Philosophy in
the Tragic Age
of the Greeks
 

Excerpts compiled from translations by: Maximillian A. Mügge (Early Greek Philosophy and Other Essays, Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. 2, T. N. Foulis, © 1911, Preface-Section 8); and Marianne Cowan (Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Regnery, © 1962, Section 9-13.) Text amended in part by The Nietzsche Channel.

Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

[Nietzsche's notes on pre-Platonic philosophy can be found in the Nachlass of Summer 1872; in April 1873, Nietzsche brought along to Bayreuth a handwritten manuscript version under the title Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. In the beginning of 1874, Nietzsche gave it to his pupil Adolf Baumgartner to copy. Nietzsche's corrections to the Baumgartner copy stop after the initial pages.—Commentary Source: Colli-Montinari, Kritische Studienausgabe 14, 108.]

Preface

If we know the aims of humans who are strangers to us, it is sufficient for us to approve of or condemn them as wholes. 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 feebler minds a sum of mistakes and truths; at any rate if regarded as highest aim they are an error, and insofar reprehensible. Therefore many disapprove of all philosophers, because their aims are not ours; they are those whom I called "strangers to us." Whoever on the contrary finds any pleasure at all in great humans 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 indiscussable, 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 human.

Later Preface

[A page in the handwriting of Nietzsche's mother (probably dictated in Winter 1875/76)—Commentary Source: Colli-Montinari, Kritische Studienausgabe 14, 108.]

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, i.e., by incompleteness. Those doctrines, however, have been selected in which the personal element of the philosopher reechoes 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 person out of three anecdotes. I endeavor to bring into relief three anecdotes out of every system and abandon the remainder.

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1

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 physis, as Goethe did, or healing through music, as Wagner. The physicians of the people condemn philosophy; one, therefore, who wants to justify it, must show to what purpose healthy nations use and have used philosophy. If one 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 toying use of it; thus the Romans at their best period lived without philosophy. But 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 oneself the hedge of self-sufficiency, philosophy was always ready to isolate one still more and to destroy one 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 hairsplittings of Christian dogmatics. They themselves have much lessened 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; no, but in good fortune, in mature adulthood, out of the midst of the fervent serenity of a brave and victorious individual'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 and gayards as the learned philistine of our days perhaps imagines, or had their life been only a state of voluptuous 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 Greece, and exhibited Zarathustra near Heraclitus, the Hindus near the Eleatics, the Egyptians near Empedocles, or even Anaxagoras among the Jews and Pythagoras 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, yea, that she, as 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 autochthonous 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 learnt as a foothold whence 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 ill­advisedly 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 fondly imagine they have rediscovered for instance in the restricted worship of the one celestial vault among the other Indo­Germans 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 wished to live immediately that which they learnt. The Greeks also philosophized as people of culture and with the aims of culture, and therefore saved themselves the trouble of inventing once again the elements of philosophy and knowledge out of some autochthonous conceit, and with a 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 purer sphere they became inventors. For they discovered the typical philosopher's 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, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Democritus 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 and general aspect. For they were met by no helpful and facilitating fashion. Thus together they form what Schopenhauer, in opposition to the republic of scholars, has 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 our 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 her 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 her great citizens 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 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 seductions of secularization the philosopher appears and as it were steps forth from the cave of Trophonios into the very midst of luxuriance, the discoverers' happiness, the wealth and the sensuousness of the Greek colonies, then we divine that they come as noble warners 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 thither. There is a steely necessity which fetters the philosopher to a true culture: but what if this culture does not exist. Then philosophers are an incalculable and therefore terror­inspiring comets, whereas in the favorable case, they shine as the central star in the solar system of culture. It is for this reason that the Greeks justify the philosopher, because with them they are no comets.

2

After such contemplations it will be accepted without offense if I speak of the pre­Platonic philosophers as of a homogeneous company, and devote this paper to them exclusively. Something quite new begins with Plato; or 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 head, many-sided. Yet it would be more just and unbiased to conceive of the latter as philosophic hybrid­characters, of the former as the pure types. Plato himself is the first magnificent hybrid­character, and as such finds expression as well in his philosophy as in his personality. In his ideology are united Socratic, Pythagorean, and Heraclitean elements, and for this reason it is no typically pure phenomenon. As person, too, Plato mingles the features of the royally secluded, all-sufficing Heraclitus, of the melancholy­compassionate and legislative Pythagoras and of the psycho-expert dialectician Socrates. All later philosophers are such hybrid­characters; wherever something one-sided does come into prominence with them as in the case of the Cynics, it is not type but caricature. Much more important however is the fact that they are founders of sects and that the sects 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, a fatum libellorum; 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, Empedocles' wonderful poem, and the writings of Democritus, whom the ancients put on a par 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 Erigena or of Pascal, and who considers that even in this enlightened century the first edition of Schopenhauer's The World As Will And Representation became wastepaper. If somebody will presuppose a special fatalistic power with respect to such things he may do so and say with Goethe: "Let no one complain about and grumble at things vile and mean, they are the real rulers,—however much this be gainsaid!" 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 battle­cry of truth, the song of philosophic heroism; and yet whether it is to live a century longer or to crumble and molder into dust and ashes, depends on the most miserable accidents, on the sudden mental eclipse of people'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 Hamann 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 than 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 so­called "general education" but has no culture and no unity of style in her life hardly knows what the latter were proclaimed by the very genius of 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 academic senility and childhood. Nobody dare venture to fulfill in oneself the law of philosophy, nobody lives philosophically, with that simple human faith which compelled an ancient, wherever one was, whatever one did, to deport oneself as a Stoic, when one had once pledged one's faith to the Stoa. 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 people, it never gets beyond the sigh: "If only!" or beyond the knowledge "Once upon a time there was." Philosophy is without rights; therefore modern humans, if they were at all courageous and conscientious, ought to condemn her and perhaps banish her with words similar to those by which Plato banished the tragic poets from his State. Of course there would be left a reply for her, as there remained to those poets against Plato. 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 fortuneteller 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. Here we are lacking, it is true, every good right; but the judges before whom we find justice judge you also and will tell you: First acquire a culture; then you shall experience what philosophy can and will do." —

