 Section 6 of Early Greek Philosophy and Other Essays by Friedrich Nietzsche. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Section 6, The Relation of Schopenhauer's Philosophy to a German Culture Preface to an Unwritten Book, 1872. In dear, vile Germany, culture now lies so decayed in the streets, jealousy of all that is great, rules so shamelessly, and the general tumult of those who raise for fortune resounds so deafeningly that one must have a strong faith, almost in the sense of cradle, quia, absurdum est, in order to hope still for a growing culture, and above all, in opposition to the press with her public opinion, to be able to work by public teaching. With violence must those in whose hearts lies the immortal care for the people free themselves from all the inrushing impressions of that which is just now actual and valid and evoke the appearance of reckoning them in different things. They must appear so because they want to think, and because a loathsome sight and a confused noise, perhaps even mixed with the trumpet flourishes of war, glory, disturb their thinking, and above all because they want to believe in the German character and because with this faith they would lose their strength. Do not find fault with these believers if they look from their distant aloofness and from the heights towards their promised land. They fear those experiences to which the kindly disposed foreigner surrenders himself when he lives among the Germans and must be surprised how little German life corresponds to those great individuals, works, and actions which in his kind disposition he has learned to revere as the true German character. Where the German cannot lift himself into the sublime he makes an impression less than the mediocre, even the celebrated German scholarship in which a number of the most useful domestic and homely virtues such as faithfulness, self-restriction, industry, moderation, cleanliness appear transposed into our pure atmosphere, and as it were transfigured is by no means the result of these virtues looked at closely the mode of urging to unlimited knowledge appears in Germany more, more like a defect, a gap than an abundance of forces. It looks almost like the consequence of a needy, formless, atrophied life and even like a flight from the moral narrow-mindedness and malice to which the German without such diversions is subjected and which also in spite of that scholarship, yea still within scholarship itself often break forth as the true virtuosity of Philistinism the Germans are at home in narrowness of life discerning and judging if anyone will carry them above themselves into the sublime then they make themselves heavy as lead and as such lead weights they hang to their truly great men in order to pull them down out of the ether to the level of their own necessitous indigence perhaps this Philistin homeliness may be only the degeneration of a genuine German virtue a profound submersion into the detail the minute the nearest and into the mysteries of the individual but this virtue grown moldy is now worse than the most open vice especially since one has now become conscious with gladness of the heart of this quality even to literary self-glorification now the educated among the proverbially so cultured Germans and the Philistines among the as everybody knows so uncultured Germans shake hands in public and agree with one another concerning the way in which henceforth one will have to write compose poetry paint make music and even philosophize yay rule so as neither to stand too much aloof from the culture of the one nor to give offense to the homeliness of the other this they call now the German culture of our times well it is only necessary to inquire after the characteristic by which that educated person is to be recognized now that we know that his foster brother the German Philistine makes himself known as such to all the world without bashfulness as it were after innocence is lost the educated person nowadays is educated above all historically by his historic consciousness he saves himself from the sublime in which the Philistine succeeds by his homeliness no longer that enthusiasm which history inspires as Gurdit was allowed to suppose but just the blunting of all enthusiasm is now the goal of these admirers of the Neil at mirari when they try to conceive everything historically to them however we should exclaim he are the fools of all centuries history will make to you only those confessions which you are worthy to receive the world has been at all times full of trivialities and non-entities do your historic hankering just these and only these unveil themselves by your thousands you may pounce upon an epic you will afterwards hunger as before and be allowed to boast of your sort of starved soundness the lamb if some quam yachtant son a totem known for a matati said eu unio consequent tour dialogious day oratory boost chapter 25 history has not fought fit to tell you anything that is essential but scorning and invisible she stood by your side slipping into this one's handsome state proceedings into that one's and ambassadorial report into another's a date or an etymology or a pragmatic cob web do you really believe yourself able to reckon up history like an addition some and do you consider your common intellect and your mathematical education good enough for that how it must vex you to hear that others narrate things out of the best known periods which you will never concede never if now to this education calling itself historic but destitute of enthusiasm and to the hostile philistine activity foaming with rage against all that is great is added that third brutal and excited company of those who race after a fortune and that in summa results in such a confused shrieking and such a limb dislocating turmoil that the thinker with stopped up ears and blindfolded eyes flees into the most solitary wilderness where he may see what those never will see where he must hear sounds which rise to him out of all the depths of nature and come down to him from the stars here he confers with the great problems floating towards him whose voices of course sound just as comfort less awful as unhistorical eternal the feeble person flees back from their cold breath and the calculating one runs right through them without perceiving them they deal worst however with the educated man who at times bestows great pains upon them to him these phantoms transform themselves into conceptual cobwebs and hollow sound figures grasping after them he imagines he has philosophy in order to search for them he climbs about in the so-called history of philosophy and when at last he is collected and piled up quite a cloud of such abstractions and stereotype patterns then it may happen to him that a real thinker crosses his path and puffs them away what a desperate annoyance indeed to meddle with philosophy as an educated person from time to time it is true it appears to him as if the impossible connection of philosophy with that which nowadays gives itself heirs as german culture has become possible some mongrel dallas and ogles between the two spheres and confuses fantasy on this side and on the other meanwhile however one piece of advice is to be given to the germans if they do not wish to let themselves be confused they may put to themselves the question about everything that they now call culture is this the hoped for german culture so serious and creative so redeeming for the german mind so purifying for the german virtues that they're only philosopher in this century arthur schopenhauer should have to espouse its cause here you have the philosopher now search for the culture proper to him and if you are able to divine what kind of culture that would have to be which would correspond to such a philosopher then you have in this divination already passed sentence on all your culture and on yourselves end of section six section seven of early greek philosophy and other essays by frederick nicha this liber vox recording is in the public domain section seven philosophy during the tragic age of the greeks 1873 part one preface probably 1874 if we know the aims of men who are strangers to us it is sufficient for us to approve of or condemn them as souls those who stand nearer to us we judge according to the means by which they further their aims we often disapprove of their aims but love them for the sake of their means and the style of their volition now philosophical systems are absolutely true only to their founders to all later philosophers they are usually one big mistake and to feeble minds a sum of mistakes and truths at any rate if regarded as highest aim they are an error and in so far reprehensible therefore many disapprove of every philosopher because his aim is not theirs they are those whom i called strangers to us whoever on the contrary finds any pleasure at all in great men finds pleasure also in such systems be they ever so erroneous for they all have in them one point which is irrefutable a personal touch and color one can use them in order to form a picture of the philosopher just as from a plant growing in a certain place one can form conclusions as to the soil that mode