The Small Corner of the Universe

“In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of ‘world history’-yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.”

“One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no furthur mission that would lead beyond human live (life?). It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it…There is nothing in nature, so despicable or insignificant that it can not immediately be blown up like a bag by a slight breath of this power of knowledge; and just as every porter wants an admirer, the proudest human being, the philosopher thinks that he sees the eyes of the universe telescopically focused from all sides on his actions and thoughts… That haughtiness which goes with knowledge and feeling, which shrouds the eyes and senses of man in a blinding fog, therefore deceives him about the value of existence by carrying in itself the most flattering evaluation of knowledge itself. Its most universal effect is deception…”

Friedriche Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in an Extra Moral Sense” 1873

And if you will give me another moment, I now add (Aristotle’s explanation of his First Philosophy, his Metaphysics):

“There is a certain science which considers the things which exist insofar as they exist, and what holds them in their own right. It is not the same as any of the particular sciences, for none of them investigates universally about the things, which exist insofar as they exist-rather, they cut off a certain part of these things and consider what holds of this part (so for example, the mathematical sciences).”

Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Gamma, 1003a21-6

The above Nietzsche citation may not be pessimistic or disheartening, but rather it may be an invitation to come onto a shining ray of pure glory in the human spirit and intellect. You may see that it is a profound warning to all including those pompous philosophers (and those terrible politicians), and I might add, those ignorant blissful artists; that it is a warning to stop and really smell the roses while they are blooming, to pause in the scheme of things, if there be a scheme of things, and to consider the nature of things, that is, to’ consider the things which exist insofar as they exist.’ We must go beyond just wanting to know the how and the what, and beyond everything except, perhaps, what Nietzsche sought, the will to power. Aristotle is saying that all of the sciences (today also) do not ask about the things that exist in so far as they exist. Nietzsche is referring to these sciences and not to Aristotle’s first philosophy, that is metaphysics, the science that deals with things insofar as they exist.

Nietzsche’s words are a warning not to just ask ‘what we can know (though this is important), but what we can determine beyond our own pompous sense of hubris, and beyond our limited knowledge of things. It is a statement about what we can know beyond any method or system of knowing about things, for thus far all of these sciences are limited, as Kant offered. It challenges all epistemology throughout history, but not in the skeptical sense, rather in the real sense of questioning our existence. It is a proclamation or a challenge for all of us to go beyond the Socratic irony of knowing that we do not know, to knowing that our asking about what we can know is a fulfilling quest, and the quest is gloriously infinite.