from which on every occasion the entire plant has grown. In fact, when we explain how the most remote metaphysical claims in a philosophy really arose, it’s good (and shrewd) for us always to ask first: What moral is it (is he —) aiming at? Consequently, I don’t believe that a “drive to knowledge” is the father of philosophy but that knowledge (and misunderstanding) have functioned only as a tool for another drive, here as elsewhere. But whoever explores the basic drives of human beings, in order to see in this very place how far they may have carried their game as inspiring geniuses (or demons and goblins), will find that all drives have already practised philosophy at some time or another—and that every single one of them has all too gladly liked to present itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of all the other drives. For every drive seeks mastery and, as such, tries to practise philosophy. Of course, with scholars, men of real scientific knowledge, things may be different—“better” if you will—where there may really be something like a drive for knowledge, some small independent clock mechanism or other which, when well wound up, bravely goes on working, without all the other drives of the scholar playing any essential role. The essential “interests” of scholars thus commonly lie entirely elsewhere, for example, in the family or in earning a living or in politics. Indeed, it is almost a matter of indifference whether his small machine is placed on this or on that point in science and whether the “promising” young worker makes a good philologist or expert in fungus or chemist— whether he becomes this or that does not define who he is.5 By contrast, with a philosopher nothing is at all impersonal. And his morality, in particular, bears a decisive and crucial witness to who he is—that is, to the rank ordering in which the innermost drives of his nature are placed relative to each other.
7
How malicious philosophers can be! I know nothing more poisonous than the joke which Epicurus permitted himself against Plato and the Platonists: he called them Dionysiokolakes. The literal meaning of that, what stands in the foreground, is “flatterers of Dionysus,” hence accessories of tyrants and lickspittles.6 But the phrase says still more than that—“they are all actors, with nothing true about them” (for Dionysokolax was a popular description of an actor). And that last part is the real maliciousness which Epicurus hurled against Plato: the magnificent manners which Plato, along with his pupils, understood, the way they stole the limelight—things Epicurus did not understand!—that irritated him, the old schoolmaster from Samos, who sat hidden in his little garden in Athens and wrote three hundred books, who knows, perhaps out of rage and ambition against Plato?—It took a hundred years until Greece came to realize who this garden god Epicurus was.—Did they realize?
8
In every philosophy there is a point where the “conviction” of the philosopher steps onto the stage, or, to make the point in the language of an old mystery play:
The ass arrived
Beautiful and most valiant.7
9
Do you want to live “according to nature”? O you noble Stoics, what a verbal swindle! Imagine a being like nature—extravagant without limit, indifferent without limit, without purposes and consideration, without pity and justice, simultaneously fruitful, desolate, and unknown—imagine this indifference itself as a power—how could you live in accordance with this indifference?8 Living—isn’t that precisely a will to be something different from what this nature is? Isn’t living appraising, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And if your imperative “live according to nature” basically means what amounts to “live according to life”— why can you not just do that? Why make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be? The truth of the matter is quite different: while you pretend to be in raptures as you read the canon of your law out of nature, you want something which is the reverse of this, you weird actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to prescribe to and incorporate into nature, this very nature, your morality, your ideal. You demand that nature be “in accordance with the stoa,” and you’d like to make all existence merely living in accordance with your own image of it—as a huge and eternal glorification and universalizing of stoicism! With all your love of truth, you have forced yourselves for such a long time and with such persistence and hypnotic rigidity to look at nature falsely, that is, stoically, until you’re no long capable of seeing nature as anything else—and some abysmal arrogance finally inspires you with the lunatic hope that, because you know how to tyrannize over yourselves—Stoicism is self-tyranny—nature also allows herself to be tyrannized. Is the Stoic then not a part of nature? . . . . But this is an ancient eternal story: what happened then with the Stoics is still happening today, as soon as a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates a world in its own image. It cannot do anything different. Philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the spiritual will to power, to a “creation of the world,” to the causa prima [first cause].
10
The enthusiasm and the delicacy—I might even say the cunning—with which people everywhere in Europe today go at the problem “of the true and the apparent world” make one think and listen—and whoever hears only a “will to truth” in the background and nothing else certainly doesn’t enjoy the keenest hearing. In single rare cases such a will to truth, some extravagant and adventurous spirit, a metaphysical ambition to hold an isolated post, may really be involved, something which in the end still prefers a handful of “certainty” to an entire wagon full of beautiful possibilities. There may even be Puritan fanatics of conscience who still prefer to lie down and die on a certain nothing than on an uncertain something. But this is nihilism and the indication of a puzzled, deathly tired soul, no matter how brave the gestures of such virtue may look. But among stronger thinkers, more full of life, still thirsty for life, it appears to be something different. When they take issue with appearances and already in their arrogance mention the word “perspective,” when they determine that the credibility of their own bodies is about as low as they rank the credibility of appearances which asserts that “the earth stands still,” and, as result, in an apparently good mood, let go of their surest possession (for nowadays what do we think is more secure than our bodies?), who knows whether they don’t, at bottom, want to win back something which people previously possessed with even more certainty, something or other of the old ownership of an earlier faith, perhaps “the immortal soul,” perhaps “the old god,” in short, ideas according to which life could be lived better, that is, more powerfully and more cheerfully than according to “modern ideas”? It’s a mistrust of these modern ideas; it’s a lack of faith in everything which has been built up yesterday and today; it’s perhaps a slight mixture of excess and scorn, which can no longer tolerate the bric-á-brac of ideas coming from different places, of the sort so-called positivism brings to market these days, a disgust of the discriminating taste with the fairground colourful patchiness of all these pseudo-philosophers of reality, in whom there is nothing new or genuine, other than these motley colours. In my view, we should, in these matters, side with today’s sceptical anti-realists and microscopists of knowledge: their instinct, which forces them away from modern reality, is irrefutable—what do we care about their retrogressive secret paths! The fundamental issue with them is not that they want to go “back,” but that they want to go away. With some more power, flight, courage, and artistry they’d want to move up—and not backwards.
11
It strikes me that nowadays people everywhere are trying to direct their gaze away from the real influence which Kant exercised on German philosophy, that is, cleverly to slip away from the value which he ascribed to himself. Above everything else, Kant was first and foremost proud of his table of categories. With this table in hand, he said, “That is the most difficult thing that ever could be undertaken on behalf of metaphysics.”— But people should understand this “could be”! He was proud of the fact that he had discovered a new faculty in human beings, the ability to make synthetic judgments a priori. Suppose that he deceived himself here. But the development and quick