made use of his Nous for the interpretation of the world was strange,
indeed scarcely pardonable; to them it seemed as though he had found a
grand tool but had not well understood it and they tried to retrieve
what the finder had neglected. They therefore did not recognise what
meaning the abstention of Anaxagoras, inspired by the purest spirit
of the method of natural science, had, and that this abstention first
of all in every case puts to itself the question: "What is the cause
of Something"? (_causa efficiens_)--and not "What is the purpose of
Something"? (_causa finalis_). The Nous has not been dragged in by
Anaxagoras for the purpose of answering the special question: "What
is the cause of motion and what causes regular motions?"; Plato
however reproaches him, that he ought to have, but had not shown that
everything was in its own fashion and its own place the most beautiful,
the best and the most appropriate. But this Anaxagoras would not have
dared to assert in any individual case, to him the existing world was
not even the most conceivably perfect world, for he saw everything
originate out of everything, and he found the segregation of the
substances through the Nous complete and done with, neither at the
end of the filled space of the world nor in the individual beings.
For his understanding it was sufficient that he had found a motion,
which, by simple continued action could create the visible order out
of a chaos mixed through and through; and he took good care not to put
the question as to the Why? of the motion, as to the rational purpose
of motion. For if the Nous had to fulfil by means of motion a purpose
innate in the noumenal essence, then it was no longer in Its free will
to commence the motion at any chance time; in so far as the Nous is
eternal, It had also to be determined eternally by this purpose, and
then no point of time could have been allowed to exist in which motion
was still lacking, indeed it would have been logically forbidden to
assume a starting point for motion: whereby again the conception of
original chaos, the basis of the whole Anaxagorean interpretation of
the world would likewise have become logically impossible. In order
to escape such difficulties, which teleology creates, Anaxagoras had
always to emphasise and asseverate that the Mind has free will; all
Its actions, including that of the primal motion, were actions of the
"free will," whereas on the contrary after that primeval moment the
whole remaining world was shaping itself in a strictly determined, and
more precisely, mechanically determined form. That absolutely free
will however can be conceived only as purposeless, somewhat after the
fashion of children's play or the artist's bent for play. It is an
error to ascribe to Anaxagoras the common confusion of the teleologist,
who, marvelling at the extraordinary appropriateness, at the agreement
of the parts with the whole, especially in the realm of the organic,
assumes that that which exists for the intellect had also come into
existence through intellect, and that that which man brings about only
under the guidance of the idea of purpose, must have been brought about
by Nature through reflection and ideas of purpose. (Schopenhauer, "The
World As Will And Idea," vol. ii., Second Book, chap. 26: On Teleology).
Conceived in the manner of Anaxagoras, however, the order and
appropriateness of things on the contrary is nothing but the immediate
result of a blind mechanical motion; and only in order to cause this
motion, in order to get for once out of the dead-rest of the Chaos,
Anaxagoras assumed the free-willed Nous who depends only on Itself.
He appreciated in the Nous just the very quality of being a thing of
chance, a chance agent, therefore of being able to act unconditioned,
undetermined, guided neither by causes nor by purposes.
Notes for a Continuation
(Early Part of 1873)
1
That this total conception of the Anaxagorean doctrine must be
right, is proved most clearly by the way in which the successors
of Anaxagoras, the Agrigentine Empedocles and the atomic teacher
Democritus in their counter-systems actually criticised and improved
that doctrine. The method of this critique is more than anything a
continued renunciation in that spirit of natural science mentioned
above, the law of economy applied to the interpretation of nature.
That hypothesis, which explains the existing world with the smallest
expenditure of assumptions and means is to have preference: for in such
a hypothesis is to be found the least amount of arbitrariness, and in
it free play with possibilities is prohibited. Should there be two
hypotheses which both explain the world, then a strict test must be
applied as to which of the two better satisfies that demand of economy.
He who can manage this explanation with the simpler and more known
forces, especially the mechanical ones, he who deduces the existing
edifice of the world out of the smallest possible number of forces,
will always be preferred to him who allows the more complicated and
less-known forces, and these moreover in greater number, to carry on a
world-creating play. So then we see Empedocles endeavouring to remove
the _superfluity_ of hypotheses from the doctrine of Anaxagoras.
