(Pythagoreans,
religious
sect.
Nietzsche - v02 - Early Greek Philosophy
How very much one
wrongs Anaxagoras if one reproaches him for the
wise abstention from teleology which shows itself in
this conception and talks scornfully of his Nous as
of a deus ex machina. Rather, on account of the
elimination of mythological and theistic miracle-
working and anthropomorphic ends and utilities,
Anaxagoras might have made use of proud words
similar to those which Kant used in his Natural His-
tory of the Heavens. For it is indeed a sublime
thought, to retrace that grandeur of the cosmos and
the marvellous arrangement of the orbits of the stars,
to retrace all that, in all forms to a simple, purely
X
## p. 153 (#221) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY I S3
mechanical motion and, as it were, to a moved mathe-
matical figure, and therefore not to reduce all that to
purposes and intervening hands of a machine-god,
but only to a kind of oscillation, which, having once
begun, is in its progress necessary and definite, and
effects result which resemble the wisest computation
of sagacity and extremely well thought-out fitness
without being anything of the sort. "I enjoy the
pleasure," says Kant, " of seeing how a well-ordered
whole produces itself without the assistance of arbi-
trary fabrications, under the impulse of fixed laws of
motion—a well-ordered whole which looks so similar
to that world-system which is ours, that I cannot ab-
stain from considering it to be the same. It seems to
me that one might say here, in a certain sense without
presumption: 'Give me matter and I will build a
world out of it. '"
18
Suppose now, that for once we allow that primal
mixture as rightly concluded, some considerations
especially from Mechanics seem to oppose the
grand plan of the world edifice. For even though
the Mind at a point causes a circular movement
its continuation is only conceivable with great
difficulty, especially since it is to be infinite and
gradually to make all existing masses rotate. As
a matter of course one would assume that the pres-
sure of all the remaining matter would have crushed
out this small circular movement when it had
scarcely begun; that this does not happen pre-
supposes on the part of the stimulating Nous, that
the latter began to work suddenly with awful force,
or at any rate so quickly, that we must call the
## p. 154 (#222) ############################################
154 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
motion a whirl: such a whirl as Democritus him-
self imagined. And since this whirl must be in-
finitely strong in order not to be checked through
the whole world of the Infinite weighing heavily
upon it, it will be infinitely quick, for strength can
manifest itself originally only in speed. On the
contrary the broader the concentric rings are, the
slower will be this motion; if once the motion could
reach the end of the infinitely extended world, then
this motion would have already infinitely little speed
of rotation. Vice versd, if we conceive of the motion
as infinitely great, i. e. , infinitely quick, at the moment
of the very first beginning of motion, then the origi-
nal circle must have been infinitely small; we get
therefore as the beginning a particle rotated round
itself, a particle with an infinitely small material con-
tent. This however would not at all explain the
further motion; one might imagine even all particles
of the primal mass to rotate round themselves and
yet the whole mass would remain unmoved and
unseparated. If, however, that material particle
of infinite smallness, caught and swung by the
Nous, was not turned round itself but described
a circle somewhat larger than a point, this would
cause it to knock against other material particles, to
move them on, to hurl them, to make them rebound
and thus gradually to stir up a great and spread-
ing tumult within which, as the next result, that
separation of the aerial masses from the ethereal
had to take place. Just as the commencement of
the motion itself is an arbitrary act of the Nous,
arbitrary also is the manner of this commencement
in so far as the first motion circumscribes a circle of
## p. 155 (#223) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 155
which the radius is chosen somewhat larger than a
point.
Here of course one might ask, what fancy had
at that time so suddenly occurred to the Nous, to
knock against some chance material particle out of
that number of particles and to turn it around in
whirling dance and why that did not occur to It
earlier. Whereupon Anaxagoras would answer:
"The Nous has the privilege of arbitrary action;
It may begin at any chance time, It depends on It-
self, whereas everything else is determined from
outside. It has no duty, and no end which It
might be compelled to pursue; if It did once begin
with that motion and set Itself an end, this after
all was only—the answer is difficult, Heraclitus
would say—play! "
That seems always to have been the last solution
or answer hovering on the lips of the Greek. The
Anaxagorean Mind is an artist and in truth the most
powerful genius of mechanics and architecture, creat-
ing with the simplest means the most magnificent
forms and tracks and as it were a mobile architecture,
but always out of that irrational arbitrariness which
lies in the soul of the artist. It is as though Anaxa-
goras was pointing at Phidias and in face of the
immense work of art, the Cosmos, was calling out to
us as he would do in front of the Parthenon: "The
Becoming is no moral, but only an artistic pheno-
menon. " Aristotle relates that, to the question what
made life worth living, Anaxagoras had answered:
"Contemplating the heavens and the total order
of the Cosmos. " He treated physical things so
## p. 156 (#224) ############################################
156 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
devotionally, and with that same mysterious awe,
which we feel when standing in front of an antique
temple; his doctrine became a species of free-think-
ing religious exercise, protecting itself through
the odi profanum vulgus et arceo and choosing its
adherents with precaution out of the highest and
noblest society of Athens. In the exclusive com-
munity of the Athenian Anaxagoreans the mytho-
logy of the people was allowed only as a symbolic
language; all myths, all gods, all heroes were con-
sidered here only as hieroglyphics of the interpreta-
tion of nature, and even the Homeric epic was said
to be the canonic song of the sway of the Nous and
the struggles and laws of Nature. Here and there
a note from this society of sublime free-thinkers
penetrated to the people; and especially Euripides,
the great and at all times daring Euripides, ever
thinking of something new, dared to let many things
become known by means of the tragic mask, many
things which pierced like an arrow through the senses
of the masses and from which the latter freed them-
selves only by means of ludicrous caricatures and
ridiculous re-interpretations.