3

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 endeavors 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 mythology, 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 honor, 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 reecho 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 coolheadedness, 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!

4

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. Anaximander of Miletus, the first philosophical author of the ancients, writes in the very way that typical philosophers will always write as long as they are not alienated from ingenuousness and naiveté by odd claims: in a grand lapidarian style of writing, sentence for sentence . . . a witness of a new inspiration, and an expression of the sojourning in sublime contemplations. The thought and its form are milestones on the path towards the highest wisdom. With such a lapidarian emphasis Anaximander once said: "Whence things originated, thither, 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." Enigmatical utterance of a true pessimist, oracular inscription on the boundary stone of Greek philosophy, how shall we explain thee?

The only serious moralist of our century in the Parerga (Vol. ii., chap. 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 all human beings is that they really are beings who ought not to exist at all, but who are expiating their existence by manifold forms of suffering and death:—What can one expect from such beings? 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 people; one 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 from 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 Anaximander 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 ens, the "Existent," Anaximander concluded, cannot possess 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 Anaximander 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 thus 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 true, be designated only negatively by us, as something to which no predicate out of the existing world of Becoming can be allotted, and might be considered a peer to the Kantian "thing-in-itself."

Of course he who is 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 philosopher at all; this is likewise to be said about those, who seriously ask themselves, whether Anaximander 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 Anaximander 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, with daring grasp caught up the tangle of the most profound ethical problem. How can anything perish that has a right to exist! Whence that restless 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, of audacious apostasy from the primordial-unity of things Anaximander 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, I 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 transitoriness 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 at once to the highest, superlunary flight. 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 Empedocles. 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; in Ephesus and in Elea 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, whence 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 fashioned, 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 were lying on the mountain range of such a world-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 secession ever originate, the darker the night became.

5

Towards the midst of this mystic night, in which Anaximander's problem of Becoming was wrapped up, Heraclitus of Ephesus approached and illuminated it by a divine flash of lightning. "I contemplate 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 Erinnyes behind all transgressions of the laws, the whole world the spectacle of a governing justice and of demoniacally 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 inviolable forms, in laws esteemed sacred? Where injustice sways, there is caprice, disorder, irregularity, contradiction; where however law and Zeus' daughter, Dike, 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 Anaximander 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, indestructibility, a bulwark in the stream. Louder than Anaximander, Heraclitus exclaimed: "I see nothing but Becoming. Be not deceived! It is the fault of your limited sensibility 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 a 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; i.e., 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 effaced equally quickly; that past and future are as unreal as any dream; that the present is only the dimensionless and unstable boundary between the two; that however, like time, so space, and again like the latter, so also everything that is simultaneously in space and time, has only a relative existence, only through and for the sake of a something else, of the same kind as itself, i.e., 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. All who have this truth before their eyes must however also proceed at once to the next Heraclitean consequence and say that the whole essence of actuality is in fact activity, and that for actuality there is no other kind of existence and reality, as Schopenhauer has likewise expounded (The World As Will And Idea, Vol. I., Bk. I, Sec. 4): "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 [Wirkung] thus constitute the whole nature of matter; its true being is its action. The totality of everything material is therefore very appropriately called in German Wirklichkeit [actuality], a word which is far more expressive than Realität [reality]. That upon which actuality acts is always matter; actuality's whole 'being' and essence therefore consist only in the orderly change, which one part of it causes in another, and is therefore wholly relative, according to a 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 Heraclitus teaches is an awful and appalling conception, and in its effects most nearly 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 he conceived of under the form of polarity, as the divergence of a force into two qualitatively different, opposite actions, striving 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 an amphora whose contents constantly need stirring up. Out of the war of the opposites all Becoming originates; the definite and to us seemingly persistent qualities express only the momentary predominance of the one fighter, but with that the war is not at an end; the wrestling 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 continual sway of a homogeneous, severe justice bound by eternal laws. Only a Greek was able to consider this conception as the fundament of a cosmology it is Hesiod's good Eris 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 gymnasia and palestra, out of the artistic agonistics, 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 all Greeks fought as though they alone were in the right, and as though an absolutely sure standard of judicial opinion could at any instant decide whither victory is inclining, thus the qualities wrestle one with another, according to inviolable laws and standards which are inherent in the struggle. The things themselves in the permanency of which the limited intellect of human and animal believes, do not "exist" at all; they are as the fierce flashing and 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, Vol. I., Bk. 2, Sec. 27) "The permanent matter must constantly change its form; for under the guidance of causality, mechanical, physical, chemical, and organic phenomena, eagerly striving to appear, wrest the matter from each other, for each desires to reveal its own Idea. This strife 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.

