Part Six

We Scholars

204

At the risk that moralizing here also will show itself to be what it always has been - that is, an unabashed montrer ses plais [display of one's wounds], as Balzac says - I'd like to dare to stand up against an unreasonable and harmful shift in rank ordering which nowadays, quite unnoticed and, as if with the clearest conscience, threatens to establish itself between science and philosophy. I think that we must on the basis of our experience - experience means, as I see it, always bad experience? - have a right to discuss such a higher question of rank, so that we do not speak like blind men about colour or as women and artists do against science ("Oh, this nasty science!" their instinct and embarrassment sigh, "it always finds out what's behind things"-). The declaration of independence of the scientific man, his emancipation from philosophy, is one of the subtler effects of the order and confusion in democracy: today the self-glorification and self-exaltation of the scholar stand in full bloom everywhere and in their finest spring - but that is still not intended to mean that in this case self-praise smells very nice. "Away with all masters!" - that's what the instinct of the rabble wants here, too, and once science enjoyed its happiest success in pushing away theology, whose "handmaiden" it was for so long, now it has the high spirits and stupidity to set about making laws for philosophy and to take its turn playing the "master" for once - what am I saying? - playing the philosopher. My memory - the memory of a scientific man, if you'll permit me to say so! - is full to bursting with the naivete in the arrogance I have heard in remarks about philosophy and philosophers from young natural scientists and old doctors (not to mention from the most educated and most conceited of all scholars, the philologists and schoolmen, who are both of these thanks to their profession -). Sometimes it was a specialist and man who hangs around in corners, who generally instinctively resists all synthetic tasks and capabilities; sometimes the industrious worker, who had taken a whiff of the otium [leisure] and of the noble opulence within the spiritual household of the philosopher and, as he did so, felt himself restricted and diminished. Sometimes it was that colour blindness of the utilitarian man, who sees nothing in philosophy other than a series of refuted systems and an extravagant expense from which no one "receives any benefit." Sometimes the fear of disguised mysticism and of an adjustment to the boundaries of knowledge sprang up; sometimes the contempt for particular philosophers had unwittingly been generalized into a contempt for philosophy. Finally, among the young scholars I most frequently found behind the arrogant belittlement of philosophy the pernicious effect of a philosopher himself, a man whom people had in general refused to follow but without escaping the spell of his value judgments rejecting other philosophers - something which brought about a collective irritation with all philosophy. (For example, Schopenhauer's effect on the most modern Germany seems to me to be something like this: with his unintelligent anger against Hegel he created a situation in which the entire last generation of Germans broke away from their connection with German culture, and this culture, all things well considered, was a high point in and a prophetic refinement of the historical sense.¹ But Schopenhauer himself in this very matter was impoverished to the point of genius - unreceptive, un-German.) From a general point of view, it may well have been more than anything else the human, all-too-human, in short, the paltriness of the newer philosophy itself which most fundamentally damaged respect for philosophy and opened the gates to the instincts of the rabble. We should nonetheless confess the extent to which, in our modern world, the whole style of Heraclitus, Plato, Empedocles, and of whatever all those royal and splendid hermits of the spirit were called is disappearing. Considering the sort of representatives of philosophy who nowadays, thanks to fashion, are just as much on top as on the very bottom - in Germany, for example, the two lions of Berlin, the anarchist Eugen Dühring and the amalgamist Eduard von Hartmann - an honest man of science is entitled to feel with some justice that he is of a better sort, with a better descent.² In particular, the sight of these mish-mash philosophers who call themselves "reality philosophers" or "positivists" is capable of throwing a dangerous mistrust into the soul of an ambitious young scholar: they are, in the best of cases, scholars and specialists themselves - that's clear enough - they are, in fact, collectively defeated, brought back under the rule of science. At some time or other they wanted more from themselves, without having any right to this "more" and to its responsibilities - and now, in word and deed, they represent in a respectable, angry, vengeful way the lack of faith in the ruling task and masterfulness of philosophy. But finally - how could it be anything different? Science nowadays is in bloom, and its face is filled with good conscience, while what all new philosophy has gradually sunk to - this remnant of philosophy today - is busy generating suspicion and ill humour against itself, if not mockery and pity. Philosophy reduced to "theory of knowledge" is, in fact, nothing more than a tentative division of philosophy into epochs and a doctrine of abstinence: a philosophy which does not venture a step over the threshold and awkwardly denies itself the right to enter - that is philosophy at death's door, an end, an agony, something pitiful! How could such a philosophy - rule!