Preface to the Second Edition

Not to my contemporaries or my compatriots, but to mankind I consign my now complete work, confident that it will not be without value to humanity, even if this value should be recognized only tardily, as is the inevitable fate of the good in whatever form. It can have been only for mankind, and not for the quickly passing generation engrossed with its delusion of the moment, that my mind, almost against my will, has pursued its work without interruption throughout a long life. As time has passed, not even lack of sympathy has been able to shake my belief in its value. I constantly saw the false and the bad, and finally the absurd and the senseless,4 standing in universal admiration and honour, and I thought to myself that, if those who are capable of recognizing the genuine and right were not so rare that we can spend some twenty years looking about for them in vain, those who are capable of producing it might not be so few that their works afterwards form an exception to the transitoriness of earthly things. In this way, the comforting prospect of posterity, which everyone who sets himself a high aim needs to fortify him, would then be lost. Whoever takes up and seriously pursues a matter that does not lead to material advantage, ought not to count on the sympathy of his contemporaries. But for the most part he will see that in the meantime the superficial aspect of such matter becomes current in the world and enjoys its day; and this is as it should be. For the matter itself also must be pursued for its own sake, otherwise there can be no success, since every purpose or intention is always dangerous to insight. Accordingly, as the history of literature testifies throughout, everything of value needs a long time to gain authority, especially if it is of the instructive and not of the entertaining sort; and meanwhile the false flourishes. For to unite the matter with the superficial aspect of the matter is difficult, if not impossible. Indeed, this is just the curse of this world of want and need, that everything must serve and slave for these. Therefore it is not so constituted that any noble and sublime endeavour, like that after light and truth, can thrive in it unhindered, and exist for its own sake. But even when such an endeavour has once been able to assert itself, and the idea of it is thus introduced, material interests and personal aims will at once take possession of it to make it their tool or their mask. Accordingly, after Kant had brought philosophy once more into repute, it was bound to become very soon the tool of political aims from above, and of personal aims from below: though, to be accurate, not philosophy, but its double that passes for it. This should not even surprise us, for the incredibly great majority of men are by their nature absolutely incapable of any but material aims; they cannot even comprehend any others. Accordingly, the pursuit of truth alone is a pursuit far too lofty and eccentric for us to expect that all or many, or indeed even a mere few, will sincerely take part in it. But if we see, as we do for instance in Germany at the moment, a remarkable activity, a general bustling, writing, and talking on matters of philosophy, then it may be confidently assumed that, in spite of all the solemn looks and assurances, only real, not ideal, aims are the actual primum mobile,⁵ the concealed motive, of such a movement; that is, that it is personal, official, ecclesiastical, political, in short material interests which are here kept in view, and that in consequence mere party ends set in such vigorous motion the many pens of pretended philosophers. Thus intentions, not intelligence, are the guiding star of these disturbers; and truth is certainly the last thing thought of in this connexion. It finds no partisans; on the contrary, it can pursue its way as silently and unheeded through such philosophical contention and tumult as through the winter night of the darkest century, involved in the most rigid faith of the Church, where it was communicated only as esoteric doctrine to a few adepts, or even entrusted only to parchment. In fact, I might say that no time can be more unfavourable to philosophy than that in which it is shamefully misused as a political means on the one hand, and a means of livelihood on the other. Or are we to believe that, with such effort and turmoil, the truth, by no means their aim, will also come to light? Truth is no harlot who throws her arms round the neck of him who does not desire her; on the contrary, she is so coy a beauty that even the man who sacrifices everything to her can still not be certain of her favours.