6

Whilst the imagination of Heraclitus measured the restlessly moving universe, the "actuality" [Wirklichkeit] with the eye of the happy spectator, who sees innumerable pairs wrestling in joyous combat entrusted to the superintendence 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 seemed to fight, and the fighters seemed to be their own judges yea, 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 Anaximander 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 round-about way accidentally got into the dual cosmic order, an order with an Olympus of numerous immortal gods and demons, viz., many realities, and with a human world, which sees only the dust cloud of the Olympic struggle and the flashing of divine spears, i.e., only a Becoming? Anaximander 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 feebleness of human cognition whereas in the nature of things there is perhaps no Becoming, but only a coexisting of many true increase indestructible realities?

These are un-Heraclitean loopholes and labyrinths; he exclaims once again: "The One is the Many." The many perceptible qualities are neither eternal entities, nor phantasmata of our senses (Anaxagoras 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 Anaximander had further developed the theory of water as the origin of things. Placing confidence in the essential part of Thales' theory, and strengthening and adding to the latter's observations, Anaximander 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 physicist subordinated himself to the importance of Anaximander, explains to himself this Anaximandrian 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 Thales and Anaximander had enunciated about the water: that in innumerable metamorphoses it 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 derives 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 Anaximander in the most important of these conceptions, e.g., 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 Anaximander in excluding the "Cold" from the physical process, whilst Anaximander 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 Anaximander 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 talcum to our assistance with the thought that "satiety gives birth to crime (the hybris)" and one may indeed ask oneself for a minute whether perhaps Heraclitus has derived that return to plurality out of the hybris. Let us just take this thought seriously: in its 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 hybris? 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 for ever and ever to bear the consequences of guilt?

7

That dangerous word, hybris, is indeed the touchstone for every Heraclitean; 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 contuitive 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 in forms so impure he masters by means of a sublime simile. 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 and the artist play, the eternally living fire plays, builds up and destroys, in innocence—and this game aeons play with themselves. Transforming themselves into water and earth, like a child they pile heaps of sand by the sea, piles up and demolishes; from time to time they recommence the game. A moment of satiety, then again desire seizes them, as desire compels the artist to create. Not wantonness, but the ever newly awakening impulse to play, calls into life other worlds. Children throw away their toys; but soon they start again in an innocent frame of mind. As soon however as children build they connect, join and form lawfully and according to an innate sense of order.

Thus only is the world contemplated by the esthetic human, 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 the 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! Humans down to their last fiber are necessity and absolutely "unfree"—if by freedom one understands the foolish claim to be able to change at will one's essentia 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 logos and in accordance with the all-overlooking artist's eye, originates from their souls being wet and from the fact that people'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 any more than why fire becomes water and earth. Heraclitus is not compelled to prove (as Leibniz 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 aeon. Humans on the whole are to him even irrational beings, with which the fact that in all their essence the law of all-ruling reason is fulfilled does not clash. Humans do not occupy a specially favored position in nature, whose highest phenomenon is not simpleminded human, but fire, for instance, as stars. In so far as humans have through necessity received a share of fire, they are a little more rational; as far as they consist of earth and water it stands badly with their reason. They are not compelled to take cognizance of the logos simply because they are human beings. Why is there water, why earth? This to Heraclitus is a much more serious problem than to ask, why humans are so stupid and bad. In the highest and the most perverted humans the same inherent lawfulness and justice manifest 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 artists experience when looking at their growing works. Only those who have cause to be discontented with the natural history of humans find them gloomy, melancholy, tearful, somber, atrabilious, pessimistic and altogether hateful. He however would take these discontented people, together with their antipathies and sympathies, their hatred and 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 Heraclitean style; probably no person 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 obscurely—a thing habitually said about Heraclitus—is absolutely inexplicable; unless he has some cause to hide his thoughts or is sufficiently a rogue 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 abstruse, scarcely attainable object of thinking, the tasks of philosophy? With respect to brevity however Jean Paul [Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763-1825) German poet] 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) obscurely so that the paltry mind would rather proclaim it to be nonsense than translate it 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 æsthetic 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 humans, so that out of his physics has arisen in those heads a crude optimism, with the continual invitation to Tom, Dick, and Harry, plaudite amici.