The first hypothesis which falls as unnecessary is that of the
Anaxagorean Nous, for its assumption is much too complex to explain
anything so simple as motion. After all it is only necessary to explain
the two kinds of motion: the motion of a body towards another, and the
motion away from another.
2
If our present Becoming is a segregating, although not a complete one,
then Empedocles asks: what prevents complete segregation? Evidently a
force works against it, _i.e.,_ a latent motion of attraction.
Further: in order to explain that Chaos, a force must already have
been at work; a movement is necessary to bring about this complicated
entanglement.
Therefore periodical preponderance of the one and the other force is
certain. They are opposites.
The force of attraction is still at work; for otherwise there would be
no Things at all, everything would be segregated.
This is the actual fact: two kinds of motion. The Nous does not explain
them. On the contrary, Love and Hatred; indeed we certainly see that
these move as well as that the Nous moves.
Now the conception of the primal state undergoes a change: it is
the most _blessed._ With Anaxagoras it was the chaos before the
architectural work, the heap of stones as it were upon the building
site.
3
Empedocles had conceived the thought of a tangential force originated
by revolution and working against gravity ("de coelo," i., p. 284),
Schopenhauer, "W. A. W.," ii. 390.
He considered the continuation of the circular movement according
to Anaxagoras _impossible._ It would result in a _whirl, i.e.,_ the
contrary of ordered motion.
If the particles were infinitely mixed, pell-mell, then one would be
able to break asunder the bodies without any exertion of power, they
would not cohere or hold together, they would be as dust.
The forces, which press the atoms against one another, and which give
stability to the mass, Empedocles calls "Love." It is a molecular
force, a constitutive force of the bodies.
4
Against Anaxagoras.
1. The Chaos already presupposes motion.
2. Nothing prevented the complete segregation.
3. Our bodies would be dust-forms. How can motion exist, if there are
not counter-motions in all bodies?
4. An ordered permanent circular motion impossible; only a whirl. He
assumes the whirl itself to be an effect of the νεῑκος.--ἀπορροιαί. How
do distant things operate on one another, sun upon earth? If everything
were still in a whirl, that would be impossible. Therefore at least two
moving powers: which must be inherent in Things.
5. Why infinite ὄντα? Transgression of experience. Anaxagoras meant
the chemical atoms. Empedocles tried the assumption of four kinds of
chemical atoms. He took the aggregate states to be essential, and heat
to be co-ordinated. Therefore the aggregate states through repulsion
and attraction; matter in four forms.
6. The periodical principle is necessary.
7. With the living beings Empedocles will also deal still on the same
principle. Here also he denies purposiveness. His greatest deed. With
Anaxagoras a dualism.
5
The symbolism of _sexual love._ Here as in the Platonic fable the
longing after Oneness shows itself, and here, likewise, is shown
that once a greater unity already existed; were this greater unity
established, then this would again strive after a still greater one.
The conviction of the unity of everything living guarantees that once
there was an _immense Living Something,_ of which we are pieces;
that is probably the Sphairos itself. He is the most blessed deity.
Everything was connected only through love, therefore in the highest
degree appropriate. Love has been torn to pieces and splintered by
hatred, love has been divided into her elements and killed--bereft
of life. In the whirl no living individuals originate. Eventually
everything is segregated and now our period begins. (He opposes the
Anaxagorean Primal Mixture by a Primal Discord.) Love, blind as she
is, with furious haste again throws the elements one against another
endeavouring to see whether she can bring them back to life again or
not. Here and there she is successful. It continues. A presentiment
originates in the living beings, that they are to strive after still
higher unions than home and the primal state. Eros. It is a terrible
crime to kill life, for thereby one works back to the Primal Discord.
Some day everything will be again one _single life,_ the most blissful
state.
The Pythagorean-orphean doctrine re-interpreted in the manner of
natural science. Empedocles consciously masters both means of
expression, therefore he is the first rhetor. Political aims.
The double-nature--the agonal and the loving, the compassionate.
Attempt of the _Hellenic total reform_.
All inorganic matter has originated out of organic, it is dead organic
matter. Corpse and man.
6
DEMOCRITUS
The greatest possible simplification of the hypotheses.
