,do you really believe yourself able to reckon up history like an addition sum1 and do you consider your common intellect and your mathematical education good enough for that8 ,how it must vex you to hear1 that others narrate things1 out of the best known periods1 which you will never conceive1 never6 ,if now to this education1 calling itself historic but destitute of enthusiasm1 and to the hostile ,philistine activity1 foaming with rage against all that is great1 is added that third brutal and excited company of those who race after ,fortune--then that in summa results in such a confused shrieking and such a limb-dislocating turmoil that the thinker with stopped-up ears and blindfolded eyes flees into the most solitary wilderness1--where he may see1 what those never will see1 where he must hear sounds which rise to him out of all the depths of nature and come down to him from the stars4 ,here he confers with the great problems floating towards him1 whose voices of course sound just as comfortless-awful1 as unhistoric-eternal4 ,the feeble person flees back from their cold breath1 and the calculating one runs right through them without perceiving them4 ,they deal worst1 however1 with the educated man who at times bestows great pains upon them4 ,to him these phantoms transform themselves into conceptual cobwebs and hollow sound-figures4 ,grasping after them he imagines he has philosophy2 in order to search for them he climbs about in the so-called history of philosophy--and when at last he has collected and piled up quite a cloud of such abstractions and stereotyped patterns1 then it may happen to him that a real thinker crosses his path and--puffs them away4 ,what a desperate annoyance indeed to meddle with philosophy as an educated person6 ,from time to time it is true it appears to him as if the impossible connection of philosophy with that which nowadays gives itself airs as ,german ,culture has become possible2 some mongrel dallies and ogles between the two spheres and confuses fantasy on this side and on the other4 ,meanwhile however one piece of advice is to be given to the ,germans1 if they do not wish to let themselves be confused4 ,they may put to themselves the question about everything that they now call ,culture3 is this the hoped-for ,german ,culture1 so serious and creative1 so redeeming for the ,german mind1 so purifying for the ,german virtues that their only philosopher in this century1 ,arthur ,schopenhauer1 should have to espouse its cause8 ,here you have the philosopher--now search for the ,culture proper to him6 ,and if you are able to divine what kind of culture that would have to be1 which would correspond to such a philosopher1 then you have1 in this divination1 already passed sentence on all your culture and on yourselves6 ,,philosophy ,,during ,,the ,,tragic ,,age ,,of ,,the ,,greeks 7#ahgc7 ,,preface 7,probably #ahgd7 ,if we know the aims of men who are strangers to us1 it is sufficient for us to approve of or condemn them as wholes4 ,those who stand nearer to us we judge according to the means by which they further their aims2 we often disapprove of their aims1 but love them for the sake of their means and the style of their volition4 ,now philosophical systems are absolutely true only to their founders1 to all later philosophers they are usually one big mistake1 and to feebler minds a sum of mistakes and truths2 at any rate if regarded as highest aim they are an error1 and in so far reprehensible4 ,therefore many disapprove of every philosopher1 because his aim is not theirs2 they are those whom ,i called strangers to us4 ,whoever on the contrary finds any pleasure at all in great men finds pleasure also in such systems1 be they ever so erroneous1 for they all have in them one point which is irrefutable1 a personal touch1 and colour2 one can use them in order to form a picture of the philosopher1 just as from a plant growing in a certain place one can form conclusions as to the soil4 ,that mode of life1 of viewing human affairs at any rate1 has existed once and is therefore possible2 the system is the growth in this soil or at least a part of this system4444 ,i narrate the history of those philosophers simplified3 ,i shall bring into relief only that point in every system which is a little bit of personality1 and belongs to that which is irrefutable1 and indiscussable1 which history has to preserve3 it is a first attempt to regain and recreate those natures by comparison1 and to let the polyphony of ,greek nature at least resound once again3 the task is1 to bring to light that which we must always love and revere and of which no later knowledge can rob us3 the great man4 ,,later ,,preface 7,towards the end of #ahgi7 ,this attempt to relate the history of the earlier ,greek philosophers distinguishes itself from similar attempts by its brevity4 ,this has been accomplished by mentioning but a small number of the doctrines of every philosopher1 i4e41 by incompleteness4 ,those doctrines1 however1 have been selected in which the personal element of the philosopher re-echoes most strongly2 whereas a complete enumeration of all possible propositions handed down to us--as is the custom in text-books--merely brings about one thing1 the absolute silencing of the personal element4 ,it is through this that those records become so tedious2 for in systems which have been refuted it is only this personal element that can still interest us1 for this alone is eternally irrefutable4 ,it is possible to shape the picture of a man out of three anecdotes4 ,i endeavour to bring into relief three anecdotes out of every system and abandon the remainder4 #a4 ,there are opponents of philosophy1 and one does well to listen to them2 especially if they dissuade the distempered heads of ,germans from metaphysics and on the other hand preach to them purification through the ,physis1 as ,goethe did1 or healing through ,music1 as ,wagner4 ,the physicians of the people condemn philosophy2 he1 therefore1 who wants to justify it1 must show to what purpose healthy nations use and have used philosophy4 ,if he can show that1 perhaps even the sick people will benefit by learning why philosophy is harmful just to them4 ,there are indeed good instances of a health which can exist without any philosophy or with quite a moderate1 almost a toying use of it2 thus the ,romans at their best period lived without philosophy4 ,but where is to be found the instance of a nation becoming diseased whom philosophy had restored to health8 ,whenever philosophy showed itself helping1 saving1 prophylactic1 it was with healthy people2 it made sick people still more ill4 ,if ever a nation was disintegrated and but loosely connected with the individuals1 never has philosophy bound these individuals closer to the whole4 ,if ever an individual was willing to stand aside and plant around himself the hedge of self-sufficiency1 philosophy was always ready to isolate him still more and to destroy him through isolation4 ,she is dangerous where she is not in her full right1 and it is only the health of a nation but not that of every nation which gives her this right4 ,let us now look around for the highest authority as to what constitutes the health of a nation4 ,i he ,greeks1 as the truly healthy nation1 have justified philosophy once for all by having philosophised2 and that indeed more than all other nations4 ,they could not even stop at the right time1 for still in their withered age they comported themselves as heated notaries of philosophy1 although they understood by it only the pious sophistries and the sacrosanct hair-splittings of ,christian dogmatics4 ,they themselves have much lessened their merit for barbarian posterity by not being able to stop at the right time1 because that posterity in its uninstructed and impetuous youth necessarily became entangled in those artfully woven nets and ropes4 ,on the contrary1 the ,greek knew how to begin at the right time1 and this lesson1 when one ought to begin philosophising1 they teach more distinctly than any other nation4 ,for it should not be begun when trouble comes as perhaps some presume who derive philosophy from moroseness2 no1 but in good fortune1 in mature manhood1 out of the midst of the fervent serenity of a brave and victorious man's estate4 ,the fact that the ,greeks philosophised at that time throws light on the nature of philosophy and her task as well as on the nature of the ,greeks themselves4 ,had they at that time been such commonsense and precocious experts and gayards as the learned ,philistine of our days perhaps imagines1 or had their life been only a state of voluptuous soaring1 chiming1 breathing and feeling1 as the unlearned visionary is pleased to assume1 then the spring of philosophy would not have come to light among them4 ,at the best there would have come forth a brook soon trickling away in the sand or evaporating into fogs1 but never that broad river flowing forth with the proud beat of its waves1 the river which we know as ,greek ,philosophy4 ,true1 it has been eagerly pointed out how much the ,greeks could find and learn abroad1 in the ,orient1 and how many different things they may easily have brought from there4 ,of course an odd spectacle resulted1 when certain scholars brought together the alleged masters from the ,orient and the possible disciples from ,greece1 and exhibited ,zarathustra near ,heraclitus1 the ,hindoos near the ,eleates1 the ,egyptians near ,empedocles1 or even ,anaxagoras among the ,jews and ,pythagoras among the ,chinese4 ,in detail little has been determined2 but we should in no way object to the general idea1 if people did not burden us with the conclusion that therefore ,philosophy had only been imported into ,greece and was not indigenous to the soil1 yea1 that she1 as something foreign1 had possibly ruined rather than improved the ,greek4 ,nothing is more foolish than to swear by the fact that the ,greeks had an aboriginal culture2 no1 they rather absorbed all the culture flourishing among other nations1 and they advanced so far1 just because they understood how to hurl the spear further from the very spot where another nation had let it rest4 ,they were admirable in the art of learning productively1 and so1 like them1 we ought to learn from our neighbours1 with a view to ,life not to pedantic knowledge1 using everything learnt as a foothold whence to leap high and still higher than our neighbour4 ,the questions as to the beginning of philosophy are quite negligible1 for everywhere in the beginning there is the crude1 the unformed1 the empty and the ugly2 and in all things only the higher stages come into consideration4 ,he who in the place of ,greek philosophy prefers to concern himself with that of ,egypt and ,persia1 because the latter are perhaps more original and certainly older1 proceeds just as ill-advisedly as those who cannot be at ease before they have traced back the ,greek mythology1 so grand and profound1 to such physical trivialities as sun1 lightning1 weather and fog1 as its prime origins1 and who fondly imagine they have rediscovered for instance in the restricted worship of the one celestial vault among the other ,indo-,germans a purer form of religion than the poly-theistic worship of the ,greek had been4 ,the road towards the beginning always leads into barbarism1 and he who is concerned with the ,greeks ought always to keep in mind the fact that the unsubdued thirst for knowledge in itself always barbarises just as much as the hatred of knowledge1 and that the ,greeks have subdued their inherently insatiable thirst for knowledge by their regard for ,life1 by an ideal need of ,life1--since they wished to live immediately that which they learnt4 ,the ,greeks also philosophised as men of culture and with the aims of culture1 and therefore saved themselves the trouble of inventing once again the elements of philosophy and knowledge out of some autochthonous conceit1 and with a will they at once set themselves to fill out1 enhance1 raise and purify these elements they had taken over in such a way1 that only now in a higher sense and in a purer sphere they became inventors4 ,for they discovered the typical philosopher's genius1 and the inventions of all posterity have added nothing essential4 ,every nation is put to shame if one points out such a wonderfully idealised company of philosophers as that of the early ,greek masters1 ,thales1 ,anaximander1 ,heraclitus1 ,parmenides1 ,anaxagoras1 ,empedocles1 ,democritus and ,socrates4 ,all those men are integral1 entire and self-contained1#a and hewn out of one stone4 ,severe necessity exists between their thinking and their character4 ,they are not bound by any convention1 because at that time no professional class of philosophers and scholars existed4 ,they all stand before us in magnificent solitude as the only ones who then devoted their life exclusively to knowledge4 ,they all possess the virtuous energy of the ,ancients1 whereby they excel all the later philosophers in finding their own form and in perfecting it by metamorphosis in its most minute details and general aspect4 ,for they were met by no helpful and facilitating fashion4 ,thus together they form what ,schopenhauer1 in opposition to the ,republic of ,scholars1 has called a ,republic of ,geniuses2 one giant calls to another across the arid intervals of ages1 and1 undisturbed by a wanton1 noisy race of dwarfs1 creeping about beneath them1 the sublime intercourse of spirits continues4 ,of this sublime intercourse of spirits ,i have resolved to relate those items which our modern hardness of hearing might perhaps hear and understand2 that means certainly the least of all4 ,it seems to me that those old sages from ,thales to ,socrates have discussed in that intercourse1 although in its most general aspect1 everything that constitutes for our contemplation the peculiarly ,hellenic4 ,in their intercourse1 as already in their personalities1 they express distinctly the great features of ,greek genius of which the whole of ,greek history is a shadowy impression1 a hazy copy1 which consequently speaks less clearly4 ,if we could rightly interpret the total life of the ,greek nation1 we should ever find reflected only that picture which in her highest geniuses shines with more resplendent colours4 ,even the first experience of philosophy on ,greek soil1 the sanction of the ,seven ,sages is a distinct and unforgettable line in the picture of the ,hellenic4 ,other nations have their ,saints1 the ,greeks have ,sages4 ,rightly it has been said that a nation is characterised not only by her great men but rather by the manner in which she recognises and honours them4 ,in other ages the philosopher is an accidental solitary wanderer in the most hostile environment1 either slinking through or pushing himself through with clenched fists4 ,with the ,greek however the philosopher is not accidental2 when in the ,sixth and ,fifth centuries amidst the most frightful dangers and seductions of secularisation he appears and as it were steps forth from the cave of ,trophonios into the very midst of luxuriance1 the discoverers' happiness1 the wealth and the sensuousness of the ,greek colonies1 then we divine that he comes as a noble warner for the same purpose for which in those centuries ,tragedy was born and which the ,orphic mysteries in their grotesque hieroglyphics give us to understand4 ,the opinion of those philosophers on ,life and ,existence altogether means so much more than a modern opinion because they had before themselves ,life in a luxuriant perfection1 and because with them1 unlike us1 the sense of the thinker was not muddled by the disunion engendered by the wish for freedom1 beauty1 fulness of life and the love for truth that only asks3 ,what is the good of ,life at all8 ,the mission which the philosopher has to discharge within a real ,culture1 fashioned in a homogeneous style1 cannot be clearly conjectured out of our circumstances and experiences for the simple reason that we have no such culture4 ,no1 it is only a ,culture like the ,greek which can answer the question as to that task of the philosopher1 only such a ,culture can1 as ,i said before1 justify philosophy at all2 because such a ,culture alone knows and can demonstrate why and how the philosopher is not an accidental1 chance wanderer driven now hither1 now thither4 ,there is a steely necessity which fetters the philosopher to a true ,culture3 but what if this ,culture does not exist8 ,then the philosopher is an incalculable and therefore terror-inspiring comet1 whereas in the favourable case1 he shines as the central star in the solar-system of culture4 ,it is for this reason that the ,greeks justify the philosopher1 because with them he is no comet4 #a ,cf4 ,napoleon's word about ,goethe3 ,voil un homme6--,,tr4 #b ,after such contemplations it will be accepted without offence if ,i speak of the pre-,platonic philosophers as of a homogeneous company1 and devote this paper to them exclusively4 ,something quite new begins with ,plato2 or it might be said with equal justice that in comparison with that ,republic of ,geniuses from ,thales to ,socrates1 the philosophers since ,plato lack something essential4 ,whoever wants to express himself unfavourably about those older masters may call them one-sided1 and their ,epigones1 with ,plato as head1 many-sided4 ,yet it would be more just and unbiassed to conceive of the latter as philosophic hybrid-characters1 of the former as the pure types4 ,plato himself is the first magnificent hybrid-character1 and as such finds expression as well in his philosophy as in his personality4 ,in his ideology are united ,socratian1 ,pythagorean1 and ,heraclitean elements1 and for this reason it is no typically pure phenomenon4 ,as man1 too1 ,plato mingles the features of the royally secluded1 all-sufficing ,heraclitus1 of the melancholy-compassionate and legislatory ,pythagoras and of the psycho-expert dialectician ,socrates4 ,all later philosophers are such hybrid-characters2 wherever something one-sided does come into prominence with them as in the case of the ,cynics1 it is not type but caricature4 ,much more important however is the fact that they are founders of sects and that the sects founded by them are all institutions in direct opposition to the ,hellenic culture and the unity of its style prevailing up to that time4 ,in their way they seek a redemption1 but only for the individuals or at the best for groups of friends and disciples closely connected with them4 ,the activity of the older philosophers tends1 although they were unconscious of it1 towards a cure and purification on a large scale2 the mighty course of ,greek culture is not to be stopped2 awful dangers are to be removed out of the way of its current2 the philosopher protects and defends his native country4 ,now1 since ,plato1 he is in exile and conspires against his fatherland4 ,it is a real misfortune that so very little of those older philosophic masters has come down to us and that all complete works of theirs are withheld from us4 ,involuntarily1 on account of that loss1 we measure them according to wrong standards and allow ourselves to be influenced unfavourably towards them by the mere accidental fact that ,plato and ,aristotle never lacked appreciators and copyists4 ,some people presuppose a special providence for books1 a fatum libellorum2 such a providence however would at any rate be a very malicious one if it deemed it wise to withhold from us the works of ,heraclitus1 ,empedocles' wonderful poem1 and the writings of ,democritus1 whom the ancients put on a par with ,plato1 whom he even excels as far as ingenuity goes1 and as a substitute put into our hand ,stoics1 ,epicureans and ,cicero4 ,probably the most sublime part of ,greek thought and its expression in words is lost to us2 a fate which will not surprise the man who remembers the misfortunes of ,scotus ,erigena or of ,pascal1 and who considers that even in this enlightened century the first edition of ,schopenhauer's ,the ,world ,as ,will ,and ,idea became waste-paper4 ,if somebody will presuppose a special fatalistic power with respect to such things he may do so and say with ,goethe3 ,let no one complain about and grumble at things vile and mean1 they are the real rulers1--however much this be gainsaid6 ,in particular they are more powerful than the power of truth4 ,mankind very rarely produces a good book in which with daring freedom is intonated the battle-song of truth1 the song of philosophic heroism2 and yet whether it is to live a century longer or to crumble and moulder into dust and ashes1 depends on the most miserable accidents1 on the sudden mental eclipse of men's heads1 on superstitious convulsions and antipathies1 finally on fingers not too fond of writing or even on eroding bookworms and rainy weather4 ,but we will not lament but rather take the advice of the reproving and consolatory words which ,hamann addresses to scholars who lament over lost works4 ,would not the artist who succeeded in throwing a lentil through the eye of a needle have sufficient1 with a bushel of lentils1 to practise his acquired skill8 ,one would like to put this question to all scholars who do not know how to use the works of the ,ancients any better than that man used his lentils4 ,it might be added in our case that not one more word1 anecdote1 or date needed to be transmitted to us than has been transmitted1 indeed that even much less might have been preserved for us and yet we should have been able to establish the general doctrine that the ,greeks justify philosophy4 ,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 philosophy1 even if the latter were proclaimed by the very ,genius of ,truth in the streets and market-places4 ,she rather remains at such a time the learned monologue of the solitary rambler1 the accidental booty of the individual1 the hidden closet-secret or the innocuous chatter between academic senility and childhood4 ,nobody dare venture to fulfil in himself the law of philosophy1 nobody lives philosophically1 with that simple manly faith which compelled an ,ancient1 wherever he was1 whatever he did1 to deport himself as a ,stoic1 when he had once pledged his faith to the ,stoa4 ,all modern philosophising is limited politically and regulated by the police to learned semblance4 ,thanks to governments1 churches1 academies1 customs1 fashions1 and the cowardice of man1 it never gets beyond the sigh3 ,if only6444 or beyond the knowledge3 ,once upon a time there was444 ,philosophy is without rights2 therefore modern man1 if he were at all courageous and conscientious1 ought to condemn her and perhaps banish her with words similar to those by which ,plato banished the tragic poets from his ,state4 ,of course there would be left a reply for her1 as there remained to those poets against ,plato4 ,if one once compelled her to speak out she might say perhaps3 ,miserable ,nation6 ,is it my fault if among you ,i am on the tramp1 like a fortune teller through the land1 and must hide and disguise myself1 as if ,i were a great sinner and ye my judges8 ,just look at my sister1 ,art6 ,it is with her as with me2 we have been cast adrift among the ,barbarians and no longer know how to save ourselves4 ,here we are lacking1 it is