and blood, rank and country to Christianity, so will we sacrifice, not for our doubts or unbelief, but for our faith.[1]
Nietzsche once said, in referring to Human, All-too-Human, "It is necessary to take up this whole positivism into myself, and none the less be a bearer of idealism."[2] By positivism he means positive knowledge, i.e., the attitude which insists on actual facts, as distinguished from fancies and speculations. We have seen something of his passion for verity in the previous period, his wish to face facts, however bare, comfortless, or empty of higher significance they might be; and we are not to imagine that he ever becomes an uncritical idealist again—he has no lapses such as are common among those who become tired of doubt; in Dawn of Day, with his face setting in the new direction, he speaks of "idealizing" as reprovingly as ever he had when his positivistic attitude was at its height.[3] And yet this attitude takes now a secondary place, for he feels that it is not equal to the whole of life. Philosophy is to his mind something more than science, or even criticism and critical science, counter as this view was to the prevailing opinion in his day. He advances a variety of considerations at different times and in different connections—I state them here in my own order. In the first place, certain knowledge is not always to be had, and in action we have often to go on chances and possibilities—indeed there is a certain weakness in always wanting to know, in not being ready for risks.[4] Secondly, facts of themselves are miscellaneous, scattering—it is really a bric-à-brac of conceptions that so-called positivism is bringing to market today; they need to be interpreted, related, put in order.[5] The special sciences cannot make themselves independent of philosophy, which is a general view from a height above them, involving an "Ueberblick, Umblick, Niederblick."[6] Philosophers have usually been against their time, and now there is a duty incumbent on them to oppose the tendency to
- ↑ Joyful Science, § 377.
- ↑ I rely here upon Riehl (op. cit., p. 184), who cites Werke, XI, 499 (presumably the first edition, which is not accessible to me). There is something similar in Werke, XIV, 351, § 211.
- ↑ Cf. §§ 299, 427.
- ↑ Joyful Science, §§ 347, 375.
- ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 10.
- ↑ Ibid., §§ 204-5.