8

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 chorus of contemporaries. To wander lonely along one's path belongs to the nature of the philosopher. Their 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 their self-sufficiency must be of diamond, if it is not to be demolished and broken, for everything is in motion against them. Their journey to immortality is more cumbersome and impeded than any other and yet nobody can believe more firmly than philosopher that they will attain the goal by that journey because they do not know where they are 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. They have truth; the wheel of time may roll whither it pleases, never can it escape from truth. It is important to hear that such humans 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 wooer of truth. Such people live in their own solar systems one has to look for them there. A Pythagoras, an Empedocles treated themselves too with a superhuman esteem, yea, with almost religious awe; but the tie of sympathy united with the great conviction of the metempsychosis and the unity of everything living, led them back to other humans, for their welfare and salvation. Of that feeling of solitude, however, which permeated the Ephesian recluse of the Artemis Temple, one can only divine something, when growing benumbed 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 appearance's sake only, extinct and icy. All around him, immediately upon the citadel of his pride beat the waves of folly and perversity: with loathing that turns away from them. But people with a feeling heart would also shun such a Gorgon monster as cast out of brass; within an out-of-the-way sanctuary, among the statues of gods, by the side of cold composedly-sublime architecture such a being may appear more comprehensible. As human among humans Heraclitus was incredible; and though he was seen paying attention to the play of noisy children, even then he was reflecting upon what never humans thought of on such an occasion: the play of the great world-child, Zeus. He had no need of people, not even for his discernments. 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" humans. "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 Sibyl. It is sufficient for the latest mankind: let the latter have that expounded to her, as oracular sayings, which he like the Delphic god " neither enunciates nor conceals." Although it is proclaimed by him, "without smiles, finery 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 humans, 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 Becoming, and of the Play in Necessity, must henceforth be beheld eternally: he has raised the curtain of this greatest stage-play.

9

While each word of Heraclitus expresses the pride and the majesty of truth, but of truth grasped in intuitions rather than attained by the rope ladder of logic, while in Sibylline rapture Heraclitus gazes but does not peer, knows but does not calculate, his contemporary Parmenides stands beside him as counter-image, likewise expressing a type of truth-teller but one formed of ice rather than fire, pouring cold piercing light all around. Once in his life Parmenides, probably at a fairly advanced age, had a moment of purest absolutely bloodless abstraction, unclouded by any reality. This moment—un-Greek as no other in the two centuries of the Tragic Age—whose product is the doctrine of Being, became for Parmenides' own life the boundary stone that separates two periods. At the same time however, this moment divides pre-Socratic thinking into two halves. The first might be called the Anaximandrian period, the second the Parmenidean proper. The first, older period of Parmenides' own philosophizing still bears Anaximandrian traces; it brought forth an organized philosophic-physical system in answer to Anaximander's questions. When later Parmenides was seized by that icy tremor of abstraction and came face to face with his utterly simple proposition as to being and non-being, his own previous teachings joined the rubbish-heap of the older doctrines. Still, he seems not to have lost every trace of paternal goodwill toward the sturdy and well-made child of his youth, and he helped himself out by saying, "There is only one right way, to be sure, but if one wishes for a change to try another, then my former view, as to quality and consistency, is the only right one." Guarding himself by this approach, he awarded to his former physical system a dignified and extensive position, even in that great poem on nature which was meant to proclaim his new insight as really the only way of truth. This paternal solicitude, even considering that it might have crept in by error, presents the only trace of human sentiment in a nature wholly petrified by logical rigidity and almost transformed into a thinking machine.

Parmenides, whose personal acquaintance with Anaximander does not seem unbelievable to me, and whose starting position from Anaximander's doctrines is not merely credible but evident, had the same distrust toward a total separation of a world which only is and a world which only comes-to-be that Heraclitus too had seized upon and which had led him to the denial of all being. Both men sought a way out of the contradictoriness and disparity of a double world order. The leap into the indefinite, undefineable, by which Anaximander had once and for all escaped the realm of come-to-be and its empirically given qualities, did not come easy to minds as independent as those of Heraclitus and Parmenides. They sought to stay on their feet as long as they could, preserving their leap for the spot where the foot no longer finds support and one must jump to keep from falling. Both of them looked repeatedly at just that world which Anaximander had condemned with such melancholy and had declared as the place of wickedness and simultaneously of atonement for the unjustness of all coming-to-be. Gazing at this world, Heraclitus, as we have seen, discovered what wonderful order, regularity and certainty manifested themselves in all coming-to-be; from this he concluded that coming-to-be itself could not be anything evil or unjust. His look was oriented from a point of view totally different from that of Parmenides. The latter compared the qualities and believed that he found them not equal, but divided into two rubrics. Comparing, for example, light and dark, he found the latter obviously but the negation of the former. Thus he differentiated between positive and negative qualities, seriously attempting to find and note this basic contradictory principle throughout all nature. His method was as follows: he took several contradictories, light and heavy for example, rare and dense, active and passive, and held them against his original model contradictories light and dark. Whatever corresponded to light was the positive quality, whatever corresponded to dark, the negative. Taking heavy and light, for example, light [in the sense of 'weightless'] was apportioned to light, heavy to dark, and thus heavy seemed to him but the negation of weightless, but weightlessness seemed a positive quality. The very method exhibits a defiant talent for abstract-logical procedure, closed against all influences of sensation. For heaviness surely seems to urge itself upon the senses as a positive quality; yet this did not prevent Parmenides from labeling it as a negation. Likewise he designated earth as against fire, cold as against warm, dense as against rare, feminine as against masculine, and passive as against active, to be negatives. Thus before his gaze our empirical world divided into two separate spheres, the one characterized by light, fieriness, warmth, weightlessness, rarification, activity and masculinity, and the other by the opposite, negative qualities. The latter really express only the lack, the absence of the former, positive ones. Thus he described the sphere which lacks the positive qualities as dark, earthy, cold, heavy, dense, and feminine-passive in general. Instead of the words "positive" and "negative" he used the absolute terms "existent" and "nonexistent." Now he had arrived at the principle—Anaximander notwithstanding—that this world of ours contains something which is existent, as well as something which is nonexistent. The existent should therefore not be sought outside the world and beyond our horizon. Right here before us, everywhere, in all coming-to-be, there is contained an active something which is existent.

