Philosopher or Ideologist?

by Peter Saint-Andre

2002-12-04

In another worthy quote from Human, All Too Human (Volume II, Part 2, ยง 171), Nietzsche reflects on those scholars who...

lack all impersonal interest in a problem; just as they themselves are personalities through and through, so all their insights and acquirements in the field of knowledge coalesce together into a personality, into a living multiplicity whose individual parts are dependent on one another, cleave to one another, are nourished by the same food, and as a whole possesses its own atmosphere and its own odor. -- Natures such as this produce, with their personality-informed structures of knowledge, the illusion that a science (or even the whole of philosophy) is finished and has reached its goal; it is the life in their structure that performs this magic.... The name usually given to such men is philosophers.

I'm not so sure -- to me, such "scholars" sound more like ideologists than philosophers.


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