Now, if governments make philosophy the means to their political ends, then scholars see in professorships of philosophy a trade that nourishes the outer man just as does any other. They therefore crowd after them in the assurance of their good way of thinking, in other words, of the purpose or intention to serve those ends. And they keep their word; not truth, not clarity, not Plato or Aristotle, but the aims and ends they were appointed to serve are their guiding star; and these at once become the criterion both of what is true, valuable, and worthy of consideration, and of its opposite. Therefore whatever does not comply with these aims, be it even the most important and extraordinary thing in their department, is either condemned, or, where this seems precarious, suppressed by being unanimously ignored. Look only at their concerted indignation at pantheism; will any simpleton believe that this proceeds from conviction? How could philosophy, degraded to become a means of earning one’s bread, generally fail to degenerate into sophistry? Just because this is bound to happen, and the rule “I sing the song of him whose bread I eat” has held good at all times, the making of money by philosophy was among the ancients the characteristic of the sophist. We have still to add that, since everywhere in this world nothing is to be expected, nothing can be demanded, and nothing is to be had for money except mediocrity, we have to put up with this here also. Accordingly, in all the German universities we see the cherished mediocrity straining to bring about from its own resources, and indeed in accordance with a prescribed standard and aim, the philosophy that still does not exist at all; a spectacle at which it would be almost cruel to mock.

While philosophy has long been obliged to serve to such an extent generally as a means to public ends on the one hand, and to private ends on the other, I have followed my course of thought, undisturbed by this fact, for more than thirty years. This I have done simply because I was obliged to, and could not do otherwise, from an instinctive impulse which, however, was supported by the confidence that anything true that a man conceives, and anything obscure that he elucidates, will at some time or other be grasped by another thinking mind, and impress, delight, and console it. To such a man we speak, just as those like us have spoken to us, and have thus become our consolation in this wilderness of life. Meanwhile, the matter is pursued on its own account and for its own sake. Now it is a strange thing as regards philosophical meditations that only that which a man has thought out and investigated for himself is afterwards of benefit to others, and not that which was originally destined for those others. The former is conspicuously nearest in character to perfect honesty, for we do not try to deceive ourselves, or offer ourselves empty husks. In this way, all sophistication and all idle display of words are then omitted, and as a result every sentence that is written at once repays the trouble of reading. Accordingly, my writings bear the stamp of honesty and openness so distinctly on their face, that they are thus in glaring contrast to those of the three notorious sophists of the post-Kantian period. I am always to be found at the standpoint of reflection, in other words, of rational deliberation and honest information, never at that of inspiration, called intellectual intuition or even absolute thought; its correct names would be humbug and charlatanism. Therefore, working in this spirit, and meanwhile constantly seeing the false and the bad held in general acceptance, indeed humbug⁶ and charlatanism⁷ in the highest admiration, I long ago renounced the approbation of my contemporaries. It is impossible that an age which for twenty years has extolled a Hegel, that intellectual Caliban, as the greatest of philosophers so loudly that the echo was heard throughout Europe, could make the man who looked at this eager for its approbation. No longer has it any crowns of honour to bestow; its applause is prostituted, its censure signifies nothing. I mean what I say here, as is obvious from the fact that, if I had in any way aspired to the approbation of my contemporaries, I should have had to strike out twenty passages that wholly contradict all their views, and indeed must in part be offensive to them. But I should reckon it a crime on my part to sacrifice even a single syllable to that approbation. My guiding star has in all seriousness been truth. Following it, I could first aspire only to my own approval, entirely averted from an age that has sunk low as regards all higher intellectual efforts, and from a national literature demoralized but for the exceptions, a literature in which the art of combining lofty words with low sentiments has reached its zenith. Of course, I can never escape from the errors and weaknesses necessarily inherent in my nature as in that of everyone else, but I shall not increase them by unworthy accommodations.

