On existence as a predicate of perfection
I thought about St. Anselm’s so-called ontological argument, thought of Kant’s famous refutation, remembered the poor devil professor who sardonically suggested I go shopping with a hundred merely possible or imaginary thalers, and I reaffirmed my agreement with Kant on that point, now based on my idea that the real world would be worth less than the perfect world even if the perfect world didn’t exist.
I thought, thus, that even non-being would be better than the being we know, if there were no other superior-perfect being to give meaning to this known being, this world, this life.
And finally, I realised that these ideas had actually expressive power and were really compelling, but they could present some inconsistencies.
I love Don Quixote and I hate Cervantes.
Mit einem solchen Erfolge gehört er in die Decadence der spanischen Cultur, er ist ein nationales Unglück (Unpublished notes: Nachlass 1876/77, 23[140], KSA 8.453–4).
Nietzsche was wrong in his comment about the Spanish Inquisition in the same paragraph, but he was totally right about Cervantes.
I read the fragment in Spanish, almost thirty years ago, in a footnote by Andrés Sánchez Pascual for The Genealogy of Morals.
There is no canonical English translation of that fragment; the one provided here is a direct translation from the original German by ChatGPT:
‘Cervantes could have fought the Inquisition, but he preferred instead to make its victims—that is, the heretics and idealists of every kind—ridiculous as well.
‘After a life full of misfortunes and reversals, he still found the desire for a great literary assault upon a false taste among Spanish readers; he fought against the romances of chivalry.
‘Unnoticed even by himself, this attack became, in his hands, the most general irony directed against every higher aspiration. He made the whole of Spain—including all the fools—laugh, and imagine themselves wise. It is a fact that no book has been laughed over as much as Don Quixote.
‘With such a success he belongs to the decadence of Spanish culture; he was a national misfortune for Spain.
‘I think that he despised human beings, and did not exempt himself. Or is he not merely mocking when he tells how, at the Duke’s court, cruel practical jokes were played upon the sick man? Could he really have refrained from laughing even at the heretic on the stake? Indeed, he does not spare his own hero that dreadful moment of suddenly becoming fully aware of his condition at the end of his life. If this is not cruelty, then it is coldness, hardness of heart, that made him create such a final scene—a contempt for readers whom, as he knew, even this ending would not interrupt in their laughter’.
On the other hand, it is shocking that Nietzsche, otherwise so accurate in those unknown words (unpublished, in fact, in English), considers Don Quixote a heretic, Don Quixote who is the ultimate expression of the Christian knight — and therefore, Catholic, since Catholic and Christian were synonymous for Don Quixote and for everyone before the immediately subsequent Protestant schism.
I suppose it’d be pointless, especially in my case, to get further entangled in that note about whether or not existence is a predicate of perfection, and to see if my idea had indeed inconsistencies.
In any case, the note let us experience firsthand something that looms over us as a matter of almost ethereal subtlety and abstraction, and very difficult to answer.
I hope that God exists (even though the ontological argument doesn’t prove it), so that the note hasn’t been in vain, as visible facts show.