Nietzsche On Philosophers

Quotes from Twilight of Idols:

"I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity."

"They think that they show their respect for a subject when they dehistoricize it sub specie aeternitas — when they turn it into a mummy. Everything that philosophers handled over the past thousands of years turned into concept mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive. Whenever these venerable concept idolators revere something, they kill it and stuff it; they suck the life out of everything they worship."

"The other characteristic of philosophers is no less dangerous; it consists in confusing the last and the first. They place that which comes at the end...in the beginning, as the beginning. This again is nothing but their way of showing reverence: the higher may not grow out of the lower..."

"Origin out of something else is considered an objection, a questioning of value. All the highest values are of the first rank; all the highest concepts, that which has being, the unconditional, the good, the true, the perfect — all these cannot have become and must therefore be causes. All these, moreover, cannot be unlike each other or in contradiction to each other."

Quotes from Beyond Good and Evil:

"We must wait for a new species of philosopher to arrive, who will have some other, opposite tastes and inclinations than the previous ones. Philosophers of the Perilous Perhaps, in every sense!"

After keeping an eye on and reading between the lines of the philosophers for a long time, I find that I must tell myself the following: the largest part of conscious thinking must be considered an instinctual activity, even in the case of philosophical thinking.

"Even behind logic and its apparent sovereignty of development stand...demands for preserving a certain type of life."

"Every one of them pretends that he has discovered and reached his opinions through the self-development of cold, pure, divinely untroubled dialectic, whereas, at bottom, a pre-conceived dogma, a notion, an institution, or mostly a heart's desire...is defended by them with arguments sought after the fact.

"I do not believe a "desire for comprehension" is the father of philosophy, but rather that a quite different desire has here as elsewhere used comprehension (together with miscomprehension) as tools to serve its own ends."

"...the moral (or amoral) intentions of each philosophy constitute the protoplasm from which each entire plant has grown."

"It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise, for philosophy is this tyrannical desire; it is the most spiritual will to power, to "creation of the world," to the causa prima.

"The various philosophical concepts do not evolve at random or autonomously but in reference and relationship to one another..."

"Their thinking is in fact not so much a discovering as a recognizing, remembering, a return and homecoming to a remote, ancient, commonly stocked household of the soul out of which the concepts grew."

Quotes from The Anti-Christ:

"A word now against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our invention; it must spring out of our personal need and defence. In every other case it is a source of danger. That which does not belong to our life menaces it; a virtue which has its roots in mere respect for the concept of “virtue,” as Kant would have it, is pernicious."

"Nothing works a more complete and penetrating disaster than every “impersonal” duty, every sacrifice before the Moloch of abstraction."

"I put aside a few sceptics, the types of decency in the history of philosophy: the rest haven’t the slightest conception of intellectual integrity. They behave like women, all these great enthusiasts and prodigies—they regard “beautiful feelings” as arguments, the “heaving breast” as the bellows of divine inspiration, conviction as the criterion of truth."