The greatest of all Anaxagoreans however is Peri-
cles, the mightiest and worthiest man of the world;
and Plato bears witness that the philosophy of An-
axagoras alone had given that sublime flight to the
genius of Pericles. When as a public orator he stood
before his people, in the beautiful rigidity and immo-
bility of a marble Olympian and now, calm, wrapped
in his mantle, with unruffled drapery, without any
change of facial expression, without smile, with a
voice the strong tone of which remained ever the
. 2
## p. 157 (#225) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 157
same, and when he now spoke in an absolutely un-
Demosthenic but merely Periclean fashion, when
he thundered, struck with lightnings, annihilated
and redeemed—then he was the epitome of the
Anaxagorean Cosmos, the image of the Nous, who
has built for Itself the most beautiful and dignified
receptacle, then Pericles was as it were the visible
human incarnation of the building, moving, eliminat-
ing, ordering, reviewing, artistically-undetermined
force of the Mind. Anaxagoras himself said man was
the most rational being or he must necessarilyshelter
the Nous within himself in greater fulness than all
other beings, because he had such admirable organs
as his hands; Anaxagoras concluded therefore, that
that Nous, according to the extent to which It made
Itself master of a material body, was always form-1
ing for Itself out of this material the tools cor-
responding to Its degree of power, consequently the
Nous made the most beautiful and appropriate tools,'
when It was appearing in his greatest fulness. And
as the most wondrous and appropriate action of the
Nous was that circular primal-motion, since at that
time the Mind was still together, undivided, in Itself,
thus to the listening Anaxagoras the effect of the
Periclean speech often appeared perhaps as a simile
of that circular primal-motion; for here too he per-
ceived a whirl of thoughts moving itself at first with
awful force but in an orderly manner, which in con-
centric circles gradually caught and carried away the
nearest and farthest and which, when it reached its
end, had reshaped—organising and segregating—
the whole nation.
To the later philosophers of antiquity the way in
## p. 158 (#226) ############################################
158 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
which Anaxagoras made use of his Nous for the in-
terpretation of the world was strange, indeed scarcely
pardonable; to them it seemed as though he had
found a grand tool but had not well understood it and
they tried to retrieve what the finder had neglected.
They therefore did not recognise what meaning the
abstention of Anaxagoras, inspired by the purest
spirit of the method of natural science, had, and that
this abstention first of all in every case puts to itself
the question: "What is the cause of Something "?
{causa efficiens)—and not "What is the purpose of
Something"? (causafinalis). The Nous has not been
dragged in by Anaxagoras for the purpose of answer-
ing the special question: "What is the cause of motion
and what causes regular motions ? "; Plato however
reproaches him, that he ought to have, but had not
shown that everything was in its own fashion and its
own place the most beautiful, the best and the most
appropriate. But this Anaxagoras would not have
dared to assert in any individual case, to him the ex-
isting world was not even the most conceivably per-
fect world, for he saw everything originate out of
everything, and he found the segregation of the sub-
stances through the Nous complete and done with,
neither at the end of the filled space of the world
nor in the individual beings. For his understand-
ing it was sufficient that he had found a motion,
which, by simple continued action could create the
visible order out of a chaos mixed through and
through; and he took good care not to put the
question as to the Why? of the motion, as to the
rational purpose of motion. For if the Nous had
to fulfil by means of motion a purpose innate in the
## p. 159 (#227) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 159
noumenal essence, then it was no longer in Its free
will to commence the motion at any chance time;
in so far as the Nous is eternal, It had also to be
determined eternally by this purpose, and then no
point of time could have been allowed to exist in
which motion was still lacking, indeed it would have
been logically forbidden to assume a starting point
for motion: whereby again the conception of original
chaos, the basis of the whole Anaxagorean inter-
pretation of the world would likewise have become
logically impossible. In order to escape such diffi-
culties, which teleology creates, Anaxagoras had
always to emphasise and asseverate that the Mind
has free will; all Its actions, including that of the
primal motion, were actions of the "free will," where-
as on the contrary after that primeval moment the
whole remaining world was shaping itself in a strictly
determined, and more precisely, mechanically deter-
mined form. That absolutely free will however can
be conceived only as purposeless, somewhat after
the fashion of children's play or the artist's bent
\ for play. It is an error to ascribe to Anaxagoras
the common confusion of the teleologist, who, mar-
velling at the extraordinary appropriateness, at the
agreement of the parts with the whole, especially in
the realm of the organic, assumes that that which
exists for the intellect had also come into existence
through intellect, and that that which man brings
about only under the guidance of the idea of purpose,
must have been brought about by Nature through
reflection and ideas of purpose. (Schopenhauer,
"The World As Will And Idea," vol. ii. , Second Book,
chap. 26: On Teleology). Conceived in the manner
## p. 160 (#228) ############################################
160 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
of Anaxagoras, however, the order and appropriate-
ness of things on the contrary is nothing but the im-
mediate result of a blind mechanical motion; and
only in order to cause this motion, in order to get
for once out of the dead-rest of the Chaos, Anaxa-
goras assumed the free-willed Nous who depends
only on Itself. He appreciated in the Nous just
the very quality of being a thing of chance, a chance
agent, therefore of being able to act unconditioned,
undetermined, guided neither by causes nor by
purposes.
## p. 160 (#229) ############################################
Notes for a Continuation
(Early Part of 1873)
11
## p. 160 (#230) ############################################
l6o VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
of Anaxagoras, however, the order and appropriate-
ness of things on the contrary is nothing but the im-
mediate result of a blind mechanical motion; and
only in order to cause this motion, in order to get
for once out of the dead-rest of the Chaos, Anaxa-
goras assumed the free-willed Nous who depends
only on Itself. He appreciated in the Nous just
the very quality of being a thing of chance, a chance
agent, therefore of being able to act unconditioned,
undetermined, guided neither by causes nor by
purposes.
## p. 161 (#231) ############################################
Notes for a Continuation
(Early Part of 1873)
11
## p. 162 (#232) ############################################
>
## p. 163 (#233) ############################################
That this total conception of the Anaxagorean
doctrine must be right, is proved most clearly by
the way in which the successors of Anaxagoras,
the Agrigentine Empedocles and the atomic teacher
Democritus in their counter-systems actually criti-
cised and improved that doctrine. The method of
this critique is more than anything a continued
renunciation in that spirit of natural science men-
tioned above, the law of economy applied to the
interpretation of nature. That hypothesis, which
explains the existing world with the smallest ex-
penditure of assumptions and means is to have pre-
ference: for in such a hypothesis is to be found the
least amount of arbitrariness, and in it free play
with possibilities is prohibited. Should there be
two hypotheses which both explain the world, then
a strict test must be applied as to which of the two
better satisfies that demand of economy. He who
can manage this explanation with the simpler and
more known forces, especially the mechanical ones,
he who deduces the existing edifice of the world out
of the smallest possible number of forces, will always
be preferred to him who allows the more compli-
cated and less-known forces, and these moreover in
greater number, to carry on a world-creating play.
So then we see Empedocles endeavouring to remove
the superfluity of hypotheses from the doctrine of
Anaxagoras.
163
## p. 164 (#234) ############################################
164 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
The first hypothesis which falls as unnecessary is
that of the Anaxagorean Nous, for its assumption
is much too complex to explain anything so simple
as motion. After all it is only necessary to explain
the two kinds of motion: the motion of a body
towards another, and the motion away from another.
If our present Becoming is a segregating, although
not a complete one, then Empedocles asks: what
prevents complete segregation? Evidently a force
works against it, i. e. , a latent motion of attraction.
