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Thread: Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

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    Default Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

    PREFACE

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