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Evil by Frederick Nietzsche, preface read by Hugh mc guire. Supposing that truth
is a woman, what then is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers,
in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women,
That the terrible seriousness and clumsy and opportunity with which they have usually paid
their addresses to truth have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman.
Certainly she has never allowed herself to be won. And at present every kind
of dogma stands with a sad and discouraged mien, if indeed it stands at
all. For there are scoffers who maintain that it has fallen that all dogma
lies on the ground, nay more that it is at its last gasp.
But to speak seriously, there are good grounds for hoping that all dogmatizing in
philosophy, whatever solemn, whatever conclusive and decided airs, it has assumed,
may have been only a noble purialism and tyrannism. And probably the time is
at hand when it will be once and again understood. What has actually sufficed
for the basis of such imposing and absolute philosophical edifices as the Dogmatists have hitherto
reared. Perhaps some popular superstition of immemorial time, such as the soul superstition,
which in the form of subject and ego superstition, has not yet ceased
doing mischief. Perhaps some play upon words, exception on the part of grammar,
or an audacious generalization of very restricted, very personal, very human,
all to human facts. The philosophy of the Dogmatists, it is to be
hoped, was only a promise for thousands of years afterwards, as was astrology
in still earlier times, in the service of which probably more labor, gold,
acuteness, and patience have been spent than on any actual science. Hitherto
we owe to it and to its superterrestrial pretensions. In Asia and Egypt,
the grand style of architecture. It seems that, in order to inscribe themselves
upon the heart of humanity with everlasting claims, all great things have first to
wander about the earth as enormous and awe inspiring caricatures. Dogmatic philosophy has been
a caricature of this kind, for instance the Vedanta doctrine in Asia and Platonism
in Europe. Let us not be ungrateful to it, although it must certainly
be confessed that the worst, the most tiresome, and the most dangerous of
errors hitherto has been a dogmatist error, namely Plato's invention of pure spirit and
the good in itself. But now, when it has been surmounted, when
Europe, rid of this nightmare, can again draw breath freely and at least
enjoy a healthier sleep, we whose duty is wakefulness itself, are the errors
of all the strength which the struggle against this error has fostered. It amounted
to the very inversion of truth and the denial of the perspective, the fundamental
condition of life. To speak of spirit and the good as Plato spoke of
them. Indeed, one might ask, as a physician, how did such
a malady attack the finest product of antiquity? Plato had the wicked Socrates really
corrupted him? Was Socrates, after all, a corrupter of youths and deserved
his hemlock. But the struggle against Plato, or to speak plainer than for
the people, the struggle against the ecclesiastical oppression of millenniums of Christianity. For
Christianity is Platonism for the people produced in Europe a magnificent tension of soul,
such as had not existed anywhere previously. With such a tensely strained bow,
one can now aim at the furthest goals. As a matter of fact,
the European feels this tension as a state of distress, and twice attempts have
been made in grand style to unbend the bow, once by means of Jesuitism,
and the second time by means of democratic enlightenment, which, with the
aid of liberty of the press and newspaper reading, might in fact bring it
about that the spirit would not so easily find itself in distress. The Germans
invented gunpowder, all credit to them, But they again made things square.
They invented printing. But we, who are neither Jesuits nor Democrats, nor
even sufficiently Germans, we good Europeans and free, very free spirits, We
have it still, all the distress of spirit, and all the tension of
its bow, and perhaps also the arrow the duty, and who knows the
goal to aim at. Written in sales Maria Upper Engadine, June eighteen eighty
five. End of preface