Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationscourse. He stands high and proud upon the pyramid f the worldprocess;as he lays the keystone of his knowledge at the top of it heseems to call out to nature all around him: 'We have reached thegoal, we are the goal, we are nature perfected.'Overproud European of the nineteenth century, you are raving!Your knowledge does not perfect nature, it only destroys your ownnature. Compare for once the heights of your capacity forknowledge with the depths of your incapacity fo r action. It is trueyou climb upon the sunbeams of knowledge up to Heaven, but youalso climb down to chaos. Your manner of moving, that of climbingupon knowledge, is your fatality; the ground sinks away from youinto the unknown; there is no longer any support fo r your life, onlyspider's threads which every new grasp of knowledge tears apart. -But enough of this seriousness, since it is also possible to view thematter' more cheerfully.The madly thoughtless shattering and dismantling of all foundations,their dissolution into a continual evolving that flowsceaselessly away, the tireless unspinning and historicizing of allthere has ever been by modern man, the great cross-spider at thenode of the cosmic web - all this may concern and dismay moralists,artists, the pious, even statesmen; we shall fo r once let it cheer us bylooking at it in the glittering magic mirror of a philosophical parodist inwhose head the age has come to an ironical awareness of itself, andhas done so with a clarity which (to speak Goethean) 'amounts toinfamy' . Hegel once taught us: 'when the spirit changes direction, wephilosophers too are there': our age changed direction, to self-irony,and behold! E. von Hartmann too was there and indited his celebratedphilosophy of the unconscious, or - to speak more clearly -his philosophy of unconscious irony. We have seldom read amerrier invention or a more philosophical piece of roguery thanthis of Hartmann; whoever is not enlightened by it as to the natureof becoming, whoever is not inwardly cleared out and set in order,indeed,. in regard to that matter, is truly ripe and ready for becominga has-been. The beginning and goal of the world-process,from the first stab of consciousness to its being hurled back intonothingness, together with an exact description of the task of ourgeneration within this world-process, all presented direct fromthat cleverly discovered well of inspiration, the unconscious, andgleaming with apocalyptic light, all so deceptively mimickingstraight-faced earnestness as though it were a genuine serious philosophyand not only ajoke philosophy such a production marks108