1. There is motion, therefore vacuum, therefore a "Non-Existent."
Thinking is motion.
2. If there is a "Non-Existent" it must be indivisible, _i.e.,_
absolutely filled. Division is only explicable in case of empty spaces
and pores. The "Non-Existent" alone is an absolutely porous thing.
3. The secondary qualities of matter, νόμῳ, not of Matter-In-Itself.
4. Establishment of the primary qualities of the ἄτομα. Wherein
homogeneous, wherein heterogeneous?
5. The aggregate-states of Empedocles (four elements) presuppose only
the homogeneous atoms, they themselves cannot therefore be ὄντα.
6. Motion is connected indissolubly with the atoms, effect of gravity.
Epicur. Critique: what does gravity signify in an infinite vacuum?
7. Thinking is the motion of the fire-atoms. Soul, life, perceptions of
the senses.
. . . . . . . .
Value of materialism and its embarrassment.
Plato and Democritus.
The hermit-like homeless noble searcher for truth. Democritus and the
Pythagoreans together find the basis of natural sciences.
. . . . . . . .
What are the causes which have interrupted a flourishing science of
experimental physics in antiquity after Democritus?
7
Anaxagoras has taken from Heraclitus the idea that in every Becoming
and in every Being the opposites are together.
He felt strongly the contradiction that a body has many qualities and
he _pulverised_ it in the belief that he had now dissolved it into
its true qualities.
. . . . . . .
_Plato:_ first Heraclitean, later Sceptic: Everything, even Thinking,
is in a state of flux.
Brought through Socrates to the permanence of the good, the beautiful.
These assumed as entitative.
All generic ideals partake of the idea of the good, the beautiful, and
they too are therefore _entitative_, _being_ (as the soul partakes of
the idea of Life). The idea is _formless_.
Through Pythagoras' metempsychosis has been answered the question: how
we can know anything about the ideas.
Plato's end: scepticism in Parmenides. Refutation of ideology.
8
CONCLUSION
Greek thought during the _tragic age is pessimistic_ or _artistically
optimistic_.
Their judgment about _life_ implies more.
The One, flight from the Becoming. _Aut_ unity, _aut_ artistic play.
Deep distrust of reality: nobody assumes a good god, who has made
everything _optime_.
{Pythagoreans, religious sect.
{Anaximander.
{Empedocles.
Eleates.
{Anaxagoras.
{Heraclitus.
Democritus: the world without moral
and æsthetic meaning, pessimism of
chance.
If one placed a tragedy before all these, the three former would see
in it the mirror of the fatality of existence, Parmenides a transitory
appearance, Heraclitus and Anaxagoras an artistic edifice and image of
the world-laws, Democritus the result of machines.
. . . . . . .
With Socrates _Optimism_ begins, an optimism no longer artistic, with
teleology and faith in the good god; faith in the enlightened good
man. Dissolution of the instincts, Socrates breaks with the hitherto
prevailing _knowledge_ and _culture;_ he intends returning to the old
citizen-virtue and to the State.
Plato dissociates himself from the State, when he observes that the
State has become identical with the new Culture.
The Socratic scepticism is a weapon against the hitherto prevailing
culture and knowledge.
ON TRUTH AND FALSITY IN THEIR ULTRAMORAL SENSE
(1873)
In some remote corner of the universe, effused into innumerable
solar-systems, there was once a star upon which clever animals invented
cognition. It was the haughtiest, most mendacious moment in the history
of this world, but yet only a moment. After Nature had taken breath
awhile the star congealed and the clever animals had to die.--Someone
might write a fable after this style, and yet he would not have
illustrated sufficiently, how wretched,; shadow-like, transitory,
purposeless and fanciful the human intellect appears in Nature. There
were eternities during which this intellect did not exist, and when it
has once more passed away there will be nothing to show that it has
existed. For this intellect is not concerned with any further mission
transcending the sphere of human life. No, it is purely human and none
but its owner and procreator regards it so pathetically as to suppose
that the world revolves around it. If, however, we and the gnat could
understand each other we should learn that even the gnat swims through
the air with the same pathos, and feels within itself the flying centre
of the world. Nothing in Nature is so bad or so insignificant that it
will not, at the smallest puff of that force cognition, immediately
swell up like a balloon, and just as a mere porter wants to have his
admirer, so the very proudest man, the philosopher, imagines he sees
from all sides the eyes of the universe telescopically directed upon
his actions and thoughts.
