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
And what delicate instruments of observation we have in our senses!
This human nose, for instance, of which no philosopher has yet spoken
with reverence and gratitude, is, for the present, the most finely
adjusted instrument at our disposal: it is able to register even such
slight changes of movement as the spectroscope would be unable to
record. Our scientific triumphs at the present day extend precisely
so far as we have accepted the evidence of our senses,—as we have
sharpened and armed them, and learned to follow them up to the
end. What remains is abortive and not yet science—that is to say,
metaphysics, theology, psychology, epistemology, or formal science, or
a doctrine of symbols, like logic and its applied form mathematics.
In all these things reality does not come into consideration at all,
even as a problem; just as little as does the question concerning the
general value of such a convention of symbols as logic.
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The other idiosyncrasy of philosophers is no less dangerous; it
consists in confusing the last and the first things. They place that
which makes its appearance last—unfortunately! for it ought not
to appear at all!—the “highest concept,” that is to say, the most
general, the emptiest, the last cloudy streak of evaporating reality,
at the beginning as the beginning. This again is only their manner of
expressing their veneration: the highest thing must not have grown out
of the lowest, it must not have grown at all.... Moral: everything
of the first rank must be _causa sui._ To have been derived from
something else, is as good as an objection, it sets the value of a
thing in question. All superior values are of the first rank, all the
highest concepts—that of Being, of the Absolute, of Goodness, of
Truth, and of Perfection; all these things cannot have been evolved,
they must therefore be _causa sui._ All these things cannot however be
unlike one another, they cannot be opposed to one another. Thus they
attain to their stupendous concept “God.” The last, most attenuated and
emptiest thing is postulated as the first thing, as the absolute cause,
as _ens realissimum._ Fancy humanity having to take the brain diseases
of morbid cobweb-spinners seriously!—And it has paid dearly for having
done so.
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