of life of viewing human affairs at any rate has existed once and is therefore possible the system is the growth in this soil or at least a part of this system i narrate the history of those philosophers simplified i shall bring into relief only that point in every system which is a little bit of personality and belongs to that which is irrefutable and indiscussible which history has to preserve it is a first attempt to regain and recreate those natures by comparison and to let the polyphony of greek nature at least resound once again the task is to bring to light that which we must always love and revere and of which no later knowledge can rob us the great man later preface towards the end of 1879 this attempt to relate the history of the earlier greek philosophers distinguishes itself from similar attempts by its brevity this has been accomplished by mentioning but a small number of the doctrines of every philosopher that is by incompleteness those doctrines however have been selected in which the personal element of the philosopher re echoes most strongly whereas a complete enumeration of all possible propositions handed down to us as is the custom in textbooks merely brings about one thing the absolute silencing of the personal element it is through this that those records become so tedious for in systems which have been refuted it is only this personal element that can still interest us for this alone is eternally irrefutable it is possible to shape the picture of a man out of three anecdotes i endeavor to bring into relief three anecdotes out of every system and abandon the remainder one there are opponents of philosophy and one does well to listen to them especially if they dissuade the distempered heads of germans from metaphysics and on the other hand preach to them purification through the physis as girded did or healing through music as Wagner the physicians of the people condemn philosophy he therefore who wants to justify it must show to what purpose healthy nations use and have used philosophy if he can show that perhaps even the sick people will benefit by learning why philosophy is harmful just to them there are indeed good instances of a health which can exist without any philosophy or with quite a moderate almost a toy use of it thus the romans at their best period lived without philosophy the where is to be found the instance of a nation becoming diseased whom philosophy had restored to health whenever philosophy showed itself helping saving prophylactic it was with healthy people it made sick people still more ill if ever a nation was disintegrated and but loosely connected with the individuals never has philosophy bound these individuals closer to the whole if ever an individual was willing to stand aside and plant around himself the hedge of self-sufficiency philosophy was always ready to isolate him still more and to destroy him through isolation she is dangerous where she is not in her full right and it is only the health of a nation but not that of every nation which gives her this right let us now look around for the highest authority as to what constitutes the health of a nation the greeks as the truly healthy nation have justified philosophy once for all by having philosophized and that indeed more than all other nations they could not even stop at the right time for still in their withered age they comported themselves as heated votaries of philosophy although they understood by it only the pious sophistries and the sacrosanct hair splittings of christian dogmatics they themselves have much lessen their merit for barbarian posterity by not being able to stop at the right time because that posterity in its uninstructed and impetuous youth necessarily became entangled in those artfully woven nets and ropes on the contrary the greek knew how to begin at the right time and this lesson when one ought to begin philosophizing they teach more distinctly than any other nation for it should not be begun when trouble comes as perhaps some presume who derive philosophy from moroseness nobody in good fortune immature manhood out of the midst of the fervent serenity of a brave and victorious man's estate the fact that the greeks philosophized at that time throws light on the nature of philosophy and her task as well as on the nature of the greeks themselves had they at that time been such common sense and precocious experts in gay yards as the learned philistine of our days perhaps imagines or had their life been only a state of luscious soaring chiming breathing and feeling as the unlearned visionary is pleased to assume then the spring of philosophy would not have come to light among them at the best there would have come forth a brook soon trickling away in the sand or evaporating into fogs but never that broad river flowing forth with the proud beat of its waves the river which we know as greek philosophy true it has been eagerly pointed out how much the greeks could find and learn abroad in the orient and how many different things they may easily have brought from there of course an odd spectacle resulted when certain scholars brought together the alleged masters from the orient and the possible disciples from greeks and exhibited their athustra near heraclitus the hindu's near the eliatis the egyptians near empeticles and even anaxagoras among the jews and pathagoras among the chinese in detail little has been determined but we should in no way object to the general idea if people did not burden us with the conclusion that therefore philosophy had only been imported into greece and was not indigenous to the soil yay that she has something foreign had possibly ruined rather than improved the greek nothing is more foolish than to swear by the fact that the greeks had an aboriginal culture no they rather absorbed all the culture flourishing among other nations and they advanced so far just because they understood how to hurl the spear further from the very spot where another nation had let it rest they were admirable in the art of learning productively and so like them we ought to learn from our neighbors with a view to life not to pedantic knowledge using everything learned as a foothold went to leap high and still higher than our neighbor the questions as to the beginning of philosophy are quite negligible for everywhere in the beginning there is the crude the unformed the empty and the ugly and in all things only the higher stages come into consideration he who in the place of greek philosophy prefers to concern himself with that of egypt and persia because the latter are perhaps more original and certainly older proceeds just as ill advisedly as those who cannot be at ease before they have traced back the greek mythology so grand and profound to such physical trivialities as sun lightning weather and fog as its prime origins and who finally imagine they have rediscovered for instance in the restricted worship of the one celestial vault among the other ender germans a purer form of religion than the polytheistic worship of the greek had been the road towards the beginning always leads into barbarism and he who is concerned with the greeks ought always to keep in mind the fact that the unsubdued thirst for knowledge in itself always barbarizes just as much as the hatred of knowledge and that the greeks have subdued their inherently insatiable thirst for knowledge by their regard for life by an ideal need of life since they wish to live immediately that which they learned the greeks also philosophize doesmin of culture and with the aims of culture and therefore save themselves the trouble of inventing once again the elements of philosophy and knowledge out of some autochthonous conceit and with the will they at once set themselves to fill out enhance raise and purify these elements they had taken over in such a way that only now in a higher sense and in a pure sphere they became inventors for they discovered the typical philosophers genius and the inventions of all posterity have added nothing essential every nation is put to shame if one points out such a wonderfully idealized company of philosophers as that of the early greek masters thales anak samander heraclitus parmenides anak sagoras and pedicles democratis and socrates all those men are integral entire and self-contained and hewn out of one stone severe necessity exists between their thinking and their character they are not bound by any convention because at that time no professional class of philosophers and scholars existed they all stand before us in magnificent solitude as the only ones who then devoted their life exclusively to knowledge they all possess the virtuous energy of the ancients whereby they excel all the later philosophers in finding their own form and in perfecting it by metamorphosis in its most minute details in general aspect for they were meant by no helpful and facilitating fashion thus together they form what schopenhauer in opposition to the republic of scholars as called a republic of geniuses one giant calls to another across the arid intervals of ages and undisturbed by a wanton noisy race of dwarfs creeping about beneath them the sublime intercourse of spirits continues of