true1 every good right2 but the judges before whom we find justice judge you also and will tell you3 ,first acquire a culture2 then you shall experience what ,philosophy can and will do4-- #c4 ,greek philosophy seems to begin with a preposterous fancy1 with the proposition that water is the origin and mother-womb of all things4 ,is it really necessary to stop there and become serious8 ,yes1 and for three reasons3 ,firstly1 because the proposition does enunciate something about the origin of things2 secondly1 because it does so without figure and fable2 thirdly and lastly1 because in it is contained1 although only in the chrysalis state1 the idea3 ,everything is one4 ,the first mentioned reason leaves ,thales still in the company of religious and superstitious people1 the second however takes him out of this company and shows him to us as a natural philosopher1 but by virtue of the third1 ,thales becomes the first ,greek philosopher4 ,if he had said3 ,out of water earth is evolved1 we should only have a scientific hypothesis2 a false one1 though nevertheless difficult to refute4 ,but he went beyond the scientific4 ,in his presentation of this concept of unity through the hypothesis of water1 ,thales has not surmounted the low level of the physical discernments of his time1 but at the best overleapt them4 ,the deficient and unorganised observations of an empiric nature which ,thales had made as to the occurrence and transformations of water1 or to be more exact1 of the ,moist1 would not in the least have made possible or even suggested such an immense generalisation4 ,that which drove him to this generalisation was a metaphysical dogma1 which had its origin in a mystic intuition and which together with the ever renewed endeavours to express it better1 we find in all philosophies1--the proposition3 ,everything is one6 ,how despotically such a faith deals with all empiricism is worthy of note2 with ,thales especially one can learn how ,philosophy has behaved at all times1 when she wanted to get beyond the hedges of experience to her magically attracting goal4 ,on light supports she leaps in advance2 hope and divination wing her feet4 ,calculating reason too1 clumsily pants after her and seeks better supports in its attempt to reach that alluring goal1 at which its divine companion has already arrived4 ,one sees in imagination two wanderers by a wild forest-stream which carries with it rolling stones2 the one1 light-footed1 leaps over it using the stones and swinging himself upon them ever further and further1 though they precipitously sink into the depths behind him4 ,the other stands helpless there most of the time2 he has first to build a pathway which will bear his heavy1 weary step2 sometimes that cannot be done and then no god will help him across the stream4 ,what therefore carries philosophical thinking so quickly to its goal8 ,does it distinguish itself from calculating and measuring thought only by its more rapid flight through large spaces8 ,no1 for a strange illogical power wings the foot of philosophical thinking2 and this power is ,fancy4 ,lifted by the latter1 philosophical thinking leaps from possibility to possibility1 and these for the time being are taken as certainties2 and now and then even whilst on the wing it gets hold of certainties4 ,an ingenious presentiment shows them to the flier2 demonstrable certainties are divined at a distance to be at this point4 ,especially powerful is the strength of ,fancy in the lightning-like seizing and illuminating of similarities2 afterwards reflection applies its standards and models and seeks to substitute the similarities by equalities1 that which was seen side by side by causalities4 ,but though this should never be possible1 even in the case of ,thales the indemonstrable philosophising has yet its value2 although all supports are broken when ,logic and the rigidity of ,empiricism want to get across to the proposition3 ,everything is water2 yet still there is always1 after the demolition of the scientific edifice1 a remainder1 and in this very remainder lies a moving force and as it were the hope of future fertility4 ,of course ,i do not mean that the thought in any restriction or attenuation1 or as allegory1 still retains some kind of truth2 as if1 for instance1 one might imagine the creating artist standing near a waterfall1 and seeing in the forms which leap towards him1 an artistically prefiguring game of the water with human and animal bodies1 masks1 plants1 rocks1 nymphs1 griffins1 and with all existing types in general1 so that to him the proposition3 ,everything is water1 is confirmed4 ,the thought of ,thales has rather its value--even after the perception of its indemonstrableness--in the very fact1 that it was meant unmythically and unallegorically4 ,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 gods1 and by contemplating the whole of nature as if it were only a disguise1 masquerade and metamorphosis of these god-men4 ,man was to them the truth1 and essence of things2 everything else mere phenomenon and deceiving play4 ,for that very reason they experienced incredible difficulty in conceiving of ideas as ideas4 ,whilst with the moderns the most personal item sublimates itself into abstractions1 with them the most abstract notions became personified4 ,thales1 however1 said1 ,not man but water is the reality of things 2 he began to believe in nature1 in so far that he at least believed in water4 ,as a mathematician and astronomer he had grown cold towards everything mythical and allegorical1 and even if he did not succeed in becoming disillusioned as to the pure abstraction1 ,everything is one1 and although he left off at a physical expression he was nevertheless among the ,greeks of his time a surprising rarity4 ,perhaps the exceedingly conspicuous ,orpheans possessed in a still higher degree than he the faculty of conceiving abstractions and of thinking unplastically2 only they did not succeed in expressing these abstractions except in the form of the allegory4 ,also ,pherecydes of ,syrus who is a contemporary of ,thales and akin to him in many physical conceptions hovers with the expression of the latter in that middle region where ,allegory is wedded to ,mythos1 so that he dares1 for example1 to compare the earth with a winged oak1 which hangs in the air with spread pinions and which ,zeus bedecks1 after the defeat of ,kronos1 with a magnificent robe of honour1 into which with his own hands ,zeus embroiders lands1 water and rivers4 ,in contrast with such gloomy allegorical philosophising scarcely to be translated into the realm of the comprehensible1 ,thales' are the works of a creative master who began to look into ,nature's depths without fantastic fabling4 ,if as it is true he used ,science and the demonstrable but soon out-leapt them1 then this likewise is a typical characteristic of the philosophical genius4 ,the ,greek word which designates the ,sage belongs etymologically to sapio1 ,i taste1 sapiens1 the tasting one1 sisyphos1 the man of the most delicate taste2 the peculiar art of the philosopher therefore consists1 according to the opinion of the people1 in a delicate selective judgment by taste1 by discernment1 by significant differentiation4 ,he is not prudent1 if one calls him prudent1 who in his own affairs finds out the good2 ,aristotle rightly says3 ,that which ,thales and ,anaxagoras know1 people will call unusual1 astounding1 difficult1 divine but--useless1 since human possessions were of no concern to those two4 ,through thus selecting and precipitating the unusual1 astounding1 difficult1 and divine1 ,philosophy marks the boundary-lines dividing her from ,science in the same way as she does it from ,prudence by the emphasising of the useless4 ,science without thus selecting1 without such delicate taste1 pounces upon everything knowable1 in the blind covetousness to know all at any price2 philosophical thinking however is always on the track of the things worth knowing1 on the track of the great and most important discernments4 ,now the idea of greatness is changeable1 as well in the moral as in the sthetic realm1 thus ,philosophy begins with a legislation with respect to greatness1 she becomes a ,nomenclator4 ,that is great1 she says1 and therewith she raises man above the blind1 untamed covetousness of his thirst for knowledge4 ,by the idea of greatness she assuages this thirst3 and it is chiefly by this1 that she contemplates the greatest discernment1 that of the essence and kernel of things1 as attainable and attained4 ,when ,thales says1 ,everything is water1 man is startled up out of his worm-like mauling of and crawling about among the individual sciences2 he divines the last solution of things and masters through this divination the common perplexity of the lower grades of knowledge4 ,the philosopher tries to make the total-chord of the universe re-echo within himself and then to project it into ideas outside himself3 whilst he is contemplative like the creating artist1 sympathetic like the religionist1 looking out for ends and causalities like the scientific man1 whilst he feels himself swell up to the macrocosm1 he still retains the circumspection to contemplate himself coldly as the reflex of the world2 he retains that cool-headedness1 which the dramatic artist possesses1 when he transforms himself into other bodies1 speaks out of them1 and yet knows how to project this transformation outside himself into written verses4 ,what the verse is to the poet1 dialectic thinking is to the philosopher2 he snatches at it in order to hold fast his enchantment1 in order to petrify it4 ,and just as words and verse to the dramatist are only stammerings in a foreign language1 to tell in it what he lived1 what he saw1 and what he can directly promulgate by gesture and music only1 thus the expression of every deep philosophical intuition by means of dialectics and scientific reflection is1 it is true1 on the one hand the only means to communicate what has been seen1 but on the other hand it is a paltry means1 and at the bottom a metaphorical1 absolutely inexact translation into a different sphere and language4 ,thus ,thales saw the ,unity of the ,existent1 and when he wanted to communicate this idea he talked of water4 #d ,whilst the general type of the philosopher in the picture of ,thales is set off rather hazily1 the picture of his great successor already speaks much more distinctly to us4 ,anaximander of ,milet1 the first philosophical author of the ,ancients1 writes in the very way that the typical philosopher will always write as long as he is not alienated from ingenuousness and navet by odd claims3 in a grand lapidarian style of writing1 sentence for sentence 444 a witness of a new inspiration1 and an expression of the sojourning in sublime contemplations4 ,the thought and its form are milestones on the path towards the highest wisdom4 ,with such a lapidarian emphasis ,anaximander once said3 ,whence things originated1 thither1 according to necessity1 they must return and perish2 for they must pay penalty and be judged for their injustices according to the order of time4 ,enigmatical utterance of a true pessimist1 oracular inscription on the boundary-stone of ,greek philosophy1 how shall we explain thee8 ,the only serious moralist of our century in the ,parergis 7,vol4 ii41 chap4 #ab1 ,additional ,remarks on ,the ,doctrine about the ,suffering in the ,world1 ,appendix of ,corresponding ,passages7 urges on us a similar contemplation3 ,the right standard by which to judge every human being is that he really is a being who ought not to exist at all1 but who is expiating his existence by manifold forms of suffering and death3--,what can one expect from such a being8 ,are we not all sinners condemned to death8 ,we expiate our birth firstly by our life and secondly by our death4 ,he who in the physiognomy of our universal human lot reads this doctrine and already recognises the fundamental bad quality of every human life1 in the fact that none can stand a very close and careful contemplation--although our time1 accustomed to the biographical epidemic1 seems to think otherwise and more loftily about the dignity of man2 he who1 like ,schopenhauer1 on the heights of the ,indian breezes has heard the sacred word about the moral value of existence1 will be kept with difficulty from making an extremely anthropomorphic metaphor and from generalizing that melancholy doctrine--at first only limited to human life--and applying it by transmission to the general character of all existence4 ,it may not be very logical1 it is however at any rate very human and moreover quite in harmony with the philosophical leaping described above1 now with ,anaximander to consider all ,becoming as a punishable emancipation from eternal ,being1 as a wrong that is to be atoned for by destruction4 ,everything that has once come into existence also perishes1 whether we think of human life or of water or of heat and cold2 everywhere where definite qualities are to be noticed1 we are allowed to prophesy the extinction of these qualities--according to the all-embracing proof of experience4 ,thus a being that possesses definite qualities and consists of them1 can never be the origin and principle of things2 the veritable ens1 the ,existent1 ,anaximander concluded1 cannot possess any definite qualities1 otherwise1 like all other things1 it would necessarily have originated and perished4 ,in order that ,becoming may not cease1 the ,primordial-being must be indefinite4 ,the immortality and eternity of the ,primordial-being lies not in an infiniteness and inexhaustibility--as usually the expounders of ,anaximander presuppose--but in this1 that it lacks the definite qualities which lead to destruction1 for which reason it bears also its name3 ,the ,indefinite4 ,the thus labelled ,primordial-being is superior to all ,becoming and for this very reason it guarantees the eternity and unimpeded course of ,becoming4 ,this last unity in that ,indefinite1 the mother-womb of all things1 can1 it is true1 be designated only negatively by man1 as something to which no predicate out of the existing world of ,becoming can be allotted1 and might be considered a peer to the ,kantian ,thing-in-itself4 ,of course he who is able to wrangle persistently with others as to what kind of thing that primordial substance really was1 whether perhaps an intermediate thing between air and water1 or perhaps between air and fire1 has not understood our philosopher at all2 this is likewise to be said about those1 who seriously ask themselves1 whether ,anaximander had thought of his primordial substance as a mixture of all existing substances4 ,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 physical2 we must direct our gaze towards that first stated lapidarian proposition4 ,when on the contrary he saw a sum of wrongs to be expiated in the plurality of things that have become1 then he1 as the first ,greek1 with daring grasp caught up the tangle of the most profound ethical problem4 ,how can anything perish that has a right to exist8 ,whence that restless ,becoming and giving-birth1 whence that expression of painful distortion on the face of ,nature1 whence the never-ending dirge in all realms of existence8 ,out of this world of injustice1 of audacious apostasy from the primordial-unity of things ,anaximander flees into a metaphysical castle1 leaning out of which he turns his gaze far and wide in order at last1 after a pensive silence1 to address to all beings this question3 ,what is your existence worth8 ,and if it is worth nothing why are you there8 ,by your guilt1 ,i observe1 you sojourn in this world4 ,you will have to expiate it by death4 ,look how your earth fades2 the seas decrease and dry up1 the marine-shell on the mountain shows you how much already they have dried up2 fire destroys your world even now1 finally it will end in smoke and ashes4 ,but again and again such a world of transitoriness will ever build itself up2 who shall redeem you from the curse of ,becoming8 ,not every kind of life may have been welcome to a man who put such questions1 whose upward-soaring thinking continually broke the empiric ropes1 in order to take at once to the highest1 superlunary flight4 ,willingly we believe tradition1 that he walked along in especially dignified attire and showed a truly tragic hauteur in his gestures and habits of life4 ,he lived as he wrote2 he spoke as solemnly as he dressed himself1 he raised his hand and placed his foot as if this existence was a tragedy1 and he had been born in order to co-operate in that tragedy by playing the rle of hero4 ,in all that he was the great model of ,empedocles4 ,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 him4 ,his thought also emigrated and founded colonies2 in ,ephesus and in ,elea they could not get rid of him2 and if they could not resolve upon staying at the spot where he stood1 they nevertheless knew that they had been led there by him1 whence they now prepared to proceed without him4 ,thales shows the need of simplifying the empire of plurality1 and of reducing it to a mere expansion or disguise of the one single existing quality1 water4 ,anaximander goes beyond him with two steps4 ,firstly he puts the question to himself3 ,how1 if there exists an eternal ,unity at all1 is that ,plurality possible8 and he takes the answer out of the contradictory1 self-devouring and denying character of this ,plurality4 ,the existence of this ,plurality becomes a moral phenomenon to him2 it is not justified1 it expiates itself continually through destruction4 ,but then the questions occur to him3 ,yet why has not everything that has become perished long ago1 since1 indeed1 quite an eternity of time has already gone by8 ,whence the ceaseless current of the ,river of ,becoming8 ,he can save himself from these questions only by mystic possibilities3 the eternal ,becoming can have its origin only in the eternal ,being1 the conditions for that apostasy from that eternal ,being to a ,becoming in injustice are ever the same1 the constellation of things cannot help itself being thus fashioned1 that no end is to be seen of that stepping forth of the individual being out of the lap of the ,indefinite4 ,at this ,anaximander stayed2 that is1 he remained within the deep shadows which like gigantic spectres were lying on the mountain range of such a world-perception4 ,the more one wanted to approach the problem of solving how out of the ,indefinite the ,definite1 out of the ,eternal the ,temporal1 out of the ,just the ,unjust could by secession ever originate1 the darker the night became4---- #e ,towards the midst of this mystic night1 in which ,anaximander's problem of the ,becoming was wrapped up1 ,heraclitus of ,ephesus approached and illuminated it by a divine flash of lightning4 ,i contemplate the ,becoming1 he exclaimed1--and nobody has so attentively watched this eternal wave-surging and rhythm of things4 ,and what do ,i behold8 ,lawfulness1 infallible certainty1 ever equal paths of ,justice1 condemning ,erinyes behind all transgressions of the laws1 the whole world the spectacle of a governing justice and of demoniacally omnipresent natural forces subject to justice's sway4 ,i do not behold the punishment of that which has become1 but the justification of ,becoming4 ,when has sacrilege1 when has apostasy manifested itself in inviolable forms1 in laws esteemed sacred8 ,where injustice sways1 there is caprice1 disorder1 irregularity1 contradiction2 where however ,law and ,zeus' daughter1 ,dike1 rule alone1 as in this world1 how could the sphere of guilt1 of expiation1 of judgment1 and as it were the place of execution of all condemned ones be there8 ,from this intuition ,heraclitus took two coherent negations1 which are put into the right light only by a comparison with the propositions of his predecessor4 ,firstly1 he denied the duality of two quite diverse worlds1 into the assumption of which ,anaximander had been pushed2 he no longer distinguished a physical world from a metaphysical1 a realm of definite qualities from a realm of indefinable indefiniteness4 ,now after this first step he could neither be kept back any longer from a still greater audacity of denying3 he denied ,being altogether4 ,for this one world which was left to him1--shielded all round by eternal1 unwritten laws1 flowing up and down in the brazen beat of rhythm1--shows nowhere persistence1 indestructibility1 a bulwark in the stream4 ,louder than ,anaximander1 ,heraclitus exclaimed3 ,i see nothing but ,becoming4 ,be not deceived6 ,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 ,becoming and ,passing4 ,you need names for things1 just as if they had a rigid permanence1 but the very river in which you bathe a second time is no longer the same one which you entered before4 ,heraclitus has as his royal property the highest power of intuitive conception1 whereas towards the other mode of conception which is consummated by ideas and logical combinations1 that is towards reason1 he shows himself cool1 apathetic1 even hostile1 and he seems to derive a pleasure when he is able to contradict reason by means of a truth gained intuitively1 and this he does in such propositions as3 ,everything has always its opposite within itself1 so fearlessly that ,aristotle before the tribunal of ,reason accuses him of the highest crime1 of having sinned against the law of opposition4 ,intuitive representation however embraces two things3 firstly1 the present1 motley1 changing world1 pressing on us in all experiences1 secondly1 the conditions by means of which alone any experience of this world becomes possible3 time and space4 ,for these are able to be intuitively apprehended1 purely in themselves and independent of any experience2 i4e41 they can be perceived1 although they are without definite contents4 ,if now ,heraclitus considered time in this fashion1 dissociated from all experiences1 he had in it the most instructive monogram of all that which falls within the realm of intuitive conception4 ,just as he conceived of time1 so also for instance did ,schopenhauer1 who repeatedly says of it3 that in it every instant exists only in so far as it has annihilated the preceding one1 its father1 in order to be itself effaced equally quickly2 that past and future are as unreal as any dream2 that the present is only the dimensionless and unstable boundary between the two2 that however1 like time1 so space1 and again like the latter1 so also everything that is simultaneously in space and time1 has only a relative existence1 only through and for the sake of a something else1 of the same kind as itself1 i4e41 existing only under the same limitations4 ,this truth is in the highest degree self-evident1 accessible to everyone1 and just for that very reason1 abstractly and rationally1 it is only attained with great difficulty4 ,whoever has this truth before his eyes must however also proceed at once to the next ,heraclitean consequence and say that the whole essence of actuality is in fact activity1 and that for actuality there is no other kind of existence and reality1 as ,schopenhauer has likewise expounded 7,the ,world ,as ,will ,and ,idea1 ,vol4 ,i41 ,bk4 ,i1 sec4 #d73 ,only as active does it fill space and time3 its action upon