I do not know, I do not know, I do not know.... And perhaps I may be
saying fundamentally the same thing, although more confusedly, that my
imaginary adversaries say, only more clearly, more definitely, and more
rationally, those adversaries whom I imagine in order that I may have
someone to fight. I do not know, I do not know.... But what they say
freezes me and sounds to me as though it proceeded from emptiness of
feeling.
And, returning to our former question, Is virtue knowledge?--Is
knowledge virtue? For they are two distinct questions. Virtue may be a
science, the science of acting rightly, without every other science
being therefore virtue. The virtue of Machiavelli is a science, and it
cannot be said that his _virtu_ is always moral virtue It is well known,
moreover, that the cleverest and the most learned men are not the best.
No, no, no! Physiology does not teach us how to digest, nor logic how to
discourse, nor esthetics how to feel beauty or express it, nor ethics
how to be good. And indeed it is well if they do not teach us how to be
hypocrites; for pedantry, whether it be the pedantry of logic, or of
esthetics, or of ethics, is at bottom nothing but hypocrisy.
Reason perhaps teaches certain bourgeois virtues, but it does not make
either heroes or saints. Perhaps the saint is he who does good not for
good's sake, but for God's sake, for the sake of eternalization.
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