Critique of the philosophy of Hartmann (Excerpts)

Excerpts

The will, the will is it, Mr. von Hartmann, as Schopenhauer has unsurpassably demonstrated, which forges the judgement. Are you married? I don’t know. In any case you wanted to marry when you wrote the artistic passage above. Humboldt’s “crime of procreation” must be whitewashed. The truth shrouded your face, when you wrote the shameful passage.

Also: is the coitus a sacrifice the individual makes? You must be – I repeat it – a very uniquely shaped being.

What are you thinking of with this commitment to the common good? You’re thinking of that, which you have already prettily painted and without disguise above, in the following manner: choose somewhere a job, learn to work with your hands, obtain money, goods, fame, power, honor etc., marry and beget children; or with other words: you destroy with your own hand the only meritorious in your work: the dissection of the illusion. You commend to him, who has seen through all illusions: “chase after illusions”, as if a dissected illusion is still an illusion and can still activate him. The great genius Heraclitus has shouted: “Woe unto you unhappy ones, who measure happiness by stomach and private parts!” and you say: Conquer your disgust, copulate, create children for the general world salvation, measure “by stomach and private parts” your sacrifice for the world salvation!

Mr. von Hartmann! I’m seized by melancholy again.

The by you demanded dedication to the common good, which has been praised as the noblest core of your philosophy, is not noble at all: it is a concession of talent for the spirit of his age, not the bold, free, courageous Truth, which a genius, feeling himself citizen of the future, puts forward to his contemporaries as law. The noble commitment to the common good, the one taught by the dark Heraclitus and myself, i.e. the ascetic human who steps out of his outer peace (he cannot be pushed out of the inner peace) and bleads for humanity, i.e. he lets blind people, which we wants to save, the lowest up to the highest, beat him, spit him, nail him to the cross. You however assert that every cobbler and cutter, who founds himself a family, every jobber who dances around the Golden Calf, brief, that everyone, who lives like almost all humans live right now, is a wise hero, a wise hero who commits himself to the world process. You virtually place an award on procreation and immorality; for everyone who intensifies the struggle in the world is, according to your teaching, the most meritorious one there can be.