Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Oxford World's Classics) by Friedrich Nietzsche

Author:Friedrich Nietzsche [Nietzsche, Friedrich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1998-11-05T05:00:00+00:00

SECTION SIX

WE SCHOLARS

204

RUNNING the risk that moralizing, even my own, will prove to be what it always has been (an unabashed montrer ses plaies,* according to Balzac), I would like to try to argue against an unseemly and harmful hierarchical shift between science* and philosophy that is now threatening to develop quite unnoticed and, it seems, in good conscience. In my opinion, a person’s right to speak about so elevated a question as hierarchy grows out of his experience (and experience, I think, always means bad experience?), so that he is not speaking about colour as the blind might do, or against science as women and artists might (‘Oh, this nasty old science!’ sighs their instinct and their shame, ‘it’s always finding out about everything!’). The scientist’s Declaration of Independence, his emancipation from philosophy, is one of the more subtle influences of the democratic disposition (and indisposition): the scholar’s overweening self-glorification is in full bloom everywhere these days, in its finest springtime—which is not yet to suggest that in this case self-praise smells sweet.* ‘Down with all masters!’—that’s what the rabble instinct is urging here too; and science, after its great success in warding off theology, whose ‘handmaid’ it was for too long, is now arrogantly and ignorantly intent on making laws for philosophy and taking its own turn at playing the ‘master’—what am I saying? the philosopher. My memory (a scientific man’s memory, if you permit me to say so!) is bursting with naive remarks about philosophy and philosophers that I have heard made by arrogant young natural scientists and old doctors (not to mention the most cultured and conceited* of scholars, the philologists and pedagogues, who are both by profession). Now it was an idler or specialist who instinctively resisted any kind of synthethic ability or project; now a diligent worker who had caught a whiff of otium* and elegant voluptuousness in the philosopher’s inner economy and felt compromised and diminished by it. Now it was the colour-blindness of a utilitarian who sees nothing in philosophy but a series of refuted systems and a wasteful display that isn’t ‘good for’ anything. Now it was the fear of veiled mysticism and of newly defined limits to knowledge that leapt to the fore; and now a disdain for particular philosophers, unwittingly generalized into disdain for philosophy in general. But most frequently I found that underlying the young scholars’ arrogant condescension towards philosophy was the bad influence of a philosopher himself, one whom they generally no longer followed, it is true, but whose spell-binding dismissive assessments of other philosophers they had not shaken off—the result then being complete annoyance with all philosophy. (It seems to me that Schopenhauer, for example, has had this kind of effect on Germany most recently—with his unintelligent wrath towards Hegel he has succeeded in wrenching a whole generation of young Germans out of their relation to German culture, a culture which, weighing everything carefully, represented a supreme divinatory refinement of the historical sense: but in just this area Schopenhauer himself was almost brilliantly wanting, unreceptive, un-German.

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