Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationspursue a consciously dishonest kind of natural science; ' he assumeswithout question that all events possess the highest intellectual valueand are thus absolutely rational and purposeful, and then that theycontain a revelation of eternal goodness itself. He is thus in need of acomplete cosmodicy and at a disadvantage compared with thosewho are concerned only with a theodicy, who conceive the entireexistence of man as, for example, a punishment or a process ofpurification. At this point, and thus embarrassed, Strauss goes so faras to venture for once a metaphysical hypothesis - the driest andmost palsied there has ever been and at bottom no more than anunconscious parody of a saying of Lessing's. 'That other saying ofLessing's', he says on page 219, 'that, if God held all truth in his righthand and in his left the never-sleeping quest for truth with the conditionof continually erring in this quest, and then offered him achoice between them, he would humbly fall upon God's left handand beg for the contents of it - this saying has always been regardedas among the finest he left to us. There has been found in it anexpression of his restless desire for actiQll and investigation. Thissaying has always made so powerful an impression upon me becausebehind its subjective significance I have heard resounding an objectiveone of immense range. For does it not contain the best reply toSchopenhauer's crude conception of an ill-advised God who knowsof nothing better to do than to enter into so wretched a world as thisis? May it not be that the Creator himself shares Lessing's opinionand prefers continual striving to peaceful possession?' A God, that isto say, who reserves to himself continual error and at the same time astriving for truth, and who perhaps humbly falls upon Strauss's lefthand and says to him: all truth is for you. If ever a God or a man wereill-advised it is this Straussian God, with his partiality for error andfailure, and the Straussian man, who has to pay for this partialityhere indeed one can 'hear resounding a significance of immenserange', here there flows Strauss's universal soothing oil, here onesenses something of the rationality of all evolution and natural law!Does one really? Or would our world not be, rather, as Lichtenbergonce called it, the work of a subordinate being who as yet lacked afu ll understanding of his task, and thus an experiment? a novice'stest-piece which was still being worked on? So that Strauss himselfwould have to concede that our world is an arena, not of rationality,but of error, and that its laws and purposefulness are no source ofconsolation, since they proceed from a God who is not merely inerror but takes pleasure in being in error. It is a truly delicious spec-32