Further: in order to explain that Chaos, a force
must already have been at work; a movement is
necessary to bring about this complicated entangle-
ment.
Therefore periodical preponderance of the one
and the other force is certain. They are opposites.
The force of attraction is still at work; for other-
wise there would be no Things at all, everything
would be segregated.
This is the actual fact: two kinds of motion.
The Nous does not explain them. On the con-
trary, Love and Hatred; indeed we certainly see
that these move as well as that the Nous moves.
Now the conception of the primal state under-
goes a change: it is the most blessed. With Anaxa-
goras it was the chaos before the architectural work,
the heap of stones as it were upon the building site.
3
Empedocles had conceived the thought of a tan-
gential force originated by revolution and working
## p. 165 (#235) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 165
(notes for a continuation)
against gravity ("de coelo," i. , p. 284), Schopen-
hauer, "W. A. W. ," ii. 390.
He considered the continuation of the circular
movement according to Anaxagoras impossible. It
would result in a whirl, i. e. , the contrary of ordered
motion.
If the particles were infinitely mixed, pell-mell,
then one would be able to break asunder the bodies
without any exertion of power, they would not cohere
or hold together, they would be as dust.
The forces, which press the atoms against one
another, and which give stability to the mass, Em-
pedocles calls "Love. " It is a molecular force, a
constitutive force of the bodies.
4
Against Anaxagoras.
1. The Chaos already presupposes motion.
2. Nothing prevented the complete segregation.
3. Our bodies would be dust-forms. How can
motion exist, if there are not counter-motions in all
bodies?
4. An ordered permanent circular motion impos-
sible ; only a whirl. He assumes the whirl itself to
be an effect of the v*ikos. —diroppoiai. How do distant
things operate on one another, sun upon earth? If
everything were still in a whirl, that would be im-
possible. Therefore at least two moving powers:
which must be inherent in Things.
5. Why infinite ovra? Transgression of experi-
ence. Anaxagoras meant the chemical atoms.
Empedocles tried the assumption of four kinds of
## p. 166 (#236) ############################################
166 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
chemical atoms. He took the aggregate states to
be essential, and heat to be co-ordinated. There-
fore the aggregate states through repulsion and
attraction; matter in four forms.
6. The periodical principle is necessary.
7. With the living beings Empedocles will also
deal still on the same principle. Here also he
denies purposiveness. His greatest deed. With
Anaxagoras a dualism.
5
The symbolism of sexual love. Here as in the
Platonic fable the longing after Oneness shows itself,
and here, likewise, is shown that once a greater unity
already existed; were this greater unity established,
then this would again strive after a still greater one
The conviction of the unity of everything living
guarantees that once there was an immense Living
Something, of which we are pieces; that is probably
the Sphairos itself. He is the most blessed deity.
Everything was connected only through love, there-
fore in the highest degree appropriate. Love has been
torn to pieces and splintered by hatred, love has been
divided into her elements and killed—bereft of life.
In the whirl no living individuals originate Even-
tually everything is segregated and now our period
begins. (He opposes the Anaxagorean Primal Mix-
ture by a Primal Discord. ) Love, blind as she is,
with furious haste again throws the elements one
against another endeavouring to see whether she can
bring them back to life again or not. Here and there
she is successful. It continues. A presentiment
originates in the living beings, that they are to strive
## p. 167 (#237) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 167
(NOTES FOR A CONTINUATION)
after still higher unions than home and the primal
state. Eros. It is a terrible crime to kill life, for
thereby one works back to the Primal Discord.
Some day everything will be again one single life,
the most blissful state.
The Pythagorean-orphean doctrine re-interpreted
in the manner of natural science. Empedocles con-
sciously masters both means of expression, therefore
he is the first rhetor. Political aims.
The double-nature—the agonal and the loving, the
compassionate.
Attempt of the Hellenic total reform.
All inorganic matter has originated out of organic,
it is dead organic matter. Corpse and man.
DEMOCRITUS
The greatest possible simplification of the hypo-
theses.
1. There is motion, therefore vacuum, therefore
a " Non-Existent. " Thinking is motion.
2. If there is a "Non-Existent" it must be indi-
visible, i. e. , absolutely filled. Division is only ex-
plicable in case of empty spaces and pores. The
"Non-Existent" alone is an absolutely porous thing.
3. The secondary qualities of matter, vo/iy, not of
Matter-In-Itself.
4. Establishment of the primary qualities of
the arofia. Wherein homogeneous, wherein hetero-
geneous?
5. The aggregate-states of Empedocles (four ele-
## p. 168 (#238) ############################################
168 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
ments) presuppose only the homogeneous atoms,
they themselves cannot therefore be on-o.
6. Motion is connected indissolubly with theatoms,
effect of gravity. Epicur. Critique: what doesgravity
signify in an infinite vacuum?
7. Thinking is the motion of the fire-atoms. Soul,
life, perceptions of the senses.
Value of materialism and its embarrassment.
Plato and Democritus.
The hermit-like homeless noble searcher for truth.
Democritus and the Pythagoreans together find
the basis of natural sciences.
What are the causes which have interrupted a
flourishing science of experimental physics in anti-
quity after Democritus?
7
Anaxagoras has taken from Heraclitus the idea
that in every Becoming and in every Being the
opposites are together.
He felt strongly the contradiction that a body
has many qualities and he pulverised it in the belief
that he had now dissolved it into its true qualities.
Plato: first Heraclitean, later Sceptic: Every-
thing, even Thinking, is in a state of flux.
Brought through Socrates to the permanence of
the good, the beautiful.
These assumed as entitative.
All generic ideals partake of the idea of the good,
the beautiful, and they too are therefore entitative,
## p. 169 (#239) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 169
(notes for a continuation)
being (as the soul partakes of the idea of Life).
The idea is formless.
Through Pythagoras' metempsychosis has been
answered the question: how we can know anything
about the ideas.
Plato's end: scepticism in Parmenides. Refuta-
tion of ideology.
8
CONCLUSION
Greek thought during the tragic age is pessimistic
or artistically optimistic.
Their judgment about life implies more.
The One, flight from the Becoming. Aut unity,
aut artistic play.
Deep distrust of reality: nobody assumes a good
god, who has made everything optime.
(Pythagoreans, religious sect.
Anaximander.
Empedocles.
Eleates.
(Anaxagoras.
Heraclitus.
Democritus: the world without moral
and aesthetic meaning, pessimism of
chance.
If one placed a tragedy before all these, the three
former would see in it the mirror of the fatality
of existence, Parmenides a transitory appearance,
Heraclitus and Anaxagoras an artistic edifice and
image of the world-laws, Democritus the result of
machines.