But now he was left with the task of formulating a more exact answer to the question "What is coming-to-be?"—and this was the moment when he had to leap to keep from falling, although for natures such as Parmenides' perhaps all leaping constitutes a kind of falling. Suffice it to say that we shall enter the fog, the mysticism of qualitas occulta and even, just a little, the realm of mythology. Parmenides, like Heraclitus, gazes at universal coming-to-be and at impermanence, and he can interpret passing away only as though it were a fault of nonexistence. For how could the existent be guilty of passing away! But coming-to-be, too, must be produced with the help of the nonexistent, for the existent is always there. Of and by itself it could not come-to-be nor could it explain coming-to-be. Hence coming-to-be as well as passing away would seem to be produced by the negative qualities. But since that which comes-to-be has a content which is lost in the process of passing away, it presupposes that the positive qualities (for they are the essence of such content) likewise participate in both processes of change. In brief, we now have the dictum that "For coming-to-be, the existent as well as the nonexistent are necessary; whenever they interact, we have coming-to-be." But how are the positive and the negative to get together? Should they not forever flee each other, as contradictories, and thus make all coming-to-be impossible? Here Parmenides appeals to a qualitas occulta, to the mystic tendency of opposites to attract and unite, and he symbolizes the opposition in the name of Aphrodite and the empirically well-known relationship between masculinity and femininity. It is the power of Aphrodite that weds the opposites, the existent with the nonexistent. Desire unites the contradictory and mutually repellent elements: the result is coming-to-be. When desire is satiated, hatred and inner opposition drives the existent and the nonexistent apart once more—and man says, "All things pass." —

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But no one lays hands with impunity on such fearsome abstractions as "the existent" and "the nonexistent." Slowly, upon touching them, the blood congeals. There came the day when a strange insight befell Parmenides, an insight which seemed to withdraw the value from all his old combinations so that he felt like throwing them away like a bag of old worn-out coins. It is usually assumed that an external influence, in addition to the inwardly compelling consistency of such terms as "existent" and "nonexistent" shared in the invention of that fateful day. This external event is supposed to be Parmenides' acquaintance with the theology of that ancient far-traveled rhapsodist, singer of mystic nature deification, the Colophonian Xenophanes. Throughout an extraordinary lifetime, Xenophanes lived as a traveling poet and through his travels became a widely informed and widely informative person who understood how to ask questions and tell stories. Heraclitus counted him among the polyhistorians and among "historical" natures in general, in the sense already alluded to. Whence and when he picked up the mystical tendency toward the one, and the "one forever at rest," no one can now reconstruct. Perhaps it was the concept of an old man finally settled down, one before whose soul there appeared, after all the mobility of his wanderings and after all his restless learning and looking, the highest and greatest thing of all, a vision of divine rest, of the permanence of all things within a pantheistic archetypal peace. To me, by the way, it seems no more than accidental that in the same place, in Elea, two men should be living for a while who both carried in their minds a concept of unity. They did not form a school; they had nothing in common which one might have learned from the other and then passed along to others in turn. For the origin of their concepts of unity was a totally different one in each case, a downright opposite one in fact. If one of them did know the doctrine of the other, he would have had to translate it into a language of his own, even to understand it. But even in such translation the specific import of each would surely have been lost. Whereas Parmenides came to the unity of the existent purely by adherence to his supposed logic, spinning it out of the concepts of being and nonbeing, Xenophanes was a religious mystic who with his mystic unity belongs very typically to the sixth century. Even though he was not as cataclysmic a personality as Pythagoras, he shared his tendency and compulsion to improve human beings, to cleanse and to heal them, as he wandered from place to place. He is the teacher of ethics, though still on the rhapsodic level; in later times he would have been a Sophist. In his bold disapproval of the current mores and values he has not his equal in Greece. And to disapprove, he by no means withdraws into solitude, like Heraclitus and Plato, but stands up before the very public whose jubilant admiration of Homer, whose passionate yearning for the honors of the gymnastic festivals, whose worship of anthropomorphic stones he scourged wrathfully and scornfully, yet not in the quarrelsome fashion of a Thersites. The freedom of the individual finds its high point in Xenophanes, and it is in this almost boundless withdrawal from all conventionality that he is related more closely to Parmenides, not in that ultimate divine unity which he once saw in a vision befitting his century and which has hardly the expression or terminology in common with Parmenides' one being, not to mention origin.