It is remarkable that this is accomplished by the intellect, which
after all has been given to the most unfortunate, the most delicate,
the most transient beings only as an expedient, in order to detain them
for a moment in existence, from which without that extra-gift they
would have every cause to flee as swiftly as Lessing's son.[1] That
haughtiness connected with cognition and sensation, spreading blinding
fogs before the eyes and over the senses of men, deceives itself
therefore as to the value of existence owing to the fact that it bears
within itself the most flattering evaluation of cognition. Its most
general effect is deception; but even its most particular effects have
something of deception in their nature.
The intellect, as a means for the preservation of the individual,
develops its chief power in dissimulation; for it is by dissimulation
that the feebler, and less robust individuals preserve themselves,
since it has been denied them to fight the battle of existence
with horns or the sharp teeth of beasts of prey. In man this art
of dissimulation reaches its acme of perfection: in him deception,
flattery, falsehood and fraud, slander, display, pretentiousness,
disguise, cloaking convention, and acting to others and to himself
in short, the continual fluttering to and fro around the _one_
flame--Vanity: all these things are so much the rule, and the law,
that few things are more incomprehensible than the way in which an
honest and pure impulse to truth could have arisen among men. They
are deeply immersed in illusions and dream-fancies; their eyes glance
only over the surface of things and see "forms"; their sensation
nowhere leads to truth, but contents itself with receiving stimuli
and, so to say, with playing hide-and-seek on the back of things.
In addition to that, at night man allows his dreams to lie to him a
whole life-time long, without his moral sense ever trying to prevent
them; whereas men are said to exist who by the exercise of a strong
will have overcome the habit of snoring. What indeed _does_ man know
about himself? Oh! that he could but once see himself complete, placed
as it were in an illuminated glass-case! Does not nature keep secret
from him most things, even about his body, _e.g.,_ the convolutions of
the intestines, the quick flow of the blood-currents, the intricate
vibrations of the fibres, so as to banish and lock him up in proud,
delusive knowledge? Nature threw away the key; and woe co the fateful
curiosity which might be able for a moment to look out and down through
a crevice in the chamber of consciousness, and discover that man,
indifferent to his own ignorance, is resting on the pitiless, the
greedy, the insatiable, the murderous, and, as it were, hanging in
dreams on the back of a tiger. Whence, in the wide world, with this
state of affairs, arises the impulse to truth?
As far as the individual tries to preserve himself against other
individuals, in the natural state of things he uses the intellect
in most cases only for dissimulation; since, however, man both from
necessity and boredom wants to exist socially and gregariously, he
must needs make peace and at least endeavour to cause the greatest
_bellum omnium contra omnes_ to disappear from his world. This first
conclusion of peace brings with it a something which looks like the
first step towards the attainment of that enigmatical bent for truth.
For that which henceforth is to be "truth" is now fixed; that is to
say, a uniformly valid and binding designation of things is invented
and the legislature of language also gives the first laws of truth:
since here, for the first time, originates the contrast between truth
and falsity. The liar uses the valid designations, the words, in order
to make the unreal appear as real; _e.g.,_ he says, "I am rich,"
whereas the right designation for his state would be "poor." He abuses
the fixed conventions by convenient substitution or even inversion
of terms. If he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful fashion,
society will no longer trust him but will even exclude him. In this way
men avoid not so much being defrauded, but being injured by fraud. At
bottom, at this juncture too, they hate not deception, but the evil,
hostile consequences of certain species of deception. And it is in
a similarly limited sense only that man desires truth: he covets the
agreeable, life-preserving consequences of truth; he is indifferent
towards pure, ineffective knowledge; he is even inimical towards truths
which possibly might prove harmful or destroying. And, moreover, what
after all are those conventions op language? Are they possibly products
of knowledge, of the love of truth; do the designations and the things
coincide? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?
