Now we must wend our way through the writings, in order of their writing, of ‘Polish nobleman’ Friedrich Nietzsche. Here, from a differing and, I think, complementary angle, we will find another, philosophical kind of ‘nothing to stick to’, one that questions the existence of any gods, any morality or any fixity by which anyone could orientate themselves. Nietzsche believes in no gods of any kind (including god substitutes). But he does believe in heroes, creative heroes who continually overcome themselves. In this section of the essay quotes from Nietzsche serve as a ‘potted Nietzsche’.
The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
Raising himself to Titanic heights, man fights for and achieves his own culture, and he compels the gods to ally themselves with him because in his very own wisdom, he holds existence and its limits in his hands.
On Truth and Lying in a A Non-Moral Sense (1873)
In some remote corner of the universe, flickering in the light of the countless solar systems into which it had been poured, there was once a planet in which clever animals invented cognition. It was the most arrogant and the most mendacious moment in the ‘history of the world’; but a minute was all it was. After nature had drawn just a few more breaths the planet froze and the clever animals had to die.
Someone could invent a fable like this and yet they would still not have given a satisfactory illustration of just how pitiful, how insubstantial and transitory, how purposeless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature; there were eternities during which it did not exist, and when it has disappeared again, nothing will have happened.
For this intellect has no further mission that might extend beyond the bounds of human life. Rather, the intellect is human, and only its own possessor and progenitor regards it with such pathos, as if it housed the axis around which the entire world revolved. But if we could communicate with a midge we would hear that it too floats through the air with the very same pathos, feeling that it too contains within itself the flying centre of this world. There is nothing in nature so despicable and mean that would not immediately swell up like a balloon from just one little puff of that force of cognition, and just as every bearer of burdens wants to be admired, so the proudest man of all, the philosopher, wants to see, on all sides, the eyes of the universe trained, as through telescopes, on his thoughts and deeds…
...Human beings do not so much flee from being tricked as from being harmed by being tricked…
...What is a word? The copy of a nervous stimulation in sounds…
...When different languages are set alongside one another it becomes clear that, where words are concerned, what matters is never truth, never the full and adequate expression; otherwise there would not be so many languages. The ‘thing-in-itself’ (which would be, precisely, pure truth, truth without consequences) is impossible for even the creator of language to grasp, and indeed this is not at all desirable. He designates only the relations of things to human beings, and in order to express them he avails himself of the boldest metaphors. The stimulation of a nerve is first translated into an image: first metaphor! The image is then imitated by a sound: second metaphor! And each time there is a complete leap from one sphere into the heart of another, new sphere…
...We believe that when we speak of trees, colours, snow, and flowers, we have knowledge of the things themselves, and yet we possess only metaphors of things which in no way correspond to the original entities…
...Let us consider in particular how concepts are formed; each word immediately becomes a concept, not by virtue of the fact that it is intended to serve as a memory (say) of the unique, utterly individualised, primary experience to which it owes its existence, but because at the same time it must fit countless other, more or less similar, cases, i.e. cases which, strictly speaking, are never equivalent, and thus nothing other than non-equivalent cases. Every concept comes into being by making equivalent that which is non-equivalent…
...Like form, a concept is produced by overlooking which is individual and real, whereas nature knows neither forms nor concepts and hence no species, but only an ‘X’ which is inaccessible to us and indefinable by us…
...What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration, and which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as firmly established, canonical, and binding; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour, coins which, having lost their stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer as coins…
...Everything which distinguishes human beings from animals depends on this ability to sublimate sensuous metaphors into a schema, in other words, to dissolve an image into a concept. This is because something becomes possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved in the realm of those sensuous first impressions, namely the construction of a pyramidal order based on castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, definitions of borders, which now confronts the other, sensuously perceived world as something firmer, more general, more familiar, more human, and hence as something regulatory and imperative…
...human beings themselves have an unconquerable urge to let themselves be deceived…
...The intellect, that master of pretence, is free and absolved of its usual slavery for as long as it can deceive without doing harm…
Human, All Too Human (1878)
Pneumatic explanation of nature. Metaphysics explains nature’s scriptures as if pneumatically, the way the church and its scholars used to explain the Bible. It takes a lot of intelligence to apply to nature the same kind of strict interpretive art that philologists today have created for all books: with the intention simply to understand what the scripture wants to say, but not to sniff out, or even presume, a double meaning. Just as we have by no means overcome bad interpretive art in regard to books, and one still comes upon vestiges of allegorical and mystical interpretation in the best-educated society, so it stands too in regard to nature - in fact much worse.
Metaphysical world. It is true, there might be a metaphysical world; one can hardly dispute the possibility of it. We see all things by means of our human head, and cannot chop it off, though it remains to wonder what would be left if it indeed had been cut off. This is a purely scientific problem, and not very suited to cause men worry. But all that has produced metaphysical assumptions and made them valuable, horrible, pleasurable to men thus far is passion, error and self-deception. The very worst methods of knowledge, not the very best, have taught us to believe in them. When one has disclosed these methods to be the foundation of all existing religions and metaphysical systems, one has refuted them. That other possibility still remains, but we cannot begin to do anything with it, let alone allow our happiness, salvation and life to depend on the spider webs of such a possibility. For there is nothing at all we could state about the metaphysical world except its differentness, a differentness inaccessible and incomprehensible to us. It would be a thing with negative qualities.
No matter how well proven the existence of such a world might be, it would still hold true that the knowledge of it would be the most inconsequential of all knowledge, even more inconsequential than the knowledge of the chemical analysis of water must be to the boatman facing a storm.
The harmlessness of metaphysics in the future. As soon as the origins of religion, art and morality have been described, so that one can explain them fully without resorting to the use of metaphysical intervention at the beginning and along the way, then one no longer has as strong an interest in the purely theoretical problem of the ‘thing-in-itself’ and ‘appearance’. For however the case may be, religion, art and morality do not enable us to touch the ‘essence of the world in itself’. We are in the realm of idea, no ‘intuition’ can carry us further. With complete calm we will let physiology and the ontogeny of organisms and concepts determine how our image of the world can be so different from the disclosed essence of the world.
