no culture and no unity of style in her life hardly knows what to
do with philosophy, even if the latter were proclaimed by the very
Genius of Truth in the streets and market-places. She rather remains
at such a time the learned monologue of the solitary rambler, the
accidental booty of the individual, the hidden closet-secret or the
innocuous chatter between academic senility and childhood. Nobody
dare venture to fulfil in himself the law of philosophy, nobody
lives philosophically, with that simple manly faith which compelled
an Ancient, wherever he was, whatever he did, to deport himself as
a Stoic, when he had once pledged his faith to the Stoa. All modern
philosophising is limited politically and regulated by the police to
learned semblance. Thanks to governments, churches, academies, customs,
fashions, and the cowardice of man, it never gets beyond the sigh: "If
only!..." or beyond the knowledge: "Once upon a time there was..."
Philosophy is without rights; therefore modern man, if he were at all
courageous and conscientious, ought to condemn her and perhaps banish
her with words similar to those by which Plato banished the tragic
poets from his State. Of course there would be left a reply for her, as
there remained to those poets against Plato. If one once compelled her
to speak out she might say perhaps: "Miserable Nation! Is it my fault
if among you I am on the tramp, like a fortune teller through the land,
and must hide and disguise myself, as if I were a great sinner and ye
my judges? Just look at my sister, Art! It is with her as with me; we
have been cast adrift among the Barbarians and no longer know how to
save ourselves. Here we are lacking, it is true, every good right; but
the judges before whom we find justice judge you also and will tell
you: First acquire a culture; then you shall experience what Philosophy
can and will do."--
3.
Greek philosophy seems to begin with a preposterous fancy, with the
proposition that _water_ is the origin and mother-womb of all things.
Is it really necessary to stop there and become serious? Yes, and
for three reasons: Firstly, because the proposition does enunciate
something about the origin of things; secondly, because it does
so without figure and fable; thirdly and lastly, because in it is
contained, although only in the chrysalis state, the idea: Everything
is one. The first mentioned reason leaves Thales still in the company
of religious and superstitious people, the second however takes him
out of this company and shows him to us as a natural philosopher, but
by virtue of the third, Thales becomes the first Greek philosopher.
If he had said: "Out of water earth is evolved," we should only have
a scientific hypothesis; a false one, though nevertheless difficult
to refute. But he went beyond the scientific. In his presentation of
this concept of unity through the hypothesis of water, Thales has not
surmounted the low level of the physical discernments of his time, but
at the best overleapt them. The deficient and unorganised observations
of an empiric nature which Thales had made as to the occurrence and
transformations of water, or to be more exact, of the Moist, would
not in the least have made possible or even suggested such an immense
generalisation. That which drove him to this generalisation was a
metaphysical dogma, which had its origin in a mystic intuition and
which together with the ever renewed endeavours to express it better,
we find in all philosophies,--the proposition: _Everything is one!_
How despotically such a faith deals with all empiricism is worthy of
note; with Thales especially one can learn how Philosophy has behaved
at all times, when she wanted to get beyond the hedges of experience
to her magically attracting goal. On light supports she leaps in
advance; hope and divination wing her feet. Calculating reason too,
clumsily pants after her and seeks better supports in its attempt to
reach that alluring goal, at which its divine companion has already
arrived. One sees in imagination two wanderers by a wild forest-stream
which carries with it rolling stones; the one, light-footed, leaps
over it using the stones and swinging himself upon them ever further
and further, though they precipitously sink into the depths behind
him. The other stands helpless there most of the time; he has first
to build a pathway which will bear his heavy, weary step; sometimes
that cannot be done and then no god will help him across the stream.
What therefore carries philosophical thinking so quickly to its goal?
Does it distinguish itself from calculating and measuring thought
only by its more rapid flight through large spaces? No, for a strange
illogical power wings the foot of philosophical thinking; and this
power is Fancy. Lifted by the latter, philosophical thinking leaps
from possibility to possibility, and these for the time being are
taken as certainties; and now and then even whilst on the wing it
gets hold of certainties. An ingenious presentiment shows them to
the flier; demonstrable certainties are divined at a distance to be
at this point. Especially powerful is the strength of Fancy in the
lightning-like seizing and illuminating of similarities; afterwards
reflection applies its standards and models and seeks to substitute
the similarities by equalities, that which was seen side by side by
causalities. But though this should never be possible, even in the case
of Thales the indemonstrable philosophising has yet its value; although
all supports are broken when Logic and the rigidity of Empiricism want
to get across to the proposition: Everything is water; yet still there
is always, after the demolition of the scientific edifice, a remainder,
and in this very remainder lies a moving force and as it were the hope
of future fertility.