Now, as regards this second edition, in the first place I am glad that after twenty-five years I find nothing to retract; my fundamental convictions have been confirmed, at any rate as far as I myself am concerned. Accordingly, the alterations in the first volume, which contains only the text of the first edition, nowhere touch what is essential, but relate to matters of only secondary importance. For the most part, indeed, they consist of very short explanatory additions inserted here and there. The criticism of the Kantian philosophy alone has received important corrections and lengthy additions, for these could not be brought into a supplementary book, like those that have been received in the second volume by each of the four books representing my own teaching. In the case of these, I have chosen the latter form of enlargement and improvement, because the twenty-five years that have elapsed since they were written have produced so marked a change in my method of presentation, and in the tone of my exposition, that it would not do to amalgamate the contents of the second volume with those of the first into one whole, as both would inevitably have suffered from such a fusion. I therefore present the two works separately, and in the earlier exposition, even in many places where I should now express myself quite differently, I have altered nothing. This I have done because I wanted to guard against spoiling the work of my earlier years by the carping criticism of old age. What might need correction in this respect will set itself right in the reader’s mind with the aid of the second volume. Both volumes have, in the full sense of the word, a supplementary relation to each other, in so far as this is due to one age in man’s life being, in an intellectual regard, the supplement of another. We shall therefore find that not only does each volume contain what the other does not, but also that the merits of the one consist precisely in what is wanting in the other. If therefore the first half of my work excels the second half in what can be vouchsafed only by the fire of youth and the energy of first conception, then the second will surpass the first in the maturity and complete elaboration of the ideas, which belongs only to the fruit of a long life, and of its application and industry. For when I had the strength originally to grasp the fundamental idea of my system, to pursue it at once into its four branches, to return from these to the unity of their stem, and then to make a clear presentation of the whole, I could not yet be in a position to work through all the parts of the system with that completeness, thoroughness, and fulness which are attained only by many years of meditation on it. Such meditation is required to test and illustrate the system by innumerable facts, to support it by proofs of the most varied nature, to throw a clear light on it from all sides, and then to place in bold contrast the different points of view, to separate the manifold materials clearly and present them in a systematic order. Therefore, although it was certainly bound to be more pleasant for the reader to have the whole of my work in one piece, instead of its consisting as now of two halves to be brought together in use, let him reflect that this would have required my achieving at one period of my life what is possible only in two, since for this I should have had to possess at one period of life the qualities which nature has divided between two quite different periods. Accordingly, the necessity for presenting my work in two halves supplementing each other is to be compared to the necessity by which an achromatic object-glass, since it cannot be made out of one piece, is produced by making it up out of a convex lens of crown-glass and a concave lens of flint-glass, the combined effect of which above all achieves what was intended. On the other hand, the reader will find some compensation for the inconvenience of using two volumes at the same time in the variety and relief afforded from the treatment of the same subject by the same mind, in the same spirit, but in very different years. For the reader who is not yet acquainted with my philosophy, however, it is generally advisable to read first of all through the first volume without dragging in the supplements, and to use these only on a second reading. For otherwise it would be too difficult for him to grasp the system in its continuity, as only in the first volume is it presented as such, while in the second the principal doctrines are established individually in greater detail, and developed more completely. Even the reader who might not decide on a second reading of the first volume will find it better to read through the second volume by itself, and only after the first volume. This he can do in the ordinary sequence of its chapters, which certainly stand to one another in a looser connexion, and the gaps in this will be completely filled by recollection of the first volume, if the reader has really grasped that. Moreover, he will everywhere find reference to the corresponding passages of the first volume. For this purpose, in the second edition of the first volume I have furnished with numbers the paragraphs which in the first edition were divided only by lines.

