It is even impossible to fix them as indubitable facts, for facts also require a verification and must be proved. There are no proofs. Philosophic and religious teachings offered by men who have had extraordinary inward experiences, not only do not generally confirm, but rather refute their own stories of revelation. For philosophic and religious teaching have always hitherto assigned themselves the task of attracting all and sundry to themselves, and in order to attain this end they had to have recourse to such methods as have effect with the ordinary man, who knows of nothing extraordinary—to proof, to the authority of visible and tangible phenomena, which can be measured, weighed and counted. In their pursuit of proofs, of persuasiveness and popularity, they had to sacrifice the important and essential, and expose for show that which is agreeable to reason—things already more or less known, and therefore of little interest and importance. In course of time, as experimental science, so-called, gained more and more power, the habit of hiding in oneself all that cannot be demonstrated ad oculos, has become more and more firmly rooted, until it is almost man's second nature. Nowadays we 'naturally' share but a small part of an experience with our friends, so that if Mahomet and Paul lived in our time, it would not enter their heads to tell their extraordinary stories. And for all his bravery, Nietzsche nevertheless passes quickly over eternal recurrence, and is much more occupied with preaching the morality of the Superman, which, though it at first astounded people, was after all accepted with more or less modification, because it was demonstrable. Evidently we are confronted with a great dilemma. If we continue to cultivate modern methodology, we run the risk of becoming so accustomed to it that we will lose not only the faculty of sharing all undemonstrable and exceptional experiences with others, but even of retaining them firmly in the memory. They will begin to be forgotten as dreams, they will even seem to be waking dreams. Thus we will cut ourselves off for ever from a vast realm of reality, whose meaning and value have by no means been divined or appreciated. In olden times men could add dreams and madmen's visions to reality; but we shall curtail the real indubitable reality, transferring it to the realm of hallucinations and dreams. I suppose even a modern man will feel some hesitation in coming over to the side of this methodology, even though he is incapable of thinking, with the ancients, that dreams are by no means worthless things. And if this is so, then the rights of experiences must not be defined by the degree of their demonstrability. However capricious our experiences may be, however little they agree with the rooted and predominant conceptions of the necessary character of events in the inward and outward life—once they have taken place in the soul of man, they acquire, ipso facto, the lawful right of figuring side by side with facts which are most demonstrable and susceptible of control and verification, and even with a deliberate experiment.
It may be said that we would not then be protected against deliberate frauds. People who have never been in paradise will give themselves out for Mahomets. That is true; they will talk and they will he. There will be no method of objective verification. But they will surely tell the truth also. For the sake of that truth we may make up our minds to swim through a whole ocean of lies. Yes, it is not in the least impossible to distinguish truth from lie in this realm, though, certainly, not by the signs which have been evolved by logic; and not even by signs, but by no signs at all. The signs of the beautiful have not yet been even approximately, defined, and, please God—be it said without offence to the Germans—they never will be defined, but yet we distinguish between Apollo and Venus. So it is with truth: she too may be recognised. But what if a man cannot distinguish without signs, and, moreover, does not want to?... What is to be done with him? Really, I do not know; besides, I do not imagine that all men down to the last should act in unison. When did all men act in agreement? Men have mostly acted separately, meeting in certain places, and parting in others. Long may it be so! Some will recognise and seek after truth by signs, others without signs, as they please, and yet others, in both ways.
The Seventh Day of Creation
Socrates said that he often used to hear from poets thoughts remarkable for their profundity and seriousness, but when he began to inquire of them more particularly, he became convinced that they themselves did not understand what they were saying. What did he really mean? Did Socrates wish to compare the poets to parrots or trained blackbirds who can learn by heart, with the assistance of a man to teach them, any ideas whatever, perfectly foreign to them. That can hardly be. Socrates hardly thought that what the poets say had been overheard by them from some one, and mechanically fixed in their mind, though it remained quite foreign to their soul. Most probably he used the word 'understand' in the sense that they could not demonstrate or explain the soundness and stability of their ideas,—they could not deduce them and relate them to a definite conception of the world. As every one knows, Socrates thought that not merely poets, but all men, from eminent statesmen down to ignorant artisans, had ideas, even a great many ideas, but they never could explain where they had got them, or make them agree among themselves.
In this respect poets were the same as the rest of people. From some mysterious source they had acquired truths, often great and profound, but they were unable to explain them. This seemed to Socrates a great misery, a real misfortune. I do not know how it happened—not a single historian of philosophy has explained it, and indeed very little interest has been taken in it—but Socrates for some reason decided that an unproven and unexplained truth had less value than a proven and explained one. In our times, when a whole theory, even a conception of the world, has been made of Socrates's idea, this notion seems so natural and self-evident that no one doubts it. But in antiquity the case was different. Strictly, Socrates thought that the poets had acquired their truths, which they were unable to prove, from a very respectable source, which deserved all possible confidence: he himself compared the poets with oracles, and consequently admitted that they had communion with the gods. There was, therefore, a most excellent guarantee that the poets were possessed of real, undiluted truth—the pledge of its purity being the divine authority. Socrates said that he himself had frequently been guided in his actions, not by considerations of reason, but by the voice of his mysterious 'demon.' That is, at times, he abstained from certain actions—his demon gave him never positive, but only negative advice—without being able to produce reasons, simply because the secret voice, more authoritative than any human mind, demanded abstinence from them.
