Beyond Good and Evil eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 233 pages of information about Beyond Good and Evil.

Beyond Good and Evil eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 233 pages of information about Beyond Good and Evil.
at another time it was the industrious worker who had got a scent of OTIUM and refined luxuriousness in the internal economy of the philosopher, and felt himself aggrieved and belittled thereby.  On another occasion it was the colour-blindness of the utilitarian, who sees nothing in philosophy but a series of refuted systems, and an extravagant expenditure which “does nobody any good”.  At another time the fear of disguised mysticism and of the boundary-adjustment of knowledge became conspicuous, at another time the disregard of individual philosophers, which had involuntarily extended to disregard of philosophy generally.  In fine, I found most frequently, behind the proud disdain of philosophy in young scholars, the evil after-effect of some particular philosopher, to whom on the whole obedience had been foresworn, without, however, the spell of his scornful estimates of other philosophers having been got rid of—­the result being a general ill-will to all philosophy. (Such seems to me, for instance, the after-effect of Schopenhauer on the most modern Germany:  by his unintelligent rage against Hegel, he has succeeded in severing the whole of the last generation of Germans from its connection with German culture, which culture, all things considered, has been an elevation and a divining refinement of the historical sense, but precisely at this point Schopenhauer himself was poor, irreceptive, and un-German to the extent of ingeniousness.) On the whole, speaking generally, it may just have been the humanness, all-too-humanness of the modern philosophers themselves, in short, their contemptibleness, which has injured most radically the reverence for philosophy and opened the doors to the instinct of the populace.  Let it but be acknowledged to what an extent our modern world diverges from the whole style of the world of Heraclitus, Plato, Empedocles, and whatever else all the royal and magnificent anchorites of the spirit were called, and with what justice an honest man of science may feel himself of a better family and origin, in view of such representatives of philosophy, who, owing to the fashion of the present day, are just as much aloft as they are down below—­in Germany, for instance, the two lions of Berlin, the anarchist Eugen Duhring and the amalgamist Eduard von Hartmann.  It is especially the sight of those hotch-potch philosophers, who call themselves “realists,” or “positivists,” which is calculated to implant a dangerous distrust in the soul of a young and ambitious scholar those philosophers, at the best, are themselves but scholars and specialists, that is very evident!  All of them are persons who have been vanquished and brought back again under the dominion of science, who at one time or another claimed more from themselves, without having a right to the “more” and its responsibility—­and who now, creditably, rancorously, and vindictively, represent in word and deed, disbelief in the
Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Beyond Good and Evil from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.