## p. 170 (#240) ############################################
170 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
With Socrates Optimism begins, an optimism no
longer artistic, with teleology and faith in the good
god; faith in the enlightened good man. Dissolu-
tion of the instincts.
Socrates breaks with the hitherto prevailing know-
ledge and culture; he intends returning to the old
citizen-virtue and to the State.
Plato dissociates himself from the State, when
he observes that the State has become identical
with the new Culture.
The Socratic scepticism is a weapon against the
hitherto prevailing culture and knowledge.
## p. 170 (#241) ############################################
On Truth and Falsity in their
Ultramoral Sense
(1873)
## p. 170 (#242) ############################################
## p. 171 (#243) ############################################
In some remote corner of the universe, effused into
innumerable solar-systems, there was once a star
upon which clever animals invented cognition. It
was the haughtiest, most mendacious moment in
the history of this world, but yet only a moment.
After Nature had taken breath awhile the star con-
gealed and the clever animals had to die. —Someone
might write a fable after this style, and yet he would
not have illustrated sufficiently, how wretched,
shadow-like, transitory, purposeless and fanciful
the human intellect appears in Nature. There were
eternities during which this intellect did not exist,
and when it has once more passed away there will
be nothing to show that it has existed. For this
intellect is not concerned with any further mission
transcending the sphere of human life. No, it is
purely human and none but its owner and procreator
regards it so pathetically as to suppose that the
world revolves around it. If, however, we and the
gnat could understand each other we should learn
that even the gnat swims through the air with the
same pathos, and feels within itself the flying centre
of the world. Nothing in Nature is so bad or so
insignificant that it will not, at the smallest puff of
that force cognition, immediately swell up like a
balloon, and just as a mere porter wants to have his
admirer, so the very proudest man, the philosopher,
173
## p. 172 (#244) ############################################
## p. 173 (#245) ############################################
In some remote corner of the universe, effused into
innumerable solar-systems, there was once a star
upon which clever animals invented cognition. It
was the haughtiest, most mendacious moment in
the history of this world, but yet only a moment.
After Nature had taken breath awhile the star con-
gealed and the clever animals had to die. —Someone
might write a fable after this style, and yet he would
not have illustrated sufficiently, how wretched,
shadow-like, transitory, purposeless and fanciful
the human intellect appears in Nature. There were
eternities during which this intellect did not exist,
and when it has once more passed away there will
be nothing to show that it has existed. For this
intellect is not concerned with any further mission
transcending the sphere of human life. No, it is
purely human and none but its owner and procreator
regards it so pathetically as to suppose that the
world revolves around it. If, however, we and the
gnat could understand each other we should learn
that even the gnat swims through the air with the
same pathos, and feels within itself the flying centre
of the world. Nothing in Nature is so bad or so
insignificant that it will not, at the smallest puff of
that force cognition, immediately swell up like a
balloon, and just as a mere porter wants to have his
admirer, so the very proudest man, the philosopher,
## p. 174 (#246) ############################################
174 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
imagines he sees from all sides the eyes of the uni-
verse telescopically directed upon his actions and
thoughts.
It is remarkable that this is accomplished by the
intellect, which after all has been given to the most
unfortunate, the most delicate, the most transient
beings only as an expedient, in order to detain them
for a moment in existence, from which without that
extra-gift they would have every cause to flee as
swiftly as Lessing's son. * That haughtiness con-
nected with cognition and sensation, spreading
blinding fogs before the eyes and over the senses
of men, deceives itself therefore as to the value of
existence owing to the fact that it bears within it-
self the most flattering evaluation of cognition. Its
most general effect is deception; but even its most
particular effects have something of deception in
their nature.
The intellect, as a means for the preservation of
the individual, develops its chief power in dissimu-
lation ; for it is by dissimulation that the feebler, and
* The German poet, Lessing, had been married for just
a little over one year to Eva Konig. A son was born
and died the same day, and the mother's life was despaired
of. In a letter to his friend Eschenburg the poet wrote:
". . . and I lost him so unwillingly, this son! For he had
so much understanding! so much understanding! Do not
suppose that the few hours of fatherhood have made me an
ape of a father! I know what I say. Was it not under-
standing, that they had to drag him into the world with a
pair of forceps? that he so soon suspected the evil of this
world? Was it not understanding, that he seized the first
opportunity to get away from it? . . . "
Eva Konig died a week later. —Tr.
## p. 175 (#247) ############################################
ON TRUTH AND FALSITY 175
less robust individuals preserve themselves, since it
has been denied them to fight the battle of existence
with horns or the sharp teeth of beasts of prey. In
man this art of dissimulation reaches its acme of
perfection : in him deception, flattery, falsehood and
fraud, slander, display, pretentiousness, disguise,
cloaking convention, and acting to others and to
himself in short, the continual fluttering to and fro
around the one flame—Vanity: all these things are
so much the rule, and the law, that few things are
more incomprehensible than the way in which an
honest and pure impulse to truth could have arisen
among men. They are deeply immersed in illusions
and dream-fancies; their eyes glance only over the
surface of things and see "forms "; their sensation
nowhere leads to truth, but contents itself with re-
ceiving stimuli and, so to say, with playing hide-and-
seek on the back of things. In addition to that, at
night man allows his dreams to lie to him a whole
life-time long, without his moral sense ever trying
to prevent them ; whereas men are said to exist who
by the exercise of a strong will have overcome the
habit of snoring. What indeed does man know
about himself? Oh! that he could but once see
himself complete, placed as it were in an illumin-
ated glass-case! Does not nature keep secret from
him most things, even about his body, e. g. , the con-
volutions of the intestines, the quick flow of the
blood-currents, the intricate vibrations of the fibres,
so as to banish and lock him up in proud, delusive
knowledge? Nature threw away the key; and woe
to the fateful curiosity which might be able for a
moment to look out and down through a crevice in
## p. 176 (#248) ############################################
176 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
the chamber of consciousness, and discover that man,
indifferent to his own ignorance, is resting on the
pitiless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous,
and, as it were, hanging in dreams on the back of a
tiger. Whence, in the wide world, with this state of
affairs, arises the impulse to truth?
As far as the individual tries to preserve himself
against other individuals, in the natural state of
things he uses the intellect in most cases only for dis-
simulation ; since, however, man both from necessity
and boredom wants to exist sociallyand gregariously,
he must needs make peace and at least endeavour
to cause the greatest bellum omnium contra omnes to
disappear from his world. This first conclusion of
peace brings with it a something which looks like the
first step towards the attainment of that enigmatical
bent for truth. For that which henceforth is to be
"truth" is now fixed ; that is to say, a uniformly valid
and binding designation of things is invented and
the legislature of language also gives the first laws
of truth : since here, for the first time, originates the
contrast between truth and falsity. The liar uses
the valid designations, the words, in order to make
the unreal appear as real; e. g. , he says," I am rich,"
whereas the right designation for his state would be
"poor. " He abuses the fixed conventions by con-
venient substitution or even inversion of terms. If
he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful
fashion, society will no longer trust him but will
even exclude him. In this way men avoid not so
much being defrauded, but being injured by fraud.