Language as an alleged science. The importance of language for the development of culture lies in the fact that, in language, man juxtaposed to the one world another world of his own, a place which he thought so sturdy that from it he could move the rest of the world from its foundations and make himself lord over it. To the extent that he believed over long periods of time in the concepts and names of things as if they were eternal truths, man has acquired that pride by which he has raised himself above the animals: he really did believe that in language he had knowledge of the world. The shaper of language was not so modest as to think that he was only giving things labels; rather, he imagined that he was expressing the highest knowledge of things with words; in fact, language is the first stage of scientific effort. Here, too, it is the belief in found truth from which the mightiest sources of strength have flowed. Very belatedly (only now) is it dawning on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a montrou error. Fortunately, it is too late to be able to revoke the development of reason, which rests on that belief.
Logic, too, rests on assumptions that do not correspond to anything in the real world, e.g., on the assumption of the equality of things, the identity of the same thing at different points of time; but this science arose from the opposite belief (that there were indeed such things in the real world). So it is with mathematics, which would certainly not have originated if it had been known from the beginning that there is no exactly straight line in nature, no real circle, no absolute measure…
...Life as the product of life. However far man may extend himself with his knowledge, however objective he may appear to himself - ultimately he reaps nothing but his own biography…
...From experience. That something is irrational is no argument against its existence, but rather a condition for it…
...Basic insight. There is no pre-established harmony between the furthering of truth and the good of mankind.
Daybreak (1881)
Concept of morality of custom… the chief proposition: morality is nothing other (therefore no more!) than obedience to customs, of whatever kind they may be; customs, however, are the traditional way of behaving and evaluating. In things in which no tradition commands there is no morality; and the less life is determined by tradition, the smaller the circle of morality. The free human being is immoral because in all things he is determined to depend upon himself and not upon a tradition: in all the original conditions of mankind, ‘evil’ signifies the same as ‘individual’, ‘free’, ‘capricious’, ‘unusual’, ‘unforeseen’, ‘incalculable’. Judged by the standard of these conditions, if an action is performed not because tradition commands it but for other motives (because of its usefulness to the individual, for example), even indeed for precisely the motives which once founded the tradition, it is called immoral and it is felt to be so by him who performed it: for it was not performed in obedience to tradition. What is tradition? A higher authority which one obeys, not because it commands what is useful to us, but because it commands. - What distinguishes this feeling in the presence of tradition from the feeling of fear in general? It is the fear in the presence of a higher intellect which here commands, of an incomprehensible, indefinite power, of something more than personal - there is superstition in this fear… Under the dominion of the morality of custom, originality of every kind has acquired a bad conscience…
...Animals and morality. - The practices demanded in polite society: careful avoidance of the ridiculous, the offensive, the presumptuous, the suppression of one’s virtues as well as of one’s strongest inclinations, self-adaptation, self-deprecation, submission to orders of rank - all this is to be found in social morality in a crude form everywhere, even in the depths of the animal world - at only at this depth do we see the purpose of all these amiable precautions: one wishes to elude one’s pursuers and be favoured in the pursuit of one’s prey. For this reason the animals learn to master themselves and alter their form, so that many, for example, adapt their colouring to the colouring of their surroundings (by virtue of the so called ‘chromatic function’), pretend to be dead or assume the forms and colours of another animal or of sand, leaves, lichen, fungus (what English researchers designate ‘mimicry’). Thus the individual hides himself in the general concept ‘humanity’, or in society, or adapts himself to princes, classes, parties, opinions of his time and place: and all the subtle ways we have of appearing fortunate, grateful, powerful, enamoured, have their easily discoverable parallels in the animal world. Even the sense for truth, which is really the sense for security, man has in common with the animals: one does not want to let oneself be deceived, does not want to mislead oneself, one harkens mistrustfully to the promptings of one’s own passions, one constrains oneself and lies in wait for oneself; the animal understands this all just as man does, with it too self-control springs from the sense for what is real (from prudence). It likewise assesses the effect it produces upon the perceptions of other animals and from this learns to look back upon itself, to take itself ‘objectively’, it too has its degree of self-knowledge. The animal assesses the movements of its friends and foes, it learns their peculiarities by heart, it prepares itself for them: it renounces war once and for all against individuals of a certain species, and can likewise divine from the way they approach that certain kinds of animals have peaceful and conciliatory intentions. The beginning of justice, as of prudence, moderation, bravery - in short, of all we designate as the Socratic virtues, are animal: a consequence of that drive which teaches us to seek food and elude enemies. Now if we consider that even the highest human being has only become more elevated and subtle in the nature of his food and in his conception of what is inimical to him, it is not improper to describe the entire phenomenon of morality as animal…
...Moral feelings and moral concepts. It is clear that moral feelings are transmitted in this way: children observe in adults inclinations for and aversions to certain actions and, as born apes, imitate these inclinations and aversions; in later life they find themselves full of these acquired and well-exercised affects and consider it only decent to try to account for and justify them. This ‘accounting’, however, has nothing to do with either the origin or the degree of intensity of the feeling: all one is doing is complying with the rule that, as a rational being, one has to have reasons for one’s For and Against, and that they have to be adducible and acceptable reasons. To this extent the history of moral feeling is quite different from the history of moral concepts. The former are powerful before the action, the latter especially after the action in face of the need to pronounce upon it.
Feelings and their origination in judgments. - ‘Trust your feelings!’ - But feelings are nothing final or original; behind feelings there stand judgments and evaluations which we inherit in the form of feelings (inclinations, aversions). The inspiration born of a feeling is the grandchild of a judgment - and often a false judgment! - and in any event not a child of your own! To trust one’s feelings - means to give more obedience to one’s grandfather and grandmother and their grandparents than to the gods which are in us: our reason and our experience.
The Gay Science (1882)
Life no argument. - We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live - by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody now could endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error...
...In the horizon of the infinite. - We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us - indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realise that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom - and there is no longer any "land."
The madman. - Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!'' - As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Emigrated? - Thus they yelled and laughed.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him - you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us - for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then: "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars - and yet they have done it themselves.”
It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchres of God?”
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85)
On The Blissful Islands
The figs fall from the trees, they are good and sweet; and in falling their red skins break. I am a north wind to ripe figs.
Thus, like figs, do these teachings fall for you, my friends: imbibe now their juice and their sweet flesh! It is autumn all around, and clear sky, and afternoon.
Behold, what abundance is around us! And it is delightful to look out upon distant seas out of the midst of superfluity.
Once did people say ‘God’, when they looked out upon distant seas; now, however, have I taught you to say, ‘Übermensch’.
God is a supposition: but I do not wish your supposing to reach beyond your creating will.
