The Best is Yet to Come

Excerpt

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in The Friend (1828), wrote: “The dwarf sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant’s shoulder to mount on.” Against this notion, Friedrich Nietzsche argued that a dwarf (the academic scholar) brings even the most sublime heights down to his level of understanding [1]. In the section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1882) entitled “On the Vision and the Riddle,” Zarathustra climbs to great heights with a dwarf on his shoulders to show him his greatest thought. Once reaching there, however, the dwarf fails to understand the profundity of the vision, and Zarathustra reproaches him for “making things too easy on himself.” If there is to be anything resembling “progress” in the history of philosophy, Nietzsche in “Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks” (1873) writes, it can only come from those rare giants among men, “each giant calling to his brother through the desolate intervals of time.” [1]. …