At bottom, at this juncture too, they hate not decep-
tion, but the evil, hostile consequences of certain
## p. 177 (#249) ############################################
ON TRUTH AND FALSITY 177
species of deception. And it is in a similarly
limited sense only that man desires truth: he covets
the agreeable, life-preserving consequences of truth;
he is indifferent towards pure, ineffective know-
ledge; he is even inimical towards truths which
possibly might prove harmful or destroying. And,
moreover, what after all are those conventions of
language? Are they possibly products of know-
ledge, of the love of truth; do the designations
and the things coincide? Is language the adequate
expression of all realities?
Only by means of forgetfulness can man ever
arrive at imagining that he possesses "truth" in
that degree just indicated. If he does not mean to
content himself with truth in the shape of tautology,
that is, with empty husks, he will always obtain
illusions instead of truth. What is a word? The
expression of a nerve-stimulus in sounds. But to
infer a cause outside us from the nerve-stimulus is
already the result of a wrong and unjustifiable appli-
cation of the proposition of causality. How should
we dare, if truth with the genesis of language, if the
point of view of certainty with the designations had
alone been decisive; how indeed should we dare to
say: the stone is hard; as if "hard" was known
to us otherwise; and not merely as an entirely sub-
jective stimulus! We divide things according to
genders; we designate the tree as masculine,* the
plant as feminine: f what arbitrary metaphors!
How far flown beyond the canon of certainty! We
* In German the tree—der Baum—is masculine. —Tr.
t In German the plant—die Pflanze—is feminine. —Tr.
12
## p. 178 (#250) ############################################
178 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
speak of a "serpent";* the designation fits nothing
but the sinuosity, and could therefore also apper-
tain to the worm. What arbitrary demarcations!
what one-sided preferences given sometimes to this,
sometimes to that quality of a thing! The different
languages placed side by side show that with words
truth or adequate expression matters little: for other-
wise there would not be so many languages. The
"Thing-in-itself" (it is just this which would be the
pure ineffective truth) is also quite incomprehensible
to the creator of language and not worth making
any great endeavour to obtain. He designates only
the relations of things to men and for their expres-
sion he calls to his help the most daring metaphors.
A nerve-stimulus, first transformed into a percept!
First metaphor! The percept again copied into
a sound! Second metaphor! And each time he
leaps completely out of one sphere right into the
midst of an entirely different one. One can imagine
a man who is quite deaf and has never had a sensa-
tion of tone and of music; just as this man will
possibly marvel at Chladni's sound figures in the
sand, will discover their cause in the vibrations of
the string, and will then proclaim that now he knows
what man calls "tone "; even so does it happen to
us all with language. When we talk about trees,
colours, snow and flowers, we believe we know some-
thing about the things themselves, and yet we only
possess metaphors of the things, and these metaphors
do not in the least correspond to the original essen-
tials. Just as the sound shows itself as a sand-
* Cf. the German die Schlange and schlingen, the English
serpent from the Latin serpere. —Tr.
gf
## p. 179 (#251) ############################################
ON TRUTH AND FALSITY 179
figure, in the same way the enigmatical x of the
Thing-in-itself is seen first as nerve-stimulus, then
as percept, and finally as sound. At any rate the
genesis of language did not therefore proceed on
logical lines, and the whole material in which and
with which the man of truth, the investigator, the
philosopher works and builds, originates, if not
from Nephelococcygia, cloud-land, at any rate not
from the essence of things.
Let us especially think about the formation of
ideas. Every word becomes at once an idea not
by having, as one might presume, to serve as a
reminder for the original experience happening but
once and absolutely individualised, to which experi-
ence such word owes its origin, no, but by having
simultaneously to fit innumerable, more or less
similar (which really means never equal, therefore
altogether unequal) cases. Every idea originates
through equating the unequal. As certainly as no
one leaf is exactly similar to any other, so certain
is it that the idea "leaf" has been formed through
an arbitrary omission of these individual differences,
through a forgetting of the differentiating qualities,
and this idea now awakens the notion that in
nature there is, besides the leaves, a something
called the "leaf," perhaps a primal form accord-
ing to which all leaves were woven, drawn, accur-
ately measured, coloured, crinkled, painted, but by
unskilled hands, so that no copy had turned out
correct and trustworthy as a true copy of the primal
form. We call a man "honest"; we ask, why
has he acted so honestly to-day? Our customary
answer runs, "On account of his honesty. " The
## p. 180 (#252) ############################################
180 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
Honesty! That means again: the "leaf" is the cause
of the leaves. We really and truly do not know
anything at all about an essential quality which
might be called the honesty, but we do know about
numerous individualised, and therefore unequal
actions, which we equate by omission of the un-
equal, and now designate as honest actions; finally
out of them we formulate a qualitas occulta with
the name " Honesty. " The disregarding of the indi-
vidual and real furnishes us with the idea, as it like-
wise also gives us the form; whereas nature knows
of no forms and ideas, and therefore knows no species
but only an x, to us inaccessible and indefinable.
For our antithesis of individual and species is anthro-
pomorphic too and does not come from the essence
of things, although on the other hand we do not dare
to say that it does not correspond to it; for that
would be a dogmatic assertion and as such just as
undemonstrable as its contrary.
What therefore is truth? A mobile army of meta-
phors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a
sum of human relations which became poetically and
rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned,
and after long usage seem to a nation fixed, canonic
and binding; truths are illusions of which one has for-
gotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors
which have become powerless to affect the senses;
coins which have their obverse effaced and now are
no longer of account as coins but merely as metal.
Still we do not yet know whence the impulse to
truth comes, for up to now we have heard only about
the obligation which society imposes in order to
exist: to be truthful, that is, to use the usual meta-
## p. 181 (#253) ############################################
ON TRUTH AND FALSITY l8l
phors, therefore expressed morally: we have heard
only about the obligation to lie according to a fixed
convention, to lie gregariously in a style binding for
all. Now man of course forgets that matters are going
thus with him; he therefore lies in that fashion pointed
out unconsciously and according to habits of cen-
turies' standing—and by this very unconsciousness; by
this very forgetting, he arrives at a sense for truth.