Could you create a God? - Then, I pray you, be silent about all gods! But you could surely create the Übermensch.
Not perhaps you yourselves, my brothers! But into fathers and forefathers of the Übermensch you could transform yourselves: and let this be your best creating!
God is a supposition: but I want your supposing restricted to the conceivable.
Could you conceive a God? - But may the will to truth mean this to you, that everything be transformed into the humanly-conceivable, the humanly-evident, the humanly-sensible! You should follow your own senses to the end!
And you yourselves should create what you have called the world: the world should be formed in your image by your reason, your will and your love. And truly, for your bliss, you enlightened ones!
And how would you endure life without that hope, you enlightened ones? Neither in the incomprehensible could you have been born, nor in the irrational.
But that I may reveal my heart entirely to you, my friends: if there were gods, how could I endure it not to be a god! Therefore there are no gods.
Yes, I have drawn that conclusion; now, however, it draws me.
God is a supposition: but who could drink all the anguish of this supposing without dying? Shall the creator be robbed of his faith and the eagle of his soaring into the heights?
God is a thought that makes all that is straight crooked and all that stands giddy. What? Would time be gone, and all that is transitory only a lie?
To think this is giddiness and vertigo to the human frame, and even vomiting to the stomach: truly, I call it the giddy sickness to suppose such a thing.
I call it evil and misanthropic, all this teaching about the one, and the perfect, and the unmoved, and the sufficient, and the intransitory!
All that is intransitory - that is but an image! And the poets lie too much.
But of time and of becoming shall the best images and parables speak: a eulogy they shall be, and a justification of all transitoriness!
Creating - that is the great salvation from suffering, and life's easement. But for the creator to appear, suffering itself is needed, and much transformation.
Yes, much bitter dying must there be in your life, you creators! Thus are you advocates and justifiers of all transitoriness.
For the creator himself to be the new-born child he must also be willing to be the mother and endure the mother’s pain.
Truly, I went my way through a hundred souls, and through a hundred cradles and birth-pangs. Many a farewell have I taken; I know the heart-breaking last hours.
But my creating will, my destiny, wants it so. Or, to tell you it more candidly: my will wants precisely such a destiny.
All feeling suffers in me, and is in prison: but my willing ever comes to me as my emancipator and comforter.
Willing liberates: that is the true doctrine of willing and freedom - thus Zarathustra teaches you.
No longer willing, and no longer evaluating, and no longer creating! Ah, that this great debility may ever be far from me!
And also in knowing and understanding too do I feel only my will's delight in begetting and becoming; and if there be innocence in my knowledge, it is because there is will to begetting in it.
This will allured me away from God and gods; for what would there be to create if gods - existed!
But to mankind does it ever impel me anew, my fervent, creative will; thus it drives the hammer to the stone.
Ah, you men, I see an image that slumbers within the stone, the image of my visions! Ah, that it should slumber in the hardest, ugliest stone!
Now my hammer rages ruthlessly against its prison. From the stone fly fragments: what is that to me?
I will complete it: for a shadow came to me - the stillest and lightest of all things once came to me!
The beauty of the Übermensch came to me as a shadow. Ah, my brothers! Of what account are the gods to me now!
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
As regards the superstition of logicians, I never tire of underlining a quick little fact that these superstitious people are reluctant to admit: namely, that a thought comes when 'it' wants to, and not when 'I’ want it to; so it is falsifying the facts to say that the subject 'I' is the condition of the predicate 'think'. There is thinking, but to assert that 'there' is the same thing as that famous old 'I' is, to put it mildly, only an assumption, an hypothesis, and certainly not an 'immediate certainty'. And in the end 'there is thinking' is also going too far: even this 'there' contains an interpretation of the process and is not part of the process itself. People are concluding here according to grammatical habit: 'Thinking is an activity; for each activity there is someone who acts; therefore -' Following approximately the same pattern, ancient atomism looked for that particle of matter, the atom, to complement the effective 'energy ' that works from out of it; more rigorous minds finally learned to do without this 'little bit of earth' and perhaps some day logicians will even get used to doing without that little 'there' (into which the honest old 'I' has evaporated)...
...O sancta simplicitas! How strangely simplified and false are people's lives! Once we have focused our eyes on this wonder, there is no end to the wonderment! See how we have made everything around us bright and free and light and simple! Weren't we clever to give our senses free access to everything superficial, to give our minds a divine craving for headlong leaps and fallacies! How we have managed from the beginning to cling to our ignorance, in order to enjoy a life of almost inconceivable freedom, thoughtlessness, carelessness, heartiness, cheerfulness - to enjoy life! And only upon this foundation of ignorance, now as firm as granite, could our science be established, and our will to knowledge only upon the foundation of a much more powerful will, the will to no knowledge, to uncertainty, to untruth - not as the opposite of the former will, but rather - as its refinement! For even if language, in this case as in others, cannot get past its own unwieldiness and continues to speak of oppositions where there are really only degrees and many fine differences of grade; even if we the knowing also find the words in our mouths twisted by the ingrained moral hypocrisy that is now part of our insuperable 'flesh and blood', now and then we understand what has happened, and laugh at how even the very best science would keep us trapped in this simplified, thoroughly artificial, neatly concocted, neatly falsified world, how the best science loves error whether it will or not, because science, being alive, - loves life!...
...There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena…
...What we do in dreams we also do when we are awake: we invent and fabricate the person with whom we associate - and immediately forget we have done so.
