now we have heard only about the obligation which society imposes in
order to exist: to be truthful, that is, to use the usual metaphors,
therefore expressed morally: we have heard only about the obligation
to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie gregariously in a style
binding for all. Now man of course forgets that matters are going thus
with him; he therefore lies in that fashion pointed out unconsciously
and according to habits of centuries' standing--and by _this very
unconsciousness,_ by this very forgetting, he arrives at a sense for
truth. Through this feeling of being obliged to designate one thing as
"red," another as "cold," a third one as "dumb," awakes a moral emotion
relating to truth. Out of the antithesis "liar" whom nobody trusts,
whom all exclude, man demonstrates to himself the venerableness,
reliability, usefulness of truth. Now as a "_rational_" being he
submits his actions to the sway of abstractions; he no longer suffers
himself to be carried away by sudden impressions, by sensations, he
first generalises all these impressions into paler, cooler ideas, in
order to attach to them the ship of his life and actions. Everything
which makes man stand out in bold relief against the animal depends on
this faculty of volatilising the concrete metaphors into a schema, and
therefore resolving a perception into an idea. For within the range of
those schemata a something becomes possible that never could succeed
under the first perceptual impressions: to build up a pyramidal order
with castes and grades, to create a new world of laws, privileges,
sub-orders, delimitations, which now stands opposite the other
perceptual world of first impressions and assumes the appearance of
being the more fixed, general, known, human of the two and therefore
the regulating and imperative one. Whereas every metaphor of perception
is individual and without its equal and therefore knows how to escape
all attempts to classify it, the great "edifice of ideas shows the
rigid regularity of a Roman Columbarium and in logic breathes forth the
sternness and coolness which we find in mathematics. He who has been
breathed upon by this coolness will scarcely believe, that the idea
too, bony and hexa-hedral, and permutable as a die, remains however
only as the _residuum of a metaphor,_ and that the illusion of the
artistic metamorphosis of a nerve-stimulus into percepts is, if not
the mother, then the grand-mother of every idea. Now in this game of
dice, "Truth" means to use every die as it is designated, to count its
points carefully, to form exact classifications, and never lo violate
the order of castes and the sequences of rank. Just as the Romans
and Etruscans for their benefit cut up the sky by means of strong
mathematical lines and banned a god as it were into a _templum,_ into a
space limited in this fashion, so every nation has above its head such
a sky of ideas divided up mathematically, and it understands the demand
for truth to mean that every conceptual god is to be looked for only
in _his_ own sphere. One may here well admire man, who succeeded in
piling up an infinitely complex dome of ideas on a movable foundation
and as it were on running water, as a powerful genius of architecture.
Of course in order to obtain hold on such a foundation it must be as
an edifice piled up out of cobwebs, so fragile, as to be carried away
by the waves: so firm, as not to be blown asunder by every wind. In
this way man as an architectural genius rises high above the bee;
she builds with wax, which she brings together out of nature; he
with the much more delicate material of ideas, which he must first
manufacture within himself. He is very much to be admired here--but
not on account of his impulse for truth, his bent for pure cognition
of things. If somebody hides a thing behind a bush, seeks it again and
finds it in the self-same place, then there is not much to boast of,
respecting this seeking and finding; thus, however, matters stand with
the seeking and finding of "truth" within the realm of reason. If I
make the definition of the mammal and then declare after inspecting a
camel, "Behold a mammal," then no doubt a truth is brought to light
thereby, but it is of very limited value, I mean it is anthropomorphic
through and through, and does not contain one single point which is
"true-in-itself," real and universally valid, apart from man. The
seeker after such truths seeks at the bottom only the metamorphosis
of the world in man, he strives for an understanding of the world as
a human-like thing and by his battling gains at best the feeling of
an assimilation. Similarly, as the astrologer contemplated the stars
in the service of man and in connection with their happiness and
unhappiness, such a seeker contemplates the whole world as related to
man, as the infinitely protracted echo of an original sound: man; as
the multiplied copy of the one arch-type: man. His procedure is to
apply man as the measure of all things, whereby he starts from the
error of believing that he has these things immediately before him
as pure objects. He therefore forgets that the original metaphors of
perception _are_ metaphors, and takes them for the things themselves.