Through this feeling of being obliged to designate
one thing as "red," another as "cold," a third one as
"dumb," awakes a moral emotion relating to truth.
Out of the antithesis "liar" whom nobody trusts,
whom all exclude, man demonstrates to himself the
venerableness, reliability, usefulness of truth. Now as
a " rational" being he submits his actions to the sway
of abstractions; he no longer suffers himself to be
carried away by sudden impressions, by sensations,
he first generalises all these impressions into paler,
cooler ideas, in order to attach to them the ship of his
life and actions. Everything which makes man stand
out in bold relief against the animal depends on this
faculty of volatilising the concrete metaphors into a
schema, and therefore resolving a perception into an
idea. For within the range of those schemata a
something becomes possible that never could succeed
under the first perceptual impressions: to build up
a pyramidal order with castes and grades, to create
a new world of laws, privileges, sub-orders, delimita-
tions, which now stands opposite the other perceptual
world of first impressions and assumes the appear-
ance of being the more fixed, general, known, human
of the two and therefore the regulating and impera-
tive one. Whereas every metaphor of perception is
## p. 182 (#254) ############################################
182 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
individual and without its equal and therefore knows
how to escape all attempts to classify it, the great
edifice of ideas shows the rigid regularity of a Roman
Columbarium and in logic breathes forth the stern-
ness and coolness which we find in mathematics. He
who has been breathed upon by this coolness will
scarcely believe, that the idea too, bony and hexa-
hedral, and permutable as a die, remains however only
as the residuum of a metaphor, and that the illusion
of the artistic metamorphosis of a nerve-stimulus
into percepts is, if not the mother, then the grand-
mother of every idea. Now in this game of dice,
"Truth" means to use every die as it is designated, to
count its pointscarefully,toformexact classifications,
and never to violate the order of castes and the se-
quences of rank. Just as the Romans and Etruscans
for their benefit cut up the sky by means of strong
mathematical lines and banned a god as it were into
a templum, into a space limited in this fashion, so
every nation has above its head such a sky of ideas
divided up mathematically, and it understands the
demand for truth to mean that every conceptual god
is to be looked for only in his own sphere. One may
here well admire man, who succeeded in piling up an
infinitely complex domeof ideas on a movable founda-
tion and as it were on running water, as a powerful
genius of architecture. Of course in order to obtain
hold on such a foundation it must be as an edifice
piled up out of cobwebs, so fragile, as to be carried
away by the waves: so firm, as not to be blown
asunder by every wind. In this way man as an
architectural genius rises high above the bee; she
builds with wax, which she brings together out of
## p. 183 (#255) ############################################
ON TRUTH AND FALSITY 183
nature; he with the much more delicate material of
ideas, which he must first manufacture within him-
self. He is very much to be admired here—but not
on account of his impulse for truth, his bent for pure
cognition of things. If somebody hides a thing be-
hind a bush, seeks it again and finds it in the self-
same place, then there is not much to boast of, re-
specting this seeking and finding; thus, however,
matters stand with the seeking and finding of "truth"
within the realm of reason. If I make the definition
of the mammal and then declare after inspecting a
camel, " Behold a mammal," then no doubt a truth
is brought to light thereby, but it is of very limited
value, I mean it is anthropomorphic through and
through, and does not contain one single point which
is "true-in-itself," real and universally valid, apart
from man. The seeker after such truths seeks at
the bottom only the metamorphosis of the world in
man, he strives for an understanding of the world as
a human-like thing and by his battling gains at best
the feeling of an assimilation. Similarly, as the
astrologer contemplated the stars in the service of
man and in connection with their happiness and
unhappiness, such a seeker contemplates the whole
world as related to man, as the infinitely protracted
echo of an original sound: man; as the multiplied
copy of the one arch-type: man. His procedure is
to apply man as the measure of all things, whereby
he starts from the error of believing that he has these
things immediately before him as pure objects. He
therefore forgets that the original metaphors of per-
ception are metaphors, and takes them for the things
themselves.
## p. 183 (#256) ############################################
182 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
individual and without its equal and therefore knows
how to escape all attempts to classify it, the great
edifice of ideas shows the rigid regularity of a Roman
Columbarium and in logic breathes forth the stern-
ness and coolness which we find in mathematics. He
who has been breathed upon by this coolness will
scarcely believe, that the idea too, bony and hexa-
hedral, and permutable as a die, remains however only
as the residuum of a metaphor, and that the illusion
of the artistic metamorphosis of a nerve-stimulus
into percepts is, if not the mother, then the grand-
mother of every idea. Now in this game of dice,
"Truth" means to use every die as it is designated, to
count its pointscarefully,toform exact classifications,
and never to violate the order of castes and the se-
quences of rank. Just as the Romans and Etruscans
for their benefit cut up the sky by means of strong
mathematical lines and banned a god as it were into
a templum, into a space limited in this fashion, so
every nation has above its head such a sky of ideas
divided up mathematically, and it understands the
demand for truth to mean that every conceptual god
is to be looked for only in his own sphere. One may
here well admire man, who succeeded in piling up an
infinitely complex domeof ideas on a movable founda-
tion and as it were on running water, as a powerful
genius of architecture. Of course in order to obtain
hold on such a foundation it must be as an edifice
piled up out of cobwebs, so fragile, as to be carried
away by the waves: so firm, as not to be blown
asunder by every wind. In this way man as an
architectural genius rises high above the bee; she
builds with wax, which she brings together out of
## p. 183 (#257) ############################################
ON TRUTH AND FALSITY 183
nature; he with the much more delicate material of
ideas, which he must first manufacture within him-
self. He is very much to be admired here—but not
on account of his impulse for truth, his bent for pure
cognition of things. If somebody hides a thing be-
hind a bush, seeks it again and finds it in the self-
same place, then there is not much to boast of, re-
specting this seeking and finding; thus, however,
matters stand with the seeking and finding of "truth"
within the realm of reason. If I make the definition
of the mammal and then declare after inspecting a
camel, " Behold a mammal," then no doubt a truth
is brought to light thereby, but it is of very limited
value, I mean it is anthropomorphic through and
through, and does not contain one single point which
is "true-in-itself," real and universally valid, apart
from man. The seeker after such truths seeks at
the bottom only the metamorphosis of the world in
man, he strives for an understanding of the world as
a human-like thing and by his battling gains at best
the feeling of an assimilation. Similarly, as the
astrologer contemplated the stars in the service of
man and in connection with their happiness and
unhappiness, such a seeker contemplates the whole
world as related to man, as the infinitely protracted
echo of an original sound: man; as the multiplied
copy of the one arch-type: man. His procedure is
to apply man as the measure of all things, whereby
he starts from the error of believing that he has these
things immediately before him as pure objects. He
therefore forgets that the original metaphors of per-
ception are metaphors, and takes them for the things
themselves.
