Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

David Strauss, the confessor and the writercommendation even upon Kant. The quite incredible fact thatStrauss has no notion how to derive from Kant's critique of reasonsupport for his testament of modern ideas, and that everywhere heflatters nothing but the crudest kind of realism, is among the moststriking characteristics of this new gospel, which presents .itselfmoreover only as the arduously attained outcome of continuous historicaland scientific research and therewith denies any involvementwith philosophy at all. For the philistine chieftain and his 'we' thereis no such thing as the Kantian philosophy. He has no notion of thefundamental antinomies of idealism or of the extreme relativity ofall science and reason. Or: it is precisely reason that ought to tell himhow little of the in-itself of things can be determined by reason. But itis true that people of a certain age find it impossible to understandKant, especially if in their youth they have, like Strauss, understood,or thought they understood, the 'gigantic spirit' Hegel, and have alsohad to occupy themselves with Schleiermacher, 'who', as Strausssays, 'possessed almost too much acuteness'. It will sound strange toStrauss when I tell him that even now he is in a state of 'absolutedependence' on Hegel and Schleiermacher, and that his doctrine ofthe universe, his way of regarding things sub specie bienni, * his grovellingbefore the realities of present-day Germany, above all his shamelessphilistine optimism, are to be elucidated by reference to certainearly youthful impressions, habits and pathological phenomena. Hewho has once contracted Hegelism and Schleiermacherism is neverquite cured of them.There is one passage in the confessional book in which this incurableoptimism goes strolling along with a downright holiday airof complacency (pp. 142-3). 'If the world is a thing that it were betterdid not exist', says Strauss, 'well then, the thought of the philosopher,which constitutes a piece of this world, is a thought that it were betterwas not thought. The pessimistic philosopher does not see that hedeclares his own thought bad when his thought declares the worldbad; but if a thought which declares the world bad is itself bad thinking,then the world is, on the contrary, good. Optimism may as a rulemake things too easy for itself, and here Schopenhauer's insistenceon the role which pain and evil play in the world is quite in order; butevery true philosophy is necessarily optimistic, since otherwise itdenies its own right to exist.' If this refutation of Schopenhauer is not"sub specie bienni: literally, 'under the aspect of two years' - Nietzsche's ironic adaptationof the well-known phrase 'sub specie aeternitatis'.27