Page 61 of 70

416.

The importance of German philosophy (Hegel,) the thinking out of a kind of pantheism which would not reckon evil, error, and suffering as arguments against godliness. This grand initiative was misused by the powers that were (State, [Pg 333]etc.) to sanction the rights of the people that happened to be paramount.

Schopenhauer appears as a stubborn opponent of this idea; he is a moral man who, in order to keep in the right concerning his moral valuation, finally becomes a denier of the world. Ultimately he becomes a "mystic."

I myself have sought an sthetic justification of the ugliness in this world. I regarded the desire for beauty and for the persistence of certain forms as a temporary preservative and recuperative measure: what seemed to me to be fundamentally associated with pain, however, was the eternal lust of creating and the eternal compulsion to destroy.

We call things ugly when we look at them with the desire of attributing some sense, some new sense, to what has become senseless: it is the accumulated power of the creator which compels him to regard what has existed hitherto as no longer acceptable, botched, worthy of being suppressed—ugly!

417.

My first solution of the problem: Dionysian wisdom. The joy in the destruction of the most noble thing, and at the sight of its gradual undoing, regarded as the joy over what is coming and what lies in the future, which triumphs over actual things, however good they may be. Dionysian: temporary identification with the principle of life (voluptuousness of the martyr included).

My innovations. The Development of Pessimism: [Pg 334]intellectual pessimism; moral criticism, the dissolution of the last comfort. Knowledge, a sign of decay, veils by means of an illusion all strong action; isolated culture is unfair and therefore strong.

(1) My fight against decay and the increasing weakness of personality. I sought a new centrum.

(2) The impossibility of this endeavour is recognised.

(3) I therefore travelled farther along the road of dissolution—and along it I found new sources of strength for individuals. We must be destroyers!—I perceived that the state of dissolution is one in which individual beings are able to arrive at a kind of perfection not possible hitherto, it is an image and isolated example of life in general. To the paralysing feeling of general dissolution and imperfection, I opposed the Eternal Recurrence.

418.

People naturally seek the picture of life in that philosophy which makes them most cheerful—that is to say, in that philosophy which gives the highest sense of freedom to their strongest instinct. This is probably the case with me.

419.

German philosophy, as a whole,—Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, to mention the greatest,—is the most out-and-out form of [Pg 335]romanticism and home-sickness that has ever yet existed: it is a yearning for the best that has ever been known on earth. One is at home nowhere; that which is ultimately yearned after is a place where one can somehow feel at home; because one has been at home there before, and that place is the Greek world! But it is precisely in that direction that airbridges are broken down—save, of course, the rainbow of concepts! And the latter lead everywhere, to all the homes and "fatherlands" that ever existed for Greek souls! Certainly, one must be very light and thin in order to cross these bridges! But what happiness lies even in this desire for spirituality, almost for ghostliness! With it, how far one is from the "press and bustle" and the mechanical boorishness of the natural sciences, how far from the vulgar din of "modern ideas"! One wants to get back to the Greeks via the Fathers of the Church, from North to South, from formul to forms; the passage out of antiquity—Christianity—is still a source of joy as a means of access to antiquity, as a portion of the old world itself, as a glistening mosaic of ancient concepts and ancient valuations. Arabesques, scroll-work, rococo of scholastic abstractions—always better, that is to say, finer and more slender, than the peasant and plebeian reality of Northern Europe, and still a protest on the part of higher intellectuality against the peasant war and insurrection of the mob which have become master of the intellectual taste of Northern Europe, and which had its leader in a man as great and unintellectual as Luther:—in [Pg 336]this respect German philosophy belongs to the Counter-Reformation, it might even be looked upon as related to the Renaissance, or at least to the will to Renaissance, the will to get ahead with the discovery of antiquity, with the excavation of ancient philosophy, and above all of pre-Socratic philosophy—the most thoroughly dilapidated of all Greek temples! Possibly, in few hundred years, people will be of the opinion that all German philosophy derived its dignity from this fact, that step by step it attempted to reclaim the soil of antiquity, and that therefore all demands for "originality" must appear both petty and foolish when compared with Germany's higher claim to having refastened the bonds which seemed for ever rent—the bonds which bound us to the Greeks, the highest type of "men" ever evolved hitherto. To-day we are once more approaching all the fundamental principles of the cosmogony which the Greek mind in Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Democritus, and Anaxagoras, was responsible for. Day by day we are growing more Greek; at first, as is only natural, the change remains confined to concepts and valuations, and we hover around like Greasing spirits: but it is to be hoped that some day our body will also be involved! Here lies (and has always lain) my hope for the German nation.

420.

I do not wish to convert anybody to philosophy: it is both necessary and perhaps desirable that the [Pg 337]philosopher should be a rare plant. Nothing is more repugnant to me than the scholarly praise of philosophy which is to be found in Seneca and Cicero. Philosophy has not much in common with virtue. I trust I may be allowed to say that even the scientific man is a fundamentally different person from the philosopher. What I most desire is, that the genuine notion "philosopher" should not completely perish in Germany. There are so many incomplete creatures in Germany already who would fain conceal their ineptitude beneath such noble names.

421.

I must set up the highest ideal of a philosopher. Learning is not everything! The scholar is the sheep in the kingdom of learning; he studies because he is told to do so, and because others have done so before him.

422.

The superstition concerning philosophers: They are confounded with men of science. As if the value of things were inherent in them and required only to be held on to tightly! To what extent are their researches carried on under the influence of values which already prevail (their hatred of appearance of the body, etc.)? Schopenhauer concerning morality (scorn of Utilitarianism). Ultimately the confusion goes so far that Darwinism is regarded as philosophy, and thus at the present day power has gone over to the men of science. Even Frenchmen like Taine prosecute [Pg 338]research, or mean to prosecute research, without being already in possession of a standard of valuation. Prostration before "facts" of a kind of cult. As a matter of fact, they destroy the existing valuations.