Why we are not idealists. – Formerly, philosophers feared the senses: is it possible that we have unlearned this fear all too much? Today we are all sensualists, we philosophers of the present and future, not in theory but in praxis, in practice.45 The former, however, saw the senses as trying to lure them away from their world, from the cold kingdom of ‘ideas’, to a dangerous Southern isle where they feared their philosophers’ virtues would melt away like snow in the sun. ‘Wax in the ear’ was virtually a condition of philosophizing; a true philosopher didn’t listen to life insofar as life is music; he denied the music of life – it is an old philosopher’s superstition that all music is siren-music.46 Today we are inclined to make the opposite judgement (which could itself be just as mistaken), namely, that ideas are worse seductresses than the senses, for all their cold, anaemic appearance and not even despite that appearance – they always lived off the ‘blood’ of the philosopher; they always drained his senses and even, if you believe it, his ‘heart’. These old philosophers were heartless: philosophizing was always a kind of vampirism. When considering such figures, including even Spinoza, don’t you feel something deeply enigmatic and strange? Don’t you see the spectacle unfolding, this steady growing paler – this ever more ideally construed desensualization? Don’t you sense in the background some long-concealed blood-sucker who starts with the senses and finally leaves behind and spares only bones and rattling? – I refer to categories, formulas, words (for, forgive me, what remained of Spinoza, amor intellectualis dei,47 is mere rattle, nothing more! What is amor; what deus, when they are missing every drop of blood?). In sum: all philosophical idealism until now was something like an illness, except where, as in Plato’s case, it was the caution of an overabundant and dangerous health; the fear of overpowerful senses; the shrewdness of a shrewd Socratic. – Maybe we moderns are not healthy enough to need Plato’s idealism? And we don’t fear the senses because –