[Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche]@TWC D-Link book
Beyond Good and Evil

CHAPTER III
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What does all modern philosophy mainly do?
Since Descartes--and indeed more in defiance of him than on the basis of his procedure--an ATTENTAT has been made on the part of all philosophers on the old conception of the soul, under the guise of a criticism of the subject and predicate conception--that is to say, an ATTENTAT on the fundamental presupposition of Christian doctrine.

Modern philosophy, as epistemological skepticism, is secretly or openly ANTI-CHRISTIAN, although (for keener ears, be it said) by no means anti-religious.
Formerly, in effect, one believed in "the soul" as one believed in grammar and the grammatical subject: one said, "I" is the condition, "think" is the predicate and is conditioned--to think is an activity for which one MUST suppose a subject as cause.

The attempt was then made, with marvelous tenacity and subtlety, to see if one could not get out of this net,--to see if the opposite was not perhaps true: "think" the condition, and "I" the conditioned; "I," therefore, only a synthesis which has been MADE by thinking itself.

KANT really wished to prove that, starting from the subject, the subject could not be proved--nor the object either: the possibility of an APPARENT EXISTENCE of the subject, and therefore of "the soul," may not always have been strange to him,--the thought which once had an immense power on earth as the Vedanta philosophy.
55.

There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with many rounds; but three of these are the most important.


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