I have already explained in the preface to the first edition that my philosophy starts from Kant’s, and therefore presupposes a thorough knowledge of it; I repeat this here. For Kant’s teaching produces a fundamental change in every mind that has grasped it. This change is so great that it may be regarded as an intellectual rebirth. It alone is capable of really removing the inborn realism which arises from the original disposition of the intellect. Neither Berkeley nor Malebranche is competent to do this, for these men remain too much in the universal, whereas Kant goes into the particular. And this he does in a way which is unexampled either before or after him, and one which has quite a peculiar, one might say immediate, effect on the mind. In consequence of this, the mind undergoes a fundamental undeceiving, and thereafter looks at all things in another light. But only in this way does a man become susceptible to the more positive explanations that I have to give. On the other hand, the man who has not mastered the Kantian philosophy, whatever else he may have studied, is, so to speak, in a state of innocence; in other words, he has remained in the grasp of that natural and childlike realism in which we are all born, and which qualifies one for every possible thing except philosophy. Consequently, such a man is related to the other as a person under age is to an adult. That nowadays this truth sounds paradoxical, as it certainly would not have done in the first thirty years after the appearance of the Critique of Reason, is due to the fact that there has since grown up a generation that does not really know Kant. It has never done more than peruse him hastily and impatiently, or listen to an account at second-hand; and this again is due to its having, in consequence of bad guidance, wasted its time on the philosophemes of ordinary, and hence officious and intrusive, heads, or even of bombastic sophists, which have been irresponsibly commended to it. Hence the confusion in the first conceptions, and generally the unspeakable crudity and clumsiness that appear from under the cloak of affectation and pretentiousness in the philosophical attempts of the generation thus brought up. But the man who imagines he can become acquainted with Kant’s philosophy from the descriptions of others, labours under a terrible mistake. On the contrary, I must utter a serious warning against accounts of this kind, especially those of recent times. In fact in the most recent years in the writings of the Hegelians I have come across descriptions of the Kantian philosophy which really reach the incredible. How could minds strained and ruined in the freshness of youth by the nonsense of Hegelism still be capable of following Kant’s profound investigations? They are early accustomed to regard the hollowest of verbiage as philosophical thoughts, the most miserable sophisms as sagacity, and silly craziness as dialectic; and by accepting frantic word-combinations in which the mind torments and exhausts itself in vain to conceive something, their heads are disorganized. They do not require any Critique of Reason or any philosophy; they need a medicina mentis, first as a sort of purgative, un petit cours de senscommunologie,⁸ and after that one must see whether there can still be any talk of philosophy with them. Thus the Kantian doctrine will be sought in vain elsewhere than in Kant’s own works; but these are instructive throughout, even where he errs, even where he fails. In consequence of his originality, it is true of him in the highest degree, as indeed of all genuine philosophers, that only from their own works does one come to know them, not from the accounts of others. For the thoughts of those extraordinary minds cannot stand filtration through an ordinary head. Born behind the broad, high, finely arched brows from under which beaming eyes shine forth, they lose all power and life, and no longer appear like themselves, when moved into the narrow lodging and low roofing of the confined, contracted, and thick-waited skulls from which peer out dull glances directed to personal ends. In fact, it can be said that heads of this sort act like uneven mirrors in which everything is twisted and distorted, loses the symmetry of its beauty, and represents a caricature. Only from their creators themselves can we receive philosophical thoughts. Therefore the man who feels himself drawn to philosophy must himself seek out its immortal teachers in the quiet sanctuary of their works. The principal chapters of any one of these genuine philosophers will furnish a hundred times more insight into their doctrines than the cumbersome and distorted accounts of them produced by commonplace minds that are still for the most part deeply entangled in the fashionable philosophy of the time, or in their own pet opinions. But it is astonishing how decidedly the public prefers to grasp at those descriptions at second-hand. In fact, an elective affinity seems to be at work here by virtue of which the common nature is drawn to its like, and accordingly will prefer to hear from one of its kind even what a great mind has said. Perhaps this depends on the same principle as the system of mutual instruction according to which children learn best from other children.

