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74 ORACULAR PHILOSOPHY
themselves whether Schopenhauer's advice to a dishonest guardian
has not been successfully administered by many educationists to
many promising youths, inside ahd outside of Germany. I have
in mind the passage : * Should you ever intend to dull the wits
of a young man and to incapacitate his brains for any kind of
thought whatever, then you cannot do better than give him Hegel
to read. For these monstrous accumulations of words that annul
and contradict one another drive the mind into tormenting itself
with vain attempts to think anything whatever in connection with
them, until finally it collapses from sheer exhaustion. Thus any
ability to think is so thoroughly destroyed that the young man
will ultimately mistake empty and hollow verbiage for real
thought. A guardian fearing that his ward might become too
intelligent for his schemes might prevent this misfortune by
innocently suggesting the reading of Hegel.'
Jaspers declares " his nihilist tendencies even more frankly,
if that is possible, than Heidegger. Only when you are faced
with Nothingness, with annihilation, Jaspers teaches, will you be
able to experience and appreciate Existence. In order to live
in the essential sense, one must live in a crisis. In order to taste
life one has not only to risk, but to lose ! Jaspers carries the
historicist idea of change and destiny recklessly to its most gloomy
extreme. All things must perish ; everything ends in failure :
in this way does the historicist law of development present itself
to his disillusioned intellect. But face destruction and you will
get the thrill of your life ! Only in the ' marginal situations ',
on the edge between existence and nothingness, do we really live.
The bliss of life always coincides with the end of its intelligibility,
particularly with extreme situations of the body, above all with
bodily danger. You cannot taste life without tasting failure.
Enjoy yourself perishing !
This is the philosophy of the gambler of the gangster.
Needless to say, this demoniac ' religion of Urge and Fear, of the
Triumphant or else the Hunted Beast ' (Kolnai 90 ), this absolute
nihilism in the fullest sense of the word, is not a popular creed.
It is a confession characteristic of an esoteric group of intellectuals
who have surrendered their reason, and with it, their humanity.
There is another Germany, that of the ordinary people whose
brains have not been poisoned by a devastating system of higher
education. But this * other ' Germany is certainly not that of
her thinkers. It is true, Germany had also some * other ' thinkers
(foremost among them, Kant) ; however, the survey just finished
The Open Society And Its Enemies Vol II
https://archive.org/details/opensocietyandit033064mbp
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This is the philosophy of the gambler of the gangster.
もしかしてmikaze007さんですか。人違いだったらすみません。
本人だったらしつこいです。私に関わらないで下さい。
