Kant says 2 + 3 = 5
In a hundred pages of
German nonsense

It is what we need
but not a how
a duplication

Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond Good and Evil

Section one on the prejudices of philosophers

10. People today are trying, it seems to me, to divert attention from Kant’s real influence on German philosophy, trying especially to evade what he himself considered his great value. Kant was most proud of his table of categories; holding it in his hands he said, ‘This is the most difficult thing that ever could be undertaken for the benefit of metaphysics.’

 But let us understand what this ‘could be’ really implies! He was proud of having discovered in man a new faculty, the faculty to make synthetic a priori judgements. Granted that he was deceiving himself about his discovery: nevertheless, the development and rapid flowering of German philosophy stem from this pride and from the rivalry of his disciples to discover if at all possible something worthy of even more pride — and in any event ‘new faculties’!

 But let’s think about it, it is high time. ‘How are synthetic a priori judgements possible ?’ wondered Kant, and what did he answer? They are facilitated by a faculty:  unfortunately, however, he did not say this in four words, but so cumbersomely, so venerably, and with such an expense of German profundity and ornateness that people misheard the comical niaiserie allemande * in such an answer. They were ecstatic about this new faculty, in fact, and the rejoicing reached its height when Kant discovered a moral faculty in man as well. (For at that time Germans were still moral, and not yet ‘real – political’.)

 There followed the honeymoon of German philosophy; all the young theologians of the Tübingen Stift * headed right for the bushes — they were all looking for ‘faculties’. And what all didn’t they find, in that innocent, rich, still youthful era of the German spirit when the malicious elf Romanticism was still piping and singing, back when no one yet had learned to distinguish between ‘finding’ and ‘inventing’! * They found above all a faculty for the ‘extra – sensual’: Schelling christened it ‘intellectual intuition’, * thus meeting the dearest desires of his essentially pious – desirous Germans. One can do no greater injustice to this whole arrogant, enthusiastic movement (which was youth itself, however audaciously it may have cloaked itself in grey, senile concepts) than to take it seriously and treat it with anything like moral indignation. Enough, people grew older — the dream vanished. The time came for them to rub their foreheads: they are rubbing them still today. They had been dreaming, and the first among them had been old Kant. ‘Facilitated by a faculty’ — that’s what he had said, or at least that’s what he had meant. But what kind of an answer is that? What kind of explanation? Isn’t it rather simply repeating the question? How can opium make us sleep? It is ‘facilitated by a faculty’, the virtus dormitiva , answers that doctor in Molière,

 quia est in eo virtus dormitiva

cujus est natura sensus assoupire. 

 But answers like these belong in comedy, and for the Kantian question ‘How are synthetic a priori judgements possible?’ it is high time to substitute another question: ‘Why is the belief in such judgements necessary ?’ — it is time to understand that for the purpose of preserving creatures of our kind, we must believe that such judgements are true; which means, of course, that they could still be false judgements. Or to put it more clearly, and crudely and completely: synthetic a priori judgements should not ‘be possible’ at all; we have no right to them, in our mouths they are only false judgements. Yet the belief in their truth happens to be necessary as one of the foreground beliefs and appearances that constitute the perspective – optics of life.

 And, finally, remembering the enormous effect that ‘German philosophy’ exercised throughout Europe (one understands, I hope, why it deserves quotation marks?), let no one doubt that a certain virtus dormitiva had a part in it: amidst the noble men of leisure, the moralists, mystics, artists, the partial Christians, and political obscurantists of every nation, people were delighted that German philosophy offered an antidote to the still overpowering sensualism pouring into this century from the previous one, in short: ‘sensus assoupire’ …

Translated by Marion Faber, Oxford University Press, 1998