the immediate object determines the perception in which alone it exists3 the effect of the action of any material object upon any other1 is known only in so far as the latter acts upon the immediate object in a different way from that in which it acted before2 it consists in this alone4 ,cause and effect thus constitute the whole nature of matter2 its true being is its action4 ,the totality of everything material is therefore very appropriately called in ,german ,wirklichkeit 7actuality7--a word which is far more expressive than ,realitt 7reality74#b ,that upon which actuality acts is always matter2 actuality's whole ',being' and essence therefore consist only in the orderly change1 which one part of it causes in another1 and is therefore wholly relative1 according to a relation which is valid only within the boundary of actuality1 as in the case of time and space4 ,the eternal and exclusive ,becoming1 the total instability of all reality and actuality1 which continually works and becomes and never is1 as ,heraclitus teaches--is an awful and appalling conception1 and in its effects most nearly related to that sensation1 by which during an earthquake one loses confidence in the firmly-grounded earth4 ,it required an astonishing strength to translate this effect into its opposite1 into the sublime1 into happy astonishment4 ,heraclitus accomplished this through an observation of the proper course of all ,becoming and ,passing1 which he conceived of under the form of polarity1 as the divergence of a force into two qualitatively different1 opposite actions1 striving after reunion4 ,a quality is set continually at variance with itself and separates itself into its opposites3 these opposites continually strive again one towards another4 ,the common people of course think to recognise something rigid1 completed1 consistent2 but the fact of the matter is that at any instant1 bright and dark1 sour and sweet are side by side and attached to one another like two wrestlers of whom sometimes the one succeeds1 sometimes the other4 ,according to ,heraclitus honey is at the same time sweet and bitter1 and the world itself an amphora whose contents constantly need stirring up4 ,out of the war of the opposites all ,becoming originates2 the definite and to us seemingly persistent qualities express only the momentary predominance of the one fighter1 but with that the war is not at an end2 the wrestling continues to all eternity4 ,everything happens according to this struggle1 and this very struggle manifests eternal justice4 ,it is a wonderful conception1 drawn from the purest source of ,hellenism1 which considers the struggle as the continual sway of a homogeneous1 severe justice bound by eternal laws4 ,only a ,greek was able to consider this conception as the fundament of a ,cosmodicy2 it is ,hesiod's good ,eris transfigured into the cosmic principle1 it is the idea of a contest1 an idea held by individual ,greeks and by their ,state1 and translated out of the gymnasia and palstra1 out of the artistic agonistics1 out of the struggle of the political parties and of the towns into the most general principle1 so that the machinery of the universe is regulated by it4 ,just as every ,greek fought as though he alone were in the right1 and as though an absolutely sure standard of judicial opinion could at any instant decide whither victory is inclining1 thus the qualities wrestle one with another1 according to inviolable laws and standards which are inherent in the struggle4 ,the ,things themselves in the permanency of which the limited intellect of man and animal believes1 do not exist at all2 they are as the fierce flashing and fiery sparkling of drawn swords1 as the stars of ,victory rising with a radiant resplendence in the battle of the opposite qualities4 ,that struggle which is peculiar to all ,becoming1 that eternal interchange of victory is again described by ,schopenhauer3 7,the ,world ,as ,will ,and ,idea1 ,vol4 ,i41 ,bk4 #b1 sec4 #bg7 ,the permanent matter must constantly change its form2 for under the guidance of causality1 mechanical1 physical1 chemical1 and organic phenomena1 eagerly striving to appear1 wrest the matter from each other1 for each desires to reveal its own ,idea4 ,this strife may be followed up through the whole of nature2 indeed nature exists only through it4 ,the following pages give the most noteworthy illustrations of this struggle1 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 itself2 it is to him a feasting on itself on the part of this dismal1 dull impulse1 as a phenomenon on the whole horrible and not at all making for happiness4 ,the arena and the object of this struggle is ,matter1--which some natural forces alternately endeavour to disintegrate and build up again at the expense of other natural forces1--as also ,space and ,time1 the union of which through causality is this very matter4 #b ,mira in quibusdam rebus verborum proprietas est1 et consuetudo sermonis antiqui qudam efficacissimis notis signat 7,seneca1 ,epist4 #ha74--,,tr4 #f ,whilst the imagination of ,heraclitus measured the restlessly moving universe1 the actuality 7,wirklichkeit71 with the eye of the happy spectator1 who sees innumerable pairs wrestling in joyous combat entrusted to the superintendence of severe umpires1 a still higher presentiment seized him1 he no longer could contemplate the wrestling pairs and the umpires1 separated one from another2 the very umpires seemed to fight1 and the fighters seemed to be their own judges--yea1 since at the bottom he conceived only of the one ,justice eternally swaying1 he dared to exclaim3 ,the contest of ,the ,many is itself pure justice4 ,and after all3 ,the ,one is ,the ,many4 ,for what are all those qualities according to their nature8 ,are they immortal gods8 ,are they separate beings working for themselves from the beginning and without end8 ,and if the world which we see knows only ,becoming and ,passing but no ,permanence1 should perhaps those qualities constitute a differently fashioned metaphysical world1 true1 not a world of unity as ,anaximander sought behind the fluttering veil of plurality1 but a world of eternal and essential pluralities8 ,is it possible that however violently he had denied such duality1 ,heraclitus has after all by a round-about way accidentally got into the dual cosmic order1 an order with an ,olympus of numerous immortal gods and demons1--viz41 many realities1--and with a human world1 which sees only the dust-cloud of the ,olympic struggle and the flashing of divine spears1--i4e41 only a ,becoming8 ,anaximander had fled just from these definite qualities into the lap of the metaphysical ,indefinite2 because the former became and passed1 he had denied them a true and essential existence2 however should it not seem now as if the ,becoming is only the looming-into-view of a struggle of eternal qualities8 ,when we speak of the ,becoming1 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 ,becoming1 but only a co-existing of many true increate indestructible realities8 ,these are ,heraclitean loop-holes and labyrinths2 he exclaims once again3 ,the ',one' is the ',many'4 ,the many perceptible qualities are neither eternal entities1 nor phantasmata of our senses 7,anaxagoras conceives them later on as the former1 ,parmenides as the latter71 they are neither rigid1 sovereign ,being nor fleeting ,appearance hovering in human minds4 ,the third possibility which alone was left to ,heraclitus nobody will be able to divine with dialectic sagacity and as it were by calculation1 for what he invented here is a rarity even in the realm of mystic incredibilities and unexpected cosmic metaphors4--,the world is the ,game of ,zeus1 or expressed more physically1 the game of fire with itself1 the ,one is only in this sense at the same time the ,many4-- ,in order to elucidate in the first place the introduction of fire as a world-shaping force1 ,i recall how ,anaximander had further developed the theory of water as the origin of things4 ,placing confidence in the essential part of ,thales' theory1 and strengthening and adding to the latter's observations1 ,anaximander however was not to be convinced that before the water and1 as it were1 after the water there was no further stage of quality3 no1 to him out of the ,warm and the ,cold the ,moist seemed to form itself1 and the ,warm and the ,cold therefore were supposed to be the preliminary stages1 the still more original qualities4 ,with their issuing forth from the primordial existence of the ,indefinite1 ,becoming begins4 ,heraclitus who as physicist subordinated himself to the importance of ,anaximander1 explains to himself this ,anaximandrian ,warm as the respiration1 the warm breath1 the dry vapours1 in short as the fiery element3 about this fire he now enunciates the same as ,thales and ,anaximander had enunciated about the water3 that in innumerable metamorphoses it was passing along the path of ,becoming1 especially in the three chief aggregate stages as something ,warm1 ,moist1 and ,firm4 ,for water in descending is transformed into earth1 in ascending into fire3 or as ,heraclitus appears to have expressed himself more exactly3 from the sea ascend only the pure vapours which serve as food to the divine fire of the stars1 from the earth only the dark1 foggy ones1 from which the ,moist derives its nourishment4 ,the pure vapours are the transitional stage in the passing of sea into fire1 the impure the transitional stage in the passing of earth into water4 ,thus the two paths of metamorphosis of the fire run continuously side by side1 upwards and downwards1 to and fro1 from fire to water1 from water to earth1 from earth back again to water1 from water to fire4 ,whereas ,heraclitus is a follower of ,anaximander in the most important of these conceptions1 e4g41 that the fire is kept up by the evaporations1 or herein1 that out of the water is dissolved partly earth1 partly fire2 he is on the other hand quite independent and in opposition to ,anaximander in excluding the ,cold from the physical process1 whilst ,anaximander had put it side by side with the ,warm as having the same rights1 so as to let the ,moist originate out of both4 ,to do so1 was of course a necessity to ,heraclitus1 for if everything is to be fire1 then1 however many possibilities of its transformation might be assumed1 nothing can exist that would be the absolute antithesis to fire2 he has1 therefore1 probably interpreted only as a degree of the ,warm that which is called the ,cold1 and he could justify this interpretation without difficulty4 ,much more important than this deviation from the doctrine of ,anaximander is a further agreement2 he1 like the latter1 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-fire4 ,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 need2 the state of being completely swallowed up by the fire as satiety2 and now to us remains the question as to how he understood and named the newly awakening impulse for world-creation1 the pouring-out-of-itself into the forms of plurality4 ,the ,greek proverb seems to come to our assistance with the thought that satiety gives birth to crime 7the ,hybris7 and one may indeed ask oneself for a minute whether perhaps ,heraclitus has derived that return to plurality out of the ,hybris4 ,let us just take this thought seriously3 in its light the face of ,heraclitus changes before our eyes1 the proud gleam of his eyes dies out1 a wrinkled expression of painful resignation1 of impotence becomes distinct1 it seems that we know why later antiquity called him the weeping philosopher4 ,is not the whole world-process now an act of punishment of the ,hybris8 ,the plurality the result of a crime8 ,the transformation of the pure into the impure1 the consequence of injustice8 ,is not the guilt now shifted into the essence of the things and indeed1 the world of ,becoming and of individuals accordingly exonerated from guilt2 yet at the same time are they not condemned for ever and ever to bear the consequences of guilt8 #g ,that dangerous word1 ,hybris1 is indeed the touchstone for every ,heraclitean2 here he may show whether he has understood or mistaken his master4 ,is there in this world3 ,guilt1 injustice1 contradiction1 suffering8 ,yes1 exclaims ,heraclitus1 but only for the limited human being1 who sees divergently and not convergently1 not for the contuitive god2 to him everything opposing converges into one harmony1 invisible it is true to the common human eye1 yet comprehensible to him who like ,heraclitus resembles the contemplative god4 ,before his fiery eye no drop of injustice is left in the world poured out around him1 and even that cardinal obstacle--how pure fire can take up its quarters in forms so impure--he masters by means of a sublime simile4 ,a ,becoming and ,passing1 a building and destroying1 without any moral bias1 in perpetual innocence is in this world only the play of the artist and of the child4 ,and similarly1 just as the child and the artist play1 the eternally living fire plays1 builds up and destroys1 in innocence--and this game the on plays with himself4 ,transforming himself into water and earth1 like a child he piles heaps of sand by the sea1 piles up and demolishes2 from time to time he recommences the game4 ,a moment of satiety1 then again desire seizes him1 as desire compels the artist to create4 ,not wantonness1 but the ever newly awakening impulse to play1 calls into life other worlds4 ,the child throws away his toys2 but soon he starts again in an innocent frame of mind4 ,as soon however as the child builds he connects1 joins and forms lawfully and according to an innate sense of order4 ,thus only is the world contemplated by the sthetic man1 who has learned from the artist and the genesis of the latter's work1 how the struggle of plurality can yet bear within itself law and justice1 how the artist stands contemplative above1 and working within the work of art1 how necessity and play1 antagonism and harmony must pair themselves for the procreation of the work of art4 ,who now will still demand from such a philosophy a system of ,ethics with the necessary imperatives--,thou ,shalt1--or even reproach ,heraclitus with such a deficiency4 ,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 garment1 a claim1 which up to the present every serious philosophy has rejected with due scorn4 ,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 ears1 their intellect in general is a bad witness when moist ooze fills their souls4 ,why that is so1 is not questioned any more than why fire becomes water and earth4 ,heraclitus is not compelled to prove 7as ,leibnitz was7 that this world was even the best of all2 it was sufficient for him that the world is the beautiful1 innocent play of the on4 ,man on the whole is to him even an irrational being1 with which the fact that in all his essence the law of all-ruling reason is fulfilled does lot clash4 ,he does not occupy a specially favoured position in nature1 whose highest phenomenon is not simple-minded man1 but fire1 for instance1 as stars4 ,in so far as man has through necessity received a share of fire1 he is a little more rational2 as far as he consists of earth and water it stands badly with his reason4 ,he is not compelled to take cognisance of the ,logos simply because he is a human being4 ,why is there water1 why earth8 ,this to ,heraclitus is a much more serious problem than to ask1 why men are so stupid and bad4 ,in the highest and the most perverted men the same inherent lawfulness and justice manifest themselves4 ,if however one would ask ,heraclitus the question ,why is fire not always fire1 why is it now water1 now earth8 then he would only just answer3 ,it is a game1 don't take it too pathetically and still less1 morally4 ,heraclitus describes only the existing world and has the same contemplative pleasure in it which the artist experiences when looking at his growing work4 ,only those who have cause to be discontented with his natural history of man find him gloomy1 melancholy1 tearful1 sombre1 atrabilarious1 pessimistic and altogether hateful4 ,he however would take these discontented people1 together with their antipathies and sympathies1 their hatred und their love1 as negligible and perhaps answer them with some such comment as3 ,dogs bark at anything they do not know1 or1 ,to the ass chaff is preferable to gold4 ,with such discontented persons also originate the numerous complaints as to the obscurity of the ,heraclitean style2 probably no man has ever written clearer and more illuminatingly2 of course1 very abruptly1 and therefore naturally obscure to the racing readers4 ,but why a philosopher should intentionally write obscurely--a thing habitually said about ,heraclitus--is absolutely inexplicable2 unless he has some cause to hide his thoughts or is sufficiently a rogue to conceal his thoughtlessness underneath words4 ,one is1 as ,schopenhauer says1 indeed compelled by lucid expression to prevent misunderstandings even in affairs of practical every-day life1 how then should one be allowed to express oneself indistinctly1 indeed puzzlingly in the most difficult1 most abstruse1 scarcely attainable object of thinking1 the tasks of philosophy8 ,with respect to brevity however ,jean ,paul gives a good precept3 ,on the whole it is right that everything great--of deep meaning to a rare mind--should be uttered with brevity and 7therefore7 obscurely so that the paltry mind would rather proclaim it to be nonsense than translate it into the realm of his empty-headedness4 ,for common minds have an ugly ability to perceive in the deepest and richest saying nothing but their own every-day opinion4 ,moreover and in spite of it ,heraclitus has not escaped the paltry minds2 already the ,stoics have re-expounded him into the shallow and dragged down his sthetic fundamental-perception as to the play of the world to the miserable level of the common regard for the practical ends of the world and more explicitly for the advantages of man1 so that out of his ,physics has arisen in those heads a crude optimism1 with the continual invitation to ,dick1 ,tom1 and ,harry1 ,plaudite amici6 #h ,heraclitus was proud2 and if it comes to pride with a philosopher then it is a great pride4 ,his work never refers him to a public1 the applause of the masses and the hailing chorus of contemporaries4 ,to wander lonely along his path belongs to the nature of the philosopher4 ,his talents are the most rare1 in a certain sense the most unnatural and at the same time exclusive and hostile even toward kindred talents4 ,the wall of his self-sufficiency must be of diamond1 if it is not to be demolished and broken1 for everything is in motion against him4 ,his journey to immortality is more cumbersome and impeded 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 time2 for the disregard of everything present and momentary lies in the essence of the great philosophic nature4 ,he has truth2 the wheel of time may roll whither it pleases1 never can it escape from truth4 ,it is important to hear that such men have lived4 ,never for example would one be able to imagine the pride of ,heraclitus as an idle possibility4 ,in itself every endeavour after knowledge seems by its nature to be eternally unsatisfied and unsatisfactory4 ,therefore nobody unless instructed by history will like to believe in such a royal self-esteem and conviction of being the only wooer of truth4 ,such men live in their own solar-system--one has to look for them there4 ,a ,pythagoras1 an ,empedocles treated themselves too with a super-human esteem1 yea1 with almost religious awe2 but the tie of sympathy united with the great conviction of the metempsychosis and the unity of everything living1 led them back to other men1 for their welfare and salvation4 ,of that feeling of solitude1 however1 which permeated the ,ephesian recluse of the ,artemis ,temple1 one can only divine something1 when growing benumbed in the wildest mountain desert4 ,no paramount feeling of compassionate agitation1 no desire to help1 heal and save emanates from him4 ,he is a star without an atmosphere4 ,his eye1 directed blazingly inwards1 looks outward1 for appearance's sake only1 extinct and icy4 ,all around him1 immediately upon the citadel of his pride beat the waves of folly and perversity3 with loathing he turns away from them4 ,but men with a feeling heart would also shun such a ,gorgon monster as cast out of brass2 within an out-of-the-way sanctuary1 among the statues of gods1 by the side of cold composedly-sublime architecture such a being may appear more comprehensible4 ,as man among men ,heraclitus was incredible2 and though he was seen paying attention to the play of noisy children1 even then he was reflecting upon what never man thought of on such an occasion3 the play of the great world-child1 ,zeus4 ,he had no need of men1 not even for his discernments4 ,he was not interested in all that which one might perhaps ascertain from them1 and in what the other sages before him had been endeavouring to ascertain4 ,he spoke with disdain of such questioning1 collecting1 in short historic men4 ,i sought and investigated myself1 he said1 with a word by which one designates the investigation of an oracle2 as if he and no one else were the true fulfiller and achiever of the ,delphic precept3 ,know thyself4 ,what he learned from this oracle1 he deemed immortal wisdom1 and eternally worthy of explanation1 of unlimited effect even in the distance1 after the model of the prophetic speeches of the ,sibyl4 ,it is sufficient for the latest mankind3 let the latter have that expounded to her1 as oracular sayings1 which he like the ,delphic god neither enunciates nor conceals4 ,although it is proclaimed by him1 without smiles1 finery and the scent of ointments1 but rather as with foaming mouth1 it must force its way through the millenniums of the future4 ,for the world needs truth eternally1 therefore she needs also ,heraclitus eternally2 although he has no need of her4 ,what does his fame matter to him8--fame with mortals ever flowing on6 as he exclaims scornfully4 ,his fame is of concern to man1 not to himself2 the immortality of mankind needs him1 not he the immortality of the man ,heraclitus4 ,that which he beheld1 the doctrine of the ,law in the ,becoming1 and of the ,play in the ,necessity1 must henceforth be beheld eternally2 he has raised the curtain of this greatest stage-play4 #i ,whereas in every word of ,heraclitus are expressed the pride and the majesty of truth1 but of truth caught by intuitions1 not scaled by the rope-ladder of ,logic1 whereas in sublime ecstasy he beholds but does not espy1 discerns but does not reckon1 he is contrasted with his contemporary ,parmenides1 a man likewise with the type of a prophet of truth1 but formed as it were out of ice and not out of fire1 and shedding around himself cold1 piercing light4 ,parmenides once had1 probably in his later years1 a moment of the very purest abstraction1 undimmed by any reality1 perfectly lifeless2 this moment--un-,greek1 like no other in the two centuries of the ,tragic ,age--the product of which is the doctrine of ,being1 became a boundary-stone for his own life1 which divided it into two periods2 at the same time however the same moment divides the