this sublime intercourse of spirits I have resolved to relate those items which are modern hardness of hearing might perhaps hear and understand that means certainly the least of all it seems to me that those old sages from Thales to Socrates have discussed in that intercourse although in its most general aspect everything that constitutes for our contemplation the peculiarly Hellenic in their intercourse as already in their personalities they express distinctly the great features of Greek genius of which the whole of Greek history is a shadowy impression a hazy copy which consequently speaks less clearly if we could rightly interpret the total life of the Greek nation we should ever find reflected only that picture which in our highest geniuses shines with more resplendent colors even the first experience of philosophy on Greek soil the sanction of the seven sages is a distinct and unforgettable line in the picture of the Hellenic other nations have their saints the Greeks have sages rightly it has been said that a nation is characterized not only by our great men but rather by the manner in which she recognizes and honors them in other ages the philosopher is an accidental solitary wanderer in the most hostile environment either slinking through or pushing himself through with clenched fists with the Greek however the philosopher is not accidental when in the sixth and fifth centuries amidst the most frightful dangers and selections of secularization he appears and as it were steps forth from the cave of Trophonius into the very midst of luxuriance the discoverer's happiness the wealth and the sensuousness of the Greek colonies then we divine that he comes as a noble warner for the same purpose for which in those centuries tragedy was born and which the orphic mysteries in their grotesque hieroglyphics give us to understand the opinion of those philosophers on life and existence altogether means so much more than a modern opinion because they had before themselves life in a luxuriant perfection and because with them unlike us the sense of the thinker was not muddled by the disunion engendered by the wish for freedom beauty fullness of life and the love for truth that only asks what is the good of life at all the mission which the philosopher has to discharge within a real culture fashioned in a homogeneous style cannot be clearly conjectured out of our circumstances and experiences for the simple reason that we have no such culture no it is only a culture like the Greek which can answer the question as to that task of the philosopher only such a culture can as I said before justify philosophy at all because such a culture alone knows and can demonstrate why and how the philosopher is not an accidental chance wanderer driven now hither now better there is a stealing necessity which fetters the philosopher to a true culture but what if this culture does not exist then the philosopher is an incalculable and therefore terror inspiring comet whereas in the favorable case he shines as the central star in the solar system of culture it is for this reason that the Greeks justify the philosopher because with them he is no comet to after such contemplations it will be accepted without offense if I speak of the pre platonic philosophers as of a homogeneous company and about this paper to them exclusively something quite new begins with Plato for it might be said with equal justice that in comparison with that republic of geniuses from Thales to Socrates the philosophers since Plato lack something essential whoever wants to express himself unfavorably about those older masters may call them one sided and their epigones with Plato as had many sided yet it would be more just and unbiased to conceive of the latter as philosophic hybrid characters of the former as the pure types Plato himself is the first magnificent hybrid character and as such finds expression as well in his philosophy as in his personality in his ideology are united Socrates Pythagorean and Heraclidian elements and for this reason it is no typically pure phenomenon as man to Plato mingles the features of the royally secluded also by sing Heraclitus of the melancholy compassionate and legislatory Pythagoras and of the psycho expert dialectician Socrates all later philosophers are such hybrid characters wherever something one sided does come into prominence with them as in the case of the cynics it is not tight but caricature much more important however is the fact that they are founders of sex and that the sex founded by them are all institutions in direct opposition to the Hellenic culture and the unity of its style prevailing up to that time in their way they seek a redemption but only for the individuals or at the best for groups of friends and disciples closely connected with them the activity of the older philosophers tends although they were unconscious of it towards a cure and purification on a large scale the mighty course of Greek culture is not to be stopped awful dangers are to be removed out of the way of its current the philosopher protects and defends his native country now since Plato he is in exile and conspires against his fatherland it is a real misfortune that so very little of those older philosophic masters has come down to us and that all complete works of theirs are withheld from us involuntarily on account of that loss we measure them according to wrong standards and allow ourselves to be influenced unfavorably towards them by the mere accidental fact that Plato and Aristotle never lacked appreciators and copyists some people presuppose a special providence for books uh fatum liberal lorem such a providence however would at any rate be a very malicious one if it deemed it wise to withhold from us the works of heraclitus in pedigree's wonderful poem and the writings of democratus whom the ancients put on a part with Plato whom he even excels as far as ingenuity goes and as a substitute put into our hand stoics epicureans and Cicero probably the most sublime part of greek thought and its expression in words is lost to us a fate which will not surprise the man who remembers the misfortunes of scotus aragina or of pascal and who considers that even in this enlightened century the first edition of schopenhauer's the world as will and idea became waste paper if somebody will presuppose a special fatalistic power with respect to such things he may do so and say with girda let no one complain about and grumble at things vile and mean they are the real rulers however much this be gained said in particular they are more powerful than the power of truth mankind very rarely produces a good book in which with daring freedom is intonated the battle song of truth the song of philosophic heroism yet whether it is to live a century longer or to crumble and mold her into dust and ashes depends on the most miserable accidents on the sudden mental eclipse of men's heads on superstitious convulsions and antipathies finally on fingers not too fond of writing or even on eroding bookworms and rainy weather but we will not lament but rather take the advice of the reproving and consolatory words which haman addresses to scholars who lament over lost works would not the artist who succeeded in throwing a lentil through the eye of a needle have sufficient with a bushel of lentils to practice his acquired skill one would like to put this question to all scholars who do not know how to use the works of the ancients any better than that man used his lentils it might be added in our case that not one more word anecdote or date needed to be transmitted to us and has been transmitted indeed that even much less might have been preserved for us and yet we should have been able to establish the general doctrine that the Greeks justify philosophy a time which suffers from the so called general education but has no culture and no unity of style in her life hardly knows what to do with philosophy even if the latter were proclaimed by the very genius of truth in the streets and marketplaces she rather remains at such a time the learned monologue of the solitary rambler the accidental booty of the individual the hidden closet secret or the innocuous chatter between academics senility and childhood nobody dare venture to fulfill in himself the law of philosophy nobody lives philosophically with that simple manly faith which compelled an ancient wherever he was whatever he did to deport himself as a stoic when he had once pledged his faith to the stowa all modern philosophizing is limited politically and regulated by the police to learned semblance thanks to governments churches academies customs fashions and the cowardice of man it never gets beyond the sigh if only or beyond the knowledge once upon a time there was philosophy is without rights therefore modern man if he were at all courageous and conscientious ought to condemn her and perhaps banish her with words similar to those by which play to banish the tragic poets from his state of course there would be left a reply for her as they remain to those poets against play to if one once compelled her to speak out she might say perhaps miserable nation is it my fault if among you i am on the