Chapter 29 eighteen

It is an eternal phenomenon: the greedy will always finds a way to detain its creatures in life, and compel them to live, by virtue of the phantasm that envelops all things.One is bound by a Socratic thirst for knowledge, delusional knowledge can heal the eternal wounds of existence; Consolation in the belief that eternal life flows unceasingly beneath the whirlpool of appearances, by which they remain silent to the more general and even more powerful phantoms which the will always prepares.Generally, these three classes of phantasy belong only to the more gifted, who feel the burden of existence with a deep loathing, and choose a stimulant to make themselves forget about this loathing.Everything we call culture is made up of these stimulants.According to the proportion of deployment, it is mainly Socratic culture, or artistic culture, or tragic culture.If you are willing to believe in historical examples, you can also say that it is the Alexandrian culture, or the Greek culture, or the Indian (Brahman) culture.

Our whole modern world, caught in the web of Alexandrian culture, regards as the ideal theorist of the highest intellectual capacity at the service of science, whose archetype and progenitor is Socrates.All our methods of education are directed at the root of this ideal, and all the rest of life can only emerge with difficulty now and then, as if they were not meant to be.The dreadful thing is that for a long time the educated man has only appeared in the guise of a scholar; even our poetics must have been derived from learned imitation, and in the chief effect of rhyme we see that our verse has grown out of artificial experiments in a non-native and thoroughly learned language.How incomprehensible must have appeared to a true Greek the intelligible modern man of culture, Faust, who conquered all learning insatiably and devoted himself to magic and the devil for the thirst of knowledge.As long as we put him next to Socrates for comparison, we can know that modern people have already begun to feel the limit of the Socratic thirst for knowledge, so they are eager to land on the vast ocean of knowledge.Goethe once said to Eckermann when referring to Napoleon: "Yes, my good friend, there is also a kind of creativity in business." He is reminding us in an elegant and simple way that for modern people, it is very important. The theoretician is something so dubious and startling that it takes Goethe's wisdom to understand, or rather forgive, such a strange way of being.

Now stop avoiding what medicine is sold in this gourd of Socratic culture!Fancy optimism!Now, if the fruits of this optimism have ripened; if this culture has corrupted the whole of society down to the lowest level, and the society is in constant panic with seething desires; Faith in the possibility of the human being gradually turns into an eager pursuit of Alexander's earthly happiness and invocation of Euripides' mechanical seance, and we need not be surprised!It should be noted that the Alexandrian culture must have a slave class in order to exist for a long time.Yet, with its optimistic outlook on life, it denies the necessity of such a hierarchy, so that once its bewitching and calming rhetoric about "human dignity" and "dignity of work" loses its potency, it will Gradually heading towards terrible destruction.There is nothing more terrifying than a savage slave class who has awakened to the injustice of its life and is ready to avenge not only itself but all generations.Who would dare seek peace of mind in our pale and weary religions in the face of such a gale?This religion has so fundamentally degenerated into academic superstition that mythology, this necessary premise of all religions, has been paralyzed everywhere, and even in the realm of mythology the spirit of optimism, which we have just pointed out as the ruin of our society, has come to reign. Germs.

The disaster lurking in the arms of theoretical culture has gradually begun to make modern people feel anxious. They rummaged through the treasure house of experience for a way to avoid the disaster, but they have no confidence.Therefore, they began to have a premonition of their end.At this time, some minds of great nature are trying to use the tools of science itself to explain the limits and conditionality of cognition, and thus firmly deny the claim of science to be universally valid and serve as a universal purpose.Because of this demonstration, the idea that the deepest essence of things can be understood by virtue of the law of causality was for the first time regarded as a delusion.The extraordinary courage and wisdom of Kant and Schopenhauer achieved the most difficult victory, over the optimism hidden in the essence of logic and which is the foundation of modern culture.When this optimism rests on aeternae veritates (eternal truths) which it sees as undoubted, believes that all the mysteries of the universe can be known and investigated, and regards space, time and causality as absolute laws of universal validity, Kant shows how the function of these categories consists only in elevating pure appearance, the work of Maya, to the sole and highest reality, replacing it with the deepest true essence of things, of which true knowledge is impossible by means of This is achieved; that is to say, according to Schopenhauer's statement, it only makes the dreamer sleep more deeply (Book 1).Out of this realization a culture arose, which I would venture to call the Tragedy Culture.The most important sign of this culture is that wisdom replaces science as the highest purpose, it is not disturbed by the temptation of science, it gazes with firm eyes at the complete picture of the world, and strives with kind love to treat the eternal pain of the world as its own pain grasp.We imagine the growing generation, with such fearless eyes and such ambitions; we imagine these dragon-slayers, walking with firm steps, full of heroic adventure, despising all the frailty of that optimism dogma, but to "live courageously" in wholeness and fullness—does not the tragic figure of this culture, then, as he educates himself to be serious and fearful, necessarily yearn for a new art, the metaphysical Art of consolation, longing for tragedy, as longing for Helen that was his?Must he not cry with Faust:

However, once the Socratic culture was shocked from two aspects, it could only hold its wand of absolute truth with trembling hands, and began to be afraid of its own conclusions that it gradually foresaw, and then it no longer used the previous That naive confidence that its grounds are eternally valid.What a tragic scene now: its mind dances, throws itself fondly upon new beauties to embrace them, and flings them suddenly, terrified, like Mephistopheles suddenly Just like throwing off those tempting snake demons.People often refer to the "break" as the primitive affliction of modern culture, and this is indeed a symptom of "break": the theorist panicked in the face of his conclusions, afraid to trust in the terrible glaciers of existence, he stood on the shore with anxiety. Wander around.He was disheartened, indifferent to everything, and had no desire to dabble in the natural cruelty of things.By now, optimism had weakened him.And he felt how a culture based on scientific principles must perish as soon as it began to be illogical, that is, as soon as it began to evade its own conclusions.Modern art exposes this general poverty: in vain is the imitation of the epochs and geniuses of all great creations, in vain is the whole "world literature" gathered around the modern man to comfort him, to place him among the artistic styles and artists of all ages, enabled him to name them as Adam named animals; and yet he remained a perpetually hungry man, a worn-out "critic," an Alexander, a librarian and proofreader at heart, poorly Blind by dust and misprints.