Of course I do not mean that the thought in any restriction or
attenuation, or as allegory, still retains some kind of "truth"; as
if, for instance, one might imagine the creating artist standing
near a waterfall, and seeing in the forms which leap towards him,
an artistically prefiguring game of the water with human and animal
bodies, masks, plants, rocks, nymphs, griffins, and with all existing
types in general, so that to him the proposition: Everything is water,
is confirmed. The thought of Thales has rather its value--even after
the perception of its indemonstrableness--in the very fact, that it was
meant unmythically and unallegorically. 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 gods, and
by contemplating the whole of nature as if it were only a disguise,
masquerade and metamorphosis of these god-men. Man was to them the
truth, and essence of things; everything else mere phenomenon and
deceiving play. For that very reason they experienced incredible
difficulty in conceiving of ideas as ideas. Whilst with the moderns
the most personal item sublimates itself into abstractions, with
them the most abstract notions became personified. Thales, however,
said, "Not man but water is the reality of things "; he began to
believe in nature, in so far that he at least believed in water. As
a mathematician and astronomer he had grown cold towards everything
mythical and allegorical, and even if he did not succeed in becoming
disillusioned as to the pure abstraction, Everything is one, and
although he left off at a physical expression he was nevertheless among
the Greeks of his time a surprising rarity. Perhaps the exceedingly
conspicuous _Orpheans_ possessed in a still higher degree than he the
faculty of conceiving abstractions and of thinking unplastically; only
they did not succeed in expressing these abstractions except in the
form of the allegory. 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 Mythos, so that he dares, for example, to compare the earth
with a winged oak, which hangs in the air with spread pinions and which
Zeus bedecks, after the defeat of Kronos, with a magnificent robe of
honour, into which with his own hands Zeus embroiders lands, water
and rivers. In contrast with such gloomy allegorical philosophising
scarcely to be translated into the realm of the comprehensible, Thales'
are the works of a creative master who began to look into Nature's
depths without fantastic fabling. If as it is true he used Science
and the demonstrable but soon out-leapt them, then this likewise
is a typical characteristic of the philosophical genius. The Greek
word which designates the Sage belongs etymologically to _sapio,_ I
taste, _sapiens,_ the tasting one, _sisyphos,_ the man of the most
delicate taste; the peculiar art of the philosopher therefore consists,
according to the opinion of the people, in a delicate selective
judgment by taste, by discernment, by significant differentiation. He
is not prudent, if one calls _him_ prudent, who in his own affairs
finds out the good; Aristotle rightly says: "That which Thales and
Anaxagoras know, people will call unusual, astounding, difficult,
divine but--useless, since human possessions were of no concern to
those two." Through thus selecting and precipitating the unusual,
astounding, difficult, and divine, Philosophy marks the boundary-lines
dividing her from Science in the same way as she does it from Prudence
by the emphasising of the useless. Science without thus selecting,
without such delicate taste, pounces upon everything knowable, in the
blind covetousness to know all at any price; philosophical thinking
however is always on the track of the things worth knowing, on the
track of the great and most important discernments. Now the idea of
greatness is changeable, as well in the moral as in the æsthetic
realm, thus Philosophy begins with a legislation with respect to
greatness, she becomes a Nomenclator. "That is great," she says,
and therewith she raises man above the blind, untamed covetousness
of his thirst for knowledge. By the idea of greatness she assuages
this thirst: and it is chiefly by this, that she contemplates the
greatest discernment, that of the essence and kernel of things, as
attainable and attained. When Thales says, "Everything is water," man
is startled up out of his worm-like mauling of and crawling about among
the individual sciences; he divines the last solution of things and
masters through this divination the common perplexity of the lower
grades of knowledge. The philosopher tries to make the total-chord of
the universe re-echo within himself and then to project it into ideas
outside himself: whilst he is contemplative like the creating artist,
sympathetic like the religionist, looking out for ends and causalities
like the scientific man, whilst he feels himself swell up to the
macrocosm, he still retains the circumspection to contemplate himself
coldly as the reflex of the world; he retains that cool-headedness,
which the dramatic artist possesses, when he transforms himself into
other bodies, speaks out of them, and yet knows how to project this
transformation outside himself into written verses. What the verse is
to the poet, dialectic thinking is to the philosopher; he snatches
at it in order to hold fast his enchantment, in order to petrify it.