Only by forgetting that primitive world of metaphors, only by the
congelation and coagulation of an original mass of similes and percepts
pouring forth as a fiery liquid out of the primal faculty of human
fancy, only by the invincible faith, that _this_ sun, _this_ window,
_this_ table is a truth in itself: in short only by the fact that
man forgets himself as subject, and what is more as an _artistically
creating_ subject: only by all this does he live with some repose,
safety and consequence. If he were able to get out of the prison walls
of this faith, even for an instant only, his "self-consciousness would
be destroyed at once. Already it costs him some trouble to admit to
himself that the insect and the bird perceive a world different from
his own, and that the question, which of the two world-perceptions is
more accurate, is quite a senseless one, since to decide this question
it would be necessary to apply the standard of _right perception,_
i.e., to apply a standard which _does not exist._ On the whole it
seems to me that the "right perception"--which would mean the adequate
expression of an object in the subject--is a nonentity full of
contradictions: for between two utterly different spheres, as between
subject and object, there is no causality, no accuracy, no expression,
but at the utmost an _æsthetical_ relation, I mean a suggestive
metamorphosis, a stammering translation into quite a distinct foreign
language, for which purpose however there is needed at any rate an
intermediate sphere, an intermediate force, freely composing and
freely inventing. The word "phenomenon" contains many seductions, and
on that account I avoid it as much as possible, for it is not true
that the essence of things appears in the empiric world. A painter
who had no hands and wanted to express the picture distinctly present
to his mind by the agency of song, would still reveal much more with
this permutation of spheres, than the empiric world reveals about
the essence of things. The very relation of a nerve-stimulus to the
produced percept is in itself no necessary one; but if the same percept
has been reproduced millions of times and has been the inheritance of
many successive generations of man, and in the end appears each time to
all mankind as the result of the same cause, then it attains finally
for man the same importance as if it were _the_ unique, necessary
percept and as if that relation between the original nerve-stimulus
and the percept produced were a close relation of causality: just as
a dream eternally repeated, would be perceived and judged as though
real. But the congelation and coagulation of a metaphor does not at all
guarantee the necessity and exclusive justification of that metaphor.
Surely every human being who is at home with such contemplations has
felt a deep distrust against any idealism of that kind, as often
as he has distinctly convinced himself of the eternal rigidity,
omni-presence, and infallibility of nature's laws: he has arrived at
the conclusion that as far as we can penetrate the heights of the
telescopic and the depths of the microscopic world, everything is quite
secure, complete, infinite, determined, and continuous. Science will
have to dig in these shafts eternally and successfully and all things
found are sure to have to harmonise and not to contradict one another.
How little does this resemble a product of fancy, for if it were one
it would necessarily betray somewhere its nature of appearance and
unreality. Against this it may be objected in the first place that if
each of us had for himself a different sensibility, if we ourselves
were only able to perceive sometimes as a bird, sometimes as a worm,
sometimes as a plant, or if one of us saw the same stimulus as red,
another as blue, if a third person even perceived it as a tone, then
nobody would talk of such an orderliness of nature, but would conceive
of her only as an extremely subjective structure. Secondly, what is,
for us in general, a law of nature? It is not known in itself but
only in its effects, that is to say in its relations to other laws
of nature, which again are known to us only as sums of relations.