On The Genealogy of Morals (1887)
...There is nothing strange about the fact that lambs bear a grudge towards large birds of prey: but that is no reason to blame the large birds of prey for carrying off the little lambs. And if the lambs say to each other, ‘These birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey and most like its opposite, a lamb, – is good, isn’t he?’, then there is no reason to raise objections to this setting-up of an ideal beyond the fact that the birds of prey will view it somewhat derisively, and will perhaps say: ‘We don’t bear any grudge at all towards these good lambs, in fact we love them, nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.’ – It is just as absurd to ask strength not to express itself as strength, not to be a desire to overthrow, crush, become master, to be a thirst for enemies, resistance and triumphs, as it is to ask weakness to express itself as strength. A quantum of force is just such a quantum of drive, will, action, in fact it is nothing but this driving, willing and acting, and only the seduction of language (and the fundamental errors of reason petrified within it), which construes and misconstrues all actions as conditional upon an agency, a ‘subject’, can make it appear otherwise. And just as the common people separates lightning from its flash and takes the latter to be a deed, something performed by a subject, which is called lightning, popular morality separates strength from the manifestations of strength, as though there were an indifferent substratum behind the strong person which had the freedom to manifest strength or not. But there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind the deed, its effect and what becomes of it; ‘the doer’ is invented as an afterthought, – the doing is everything. Basically, the common people double a deed; when they see lightning, they make a doing-a-deed out of it: they posit the same event, first as cause and then as its effect. The scientists do no better when they say ‘force moves, force causes’ and such like, – all our science, in spite of its coolness and freedom from emotion, still stands exposed to the seduction of language and has not rid itself of the changelings foisted upon it, the ‘subjects’ (the atom is, for example, just such a changeling, likewise the Kantian ‘thing-in-itself’): no wonder, then, if the entrenched, secretly smouldering emotions of revenge and hatred put this belief to their own use and, in fact, do not defend any belief more passionately than that the strong are free to be weak, and the birds of prey are free to be lambs: – in this way, they gain the right to make the birds of prey responsible for being birds of prey . . . When the oppressed, the downtrodden, the violated say to each other with the vindictive cunning of powerlessness: ‘Let us be different from evil people, let us be good! And a good person is anyone who does not rape, does not harm anyone, who does not attack, does not retaliate, who leaves the taking of revenge to God, who keeps hidden as we do, avoids all evil and asks little from life in general, like us who are patient, humble and upright’ – this means, if heard coolly and impartially, nothing more than: ‘We weak people are just weak; it is good to do nothing for which we are not strong enough’ – but this grim state of affairs, this cleverness of the lowest rank which even insects possess (which play dead, in order not to ‘do too much’ when in great danger), has, thanks to the counterfeiting and self-deception of powerlessness, clothed itself in the finery of self-denying, quiet, patient virtue, as though the weakness of the weak were itself – I mean its essence, its effect, its whole unique, unavoidable, irredeemable reality – a voluntary achievement, something wanted, chosen, a deed, an accomplishment. This type of man needs to believe in an unbiased ‘subject’ with freedom of choice, because he has an instinct of self-preservation and self-affirmation in which every lie is sanctified. The reason the subject (or, as we more colloquially say, the soul) has been, until now, the best doctrine on earth, is perhaps because it facilitated that sublime self-deception whereby the majority of the dying, the weak and the oppressed of every kind could construe weakness itself as freedom, and their particular mode of existence as an accomplishment.
Twilight of the Idols (1888)
If we possess our why of life we can put up with almost any how...
...I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity…
...Whether we immoralists do virtue any harm? - As little as anarchists do princes. Only since they have been shot at do they again sit firmly on their thrones. Moral: one must shoot at morals…
...I set aside with great respect the name of Heraclitus. While the rest of the mass of philosophers were rejecting the testimony of their senses because the senses displayed plurality and change, he rejected the testimony of the senses because they displayed things as if they had duration and unity. Even Heraclitus did not do justice to the senses. They do not lie either in the way the Eleatics thought or in the way that he thought — they do not lie at all. What we make of their testimony is what first introduces the lie, for example, the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of duration... “Reason” is what causes us to falsify the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses display becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie... But Heraclitus will always be in the right for saying that being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only world: the “true world” is just added to it by a lie…
....You will be thankful to me if I condense such an essential and new insight into four theses: I thus make it easier to understand, and I dare you to contradict it.
First proposition. The grounds on which “this” world has been called apparent are instead grounds for its reality—another kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable.
Second proposition. The distinguishing marks which have been given to the “true being” of things are the distinguishing marks of nonbeing, of nothingness—the “true world” has been constructed by contradicting the actual world: this “true world” is in fact an apparent world, insofar as it is just a moral-optical illusion.
Third proposition. It makes no sense whatsoever to tell fictional stories about “another” world than this one, as long as the instinct to slander, trivialize, and look down upon life is not powerful within us: in that case, we revenge ourselves on life with the phantasmagoria of “another,” “better” life.
Fourth proposition. Dividing the world into a “true” and an “apparent” world, whether in the style of Christianity or in the style of Kant (a sneaky Christian to the end), is merely a move inspired by décadence—a symptom of declining life... The fact that the artist prizes appearance over reality is no objection to this proposition. For “appearance” here means reality once again, but in the form of a selection, an emphasis, a correction . . . Tragic artists are not pessimists—in fact, they say yes to everything questionable and terrible itself, they are Dionysian…
(How The ‘True World’ Finally Became A Fiction: History of an Error)
1. The true world, attainable for the wise, the devout, the virtuous—they live in it, they are it. (Oldest form of the idea, relatively clever, simple, convincing. Paraphrase of the assertion, “I, Plato, am the truth.”)
2. The true world, unattainable for now, but promised to the wise, the devout, the virtuous (“to the sinner who does penance”). (Progress of the idea: it becomes more refined, more devious, more mystifying—it becomes woman, it becomes Christian....)
3. The true world, unattainable, unprovable, unpromisable, but a consolation, an obligation, an imperative, merely by virtue of being thought. (The old sun basically, but glimpsed through fog and skepticism; the idea become sublime, pallid, Nordic, Königsbergian.)
4. The true world—unattainable? In any case, unattained. And if it is unattained, it is also unknown. And hence it is not consoling, redeeming, or obligating either; to what could something unknown obligate us? . . . (Gray dawn. First yawnings of reason. Rooster’s crow of positivism.)
5. The “true world”—an idea with no use anymore, no longer even obligating—an idea become useless, superfluous, hence a refuted idea: let’s do away with it! (Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens [good sense] and cheerfulness; Plato blushes; pandemonium of all free spirits.)
6. We have done away with the true world: what world is left over? The apparent one, maybe? . . . But no! Along with the true world, we have also done away with the apparent! (Midday; moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)...