pre-,socratic thinking into two halves1 of which the first might be called the ,anaximandrian1 the second the ,parmenidean4 ,the first period in ,parmenides' own philosophising bears still the signature of ,anaximander2 this period produced a detailed philosophic-physical system as answer to ,anaximander's questions4 ,when later that icy abstraction-horror caught him1 and the simplest proposition treating of ,being and ,not-,being was advanced by him1 then among the many older doctrines thrown by him upon the scrap heap was also his own system4 ,however he does not appear to have lost all paternal piety towards the strong and well-shapen child of his youth1 and he saved himself therefore by saying3 ,it is true there is only one right way2 if one however wants at any time to betake oneself to another1 then my earlier opinion according to its purity and consequence alone is right4 ,sheltering himself with this phrase he has allowed his former physical system a worthy and extensive space in his great poem on ,nature1 which really was to proclaim the new discernment as the only signpost to truth4 ,this fatherly regard1 even though an error should have crept in through it1 is a remainder of human feeling1 in a nature quite petrified by logical rigidity and almost changed into a thinking-machine4 ,parmenides1 whose personal intercourse with ,anaximander does not seem incredible to me1 and whose starting from ,anaximander's doctrine is not only credible but evident1 had the same distrust for the complete separation of a world which only is1 and a world which only becomes1 as had also caught ,heraclitus and led to a denying of ,being altogether4 ,both sought a way out from that contrast and divergence of a dual order of the world4 ,that leap into the ,indefinite1 ,indefinable1 by which once for all ,anaximander had escaped from the realm of ,becoming and from the empirically given qualities of such realm1 that leap did not become an easy matter to minds so independently fashioned as those of ,heraclitus and ,parmenides2 first they endeavoured to walk as far as they could and reserved to themselves the leap for that place1 where the foot finds no more hold and one has to leap1 in order not to fall4 ,both looked repeatedly at that very world1 which ,anaximander had condemned in so melancholy a way and declared to be the place of wanton crime and at the same time the penitentiary cell for the injustice of ,becoming4 ,contemplating this world ,heraclitus1 as we know already1 had discovered what a wonderful order1 regularity and security manifest themselves in every ,becoming2 from that he concluded that the ,becoming could not be anything evil and unjust4 ,quite a different outlook had ,parmenides2 he compared the qualities one with another1 and believed that they were not all of the same kind1 but ought to be classified under two headings4 ,if for example he compared bright and dark1 then the second quality was obviously only the negation of the first2 and thus he distinguished positive and negative qualities1 seriously endeavouring to rediscover and register that fundamental antithesis in the whole realm of ,nature4 ,his method was the following3 ,he took a few antitheses1 e4g41 light and heavy1 rare and dense1 active and passive1 and compared them with that typical antithesis of bright and dark3 that which corresponded with the bright was the positive1 that which corresponded with the dark the negative quality4 ,if he took perhaps the heavy and light1 the light fell to the side of the bright1 the heavy to the side of the dark2 and thus heavy was to him only the negation of light1 but the light a positive quality4 ,this method alone shows that he had a defiant aptitude for abstract logical procedure1 closed against the suggestions of the senses4 ,the heavy seems indeed to offer itself very forcibly to the senses as a positive quality2 that did not keep ,parmenides from stamping it as a negation4 ,similarly he placed the earth in opposition to the fire1 the cold in opposition to the warm1 the dense in opposition to the rare1 the female in opposition to the male1 the passive in opposition to the active1 merely as negations3 so that before his gaze our empiric world divided itself into two separate spheres1 into that of the positive qualities--with a bright1 fiery1 warm1 light1 rare1 active-masculine character--and into that of the negative qualities4 ,the latter express really only the lack1 the absence of the others1 the positive ones4 ,he therefore described the sphere in which the positive qualities are absent as dark1 earthy1 cold1 heavy1 dense and altogether as of feminine-passive character4 ,instead of the expressions positive and negative he used the standing term existent and non-existent and had arrived with this at the proposition1 that1 in contradiction to ,anaximander1 this our world itself contains something existent1 and of course something non-existent4 ,one is not to seek that existent outside the world and as it were above our horizon2 but before us1 and everywhere in every ,becoming1 something existent and active is contained4 ,with that however still remained to him the task of giving the more exact answer to the question3 ,what is the ,becoming8 and here was the moment where he had to leap1 in order not to fall1 although perhaps to such natures as that of ,parmenides1 even any leaping means a falling4 ,enough6 we get into fog1 into the mysticism of qualitates occult1 and even a little into mythology4 ,parmenides1 like ,heraclitus1 looks at the general ,becoming and ,not-remaining and explains to himself a ,passing only thus1 that the ,non-,existent bore the guilt4 ,for how should the ,existent bear the guilt of ,passing8 ,likewise1 however1 the ,originating1 i4e41 the ,becoming1 must come about through the assistance of the ,non-,existent2 for the ,existent is always there and could not of itself first originate and it could not explain any ,originating1 any ,becoming4 ,therefore the ,originating1 the ,becoming as well as the ,passing and ,perishing have been brought about by the negative qualities4 ,but that the originating thing has a content1 and the passing thing loses a content1 presupposes that the positive qualities--and that just means that very content--participate likewise in both processes4 ,in short the proposition results3 ,for the ,becoming the ',existent' as well as the ',non-,existent' is necessary2 when they co-operate then a ,becoming results4 ,but how come the positive and the negative to one another8 ,should they not on the contrary eternally flee one another as antitheses and thereby make every ,becoming impossible8 ,here ,parmenides appeals to a qualitas occulta1 to a mystic tendency of the antithetical pairs to approach and attract one another1 and he allegorises that peculiar contrariety by the name of ,aphrodite1 and by the empirically known relation of the male and female principle4 ,it is the power of ,aphrodite which plays the matchmaker between the antithetical pair1 the ,existent and the ,non-,existent4 ,passion brings together the antagonistic and antipathetic elements3 the result is a ,becoming4 ,when ,desire has become satiated1 ,hatred and the innate antagonism again drive asunder the ,existent and the ,non-,existent--then man says3 the thing perishes1 passes4 #aj ,but no one with impunity lays his profane hands on such awful abstractions as the ,existent and the ,non-,existent2 the blood freezes slowly as one touches them4 ,there was a day upon which an odd idea suddenly occurred to ,parmenides1 an idea which seemed to take all value away from his former combinations1 so that he felt inclined to throw them aside1 like a money bag with old worn-out coins4 ,it is commonly believed that an external impression1 in addition to the centrifugal consequence of such ideas as existent and non-existent1 has also been co-active in the invention of that day2 this impression was an acquaintance with the theology of the old roamer and rhapsodist1 the singer of a mystic deification of ,nature1 the ,kolophonian ,xenophanes4 ,throughout an extraordinary life ,xenophanes lived as a wandering poet and became through his travels a well-informed and most instructive man who knew how to question and how to narrate1 for which reason ,heraclitus reckoned him amongst the polyhistorians and above all amongst the historic natures1 in the sense mentioned4 ,whence and when came to him the mystic bent into the ,one and the eternally ,resting1 nobody will be able to compute2 perhaps it is only the conception of the finally settled old man1 to whom1 after the agitation of his erratic wanderings1 and after the restless learning and searching for truth1 the vision of a divine rest1 the permanence of all things within a pantheistic primal peace appears as the highest and greatest ideal4 ,after all it seems to me quite accidental that in the same place in ,elea two men lived together for a time1 each of whom carried in his head a conception of unity2 they formed no school and had nothing in common which perhaps the one might have learned from the other and then might have handed on4 ,for1 in the case of these two men1 the origin of that conception of unity is quite different1 yea opposite2 and if either of them has become at all acquainted with the doctrine of the other then1 in order to understand it at all1 he had to translate it first into his own language4 ,with this translation however the very specific element of the other doctrine was lost4 ,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-,being1 ,xenophanes was a religious mystic and belonged1 with that mystic unity1 very properly to the ,sixth ,century4 ,although he was no such revolutionising personality as ,pythagoras he had nevertheless in his wanderings the same bent and impulse to improve1 purify1 and cure men4 ,he was the ethical teacher1 but still in the stage of the rhapsodist2 in a later time he would have been a sophist4 ,in the daring disapproval of the existing customs and valuations he had not his equal in ,greece2 moreover he did not1 like ,heraclitus and ,plato1 retire into solitude but placed himself before the very public1 whose exulting admiration of ,homer1 whose passionate propensity for the honours of the gymnastic festivals1 whose adoration of stones in human shape1 he criticised severely with wrath and scorn1 yet not as a brawling ,thersites4 ,the freedom of the individual was with him on its zenith2 and by this almost limitless stepping free from all conventions he was more closely related to ,parmenides than by that last divine unity1 which once he had beheld1 in a visionary state worthy of that century4 ,his unity scarcely had expression and word in common with the one ,being of ,parmenides1 and certainly had not the same origin4 ,it was rather an opposite state of mind in which ,parmenides found his doctrine of ,being1 ,on that day and in that state he examined his two co-operating antitheses1 the ,existent and the ,non-,existent1 the positive and the negative qualities1 of which ,desire and ,hatred constitute the world and the ,becoming4 ,he was suddenly caught up1 mistrusting1 by the idea of negative quality1 of the ,non-,existent4 ,for can something which does not exist be a quality8 or to put the question in a broader sense3 can anything indeed which does not exist1 exist8 ,the only form of knowledge in which we at once put unconditional trust and the disapproval of which amounts to madness1 is the tautology ,a ,a4 ,but this very tautological knowledge called inexorably to him3 what does not exist1 exists not6 ,what is1 is6 ,suddenly he feels upon his life the load of an enormous logical sin2 for had he not always without hesitation assumed that there were existing negative qualities1 in short a ,non-,existent1 that therefore1 to express it by a formula1 ,a ,not-,a1 which indeed could only be advanced by the most out and out perversity of thinking4 ,it is true1 as he recollected1 the whole great mass of men judge with the same perversity2 he himself has only participated in the general crime against logic4 ,but the same moment which charges him with this crime surrounds him with the light of the glory of an invention1 he has found1 apart from all human illusion1 a principle1 the key to the world-secret1 he now descends into the abyss of things1 guided by the firm and fearful hand of the tautological truth as to ,being4 ,on the way thither he meets ,heraclitus--an unfortunate encounter6 ,just now ,heraclitus' play with antinomies was bound to be very hateful to him1 who placed the utmost importance upon the severest separation of ,being and ,not-,being2 propositions like this3 ,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 thing1 propositions through which all that he had just elucidated and disentangled became again dim and inextricable1 incited him to wrath4 ,away with the men1 he exclaimed1 who seem to have two heads and yet know nothing6 ,with them truly everything is in flux1 even their thinking6 ,they stare at things stupidly1 but they must be deaf as well as blind so to mix up the opposites6 ,the want of judgment on the part of the masses1 glorified by playful antinomies and praised as the acme of all knowledge was to him a painful and incomprehensible experience4 ,now he dived into the cold bath of his awful abstractions4 ,that which is true must exist in eternal presence1 about it cannot be said it was1 it will be4 ,the ,existent cannot have become2 for out of what should it have become8 ,out of the ,non-,existent8 ,but that does not exist and can produce nothing4 ,out of the ,existent8 ,this would not produce anything but itself4 ,the same applies to the ,passing1 it is just as impossible as the ,becoming1 as any change1 any increase1 any decrease4 ,on the whole the proposition is valid3 ,everything about which it can be said3 it has been or it will be does not exist2 about the ,existent however it can never be said it does not exist4 ,the ,existent is indivisible1 for where is the second power1 which should divide it8 ,it is immovable1 for whither should it move itself8 ,it cannot be infinitely great nor infinitely small1 for it is perfect and a perfectly given infinitude is a contradiction4 ,thus the ,existent is suspended1 delimited1 perfect1 immovable1 everywhere equally balanced and such equilibrium equally perfect at any point1 like a globe1 but not in a space1 for otherwise this space would be a second ,existent4 ,but there cannot exist several ,existents1 for in order to separate them1 something would have to exist which was not existing1 an assumption which neutralises itself4 ,thus there exists only the eternal ,unity4 ,if now1 however1 ,parmenides turned back his gaze to the world of ,becoming1 the existence of which he had formerly tried to understand by such ingenious conjectures1 he was wroth at his eye seeing the ,becoming at all1 his ear hearing it4 ,do not follow the dim-sighted eyes1 now his command runs1 not the resounding ear nor the tongue1 but examine only by the power of the thought4 ,therewith he accomplished the extremely important first critique of the apparatus of knowledge1 although this critique was still inadequate and proved disastrous in its consequences4 ,by tearing entirely asunder the senses and the ability to think in abstractions1 i4e4 reason1 just as if they were two thoroughly separate capacities1 he demolished the intellect itself1 and incited people to that wholly erroneous separation of mind and body which1 especially since ,plato1 lies like a curse on philosophy4 ,all sense perceptions1 ,parmenides judges1 cause only illusions and their chief illusion is their deluding us to believe that even the ,non-,existent exists1 that even the ,becoming has a ,being4 ,all that plurality1 diversity and variety of the empirically known world1 the change of its qualities1 the order in its ups and downs1 is thrown aside mercilessly as mere appearance and delusion2 from there nothing is to be learnt1 therefore all labour is wasted which one bestows upon this false1 through-and-through futile world1 the conception of which has been obtained by being hum-bugged by the senses4 ,he who judges in such generalisations as ,parmenides did1 ceases therewith to be an investigator of natural philosophy in detail2 his interest in phenomena withers away2 there develops even a hatred of being unable to get rid of this eternal fraud of the senses4 ,truth is now to dwell only in the most faded1 most abstract generalities1 in the empty husks of the most indefinite words1 as in a maze of cobwebs2 and by such a truth now the philosopher sits1 bloodless as an abstraction and surrounded by a web of formul4 ,the spider undoubtedly wants the blood of its victims2 but the ,parmenidean philosopher hates the very blood of his victims1 the blood of ,empiricism sacrificed by him4 #aa ,and that was a ,greek who flourished about the time of the outbreak of the ,ionic ,revolution4 ,at that time it was possible for a ,greek to flee out of the superabundant reality1 as out of a mere delusive schematism of the imaginative faculties--not perhaps like ,plato into the land of the eternal ideas1 into the workshop of the world-creator1 in order to feast the eyes on unblemished1 unbreakable primal-forms of things--but into the rigid death-like rest of the coldest and emptiest conception1 that of the ,being4 ,we will indeed beware of interpreting such a remarkable fact by false analogies4 ,that flight was not a world-flight in the sense of ,indian philosophers2 no deep religious conviction as to the depravity1 transitoriness and accursedness of ,existence demanded that flight--that ultimate goal1 the rest in the ,being1 was not striven after as the mystic absorption in one all-sufficing enrapturing conception which is a puzzle and a scandal to common men4 ,the thought of ,parmenides bears in itself not the slightest trace of the intoxicating mystical ,indian fragrance1 which is perhaps not wholly imperceptible in ,pythagoras and ,empedocles2 the strange thing in that fact1 at this period1 is rather the very absence of fragrance1 colour1 soul1 form1 the total lack of blood1 religiosity and ethical warmth1 the abstract-schematic--in a ,greek6--above all however our philosopher's awful energy of striving after ,certainty1 in a mythically thinking and highly emotional--fantastic age is quite remarkable4 ,grant me but a certainty1 ye gods6is the prayer of ,parmenides1 and be it1 in the ocean of ,uncertainty1 only a board1 broad enough to lie on6 ,everything becoming1 everything luxuriant1 varied1 blossoming1 deceiving1 stimulating1 living1 take all that for yourselves1 and give to me but the single poor empty ,certainty6 ,in the philosophy of ,parmenides the theme of ontology forms the prelude4 ,experience offered him nowhere a ,being as he imagined it to himself1 but from the fact that he could conceive of it he concluded that it must exist2 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 experience4 ,the material of our thinking according to ,parmenides does not exist in perception at all but is brought in from somewhere else1 from an extra-material world to which by thinking we have a direct access4 ,against all similar chains of reasoning ,aristotle has already asserted that existence never belongs to the essence1 never belongs to the nature of a thing4 ,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 all4 ,the logical content of that antithesis ,being and ,not-,being is perfectly nil1 if the object lying at the bottom of it1 if the precept cannot be given from which this antithesis has been deduced by abstraction2 without this going back to the precept the antithesis is only a play with conceptions1 through which indeed nothing is discerned4 ,for the merely logical criterion of truth1 as ,kant teaches1 namely the agreement of a discernment with the general and the formal laws of intellect and reason is1 it is true1 the conditio sine qua non1 consequently the negative condition of all truth2 further however logic cannot go1 and logic cannot discover by any touchstone the error which pertains not to the form but to the contents4 ,as soon1 however1 as one seeks the content for the logical truth of the antithesis3 ,that which is1 is2 that which is not1 is not1 one will find indeed not a simple reality1 which is fashioned rigidly according to that antithesis3 about a tree ,i can say as well it is in comparison with all the other things1 as well it becomes in comparison with itself at another moment of time as finally also it is not1 e4g41 it is not yet tree1 as long as ,i perhaps look at the shrub4 ,words are only symbols for the relations of things among themselves and to us1 and nowhere touch absolute truth2 and now to crown all1 the word ,being designates only the most general relation1 which connects all things1 and so does the word ,not-,being4 ,if however the ,existence of the things themselves be unprovable1 then the relation of the things among themselves1 the so-called ,being and ,not-,being1 will not bring us any nearer to the land of truth4 ,by means of words and ideas we shall never get behind the wall of the relations1 let us say into some fabulous primal cause of things1 and even in the pure forms of the sensitive faculty and of the intellect1 in space1 time and causality we gain nothing1 which might resemble a ,veritas terna8 ,it is absolutely impossible for the subject to see and discern something beyond himself1 so impossible that ,cognition and ,being are the most contradictory of all spheres4 ,and if in the uninstructed navet of the then critique of the intellect ,parmenides was permitted to fancy that out of the eternally subjective idea he had come to a ,being-,in-itself1 then it is to-day1 after ,kant1 a daring ignorance1 if here and there1 especially among badly informed theologians who want to play the philosopher1 is proposed as the task of philosophy3 to conceive the ,absolute by means of consciousness1 perhaps even in the form3 the ,absolute is already extant1 else how could it be sought8 as ,hegel has expressed himself1 or with the saying of ,beneke3 that the ',being' must be given somehow1 must be attainable for us somehow1 since otherwise we could not even have the idea of ',being4' ,the idea of ,being6 ,as though that idea did not indicate the most miserable empiric origin already in the etymology of the word4 ,for esse means at the bottom3 to breathe1 if man uses it of all other things1 then he transmits the conviction that he himself breathes and lives by means of a metaphor1 i4e41 by means of something illogical to the other things and conceives of their ,existence as a ,breathing according to human analogy4 ,now the original meaning of the word soon becomes effaced2 so much however still remains that man conceives of the existence of other things according to the analogy of his own existence1 therefore anthropomorphically1 and at any rate by means of an illogical transmission4 ,even to man1 therefore apart from that transmission1 the proposition3 ,i breathe1 therefore a ',being' exists is quite insufficient since against it the same objection must be made1 as against the ambulo1 ergo sum1 or ergo est4 #ab ,the other idea1 of greater import than that of the ,existent1 and likewise invented