Is it not strange that under such circumstances, at an epoch when the gods vouchsafed truths to men, there should have suddenly appeared in a man the unexplained desire to acquire truths without the help of the gods, and in independence of them, by the dialectic method so beloved of the Greeks? It is doubtful which is more important for us, to acquire the truth or to acquire for one's self with one's own effort, it may be a false, but one's own judgment. The example of Socrates, who has been a pattern for all subsequent generations of thinking men, leaves not the slightest doubt. Men do not need a truth ready made; they turn away from the gods to devote themselves to independent creations. Practically the same story is told in the Bible. What indeed was lacking to Adam? He lived in paradise, in direct proximity to God, from whom he could learn anything he wanted. And yet it did not suit him. It was enough that the Serpent should make his perfidious proposal for the man to forget the wrath of God, and all the dangers which threatened him, and to pluck the apple from the forbidden tree. Then the truth, which until the creation of the world and man had been one, split and broke with a great, perhaps an infinitely great, number of most diverse truths, eternally being born, and eternally dying. This was the seventh day of creation, unrecorded in history. Man became God's collaborator. He himself became a creator. Socrates renounced the divine truth and even spoke contemptuously of it, merely because it was not proven, that is, because it does not bear the marks of man's handiwork. Socrates really did not prove anything, but he was proving, creating, and in this he saw the meaning of his own life and of all human lives. Thus, surely, the pronouncement of the Delphic oracle seems true even now: Socrates was the wisest of men. And he who would be wise must, imitating Socrates, not be like him in anything. Thus did all great men, and all great philosophers.
What does the History of Philosophy teach us?
Neo-Kantianism is the prevalent school of modern philosophy. The literature about Kant has grown to unheard-of proportions. But if you attempt to analyse the colossal mass that has been written upon Kant, and put the question to yourself, what has really been left to us of Kant's teaching, then to your great amazement you will have to reply: Nothing at all. There is an extraordinary, incredibly famous name—Kant, and there is positively not a single Kantian thesis which in an uninterpreted form would have survived till our day. I say in an uninterpreted form, for interpretations resolve at bottom into arbitrary recastings, which often have not even an outward resemblance to the original. These interpretations began while Kant was still alive. Fichte gave the first example. It is well known that Kant reacted, demanding that his teaching should be understood not in the spirit but in the letter. And Kant was, naturally, quite right. Of two things one: either you take his teaching as it is, or you invent your own. But the fate of all thinkers who have been destined to give their names to an epoch is similar: they have been interpreted, recast, till they are unrecognisable. For after a short time had elapsed, it became clear that their ideas were so overburdened with contradictions, that in the form in which they emerged from the hands of their creators, they are absolutely unacceptable. Indeed, all the critics who had not made up their minds beforehand to be orthodox Kantians, came to the conclusion that Kant had not proved a single one of his fundamental propositions. Something stronger may be said. By virtue of the fact that Kant, owing to the central position which he occupied, attracted much attention to himself and was forced to submit to very careful criticism, there gradually emerged a truth which might have been known beforehand: that Kant's teaching is a mass of contradictions. The sum-total of more than a century's study of Kant may be resumed in a few words. Although he was not afraid of the most crying contradictions, he did not have the smallest degree of success in proving the correctness of his teaching. With an extraordinary power and depth of mind, with all the originality, boldness, and talent of his constructions, he really provided nothing that might be indisputably called a positive acquisition of philosophy. I repeat that I am not expressing my own opinion. I am only reckoning the sum-total of the opinions of the German critics of Kant, of those same critics who built him a monument aere perennius.
The same may be said of all the great representatives of philosophic thought beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and ending with Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Their works astonish by their power, depth, boldness, beauty and originality of thought. While you read them it seems that truth herself speaks with their lips. And what strong measures of precaution did they take to prevent themselves from being mistaken! They believed in nothing that men had grown accustomed to believe. They methodically doubted everything, reexamined everything, tens, hundreds of times. They gave their life to the truth not in words, but in deed. And still the sum-total is the same in their case as in Kant's: not one of them succeeded in inventing a system free from internal contradictions.
Aristotle was already criticising Plato, and the sceptics criticised both of them, and so on until in our day each new thinker struggles with his predecessors, refutes their contradictions and errors, although he knows that he is doomed to the same fate. The historians of philosophy are at infinite pains to conceal the most glaring and noticeable trait of philosophic creation, which is, at bottom, no secret to any one. The uninitiated, and people generally who do not like thinking, and therefore wish to be contemptuous of philosophy, point to the lack of unity among philosophers as evidence that it is not worth while to study philosophy. But they are both wrong. The history of philosophy not only does not inspire us with the thought of the continual evolution of an idea, but palpably convinces us of the contrary, that among philosophers there is not, has not been, and will never be, any aspiration towards unity. Neither will they find in future a truth free from contradiction, for they do not seek the truth in the sense in which the word is understood by the people and by science; and, after all, contradictions do not frighten them, but rather attract. Schopenhauer begins his criticism of Kant's philosophy with the words of Voltaire: 'It is the privilege of genius to make great mistakes with impunity.' I believe that the secret of the philosophic genius lies here. He makes great, the greatest, mistakes, and with impunity. Moreover his mistakes are put to his credit, for the important matter is not his truths, or his judgments, but himself. When you hear from Plato that the life we see is only a shadow, when Spinoza, intoxicated by God, exalts the idea of necessity, when Kant declares that reason dictates laws to Nature,—listening to them you do not examine whether their assertions are true or not, you agree with each of them, whatever he says, and only this question arises in your soul: 'Who is he that speaketh as one having authority?'