...A psychological explanation of this error.—Tracing something unfamiliar back to something familiar alleviates us, calms us, pacifies us, and in addition provides a feeling of power. The unfamiliar brings with it danger, unrest, and care—our first instinct is to do away with these painful conditions. First principle: some explanation is better than none. Since at bottom all we want is to free ourselves from oppressive representations, we aren’t exactly strict about the means of freeing ourselves from them: the first representation that serves to explain the unfamiliar as familiar is so beneficial that we “take it to be true.” Proof of pleasure (“strength”) as criterion of truth. —
Thus, the drive to find causes is conditioned and aroused by the feeling of fear. Whenever possible, the “why?” should not so much provide the cause for its own sake, but instead provide a type of cause—a relaxing, liberating, alleviating cause. The fact that something already familiar, something we have experienced, something inscribed in memory is posited as the cause, is the first consequence of this requirement. The new, the unexperienced, the alien, is excluded as a cause.—So we not only look for some type of explanation as the cause, but we single out and favour a certain type of explanation, the type that eliminates the feeling of the alien, new, and unexperienced, as fast and as often as possible—the most customary explanations.—
Consequence: one kind of cause-positing becomes more and more prevalent, concentrates itself into a system, and finally comes to the fore as dominant, that is, as simply excluding any other causes and explanations.—The banker thinks right away about “business,” the Christian about “sin,” the girl about her love…
...What can be our doctrine alone?—That nobody gives human beings their qualities, neither God, nor society, nor their parents and ancestors, nor they themselves (the nonsense of this last notion we are rejecting was taught by Kant as “intelligible freedom,” and maybe was already taught by Plato as well). Nobody is responsible for being here in the first place, for being constituted in such and such a way, for being in these circumstances, in this environment. The fatality of our essence cannot be separated from the fatality of all that was and will be. We are not the consequence of a special intention, a will, a goal; we are not being used in an attempt to reach an “ideal of humanity,” or an “ideal of happiness,” or an “ideal of morality”—it is absurd to want to divert our essence towards some goal. We have invented the concept “goal”: in reality, goals are absent.
One is necessary, one is a piece of destiny, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole.—There is nothing that could rule, measure, compare, judge our being, for that would mean ruling, measuring, comparing, and judging the whole... But there is nothing outside the whole! — That nobody is made responsible anymore, that no way of being may be traced back to a causa prima [first cause], that the world is not a unity either as sensorium or as “spirit,” only this is the great liberation—in this way only, the innocence of becoming is restored... The concept “God” was up to now the greatest objection against existence... We deny God, and in denying God we deny responsibility: only thus do we redeem the world…
...Morality for psychologists.—Don’t do tabloid psychology! Never observe in order to observe! That leads to a false perspective, squinting, stilted, and overdone. Experiencing because you want to experience— that doesn’t work. You mustn’t look at yourself during an experience; every such look becomes the “evil eye.” A born psychologist instinctively avoids seeing in order to see; the same goes for the born painter. He never works “from nature”—he trusts his instinct, his camera obscura, to sift through and express the “case,” “nature,” the “experience.”... The universal is what first comes into his consciousness, the conclusion, the result: he is not familiar with that willful process of abstracting from the individual case.—
What happens if you do otherwise? For example, if you do tabloid psychology in the manner of Parisian romanciers [novelists] great and small? That approach lies in wait for reality, so to speak; that approach brings home a handful of curiosities every evening... But just look at what comes of this in the end—a pile of scribbles, a mosaic at best, in any case something added together, something restless, with loud colours. The worst in this genre is what the Goncourts produce: they can’t put together three sentences that don’t simply pain the eye, the psychologist’s eye.—
Nature, in the judgment of an artist, is not a model. It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps. Nature is chance. Studying “from nature” seems like a bad sign to me: it betrays submission, weakness, fatalism—lying in the dust like this in front of petits faits [petty facts] is unworthy of a complete artist. To see what is—that’s typical of a different kind of spirit, the anti-artistic, the factual kind. One must know who one is...
...Beautiful and ugly.—Nothing is more conditional, or let’s say more constrained, than our feeling of beauty. Anyone who wanted to conceive of it apart from human beings’ pleasure in themselves would immediately lose all ground to stand on. The “beautiful in itself ” is just words, not even a concept. In the beautiful, humanity posits itself as the standard of perfection; in special cases, it worships itself in the beautiful. A species simply cannot do anything except say yes to itself alone like this. Its most basic instinct, the instinct of self-preservation and self-expansion, still shines through in such sublimities. Humanity believes that the world itself is piled with beauty—we forget that we are beauty’s cause. We alone have endowed the world with beauty—alas, only with a very human, all too-human beauty...
At bottom, human beings mirror themselves in things; they consider anything beautiful if it casts their image back to them: the judgment “beautiful” is the vanity of their species... For a little suspicion may whisper into the skeptic’s ear: is the world really beautified by the mere fact that human beings take it to be beautiful? They’ve humanized it: that’s all. But nothing, nothing at all guarantees to us that we, of all things, should serve as the model for the beautiful. Do any of us know what we look like in the eyes of a higher judge of taste? Outrageous, maybe? Maybe even funny? Maybe a little arbitrary? “Oh divine Dionysus, why are you pulling my ears?” Ariadne once asked her philosophical lover in one of those famous dialogues on Naxos. “I find a sort of humour in your ears, Ariadne: why aren’t they even longer?”
The Anti-Christ (1888)
This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is yet alive. It is possible that they may be among those who understand my Zarathustra: how could I confound myself with those who are now sprouting ears? — First the day after tomorrow must come for me. Some men are born posthumously.
The conditions under which any one understands me, and necessarily understands me — I know them only too well. Even to endure my seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness. He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops — and to looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and nationalism as beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him…. He must have an inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage for; the courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand manner — to hold together his strength, his enthusiasm. . . . Reverence for self; love of self; absolute freedom of self….
Very well, then! Of that sort only are my readers, my true readers, my readers foreordained: of what account are the rest? — The rest are merely humanity. — One must make one’s self superior to humanity, in power, in loftiness of soul — in contempt…
...A painful, terrible spectacle is playing itself out in front of me: I lifted the curtain to reveal the corruption of humanity. This word, coming from my mouth, is absolved of one suspicion at least: the suspicion that it implies some moral indictment of human beings. It is - I want to keep stressing this - moral-free: and this to the extent that I see the most corruption precisely where people have made the most concerted effort to achieve 'virtue', to attain 'godliness' . I understand corruption (as I am sure you have guessed by now) in the sense of decadence: my claim is that all the values in which humanity has collected its highest desiderata are values of decadence.
I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers things that will harm it. A history of the 'higher feelings', the 'ideals of humanity' - and I might have to tell this history - would amount to an explanation of why human beings are so corrupt.