tramp like a fortune teller through the land and must hide and disguise myself as if i were a great sinner and ye my judges just look at my sister art it is with her as with me we have been cast adrift among the barbarians and no longer know how to save ourselves if we are lacking it is true every good right but the judges before whom we find justice judge you also and will tell you then you shall experience then you shall experience what philosophy can and will do you end of section seven section eight of early greek philosophy and other essays by frederick nicha this libra vox recording is in the public domain section eight philosophy during the tragic age of the greeks part two three greek philosophy seems to begin with a preposterous fancy with the proposition that water is the origin and mother womb of all things is it really necessary to stop there and become serious yes and for three reasons firstly because the proposition does enunciate something about the origin of things secondly because it does so without figure and fable thirdly and lastly because in it is contained although only in the chrysalis state the idea everything is one the first mentioned reason leaves thales still in the company of religious and superstitious people the second however takes him out of this company and shows him to us as a natural philosopher but by virtue of the third thales becomes the first greek philosopher if he had said out of water earth is evolved we should only have a scientific hypothesis a false one though nevertheless difficult to refute but he went beyond the scientific in his presentation of this concept of unity through the hypothesis of water thales has not surmounted the low level of the physical discernments of his time but at the best over leaped them the deficient and unorganized observations of an empiric nature which thales had made as to the occurrence and transformations of water or to be more exact of the moist would not in the least have made possible or even suggested such an immense generalization that which drove him to this generalization was a metaphysical dogma which had its origin in a mystic intuition and which together with the ever renewed endeavors to express it better we find in all philosophies the proposition everything is one how despotically such a faith deals with all empiricism is worthy of note with thales especially one can learn how philosophy has behaved at all times when she wanted to get beyond the hedges of experience to her magically attracting gold on light supports she leaps in advance hope and divination wing her feet calculating reason to clumsily pants after her and seeks better supports in its attempt to reach that alluring goal at which its divine companion has already arrived one sees in imagination two wanderers by a wild forest stream which carries with it rolling stones the one light-footed leaps over it using the stones and swinging himself upon them ever further and further though they precipitously sink into the depths behind him the other stands helpless there most of the time he has first to build a pathway which will bear his heavy weary step sometimes that cannot be done and then no god will help him across the stream what therefore carries philosophical thinking so quickly to its goal does it distinguish itself from calculating and measuring thought only by its more rapid flight through large spaces no forest range the logical power wings the foot of philosophical thinking and this power is fancy lifted by the latter philosophical thinking leaps from possibility to possibility and these for the time being are taken as certainties and now and then even whilst on the wing it gets hold of certainties an ingenious presentiment shows them to the flyer demonstrable certainties are defined at a distance to be at this point especially powerful is the strength of fancy in the lightning like seizing and illuminating of similarities afterwards reflection applies its standards and models and seeks to substitute the similarities by equalities that which was seen side by side by causalities but though this should never be possible even in the case of failings the indemonstrable philosophizing as yet its value although all supports are broken when logic and the rigidity of empiricism want to get across to the proposition everything is water yet still there's always after the demolition of the scientific edifice a remainder and in this very remainder lies a moving force and as it were the hope of future fertility of course i do not mean that the thought in any restriction or attenuation or as allegory still retains some kind of truth as if for instance one might imagine the creating artist standing near a waterfall and seeing in the forms which leave towards him and artistically figuring game of the water with human and animal bodies masks plants rocks nymphs griffins and with all existing types in general said that to him the proposition everything is water is confirmed the thought of thales has rather its value even after the perception of its indemonstrableness in the very fact that it was meant unmythically and unallegorically the greeks among whom thales became so suddenly conspicuous were the anti type of all realists by only believing essentially in the reality of men and gods and by contemplating the whole of nature as if it were only a disguise masquerade and metamorphosis of these god men man was to them the truth and essence of things everything else mere phenomenon and deceiving play for that very reason they experienced incredible difficulty in conceiving of ideas as ideas whilst with the moderns the most personal item sublimates itself into abstractions with them the most abstract notions became personified thales however said not man but water is the reality of things he began to believe in nature in so far that he at least believed in water as a mathematician and astronomer he had grown cold towards everything mythical and allegorical and even if he did not succeed in becoming disillusioned as to the pure abstraction everything is one and although he left off at a physical expression he was nevertheless among the Greeks of his time a surprising rarity perhaps the exceedingly conspicuous orpheans possessed in a still higher degree than he the faculty of conceiving abstractions and of thinking unplastically only they did not succeed in expressing these abstractions except in the form of the allegory also phara side ease of Cyrus who is a contemporary of Thales and akin to him in many physical conceptions hovers with the expression of the latter in that middle region where allegory is wedded to mythos so that he dares for example to compare the earth without winged oak which hangs in the air with spread pinions on which Zeus bedecks after the defeat of chronos with the magnificent robe of honor into which with his own hands Zeus embroidered lands water and rivers in contrasts with such gloomy allegorical philosophizing scarcely to be translated into the realm of the comprehensible Thales are the works of a creative master who began to look into nature's depths without fantastic babling if as it is true he used science and the demonstrable but soon out leaped them then this likewise is a typical characteristic of the philosophical genius the Greek word which designates the sage belongs etymologically to sapio I taste sapiens the tasting one Sisyphus the man of the most delicate taste the peculiar art of the philosopher therefore consists according to the opinion of the people in a delicate selective judgment by taste by discernment by significant differentiation he is not prudent if one calls him prudent who in his own affairs finds out the good Aristotle rightly says that which Thales and acts agorist no people will call unusual astounding difficult divine but useless since human possessions were of no concern to those too through thus selecting and precipitating the unusual astounding difficult and divine philosophy marks the boundary lines dividing her from science in the same way as she does it from prudence by the emphasizing of the useless science without thus selecting without such delicate taste pounces upon everything knowable in the blind covetousness to know all at any price philosophical thinking however is always on the track of the things worth knowing on the track of the great and most important discernments now the idea of greatness is changeable as well in that moral as in the aesthetic realm thus philosophy begins with the legislation with respect to greatness she becomes a nomenclator that is great she says and therewith she raises man above the blind untamed covetousness of his thirst for knowledge by the idea of greatness she assuages this thirst and it is chiefly by this that she contemplates the greatest discernment that of the essence and kernel of things as attainable and attain when Thales says everything is water man has startled up out of his worm-like mauling of and crawling about among the individual sciences he devines the last solution of things and masters through this demination the common perplexity of the lower grades of knowledge the philosopher tries to make the total chord of the universe