already by ,parmenides1 although not yet so clearly applied as by his disciple ,zeno is the idea of the ,infinite4 ,nothing ,infinite can exist2 for from such an assumption the contradictory idea of a perfect ,infinitude would result4 ,since now our actuality1 our existing world everywhere shows the character of that perfect ,infinitude1 our world signifies in its nature a contradiction against logic and therewith also against reality and is deception1 lie1 fantasma4 ,zeno especially applied the method of indirect proof2 he said for example1 ,there can be no motion from one place to another2 for if there were such a motion1 then an ,infinitude would be given as perfect1 this however is an impossibility4 ,achilles cannot catch up the tortoise which has a small start in a race1 for in order to reach only the point from which the tortoise began1 he would have had to run through innumerable1 infinitely many spaces1 viz41 first half of that space1 then the fourth1 then the sixteenth1 and so on ad infinitum4 ,if he does in fact overtake the tortoise then this is an illogical phenomenon1 and therefore at any rate not a truth1 not a reality1 not real ,being1 but only a delusion4 ,for it is never possible to finish the infinite4 ,another popular expression of this doctrine is the flying and yet resting arrow4 ,at any instant of its flight it has a position2 in this position it rests4 ,now would the sum of the infinite positions of rest be identical with motion8 ,would now the ,resting1 infinitely often repeated1 be ,motion1 therefore its own opposite8 ,the ,infinite is here used as the aqua fortis of reality1 through it the latter is dissolved4 ,if however the ,ideas are fixed1 eternal and entitative--and for ,parmenides ,being and ,thinking coincide--if therefore the ,infinite can never be perfect1 if ,rest can never become ,motion1 then in fact the arrow has not flown at all2 it never left its place and resting position2 no moment of time has passed4 ,or expressed in another way3 in this so-called yet only alleged ,actuality there exists neither time1 nor space1 nor motion4 ,finally the arrow itself is only an illusion2 for it originates out of the ,plurality1 out of the phantasmagoria of the ,non-,one produced by the senses4 ,suppose the arrow had a ,being1 then it would be immovable1 timeless1 increate1 rigid and eternal--an impossible conception6 ,supposing that ,motion was truly real1 then there would be no rest1 therefore no position for the arrow1 therefore no space--an impossible conception6 ,supposing that time were real1 then it could not be of an infinite divisibility2 the time which the arrow needed1 would have to consist of a limited number of time-moments1 each of these moments would have to be an ,atomon--an impossible conception6 ,all our conceptions1 as soon as their empirically-given content1 drawn out of this concrete world1 is taken as a ,veritas terna1 lead to contradictions4 ,if there is absolute motion1 then there is no space2 if there is absolute space then there is no motion2 if there is absolute ,being1 then there is no ,plurality2 if there is an absolute ,plurality1 then there is no ,unity4 ,it should at least become clear to us how little we touch the heart of things or untie the knot of reality with such ideas1 whereas ,parmenides and ,zeno inversely hold fast to the truth and omnivalidity of ideas and condemn the perceptible world as the opposite of the true and omnivalid ideas1 as an objectivation of the illogical and contradictory4 ,with all their proofs they start from the wholly undemonstrable1 yea improbable assumption that in that apprehensive faculty we possess the decisive1 highest criterion of ,being and ,not-,being1 i4e41 of objective reality and its opposite2 those ideas are not to prove themselves true1 to correct themselves by ,actuality1 as they are after all really derived from it1 but on the contrary they are to measure and to judge ,actuality1 and in case of a contradiction with logic1 even to condemn4 ,in order to concede to them this judicial competence ,parmenides had to ascribe to them the same ,being1 which alone he allowed in general as the ,being2 ,thinking and that one increate perfect ball of the ,existent were now no longer to be conceived as two different kinds of ,being1 since there was not permitted a duality of ,being4 ,thus the over-risky flash of fancy had become necessary to declare ,thinking and ,being identical4 ,no form of perceptibility1 no symbol1 no simile could possibly be of any help here2 the fancy was wholly inconceivable1 but it was necessary1 yea in the lack of every possibility of illustration it celebrated the highest triumph over the world and the claims of the senses4 ,thinking and that clod-like1 ball-shaped1 through-and-through dead-massive1 and rigid-immovable ,being1 must1 according to the ,parmenidean imperative1 dissolve into one another and be the same in every respect1 to the horror of fantasy4 ,what does it matter that this identity contradicts the senses6 ,this contradiction is just the guarantee that such an identity is not borrowed from the senses4 #ac ,moreover against ,parmenides could be produced a strong couple of argumenta ad hominem or ex concessis1 by which1 it is true1 truth itself could not be brought to light1 but at any rate the untruth of that absolute separation of the world of the senses and the world of the ideas1 and the untruth of the identity of ,being and ,thinking could be demonstrated4 ,firstly1 if the ,thinking of ,reason in ideas is real1 then also ,plurality and ,motion must have reality1 for rational ,thinking is mobile2 and more precisely1 it is a motion from idea to idea1 therefore within a plurality of realities4 ,there is no subterfuge against that2 it is quite impossible to designate ,thinking as a rigid ,permanence1 as an eternally immobile1 intellectual ,introspection of ,unity4 ,secondly1 if only fraud and illusion come from the senses1 and if in reality there exists only the real identity of ,being and ,thinking1 what then are the senses themselves8 ,they too are certainly ,appearance only since they do not coincide with the ,thinking1 and their product1 the world of senses1 does not coincide with ,being4 ,if however the senses themselves are ,appearance to whom then are they ,appearance8 ,how can they1 being unreal1 still deceive8 ,the ,non-,existent cannot even deceive4 ,therefore the ,whence8 of deception and ,appearance remains an enigma1 yea1 a contradiction4 ,we call these argumenta ad hominem3 ,the ,objection ,of ,the ,mobile ,reason and that of ,the ,origin ,of ,appearance4 ,from the first would result the reality of ,motion and of ,plurality1 from the second the impossibility of the ,parmenidean ,appearance1 assuming that the chief-doctrine of ,parmenides on the ,being were accepted as true4 ,this chief-doctrine however only says3 ,the ,existent only has a ,being1 the ,non-,existent does not exist4 ,if ,motion however has such a ,being1 then to ,motion applies what applies to the ,existent in general3 it is increate1 eternal1 indestructible1 without increase or decrease4 ,but if the ,appearance is denied and a belief in it made untenable1 by means of that question as to the ,whence8 of the ,appearance1 if the stage of the so-called ,becoming1 of change1 our many-shaped1 restless1 coloured and rich ,existence is protected from the ,parmenidean rejection1 then it is necessary to characterise this world of change and alteration as a sum of such really existing ,essentials1 existing simultaneously into all eternity4 ,of a change in the strict sense1 of a ,becoming there cannot naturally be any question even with this assumption4 ,but now ,plurality has a real ,being1 all qualities have a real ,being and motion not less2 and of any moment of this world--although these moments chosen at random lie at a distance of millenniums from one another--it would have to be possible to say3 all real ,essentials extant in this world are without exception co-existent1 unaltered1 undiminished1 without increase1 without decrease4 ,a millennium later the world is exactly the same4 ,nothing has altered4 ,if in spite of that the appearance of the world at the one time is quite different from that at the other time1 then that is no deception1 nothing merely apparent1 but the effect of eternal motion4 ,the real ,existent is moved sometimes thus1 sometimes thus3 together1 asunder1 upwards1 downwards1 into one another1 pell-mell4 #ad ,with this conception we have already taken a step into the realm of the doctrine of ,anaxagoras4 ,by him both objections against ,parmenides are raised in full strength2 that of the mobile ,thinking and that of the ,whence8 of ,appearance2 but in the chief proposition ,parmenides has subjugated him as well as all the younger philosophers and nature-explorers4 ,they all deny the possibility of ,becoming and ,passing1 as the mind of the people conceives them and as ,anaximander and ,heraclitus had assumed with greater circumspection and yet still heedlessly4 ,such a mythological ,originating out of the ,nothing1 such a ,disappearing into the ,nothing1 such an arbitrary ,changing of the ,nothing into the ,something1 such a random exchanging1 putting on and putting off of the qualities was henceforth considered senseless2 but so was1 and for the same reasons1 an originating of the ,many out of the ,one1 of the manifold qualities out of the one primal-quality1 in short the derivation of the world out of a primary substance1 as argued by ,thales and ,heraclitus4 ,rather was now the real problem advanced of applying the doctrine of increate imperishable ,being to this existing world1 without taking one's refuge in the theory of appearance and deception4 ,but if the empiric world is not to be ,appearance1 if the things are not to be derived out of ,nothing and just as little out of the one ,something1 then these things must contain in themselves a real ,being1 their matter and content must be unconditionally real1 and all change can refer only to the form1 i4e41 to the position1 order1 grouping1 mixing1 separation of these eternally co-existing ,essentials4 ,it is just as in a game of dice2 they are ever the same dice2 but falling sometimes thus1 sometimes thus1 they mean to us something different4 ,all older theories had gone back to a primal element1 as womb and cause of ,becoming1 be this water1 air1 fire or the ,indefinite of ,anaximander4 ,against that ,anaxagoras now asserts that out of the ,equal the ,unequal could never come forth1 and that out of the one ,existent the change could never be explained4 ,whether now one were to imagine that assumed matter to be rarefied or condensed1 one would never succeed by such a condensation or rarefaction in explaining the problem one would like to explain3 the plurality of qualities4 ,but if the world in fact is full of the most different qualities then these must1 in case they are not appearance1 have a ,being1 i4e41 must be eternal1 increate1 imperishable and ever co-existing4 ,appearance1 however1 they cannot be1 since the question as to the ,whence8 of ,appearance remains unanswered1 yea answers itself in the negative6 ,the earlier seekers after ,truth had intended to simplify the problem of ,becoming by advancing only one substance1 which bore in its bosom the possibilities of all ,becoming2 now on the contrary it is asserted3 there are innumerable substances1 but never more1 never less1 and never new ones4 ,only ,motion1 playing dice with them throws them into ever new combinations4 ,that ,motion however is a truth and not ,appearance1 ,anaxagoras proved in opposition to ,parmenides by the indisputable succession of our conceptions in thinking4 ,we have therefore in the most direct fashion the insight into the truth of motion and succession in the fact that we think and have conceptions4 ,therefore at any rate the one rigid1 resting1 dead ,being of ,parmenides has been removed out of the way1 there are many ,existents just as surely as all these many ,existents 7existing things1 substances7 are in motion4 ,change is motion--but whence originates motion8 ,does this motion leave perhaps wholly untouched the proper essence of those many independent1 isolated substances1 and1 according to the most severe idea of the ,existent1 must not motion in itself be foreign to them8 ,or does it after all belong to the things themselves8 ,we stand here at an important decision2 according to which way we turn1 we shall step into the realm either of ,anaxagoras or of ,empedocles or of ,democritus4 ,the delicate question must be raised3 if there are many substances1 and if these many move1 what moves them8 ,do they move one another8 ,or is it perhaps only gravitation8 ,or are there magic forces of attraction and repulsion within the things themselves8 ,or does the cause of motion lie outside these many real substances8 ,or putting the question more pointedly3 if two things show a succession1 a mutual change of position1 does that originate from themselves8 ,and is this to be explained mechanically or magically8 ,or if this should not be the case is it a third something which moves them8 ,it is a sorry problem1 for ,parmenides would still have been able to prove against ,anaxagoras the impossibility of motion1 even granted that there are many substances4 ,for he could say3 ,take two ,substances existing of themselves1 each with quite differently fashioned1 autonomous1 unconditioned ,being--and of such kind are the ,anaxagorean substances--they can never clash together1 never move1 never attract one another1 there exists between them no causality1 no bridge1 they do not come into contact with one another1 do not disturb one another1 they do not interest one another1 they are utterly indifferent4 ,the impact then is just as inexplicable as the magic attraction3 that which is utterly foreign cannot exercise any effect upon another1 therefore cannot move itself nor allow itself to be moved4 ,parmenides would even have added3 the only way of escape which is left to you is this1 to ascribe motion to the things themselves2 then however all that you know and see as motion is indeed only a deception and not true motion1 for the only kind of motion which could belong to those absolutely original substances1 would be merely an autogenous motion limited to themselves without any effect4 ,but you assume motion in order to explain those effects of change1 of the disarrangement in space1 of alteration1 in short the causalities and relations of the things among themselves4 ,but these very effects would not be explained and would remain as problematic as ever2 for this reason one cannot conceive why it should be necessary to assume a motion since it does not perform that which you demand from it4 ,motion does not belong to the nature of things and is eternally foreign to them4 ,those opponents of the ,eleatean unmoved ,unity were induced to make light of such an argument by prejudices of a perceptual character4 ,it seems so irrefutable that each veritable ,existent is a space-filling body1 a lump of matter1 large or small but in any case spacially dimensioned2 so that two or more such lumps cannot be in one space4 ,under this hypothesis ,anaxagoras1 as later on ,democritus1 assumed that they must knock against each other2 if in their motions they came by chance upon one another1 that they would dispute the same space with each other1 and that this struggle was the very cause of all ,change4 ,in other words3 those wholly isolated1 thoroughly heterogeneous and eternally unalterable substances were after all not conceived as being absolutely heterogeneous but all had in addition to a specific1 wholly peculiar quality1 also one absolutely homogeneous substratum3 a piece of space-filling matter4 ,in their participation in matter they all stood equal and therefore could act upon one another1 i4e41 knock one another4 ,moreover all ,change did not in the least depend on the heterogeneity of those substances but on their homogeneity1 as matter4 ,at the bottom of the assumption of ,anaxagoras is a logical oversight2 for that which is the ,existent-,in-,itself must be wholly unconditional and coherent1 is therefore not allowed to assume as its cause anything1--whereas all those ,anaxagorean substances have still a conditioning ,something3 matter1 and already assume its existence2 the substance ,red for example was to ,anaxagoras not just merely red in itself but also in a reserved or suppressed way a piece of matter without any qualities4 ,only with this matter the ,red-,in-,itself acted upon other substances1 not with the ,red1 but with that which is not red1 not coloured1 nor in any way qualitatively definite4 ,if the ,red had been taken strictly as ,red1 as the real substance itself1 therefore without that substratum1 then ,anaxagoras would certainly not have dared to speak of an effect of the ,red upon other substances1 perhaps even with the phrase that the ,red-,in-,itself was transmitting the impact received from the ,fleshy-,in-,itself4 ,then it would be clear that such an ,existent par excellence could never be moved4 #ae ,one has to glance at the opponents of the ,eleates1 in order to appreciate the extraordinary advantages in the assumption of ,parmenides4 ,what embarrassments1--from which ,parmenides had escaped1--awaited ,anaxagoras and all who believed in a plurality of substances1 with the question1 ,how many substances8 ,anaxagoras made the leap1 closed his eyes and said1 ,infinitely many2 thus he had flown at least beyond the incredibly laborious proof of a definite number of elementary substances4 ,since these ,infinitely ,many had to exist without increase and unaltered for eternities1 in that assumption was given the contradiction of an infinity to be conceived as completed and perfect4 ,in short1 ,plurality1 ,motion1 ,infinity driven into flight by ,parmenides with the amazing proposition of the one ,being1 returned from their exile and hurled their projectiles at the opponents of ,parmenides1 causing them wounds for which there is no cure4 ,obviously those opponents have no real consciousness and knowledge as to the awful force of those ,eleatean thoughts1 ,there can be no time1 no motion1 no space2 for all these we can only think of as infinite1 and to be more explicit1 firstly infinitely large1 then infinitely divisible2 but everything infinite has no ',being1' does not exist1 and this nobody doubts1 who takes the meaning of the word ,being severely and considers the existence of something contradictory impossible1 e4g41 the existence of a completed infinity4 ,if however the very ,actuality shows us everything under the form of the completed infinity then it becomes evident that it contradicts itself and therefore has no true reality4 ,if those opponents however should object3 but in your thinking itself there does exist succession1 therefore neither could your thinking be real and consequently could not prove anything1 then ,parmenides perhaps like ,kant in a similar case of an equal objection would have answered3 ,i can1 it is true1 say my conceptions follow upon one another1 but that means only that we are not conscious of them unless within a chronological order1 i4e41 according to the form of the inner sense4 ,for that reason time is not a something in itself nor any order or quality objectively adherent to things4 ,we should therefore have to distinguish between the ,pure ,thinking1 that would be timeless like the one ,parmenidean ,being1 and the consciousness of this thinking1 and the latter would already translate the thinking into the form of appearance1 i4e41 of succession1 plurality and motion4 ,it is probable that ,parmenides would have availed himself of this loophole2 however1 the same objection would then have to be raised against him which is raised against ,kant by ,a4 ,spir 7,thinking ,and ,reality1 #bnd ed41 vol4 i41 pp4 #bji1 c74 ,now1 in the first place however it is clear1 that ,i cannot know anything of a succession as such1 unless ,i have the successive members of the same simultaneously in my consciousness4 ,thus the conception of a succession itself is not at all successive1 hence also quite different from the succession of our conceptions4 ,secondly ,kant's assumption implies such obvious absurdities that one is surprised that he could leave them unnoticed4 ,csar and ,socrates according to this assumption are not really dead1 they still live exactly as they did two thousand years ago and only seem to be dead1 as a consequence of an organisation of my inner sense4 ,future men already live and if they do not now step forward as living that organisation of the inner sense is likewise the cause of it4 ,here above all other things the question is to be put3 ,how can the beginning and the end of conscious life itself1 together with all its internal and external senses1 exist merely in the conception of the inner sense8 ,the fact is indeed this1 that one certainly cannot deny the reality of ,change4 ,if it is thrown out through the window it slips in again through the keyhole4 ,if one says3 ,it merely seems to me1 that conditions and conceptions change1--then this very semblance and appearance itself is something objectively existing and within it without doubt the succession has objective reality1 some things in it really do succeed one another4--,besides one must observe that indeed the whole critique of reason only has cause and right of existence under the assumption that to us our conceptions themselves appear exactly as they are4 ,for if the conceptions also appeared to us otherwise than they really are1 then one would not be able to advance any solid proposition about them1 and therefore would not be able to accomplish any gnosiology or any transcendental investigation of objective validity4 ,now it remains however beyond all doubt that our conceptions themselves appear to us as successive4 ,the contemplation of this undoubted succession and agitation has now urged ,anaxagoras to a memorable hypothesis4 ,obviously the conceptions themselves moved themselves1 were not pushed and had no cause of motion outside themselves4 ,therefore he said to himself1 there exists a something which bears in itself the origin and the commencement of motion2 secondly1 however1 he notices that this conception was moving not only itself but also something quite different1 the body4 ,he discovers therefore1 in the most immediate experience an effect of conceptions upon expansive matter1 which makes itself known as motion in the latter4 ,that was to him a fact2 and only incidentally it stimulated him to explain this fact4 ,let it suffice that he had a regulative schema for the motion in the world1--this motion he now understood either as a motion of the true isolated essences through the ,conceptual ,principle1 the ,nous1 or as a motion through a something already moved4 ,that with his fundamental assumption the latter kind1 the mechanical transmission of motions and impacts likewise contained in itself a problem1 probably escaped him2 the commonness and every-day occurrence of the effect through impact most probably dulled his eye to the mysteriousness of impact4 ,on the other hand he certainly felt the problematic1 even contradictory nature of an effect of conceptions upon substances