I consider life itself to be an instinct for growth, for endurance, for the accumulation of force, for power: when there is no will to power, there is decline. My claim is that none of humanity's highest values have had this will, - that nihilistic values, values of decline, have taken control under the aegis of the holiest names…
...In Christianity, morality and religion are both completely out of touch with reality. Completely imaginary causes ('God', 'soul', 'I', 'spirit', 'free will' - or even an 'unfree' one); completely imaginary effects ('sin', 'redemption', 'grace', 'punishment', 'forgiveness of sins'). Contact between imaginary entities ('God', 'spirits', 'souls'); an imaginary natural science (anthropocentric; total absence of any concept of natural cause); an imaginary psychology (complete failure to understand oneself, interpretations of pleasant or unpleasant general sensations - for instance, the states of nervus sympathicus - using the sign language of religious-moral idiosyncrasy, - 'repentance', 'the pangs of conscience', 'temptation by the devil', 'the presence of God'); an imaginary teleology (‘the kingdom of God', 'the Last Judgment', 'eternal life'). - This entirely fictitious world can be distinguished from the world of dreams (to the detriment of the former) in that dreams reflect reality while Christianity falsifies, devalues, and negates reality. Once the concept of 'nature' had been invented as a counter to the idea of 'God', 'natural' had to mean 'reprehensible', - that whole fictitious world is rooted in a hatred of the natural (- of reality! -), it is the expression of a profound sense of unease concerning reality... But this explains everything. Who are the only people motivated to lie their way out of reality? People who suffer from it. But to suffer from reality means that you are a piece of reality that has gone wrong... The preponderance of feelings of displeasure over feelings of pleasure is the cause of that fictitious morality and religion: but a preponderance like this provides the formula for decadence…
...The Christian idea of God - God as a god of the sick, God as spider, God as spirit - is one of the most corrupt conceptions of God the world has ever seen; this may even represent a new low in the declining development of the types of god. God having degenerated into a contradiction of life instead of its transfiguration and eternal yes! God as declared aversion to life, to nature, to the will to life! God as the formula for every slander against 'the here and now', for every lie about the 'beyond' ! God as the deification of nothingness, the canonization of the will to nothingness!...
...The concepts of guilt and punishment are completely missing from the psychology of the 'evangel'; so is the concept of reward. 'Sin', any distance between God and man: these are abolished, this is what the 'glad tidings ' are all about. Blessedness is not a promise, it has no strings attached: it is the only reality - everything else is just a symbol used to speak about it...
This state projects itself into a new practice, the genuinely evangelical practice. Christians are not characterized by their 'faith': Christians act, they are characterized by a different way of acting. By the fact that they do not offer any resistance, in their words or in their heart, to people who are evil to them. By the fact that they do not make any distinction between foreigners and natives, between Jews and non-Jews ('the neighbour' is really the co-religionist, the Jew). By the fact that they do not get angry at anyone or belittle anyone. By the fact that they do not let themselves be seen in or involved with (‘sworn in' to) courts of law. By the fact that they would not get a divorce under any circumstances, even when the wife has been proven unfaithful . - All of this is fundamentally a single proposition, all of this is the result of a single instinct -
The life of the redeemer was nothing other than this practice, - even his death was nothing else... He no longer needed formulas, rites for interacting with God - or even prayer. He had settled his accounts with the whole Jewish doctrine of atonement and reconciliation; he knew how the practice of life is the only thing that can make you feel 'divine', 'blessed', 'evangelic', like a 'child of God' at all times. 'Atonement' and 'praying for forgiveness' are not the way to God: only the evangelical practice leads to God, in fact it is 'God' - What the evangel did away with was the Judaism of the concepts of 'sin', 'forgiveness of sin', 'faith', 'redemption through faith' - the whole Jewish church doctrine was rejected in the 'glad tidings'.
The profound instinct for how we must live to feel as if we are 'in heaven', to feel as if we are 'eternal', given that we do not feel remotely as if we are 'in heaven' when we behave in any other way: this, and this alone, is the psychological reality of 'redemption'. - A new way of life, not a new faith…
Ecce Homo (1888)
...my humanity consists, not in feeling for and with man, but in enduring that I do feel for and with him… My humanity is a continual self-overcoming…
...It is not doubt, it is certainty which makes mad…
...I know of no other way of dealing with great tasks than that of play: this is, as a sign of greatness, an essential precondition…
...Finally: when it comes to the question of who I am speaking to, I cannot put it any better than Zarathustra does; who is the only one he wants to tell his riddles to?
To you, the bold seekers, experimenters, and anyone who has ever embarked with cunning sails on terrible seas, - to you, the riddle-drunk, twilight-glad, whose souls are seduced by flutes to every wild abyss: - because you do not want to fumble for a thread with a cowardly hand; and you hate to guess where you can discern…
The Will to Power (from Nietzsche’s notebooks)
...As if values were inherent in things and all one had to do was grasp them!...
...Prostration before “facts” a kind of cult…
The Epistemological Starting Point
Profound aversion to reposing once and for all in any one total view of the world. Fascination of the opposing point of view: refusal to be deprived of the stimulus of the enigmatic…
...I maintain the phenomenality of the inner world, too: everything of which we become conscious is arranged, simplified, schematized, interpreted through and through—the actual process of inner “perception,” the causal connection between thoughts, feelings, desires, between subject and object, are absolutely hidden from us— and are perhaps purely imaginary. The “apparent inner world” is governed by just the same forms and procedures as the “outer” world. We never encounter “facts”: pleasure and displeasure are subsequent and derivative intellectual phenomena— “Causality” eludes us; to suppose a direct causal link between thoughts, as logic does— that is the consequence of the crudest and clumsiest observation. Between two thoughts all kinds of affects play their game: but their motions are too fast, therefore we fail to recognize them, we deny them— “Thinking,” as epistemologists conceive it, simply does not occur: it is a quite arbitrary fiction, arrived at by selecting one element from the process and eliminating all the rest, an artificial arrangement for the purpose of intelligibility— The “spirit,” something that thinks: where possible even “absolute, pure spirit”—this conception is a second derivative of that false introspection which believes in “thinking”: first an act is imagined which simply does not occur, “thinking,” and secondly a subject-substratum in which every act of thinking, and nothing else, has its origin: that is to say, both the deed and the doer are fictions…
...Against positivism, which halts at phenomena—“There are only facts"—I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact “in itself’: perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing.
“Everything is subjective,” you say; but even this is interpretation. The “subject” is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is.— Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is invention, hypothesis.
