in response to stimuli—and the stimuli Nietzsche distinctly does not contemplate as self-generated. p They do not come from the outer word as we picture it, for this is an after-product of the sensations themselves; all the same we "receive" them, and Nietzsche is inevitably driven to ask, whence?[1]
The idea of reality outside us is thus inexpugnable to him. What it is, what its constitution, is another matter. It is not this familiar world of common sense; it is not the world of atoms and denatured "forces" of popular science; nor is it the world of purely quantitative and mathematical relations of refined science. Still more, it is not a world of "things-in-themselves," as this phrase is often bandied about by philosophical writers who think to refute Kant by showing that the idea of things out of any kind of relation is absurd; neither Kant nor any other realist worth mentioning has ever meant by independent reality that. Things are always in relation—and when conceived of (if they can be conceived of) as isolated, they are a pure invention of the mind, an illusion.[2] Most emphatically it is not a world of pure and changeless being such as Schopenhauer dreamed of. That being changes is our ground-certainty about it.[3] Schopenhauer's other world is the product of a mind ill at ease in the order of change and suffering we know and conjuring up another order for its relief, i.e., it is the offspring of subjective need, and Nietzsche distrusts (at least for his own account) constructions that come from any other need or impulse than the theoretic or knowing one itself.[4] Even moral needs are no safe basis for construction, not to speak of the needs of happiness, comfort, or inspiration. q
What is left, then? one may ask. There is evidence that Nietzsche was for a time in sore perplexity. The very extreme of skepticism and uncertainty as to both metaphysics and morals is pictured in "The Shadow" in Thus spake Zarathustra—
- ↑ Cf. Will to Power, § 569 (the ambiguity in this passage turns about the term "things," which Nietzsche, as we have seen, regards as a subjective fiction; but that we are to a certain extent passive and acted upon is implied throughout).
- ↑ Nietzsche makes a running fire on both "things in themselves" and "things," sometimes misconstruing what Kant meant by the former himself (ibid., §§ 552-9; cf. § 473; Joyful Science, § 354).
- ↑ Werke, XII, 23, § 39.
- ↑ Cf. Will to Power, §§ 708, 585, 576.