existing in themselves and he also tried therefore to trace this effect back to a mechanical push and impact which were considered by him as quite comprehensible4 ,for the ,nous too was without doubt such a substance existing in itself and was characterised by him as a very delicate and subtle matter1 with the specific quality of thinking4 ,with a character assumed in this way1 the effect of this matter upon other matter had of course to be of exactly the same kind as that which another substance exercises upon a third1 i4e41 a mechanical effect1 moving by pressure and impact4 ,still the philosopher had now a substance which moves itself and other things1 a substance of which the motion did not come from outside and depended on no one else3 whereas it seemed almost a matter of indifference how this automobilism was to be conceived of1 perhaps similar to that pushing themselves hither and thither of very fragile and small globules of quicksilver4 ,among all questions which concern motion there is none more troublesome than the question as to the beginning of motion4 ,for if one may be allowed to conceive of all remaining motions as effect and consequences1 then nevertheless the first primal motion is still to be explained2 for the mechanical motions1 the first link of the chain certainly cannot lie in a mechanical motion1 since that would be as good as recurring to the nonsensical idea of the causa sui4 ,but likewise it is not feasible to attribute to the eternal1 unconditional things a motion of their own1 as it were from the beginning1 as dowry of their existence4 ,for motion cannot be conceived without a direction whither and whereupon1 therefore only as relation and condition2 but a thing is no longer entitative-in-itself and unconditional1 if according to its nature it refers necessarily to something existing outside of it4 ,in this embarrassment ,anaxagoras thought he had found an extraordinary help and salvation in that ,nous1 automobile and otherwise independent2 the nature of that ,nous being just obscure and veiled enough to produce the deception about it1 that its assumption also involves that forbidden causa sui4 ,to empiric observation it is even an established fact that ,conception is not a causa sui but the effect of the brain1 yea1 it must appear to that observation as an odd eccentricity to separate the mind1 the product of the brain1 from its causa and still to deem it existing after this severing4 ,this ,anaxagoras did2 he forgot the brain1 its marvellous design1 the delicacy and intricacy of its convolutions and passages and he decreed the ,mind-,in-,itself4 ,this ,mind-,in-,itself alone among all substances had ,free-will1--a grand discernment6 ,this ,mind was able at any odd time to begin with the motion of the things outside it2 on the other hand for ages and ages it could occupy itself with itself--in short ,anaxagoras was allowed to assume a first moment of motion in some primeval age1 as the ,chalaza of all so-called ,becoming2 i4e41 of all ,change1 namely of all shifting and rearranging of the eternal substances and their particles1 ,although the ,mind itself is eternal1 it is in no way compelled to torment itself for eternities with the shifting about of grains of matter2 and certainly there was a time and a state of those matters--it is quite indifferent whether that time was of long or short duration--during which the ,nous had not acted upon them1 during which they were still unmoved4 ,that is the period of the ,anaxagorean chaos4 #af ,the ,anaxagorean chaos is not an immediately evident conception2 in order to grasp it one must have understood the conception which our philosopher had with respect to the so-called ,becoming4 ,for in itself the state of all heterogeneous ,elementary-existences before all motion would by no means necessarily result in an absolute mixture of all seeds of things1 as the expression of ,anaxagoras runs1 an intermixture1 which he imagined as a complete pell-mell1 disordered in its smallest parts1 after all these ,elementary-existences had been1 as in a mortar1 pounded and resolved into atoms of dust1 so that now in that chaos1 as in an amphora1 they could be whirled into a medley4 ,one might say that this conception of the chaos did not contain anything inevitable1 that one merely needed rather to assume any chance position of all those existences1 but not an infinite decomposition of them2 an irregular side-by-side arrangement was already sufficient2 there was no need of a pell-mell1 let alone such a total pell-mell4 ,what therefore put into ,anaxagoras' head that difficult and complex conception8 ,as already said3 his conception of the empirically given ,becoming4 ,from his experience he drew first a most extraordinary proposition on the ,becoming1 and this proposition necessarily resulted in that doctrine of the chaos1 as its consequence4 ,the observation of the processes of evolution in nature1 not a consideration of an earlier philosophical system1 suggested to ,anaxagoras the doctrine1 that ,all originated from ,all2 this was the conviction of the natural philosopher based upon a manifold1 and at the bottom1 of course1 excessively inadequate induction4 ,he proved it thus3 if even the contrary could originate out of the contrary1 e4g41 the ,black out of the ,white1 everything is possible2 that however did happen with the dissolution of white snow into black water4 ,the nourishment of the body he explained to himself in this way3 that in the articles of food there must be invisibly small constituents of flesh or blood or bone which during alimentation became disengaged and united with the homogeneous in the body4 ,but if ,all can become out of ,all1 the ,firm out of the ,liquid1 the ,hard out of the ,soft1 the ,black out of the ,white1 the ,fleshy out of ,bread1 then also ,all must be contained in ,all4 ,the names of things in that case express only the preponderance of the one substance over the other substances to be met with in smaller1 often imperceptible quantities4 ,in gold1 that is to say1 in that which one designates a potiore by the name gold1 there must be also contained silver1 snow1 bread1 and flesh1 but in very small quantities2 the whole is called after the preponderating item1 the gold-substance4 ,but how is it possible1 that one substance preponderates and fills a thing in greater mass than the others present8 ,experience shows1 that this preponderance is gradually produced only through ,motion1 that the preponderance is the result of a process1 which we commonly call ,becoming4 ,on the other hand1 that ,all is in ,all is not the result of a process1 but1 on the contrary1 the preliminary condition of all ,becoming and all ,motion1 and is consequently previous to all ,becoming4 ,in other words3 experience teaches1 that continually the like is added to the like1 e4g41 through nourishment1 therefore originally those homogeneous substances were not together and agglomerated1 but they were separate4 ,rather1 in all empiric processes coming before our eyes1 the homogeneous is always segregated from the heterogeneous and transmitted 7e4g41 during nourishment1 the particles of flesh out of the bread1 c71 consequently the pell-mell of the different substances is the older form of the constitution of things and in point of time previous to all ,becoming and ,moving4 ,if all so-called ,becoming is a segregating and presupposes a mixture1 the question arises1 what degree of intermixture this pell-mell must have had originally4 ,although the process of a moving on the part of the homogeneous to the homogeneous--i4e41 ,becoming--has already lasted an immense time1 one recognises in spite of that1 that even yet in all things remainders and seed-grains of all other things are enclosed1 waiting for their segregation1 and one recognises further that only here and there a preponderance has been brought about2 the primal mixture must have been a complete one1 i4e41 going down to the infinitely small1 since the separation and unmixing takes up an infinite length of time4 ,thereby strict adherence is paid to the thought3 that everything which possesses an essential ,being is infinitely divisible1 without forfeiting its specificum4 ,according to these hypotheses ,anaxagoras conceives of the world's primal existence3 perhaps as similar to a dust-like mass of infinitely small1 concrete particles of which every one is specifically simple and possesses one quality only1 yet so arranged that every specific quality is represented in an infinite number of individual particles4 ,such particles ,aristotle has called ,homoiomere in consideration of the fact that they are the ,parts1 all equal one to another1 of a ,whole which is homogeneous with its ,parts4 ,one would however commit a serious mistake to equate this primal pell-mell of all such particles1 such seed-grains of things to the one primal matter of ,anaximander2 for the latter's primal matter called the ,indefinite is a thoroughly coherent and peculiar mass1 the former's primal pell-mell is an aggregate of substances4 ,it is true one can assert about this ,aggregate of ,substances exactly the same as about the ,indefinite of ,anaximander1 as ,aristotle does3 it could be neither white nor grey1 nor black1 nor of any other colour2 it was tasteless1 scentless1 and altogether as a ,whole defined neither quantitatively nor qualitatively3 so far goes the similarity of the ,anaximandrian ,indefinite and the ,anaxagorean ,primal ,mixture4 ,but disregarding this negative equality they distinguish themselves one from another positively by the latter being a compound1 the former a unity4 ,anaxagoras had by the assumption of his ,chaos at least so much to his advantage1 that he was not compelled to deduce the ,many from the ,one1 the ,becoming out of the ,existent4 ,of course with his complete intermixture of the seeds he had to admit one exception3 the ,nous was not then1 nor is ,it now admixed with any thing4 ,for if ,it were admixed with only one ,existent1 ,it would have1 in infinite divisions1 to dwell in all things4 ,this exception is logically very dubious1 especially considering the previously described material nature of the ,nous1 it has something mythological in itself and seems arbitrary1 but was however1 according to ,anaxagorean prmissa1 a strict necessity4 ,the ,mind1 which is moreover infinitely divisible like any other matter1 only not through other matters but through ,itself1 has1 if ,it divides ,itself1 in dividing and conglobating sometimes in large1 sometimes in small masses1 ,its equal mass and quality from all eternity2 and that which at this minute exists as ,mind in animals1 plants1 men1 was also ,mind without a more or less1 although distributed in another way a thousand years ago4 ,but wherever ,it had a relation to another substance1 there ,it never was admixed with it1 but voluntarily seized it1 moved and pushed it arbitrarily--in short1 ruled it4 ,mind1 which alone has motion in ,itself1 alone possesses ruling power in this world and shows it through moving the grains of matter4 ,but whither does ,it move them8 ,or is a motion conceivable1 without direction1 without path8 ,is ,mind in ,its impacts just as arbitrary as it is1 with regard to the time when ,it pushes1 and when ,it does not push8 ,in short1 does ,chance1 i4e41 the blindest option1 rule within ,motion8 ,at this boundary we step into the ,most ,holy within the conceptual realm of ,anaxagoras4 #ag ,what had to be done with that chaotic pell-mell of the primal state previous to all motion1 so that out of it1 without any increase of new substances and forces1 the existing world might originate1 with its regular stellar orbits1 with its regulated forms of seasons and days1 with its manifold beauty and order1--in short1 so that out of the ,chaos might come a ,cosmos8 ,this can be only the effect of ,motion1 and of a definite and well-organised motion4 ,this ,motion itself is the means of the ,nous1 ,its goal would be the perfect segregation of the homogeneous1 a goal up to the present not yet attained1 because the disorder and the mixture in the beginning was infinite4 ,this goal is to be striven after only by an enormous process1 not to be realized suddenly by a mythological stroke of the wand4 ,if ever1 at an infinitely distant point of time1 it is achieved that everything homogeneous is brought together and the primal-existences undivided are encamped side by side in beautiful order1 and every particle has found its comrades and its home1 and the great peace comes about after the great division and splitting up of the substances1 and there will be no longer anything that is divided ind split up1 then the ,nous will again return into ,its automobilism and1 no longer ,itself divided1 roam through the world1 sometimes in larger1 sometimes in smaller masses1 as plant-mind or animal-mind1 and no longer will ,it take up ,its new dwelling-place in other matter4 ,meanwhile the task has not been completed2 but the kind of motion which the ,nous has thought out1 in order to solve the task1 shows a marvellous suitableness1 for by this motion the task is further solved in each new moment4 ,for this motion has the character of concentrically progressive circular motion2 it began at some one point of the chaotic mixture1 in the form of a little gyration1 and in ever larger paths this circular movement traverses all existing ,being1 jerking forth everywhere the homogeneous to the homogeneous4 ,at first this revolution brings everything ,dense to the ,dense1 everything ,rare to the ,rare1 and likewise all that is ,dark1 ,bright1 ,moist1 ,dry to their kind2 above these general groups or classifications there are again two still more comprehensive1 namely ,ether1 that is to say everything that is ,warm1 ,bright1 ,rare1 and ,ar1 that is to say everything that is ,dark1 ,cold1 ,heavy1 ,firm4 ,through the segregation of the ethereal masses from the arial1 there is formed1 as the most immediate effect of that epicycle whose centre moves along in the circumference of ever greater circles1 a something as in an eddy made in standing water2 heavy compounds are led towards the middle and compressed4 ,just in the same way that travelling waterspout in chaos forms itself on the outer side out of the ,ethereal1 ,rare1 ,bright ,constituents1 on the inner side out of the ,cloudy1 ,heavy1 ,moist ,constituents4 ,then in the course of this process out of that ,arial mass1 conglomerating in its interior1 water is separated1 and again out of the water the earthy element1 and then out of the earthy element1 under the effect of the awful cold are separated the stones4 ,again at some juncture masses of stone1 through the momentum of the rotation1 are torn away sideways from the earth and thrown into the realm of the hot light ,ether2 there in the latter's fiery element they are made to glow and1 carried along in the ethereal rotation1 they irradiate light1 and as sun and stars illuminate and warm the earth1 in herself dark and cold4 ,the whole conception is of a wonderful daring and simplicity and has nothing of that clumsy and anthropomorphical teleology1 which has been frequently connected with the name of ,anaxagoras4 ,that conception has its greatness just in this1 that it derives the whole ,cosmos of ,becoming out of the moved circle1 whereas ,parmenides contemplated the true ,existent as a resting1 dead ball4 ,once that circle is put into motion and caused to roll by the ,nous1 then all the order1 law and beauty of the world is the natural consequence of that first impetus4 ,how very much one wrongs ,anaxagoras if one reproaches him for the wise abstention from teleology which shows itself in this conception and talks scornfully of his ,nous as of a deus ex machina4 ,rather1 on account of the elimination of mythological and theistic miracle-working and anthropomorphic ends and utilities1 ,anaxagoras might have made use of proud words similar to those which ,kant used in his ,natural ,history of the ,heavens4 ,for it is indeed a sublime thought1 to retrace that grandeur of the cosmos and the marvellous arrangement of the orbits of the stars1 to retrace all that1 in all forms to a simple1 purely mechanical motion and1 as it were1 to a moved mathematical figure1 and therefore not to reduce all that to purposes and intervening hands of a machine-god1 but only to a kind of oscillation1 which1 having once begun1 is in its progress necessary and definite1 and effects result which resemble the wisest computation of sagacity and extremely well thought-out fitness without being anything of the sort4 ,i enjoy the pleasure1 says ,kant1 of seeing how a well-ordered whole produces itself without the assistance of arbitrary fabrications1 under the impulse of fixed laws of motion--a well-ordered whole which looks so similar to that world-system which is ours1 that ,i cannot abstain from considering it to be the same4 ,it seems to me that one might say here1 in a certain sense without presumption3 ',give me matter and ,i will build a world out of it4' #ah ,suppose now1 that for once we allow that primal mixture as rightly concluded1 some considerations especially from ,mechanics seem to oppose the grand plan of the world edifice4 ,for even though the ,mind at a point causes a circular movement its continuation is only conceivable with great difficulty1 especially since it is to be infinite and gradually to make all existing masses rotate4 ,as a matter of course one would assume that the pressure of all the remaining matter would have crushed out this small circular movement when it had scarcely begun2 that this does not happen presupposes on the part of the stimulating ,nous1 that the latter began to work suddenly with awful force1 or at any rate so quickly1 that we must call the motion a whirl3 such a whirl as ,democritus himself imagined4 ,and since this whirl must be infinitely strong in order not to be checked through the whole world of the ,infinite weighing heavily upon it1 it will be infinitely quick1 for strength can manifest itself originally only in speed4 ,on the contrary the broader the concentric rings are1 the slower will be this motion2 if once the motion could reach the end of the infinitely extended world1 then this motion would have already infinitely little speed of rotation4 ,vice versa1 if we conceive of the motion as infinitely great1 i4e41 infinitely quick1 at the moment of the very first beginning of motion1 then the original circle must have been infinitely small2 we get therefore as the beginning a particle rotated round itself1 a particle with an infinitely small material content4 ,this however would not at all explain the further motion2 one might imagine even all particles of the primal mass to rotate round themselves and yet the whole mass would remain unmoved and unseparated4 ,if1 however1 that material particle of infinite smallness1 caught and swung by the ,nous1 was not turned round itself but described a circle somewhat larger than a point1 this would cause it to knock against other material particles1 to move them on1 to hurl them1 to make them rebound and thus gradually to stir up a great and spreading tumult within which1 as the next result1 that separation of the arial masses from the ethereal had to take place4 ,just as the commencement of the motion itself is an arbitrary act of the ,nous1 arbitrary also is the manner of this commencement in so far as the first motion circumscribes a circle of which the radius is chosen somewhat larger than a point4 #ai ,here of course one might ask1 what fancy had at that time so suddenly occurred to the ,nous1 to knock against some chance material particle out of that number of particles and to turn it around in whirling dance and why that did not occur to ,it earlier4 ,whereupon ,anaxagoras would answer3 ,the ,nous has the privilege of arbitrary action2 ,it may begin at any chance time1 ,it depends on ,itself1 whereas everything else is determined from outside4 ,it has no duty1 and no end which ,it might be compelled to pursue2 if ,it did once begin with that motion and set ,itself an end1 this after all was only--the answer is difficult1 ,heraclitus would say--play6 ,that seems always to have been the last solution or answer hovering on the lips of the ,greek4 ,the ,anaxagorean ,mind is an artist and in truth the most powerful genius of mechanics and architecture1 creating with the simplest means the most magnificent forms and tracks and as it were a mobile architecture1 but always out of that irrational arbitrariness which lies in the soul of the artist4 ,it is as though ,anaxagoras was pointing at ,phidias and in face of the immense work of art1 the ,cosmos1 was calling out to us as he would do in front of the ,parthenon3 ,the ,becoming is no moral1 but only an artistic phenomenon4 ,aristotle relates that1 to the question what made life worth living1 ,anaxagoras had answered3 ,contemplating the heavens and the total order of the ,cosmos4 ,he treated physical things so devotionally1 and with that same mysterious awe1 which we feel when standing in front of an antique temple2 his doctrine became a species of free-thinking religious exercise1 protecting itself through the odi profanum vulgus et arceo and choosing its adherents with precaution out of the highest and noblest society of ,athens4 ,in the exclusive community of the ,athenian ,anaxagoreans the mythology of the people was allowed only as a symbolic language2 all myths1 all gods1 all heroes were considered here only as hieroglyphics of the interpretation of nature1 and even the ,homeric epic was said to be the canonic song of the sway of the ,nous and the struggles and laws of ,nature4 ,here and there a note from this society of sublime free-thinkers penetrated to the people2 and especially ,euripides1 the great and at all times daring ,euripides1 ever thinking of something new1 dared to let many things become known by means of the tragic mask1 many things which pierced like an arrow through the senses of the masses and from which the latter freed themselves only by means of ludicrous caricatures and ridiculous re-interpretations4 ,the greatest of all ,anaxagoreans however is ,pericles1 the mightiest and worthiest man of the world2 and ,plato bears witness that the philosophy of ,anaxagoras alone had given that sublime flight to the genius of ,pericles4 ,when as a public orator he stood before his people1 in the beautiful rigidity and immobility of a marble ,olympian and now1 calm1 wrapped in his mantle1 with unruffled drapery1 without any change of facial expression1 without smile1 with a voice the strong tone of which remained ever the same1 and when he now spoke in an absolutely un-,demosthenic but merely ,periclean fashion1 when he thundered1 struck with lightnings1 annihilated and redeemed--then he was the epitome of the ,anaxagorean ,cosmos1 the image of the ,nous1 who has built for ,itself the most beautiful and dignified receptacle1 then ,pericles was as it were the visible human incarnation of the building1 moving1 eliminating1 ordering1 reviewing1 artistically-undetermined force of the ,mind4 ,anaxagoras himself said man was the most rational being or he must necessarily shelter the ,nous within himself in greater fulness than all other beings1 because he