"will," while it may be more elementary than other phenomena, is still phenomenal, "the most general phenomenal form of something that is otherwise entirely undecipherable."[1]
Thus the basis for a metaphysical construction fails altogether, and Nietzsche really falls back into the purely negative attitude that is the outcome of Kant's criticism, from which Schopenhauer had temporarily delivered him. It is likely that some time was required for this anti-metaphysical attitude to establish itself definitively. He had read as a student at Leipzig Lange's History of Materialism—read it twice over, and thoroughly absorbed its leading ideas. One of the characteristic points of view of this remarkable book is that, granting that man cannot know ultimate reality, he may lawfully exercise his imagination upon it in order to satisfy the needs of his heart (Gemüth)—may poetize about it. We find Nietzsche sometimes speaking of philosophy, accordingly, as art rather than knowledge, as kindred to poetry and religion. The essentially Schopenhauerian metaphysics, which has just been described, may have been held by him as poetry in this way, after he had ceased to believe in it literally—as philosophers sometimes do now with the religious beliefs of their youth. There is a fragment belonging to this time, entitled "Critique of the Schopenhauerian philosophy," in which, after asserting that Schopenhauer as little as his predecessors had reached the final reality of things, he says that his system has the value of a poetic intuition rather than of a logical argumentation.j Indeed, it is possible to hold that Nietzsche never took the Schopenhauerian metaphysics literally, and that his special variety of it, Artisten-Metaphysik, was but a poetic play. The question is one of literary interpretation. The probability seems to me to be that he cherished the belief originally and then felt obliged to modify it, and at last to give it up altogether.k In the succeeding period of his life we do not hear of it even as poetry.
III
In turning away from metaphysics proper, Nietzsche developes interesting, if not absolutely novel, views of the sensible
- ↑ Ibid., IX, 214. Cf. ibid., IX, 108, § 65; 204, § 147; 194, § 137 ("the whole world is phenomenon, through and through, atom on atom, without interval").