## p. 184 (#258) ############################################
184 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
Only by forgetting that primitive world of meta-
phors, only by the congelation and coagulation of an
original mass of similes and percepts pouring forth
as a fiery liquid out of the primal faculty of human
fancy, only by the invincible faith, that this sun, this
window, this table is a truth in itself: in short only
by the fact that man forgets himself as subject, and
what is more as an artistically creating subject: only
by all this does he live with some repose, safety and
consequence. If he were able to get out of the prison
walls of this faith, even for an instant only, his " self-
consciousness " would be destroyed at once. Already
it costs him some trouble to admit to himself that the
insect and the bird perceive a world different from his
own, and that the question, which of the two world-
perceptions is more accurate, is quite a senseless one,
since to decide this question it would be necessary
to apply the standard of right perception, i. e. , to apply
a standard which does not exist. On the whole it
seems to me that the "right perception"—which
would mean the adequate expression of an object in
the subject—is a nonentity full of contradictions:
for between two utterly different spheres, as between
subject and object, there is no causality, no accuracy,
no expression, but at the utmost an cesthetical relation,
I mean a suggestive metamorphosis, a stammering
translation into quite a distinct foreign language, for
which purpose however there is needed at any rate
an intermediate sphere, an intermediate force, freely
composing and freely inventing. The word "phe-
nomenon" contains many seductions, and on that
account I avoid it as much as possible, for it is not
true that the essence of things appears in the empiric
## p. 185 (#259) ############################################
ON TRUTH AND FALSITY 185
world. A painter who had no hands and wanted to
express the picture distinctly present to his mind by
the agency of song, would still reveal much more
with this permutation of spheres, than the empiric
world reveals about the essence of things. The very
relation of a nerve-stimulus to the produced percept
is in itself no necessary one; but if the same percept
has been reproduced millions of times and has been
the inheritance of many successive generations of
man, and in the end appears each time to all mankind
as the result of the same cause, then it attains finally
for man the same importance as if it were the unique,
necessary percept and as if that relation between
the original nerve-stimulus and the percept pro-
duced were a close relation of causality: just as
a dream eternally repeated, would be perceived and
judged as though real. But the congelation and
coagulation of a metaphor does not at all guaran-
tee the necessity and exclusive justification of that
metaphor.
Surely every human being who is at home with
such contemplations has felt a deep distrust against
any idealism of that kind, as often as he has distinctly
convinced himself of the eternal rigidity, omni-
presence, and infallibility of nature's laws: he has
arrived at the conclusion that as far as we can pene-
trate the heights of the telescopic and the depths of
the microscopic world, everything is quite secure,
complete, infinite, determined, and continuous.
Science will have to dig in these shafts eternally
and successfully and all things found are sure to
have to harmonise and not to contradict one another.
How little does this resemble a product of fancy, for
## p. 186 (#260) ############################################
186 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
if it were one it would necessarily betray somewhere
its nature of appearance and unreality. Against this
it may be objected in the first place that if each of us
had for himself a different sensibility, if we ourselves
were only able to perceive sometimes as a bird, some-
times as a worm, sometimes as a plant, or if one of
us saw the same stimulus as red, another as blue, if
a third person even perceived it as a tone, then no-
body would talk of such an orderliness of nature, but
would conceive of her only as an extremely subjec-
tive structure. Secondly, what is, for us in general, a
law of nature? It is not known in itself but only in
its effects, that is to say in its relations to other laws
of nature, which again are known to us only as sums
of relations. Therefore all these relations refer only
one to another and are absolutely incomprehensible
to us in their essence; only that which we add: time,
space, i. e. , relations of sequence and numbers, are
really known to us in them. Everything wonderful
however, that we marvel at in the laws of nature,
everything that demands an explanation and might
seduce us into distrusting idealism, lies really and
solely in the mathematical rigour and inviolability
of the conceptions of time and space. These how-
ever we produce within ourselves and throw them
forth with that necessity with which the spider spins;
since we are compelled to conceive all things under
these forms only, then it is no longer wonderful that
in all things we actually conceive none but these
forms: for they all must bear within themselves the
laws of number, and this very idea of number is the
most marvellous in all things. All obedience to law
which impresses us so forcibly in the orbits of stars
## p. 187 (#261) ############################################
ON TRUTH AND FALSITY 187
and in chemical processes coincides at the bottom
with those qualities which we ourselves attach to
those things, so that it is we who thereby make the
impression upon ourselves. Whence it clearly follows
that that artistic formation of metaphors, with which
every sensation in us begins, already presupposes
those forms,and is therefore only consummated with-
in them; only out of the persistency of these primal
forms the possibility explains itself, how afterwards
out of the metaphors themselves a structure of ideas
could again be compiled. For the latter is an imita-
tion of the relations of time, space and number in
the realm of metaphors.
wrongs Anaxagoras if one reproaches him for the
wise abstention from teleology which shows itself in
this conception and talks scornfully of his Nous as
of a deus ex machina. Rather, on account of the
elimination of mythological and theistic miracle-
working and anthropomorphic ends and utilities,
Anaxagoras might have made use of proud words
similar to those which Kant used in his Natural His-
tory of the Heavens. For it is indeed a sublime
thought, to retrace that grandeur of the cosmos and
the marvellous arrangement of the orbits of the stars,
to retrace all that, in all forms to a simple, purely
X
## p. 153 (#221) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY I S3
mechanical motion and, as it were, to a moved mathe-
matical figure, and therefore not to reduce all that to
purposes and intervening hands of a machine-god,
but only to a kind of oscillation, which, having once
begun, is in its progress necessary and definite, and
effects result which resemble the wisest computation
of sagacity and extremely well thought-out fitness
without being anything of the sort. "I enjoy the
pleasure," says Kant, " of seeing how a well-ordered
whole produces itself without the assistance of arbi-
trary fabrications, under the impulse of fixed laws of
motion—a well-ordered whole which looks so similar
to that world-system which is ours, that I cannot ab-
stain from considering it to be the same. It seems to
me that one might say here, in a certain sense without
presumption: 'Give me matter and I will build a
world out of it. '"
18
Suppose now, that for once we allow that primal
mixture as rightly concluded, some considerations
especially from Mechanics seem to oppose the
grand plan of the world edifice. For even though
the Mind at a point causes a circular movement
its continuation is only conceivable with great
difficulty, especially since it is to be infinite and
gradually to make all existing masses rotate. As
a matter of course one would assume that the pres-
sure of all the remaining matter would have crushed
out this small circular movement when it had
scarcely begun; that this does not happen pre-
supposes on the part of the stimulating Nous, that
the latter began to work suddenly with awful force,
or at any rate so quickly, that we must call the
## p. 154 (#222) ############################################
154 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
motion a whirl: such a whirl as Democritus him-
self imagined. And since this whirl must be in-
finitely strong in order not to be checked through
the whole world of the Infinite weighing heavily
upon it, it will be infinitely quick, for strength can
manifest itself originally only in speed. On the
contrary the broader the concentric rings are, the
slower will be this motion; if once the motion could
reach the end of the infinitely extended world, then
this motion would have already infinitely little speed
of rotation. Vice versd, if we conceive of the motion
as infinitely great, i. e. , infinitely quick, at the moment
of the very first beginning of motion, then the origi-
nal circle must have been infinitely small; we get
therefore as the beginning a particle rotated round
itself, a particle with an infinitely small material con-
tent. This however would not at all explain the
further motion; one might imagine even all particles
of the primal mass to rotate round themselves and
yet the whole mass would remain unmoved and
unseparated. If, however, that material particle
of infinite smallness, caught and swung by the
Nous, was not turned round itself but described
a circle somewhat larger than a point, this would
cause it to knock against other material particles, to
move them on, to hurl them, to make them rebound
and thus gradually to stir up a great and spread-
ing tumult within which, as the next result, that
separation of the aerial masses from the ethereal
had to take place. Just as the commencement of
the motion itself is an arbitrary act of the Nous,
arbitrary also is the manner of this commencement
in so far as the first motion circumscribes a circle of
## p. 155 (#223) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 155
which the radius is chosen somewhat larger than a
point.