In so far as the word “knowledge” has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings.— “Perspectivism.” It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm…
...Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive…
...The valuation “I believe that this and that is so” as the essence at "truth.” In valuations are expressed conditions of preservation and growth. All our organs of knowledge and our senses are developed only with regard to conditions of preservation and growth. Trust in reason and its categories, in dialectic, therefore the valuation of logic, proves only their usefulness for life, proved by experience— not that something is true.
That a great deal of belief must be present; that judgments may be ventured; that doubt concerning all essential values is lacking—that is the precondition of every living thing and its life. Therefore, what is needed is that something must be held to be true— not that something is true.
“The real and the apparent world”— I have traced this antithesis back to value relations. We have projected the conditions of our preservation as predicates of being in general. Because we have to be stable in our beliefs if we are to prosper, we have made the “real” world a world not of change and becoming, but one of being…
...We are unable to affirm and to deny one and the same thing: this is a subjective empirical law, not the expression of any “necessity” but only of an inability.
If, according to Aristotle, the law of contradiction is the most certain of all principles, if it is the ultimate and most basic, upon which every demonstrative proof rests, if the principle of every axiom lies in it; then one should consider all the more rigorously what presuppositions already lie at the bottom of it. Either it asserts something about actuality, about being, as if one already knew this from another source; that is, as if opposite attributes could not be ascribed to it. Or the proposition means: opposite attributes should not be ascribed to it. In that case, logic would be an imperative, not to know the true, but to posit and arrange a world that shall be called true by us.
In short, the question remains open: are the axioms of logic adequate to reality or are they a means and measure for us to create reality, the concept “reality,” for ourselves?— To affirm the former one would, as already said, have to have a previous knowledge of being— which is certainly not the case. The proposition therefore contains no criterion of truth, but an imperative concerning that which should count as true.
Supposing there were no self-identical "A”, such as is presupposed by every proposition of logic (and of mathematics), and the "A” were already mere appearance, then logic would have a merely apparent world as its condition. In fact, we believe in this proposition under the influence of ceaseless experience which seems continually to confirm it. The “thing”— that is the real substratum of "A”; our belief in things is the precondition of our belief in logic. The "A” of logic is, like the atom, a reconstruction of the thing— If we do not grasp this, but make of logic a criterion of true being, we are on the way to positing as realities all those hypostases: substance, attribute, object, subject, action, etc.; that is, to conceiving a metaphysical world, that is, a “real world” (—this, however, is the apparent world once more— ).
The very first acts of thought, affirmation and denial, holding true and holding not true, are, in as much as they presuppose, not only the habit of holdings things true and holding them not true, but a right to do this, already dominated by the belief that we can gain possession of knowledge, that judgments really can hit upon the truth;—in short, logic does not doubt its ability to assert something about the true-in-itself (namely, that it cannot have opposite attributes).
Here reigns the coarse sensualistic prejudice that sensations teach us truths about things— that I cannot say at the same time of one and the same thing that it is hard and that it is soft. (The instinctive proof “I cannot have two opposite sensations at the same time”—-quite coarse and false.)
The conceptual ban on contradiction proceeds from the belief that we are able to form concepts, that the concept not only designates the essence of a thing but comprehends it— In fact, logic (like geometry and arithmetic) applies only to fictitious entities that we have created. Logic is the attempt to comprehend the actual world by means of a scheme of being posited by ourselves; more correctly, to make it formulatable and calculable for us—…
...On “logical semblance”— The concepts “individual” and “species” equally false and merely apparent. “Species” expresses only the fact that an abundance of similar creatures appear at the same time and that the tempo of their further growth and change is for a long time slowed down, so actual small continuations and increases are not very much noticed (— a phase of evolution in which the evolution is not visible, so an equilibrium seems to have been attained, making possible the false notion that a goal has been attained—and that evolution has a goal— ).
The form counts as something enduring and therefore more valuable; but the form has merely been invented by us; and however often “the same form is attained,” it does not mean that it is the same form—what appears is always something new, and it is only we, who are always comparing, who include the new, to the extent that it is similar to the old, in the unity of the “form,” As if a type should be attained and, as it were, was intended by and inherent in the process of formation.
Form, species, law, idea, purpose—in all these cases the same error is made of giving a false reality to a fiction, as if events were in some way obedient to something—an artificial distinction is made in respect of events between that which acts and that toward which the act is directed (but this “which” and this “toward” are only posited in obedience to our metaphysical-logical dogmatism: they are not “facts” ).
One should not understand this compulsion to construct concepts, species, forms, purposes, laws (“a world of identical cases”) as if they enabled us to fix the real world; but as a compulsion to arrange a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible:—we thereby create a world which is calculable, simplified, comprehensible, etc., for us.
This same compulsion exists in the sense activities that support reason—by simplification, coarsening, emphasizing, and elaborating, upon which all “recognition,” all ability to make oneself intelligible rests. Our needs have made our senses so precise that the “same apparent world” always reappears and has thus acquired the semblance of reality.
Our subjective compulsion to believe in logic only reveals that, long before logic itself entered our consciousness, we did nothing but introduce its postulates into events: now we discover them in events—we can no longer do otherwise— and imagine that this compulsion guarantees something connected with “truth.” It is we who created the “thing,” the “identical thing,” subject, attribute, activity, object, substance, form, after we had long pursued the process of making identical, coarse and simple. The world seems logical to us because we have made it logical…
...Ultimate solution.— We believe in reason: this, however, is the philosophy of gray concepts. Language depends on the most naive prejudices.
Now we read disharmonies and problems into things because we think only in the form of language— and thus believe in the “eternal truth” of “reason” (e.g., subject, attribute, etc.)
We cease to think when we refuse to do so under the constraint of language; we barely reach the doubt that sees this limitation as a limitation.
Rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme that we cannot throw off…
...Parmenides said, “one cannot think of what is not”;—we are at the other extreme, and say “what can be thought of must certainly be a fiction.”...
