Nietzsche on Philosophers’ Idiosyncrasies: Deconstructing Reality
Nietzsche on Philosophers’ Idiosyncrasies
1. The Rejection of Becoming
“You ask what things are idiosyncrasies of philosophers? … For example, its lack of historical sense, their hatred of the very notion of becoming, its Egyptianism. They believe an honor is given to a thing when they dehistoricize it, sub specie aeterni, when they make it a mummy. All that philosophers have been handling for thousands of years have been conceptual mummies; nothing real left their hands alive. They kill, they stuff with straw, these gentlemen idolators of concepts, when they worship, they become mortally dangerous for everything when they worship.
Death, change, aging, as well as procreation and growth are for them objections, even refutations. What is does not become; what becomes is not…
But they all believe, even to despair, in what it is. But since they cannot take it, they look for reasons why they were retained. “There must be an illusion, a deception that does not perceive what it is: where lies the deceiver? – “We have it,” they cry happily, “it is the sensitivity! These senses, which in other respects are so immoral, deceive us about the real world. Moral: get rid of the deception of the senses, of becoming, from history [Historie], falsehood, the story is nothing more than faith in the senses, faith in lies. Moral: say no to anything that gives faith to the senses, all the rest of humanity: they are all “people.”
Be a philosopher, be a mummy, represent dull theism with a gravedigger’s mimicry! – And, above all, get rid of the body, that unfortunate idée fixe of the senses!, subject to all the logic errors that exist, refuted, even impossible, although it is impudent enough to behave like it is real! ….”
2. Heraclitus and the Senses
“I put aside, with great reverence, the name of Heraclitus. While the rest of the people of the philosophers rejected the testimony of the senses because they showed multiplicity and change, he rejected their testimony because they showed things as if they had life and unity.
Heraclitus was also unfair to the senses. These do not lie in the way the Eleatics believed or the way he thought, they do not lie in any way.
What we make of their testimony, that is what introduces the lie, for example, the lie of unity, the lie of thing-ness, of substance, of duration … “Reason” is what causes us to pervert the evidence of the senses. Showing becoming, passing away, change, the senses do not lie …
But Heraclitus will ever be right to say that being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only one: the “real world” is nothing but a lie added …”
3. The Power of Observation
“- And what subtle observation instruments we have in our senses! This nose, for example, of which no philosopher has yet spoken with reverence and gratitude, is so far even the most delicate of instruments at our disposal. It is able to record even slight differences in movement that even the spectroscope cannot record.
Today we possess science precisely to the extent that we have decided to accept the testimony of the senses, in which we have learned to follow, sharpen, arm them, and think them through.
The rest is an abortion and still-no-science: I mean, metaphysics, theology, psychology, and the theory of knowledge. Or formal science, the theory of signs: like logic, and that logic applied to mathematics. In reality, they failed to emerge, even as a problem, as well as the question of what value is generally the convention of signs is the logic .-“
4. Confusing the Last and First
“The other idiosyncrasy of philosophers is no less dangerous: it consists in confusing the last and first. They place at the beginning, as a start, what comes at the end – unfortunately!, It should not even come! -the “highest concepts”, that is, the most general concepts, the most empty, the last smoke of evaporating reality.
That is, once again, only the expression of their mode of worship: to the higher it is not lawful to come from the lower, no one is permitted to come from nothing … Moral: whatever is of the first rank must be causa sui (cause of itself). The proceeds of something different is considered as an objection, as something that calls into question the value. All supreme values are of the first rank, none of the highest concepts, existing, unconditioned, the good, the true, perfect, none of them may have become, therefore has to be causa sui. But none of these things may be unequal to each other, can not be in contradiction with itself … With this, philosophers have their wonderful concept “God” …
The latest, most tenuous, empty as it is, is placed first as a cause in itself, as ens realissimum (being very real) …
That mankind has had to take seriously the complaints about sick brain cobweb weavers! – And have paid dearly! …”