PART TWO
Interposed considerations
§7. Four objections to the interpretation
a) The dictum is too far removed and is antiquated, crude and meager, unreal
Appearance—noncompliance—time—limitlessness: are we not floundering here very unsteadily amid empty words? With what right do the pronouncements at issue present themselves? How do they intend to demonstrate their truth? On what path are they acquired? Are they not all mere decrees, conceits of a flighty arbitrariness, and not “strict science”? Yet it makes no difference whatever they may be, whether science or philosophy or poetry or something else for which we have no name, since these pronouncements are inaccessible to us, we feel no nearness to them, they are no longer of any concern.
Moreover, if we accept what we had to concede right at the start, namely, that little has been handed down and that this little is even incomplete (cf. below, p. 31), then does not the entire project of seeking out the beginning of Western philosophy become problematic in the highest degree? To be sure. It is accordingly time to pose relentlessly the objections to which our project is exposed. We will reduce them to four: |
1) Between us and that beginning of Western philosophy lies a temporal span of two and a half millennia. The world and mankind have radically altered in the interim. That early time is so far removed it must remain inaccessible. Arranging a lecture course such as this will not simply leap over the two thousand five hundred years.
2) Yet even if it were possible, on the basis of other sources, to bridge this gap to some extent, what would the effort avail us? Only to establish finally that in the meantime philosophy has advanced very far? What then are we supposed to do with these long-surpassed issues and dicta? We of today especially, for whom the newest can never be “new” enough—how could we more sharply reproach and spurn something than by pointing out it is antiquated?
3) It might be conceded that this antiquated thought did continue on in what followed and did determine later developments and can therefore claim significance for itself. Even so, | this significance will vanish as soon as we note how crude and much too meager these propositions and doctrines look in comparison, for instance, to the inner vitality of the Platonic dialogues or the compactness and fullness