...Against the scientific prejudice.— The biggest fable of all is the fable of knowledge. One would like to know what things-in-themselves are; but behold, there are no things-in-themselves! But even supposing there were an in-itself, an unconditioned thing, it would for that very reason be unknowable! Something unconditioned cannot be known; otherwise it would not be unconditioned! Coming to know, however, is always “placing oneself in a conditional relation to something”;------one who seeks to know the unconditioned desires that it should not concern him, and that this same something should be of no concern to anyone. This involves a contradiction, first, between wanting to know and the desire that it not concern us (but why know at all, then?) and, secondly, because something that is of no concern to anyone is not at all, and thus cannot be known at all.—
Coming to know means “to place oneself in a conditional relation to something”; to feel oneself conditioned by something and oneself to condition it—it is therefore under all circumstances establishing, denoting, and making-conscious of conditions (not forthcoming, entities, things, what is “in-itself” )...
...The aberration of philosophy is that, instead of seeing in logic and the categories of reason means toward the adjustment of the world for utilitarian ends (basically, toward an expedient falsification), one believed one possessed in them the criterion of truth and reality. The “criterion of truth” was in fact merely the biological utility of such a system of systematic falsification; and since a species of animals knows of nothing more important than its own preservation, one might indeed be permitted to speak here of “truth.” The naivete was to take an anthropocentric idiosyncrasy as the measure of things, as the rule for determining “real” and “unreal” : in short, lo make absolute something conditioned. And behold, suddenly the world fell apart into a “true” world and an “apparent” world: and precisely the world that man’s reason had devised for him to live and settle in was discredited. Instead of employing the forms as a tool for making the world manageable and calculable, the madness of philosophers divined that in these categories is presented the concept of that world to which the one in which man lives does not correspond— The means were misunderstood as measures of value, even as a condemnation of their real intention—
The intention was to deceive oneself in a useful way; the means, the invention of formulas and signs by means of which one could reduce the confusing multiplicity to a purposive and manageable schema.
But alas! now a moral category was brought into play: no creature wants to deceive itself, no creature may deceive— consequently there is only a will to truth. What is “truth”?
The law of contradiction provided the schema: the true world, to which one seeks the way, cannot contradict itself, cannot change, cannot become, has no beginning and no end.
This is the greatest error that has ever been committed, the essential fatality of error on earth: one believed one possessed a criterion of reality in the forms of reason—while in fact one possessed them in order to become master of reality, in order to misunderstand reality in a shrewd manner—
And behold: now the world became false, and precisely on account of the properties that constitute its reality: change, becoming, multiplicity, opposition, contradiction, war. And then the entire fatality was there:
1. How can one get free from the false, merely apparent world? (— it was the real, the only one);
2. How can one become oneself as much as possible the antithesis of the character of the apparent world? (Concept of the perfect creature as an antithesis to the real creature; more clearly, as the contradiction of life— )
The whole tendency of values was toward slander of life; one created a confusion of idealist dogmatism and knowledge in general: so that the opposing party also was always attacking science.
The road to science was in this way doubly blocked: once by belief in the “true” world, and again by the opponents of this belief. Natural science, psychology was (1) condemned with regard to its objects, (2) deprived of its innocence—
In the actual world, in which everything is bound to and conditioned by everything else, to condemn and think away anything means to condemn and think away everything. The expression “that should not be,” “that should not have been,” is farcical— If one thinks out the consequences, one would ruin the source of life if one wanted to abolish whatever was in some respect harmful or destructive. Physiology teaches us better! —
We see how morality (a) poisons the entire conception of the world, (b) cuts off the road to knowledge, to science, (c) disintegrates and undermines all actual instincts (in that it teaches that their roots are immoral).
We see at work before us a dreadful tool of decadence that props itself up by the holiest names and attitudes…
...No limit to the ways in which the world can be interpreted; every interpretation a symptom of growth or of decline.
Inertia needs unity (monism); plurality of interpretations a sign of strength. Not to desire to deprive the world of its disturbing and enigmatic character!...
...“Interpretation,” the introduction of meaning—not “explanation” (in most cases a new interpretation over an old interpretation that has become incomprehensible, that is now itself only a sign). There are no facts, everything is in flux, incomprehensible, elusive; what is relatively most enduring is— our opinions…
...That the value of the world lies in our interpretation (— that other interpretations than merely human ones are perhaps somewhere possible—); that previous interpretations have been perspective valuations by virtue of which we can survive in life, i.e., in the will to power, for the growth of power; that every elevation of man brings with it the overcoming of narrower interpretations; that every strengthening and increase of power opens up new perspectives and means believing in new horizons— this idea permeates my writings. The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e., is not a fact but a fable and approximation on the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is “in flux,” as something in a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for—there is no “truth.”...
...Against the physical atom.— To comprehend the world, we have to be able to calculate it; to be able to calculate it, we have to have constant causes; because we find no such constant causes in actuality, we invent them for ourselves— the atoms. This is the origin of atomism. The calculability of the world, the expressibility of all events in formulas— is this really ‘comprehension”? How much of a piece of music has been understood when that in it which is calculable and can be reduced to formulas has been reckoned up?— And “constant causes,” things, substances, something “unconditioned”; invented—what has one achieved?...
...It is an illusion that something is known when we possess a mathematical formula for an event: it is only designated, described; nothing more!...
...The artistic view of the world: to sit down to contemplate life. But any analysis of the aesthetic outlook is lacking: its reduction to cruelty, a feeling of security, playing the judge and standing outside, etc. One must examine the artist himself, and his psychology (critique of the drive to play as a release of force, a pleasure in change, in impressing one’s soul on something foreign, the absolute egoism of the artist, etc.) What drives he sublimates.
The scientific view of the world: critique of the psychological need for science. The desire to make comprehensible; the desire to make practical, useful, exploitable—to what extent anti-aesthetic. Only value, what can be counted and calculated. How an average type of man seeks to gain the upper hand in this way. Dreadful when history is appropriated in this way—the realm of the superior, of those who judge. What drives they sublimate!
The religious view of the world: critique of the religious man. He is not necessarily the moral man, but the man of powerful exaltations and deep depressions who interprets the former with gratitude or suspicion and does not derive them from himself (— not the latter either). Essentially the man who feels himself “unfree,” who sublimates his moods, his instincts of subjection.
The moral view of the world: The feelings of a social order of rank are projected into the universe: irremovability, law, classification and coordination, because they are valued the highest, are also sought in the highest places—above the universe or behind the universe.
What is common to all: the ruling drives want to be viewed also as the highest courts of value in general, indeed as creative and ruling powers. It is clear that these drives either oppose or subject each other (join together synthetically or alternate in dominating). Their profound antagonism is so great, however, that where they all seek satisfaction, a man of profound mediocrity must result.
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