Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays: Collected Works, Volume TwoNietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays: Collected Works, Volume Two
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
Philosophy, Ancient
themselves; then however all that you know and see as motion is indeed
only a deception and not true motion, for the only kind of motion which
could belong to those absolutely original substances, would be merely
an autogenous motion limited to themselves without any effect. But
you _assume_ motion in order to explain those effects of change, of
the disarrangement in space, of alteration, in short the causalities
and relations of the things among themselves. But these very effects
would not be explained and would remain as problematic as ever; for
this reason one cannot conceive why it should be necessary to assume a
motion since it does not perform that which you demand from it. Motion
does not belong to the nature of things and is eternally foreign to
them.
Those opponents of the Eleatean unmoved Unity were induced to make
light of such an argument by prejudices of a perceptual character. It
seems so irrefutable that each veritable "Existent" is a space-filling
body, a lump of matter, large or small but in any case spacially
dimensioned; so that two or more such lumps cannot be in one space.
Under this hypothesis Anaxagoras, as later on Democritus, assumed that
they must knock against each other; if in their motions they came by
chance upon one another, that they would dispute the same space with
each other, and that this struggle was the very cause of all Change.
In other words: those wholly isolated, thoroughly heterogeneous and
eternally unalterable substances were after all not conceived as
being absolutely heterogeneous but all had in addition to a specific,
wholly peculiar quality, also one absolutely homogeneous substratum: a
piece of space-filling matter. In their participation in matter they
all stood equal and therefore could act upon one another, _i.e.,_
knock one another. Moreover all Change did not in the least depend on
the heterogeneity of those substances but on their homogeneity, as
matter. At the bottom of the assumption of Anaxagoras is a logical
oversight; for that which is _the_ "Existent-In-Itself" must be wholly
unconditional and coherent, is therefore not allowed to assume as its
cause anything,--whereas all those Anaxagorean substances have still
a conditioning Something: matter, and already assume its existence;
the substance "Red" for example was to Anaxagoras not just merely red
in itself but also in a reserved or suppressed way a piece of matter
without any qualities. Only with this matter the "Red-In-Itself" acted
upon other substances, not with the "Red," but with that which is
not red, not coloured, nor in any way qualitatively definite. If the
"Red" had been taken strictly as "Red," as the real substance itself,
therefore without that substratum, then Anaxagoras would certainly not
have dared to speak of an effect of the "Red" upon other substances,
perhaps even with the phrase that the "Red-In-Itself" was transmitting
the impact received from the "Fleshy-In-Itself." Then it would be clear
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