And just as words and verse to the dramatist are only stammerings in
a foreign language, to tell in it what he lived, what he saw, and
what he can directly promulgate by gesture and music only, thus the
expression of every deep philosophical intuition by means of dialectics
and scientific reflection is, it is true, on the one hand the only
means to communicate what has been seen, but on the other hand it is
a paltry means, and at the bottom a metaphorical, absolutely inexact
translation into a different sphere and language. Thus Thales saw the
Unity of the "Existent," and when he wanted to communicate this idea he
talked of water.
4
Whilst the general type of the philosopher in the picture of Thales
is set off rather hazily, the picture of his great successor already
speaks much more distinctly to us. _Anaximander_ of Milet, the
first philosophical author of the Ancients, writes in the very way
that the typical philosopher will always write as long as he is
not alienated from ingenuousness and _naïveté_ by odd claims: in
a grand lapidarian style of writing, sentence for sentence ... a
witness of a new inspiration, and an expression of the sojourning in
sublime contemplations. The thought and its form are milestones on
the path towards the highest wisdom. With such a lapidarian emphasis
Anaximander once said: "Whence things originated, thither, according
to necessity, they must return and perish; for they must pay penalty
and be judged for their injustices according to the order of time."
Enigmatical utterance of a true pessimist, oracular inscription on the
boundary-stone of Greek philosophy, how shall we explain thee?
The only serious moralist of our century in the Parergis (Vol. ii.,
chap. 12, "Additional Remarks on The Doctrine about the Suffering in
the World, Appendix of Corresponding Passages") urges on us a similar
contemplation: "The right standard by which to judge every human
being is that he really is a being who ought not to exist at all,
but who is expiating his existence by manifold forms of suffering
and death:--What can one expect from such a being? Are we not all
sinners condemned to death? We expiate our birth firstly by our
life and secondly by our death." He who in the physiognomy of our
universal human lot reads this doctrine and already recognises the
fundamental bad quality of every human life, in the fact that none
can stand a very close and careful contemplation--although our time,
accustomed to the biographical epidemic, seems to think otherwise and
more loftily about the dignity of man; he who, like Schopenhauer, on
"the heights of the Indian breezes" has heard the sacred word about
the moral value of existence, 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 existence.
It may not be very logical, it is however at any rate very human and
moreover quite in harmony with the philosophical leaping described
above, now with Anaximander to consider all Becoming as a punishable
emancipation from eternal "Being," as a wrong that is to be atoned
for by destruction. Everything that has once come into existence also
perishes, whether we think of human life or of water or of heat and
cold; everywhere where definite qualities are to be noticed, we are
allowed to prophesy the extinction of these qualities--according to
the all-embracing proof of experience. Thus a being that possesses
definite qualities and consists of them, can never be the origin and
principle of things; the veritable _ens,_ the "Existent," Anaximander
concluded, cannot possess any definite qualities, otherwise, like
all other things, it would necessarily have originated and perished.
In order that Becoming may not cease, the Primordial-being must be
indefinite. The immortality and eternity of the Primordial-being lies
not in an infiniteness and inexhaustibility--as usually the expounders
of Anaximander presuppose--but in this, that it lacks the definite
qualities which lead to destruction, for which reason it bears also its
name: The Indefinite. The thus labelled Primordial-being is superior
to all Becoming and for this very reason it guarantees the eternity
and unimpeded course of Becoming. This last unity in that Indefinite,
the mother-womb of all things, can, it is true, be designated only
negatively by man, as something to which no predicate out of the
existing world of Becoming can be allotted, and might be considered a
peer to the Kantian "Thing-in-itself."
Of course he who is able to wrangle persistently with others as to what
kind of thing that primordial substance really was, whether perhaps an
intermediate thing between air and water, or perhaps between air and
fire, has not understood our philosopher at all; this is likewise to
be said about those, who seriously ask themselves, whether Anaximander
had thought of his primordial substance as a mixture of all existing
substances. 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 physical; we must direct our gaze towards that
first stated lapidarian proposition. When on the contrary he saw a sum
of wrongs to be expiated in the plurality of things that have become,
then he, as the first Greek, with daring grasp caught up the tangle of
the most profound ethical problem. How can anything perish that has a
right to exist? Whence that restless Becoming and giving-birth, whence
that expression of painful distortion on the face of Nature, whence the
never-ending dirge in all realms of existence? Out of this world of
injustice, of audacious apostasy from the primordial-unity of things
Anaximander flees into a metaphysical castle, leaning out of which he
turns his gaze far and wide in order at last, after a pensive silence,
to address to all beings this question: "What is your existence worth?