It was rather an opposite frame of mind in which Parmenides found his doctrine of being. On a certain day and in a certain frame of mind he tested his two interactive contradictories, whose mutual desire and hatred constitute the world and all coming-to-be. He tested the existent and the nonexistent, the positive and the negative properties—and suddenly he found that he could not get past the concept of a negative duality, the concept of nonexistence. Can something which is not be a quality? Or, more basically, can something which is not, be? For the only single form of knowledge which we trust immediately and absolutely and to deny which amounts to insanity is the tautology A = A. But just this tautological insight proclaims inexorably: What is not, is not! What is, is! And suddenly Parmenides felt a monstrous logical sin burdening his whole previous life. Had he not light-heartedly always assumed that there are such things as negative qualities, nonexistent entities, that, in other words, A is not A? But only total perversity of thinking could have done so. To be sure, he reflected, the great mass of people had always made the same perverse judgment; he had merely participated in a universal crime against logic. But the same moment that shows him his crime illuminates him with a glorious discovery. He has found a principle, the key to the cosmic secret, remote from all human illusion. Now, grasping the firm and awful hand of tautological truth about being, he can climb down, into the abyss of all things.

On his way down he meets Heraclitus—an unhappy encounter! Caring now for nothing except the strictest separation of being from nonbeing, he must hate in his deepest soul the antinomy-play of Heraclitus. Propositions such as "We are and at the same time are not," or "Being and nonbeing is at the same time the same and not the same," tangle and cloud everything which he had just illuminated and distinguished. They drove him to fury. "Away with those people," he screamed, "who seem to have two heads and yet know nothing! Everything is in flux with them, including their thinking! They stand in dull astonishment before things and yet must be deaf as well as blind to mix up the opposites the way they do!" The irrationality of the masses, glorified in playful antinomies and lauded as the culmination of all wisdom was now a painful and incomprehensible experience.

And then he really dipped into the cold bath of his awe-inspiring abstractions. That which truly is must be forever present; you cannot say of it "it was," "it will be." The existent cannot have come to be, for out of what could it have come? Out of the nonexistent? But the nonexistent is not, and cannot produce anything. Out of the existent? This would reproduce nothing but itself. It is the same with passing away. Passing away is just as impossible as coming-to-be, as is all change, all decrease, all increase. In fact the only valid proposition that can be stated is "Everything of which you can say 'it has been' or 'it will be' is not; of the existent you can never say 'it is not."' The existent is indivisible, for where is the second power that could divide it? It is immobile, for where could it move to? It can be neither infinitely large nor infinitely small, for it is perfect, and a perfectly given infinity is a contradiction. Thus it hovers: bounded, finished, immobile, everywhere in balance, equally perfect at each point, like a globe, though not in space, for this space would be a second existent. But there cannot be several existents. For in order to separate them, there would have to be something which is not existent, a supposition which cancels itself. Thus there is only eternal unity.

And now, whenever Parmenides glances backward at the world of come-to-be, the world whose existence he used to try to comprehend by means of ingenious conjectures, he becomes angry with his eyes for so much as seeing come-to-be, with his ears for hearing it. "Whatever you do, do not be guided by your dull eyes," is now his imperative, "nor by your resounding ears, nor by your tongue, but test all things with the power of your thinking alone!" Thus he accomplished the immensely significant first critique of man's apparatus of knowledge, a critique as yet inadequate but doomed to bear dire consequences. By wrenching apart the senses and the capacity for abstraction, in other words by splitting up mind as though it were composed of two quite separate capacities, he demolished intellect itself, encouraging man to indulge in that wholly erroneous distinction between "spirit" and "body" which, especially since Plato, lies upon philosophy like a curse. All sense perceptions, says Parmenides, yield but illusions. And their main illusoriness lies in their pretense that the nonexistent coexists with the existent, that Becoming, too, has Being. All the manifold colorful world known to experience, all the transformations of its qualities, all the orderliness of its ups and downs, are cast aside mercilessly as mere semblance and illusion. Nothing may be learned from them. All effort spent upon this false deceitful world which is futile and negligible, faked into a lying existence by the senses is therefore wasted. When one makes as total a judgment as does Parmenides about the whole of the world, one ceases to be a scientist, an investigator into any of the world's parts. One's sympathy toward phenomena atrophies; one even develops a hatred for phenomena including oneself, a hatred for being unable to get rid of the everlasting deceitfulness of sensation. Henceforward truth shall live only in the palest, most abstracted generalities, in the empty husks of the most indefinite terms, as though in a house of cobwebs. And beside such truth now sits our philosopher, likewise as bloodless as his abstractions, in the spun out fabric of his formulas. A spider at least wants blood from its victims. The Parmenidean philosopher hates most of all the blood of his victims, the blood of the empirical reality which was sacrificed and shed by him.

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And this was a Greek who flourished approximately during the outbreak of the Ionian Revolt. In those days it was possible for a Greek to flee from an overabundant reality as though it were but the tricky scheming of the imagination—and to flee, not like Plato into the land of eternal ideas, into the workshop of the world-creator, feasting one's eyes on the unblemished unbreakable archetypes, but into the rigor mortis of the coldest emptiest concept of all, the concept of being. Let us be exceedingly careful not to interpret such a remarkable event according to false analogies. The Parmenidean escape was not the flight from the world taken by the Hindu philosophers; it was not evoked by a profound religious conviction as to the depravity, ephemerality and accursedness of human existence. Its ultimate goal, peace in being, was not striven after as though it were the mystic absorption into one all-sufficing ecstatic state of mind which is the enigma and vexation of ordinary minds. Parmenides' thinking conveys nothing whatever of the dark intoxicating fragrance of Hindu wisdom which is not entirely absent from Pythagoras and Empedocles. No, the strange thing about his philosophic feat at this period is just its lack of fragrance, of color, soul, and form, its total lack of blood, religiosity and ethical warmth. What astonishes us is the degree of schematism and abstraction—in a Greek!—above all, the terrible energetic striving for certainty in an epoch which otherwise thought mythically and whose imagination was highly mobile and fluid. "Grant me, ye gods, but one certainty," runs Parmenides' prayer, "and if it be but a log's breadth on which to lie, on which to ride upon the sea of uncertainty! Take away everything that comes-to-be, everything lush, colorful, blossoming, illusory, everything that charms and is alive. Take all these for yourselves and grant me but the one and only, poor empty certainty!"