had such admirable organs as his hands2 ,anaxagoras concluded therefore1 that that ,nous1 according to the extent to which ,it made ,itself master of a material body1 was always forming for ,itself out of this material the tools corresponding to ,its degree of power1 consequently the ,nous made the most beautiful and appropriate tools1 when ,it was appearing in his greatest fulness4 ,and as the most wondrous and appropriate action of the ,nous was that circular primal-motion1 since at that time the ,mind was still together1 undivided1 in ,itself1 thus to the listening ,anaxagoras the effect of the ,periclean speech often appeared perhaps as a simile of that circular primal-motion2 for here too he perceived a whirl of thoughts moving itself at first with awful force but in an orderly manner1 which in concentric circles gradually caught and carried away the nearest and farthest and which1 when it reached its end1 had reshaped--organising and segregating--the whole nation4 ,to the later philosophers of antiquity the way in which ,anaxagoras made use of his ,nous for the interpretation of the world was strange1 indeed scarcely pardonable2 to them it seemed as though he had found a grand tool but had not well understood it and they tried to retrieve what the finder had neglected4 ,they therefore did not recognise what meaning the abstention of ,anaxagoras1 inspired by the purest spirit of the method of natural science1 had1 and that this abstention first of all in every case puts to itself the question3 ,what is the cause of ,something8 7causa efficiens7--and not ,what is the purpose of ,something8 7causa finalis74 ,the ,nous has not been dragged in by ,anaxagoras for the purpose of answering the special question3 ,what is the cause of motion and what causes regular motions82 ,plato however reproaches him1 that he ought to have1 but had not shown that everything was in its own fashion and its own place the most beautiful1 the best and the most appropriate4 ,but this ,anaxagoras would not have dared to assert in any individual case1 to him the existing world was not even the most conceivably perfect world1 for he saw everything originate out of everything1 and he found the segregation of the substances through the ,nous complete and done with1 neither at the end of the filled space of the world nor in the individual beings4 ,for his understanding it was sufficient that he had found a motion1 which1 by simple continued action could create the visible order out of a chaos mixed through and through2 and he took good care not to put the question as to the ,why8 of the motion1 as to the rational purpose of motion4 ,for if the ,nous had to fulfil by means of motion a purpose innate in the noumenal essence1 then it was no longer in ,its free will to commence the motion at any chance time2 in so far as the ,nous is eternal1 ,it had also to be determined eternally by this purpose1 and then no point of time could have been allowed to exist in which motion was still lacking1 indeed it would have been logically forbidden to assume a starting point for motion3 whereby again the conception of original chaos1 the basis of the whole ,anaxagorean interpretation of the world would likewise have become logically impossible4 ,in order to escape such difficulties1 which teleology creates1 ,anaxagoras had always to emphasise and asseverate that the ,mind has free will2 all ,its actions1 including that of the primal motion1 were actions of the free will1 whereas on the contrary after that primeval moment the whole remaining world was shaping itself in a strictly determined1 and more precisely1 mechanically determined form4 ,that absolutely free will however can be conceived only as purposeless1 somewhat after the fashion of children's play or the artist's bent for play4 ,it is an error to ascribe to ,anaxagoras the common confusion of the teleologist1 who1 marvelling at the extraordinary appropriateness1 at the agreement of the parts with the whole1 especially in the realm of the organic1 assumes that that which exists for the intellect had also come into existence through intellect1 and that that which man brings about only under the guidance of the idea of purpose1 must have been brought about by ,nature through reflection and ideas of purpose4 7,schopenhauer1 ,the ,world ,as ,will ,and ,idea1 vol4 ii41 ,second ,book1 chap4 #bf3 ,on ,teleology74 ,conceived in the manner of ,anaxagoras1 however1 the order and appropriateness of things on the contrary is nothing but the immediate result of a blind mechanical motion2 and only in order to cause this motion1 in order to get for once out of the dead-rest of the ,chaos1 ,anaxagoras assumed the free-willed ,nous who depends only on ,itself4 ,he appreciated in the ,nous just the very quality of being a thing of chance1 a chance agent1 therefore of being able to act unconditioned1 undetermined1 guided neither by causes nor by purposes4 ,notes for a ,continuation 7,early ,part of #ahgc7 #a ,that this total conception of the ,anaxagorean doctrine must be right1 is proved most clearly by the way in which the successors of ,anaxagoras1 the ,agrigentine ,empedocles and the atomic teacher ,democritus in their counter-systems actually criticised and improved that doctrine4 ,the method of this critique is more than anything a continued renunciation in that spirit of natural science mentioned above1 the law of economy applied to the interpretation of nature4 ,that hypothesis1 which explains the existing world with the smallest expenditure of assumptions and means is to have preference3 for in such a hypothesis is to be found the least amount of arbitrariness1 and in it free play with possibilities is prohibited4 ,should there be two hypotheses which both explain the world1 then a strict test must be applied as to which of the two better satisfies that demand of economy4 ,he who can manage this explanation with the simpler and more known forces1 especially the mechanical ones1 he who deduces the existing edifice of the world out of the smallest possible number of forces1 will always be preferred to him who allows the more complicated and less-known forces1 and these moreover in greater number1 to carry on a world-creating play4 ,so then we see ,empedocles endeavouring to remove the superfluity of hypotheses from the doctrine of ,anaxagoras4 ,the first hypothesis which falls as unnecessary is that of the ,anaxagorean ,nous1 for its assumption is much too complex to explain anything so simple as motion4 ,after all it is only necessary to explain the two kinds of motion3 the motion of a body towards another1 and the motion away from another4 #b ,if our present ,becoming is a segregating1 although not a complete one1 then ,empedocles asks3 what prevents complete segregation8 ,evidently a force works against it1 i4e41 a latent motion of attraction4 ,further3 in order to explain that ,chaos1 a force must already have been at work2 a movement is necessary to bring about this complicated entanglement4 ,therefore periodical preponderance of the one and the other force is certain4 ,they are opposites4 ,the force of attraction is still at work2 for otherwise there would be no ,things at all1 everything would be segregated4 ,this is the actual fact3 two kinds of motion4 ,the ,nous does not explain them4 ,on the contrary1 ,love and ,hatred2 indeed we certainly see that these move as well as that the ,nous moves4 ,now the conception of the primal state undergoes a change3 it is the most blessed4 ,with ,anaxagoras it was the chaos before the architectural work1 the heap of stones as it were upon the building site4 #c ,empedocles had conceived the thought of a tangential force originated by revolution and working against gravity 7de coelo1 i41 p4 #bhd71 ,schopenhauer1 ,w4 ,a4 ,w41 ii4 #cij4 ,he considered the continuation of the circular movement according to ,anaxagoras impossible4 ,it would result in a whirl1 i4e41 the contrary of ordered motion4 ,if the particles were infinitely mixed1 pell-mell1 then one would be able to break asunder the bodies without any exertion of power1 they would not cohere or hold together1 they would be as dust4 ,the forces1 which press the atoms against one another1 and which give stability to the mass1 ,empedocles calls ,love4 ,it is a molecular force1 a constitutive force of the bodies4 #d ,against ,anaxagoras4 #a4 ,the ,chaos already presupposes motion4 #b4 ,nothing prevented the complete segregation4 #c4 ,our bodies would be dust-forms4 ,how can motion exist1 if there are not counter-motions in all bodies8 #d4 ,an ordered permanent circular motion impossible2 only a whirl4 ,he assumes the whirl itself to be an effect of the 4--4 ,how do distant things operate on one another1 sun upon earth8 ,if everything were still in a whirl1 that would be impossible4 ,therefore at least two moving powers3 which must be inherent in ,things4 #e4 ,why infinite 8 ,transgression of experience4 ,anaxagoras meant the chemical atoms4 ,empedocles tried the assumption of four kinds of chemical atoms4 ,he took the aggregate states to be essential1 and heat to be co-ordinated4 ,therefore the aggregate states through repulsion and attraction2 matter in four forms4 #f4 ,the periodical principle is necessary4 #g4 ,with the living beings ,empedocles will also deal still on the same principle4 ,here also he denies purposiveness4 ,his greatest deed4 ,with ,anaxagoras a dualism4 #e ,the symbolism of sexual love4 ,here as in the ,platonic fable the longing after ,oneness shows itself1 and here1 likewise1 is shown that once a greater unity already existed2 were this greater unity established1 then this would again strive after a still greater one4 ,the conviction of the unity of everything living guarantees that once there was an immense ,living ,something1 of which we are pieces2 that is probably the ,sphairos itself4 ,he is the most blessed deity4 ,everything was connected only through love1 therefore in the highest degree appropriate4 ,love has been torn to pieces and splintered by hatred1 love has been divided into her elements and killed--bereft of life4 ,in the whirl no living individuals originate4 ,eventually everything is segregated and now our period begins4 7,he opposes the ,anaxagorean ,primal ,mixture by a ,primal ,discord47 ,love1 blind as she is1 with furious haste again throws the elements one against another endeavouring to see whether she can bring them back to life again or not4 ,here and there she is successful4 ,it continues4 ,a presentiment originates in the living beings1 that they are to strive after still higher unions than home and the primal state4 ,eros4 ,it is a terrible crime to kill life1 for thereby one works back to the ,primal ,discord4 ,some day everything will be again one single life1 the most blissful state4 ,the ,pythagorean-orphean doctrine re-interpreted in the manner of natural science4 ,empedocles consciously masters both means of expression1 therefore he is the first rhetor4 ,political aims4 ,the double-nature--the agonal and the loving1 the compassionate4 ,attempt of the ,hellenic total reform4 ,all inorganic matter has originated out of organic1 it is dead organic matter4 ,corpse and man4 #f ,,democritus ,the greatest possible simplification of the hypotheses4 #a4 ,there is motion1 therefore vacuum1 therefore a ,non-,existent4 ,thinking is motion4 #b4 ,if there is a ,non-,existent it must be indivisible1 i4e41 absolutely filled4 ,division is only explicable in case of empty spaces and pores4 ,the ,non-,existent alone is an absolutely porous thing4 #c4 ,the secondary qualities of matter1 1 not of ,matter-,in-,itself4 #d4 ,establishment of the primary qualities of the 4 ,wherein homogeneous1 wherein heterogeneous8 #e4 ,the aggregate-states of ,empedocles 7four elements7 presuppose only the homogeneous atoms1 they themselves cannot therefore be 4 #f4 ,motion is connected indissolubly with the atoms1 effect of gravity4 ,epicur4 ,critique3 what does gravity signify in an infinite vacuum8 #g4 ,thinking is the motion of the fire-atoms4 ,soul1 life1 perceptions of the senses4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 ,value of materialism and its embarrassment4 ,plato and ,democritus4 ,the hermit-like homeless noble searcher for truth4 ,democritus and the ,pythagoreans together find the basis of natural sciences4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 ,what are the causes which have interrupted a flourishing science of experimental physics in antiquity after ,democritus8 #g ,anaxagoras has taken from ,heraclitus the idea that in every ,becoming and in every ,being the opposites are together4 ,he felt strongly the contradiction that a body has many qualities and he pulverised it in the belief that he had now dissolved it into its true qualities4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 ,plato3 first ,heraclitean1 later ,sceptic3 ,everything1 even ,thinking1 is in a state of flux4 ,brought through ,socrates to the permanence of the good1 the beautiful4 ,these assumed as entitative4 ,all generic ideals partake of the idea of the good1 the beautiful1 and they too are therefore entitative1 being 7as the soul partakes of the idea of ,life74 ,the idea is formless4 ,through ,pythagoras' metempsychosis has been answered the question3 how we can know anything about the ideas4 ,plato's end3 scepticism in ,parmenides4 ,refutation of ideology4 #h ,,conclusion ,greek thought during the tragic age is pessimistic or artistically optimistic4 ,their judgment about life implies more4 ,the ,one1 flight from the ,becoming4 ,aut unity1 aut artistic play4 ,deep distrust of reality3 nobody assumes a good god1 who has made everything optime4 ,pythagoreans1 religious sect4 ,anaximander4 ,empedocles4 ,eleates4 ,anaxagoras4 ,heraclitus4 ,democritus3 the world without moral and sthetic meaning1 pessimism of chance4 ,if one placed a tragedy before all these1 the three former would see in it the mirror of the fatality of existence1 ,parmenides a transitory appearance1 ,heraclitus and ,anaxagoras an artistic edifice and image of the world-laws1 ,democritus the result of machines4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 ,with ,socrates ,optimism begins1 an optimism no longer artistic1 with teleology and faith in the good god2 faith in the enlightened good man4 ,dissolution of the instincts1 ,socrates breaks with the hitherto prevailing knowledge and culture2 he intends returning to the old citizen-virtue and to the ,state4 ,plato dissociates himself from the ,state1 when he observes that the ,state has become identical with the new ,culture4 ,the ,socratic scepticism is a weapon against the hitherto prevailing culture and knowledge4 ,,on ,,truth ,,and ,,falsity ,,in ,,their ,,ultramoral ,,sense 7#ahgc7 ,in some remote corner of the universe1 effused into innumerable solar-systems1 there was once a star upon which clever animals invented cognition4 ,it was the haughtiest1 most mendacious moment in the history of this world1 but yet only a moment4 ,after ,nature had taken breath awhile the star congealed and the clever animals had to die4--,someone might write a fable after this style1 and yet he would not have illustrated sufficiently1 how wretched12 shadow-like1 transitory1 purposeless and fanciful the human intellect appears in ,nature4 ,there were eternities during which this intellect did not exist1 and when it has once more passed away there will be nothing to show that it has existed4 ,for this intellect is not concerned with any further mission transcending the sphere of human life4 ,no1 it is purely human and none but its owner and procreator regards it so pathetically as to suppose that the world revolves around it4 ,if1 however1 we and the gnat could understand each other we should learn that even the gnat swims through the air with the same pathos1 and feels within itself the flying centre of the world4 ,nothing in ,nature is so bad or so insignificant that it will not1 at the smallest puff of that force cognition1 immediately swell up like a balloon1 and just as a mere porter wants to have his admirer1 so the very proudest man1 the philosopher1 imagines he sees from all sides the eyes of the universe telescopically directed upon his actions and thoughts4 ,it is remarkable that this is accomplished by the intellect1 which after all has been given to the most unfortunate1 the most delicate1 the most transient beings only as an expedient1 in order to detain them for a moment in existence1 from which without that extra-gift they would have every cause to flee as swiftly as ,lessing's son4#a ,that haughtiness connected with cognition and sensation1 spreading blinding fogs before the eyes and over the senses of men1 deceives itself therefore as to the value of existence owing to the fact that it bears within itself the most flattering evaluation of cognition4 ,its most general effect is deception2 but even its most particular effects have something of deception in their nature4 ,the intellect1 as a means for the preservation of the individual1 develops its chief power in dissimulation2 for it is by dissimulation that the feebler1 and less robust individuals preserve themselves1 since it has been denied them to fight the battle of existence with horns or the sharp teeth of beasts of prey4 ,in man this art of dissimulation reaches its acme of perfection3 in him deception1 flattery1 falsehood and fraud1 slander1 display1 pretentiousness1 disguise1 cloaking convention1 and acting to others and to himself in short1 the continual fluttering to and fro around the one flame--,vanity3 all these things are so much the rule1 and the law1 that few things are more incomprehensible than the way in which an honest and pure impulse to truth could have arisen among men4 ,they are deeply immersed in illusions and dream-fancies2 their eyes glance only over the surface of things and see forms2 their sensation nowhere leads to truth1 but contents itself with receiving stimuli and1 so to say1 with playing hide-and-seek on the back of things4 ,in addition to that1 at night man allows his dreams to lie to him a whole life-time long1 without his moral sense ever trying to prevent them2 whereas men are said to exist who by the exercise of a strong will have overcome the habit of snoring4 ,what indeed does man know about himself8 ,oh6 that he could but once see himself complete1 placed as it were in an illuminated glass-case6 ,does not nature keep secret from him most things1 even about his body1 e4g41 the convolutions of the intestines1 the quick flow of the blood-currents1 the intricate vibrations of the fibres1 so as to banish and lock him up in proud1 delusive knowledge8 ,nature threw away the key2 and woe co the fateful curiosity which might be able for a moment to look out and down through a crevice in the chamber of consciousness1 and discover that man1 indifferent to his own ignorance1 is resting on the pitiless1 the greedy1 the insatiable1 the murderous1 and1 as it were1 hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger4 ,whence1 in the wide world1 with this state of affairs1 arises the impulse to truth8 ,as far as the individual tries to preserve himself against other individuals1 in the natural state of things he uses the intellect in most cases only for dissimulation2 since1 however1 man both from necessity and boredom wants to exist socially and gregariously1 he must needs make peace and at least endeavour to cause the greatest bellum omnium contra omnes to disappear from his world4 ,this first conclusion of peace brings with it a something which looks like the first step towards the attainment of that enigmatical bent for truth4 ,for that which henceforth is to be truth is now fixed2 that is to say1 a uniformly valid and binding designation of things is invented and the legislature of language also gives the first laws of truth3 since here1 for the first time1 originates the contrast between truth and falsity4 ,the liar uses the valid designations1 the words1 in order to make the unreal appear as real2 e4g41 he says1 ,i am rich1 whereas the right designation for his state would be poor4 ,he abuses the fixed conventions by convenient substitution or even inversion of terms4 ,if he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful fashion1 society will no longer trust him but will even exclude him4 ,in this way men avoid not so much being defrauded1 but being injured by fraud4 ,at bottom1 at this juncture too1 they hate not deception1 but the evil1 hostile consequences of certain species of deception4 ,and it is in a similarly limited sense only that man desires truth3 he covets the agreeable1 life-preserving consequences of truth2 he is indifferent towards pure1 ineffective knowledge2 he is even inimical towards truths which possibly might prove harmful or destroying4 ,and1 moreover1 what after all are those conventions op language8 ,are they possibly products of knowledge1 of the love of truth2 do the designations and the things coincide8 ,is language the adequate expression of all realities8 ,only by means of forgetfulness can man ever arrive at imagining that he possesses truth in that degree just indicated4 ,if he does not mean to content himself with truth in the shape of tautology1 that is1 with empty husks1 he will always obtain illusions instead of truth4 ,what is a word8 ,the expression of a nerve-stimulus in sounds4 ,but to infer a cause outside us from the nerve-stimulus is already the result of a wrong and unjustifiable application of the proposition of causality4 ,how should we dare1 if truth with the genesis of language1 if the point of view of certainty with the designations had alone been decisive2 how indeed should we dare to say3 the stone is hard2 as if hard was known to us otherwise2 and not merely as an entirely subjective stimulus6 ,we divide things according to genders2 we designate the tree as masculine1#b the plant as feminine3#c what arbitrary metaphors6 ,how far flown beyond the canon of certainty6 ,we speak of a serpent2#d the designation fits nothing but the sinuosity1 and could therefore also appertain to the worm4 ,what arbitrary demarcations6 what one-sided preferences given sometimes to this1 sometimes to that quality of a thing6 ,the different languages placed side by side show that with words truth or adequate expression matters little3 for otherwise there would not be so many languages4 ,the ,thing-in-itself 7it is just this which would be the pure ineffective truth7 is also quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and not worth making any great endeavour to obtain4 ,he designates only the relations of things to men and for their expression he calls to his help the most daring metaphors4 ,a nerve-stimulus1 first transformed into a percept6 ,first metaphor6 ,the percept again copied into a sound6 ,second metaphor6 ,and each time he leaps completely out of one sphere right into the midst of an entirely different one4 ,one can imagine a man who is quite deaf and has never had a sensation of tone and of music2 just as this man will possibly marvel at ,chladni's sound figures in the sand1 will discover their cause in the vibrations of the string1 and will then proclaim that now he knows what man calls tone2 even so does it happen to us all