ABSTRACT
In a celebrated section of Götzen-Dämmerung, Nietzsche describes what he takes to have been the role of ‘reason’ in philosophy. Reaffirming an advocacy of ‘historical philosophizing’ (historisches Philosophieren) which has been central to his work ever since the opening paragraphs of Human, All-too-Human, he suggests that one of the most dangerous idiosyncrasies of philosophers has been ‘to confuse the first and the last’:
They place that which comes at the end-unfortunately! for it ought not to come at all!—namely, the ‘highest concepts’, which means the most general, the emptiest concepts, the last smoke of an evaporating reality, 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, may not have grown at all… That which is last, thinnest and emptiest is put first as cause in itself, as ens realissimum.1
