On the old problem: ‘What is German?’ – Add up for yourself the real achievements in philosophical thinking that can be attributed to Germans: is there any legitimate sense in which one can credit them to the entire race? Can we say that they are also the work of the ‘German soul’, or at least symptoms of it in the same sense in which we are accustomed to take Plato’s ideomania, his nearly religious lunacy about forms, as a development and testimony of ‘the Greek soul’? Or would the opposite be true? Would they be just so individual, just so much exceptions to the spirit of the race as was, for instance, Goethe’s paganism with a good conscience? Or as is Bismarck’s Machiavellianism with a good conscience, his so-called Realpolitik, among Germans? Might our philosophers perhaps even contradict the need of the ‘German soul’? In short, were the German philosophers really – philosophical Germans? I recall three cases. First, Leibniz’s incomparable insight18 that has been vindicated not only against Descartes but also against everyone who had philosophized before him – that consciousness (Bewutheit)19 is merely an accidens20 of the power of representation (Vorstellung) and not its necessary and essential attribute; so that what we call consciousness (Bewutsein) constitutes only one state of our spiritual and psychic world (perhaps a sick state) and by no means the whole of it – is there something German to this idea, the profundity of which has not been exhausted to this day? Is there reason to surmise that no Latin could easily have thought of this reversal of appearances? For it is a reversal. Let us recall, secondly, Kant’s colossal question mark that he placed on the concept ‘causality’21 – without, like Hume, doubting its legitimacy altogether: he started much more cautiously to delimit the realm in which this concept makes any sense whatsoever (and to this day we have not yet come to terms with this marking out of the boundaries). Let us take, thirdly, Hegel’s astonishing move, with which he struck through all logical habits and indulgences when he dared to teach that species concepts develop *out of each other:*22 with this proposition the minds of Europe were preformed for the last great scientific movement, Darwinism – for without Hegel there could be no Darwin. Is there anything German in this Hegelian innovation which first introduced the decisive concept of ‘development’ into science? Yes, without any doubt: in all three cases we feel that something in ourselves has been ‘uncovered’ and figured out, and we are grateful and at the same time surprised. Each of these three propositions is a thoughtful piece of German self-knowledge, self-experience, and self-conception. ‘Our inner world is much richer, more comprehensive, more hidden’, we feel with Leibniz. As Germans, we doubt with Kant the ultimate validity of the discoveries of the natural sciences and altogether of everything that can be known causaliter23 – what is knowable already seems to us of less value on that account. We Germans are Hegelians even had there been no Hegel, insofar as we (as opposed to all Latins) instinctively attribute a deeper meaning and greater value to becoming and development than to what ‘is’; we hardly believe in the justification of the concept ‘being’ – and also insofar as we are not inclined to concede that our human logic is logic as such or the only kind of logic (we would rather persuade ourselves that it is only a special case and perhaps one of the oddest and stupidest). A fourth question would be whether Schopenhauer, too, with his pessimism – that is, the problem of the value of existence24 – had to be precisely a German. I believe not. The event after which this problem was to be expected with certainty, so that an astronomer of the soul could have calculated the very day and hour for it – the decline of the faith in the Christian god, the triumph of scientific atheism – is a pan-European event in which all races had their share and for which all deserve credit and honour. Conversely, one might charge precisely the Germans – those Germans who were contemporaries of Schopenhauer – with having delayed this triumph of atheism most dangerously for the longest time. Hegel in particular was a delayer par excellence, in accordance with his grandiose attempt to persuade us of the divinity of existence, appealing as a last resort to our sixth sense, ‘the historical sense’. As a philosopher, Schopenhauer was the first admitted and uncompromising atheist among us Germans: this was the background of his enmity towards Hegel. The ungodliness of existence counted for him as something given, palpable, indisputable; he always lost his philosopher’s composure and became indignant when he saw anyone hesitate or beat around the bush on this point. This is the locus of his whole integrity; unconditional and honest atheism is simply the presupposition of his way of putting the problem, as a victory of the European conscience won finally and with great difficulty; as the most fateful act of two thousand years of discipline for truth that in the end forbids itself the lie of faith in God…One can see what it was that actually triumphed over the Christian god: Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness that was taken ever more rigorously; the father confessor’s refinement of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price. Looking at nature as if it were proof of the goodness and care of a god; interpreting history in honour of some divine reason, as a continual testimony of a moral world order and ultimate moral purposes; interpreting one’s own experiences as pious people have long interpreted theirs, as if everything were providential, a hint, designed and ordained for the sake of salvation of the soul – that is over now; that has conscience against it; every refined conscience considers it to be indecent, dishonest, a form of mendacity, effeminacy, weakness, cowardice. With this severity, if with anything, we are simply good Europeans and heirs of Europe’s longest and most courageous self-overcoming. As we thus reject Christian interpretation and condemn its ‘meaning’ as counterfeit, Schopenhauer’s question immediately comes at us in a terrifying way: Does existence have any meaning at all? A few centuries will be needed before this question can ever be heard completely and in its full depth. What Schopenhauer himself said in answer to this question was – forgive me – something hasty, youthful, a mere compromise, a way of remaining and staying stuck in precisely those Christian and ascetic moral perspectives in which one had renounced faith along with the faith in God. But he posed the question – as a good European, as I said before, and not as a German. Or is it possible that at least the manner in which the Germans appropriated Schopenhauer’s question proves that the Germans did have an inner affinity and relation, preparation, and need for this problem? That after Schopenhauer one thought and printed things in Germany, too – by the way, late enough – about the problem he had posed is certainly not sufficient to decide in favour of this closer affinity. One might rather adduce the peculiar ineptitude of this post-Schopenhauerian pessimism against the thesis; clearly the Germans did not behave in this affair as if they were in their element. This is by no means an allusion to Eduard von Hartmann.25 On the contrary, to this day I have not shaken off my old suspicion that he is too apt for us. I mean that he may have been a real rogue from the start who perhaps made fun not only of German pessimism – but in the end he might even reveal to the Germans in his last will and testament to what extent it was possible to make fools of them, even in an era of economic initiative and success.26 But let me ask you: should we perhaps consider that old humming-top Bahnsen27 as a credit to the Germans, seeing how voluptuously he revolved his life around his real-dialectical misery and ‘personal bad luck’? Might precisely that be German? (I herewith recommend his writings to the end for which I have used them myself, as an anti-pessimistic diet, especially on account of their elegantiae psychologicae,28 with which, I think, they should be effective also for the most constipated bowels and temperaments.) Or could one count such dilettantes and old spinsters as that mawkish apostle of virginity, Mainlander,29 as a genuine German? In the end he must have been a Jew (all Jews become mawkish when they moralize). Neither Bahnsen nor Mainlander, nor even Eduard von Hartmann, gives us any clear evidence regarding the question whether Schopenhauer’s pessimism, his horrified look into a de-deified world that had become stupid, blind, crazed, and questionable, his honest horror…was not merely an exception among Germans but a German event. Everything else that is otherwise in the foreground – our brave politics, our merry fatherlandishness which resolutely enough consider all matters with a view to a not very philosophical principle (‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’30), i.e. *sub specie speciei,*31 namely the German species, bears emphatic witness to the opposite. No, the Germans of today are no pessimists. And Schopenhauer was a pessimist, to repeat, as a good European and not as a German. –