Only by means of forgetfulness can man ever arrive at imagining that he
possesses "truth" in that degree just indicated. If he does not mean
to content himself with truth in the shape of tautology, that is, with
empty husks, he will always obtain illusions instead of truth. What
is a word? The expression of a nerve-stimulus in sounds. But to infer
a cause outside us from the nerve-stimulus is already the result of a
wrong and unjustifiable application of the proposition of causality.
How should we dare, if truth with the genesis of language, if the point
of view of certainty with the designations had alone been decisive; how
indeed should we dare to say: the stone is hard; as if "hard" was known
to us otherwise; and not merely as an entirely subjective stimulus!
We divide things according to genders; we designate the tree as
masculine,[2] the plant as feminine:[3] what arbitrary metaphors! How
far flown beyond the canon of certainty! We speak of a "serpent";[4]
the designation fits nothing but the sinuosity, and could therefore
also appertain to the worm. What arbitrary demarcations! what one-sided
preferences given sometimes to this, sometimes to that quality of a
thing! The different languages placed side by side show that with words
truth or adequate expression matters little: for otherwise there would
not be so many languages. The "Thing-in-itself" (it is just this which
would be the pure ineffective truth) is also quite incomprehensible
to the creator of language and not worth making any great endeavour
to obtain. He designates only the relations of things to men and for
their expression he calls to his help the most daring metaphors. A
nerve-stimulus, first transformed into a percept! First metaphor! The
percept again copied into a sound! Second metaphor! And each time he
leaps completely out of one sphere right into the midst of an entirely
different one. One can imagine a man who is quite deaf and has never
had a sensation of tone and of music; just as this man will possibly
marvel at Chladni's sound figures in the sand, will discover their
cause in the vibrations of the string, and will then proclaim that
now he knows what man calls "tone"; even so does it happen to us all
with language. When we talk about trees, colours, snow and flowers,
we believe we know something about the things themselves, and yet we
only possess metaphors of the things, and these metaphors do not in the
least correspond to the original essentials. Just as the sound shows
itself as a sand-figure, in the same way the enigmatical _x_ of the
Thing-in-itself is seen first as nerve-stimulus, then as percept, and
finally as sound. At any rate the genesis of language did not therefore
proceed on logical lines, and the whole material in which and with
which the man of truth, the investigator, the philosopher works and
builds, originates, if not from Nephelococcygia, cloud-land, at any
rate not from the essence of things.
Let us especially think about the formation of ideas. Every word
becomes at once an idea not by having, as one might presume, to serve
as a reminder for the original experience happening but once and
absolutely individualised, to which experience such word owes its
origin, no, but by having simultaneously to fit innumerable, more or
less similar (which really means never equal, therefore altogether
unequal) cases. Every idea originates through equating the unequal. As
certainly as no one leaf is exactly similar to any other, so certain
is it that the idea "leaf" has been formed through an arbitrary
omission of these individual differences, through a forgetting of the
differentiating qualities, and this idea now awakens the notion that in
nature there is, besides the leaves, a something called _the_ "leaf,"
perhaps a primal form according to which all leaves were woven, drawn,
accurately measured, coloured, crinkled, painted, but by unskilled
hands, so that no copy had turned out correct and trustworthy as a
true copy of the primal form. We call a man "honest"; we ask, why has
he acted so honestly to-day? Our customary answer runs, "On account of
his honesty." _The_ Honesty! That means again: the "leaf" is the
cause of the leaves. We really and truly do not know anything at all
about an essential quality which might be called _the_ honesty, but we
do know about numerous individualised, and therefore unequal actions,
which we equate by omission of the unequal, and now designate as honest
actions; finally out of them we formulate a _qualitas occulta_ with the
name "Honesty." The disregarding of the individual and real furnishes
us with the idea, as it likewise also gives us the form; whereas nature
knows of no forms and ideas, and therefore knows no species but only
an _x,_ to us inaccessible and indefinable. For our antithesis of
individual and species is anthropomorphic too and does not come from
the essence of things, although on the other hand we do not dare to
say that it does not correspond to it; for that would be a dogmatic
assertion and as such just as undemonstrable as its contrary.
What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies,
anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which became
poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and
after long usage seem to a nation fixed, canonic and binding; truths
are illusions of which one has forgotten that they _are_ illusions;
worn-out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses;
coins which have their obverse effaced and now are no longer of account
as coins but merely as metal.