[1] PREFACE
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[4]
[5] SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman--what then? Is there not ground
[6] for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been
[7] dogmatists, have failed to understand women--that the terrible
[8] seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually
[9] paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly
[10] methods for winning a woman? Certainly she has never allowed
[11] herself to be won; and at present every kind of dogma stands with
[12] sad and discouraged mien--IF, indeed, it stands at all! For there
[13] are scoffers who maintain that it has fallen, that all dogma lies
[14] on the ground--nay more, that it is at its last gasp. But to
[15] speak seriously, there are good grounds for hoping that all
[16] dogmatizing in philosophy, whatever solemn, whatever conclusive
[17] and decided airs it has assumed, may have been only a noble
[18] puerilism and tyronism; and probably the time is at hand when it
[19] will be once and again understood WHAT has actually sufficed for
[20] the basis of such imposing and absolute philosophical edifices as
[21] the dogmatists have hitherto reared: perhaps some popular
[22] superstition of immemorial time (such as the soul-superstition,
[23] which, in the form of subject- and ego-superstition, has not yet
[24] ceased doing mischief): perhaps some play upon words, a deception
[25] on the part of grammar, or an audacious generalization of very
[26] restricted, very personal, very human--all-too-human facts. The
[27] philosophy of the dogmatists, it is to be hoped, was only a
[28] promise for thousands of years afterwards, as was astrology in
[29] still earlier times, in the service of which probably more
[30] labour, gold, acuteness, and patience have been spent than on any
[31] actual science hitherto: we owe to it, and to its "super-
[32] terrestrial" pretensions in Asia and Egypt, the grand style of
[33] architecture. It seems that in order to inscribe themselves upon
[34] the heart of humanity with everlasting claims, all great things
[35] have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe-
[36] inspiring caricatures: dogmatic philosophy has been a caricature
[37] of this kind--for instance, the Vedanta doctrine in Asia, and
[38] Platonism in Europe. Let us not be ungrateful to it, although it
[39] must certainly be confessed that the worst, the most tiresome,
[40] and the most dangerous of errors hitherto has been a dogmatist
[41] error--namely, Plato's invention of Pure Spirit and the Good in
[42] Itself. But now when it has been surmounted, when Europe, rid of
[43] this nightmare, can again draw breath freely and at least enjoy a
[44] healthier--sleep, we, WHOSE DUTY IS WAKEFULNESS ITSELF, are the
[45] heirs of all the strength which the struggle against this error
[46] has fostered. It amounted to the very inversion of truth, and the
[47] denial of the PERSPECTIVE--the fundamental condition--of life, to
[48] speak of Spirit and the Good as Plato spoke of them; indeed one
[49] might ask, as a physician: "How did such a malady attack that
[50] finest product of antiquity, Plato? Had the wicked Socrates
[51] really corrupted him? Was Socrates after all a corrupter of
[52] youths, and deserved his hemlock?" But the struggle against
[53] Plato, or--to speak plainer, and for the "people"--the struggle
[54] against the ecclesiastical oppression of millenniums of
[55] Christianity (FOR CHRISITIANITY IS PLATONISM FOR THE "PEOPLE"),
[56] produced in Europe a magnificent tension of soul, such as had not
[57] existed anywhere previously; with such a tensely strained bow one
[58] can now aim at the furthest goals. As a matter of fact, the
[59] European feels this tension as a state of distress, and twice
[60] attempts have been made in grand style to unbend the bow: once by
[61] means of Jesuitism, and the second time by means of democratic
[62] enlightenment--which, with the aid of liberty of the press and
[63] newspaper-reading, might, in fact, bring it about that the spirit
[64] would not so easily find itself in "distress"! (The Germans
[65] invented gunpowder-all credit to them! but they again made things
[66] square--they invented printing.) But we, who are neither Jesuits,
[67] nor democrats, nor even sufficiently Germans, we GOOD EUROPEANS,
[68] and free, VERY free spirits--we have it still, all the distress
[69] of spirit and all the tension of its bow! And perhaps also the
[70] arrow, the duty, and, who knows? THE GOAL TO AIM AT. . . .
[71]
[72] Sils Maria Upper Engadine, JUNE, 1885.
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