re echo within himself and then to project it into ideas outside himself whilst he is contemplated like the creating artist sympathetic like the religionist looking out for ends and causalities like the scientific man whilst he feels himself swell up to the macrocosm he still retains the circumspection to contemplate himself coldly as the reflex of the world he retains that cool headedness which the dramatic artist possesses when he transforms himself into other bodies speaks out of them and yet knows how to project this transformation outside himself into written verses what the verse is to the poet dialectic thinking is to the philosopher he snatches at it in order to hold fast his enchantment in order to petrify it and just as words in verse to the dramatist are only stammerings in a foreign language to tell in it what he lived what he saw and what he can directly promulgate by gesture music only thus the expression of every deep philosophical intuition by means of dialectics and scientific reflection is it is true on the one hand the only means to communicate what has been seen but on the other hand it is upholtery means and at the bottom a metaphorical absolutely an exact translation into a different sphere in language thus Thales saw the unity of the existent and when he wanted to communicate this idea he talked of water for whilst the general type of the philosopher in the picture of Thales is set off rather hazily the picture of his great successor already speaks much more distinctly to us an axamander of malay the first philosophical author of the ancients writes in the very way that the typical philosopher will always write as long as he is not alienated from ingenuousness and naive tape by odd claims in a grand lapidarian style of writing sentence for sentence a witness about new inspiration and an expression of the so journey and sublime contemplations the thought in its form are milestones on the path towards the highest wisdom with such a lapidarian emphasis and axamander once said whence things originated with her according to necessity they must return and perish for they must pay penalty and be judged for their injustices according to the order of time enigmatic utterance of a true pessimist a regular inscription on the boundary stone of greek philosophy how shall we explain the the only serious moralist of our century is in the peruges volume 2 chapter 12 additional remarks on the doctrine about the suffering in the world appendix of corresponding passages urges on us a similar contemplation the right standard by which to judge every human being is that he really is a being who ought not to exist at all but who is expiating his existence by manifold forms of suffering and death what can one expect from such a being are we not all sinners condemned to death we expiate our birth firstly by our life and secondly by our death he who in the physiognomy of our universal human lot reads this doctrine and already recognizes the fundamental bad quality of every human life in the fact that none can stand a very close and careful contemplation although our time accustomed to the biographical epidemic seems to think otherwise and more loftily about the dignity of man he who like schopenhauer on the heights of the indian breezes has heard the sacred word about the moral value of existence will be kept with difficulty for making an extremely anthropomorphic metaphor and from generalizing that melancholy doctrine at first only limited to human life and applying it by transmission to the general character of all existence it may not be very logical it is however at any rate very human and moreover quite in harmony with the philosophical leaping described above now with an ax Amanda to consider all becoming as a punishable emancipation from eternal being as a wrong that is to be atoned for by destruction everything that has once come into existence also perishes whether we think of human life or of water or of heat and cold everywhere where definite qualities are to be noticed we are allowed to prophesy the extinction of these qualities according to the all embracing proof of experience thus a being that possesses definite qualities and consists of them can never be the origin and principle of things the veritable ends the existent an ax Amanda concluded cannot possess any definite qualities otherwise like all other things it would necessarily have originated and perished in order that becoming may not cease the primordial being must be indefinite the immortality and eternity of the primordial being lies not in an infiniteness and inexhaustibility as usually the expounders of an ax Amanda presuppose but in this that it lacks the definite qualities which lead to destruction for which reason it bears also its name the indefinite the best labeled primordial being is superior to all becoming and for this very reason it guarantees the eternity and unimpeded course of becoming this last unity in that indefinite the mother womb of all things can it is to be designated only negatively by man as something to which no predicate out of the existing word of becoming can be allotted and might be considered appear to the Kantian thing in itself of course he who was able to wrangle persistently with others as to what kind of thing that primordial substance really was whether perhaps an intermediate thing between air and water or perhaps between air and fire has not understood our philosophy at all this is likewise to be said about those who seriously asked themselves whether an ax Amanda had thought of his primordial substance as a mixture of all existing substances rather we must direct our gaze to the place where we can learn that an ax Amanda no longer treated the question of the origin of the world as purely physical we must direct our gaze towards that first stated lapidarian proposition when on the contrary he saw a sum of wrongs to be expiated in the plurality of things that have become then he as the first Greek but they're in grasp caught up the tangle of the most profound ethical problem how can anything perish that has a right to exist whence that rest is becoming and giving birth whence that expression of painful distortion on the face of nature whence the never ending dirge in all realms of existence out of this world of injustice the vodacious apostasy from the primordial unity of things and acts Amanda flees into a metaphysical castle leaning out of which he turns his gaze far and wide in order at last after a pensive silence to address to all beings this question what is your existence worth and if it is worth nothing why are you there by your guilt observe you sojourn in this world you will have to expiate it by death look how your earth fades the seas decrease and dry up the marine shell on the mountain shows you how much already they have dried up fire destroys your world even now finally it will end in smoke and ashes but again and again such a world of transitoryness will ever build itself up who shall redeem you from the curse of becoming not every kind of life may have been welcome to a man who put such questions whose upward soaring thinking continually broke the empiric ropes in order to take it once to the highest superlunary blight willingly we believe tradition that he walked along in especially dignified attire and showed a truly tragic hauteur in his gestures and habits of life he lived as he wrote he spoke as solemnly as he dressed himself he raised his hand and placed his foot as if this existence was a tragedy and he had been born in order to cooperate in that tragedy by playing the role of hero in all that he was the great model of empedoclese his fellow citizens elected him the leader of an emigrating colony perhaps they were pleased at being able to honor him and at the same time to get rid of him his thought also emigrated and founded colonies and Ephesus and Elia they could not get rid of him and if they could not resolve upon staying at the spot where he stood they nevertheless knew that they had been led there by him once they now prepared to proceed without him. Thales shows the need of simplifying the empire of plurality and of reducing it to a mere expansion or disguise of the one single existing quality water. Anaximander goes beyond him with two steps firstly he puts the question to himself how if there exists an eternal unity at all is that plurality possible and he takes the answer out of the contradictory self-devouring and denying character of this plurality the existence of this plurality becomes a moral phenomenon to him it is not justified it expiates itself continually through destruction but then the questions occur to him yet why has not everything that has become perished long ago since indeed quite an eternity of time has already gone by whence the ceaseless current of the river of becoming he can save himself from these questions only by mystic possibilities the eternal becoming can have its origin only in the eternal being the conditions for that apostasy from that eternal being to a becoming in injustice are ever the same the constellation of things cannot help itself being thus fashion that no end is to be seen of that stepping forth