3

Hitherto, the subject reflected on least adequately has been good and evil: it was too dangerous a subject. Conscience, reputation, Hell, sometimes even the police have permitted and continue to permit no impartiality; in the presence of morality, as in the face of any authority, one is not allowed to think, far less to express an opinion: here one has to obey! As long as the world has existed no authority has yet been willing to let itself become the object of criticism; and to criticise morality itself, to regard morality as a problem, as problematic: what? has that not been is that not  immoral?  But morality does not merely have at its command every kind of means of frightening off critical hands and torture-instruments: its security reposes far more in a certain art of enchantment it has at its disposal  it knows how to 'inspire'. With this art it succeeds, often with no more than a single glance, in paralysing the critical will and even in enticing it over to its own side; there are even cases in which morality has been able to turn the critical will against itself, so that, like the scorpion, it drives its sting into its own body. For morality has from of old been master of every diabolical nuance of the art of persuasion: there is no orator, even today, who does not have recourse to its assistance (listen, for example, even to our anarchists: how morally they speak when they want to persuade! In the end they even go so far as to call themselves 'the good and the just'.) For as long as there has been speech and persuasion on earth, morality has shown itself to be the greatest of all mistresses of seduction  and, so far as we philosophers are concerned, the actual Circe of the philosophers². Why is it that from Plato onwards every philosophical architect in Europe has built in vain? That everything they themselves in all sober seriousness regarded as aere perennius³ is threatening to collapse or already lies in ruins? Oh how false is the answer which even today is reserved in readiness for this question: 'because they had all neglected the presupposition for such an undertaking, the testing of the foundations, a critique of reason as a whole'  that fateful answer of Kant's which has certainly not lured us modern philosophers on to any firmer or less treacherous ground! ( and, come to think of it, was it not somewhat peculiar to demand of an instrument that it should criticise its own usefulness and suitability? that the intellect itself should 'know' its own value, its own capacity, its own limitations? was it not even a little absurd?  ). The correct answer would rather have been that all philosophers were building under the seduction of morality, even Kant  that they were apparently aiming at certainty, at 'truth', but in reality at 'majestic moral structures': to employ once again the innocent language of Kant, who describes his own 'not so glittering yet not undeserving' task and labour as 'to level and make firm the ground for these majestic moral structures' (Critique of Pure Reason II, 4p.257). Alas, we have to admit today that he did not succeed in doing that, quite the contrary! Kant was, with such an enthusiastic intention, the true son of his century, which before any other can be called the century of enthusiasm: as he fortunately remained also in regard to its more valuable aspects (for example in the good portion of sensism he took over into his theory of knowledge). He too had been bitten by the moral tarantula Rousseau, he too harboured in the depths of his soul the idea of that moral fanaticism whose executor another disciple of Rousseau felt and confessed himself to be, namely Robespierre⁴, 'de fonder sur la terre l'empire de la sagesse, de la justice et de la vertu⁵' (speech of 7 June 1794). On the other hand, with such a French fanaticism in one's heart, one could not have gone to work in a less French fashion, more thoroughly, more in a German fashion  if the word 'German' is still permitted today in this sense  than Kant did: to create room for his 'moral realm' he saw himself obliged to posit an undemonstrable world, a logical 'Beyond'  it was for precisely that that he had need of his critique of pure reason! In other words: he would not have had need of it if one thing had not been more vital to him than anything else: to render the 'moral realm' unassailable, even better incomprehensible to reason  for he felt that a moral order of things was only too assailable by reason! In the face of nature and history, in the face of the thorough immorality of nature and history, Kant was, like every good German of the old stamp, a pessimist; he believed in morality, not because it is demonstrated in nature and history, but in spite of the fact that nature and history continually contradict it. To understand this 'in spite of', one might perhaps recall something similar in Luther⁶, that other great pessimist who, with all the audacity native to him, once admonished his friends: 'if we could grasp by reason who the God who shows so much wrath and malice can be just and merciful, what need would we have of faith?' For nothing has from the beginning made a more profound impression on the German soul, nothing has 'tempted' it more, than this most perilous of all conclusions, which to every true Roman is a sin against the spirit: credo quia absurdum est⁷:  it was with this conclusion that German logic first entered the history of Christian dogma: but even today, a millennium later, we Germans of today, late Germans in every respect, still sense something of truth, of the possibility of truth behind the celebrated dialectical principle⁸; with which in his day Hegel assisted the German spirit to conquer Europe  'Contradiction moves the world, all things contradict themselves'  : for we are, even in the realm of logic, pessimists.