Therefore all these relations refer only one to another and are
absolutely incomprehensible to us in their essence; only that which we
add: time, space, _i.e.,_ relations of sequence and numbers, are really
known to us in them. Everything wonderful, however, that we marvel
at in the laws of nature, everything that demands an explanation and
might seduce us into distrusting idealism, lies really and solely in
the mathematical rigour and inviolability of the conceptions of time
and space. These however we produce within ourselves and throw them
forth with that necessity with which the spider spins; since we are
compelled to conceive all things under these forms only, then it is no
longer wonderful that in all things we actually conceive none but these
forms: for they all must bear within themselves the laws of number,
and this very idea of number is the most marvellous in all things. All
obedience to law which impresses us so forcibly in the orbits of stars
and in chemical processes coincides at the bottom with those qualities
which we ourselves attach to those things, so that it is we who
thereby make the impression upon ourselves. Whence it clearly follows
that that artistic formation of metaphors, with which every sensation
in us begins, already presupposes those forms, and is therefore only
consummated within them; only out of the persistency of these primal
forms the possibility explains itself, how afterwards--out of the
metaphors themselves a structure of ideas, could again be compiled. For
the latter is an imitation of the relations of time, space and number
in the realm of metaphors.
[1] The German poet, Lessing, had been married for just a little over
one year to Eva König. A son was born and died the same day, and the
mother's life was despaired of. In a letter to his friend Eschenburg
the poet wrote: "... and I lost him so unwillingly, this son! For he
had so much understanding! so much understanding! Do not suppose that
the few hours of fatherhood have made me an ape of a father! I know
what I say. Was it not understanding, that they had to drag him into
the world with a pair of forceps? that he so soon suspected the evil
of this world? Was it not understanding, that he seized the first
opportunity to get away from it?..."
Eva König died a week later.--TR.
[2] In German _the tree--der Baum_--is masculine.--TR.
[3] In German _the plant--die Pflanze--_-is feminine--TR.
[4] _Cf._ the German _die Schlange_ and _schlingen,_ the English
_serpent_ from the Latin _serpere._--TR.
2
As we saw, it is _language_ which has worked originally at the
construction of ideas; in later times it is _science._ Just as the
bee works at the same time at the cells and fills them with honey,
thus science works irresistibly at that great columbarium of ideas,
the cemetery of perceptions, builds ever newer and higher storeys;
supports, purifies, renews the old cells, and endeavours above all to
fill that gigantic framework and to arrange within it the whole of the
empiric world, _i.e.,_ the anthropomorphic world. And as the man of
action binds his life to reason and its ideas, in order to avoid being
swept away and losing himself, so the seeker after truth builds his hut
close to the towering edifice of science in order to collaborate with
it and to find protection. And he needs protection. For there are awful
powers which continually press upon him, and which hold out against the
"truth" of science "truths" fashioned in quite another way, bearing
devices of the most heterogeneous character.
That impulse towards the formation of metaphors, mat fundamental
impulse of man, which we cannot reason away for one moment--for thereby
we should reason away man himself--is in truth not defeated nor even
subdued by the fact that out of its evaporated products, the ideas, a
regular and rigid new world has been built as a stronghold for it. This
impulse seeks for itself a new realm of action and another river-bed,
and finds it in _Mythos_ and more generally in _Art._ This impulse
constantly confuses the rubrics and cells of the ideas, by putting
up new figures of speech, metaphors, metonymies; it constantly shows
its passionate longing for shaping the existing world of waking man
as motley, irregular, inconsequentially incoherent, attractive, and
eternally new as the world of dreams is. For indeed, waking man _per
se_ is only clear about his being awake through the rigid and orderly
woof of ideas, and it is for this very reason that he sometimes comes
to believe that he was dreaming when that woof of ideas has for a
moment been torn by Art. Pascal is quite right, when he asserts, that
if the same dream came to us every night we should be just as much
occupied by it as by the things which we see every day; to quote his
words, "If an artisan were certain that he would dream every night
for fully twelve hours that he was a king, I believe that he would
be just as happy as a king who dreams every night for twelve hours
that he is an artisan." The wide-awake day of a people mystically
excitable, let us say of the earlier Greeks, is in fact through the
continually-working wonder, which the mythos presupposes, more akin to
the dream than to the day of the thinker sobered by science. If every
tree may at some time talk as a nymph, or a god under the disguise of
a bull, carry away virgins, if the goddess Athene herself be suddenly
seen as, with a beautiful team, she drives, accompanied by Pisistratus,
through the markets of Athens--and every honest Athenian did believe
this--at any moment, as in a dream, everything is possible; and all
nature swarms around man as if she were nothing but the masquerade
of the gods, who found it a huge joke to deceive man by assuming all
possible forms.
