of the Aristotelian treatises or especially in comparison to the breadth and complex stratification of the works of Kant or Hegel. We who “know” all this resist such (all too) “primitive,” simple, and insipid truths. And we feel it is almost an affront to be required to take seriously these ever-so-crude attempts made at the beginning—we to whom truth cannot be sufficiently intricate and provocative in order to count as truth at all.
4) Let even this be conceded: the simplicity and crude character of these propositions should not prevent us from pondering their content. In the end, however, does that not signify a mere scholarly occupation which entices us into all possible artifices of interpretation and perhaps momentarily enchants us with previously unfamiliar ideas? Yet it all remains a world of shadows and semblances, so that we do not come upon anything which could affect us of “today,” let alone conclusively and lastingly change us. Instead, it is all unreal, a literary-philological invention, and therefore without any compelling power over us.
That is a compact series of weighty objections: unbridgeable span of time / antiquated / crude and meager / unreal (shadowy). Our project is exposed to such objections provided it intends to be something other than a far-fetched, obsolete, and altogether irrelevant report on a long-vanished age of human history. Can these objections be disabled, perhaps by refuting them with counterarguments?
Yet can this vanished time indeed be expected to return by way of a refutation of objections and become new and fertile and real? In fact, a reality never arises out of the mere refutation of false views. Cf. below.
b) Presuppositions of the objections in a self-delusion
To charge headlong at those objections would be useless without wondering at all about the content and essence of the presuppositions from which the objections arise and draw sustenance. What is speaking out in those objections? It is we ourselves, which is why they seem judicious and pressing. We therefore—we, the way we behave when we say: unbridgeable span of time / antiquated / crude and meager / unreal (shadowy)—we act in the reeling off of these objections as if we were undoubtedly ready to lend an ear to the beginning of Western philosophy. We act as if we were not only ready but naturally also predisposed to let it say something to us. We act as if we were even capable of deciding whether this beginning has something to say to us or not. We even think that such would be an honorable endeavor, and we flatter ourselves on the criti cal prudence with which we look upon the project of seeking out the beginning. We do all this, but what if we are thereby deluding ourselves? And what if this self-delusion was