Beyond Good and Evil (R. J. Hollingdale & Michael Tanner) by Friedrich Nietzsche

Author:Friedrich Nietzsche [Nietzsche, Friedrich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy
ISBN: 014044923X
Amazon: B002RI9R3O
Publisher: ePenguin
Published: 1886-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Part Six: We Scholars

204

At the risk that moralizing will here too prove to be what it has always been – namely an undismayed montrer ses plaies, as Balzac says – I should like to venture to combat a harmful and improper displacement of the order of rank between science and philosophy which is today, quite unnoticed and as if with a perfect good conscience, threatening to become established. In my view it is only from one's experience – experience always means bad experience, does it not? – that one can acquire the right to speak on such a higher question of rank: otherwise one will talk like a blind man about colours or like women and artists against science (‘oh this wicked science’, their modesty and instinct sighs, ‘it always exposes the facts!’–). The Declaration of Independence of the man of science, his emancipation from philosophy, is one of the more subtle after-effects of the democratic form and formlessness of life: the self-glorification and presumption of the scholar now stands everywhere in full bloom and in its finest springtime – which does not mean to say that in this case self-praise smells sweetly. ‘Away with all masters!’ – that is what the plebeian instinct desires here too; and now that science has most successfully resisted theology, whose ‘hand-maid’ it was for too long, it is now, with great high spirits and a plentiful lack of understanding, taking it upon itself to lay down laws for philosophy and for once to play the ‘master’ – what am I saying? to play the philosopher itself. My memory – the memory of a man of science, if I may say so! – is full of arrogant naïveties I have heard about philosophy and philosophers from young scientists and old physicians (not to speak of the most cultured and conceited of all scholars, the philologists and schoolmen, who are both by profession –). Now it was the specialist and jobbing workman who instinctively opposed synthetic undertakings and capacities in general; now the industrious labourer who had got a scent of the otium and noble luxury in the philosopher's physical economy and felt wronged and diminished by it. Now it was that colour blindness of the utility man who sees in philosophy nothing but a series of refuted systems and a wasteful expenditure which ‘benefits’ nobody. Now a fear of disguised mysticism and a rectification of the frontiers of knowledge leaped out; now a disrespect for an individual philosopher which had involuntarily generalized itself into a disrespect for philosophy. Finally, what I found most frequently among young scholars was that behind the arrogant disdain for philosophy there lay the evil after-effect of a philosopher himself, from whom they had, to be sure, withdrawn their allegiance, without, however, having got free from the spell of his disparaging evaluation of other philosophers – the result being a feeling of ill humour towards philosophy in general. (This is the sort of after-effect which, it seems to me, Schopenhauer,

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