Preface
Supposing
truth to be a woman - what? is the suspicion not well
founded that all philosophers, when they have been dogmatists, have had little
understanding of women? that the gruesome earnestness,
the clumsy importunity with which they have hitherto been in the habit of
approaching truth have been inept and improper means for winning a wench? Certainly she has not let herself be won -
and today every kind of dogmatism stands sad and discouraged. If it continued to stand at all! for there are scoffers who assert it has
fallen down, that dogmatism lies on the floor, more, that dogmatism is at its
last gasp. To speak seriously, there are
good grounds for hoping that all dogmatizing in philosophy, the solemn air of
finality it has given itself notwithstanding, may nonetheless have been no more
than a noble childishness and tyronism; and the time
is perhaps very close at hand when it will be grasped in case after case what
has been sufficient to furnish the foundation-stone for such sublime and
unconditional philosophers' edifices as the dogmatists have hitherto been
constructing - some popular superstition or other from time immemorial (such as
the soul superstition which, as the subject-and-ego superstition, has not yet
ceased to do mischief even today), perhaps some play on words, a grammatical seduction,
or an audacious generalization on the basis of very narrow, very personal, very
human, all too human facts. Let us hope
that dogmatic philosophy was only a promise across millennia: as, in a still
earlier age, was astrology, in the service of which more labour, money,
ingenuity and patience has perhaps been expended than for any real science
hitherto - we owe to it and to its 'supra-terrestrial' claims the grand style
of architecture in Asia and Egypt. It seems
that, in order to inscribe themselves in the hearts of humanity with eternal
demands, all great things have first to wander the earth as monstrous and
fear-inspiring grotesques: dogmatic philosophy, the doctrine of the Vedanta in
Asia and Platonism in Europe for example, was a grotesque of this kind. Let us not be ungrateful to it, even though
it certainly has to be admitted that the worst, most wearisomely protracted and
most dangerous of all errors hitherto has been a dogmatist's error, namely
Plato's invention of pure spirit and the good in itself. But now, when that has been overcome, when
Europe breathes again after the nightmare and can enjoy at any rate a healthier
- sleep, we whose task is wakefulness itself have inherited all the strength which has been
cultivated by the struggle against this error.
To be sure, to speak of spirit and the good as Plato did meant standing
truth on her head and denying perspective itself, the basic condition of
life; indeed, one may ask as a physician: 'how could such a malady attack this
loveliest product of antiquity, Plato? did the wicked
Socrates corrupt him after all? could Socrates have
been a corrupter of youth after all? and have deserved
his hemlock?' - But the struggle against Plato, or, to express it more plainly
for 'the people' - has created in
Sils-Maria,
June
1885