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Towards an evaluation of the vita contemplativa.  Let us, as men of the vita contemplativa¹⁹, not forget what kind of evil and ill-fortune has come upon the man of the vita activa through the after-effects of contemplation  in short, what counter-reckoning the vita activa has in store for us if we boast too proudly before it of our good deeds. First: the socalled religious natures, whose numbers preponderate among the contemplative and who consequently constitute their commonest species, have at all times had the effect of making life hard for practical men and, where possible, intolerable to them: to darken the heavens, to blot out the sun, to cast suspicion on joy, to deprive hope of its value, to paralyse the active hand  this is what they have known how to do, just as much as they have had their consolations, alms, helping hand and benedictions for wretched feelings and times of misery. Secondly: the artists, somewhat rarer than the religious yet still a not uncommon kind of man of the vita contemplativa, have as individuals usually been unbearable, capricious, envious, violent and unpeaceable: this effect has to be set against the cheering and exalting effects of their works. Thirdly: the philosophers, a species in which religious and artistic powers exist together but in such a fashion that a third thing, dialectics, love of demonstrating, has a place beside them, have been the author of evils in the manner of the religious and the artists and have in addition through their inclination for dialectics brought boredom to many people; but their number has always been very small. Fourthly: the thinkers and the workers in science; they have rarely aimed at producing effects but have dug away quietly under their mole-hills. They have thus caused little annoyance or discomfort, and often, as objects of mockery and laughter, have without desiring it even alleviated the life of the men of the vita activa. Science has, moreover, become something very useful to everyone: if on account of this utility very many predestined for the vita activa now, in the sweat of their brow and not without brain-racking and imprecations, beat out for themselves a path to science, this distress is not the fault of the host of thinkers and workers in science; it is 'self-inflicted pain'.

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Origin of the vita contemplativa.  In rude ages, where pessimistic judgments as to the nature of man and world prevail, the individual in the feeling of possessing all his powers is always intent upon acting in accordance with these judgments and thus translating idea into action through hunting, robbing, attacking, mistreatment and murder, including the paler reflections of these actions such as are alone tolerated within the community. But if his powers decline, if he feels weary or ill or melancholy or satiated and as a consequence for the time being devoid of desires and wishes, he is then a relatively better, that is to say less harmful man, and his pessimistic ideas discharge themselves only in words and thoughts, for example about the value of his comrades or his wife or his life or his gods  his judgments will be unfavourable judgments. In this condition he becomes thinker and prophet, or he expands imaginatively on his superstition and devises new usages, or he mocks his enemies  but whatever he may think about, all the products of his thinking are bound to reflect the condition he is in, which is one in which fear and weariness are on the increase and his valuation of action and active enjoyment on the decrease; the content of these products of his thinking must correspond to the content of these poetical, thoughtful, priestly moods; unfavourable judgment is bound to predominate. Later on, all those who continually acted as the single individual had formerly acted while in this condition, and who thus judged unfavourably and whose lives were melancholy and poor in deeds, came to be called poets or thinkers or priests or medicine-men  because they were so inactive one would have liked to have despised such men and ejected them from the community; but there was some danger attached to that  they were versed in superstition and on the scent of divine forces, one never doubted that they commanded unknown sources of power. This is the estimation under which the oldest race of contemplative natures lived  despised to just the extent they were not dreaded! In this muffled shape, in this ambiguous guise, with an evil heart and often an anguished head, did contemplation first appear on earth, at once weak and fearsome, secretly despised and publicly loaded with superstitious reference! Here, as always, it is a case of pudenda origo!²⁰

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The many forces that now have to come together in the thinker.  To abstract oneself from sensory perception, to exalt oneself to contemplation of abstractions  that was at one time actually felt as exaltation: we can no longer quite enter into this feeling. To revel in pallid images of words and things, to sport with such invisible, inaudible, impalpable beings, was, out of contempt for the sensorily tangible, seductive and evil world, felt as a life in another higher world. 'These abstracta are certainly not seductive, but they can offer us guidance!'  with that one lifted oneself upwards. It is not the content of these sportings of spirituality, it is they themselves which constituted 'the higher life' in the prehistoric ages of science. Hence Plato's admiration for dialectics²¹ and his enthusiastic belief that dialectics necessarily pertained to the good, unsensory man. It is not only knowledge which has been discovered gradually and piece by piece, the means of knowing as such, the conditions and operations which precede knowledge in man, have been discovered gradually and piece by piece too. And each time the newly discovered operation or the novel condition seemed to be, not a means to knowledge, but in itself the content, goal and sum total of all that was worth knowing. The thinker needs imagination, self-uplifting, abstraction, desensualization, invention, presentiment, induction, dialectics, deduction, the critical faculty, the assemblage of material, the impersonal mode of thinking, contemplativeness and comprehensiveness, and not least justice and love for all that exists  but all these means to knowledge once counted individually in the history of the vita contemplativa as goals, and final goals, and bestowed on their inventors that feeling of happiness which appears in the human soul when it catches sight of a final goal.

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Origin and significance.  Why is it that this thought comes back to me again and again and in ever more varied colours?  that formerly, when investigators of knowledge sought out the origin of things they always believed they would discover something of incalculable significance for all later action and judgment, that they always presupposed, indeed, that the salvation of man must depend on insight into the origin of things: but that now, on the contrary, the more we advance towards origins, the more our interest diminishes; indeed, that all the evaluations and 'interestedness' we have implanted into things begin to lose their meaning the further we go back and the closer we approach the things themselves. The more insight we possess into an origin the less significant does the origin appear: while what is nearest to us, what is around us and in us, gradually begins to display colours and beauties and enigmas and riches of significance of which earlier mankind had not an inkling. Formerly, thinkers prowled around angrily like captive animals, watching the bars of their cages and leaping against them in order to smash them down: and happy seemed he who through a gap in them believed he saw something of what was outside, of what was distant and beyond.

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A tragic ending for knowledge.  Of all the means of producing exaltation, it has been human sacrifice which has at all times most exalted and elevated man. And perhaps every other endeavour could still be thrown down by one tremendous idea, so that it would achieve victory over the most victorious  the idea of self-sacrificing mankind. But to whom should mankind sacrifice itself?. One could already take one's oath that, if ever the constellation of this idea appears above the horizon, the knowledge of truth would remain as the one tremendous goal commensurate with such a sacrifice, because for this goal no sacrifice is too great. In the meantime, the problem of the extent to which mankind can as a whole take steps towards the advancement of knowledge has never yet been posed; not to speak of what drive to knowledge could drive mankind to the point of dying with the light of an anticipatory wisdom in its eyes. Perhaps, if one day an alliance has been established with the inhabitants of other stars for the purpose of knowledge, and knowledge has been communicated from star to star for a few millennia: perhaps enthusiasm for knowledge may then rise to such a high-water mark!