And in this wise, too, arises that disunity which seems to us inseparable from the essence of man, but is really only the expression of the dominance of word-language in his waking-consciousness. This instrument of communication between Ego and Tu has, by reason of its perfection, fashioned out of the animal understanding of sensation, a thinking-in-words which stands proxy for sensation. Subtle thinking — "splitting hairs," as it is called — is conversing with oneself in word-significances. It is the activity that no kind of language but the language of words can subserve, and it becomes, with the perfection of the language, distinctive of the life-habit of whole classes of human beings. The divorce of speech, rigid and devitalized, from speaking, which makes it impossible to include the whole truth in a verbal utterance, has particularly far-reaching consequences in the sign-system of words. Abstract thinking consists in the use of a finite word-framework into which it is sought to squeeze the whole infinite content of life. Concepts kill Being and falsify Waking-Being. Long ago in the springtime of language-history, while understanding had still to struggle in order to hold its own with sensation, this mechanization was without importance for life. But now, from a being who occasionally thought, man has become a thinking being, and it is the ideal of every thought-system to subject life, once and for all, to the domination of intellect. This is achieved in theory by according validity only to the known and branding the actual as a sham and a delusion. It is achieved in practice by forcing the voices of the blood to be silent in the presence of universal ethical principles.[1]
Both, logic and ethics alike, are systems of absolute and eternal truths for the intellect, and correspondingly untruths for history. However completely the inner eye may triumph over the outer in the domain of thought, in the realm of facts the belief in eternal truths is a petty and absurd stage-play that exists only in the heads of individuals. A true system of thoughts emphatically cannot exist, for no sign can replace actuality. Profound and honest thinkers are always brought to the conclusion that all cognition is conditioned a priori by its own form and can never reach that which the words mean — apart, again, from the case of technics, in which the concepts are instruments and not aims in themselves. And this ignorabimus is in conformity also with the intuition of every true sage, that abstract principles of life are acceptable only as figures of speech, trite maxims of daily use underneath which life flows, as it has always flowed, onward. Race, in the end, is stronger than languages, and thus it is that, under all the great names, it has been thinkers — who are personalities — and not systems — which are mutable — that have taken effect upon life.
- ↑ Only technics are entirely true, for here the words are merely the key to actuality, and the sentences are continually modified until they are, not "truth," but actuality. A hypothesis claims, not rightness, but usefulness.
