Lecture VII

If only our contemporaries were not so prone to skim thoughtlessly over so much that is of value! It is so easy to skim lightly over a passage in Nietzsche that can profoundly move us, take possession of us and shake our souls. The passage occurs in his posthumous work Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, where he describes Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras and Empedocles. Right at the beginning of this work there is a passage where, if we truly enter into it, we can see that Nietzsche perceived something of what these first lonely Greek thinkers experienced in their souls. Look up the passage in Nietzsche where he says, “How must it have been with the souls of those heroes of philosophy who had to make the transition from the period of living vision (of which Nietzsche knew nothing but that he was able to sense) to an age when what had formerly been alive in their souls was superseded by dry, abstract, prosaic concepts; when ‘being,’ that cold, abstract, prosaic notion, appeared, as a ‘concept,’ replacing the full aliveness of clairvoyant consciousness?” And Neitzsche feels, “It is as if our blood would freeze in our veins when we cross over from the realm of life into the world of concepts in Thales or Heraclitus who use such concepts as ‘being’ and ‘becoming,’ so that we pass from the warm realm of becoming over into the icy region of ‘concepts.’ ”