of the individual being out of the lap of the indefinite at this Anaximander stayed that is he remained within the deep shadows which like gigantic specters relying on the mountain range of such a rural perception the more one wanted to approach the problem of solving how out of the indefinite the definite out of the eternal the temporal out of the just the unjust could by succession ever originate the darker the night became by towards the midst of this mystic night in which the Anaximander's problem of the becoming was wrapped up Heraclitus of Ephesus approached and eliminated it by divine flash of lightning I contemplate the becoming he exclaimed and nobody has so attentively watched this eternal wave surging and rhythm of things and what do I behold lawfulness infallible certainty ever equal paths of justice condemning a renews behind all transgressions of the loss the whole world the spectacle of a governing justice and the maniacally omnipresent natural forces subject to justice's sway I do not behold the punishment of that which has become but the justification of becoming when has sacrilege when has apostasy manifested itself in invalible forms in law's esteemed sacred we're injustice ways there's caprice disorder irregularity contradiction we're however law and Zeus's daughter dyke rule alone as in this world how could the sphere of guilt of expiation of judgment and as it were the place of execution of all condemned ones be there from this intuition Heraclitus took two coherent negations which are put into the right light only by a comparison with the propositions of his predecessor firstly he denied the duality of two quite diverse worlds into the assumption of which an axiomander had been pushed he no longer distinguished a physical world from a metaphysical a realm of definite qualities from a realm of indefinable indefiniteness now after this first step he could neither be kept back any longer from a still greater audacity of denying he denied being altogether for this one world which was left to him shielded all round by eternal unwritten laws flowing up and down in the brazen beat of rhythm shows nowhere persistence and destructibility a bulwark in the stream louder than an axiomander Heraclitus exclaimed I see nothing but becoming be not deceived it is the fault of your limited outlook and not the fault of the essence of things if you believe that you see firm land anywhere in the ocean of becoming and passing you need names for things just as if they had a rigid permanence but the very river in which you bathe the second time is no longer the same one which you entered before Heraclitus has as his royal property the highest power of intuitive conception whereas towards the other mode of conception which is consummated by ideas and logical combinations that is towards reason he shows himself cool apathetic even hostile and he seems to derive a pleasure when he is able to contradict reason by means of a truth gained intuitively and this he does in such propositions as everything has always its opposite within itself so fearlessly that Aristotle before the tribunal of reason accuses him of the highest crime of having sinned against the law of opposition intuitive representation however embraces two things firstly the present motley changing world pressing on us in all experiences secondly the conditions by means of which alone any experience of this world becomes possible time and space for these are able to be intuitively apprehended purely in themselves and independent of any experience that is they can be perceived although they are without definite contents if now Heraclitus considered time in this fashion dissociated from all experiences he had in it the most instructive monogram of all that which falls within the realm of intuitive conception just as he conceived of time so also for instance did Schopenhauer who repeatedly says of it that in it every instant exists only in so far as it has annihilated the preceding one its father in order to be itself it faced equally quickly that past and future are as unreal as any dream that the president's only the dimensionless and unstable boundary between the two that however like time so spaced and again like the letter so also everything that is simultaneously in space and time has only a relative existence only through and for the sake of something else of the same kind as itself that is existing only under the same limitations this truth is in the highest degree self-evident accessible to everyone and just for that very reason abstractly and rationally it is only attained with great difficulty whoever has this truth before his eyes must however also proceed at once to the next Heraclitian consequence and say that the whole essence of actuality is in fact activity and that for actuality there is no other kind of existence than reality as Schopenhauer has likewise expounded the world is will and idea volume one book one section four only as active does it fill space and time its action upon the immediate object determines the perception in which alone it exists the effect of the action of any material object upon any other is known only in so far as the latter acts upon the immediate object in a different way from that in which it acted before it consists in this alone cause and effect that's constitute the whole nature of matter its true being is its action the totality of everything material is therefore very appropriately called in German vert click kite actuality a word which is far more expressive than really taught reality that upon which actuality acts as always matter actualities whole being and essence therefore consists only in the orderly change which one part of it causes in another and is therefore wholly relative according to our relation which is valid only within the boundary of actuality as in the case of time and space the eternal and exclusive becoming the total instability of all reality and actuality which continually works and becomes and never is as there are crisis teachers is an awful and appalling conception and in its effects most newly related to that sensation by which during an earthquake one loses confidence in the firmly grounded earth it required an astonishing strength to translate this effect into its opposite into the sublime into happy astonishment heraclitus accomplished this through an observation of the proper course of all becoming and passing which you conceived of under the form of polarity as the divergence of a force into two qualitatively different opposite actions driving after reunion a quality is set continually at variance with itself and separates itself into its opposites these opposites continually strive again one towards another the common people of course think to recognize something rigid completed consistent but the fact of the matter is that at any instant bright and dark sour and sweet are side by side and attached to one another like two wrestlers of whom sometimes the one succeeds sometimes the other according to heraclitus honey is at the same time sweet and bitter and the world itself and am for whose contents constantly needs stirring up out of the war the opposites all becoming originates the definite and to a seemingly persistent qualities express only the momentary predominance of the one fighter but with that the war is not at an end the resting continues to all eternity everything happens according to this struggle and this very struggle manifests eternal justice it is a wonderful conception drawn from the purest source of hellenism which considers the struggle as the continuous way of a homogeneous severe justice bound by eternal laws only a greek was able to consider this conception as the fundament of a cosmotasy it is he sees good eras transfigured into the cosmic principle it is the idea of a contest an idea held by individual greeks and by their state and translated out of the gymnasium and palestra out of the artistic agamistics out of the struggle of the political parties and of the towns into the most general principle so that the machinery of the universe is regulated by it just as every greek fought as though he alone were in the right and as though an absolutely sure standard of judicial opinion could at any instant decide whether victory is inclining thus the qualities wrestle one with another according to invaluable laws and standards which are inherent in the struggle the things themselves in the permanency of which the limited intellect of man and animal believes do not exist at all they are as the fears splashing in fiery sparkling of drawn swords as the stars of victory rising with a radiant resplendence in the battle of the opposite qualities that struggle which is peculiar to all becoming that eternal interchange of victory is again described by schopenhauer the world as will and idea volume one book two section 27 the permanent matter most constantly changes form for under the guidance of causality mechanical physical chemical and organic phenomena eagerly striving to appear rest the matter from each other for each desires to reveal its own idea this drive may be followed up through the whole of nature indeed nature exists