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III.
CRITICISM OF PHILOSOPHY.
1. General Remarks.
406.
Let us rid ourselves of a few superstitions which heretofore have been fashionable among philosophers!
407.
Philosophers are prejudiced against appearance, change, pain, death, the things of the body, the senses, fate, bondage, and all that which has no purpose.
In the first place, they believe in: absolute knowledge, (2) in knowledge for its own sake,
(3) in virtue and happiness as necessarily related,
(4) in the recognisability of men's acts. They are led by instinctive determinations of values, in which former cultures are reflected (more dangerous cultures too).
408.
What have philosophers lacked! (1) A sense of history, (2) a knowledge of physiology, (3) a [Pg 328]goal in the future.—The ability to criticise without irony or moral condemnation.
409.
Philosophers have had (1) from times immemorial a wonderful capacity for the contradictio in adjecto, (2) they have always trusted concepts as unconditionally as they have mistrusted the senses: it never seems to have occurred to them that notions and words are our inheritance of past ages in which thinking was neither very clear nor very exact.
What seems to dawn upon philosophers last of all: that they must no longer allow themselves to be presented with concepts already conceived, nor must they merely purify and polish up those concepts; but they must first make them, create them, themselves, and then present them and get people to accept them. Up to the present, people have trusted their concepts generally, as if they had been a wonderful dowry from some kind of wonderland: but they constitute the inheritance of our most remote, most foolish, and most intelligent forefathers. This piety towards that which already exists in us is perhaps related to the moral element in science. What we needed above all is absolute scepticism towards all traditional concepts (like that which a certain philosopher may already have possessed—and he was Plato, of course: for he taught the reverse).
410.
Profoundly mistrustful towards the dogmas of the theory of knowledge, I liked to look now out of this window, now out of that, though I took good care not to become finally fixed anywhere, indeed I should have thought it dangerous to have done so—though finally: is it within the range of probabilities for an instrument to criticise its own fitness? What I noticed more particularly was, that no scientific scepticism or dogmatism has ever arisen quite free from all arrires penses—that it has only a secondary value as soon as the motive lying immediately behind it is discovered.
Fundamental aspect: Kant's, Hegel's, Schopenhauer's, the sceptical and epochistical, the historifying and the pessimistic attitudes—all have a moral origin. I have found no one who has dared to criticise the moral valuations, and I soon turned my back upon the meagre attempts that have been made to describe the evolution of these feelings (by English and German Darwinians).
How can Spinoza's position, his denial and repudiation of the moral values, be explained? (It was the result of his Theodicy!)
411.
Morality regarded as the highest form of protection.—Our world is either the work and expression (the modus) of God, in which case it must be in the highest degree perfect (Leibnitz's [Pg 330]conclusion ...),—and no one doubted that he knew what perfection must be like,—and then all evil can only be apparent (Spinoza is more radical, he says this of good and evil), or it must be a part of God's high purpose (a consequence of a particularly great mark of favour on God's part, who thus allows man to choose between good and evil: the privilege of being no automaton; "freedom," with the ever-present danger of making a mistake and of choosing wrongly.... See Simplicius, for instance, in the commentary to Epictetus).
Or our world is imperfect; evil and guilt are real, determined, and are absolutely inherent to its being; in that case it cannot be the real world: consequently knowledge can only be a way of denying the world, for the latter is error which may be recognised as such. This is Schopenhauer's opinion, based upon Kantian first principles. Pascal was still more desperate: he thought that even knowledge must be corrupt and false—that revelation is a necessity if only in order to recognise that the world should be denied....
412.
Owing to our habit of believing in unconditional authorities, we have grown to feel a profound need for them: indeed, this feeling is so strong that, even in an age of criticism such as Kant's was, it showed itself to be superior to the need for criticism, and, in a certain sense, was able to subject the whole work of critical acumen, and to convert it to its own use. It proved its [Pg 331]superiority once more in the generation which followed, and which, owing to its historical instincts, naturally felt itself drawn to a relative view of all authority, when it converted even the Hegelian philosophy of evolution (history rechristened and called philosophy) to its own use, and represented history as being the self-revelation and self-surpassing of moral ideas. Since Plato, philosophy has lain under the dominion of morality. Even in Plato's predecessors, moral interpretations play a most important rle (Anaximander declares that all things are made to perish as a punishment for their departure from pure being; Heraclitus thinks that the regularity of phenomena is a proof of the morally correct character of evolution in general).
413.
The progress of philosophy has been hindered most seriously hitherto through the influence of moral arrires-penses.
414.
In all ages, "fine feelings" have been regarded as arguments, "heaving breasts" have been the bellows of godliness, convictions have been the "criteria" of truth, and the need of opposition has been the note of interrogation affixed to wisdom. This falseness and fraud permeates the whole history of philosophy. But for a few respected sceptics, no instinct for intellectual Uprightness is to be found anywhere. Finally, Kant [Pg 332]guilelessly sought to make this thinker's corruption scientific by means of his concept, "practical reason". He expressly invented a reason which, in certain cases, would allow one not to bother about reason—that is to say, in cases where the heart's desire, morality, or "duty" are the motive power.
415.
Hegel: his popular side, the doctrine of war and of great men. Right is on the side of the victorious: he (the victorious man) stands for the progress of mankind. His is an attempt at proving the dominion of morality by means of history.
Kant: a kingdom of moral values withdrawn from us, invisible, real.
Hegel: a demonstrable process of evolution, the actualisation of the kingdom of morality.
We shall not allow ourselves to be deceived either in Kant's or Hegel's way:—We no longer believe, as they did, in morality, and therefore have no philosophies to found with the view of justifying morality. Criticism and history have no charm for us in this respect: what is their charm, then?
