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From "Philosophy During the Tragic Age of the Greeks"
Nietzsche On Thales
Translated by Maximillian A. Mügge
Revised by Charles S. Taylor
Greek philosophy seems to begin with a preposterous idea, 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 actually leapt
over 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 thought, which had its origin in
mystic intuition and which together with the ever renewed endeavours to
express it better, we find in all philosophies,— the proposition: Everything
is one!
How forcefully 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 goal. On light supports she leaps in advance; hope and divination
wing her feet. Calculating reason too, 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 imagines 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 upon them ever further and further,
though they precipitously sink into the depths behind. The other stands
helpless there most of the time; one has first to build a pathway which
will bear a heavy, weary step; sometimes that cannot be done and then no
god will help one 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, for a strange illogical power wings the foot of philosophical thinking;
and this power is creative imagination. 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 flier;
demonstrable certainties are divined at a distance to be at this point.
Especially powerful is the strength of imagination in the lightning-like
seizing and illuminating of similarities; afterwards reflection applies
its measuring and models (templates) 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 Thales the indemonstrable
philosophizing has 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 is 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 leap towards him, an artistically prefiguring game of the
water with human and animal bodies, masks, plants, rocks, nymphs, griffins,
and with all existing types in general, so 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 mortals and gods, and by contemplating the whole
of nature as if it were only a disguise, masquerade and metamorphosis of these
god-humans. Humans were 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 (without images); only they did not
succeed in expressing these abstractions except in the form of the allegory.
Also Pherecydes of Syrus 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 with a winged oak, which hangs in the air with spread pinions
and which Zeus bedecks, after the defeat of Kronos, with a magnificent robe
of honour, into which with his own hands Zeus embroiders lands, water and rivers.
In contrast 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 fabling. If as it is
true he used Science and the demonstrable but soon outleapt 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, sisyphos, the person 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 Anaxagoras know,
people will call unusual, astounding, difficult, divine but — useless, since
human possessions were of no concern to those two". 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
the moral as in the esthetic realm, thus Philosophy begins with a legislation
with respect to greatness, she becomes a Nomenclator (name-giver). "That
is great", she says, and therewith she raises us above the blind, untamed
covetousness of our 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 attained. When Thales
says, "Everything is water", we are startled up out of our worm-like
mauling of and crawling about among the individual sciences; we divine the last
solution of things and master through this divination the common perplexity
of the lower grades of knowledge. Philosophers try to make the total-chord of
the universe re-echo within themselves and then to project it into ideas outside
themselves: whilst they are contemplative like the artistic, sympathetic like
the religious, looking out for ends and causalities like the scientific, whilst
they feel themselves swell up to the macrocosm, they still retain the circumspection
to contemplate themselves coldly as the reflex of the world; they retain that
cool-headedness, which dramatic artists possess, when they transform themselves
into other bodies, speak out of them, and yet know how to project this transformation
outside themselves into written verses. What the verse is to the poet, dialectic
thinking is to philosophers; they snatch at it in order to hold fast their enchantment,
in order to petrify it. And just as words and verse to dramatists are only stammerings
in a foreign language, to tell in it what they lived, what they saw, and what
they can directly promulgate by gesture and 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 a paltry means, and at the bottom
a metaphorical, absolutely inexact translation into a different sphere and language.
Thus Thales saw the Unity of the "Existent", and when he wanted to
communicate this idea he talked of water.
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