only through it the following pages give the most noteworthy illustrations of this struggle only that the prevailing tone of this description ever remains other than that of heraclitus in so far as to schopenhauer the struggle is a proof of the will to life falling out with itself it is to him a feasting on itself on the part of this dismal dull impulse as a phenomenon on the whole horrible and not at all making for happiness the arena and the object of this struggle is matter which some natural forces alternately endeavor to disintegrate and build up again at the expense of other natural forces as also space and time the union of which through causality is this very matter end of section eight section nine of early greek philosophy and other essays by frederick nichea this leverbox recording is in the public domain section nine philosophy during the tragic age of the greeks part three six whilst the imagination of heraclitus measured the restlessly moving universe the actuality virk lick kite with the eye of the happy spectator who sees innumerable pairs wrestling enjoy his combat entrusted to the superintendents of severe umpires a still higher presentiment seized him he no longer could contemplate the wrestling pairs and the umpires separated one from another the very umpires seem to fight and the fighters seem to be their own judges yay since at the bottom he conceived only of the one justice eternally swaying he dared to exclaim the contest of the many is itself pure justice and after all the one is the many for what are all those qualities according to their nature are they immortal gods are they separate beings working for themselves from the beginning and without end and if the world which we see knows only becoming and passing but no permanence should perhaps those qualities constitute a differently fashioned metaphysical world true not a world of unity as an axamander sought behind the fluttering veil of plurality but a world of eternal and essential pluralities is it possible that however violently he had denied such duality heraclitus has after all by a roundabout way accidentally got into the dual cosmic order in order with an olympus of numerous immortal gods and demons these many realities and with a human world which sees only the dust cloud of the olympic struggle and the flashing of divine spears that is only a becoming an axamander had fled just from these definite qualities into the lap of the metaphysical indefinite because the former became and passed he had denied them a true and essential existence however should it not seem now as if the becoming is only the looming into view of a struggle of eternal qualities when we speak of the becoming should not the original cause of this be sought in the peculiar evilness of human cognition whereas in the nature of things there is perhaps no becoming but only a co-existing of many true increate indestructible realities these are heraclitian loopholes and labyrinths he exclaims once again the one is the many the many perceptible qualities are neither eternal entities nor then tasmata of our senses an exagerus conceives them later on as the former parmenides as the latter they are neither rigid sovereign being nor fleeting appearance hovering in human minds the third possibility which alone was left to heraclitus nobody will be able to divine with dialectic sagacity and as it were by calculation for what he invented here is a rarity even in the realm of mystic incredibilities and unexpected cosmic metaphors the world is the game of Zeus or expressed more physically the game of fire with itself the one is only in this sense at the same time the many in order to elucidate in the first place the introduction of fire as a world shaping force i recall how an axamander had further developed the theory of water as the origin of things placing confidence in the essential part of feyley's theory and strengthening and adding to the latter's observations an axamander however was not to be convinced that before the water and as it were after the water there was no further stage of quality no to him out of the warm and the cold the moist seemed to form itself and the warm and the cold therefore were supposed to be the preliminary stages the still more original qualities with their issuing forth from the primordial existence of the indefinite becoming begins heraclitus who as physicists subordinated himself to the importance of an axamander explains to himself this an axmandrian warm as the respiration the warm breath the dry vapors in short as the fiery element about this fire he now enunciates the same as feyley's and an axamander had enunciated about the water that in innumerable metamorphoses he was passing along the path of becoming especially in the three chief aggregate stages as something warm moist and firm for water in descending is transformed into earth in ascending into fire or as heraclitus appears to have expressed himself more exactly from the sea ascend only the pure vapors which serve as food to the divine fire of the stars from the earth only the dark foggy ones from which the moist arrives its nourishment the pure vapors are the transitional stage in the passing of sea into fire the impure the transitional stage in the passing of earth into water thus the two paths of metamorphosis of the fire run continuously side by side upwards and downwards to and fro from fire to water from water to earth from earth back again to water from water to fire whereas heraclitus is a follower of an axamander in the most important of these conceptions for example that the fire is kept up by the evaporations or herein that out of the water is dissolved partly earth partly fire he is on the other hand quite independent and in opposition to an axamander in excluding the cold from the physical process whilst an axamander had put it side by side with the warm as having the same rights so as to let the moist originate out of both to do so was of course a necessity to heraclitus for if everything is to be fire then however many possibilities of its transformation might be assumed nothing can exist that would be the absolute antithesis to fire he has therefore probably interpreted only as a degree of the warm that which is called the cold and he could justify this interpretation without difficulty much more important than this deviation from the doctrine of an axamander is a further agreement he like the latter believes in an end of the world periodically repeating itself and in an ever renewed emerging of another world out of the all destroying world fire the period during which the world hastens towards that world fire and the dissolution into pure fire is characterized by him most strikingly as a demand and a need the state of being completely swallowed up by the fire as satiety and now to us remains the question as to how he understood and named the newly awakening impulse for world creation the pouring out of itself into the forms of plurality the greek proverb seems to come to our assistance with the thought that satiety gives birth to crime the hubris and one may indeed ask one cell for a minute whether perhaps heraclitus has derived that return to plurality out of the hubris let us just take this thought seriously in his light the face of heraclitus changes before our eyes the proud gleam of his eyes dies out a wrinkled expression of painful resignation of impotence becomes distinct it seems that we know why later antiquity called him the weeping philosopher is not the whole world process now an act of punishment of the hubris the plurality the result of a crime the transformation of the pure into the impure the consequence of injustice is not the guilt now shifted into the essence of the things and indeed the world of becoming and of individuals accordingly exonerated from guilt yet at the same time are they not condemned forever and ever to bear the consequences of guilt seven that dangerous word hubris is indeed the touchstone for every heraclitian here he may show whether he has understood or mistaken his master is there in this world guilt injustice contradiction suffering yes exclaims heraclitus but only for the limited human being who sees divergently and not convergently not for the contuative god to him everything opposing converges into one harmony invisible it is true to the common human eye yet comprehensible to him who like heraclitus resembles the contemplative god before his fiery eye no drop of injustice is left in the world poured out around him and even that cardinal obstacle how pure fire can take up its quarters informs so impure he masters by means of a sublime simile a becoming and passing a building and destroying without any moral bias in perpetual innocence is in this world only the play of the artist and of the child and similarly just as the child in the artist play the eternally living fire plays builds up and destroys in innocence and this game the eon plays with himself transforming himself into water and earth like a child he piles heaps of sand by the sea piles up and demolishes from time to time he recommences the game a moment of satiety then again desire seizes him as desire compels the artist to