The Twilight of the Idols; or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer. The Antichrist: Complete Works, Volume Sixteen — Nietzsche — John Shaqi
The Twilight of the Idols; or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer. The Antichrist: Complete Works, Volume Sixteen
Nietzsche · en
You ask me what all idiosyncrasy is in philosophers? ... For instance
their lack of the historical sense, their hatred even of the idea of
Becoming, their Egyptianism. They imagine that they do honour to a
thing by divorcing it from history _sub specie æterni,—_when they
make a mummy of it. All the ideas that philosophers have treated for
thousands of years, have been mummied concepts; nothing real has ever
come out of their hands alive. These idolaters of concepts merely
kill and stuff things when they worship,—they threaten the life of
everything they adore. Death, change, age, as well as procreation and
growth, are in their opinion objections,—even refutations. That which
is cannot evolve; that which evolves _is_ not. Now all of them believe,
and even with desperation, in Being. But, as they cannot lay hold of
it, they try to discover reasons why this privilege is withheld from
them. “Some merely apparent quality, some deception must be the cause
of our not being able to ascertain the nature of Being: where is the
deceiver?” “We have him,” they cry rejoicing, “it is sensuality!” These
senses, _which in other things are so immoral,_ cheat us concerning the
true world. Moral: we must get rid of the deception of the senses, of
Becoming, of history, of falsehood.—History is nothing more than the
belief in the senses, the belief in falsehood. Moral: we must say “no”
to everything in which the senses believe: to all the rest of mankind:
all that belongs to the “people.” Let us be philosophers, mummies,
monotono-theists, grave-diggers!—And above all, away with the _body,_
this wretched _idée fixe_ of the senses, infected with all the faults
of logic that exist, refuted, even impossible, although it be impudent
enough to pose as if it were real!
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With a feeling of great reverence I except the name of _Heraclitus._
If the rest of the philosophic gang rejected the evidences of the
senses, because the latter revealed a state of multifariousness and
change, he rejected the same evidence because it revealed things as if
they possessed permanence and unity. Even Heraclitus did an injustice
to the senses. The latter lie neither as the Eleatics believed them
to lie, nor as he believed them to lie,—they do not lie at all. The
interpretations we give to their evidence is what first introduces
falsehood into it; for instance the lie of unity, the lie of matter,
of substance and of permanence. Reason is the cause of our falsifying
the evidence of the senses. In so far as the senses show us a state
of Becoming, of transiency, and of change, they do not lie. But in
declaring that Being was an empty illusion, Heraclitus will remain
eternally right. The “apparent” world is the only world: the “true
world” is no more than a false adjunct thereto.
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