Now one more word for the professors of philosophy. I have always felt compelled to admire not only the sagacity, the correct and fine tact with which, immediately on its appearance, they recognized my philosophy as something quite different from, and indeed dangerous to, their own attempts, or in popular language as something that did not suit their purpose; but also the sure and astute policy by virtue of which they at once found out the only correct procedure towards it, the perfect unanimity with which they applied this, and finally the determination with which they have remained faithful to it. This procedure, which incidentally commended itself also by the ease with which it can be carried out, consists, as is well known, in wholly ignoring and thus in secreting—according to Goethe’s malicious expression, which really means suppressing what is of importance and of significance. The effectiveness of this silent method is enhanced by the corybantic shouting with which the birth of the spiritual children of those of the same mind is reciprocally celebrated, shouting which forces the public to look and to notice the important airs with which they greet one another over it. Who could fail to recognize the purpose of this procedure? Is there then nothing to be said against the maxim primum vivere, deinde philosophari? ⁹ The gentlemen want to live, and indeed to live by philosophy. To philosophy they are assigned with their wives and children, and in spite of Petrarch’s povera e nuda vai filosofia,¹⁰ they have taken a chance on it. Now my philosophy is certainly not so ordered that anyone could live by it. It lacks the first indispensable requisite for a well-paid professorial philosophy, namely a speculative theology, which should and must be the principal theme of all philosophy—in spite of the troublesome Kant with his Critique of Reason; although such a philosophy thus has the task of for ever talking about that of which it can know absolutely nothing. In fact, my philosophy does not allow of the fiction which has been so cleverly devised by the professors of philosophy and has become indispensable to them, namely the fiction of a reason that knows, perceives, or apprehends immediately and absolutely. One need only impose this fiction on the reader at the very beginning, in order to drive in the most comfortable manner in the world, in a carriage and four so to speak, into that region beyond all possibility of experience, wholly and for ever shut off from our knowledge by Kant. In such a region, then, are to be found, immediately revealed and most beautifully arranged, precisely those fundamental dogmas of modern, Judaizing, optimistic Christianity. My meditative philosophy, deficient in these essential requisites, lacking in consideration and the means of subsistence, has for its pole star truth alone, naked, unrewarded, unbefriended, often persecuted truth, and towards this it steers straight, looking neither to the right nor to the left. Now what in the world has such a philosophy to do with that alma mater, the good, substantial university philosophy, which, burdened with a hundred intentions and a thousand considerations, proceeds on its course cautiously tacking, since at all times it has before its eyes the fear of the Lord, the will of the ministry, the dogmas of the established Church, the wishes of the publisher, the encouragement of students, the goodwill of colleagues, the course of current politics, the momentary tendency of the public, and Heaven knows what else? Or what has my silent and serious search for truth in common with the yelling school disputations of the chairs and benches, whose most secret motives are always personal aims? On the contrary, the two kinds of philosophy are fundamentally different. Therefore with me there is no compromise and there is no fellowship, and no one derives any advantage from me, except perhaps the man who is looking for nothing but the truth; none, therefore, of the philosophical parties of the day, for they all pursue their own aims. I, however, have only insight and discernment to offer, which suit none of those aims, because they are simply not modelled on any of them. But if my philosophy itself were to become susceptible to the professor’s chair, there would have to be a complete change in the times. It would be a fine thing, then, if such a philosophy, by which no one can live at all, were to gain light and air, not to mention universal regard! Consequently, this had to be guarded against, and all had to oppose it as one man. But a man has not so easy a game with disputing and refuting; moreover, these are precarious and uncertain means, for the very reason that they direct public attention to the matter, and reading my works might ruin the public’s taste for the lucubrations of the professors of philosophy. For the man who has tasted the serious will no longer relish the comic, especially when it is of a tedious nature. Therefore the system of silence, so unanimously resorted to, is the only right one, and I can only advise them to stick to it, and go on with it as long as it works—in other words, until ignoring is taken to imply ignorance; then there will still just be time to come round. Meanwhile, everyone is at liberty to pluck a little feather here and there for his own use, for the superfluity of ideas at home is not usually very oppressive. Thus the system of ignoring and of maintaining silence can last for a good while, at any rate for the span of time that I may yet have to live; in this way much is already gained. If in the meantime an indiscreet voice here and there has allowed itself to be heard, it is soon drowned by the loud talking of the professors who, with their airs of importance, know how to entertain the public with quite different things. But I advise a somewhat stricter observance of the unanimity of procedure, and, in particular, supervision of the young men, who at times are terribly indiscreet. For even so, I am unable to guarantee that the commended procedure will last for ever, and I cannot be answerable for the final result. It is a ticklish question, the steering of the public, good and docile as it is on the whole. Although we see the Gorgiases and Hippiases nearly always at the top; although as a rule the absurd culminates, and it seems impossible for the voice of the individual ever to penetrate through the chorus of foolers and the fooled, still there is left to the genuine works of all times a quite peculiar, silent, slow, and powerful influence; and as if by a miracle, we see them rise at last out of the turmoil like a balloon that floats up out of the thick atmosphere of this globe into purer regions. Having once arrived there, it remains at rest, and no one can any longer draw it down again.

Frankfurt a. M., February 1844.