with language4 ,when we talk about trees1 colours1 snow and flowers1 we believe we know something about the things themselves1 and yet we only possess metaphors of the things1 and these metaphors do not in the least correspond to the original essentials4 ,just as the sound shows itself as a sand-figure1 in the same way the enigmatical x of the ,thing-in-itself is seen first as nerve-stimulus1 then as percept1 and finally as sound4 ,at any rate the genesis of language did not therefore proceed on logical lines1 and the whole material in which and with which the man of truth1 the investigator1 the philosopher works and builds1 originates1 if not from ,nephelococcygia1 cloud-land1 at any rate not from the essence of things4 ,let us especially think about the formation of ideas4 ,every word becomes at once an idea not by having1 as one might presume1 to serve as a reminder for the original experience happening but once and absolutely individualised1 to which experience such word owes its origin1 no1 but by having simultaneously to fit innumerable1 more or less similar 7which really means never equal1 therefore altogether unequal7 cases4 ,every idea originates through equating the unequal4 ,as certainly as no one leaf is exactly similar to any other1 so certain is it that the idea leaf has been formed through an arbitrary omission of these individual differences1 through a forgetting of the differentiating qualities1 and this idea now awakens the notion that in nature there is1 besides the leaves1 a something called the leaf1 perhaps a primal form according to which all leaves were woven1 drawn1 accurately measured1 coloured1 crinkled1 painted1 but by unskilled hands1 so that no copy had turned out correct and trustworthy as a true copy of the primal form4 ,we call a man honest2 we ask1 why has he acted so honestly to-day8 ,our customary answer runs1 ,on account of his honesty4 ,the ,honesty6 ,that means again3 the leaf is the cause of the leaves4 ,we really and truly do not know anything at all about an essential quality which might be called the honesty1 but we do know about numerous individualised1 and therefore unequal actions1 which we equate by omission of the unequal1 and now designate as honest actions2 finally out of them we formulate a qualitas occulta with the name ,honesty4 ,the disregarding of the individual and real furnishes us with the idea1 as it likewise also gives us the form2 whereas nature knows of no forms and ideas1 and therefore knows no species but only an x1 to us inaccessible and indefinable4 ,for our antithesis of individual and species is anthropomorphic too and does not come from the essence of things1 although on the other hand we do not dare to say that it does not correspond to it2 for that would be a dogmatic assertion and as such just as undemonstrable as its contrary4 ,what therefore is truth8 ,a mobile army of metaphors1 metonymies1 anthropomorphisms3 in short a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified1 metamorphosed1 adorned1 and after long usage seem to a nation fixed1 canonic and binding2 truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions2 worn-out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses2 coins which have their obverse effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal4 ,still we do not yet know whence the impulse to truth comes1 for up to now we have heard only about the obligation which society imposes in order to exist3 to be truthful1 that is1 to use the usual metaphors1 therefore expressed morally3 we have heard only about the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention1 to lie gregariously in a style binding for all4 ,now man of course forgets that matters are going thus with him2 he therefore lies in that fashion pointed out unconsciously and according to habits of centuries' standing--and by this very unconsciousness1 by this very forgetting1 he arrives at a sense for truth4 ,through this feeling of being obliged to designate one thing as red1 another as cold1 a third one as dumb1 awakes a moral emotion relating to truth4 ,out of the antithesis liar whom nobody trusts1 whom all exclude1 man demonstrates to himself the venerableness1 reliability1 usefulness of truth4 ,now as a rational being he submits his actions to the sway of abstractions2 he no longer suffers himself to be carried away by sudden impressions1 by sensations1 he first generalises all these impressions into paler1 cooler ideas1 in order to attach to them the ship of his life and actions4 ,everything which makes man stand out in bold relief against the animal depends on this faculty of volatilising the concrete metaphors into a schema1 and therefore resolving a perception into an idea4 ,for within the range of those schemata a something becomes possible that never could succeed under the first perceptual impressions3 to build up a pyramidal order with castes and grades1 to create a new world of laws1 privileges1 sub-orders1 delimitations1 which now stands opposite the other perceptual world of first impressions and assumes the appearance of being the more fixed1 general1 known1 human of the two and therefore the regulating and imperative one4 ,whereas every metaphor of perception is individual and without its equal and therefore knows how to escape all attempts to classify it1 the great edifice of ideas shows the rigid regularity of a ,roman ,columbarium and in logic breathes forth the sternness and coolness which we find in mathematics4 ,he who has been breathed upon by this coolness will scarcely believe1 that the idea too1 bony and hexa-hedral1 and permutable as a die1 remains however only as the residuum of a metaphor1 and that the illusion of the artistic metamorphosis of a nerve-stimulus into percepts is1 if not the mother1 then the grand-mother of every idea4 ,now in this game of dice1 ,truth means to use every die as it is designated1 to count its points carefully1 to form exact classifications1 and never lo violate the order of castes and the sequences of rank4 ,just as the ,romans and ,etruscans for their benefit cut up the sky by means of strong mathematical lines and banned a god as it were into a templum1 into a space limited in this fashion1 so every nation has above its head such a sky of ideas divided up mathematically1 and it understands the demand for truth to mean that every conceptual god is to be looked for only in his own sphere4 ,one may here well admire man1 who succeeded in piling up an infinitely complex dome of ideas on a movable foundation and as it were on running water1 as a powerful genius of architecture4 ,of course in order to obtain hold on such a foundation it must be as an edifice piled up out of cobwebs1 so fragile1 as to be carried away by the waves3 so firm1 as not to be blown asunder by every wind4 ,in this way man as an architectural genius rises high above the bee2 she builds with wax1 which she brings together out of nature2 he with the much more delicate material of ideas1 which he must first manufacture within himself4 ,he is very much to be admired here--but not on account of his impulse for truth1 his bent for pure cognition of things4 ,if somebody hides a thing behind a bush1 seeks it again and finds it in the self-same place1 then there is not much to boast of1 respecting this seeking and finding2 thus1 however1 matters stand with the seeking and finding of truth within the realm of reason4 ,if ,i make the definition of the mammal and then declare after inspecting a camel1 ,behold a mammal1 then no doubt a truth is brought to light thereby1 but it is of very limited value1 ,i mean it is anthropomorphic through and through1 and does not contain one single point which is true-in-itself1 real and universally valid1 apart from man4 ,the seeker after such truths seeks at the bottom only the metamorphosis of the world in man1 he strives for an understanding of the world as a human-like thing and by his battling gains at best the feeling of an assimilation4 ,similarly1 as the astrologer contemplated the stars in the service of man and in connection with their happiness and unhappiness1 such a seeker contemplates the whole world as related to man1 as the infinitely protracted echo of an original sound3 man2 as the multiplied copy of the one arch-type3 man4 ,his procedure is to apply man as the measure of all things1 whereby he starts from the error of believing that he has these things immediately before him as pure objects4 ,he therefore forgets that the original metaphors of perception are metaphors1 and takes them for the things themselves4 ,only by forgetting that primitive world of metaphors1 only by the congelation and coagulation of an original mass of similes and percepts pouring forth as a fiery liquid out of the primal faculty of human fancy1 only by the invincible faith1 that this sun1 this window1 this table is a truth in itself3 in short only by the fact that man forgets himself as subject1 and what is more as an artistically creating subject3 only by all this does he live with some repose1 safety and consequence4 ,if he were able to get out of the prison walls of this faith1 even for an instant only1 his self-consciousness would be destroyed at once4 ,already it costs him some trouble to admit to himself that the insect and the bird perceive a world different from his own1 and that the question1 which of the two world-perceptions is more accurate1 is quite a senseless one1 since to decide this question it would be necessary to apply the standard of right perception1 i4e41 to apply a standard which does not exist4 ,on the whole it seems to me that the right perception--which would mean the adequate expression of an object in the subject--is a nonentity full of contradictions3 for between two utterly different spheres1 as between subject and object1 there is no causality1 no accuracy1 no expression1 but at the utmost an sthetical relation1 ,i mean a suggestive metamorphosis1 a stammering translation into quite a distinct foreign language1 for which purpose however there is needed at any rate an intermediate sphere1 an intermediate force1 freely composing and freely inventing4 ,the word phenomenon contains many seductions1 and on that account ,i avoid it as much as possible1 for it is not true that the essence of things appears in the empiric world4 ,a painter who had no hands and wanted to express the picture distinctly present to his mind by the agency of song1 would still reveal much more with this permutation of spheres1 than the empiric world reveals about the essence of things4 ,the very relation of a nerve-stimulus to the produced percept is in itself no necessary one2 but if the same percept has been reproduced millions of times and has been the inheritance of many successive generations of man1 and in the end appears each time to all mankind as the result of the same cause1 then it attains finally for man the same importance as if it were the unique1 necessary percept and as if that relation between the original nerve-stimulus and the percept produced were a close relation of causality3 just as a dream eternally repeated1 would be perceived and judged as though real4 ,but the congelation and coagulation of a metaphor does not at all guarantee the necessity and exclusive justification of that metaphor4 ,surely every human being who is at home with such contemplations has felt a deep distrust against any idealism of that kind1 as often as he has distinctly convinced himself of the eternal rigidity1 omni-presence1 and infallibility of nature's laws3 he has arrived at the conclusion that as far as we can penetrate the heights of the telescopic and the depths of the microscopic world1 everything is quite secure1 complete1 infinite1 determined1 and continuous4 ,science will have to dig in these shafts eternally and successfully and all things found are sure to have to harmonise and not to contradict one another4 ,how little does this resemble a product of fancy1 for if it were one it would necessarily betray somewhere its nature of appearance and unreality4 ,against this it may be objected in the first place that if each of us had for himself a different sensibility1 if we ourselves were only able to perceive sometimes as a bird1 sometimes as a worm1 sometimes as a plant1 or if one of us saw the same stimulus as red1 another as blue1 if a third person even perceived it as a tone1 then nobody would talk of such an orderliness of nature1 but would conceive of her only as an extremely subjective structure4 ,secondly1 what is1 for us in general1 a law of nature8 ,it is not known in itself but only in its effects1 that is to say in its relations to other laws of nature1 which again are known to us only as sums of relations4 ,therefore all these relations refer only one to another and are absolutely incomprehensible to us in their essence2 only that which we add3 time1 space1 i4e41 relations of sequence and numbers1 are really known to us in them4 ,everything wonderful1 however1 that we marvel at in the laws of nature1 everything that demands an explanation and might seduce us into distrusting idealism1 lies really and solely in the mathematical rigour and inviolability of the conceptions of time and space4 ,these however we produce within ourselves and throw them forth with that necessity with which the spider spins2 since we are compelled to conceive all things under these forms only1 then it is no longer wonderful that in all things we actually conceive none but these forms3 for they all must bear within themselves the laws of number1 and this very idea of number is the most marvellous in all things4 ,all obedience to law which impresses us so forcibly in the orbits of stars and in chemical processes coincides at the bottom with those qualities which we ourselves attach to those things1 so that it is we who thereby make the impression upon ourselves4 ,whence it clearly follows that that artistic formation of metaphors1 with which every sensation in us begins1 already presupposes those forms1 and is therefore only consummated within them2 only out of the persistency of these primal forms the possibility explains itself1 how afterwards--out of the metaphors themselves a structure of ideas1 could again be compiled4 ,for the latter is an imitation of the relations of time1 space and number in the realm of metaphors4 #a ,the ,german poet1 ,lessing1 had been married for just a little over one year to ,eva ,knig4 ,a son was born and died the same day1 and the mother's life was despaired of4 ,in a letter to his friend ,eschenburg the poet wrote3 444 and ,i lost him so unwillingly1 this son6 ,for he had so much understanding6 so much understanding6 ,do not suppose that the few hours of fatherhood have made me an ape of a father6 ,i know what ,i say4 ,was it not understanding1 that they had to drag him into the world with a pair of forceps8 that he so soon suspected the evil of this world8 ,was it not understanding1 that he seized the first opportunity to get away from it8444 ,eva ,knig died a week later4--,,tr4 #b ,in ,german the tree--der ,baum--is masculine4--,,tr4 #c ,in ,german the plant--die ,pflanze---is feminine--,,tr4 #d ,cf4 the ,german die ,schlange and schlingen1 the ,english serpent from the ,latin serpere4--,,tr4 #b ,as we saw1 it is language which has worked originally at the construction of ideas2 in later times it is science4 ,just as the bee works at the same time at the cells and fills them with honey1 thus science works irresistibly at that great columbarium of ideas1 the cemetery of perceptions1 builds ever newer and higher storeys2 supports1 purifies1 renews the old cells1 and endeavours above all to fill that gigantic framework and to arrange within it the whole of the empiric world1 i4e41 the anthropomorphic world4 ,and as the man of action binds his life to reason and its ideas1 in order to avoid being swept away and losing himself1 so the seeker after truth builds his hut close to the towering edifice of science in order to collaborate with it and to find protection4 ,and he needs protection4 ,for there are awful powers which continually press upon him1 and which hold out against the truth of science truths fashioned in quite another way1 bearing devices of the most heterogeneous character4 ,that impulse towards the formation of metaphors1 mat fundamental impulse of man1 which we cannot reason away for one moment--for thereby we should reason away man himself--is in truth not defeated nor even subdued by the fact that out of its evaporated products1 the ideas1 a regular and rigid new world has been built as a stronghold for it4 ,this impulse seeks for itself a new realm of action and another river-bed1 and finds it in ,mythos and more generally in ,art4 ,this impulse constantly confuses the rubrics and cells of the ideas1 by putting up new figures of speech1 metaphors1 metonymies2 it constantly shows its passionate longing for shaping the existing world of waking man as motley1 irregular1 inconsequentially incoherent1 attractive1 and eternally new as the world of dreams is4 ,for indeed1 waking man per se is only clear about his being awake through the rigid and orderly woof of ideas1 and it is for this very reason that he sometimes comes to believe that he was dreaming when that woof of ideas has for a moment been torn by ,art4 ,pascal is quite right1 when he asserts1 that if the same dream came to us every night we should be just as much occupied by it as by the things which we see every day2 to quote his words1 ,if an artisan were certain that he would dream every night for fully twelve hours that he was a king1 ,i believe that he would be just as happy as a king who dreams every night for twelve hours that he is an artisan4 ,the wide-awake day of a people mystically excitable1 let us say of the earlier ,greeks1 is in fact through the continually-working wonder1 which the mythos presupposes1 more akin to the dream than to the day of the thinker sobered by science4 ,if every tree may at some time talk as a nymph1 or a god under the disguise of a bull1 carry away virgins1 if the goddess ,athene herself be suddenly seen as1 with a beautiful team1 she drives1 accompanied by ,pisistratus1 through the markets of ,athens--and every honest ,athenian did believe this--at any moment1 as in a dream1 everything is possible2 and all nature swarms around man as if she were nothing but the masquerade of the gods1 who found it a huge joke to deceive man by assuming all possible forms4 ,man himself1 however1 has an invincible tendency to let himself be deceived1 and he is like one enchanted with happiness when the rhapsodist narrates to him epic romances in such a way that they appear real or when the actor on the stage makes the king appear more kingly than reality shows him4 ,intellect1 that master of dissimulation1 is free and dismissed from his service as slave1 so long as ,it is able to deceive without injuring1 and then ,it celebrates ,its ,saturnalia4 ,never is ,it richer1 prouder1 more luxuriant1 more skilful and daring2 with a creator's delight ,it throws metaphors into confusion1 shifts the boundary-stones of the abstractions1 so that for instance ,it designates the stream as the mobile way which carries man to that place whither he would otherwise go4 ,now ,it has thrown off ,its shoulders the emblem of servitude4 ,usually with gloomy officiousness ,it endeavours to point out the way to a poor individual coveting existence1 and ,it fares forth for plunder and booty like a servant for his master1 but now ,it ,itself has become a master and may wipe from ,its countenance the expression of indigence4 ,whatever ,it now does1 compared with ,its former doings1 bears within itself dissimulation1 just as ,its former doings bore the character of distortion4 ,it copies human life1 but takes it for a good thing and seems to rest quite satisfied with it4 ,that enormous framework and hoarding of ideas1 by clinging to which needy man saves himself through life1 is to the freed intellect only a scaffolding and a toy for ,its most daring feats1 and when ,it smashes it to pieces1 throws it into confusion1 and then puts it together ironically1 pairing the strangest1 separating the nearest items1 then ,it manifests that ,it has no use for those makeshifts of misery1 and that ,it is now no longer led by ideas but by intuitions4 ,from these intuitions no regular road leads into the land of the spectral schemata1 the abstractions2 for them the word is not made1 when man sees them he is dumb1 or speaks in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations of ideas1 in order to correspond creatively with the impression of the powerful present intuition at least by destroying and jeering at the old barriers of ideas4 ,there are ages1 when the rational and the intuitive man stand side by side1 the one full of fear of the intuition1 the other full of scorn for the abstraction2 the latter just as irrational as the former is inartistic4 ,both desire to rule over life2 the one by knowing how to meet the most important needs with foresight1 prudence1 regularity2 the other as an over-joyous hero by ignoring those needs and taking that life only as real which simulates appearance and beauty4 ,wherever intuitive man1 as for instance in the earlier history of ,greece1 brandishes his weapons more powerfully and victoriously than his opponent1 there under favourable conditions1 a culture can develop and art can establish her rule over life4 ,that dissembling1 that denying of neediness1 that splendour of metaphorical notions and especially that directness of dissimulation accompany all utterances of such a life4 ,neither the house of man1 nor his way of walking1 nor his clothing1 nor his earthen jug suggest that necessity invented them2 it seems as if they all were intended as the expressions of a sublime happiness1 an ,olympic cloudlessness1 and as it were a playing at seriousness4 ,whereas the man guided by ideas and abstractions only wards off misfortune by means of them1 without even enforcing for himself happiness out of the abstractions2 whereas he strives after the greatest possible freedom from pains1 the intuitive man dwelling in the midst of culture has from his intuitions a harvest3 besides the warding off of evil1 he attains a continuous in-pouring of enlightenment1 enlivenment and redemption4 ,of course when he does suffer1 he suffers more3 and he even suffers more frequently since he cannot learn from experience1 but again and again falls into the same ditch into which he has fallen before4 ,in suffering he is just as irrational as in happiness2 he cries aloud and finds no consolation4 ,how different matters are in the same misfortune with the ,stoic1 taught by experience and ruling himself by ideas6 ,he who otherwise only looks for uprightness1 truth1 freedom from deceptions and shelter from ensnaring and sudden attack1 in his misfortune performs the masterpiece of dissimulation1 just as the other did in his happiness2 he shows no twitching mobile human face but as it were a mask with dignified1 harmonious features2 he does not cry out and does not even alter his voice2 when a heavy thundercloud bursts upon him1 he wraps himself up in his cloak and with slow and measured step walks away from beneath it4 ,,the ,,end4