'Reason'
in Philosophy
1
YOU ask me about the idiosyncrasies of
philosophers? ... There is their lack of historical sense, their hatred of even
the ideal of becoming, their Egyptianism. They think they are doing a thing honour
when they dehistoricize it, sub specie aeterni [from the viewpoint of eternity.] - when they make a mummy of
it. All that philosophers have handled
for millennia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has escaped from
their hands alive. They kill, they stuff,
when they worship, these conceptual idolaters - they become a mortal danger to
everything when they worship. Death,
change, age, as well as procreation and growth, are for them objections -
refutations even. What is, does not become; what becomes, is not....
Now they all believe, even to the point of despair, in that which is. But since they cannot get hold of it, they
look for reasons why it is being withheld from them. 'It must be an illusion, a deception which
prevents us from perceiving that which is: where is the deceiver to be found?'
- 'We've got it,' they cry in delight, 'it is the senses! These senses, which are so immoral as well,
it is they which deceive us about the real world. Moral: escape from sense-deception, from
becoming, from history, from falsehood - history is nothing but belief in the
senses, belief in falsehood. Moral:
denial of all that believes in the senses, of all the rest of mankind: all of
that is mere "people". Be a
philosopher, be a mummy, represent monotono-theism by
a gravedigger-mimicry! - And away, above all, with the body, that
pitiable idée fixe of the senses! infected
with every error of logic there is, refuted, impossible even, notwithstanding
it is impudent enough to behave as if it actually existed!' ...
2
I set apart with high reverence the name
of Heraclitus.
When the rest of the philosopher crowd rejected the evidence of the
senses because these showed plurality and change, he rejected their evidence
because they showed things as if they possessed duration and unity. Heraclitus too was
unjust to the senses, which lie neither in the way the Eleatics
[The
3
- And what subtle instruments for
observation we possess in our senses!
This nose, for example, of which no philosopher has hitherto spoken with
respect and gratitude, is nonetheless the most delicate tool we have at our
command: it can detect minimal differences in movement which even the
spectroscope cannot detect. We possess
scientific knowledge today to precisely the extent that we have decided to accept
the evidence of the senses - to the extent that we have learned to sharpen and
arm them and to think them through to their conclusions. The rest is abortion and not-yet-science:
which is to say metaphysics, theology, psychology, epistemology. Or science of formulae, sigh-systems:
such as logic and that applied logic, mathematics. In these reality
does not appear at all, not even as a problem; just as little as does the
question what value a system of conventional signs such as constitutes logic
can possibly possess.
4
The other idiosyncrasy of
philosophers is no less perilous: it consists in mistaking the last for the
first. They put that which comes at the
end - unfortunately! for it ought not to come at all!
- the 'highest concepts', that is to say the most general, the emptiest
concepts, the last fumes of evaporating reality, at the beginning as the
beginning. It is again only the
expression of their way of doing reverence: the higher must not be allowed
to grow out of the lower, must not be allowed to have grown at all....
Moral: everything of the first rank must be causa
sui. [the cause of
itself.] Origin in something
else counts as an objection, as casting a doubt on value. All supreme values are of the first rank, all
the supreme concepts - that which is, the unconditioned, the good, the true,
the perfect - all that cannot have become, must therefore be causa sui. But neither can these supreme concepts be
incommensurate with one another, be incompatible with one another.... Thus they
acquired their stupendous concept 'God'.... The last, thinnest, emptiest is
placed at the first, as cause in itself, as ens realissimum....
[the
most real being.] That
mankind should have taken seriously the brainsick fancies of morbid
cobweb-spinners! - And it has paid dearly for doing so! ...
5
- Let us, in conclusion, set against this
the very different way in which we (- I say 'we' out of politeness ...)
view the problem of error and appearance.
Change, mutation, becoming in general were formerly taken as proof of
appearance, as a sign of the presence of something which led us astray. Today, on the contrary, we see ourselves as
it were entangled in error, necessitated to error, to precisely the
extent that our prejudice in favour of reason compels us to posit unity,
identity, duration, substance, cause, materiality, being; however sure we may
be, on the basis of a strict reckoning, that error is to be found
here. The situation is the same as with
the motions of the sun: in that case error has our eyes, in the present case
our language as a perpetual advocate.
Language belongs in its origin to the age of the most rudimentary form
of psychology: we find ourselves in the midst of a rude fetishism when we call
to mind the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language - which is to
say, of reason. It is this
which sees everywhere deed and doer; this which believes in will as cause in
general; this which believes in the 'ego', in the ego as being, in the ego as
substance, and which projects its belief in the ego-substance on to all
things - only thus does it create the concept 'thing'.... Being is
everywhere thought in, foisted on, as cause; it is only from the
conception 'ego' that there follows, derivatively, the concept 'being'.... At
the beginning stands the great fateful error that the will is something which produces
an effect - that will is a faculty.... Today we know it is merely a
word.... Very much later, in a world a thousand times more enlightened, the security,
the subjective certainty with which the categories of reason [The context makes it clear that this
Kantian-sounding term is not being employed in the sense of Kant's twelve 'a
priori' "categories", but simply to mean the faculty of reasoning.] could be employed came all of a sudden
into philosopher's heads: they concluded that these could not have originated
in the empirical world - indeed, the entire empirical world was incompatible
with them. Where then do they
originate? - And in
6
It will be a matter for gratitude if I now
compress so fundamental and new an insight into four theses: I shall thereby
make it easier to understand, I shall thereby challenge contradiction.
First proposition.
The grounds upon which 'this' world has been designated as apparent
establish rather its reality - another kind of reality is absolutely undemonstrable.
Second proposition.
The characteristics which have been assigned to the 'real being' of
things are the characteristics of non-being, of nothingness - the 'real
world' has been constructed out of the contradiction to the actual world: an
apparent world indeed, insofar as it is no more than a moral-optical
illusion.
Third proposition.
To talk about 'another' world than this is quite pointless, provided
that an instinct for slandering, disparaging and accusing life is not strong
within us: in the latter case we revenge ourselves on life by means of
the phantasmagoria of 'another', a 'better' life.
Fourth proposition. To divide the world in a 'real' and an 'apparent' world, whether in
the manner of Christianity or in the manner of Kant (which is, after all, that
of a cunning declining life.... That the artist places a higher
value on appearance than on reality constitutes no objection to this
proposition. For 'appearance' here
signifies reality once more, only selected, strengthened, corrected....
The tragic artist is not a pessimist - it is precisely he who affirms
all that is questionable and terrible in existence, he is Dionysian
...