The prelude in Parmenides' philosophy is played with ontology as its theme. Experience nowhere offered him being as he imagined it, but he concluded its existence from the fact that he was able to think it. This is a conclusion which rests on the assumption that we have an organ of knowledge which reaches into the essence of things and is independent of experience. The content of our thinking, according to Parmenides, is not present in sense perception but is an additive from somewhere else, from an extrasensory world to which we have direct access by means of our thinking. Now Aristotle asserted against all similar reasoning that existence is never an intrinsic part of essence. One may never infer the existentia of being from the concept being—whose essentia is nothing more than being itself. The logical truth of the pair of opposites being and nonbeing is completely empty, if the object of which it is a reflection cannot be given, i.e., the sense perception from which this antithesis was abstracted. Without such derivation from a perception, it is no more than a playing with ideas, which in fact yields no knowledge. For the mere logical criterion of truth, as Kant teaches it, the correspondence of knowledge with the universal and formal laws of understanding and reason, is, to be sure, the conditio sine qua non, the negative condition of all truth. But further than this, logic cannot go, and the error as to content rather than form cannot be detected by using any logical touchstone whatever. As soon as we seek the content of the logical truth of the paired propositions "What is, is; what is not, is not," we cannot in deed find any reality whatever which is constructed strictly in accordance with those propositions. I may say of a tree that "it is" in distinction to things which are not trees; I may say "it is coming to be" in distinction to itself seen at a different time; I may even say "it is not," as for example in "it is not yet a tree" when I am looking at a shrub. Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth. Above all, the word "being" designates only the most general relationship which connects all things, as does the word "nonbeing." But if the existence of things themselves cannot be proved, surely the interrelationship of things, their so-called being or nonbeing, will advance us not a step toward the land of truth. Through words and concepts we shall never reach beyond the wall of relations, to some sort of fabulous primal ground of things. Even in the pure forms of sense and understanding, in space, time and causality, we gain nothing that resembles a veritas aeterna. It is absolutely impossible for a subject to see or have insight into something while leaving itself out of the picture, so impossible that knowing and being are the most opposite of all spheres. And if Parmenides could permit himself, in the uninformed naiveté of his time, so far as critique of the intellect is concerned, to derive absolute being from a forever subjective concept, today, after Kant, it is certainly reckless ignorance to attempt it. Now and again, particularly among badly taught theologians who would like to play philosopher, the task of philosophy is designated as "comprehending the absolute by means of consciousness," even in the form of "The absolute is already present, how could it otherwise be sought?" (Hegel) or "Being must be given to us somehow, must be somehow attainable; if it were not we could not have the concept." (Beneke) The concept of being! As though it did not show its low empirical origin in its very etymology! For esse basically means "to breathe." And if man uses it of all things other than himself as well, he projects his conviction that he himself breathes and lives by means of a metaphor, i.e., a nonlogical process, upon all other things. He comprehends their existence as a "breathing" by analogy with his own. The original meaning of the word was soon blurred, but enough remains to make it obvious that man imagines the existence of other things by analogy with his own existence, in other words anthropomorphically and in any event, with nonlogical projection. But even for man—quite aside from his projection—the proposition "I breathe, therefore being exists" is wholly insufficient. The same objection must be made against it as must be made against ambulo, ergo sum or ergo est.