Man himself, however, has an invincible tendency to let himself
be deceived, and he is like one enchanted with happiness when the
rhapsodist narrates to him epic romances in such a way that they appear
real or when the actor on the stage makes the king appear more kingly
than reality shows him. Intellect, that master of dissimulation, is
free and dismissed from his service as slave, so long as It is able
to deceive without _injuring,_ and then It celebrates Its Saturnalia.
Never is It richer, prouder, more luxuriant, more skilful and daring;
with a creator's delight It throws metaphors into confusion, shifts the
boundary-stones of the abstractions, so that for instance It designates
the stream as the mobile way which carries man to that place whither
he would otherwise go. Now It has thrown off Its shoulders the emblem
of servitude. Usually with gloomy officiousness It endeavours to point
out the way to a poor individual coveting existence, and It fares forth
for plunder and booty like a servant for his master, but now It Itself
has become a master and may wipe from Its countenance the expression
of indigence. Whatever It now does, compared with Its former doings,
bears within itself dissimulation, just as Its former doings bore the
character of distortion. It copies human life, but takes it for a
good thing and seems to rest quite satisfied with it. That enormous
framework and hoarding of ideas, by clinging to which needy man saves
himself through life, is to the freed intellect only a scaffolding and
a toy for Its most daring feats, and when It smashes it to pieces,
throws it into confusion, and then puts it together ironically, pairing
the strangest, separating the nearest items, then It manifests that It
has no use for those makeshifts of misery, and that It is now no longer
led by ideas but by intuitions. From these intuitions no regular road
leads into the land of the spectral schemata, the abstractions; for
them the word is not made, when man sees them he is dumb, or speaks in
forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations of ideas, in order
to correspond creatively with the impression of the powerful present
intuition at least by destroying and jeering at the old barriers of
ideas.
There are ages, when the rational and the intuitive man stand side by
side, the one full of fear of the intuition, the other full of scorn
for the abstraction; the latter just as irrational as the former is
inartistic. Both desire to rule over life; the one by knowing how to
meet the most important needs with foresight, prudence, regularity;
the other as an "over-joyous" hero by ignoring those needs and taking
that life only as real which simulates appearance and beauty. Wherever
intuitive man, as for instance in the earlier history of Greece,
brandishes his weapons more powerfully and victoriously than his
opponent, there under favourable conditions, a culture can develop and
art can establish her rule over life. That dissembling, that denying of
neediness, that splendour of metaphorical notions and especially that
directness of dissimulation accompany all utterances of such a life.
Neither the house of man, nor his way of walking, nor his clothing, nor
his earthen jug suggest that necessity invented them; it seems as if
they all were intended as the expressions of a sublime happiness, an
Olympic cloudlessness, and as it were a playing at seriousness. Whereas
the man guided by ideas and abstractions only wards off misfortune by
means of them, without even enforcing for himself happiness out of the
abstractions; whereas he strives after the greatest possible freedom
from pains, the intuitive man dwelling in the midst of culture has from
his intuitions a harvest: besides the warding off of evil, he attains a
continuous in-pouring of enlightenment, enlivenment and redemption. Of
course when he _does_ suffer, he suffers more: and he even suffers more
frequently since he cannot learn from experience, but again and again
falls into the same ditch into which he has fallen before. In suffering
he is just as irrational as in happiness; he cries aloud and finds no
consolation. How different matters are in the same misfortune with
the Stoic, taught by experience and ruling himself by ideas! He who
otherwise only looks for uprightness, truth, freedom from deceptions
and shelter from ensnaring and sudden attack, in his misfortune
performs the masterpiece of dissimulation, just as the other did in
his happiness; he shows no twitching mobile human face but as it were a
mask with dignified, harmonious features; he does not cry out and does
not even alter his voice; when a heavy thundercloud bursts upon him,
he wraps himself up in his cloak and with slow and measured step walks
away from beneath it.
THE END.