And if it is worth nothing why are you there? By your guilt, I observe,
you sojourn in this world. You will have to expiate it by death. Look
how your earth fades; the seas decrease and dry up, the marine-shell
on the mountain shows you how much already they have dried up; fire
destroys your world even now, finally it will end in smoke and ashes.
But again and again such a world of transitoriness will ever build
itself up; who shall redeem you from the curse of Becoming?"
Not every kind of life may have been welcome to a man who put such
questions, whose upward-soaring thinking continually broke the empiric
ropes, in order to take at once to the highest, superlunary flight.
Willingly we believe tradition, that he walked along in especially
dignified attire and showed a truly tragic hauteur in his gestures
and habits of life. He lived as he wrote; he spoke as solemnly as he
dressed himself, he raised his hand and placed his foot as if this
existence was a tragedy, and he had been born in order to co-operate
in that tragedy by playing the _rôle_ of hero. In all that he was the
great model of Empedocles. 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 him. His thought also
emigrated and founded colonies; in Ephesus and in Elea they could not
get rid of him; and if they could not resolve upon staying at the spot
where he stood, they nevertheless knew that they had been led there by
him, whence they now prepared to proceed without him.
Thales shows the need of simplifying the empire of plurality, and
of reducing it to a mere expansion or disguise of the _one single_
existing quality, water. Anaximander goes beyond him with two steps.
Firstly he puts the question to himself: How, if there exists an
eternal Unity at all, is that Plurality possible? and he takes the
answer out of the contradictory, self-devouring and denying character
of this Plurality. The existence of this Plurality becomes a moral
phenomenon to him; it is not justified, it expiates itself continually
through destruction. But then the questions occur to him: Yet why has
not everything that has become perished long ago, since, indeed, quite
an eternity of time has already gone by? Whence the ceaseless current
of the River of Becoming? He can save himself from these questions
only by mystic possibilities: the eternal Becoming can have its origin
only in the eternal "Being," the conditions for that apostasy from
that eternal "Being" to a Becoming in injustice are ever the same, the
constellation of things cannot help itself being thus fashioned, that
no end is to be seen of that stepping forth of the individual being out
of the lap of the "Indefinite." At this Anaximander stayed; that is,
he remained within the deep shadows which like gigantic spectres were
lying on the mountain range of such a world-perception. The more one
wanted to approach the problem of solving how out of the Indefinite the
Definite, out of the Eternal the Temporal, out of the Just the Unjust
could by secession ever originate, the darker the night became.----
5
Towards the midst of this mystic night, in which Anaximander's problem
of the Becoming was wrapped up, Heraclitus of Ephesus approached and
illuminated it by a divine flash of lightning. "I contemplate the
Becoming," he exclaimed,--"and nobody has so attentively watched this
eternal wave-surging and rhythm of things. And what do I behold?
Lawfulness, infallible certainty, ever equal paths of Justice,
condemning Erinyes behind all transgressions of the laws, the whole
world the spectacle of a governing justice and of demoniacally
omnipresent natural forces subject to justice's sway. I do not behold
the punishment of that which has become, but the justification of
Becoming. When has sacrilege, when has apostasy manifested itself in
inviolable forms, in laws esteemed sacred? Where injustice sways, there
is caprice, disorder, irregularity, contradiction; where however Law
and Zeus' daughter, Dike, rule alone, as in this world, how could the
sphere of guilt, of expiation, of judgment, and as it were the place of
execution of all condemned ones be there?"
From this intuition Heraclitus took two coherent negations, which are
put into the right light only by a comparison with the propositions of
his predecessor. Firstly, he denied the duality of two quite diverse
worlds, into the assumption of which Anaximander had been pushed; he
no longer distinguished a physical world from a metaphysical, a realm
of definite qualities from a realm of indefinable indefiniteness. Now
after this first step he could neither be kept back any longer from
a still greater audacity of denying: he denied "Being" altogether.
For this one world which was left to him,--shielded all round by
eternal, unwritten laws, flowing up and down in the brazen beat of
rhythm,--shows nowhere persistence, indestructibility, a bulwark in the
stream. Louder than Anaximander, Heraclitus exclaimed: "I see nothing
but Becoming. Be not deceived! 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 Passing. You need names
for things, just as if they had a rigid permanence, but the very river
in which you bathe a second time is no longer the same one which you
entered before."