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The second concept, of more content than being, likewise invented by Parmenides though not used by him as skillfully as by his disciple Zeno, is that of the infinite. Nothing infinite can exist, for to assume it would yield the contradictory concept of a perfect infinity. Now since our reality, our given world, everywhere bears the stamp of just such perfect infinity, the word signifies in its very nature a contradiction to logic and hence to the real, and is therefore an illusion, a lie, a phantasm. Zeno especially makes use of indirect proof. He says, for example, "There can be no movement from one place to another, for if there were such movement, we would have a perfect infinity, but this is an impossibility. Achilles cannot catch up with the tortoise which has a small start over him, for in order to reach even the starting point of the tortoise, Achilles must have traversed innumerable, infinitely many spaces: first half of the interval, then a fourth of it, an eighth, a sixteenth, and so on ad infinitum. If he in reality does catch up with the tortoise, this is an illogical phenomenon, not a real one. It is not true Being; it is merely an illusion. For it is never possible to finish the infinite." Another popular device of this doctrine is the example of the flying and yet resting arrow. At each moment of its flight it occupies a position. In this position it is at rest. But can we say that the sum of infinitely many positions of rest is identical with motion? Can we say that resting, infinitely repeated, equals motion, which is its contrary? The infinite is here utilized as the catalyst of reality; in its presence reality dissolves. If the concepts are firm, eternal and existent (remembering that being and thinking coincide for Parmenides), if in other words the infinite can never be complete, if rest can never become motion, then the arrow has really never flown at all. It never left its initial position of rest; no moment of time has passed. Or, to express it differently: in this so-called, but merely alleged reality, there is really neither time nor space nor motion. Finally, even the arrow itself is an illusion, for it has its origin in the many, in the sense-produced phantasmagoria of the non-one. Let us assume that the arrow has true being. Then it would be immobile, timeless, uncreated rigid and eternal—which is impossible to conceive! Let us assume that motion is truly real. Then there would be no rest, hence no position for the arrow, hence no space—which is impossible to conceive! Let us assume that time is real. Then it could not be infinitely divisible. The time that the arrow needs would have to consist of a limited number of moments; each of these moments would have to be an atomon—which is impossible to conceive! All our conceptions lead to contradictions as soon as their empirically given content, drawn from our perceivable world, is taken as a veritas eterna. If absolute motion exists, then space does not; if absolute space exists, then motion does not; if absolute being exists, then the many does not. Wouldn't one think that confronted with such logic a man would attain the insight that such concepts do not touch the heart of things, do not undo the tangle of reality? Parmenides and Zeno, on the contrary, hold fast to the truth and universal validity of the concepts and discard the perceivable world as the antithesis to all true and universally valid concepts, as the objectification of illogic and contradiction. The starting point of all their proof is the wholly unprovable, improbable assumption that with our capacity to form concepts we possess the decisive and highest criterion as to being and nonbeing, i.e., as to objective reality and its antithesis. Instead of being corrected and tested against reality (considering that they are in fact derived from it) the concepts, on the contrary, are supposed to measure and direct reality and, in case reality contradicts logic, to condemn the former. In order to impose upon the concepts this capacity for judging reality, Parmenides had to ascribe to them the being which was for him the only true being. Thinking and that single uncreated perfect globe of existentiality were not to be comprehended as two different types of being, since of course there could be no dichotomy in being. Thus an incredibly bold notion became necessary, the notion of the identity of thinking and being. No form of perception, no symbol, no allegory could help here; the notion was utterly beyond conceiving, but—it was necessary. In its very lack of any and all possibility for being translated into sensation, it celebrated the highest triumph over the world and the claims of the senses. Thinking and that bulbous-spherical being, wholly dead-inert and rigid-immobile must, according to Parmenides' imperative, coincide and be utterly the same thing. What a shock to human imagination! But let their identity contradict sensation! Just that fact guarantees better than anything else that this was a conception not derived from the senses.

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One might advance against Parmenides a sturdy pair of arguments ad hominem or ex concessis. They would not bring the truth to light, to be sure, though they do expose the falsehood inherent in the absolute separation of senses and concepts, and in the identity of being and thinking. In the first place: if thinking in concepts, on the part of reason, is real, then the many and motion must partake of reality also, for reasoned thinking is mobile. It moves from concept to concept. It is mobile, in other words, within a plurality of realities. Against this, no objection can be made; it is quite impossible to designate thinking as a rigid persistence, as an eternally unmoved thinking-in-and-on-itself on the part of a unity. In the second place: if only fraud and semblance emanate from the senses, and if in truth there is only the real identity of being and thinking, what then are the senses themselves? Evidently a part of semblance, since they do not coincide with thinking, and since their product, the sensuous world, does not coincide with semblance. But if the senses are semblance, to whom do they dissemble? How, being unreal, can they deceive? Nonbeing cannot even practice deceit. Therefore the whence of illusion and semblance remains an enigma, in fact a contradiction. We shall call these two argumenta ad hominem: one, the argument based on the mobility of reason; two, the argument based on the origin of semblance. From the first follows the reality of motion and of the many, from the second the impossibility of Parmenidean semblance. In both cases, we are still accepting Parmenides' main doctrine concerning being as well-founded.

But this doctrine merely states, "The existent alone has being; the nonexistent does not." Now if motion has being, then what is true of being in general and in all cases is true of motion: it is uncreated, eternal, indestructible, without increase or decrease. But if semblance is denied of this world (by means of the question as to its origin), if the stage of so-called coming-to-be, of change—in other words our whole multi-formed restless colorful and rich existence—is protected against Parmenidean discard, then it is necessary to characterize this world of interaction and transformation as a sum of such truly existent essences, existing simultaneously in all eternity. In this supposition too there is no room for transformation in a narrow sense, i.e., for coming-to-be. But what we have now is a multiplicity which has true being; all the properties have true being, as has motion. About each and every moment of this world, even if we choose moments that lie a millennium apart, one would have to be able to say: all true essences contained in the world are existent simultaneously, unchanged, undiminished, without increase, without decrease. A millennium later exactly the same holds true; nothing has meanwhile changed. If, in spite of this, the world looks totally different from time to time, this is not an illusion, not mere semblance, but rather the consequence of everlasting motion. True being is moved sometimes this way, sometimes that way, together asunder, upwardly downward, withinly in all directions.

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