create not wantonness but the ever newly awakening impulse to play caused into life other worlds the child throws away his toys but soon he starts again in an innocent frame of mind as soon however as the child builds he connects joins informs lawfully and according to an innate sense of order thus only is the world contemplated by the aesthetic man who has learned from the artist and the genesis of the latter's work how the struggle of plurality can yet bear within itself law and justice how the artist stands contemplative above and working within the work of art how necessity and play antagonism and harmony must pair themselves for their procreation of the work of art who now will still demand from such a philosophy a system of ethics with the necessary imperatives thou shalt or even reproach heraclitus with such a deficiency man down to his last fiber is necessity and absolutely unfree if by freedom one understands the foolish claim to be able to change it will ones essential like a garment a claim which up to the present every serious philosophy has rejected with due scorn that so few human beings live with consciousness in the low ghosts and in accordance with the all overlooking artist's eye originates from their souls being wet and from the fact that men's eyes and ears their intellect in general is a bad witness when moist ooze fills their souls why that is so is not questioned anymore than why fire becomes water and earth heraclitus is not compelled to prove as livenets was that this world was even the best of all it was sufficient for him that the world is the beautiful innocent play of the eon man on the whole is to him even an irrational being with which the fact that in all his essence the law of all ruling reason is fulfilled does not clash he does not occupy a specially favored position in nature whose highest phenomenon is not simple minded man but fire for instance as stars in so far as man has through necessity received a share of fire he is a little more rational as far as he consists of earth and water it stands badly with his reason is not compelled to take cognizance of the logo simply because he is a human being why is there water why earth this to heraclitus is a much more serious problem than to ask why men are so stupid and bad in the highest and the most perverted men the same inherent lawfulness and justice manifests themselves if however one would ask heraclitus the question why is fire not always fire why is it now water now earth then he would only just answer it is a game don't take it too pathetically and still less morally heraclitus describes only the existing world and has the same contemplative pleasure in it which the artist experiences when looking at his growing work only those who have caused to be discontented with his natural history of man find him gloomy melancholy tearful somber attra hilarious pessimistic and altogether hateful he however would take these discontented people together with their antipathies and sympathies their hatred in their love as negligible and perhaps answer them with some such comment as dogs bark at anything they do not know or to the ass chaff is preferable to gold with such discontented persons also originate the numerous complaints as to the obscurity of the heraclitian style probably no man has ever written clearer and more illuminatingly of course very abruptly and therefore naturally obscure to the racing readers but why a philosopher should intentionally write obscurity a thing habitually said about heraclitus is absolutely inexplicable unless he has some cause to hide his thoughts or is sufficiently erode to conceal his thoughtlessness underneath words one is as Schopenhauer says indeed compelled by lucid expression to prevent misunderstandings even in affairs of practical everyday life how then should one be allowed to express oneself indistinctly indeed puzzlingly in the most difficult most upstairs scarcely attainable object of thinking the tasks of philosophy with respect to brevity however Jean Paul gives a good precept on the whole it is right that everything great of deep meaning to a rare mind should be uttered with brevity and therefore obscurity so that the paltry mind would rather proclaim it to be nonsense then translated into the realm of his empty headedness for common minds have an ugly ability to perceive in the deepest and richest saying nothing but their own everyday opinion moreover and in spite of it heraclitus has not escaped the paltry minds already the stoics have re-expounded him into the shallow and dragged down his aesthetic fundamental perception as to the play of the world to the miserable level of the common regard for the practical ends of the world and more explicitly for the advantages of man so that out of his physics has arisen in those heads accrued optimism with the continual invitation to dig Tom and Harry plow dete amici eight heraclitus was proud and if it comes to pride with a philosopher then it is a great pride his work never refers him to a public the applause of the masses and the hailing course of contemporaries to wander lonely along his path belongs to the nature of the philosopher his talents are the most rare in a certain sense the most unnatural and at the same time exclusive and hostile even toward kindred talents the wall of his self-sufficiency must be of diamond if it is not to be demolished and broken for everything is in motion against him his journey to immortality is more cumbersome and impeded than any other and yet nobody can believe more firmly than the philosopher that he will attain the goal by that journey because he does not know where he is to stand if not on the widely spread wings of all time for the disregard of everything present and momentary lies in the essence of the great philosophic nature he has true he has truth the wheel of time may roll wither it pleases never can it escape from truth it is important to hear that such men have lived never for example would one be able to imagine the pride of heraclitus as an idle possibility in itself every endeavor after knowledge seems by its nature to be eternally unsatisfied and unsatisfactory therefore nobody unless instructed by history will like to believe in such a royal self-esteem and conviction of being the only ruler of truth such men live in their own solar system one has to look for them there apathagoras and them pedigrees treated themselves to with a superhuman esteem yea with almost religious awe but the tie of sympathy united with the great conviction of the men of psychosis and the unity of everything living led them back to other men for their welfare and salvation of that feeling of solitude however we permeated the effusion recluse of the Artemis temple one can only divine something when growing benign in the wildest mountain desert no paramount feeling of compassionate agitation no desire to help heal and save emanates from him he is a star without an atmosphere his eye directed blazingly inwards looks outward for appearances sake only extinct and icy all around him immediately upon the citadel of his pride beat the waves of folly and perversity with loathing he turns away from them the men with a feeling heart would also shun such a gorgon monster as cast out of brass within and out of the way sanctuary among the statues of gods by the sight of cold composedly sublime architecture such a being may appear more comprehensible as man among men Heraclitus was incredible and though he was seen paying attention to the play of noisy children even then he was reflecting upon what never man thought of on such an occasion the play of the great world child Zeus he had no need of men not even for his discernment he was not interested in all that which one might perhaps ascertain from them and in what the other sages before him had been endeavoring to ascertain he spoke with disdain of such questioning collecting in short historic men I sought and investigated myself he said with a word by which one designates the investigation of an oracle as if he and no one else were the true Fulfiller and achiever of the Delphic precept know thyself what he learned from this oracle he deemed immortal wisdom and eternally worthy of explanation of unlimited effect even in the distance after the model of the prophetic speeches of the symbol is sufficient for the latest mankind let the latter have that expounded to her as a regular sayings which he liked the Delphic god neither enunciates nor conceals although it is proclaimed by him without smiles binary and the scent of ointments but rather as with foaming mouth it must force its way through the millenniums of the future for the world needs truth eternally therefore she needs also heraclitus eternally although he has no need of her what does his fame matter to him fame with mortals ever flowing on as he exclaims scornfully his fame is of concern to man not to himself the immortality of mankind needs him not he the immortality of the man heraclitus that which he beheld the doctrine of the law in the becoming and of the play in the necessity must henceforth be beheld eternally he has raised the curtain of this greatest stage play end of section nine