Preface

[10th Paragraph]

Since the rabulistry of caprice has seized the name of philosophy and has succeeded in persuading a large public that such activity is philosophy, it has almost become a dishonor to speak philosophically about the nature of the state; and upright men are not to be blamed if they become impatient as soon as they hear of a philosophical science of the state. It is even less a surprise that governments have finally directed their attention to such philosophizing, since with us philosophy does not, as it did with the Greeks, exist as a private art, but has a public existence affecting the public, primarily or solely in the service of the state. |XV| If governments have demonstrated trust in their scholars dedicated to this field, relying on them entirely for the development and the content of philosophy—even if here and there, if one likes, it may have been not so much trust as indifference toward science itself, and its teaching office was kept up merely by tradition (as, so far as I know, in France the chairs of metaphysics at least have been allowed to lapse)—then that trust has frequently been poorly repaid, or where one wished to see indifference, the result, the decay of thorough knowledge, is to be regarded as a penance for this indifference. At first, shallowness indeed seems most compatible at least with external order and peace, because it does not get so far as to touch the substance of things, or even to suspect it; it would thus, at first at least, have nothing against it from the police, if the state did not still enclose within itself the need for deeper education and insight and demanded its satisfaction from science. |XVI| But shallowness leads of its own accord regarding the ethical, right, and duty in general, to those principles which in this sphere make up what is shallow, to the principles of the Sophists, which we know so decisively from Plato—the principles that place what is right on subjective ends and opinions, on subjective feeling and particular conviction—principles from which the destruction of inner ethical life and of the upright conscience, of love and of right among private persons follows, just as much as the destruction of public order and state laws. The significance that such phenomena must gain for governments will not be brushed aside by a title that relies on the very trust granted and on the authority of an office, in order to demand of the state that it should allow and let prevail what corrupts the substantial source of deeds, the universal principles, and even its defiance, as though this were only proper. To whom God gives an office, He also gives understanding, is an old joke which in our times one would likely not wish to assert in earnest.

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