Here of course one might ask, what fancy had
at that time so suddenly occurred to the Nous, to
knock against some chance material particle out of
that number of particles and to turn it around in
whirling dance and why that did not occur to It
earlier. Whereupon Anaxagoras would answer:
"The Nous has the privilege of arbitrary action;
It may begin at any chance time, It depends on It-
self, whereas everything else is determined from
outside. It has no duty, and no end which It
might be compelled to pursue; if It did once begin
with that motion and set Itself an end, this after
all was only—the answer is difficult, Heraclitus
would say—play! "
That seems always to have been the last solution
or answer hovering on the lips of the Greek. The
Anaxagorean Mind is an artist and in truth the most
powerful genius of mechanics and architecture, creat-
ing with the simplest means the most magnificent
forms and tracks and as it were a mobile architecture,
but always out of that irrational arbitrariness which
lies in the soul of the artist. It is as though Anaxa-
goras was pointing at Phidias and in face of the
immense work of art, the Cosmos, was calling out to
us as he would do in front of the Parthenon: "The
Becoming is no moral, but only an artistic pheno-
menon. " Aristotle relates that, to the question what
made life worth living, Anaxagoras had answered:
"Contemplating the heavens and the total order
of the Cosmos. " He treated physical things so
## p. 156 (#224) ############################################
156 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
devotionally, and with that same mysterious awe,
which we feel when standing in front of an antique
temple; his doctrine became a species of free-think-
ing religious exercise, protecting itself through
the odi profanum vulgus et arceo and choosing its
adherents with precaution out of the highest and
noblest society of Athens. In the exclusive com-
munity of the Athenian Anaxagoreans the mytho-
logy of the people was allowed only as a symbolic
language; all myths, all gods, all heroes were con-
sidered here only as hieroglyphics of the interpreta-
tion of nature, and even the Homeric epic was said
to be the canonic song of the sway of the Nous and
the struggles and laws of Nature. Here and there
a note from this society of sublime free-thinkers
penetrated to the people; and especially Euripides,
the great and at all times daring Euripides, ever
thinking of something new, dared to let many things
become known by means of the tragic mask, many
things which pierced like an arrow through the senses
of the masses and from which the latter freed them-
selves only by means of ludicrous caricatures and
ridiculous re-interpretations.
The greatest of all Anaxagoreans however is Peri-
cles, the mightiest and worthiest man of the world;
and Plato bears witness that the philosophy of An-
axagoras alone had given that sublime flight to the
genius of Pericles. When as a public orator he stood
before his people, in the beautiful rigidity and immo-
bility of a marble Olympian and now, calm, wrapped
in his mantle, with unruffled drapery, without any
change of facial expression, without smile, with a
voice the strong tone of which remained ever the
. 2
## p. 157 (#225) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 157
same, and when he now spoke in an absolutely un-
Demosthenic but merely Periclean fashion, when
he thundered, struck with lightnings, annihilated
and redeemed—then he was the epitome of the
Anaxagorean Cosmos, the image of the Nous, who
has built for Itself the most beautiful and dignified
receptacle, then Pericles was as it were the visible
human incarnation of the building, moving, eliminat-
ing, ordering, reviewing, artistically-undetermined
force of the Mind. Anaxagoras himself said man was
the most rational being or he must necessarilyshelter
the Nous within himself in greater fulness than all
other beings, because he had such admirable organs
as his hands; Anaxagoras concluded therefore, that
that Nous, according to the extent to which It made
Itself master of a material body, was always form-1
ing for Itself out of this material the tools cor-
responding to Its degree of power, consequently the
Nous made the most beautiful and appropriate tools,'
when It was appearing in his greatest fulness. And
as the most wondrous and appropriate action of the
Nous was that circular primal-motion, since at that
time the Mind was still together, undivided, in Itself,
thus to the listening Anaxagoras the effect of the
Periclean speech often appeared perhaps as a simile
of that circular primal-motion; for here too he per-
ceived a whirl of thoughts moving itself at first with
awful force but in an orderly manner, which in con-
centric circles gradually caught and carried away the
nearest and farthest and which, when it reached its
end, had reshaped—organising and segregating—
the whole nation.
To the later philosophers of antiquity the way in
## p. 158 (#226) ############################################
158 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
which Anaxagoras made use of his Nous for the in-
terpretation of the world was strange, indeed scarcely
pardonable; to them it seemed as though he had
found a grand tool but had not well understood it and
they tried to retrieve what the finder had neglected.
They therefore did not recognise what meaning the
abstention of Anaxagoras, inspired by the purest
spirit of the method of natural science, had, and that
this abstention first of all in every case puts to itself
the question: "What is the cause of Something "?
{causa efficiens)—and not "What is the purpose of
Something"? (causafinalis). The Nous has not been
dragged in by Anaxagoras for the purpose of answer-
ing the special question: "What is the cause of motion
and what causes regular motions ? "; Plato however
reproaches him, that he ought to have, but had not
shown that everything was in its own fashion and its
own place the most beautiful, the best and the most
appropriate. But this Anaxagoras would not have
dared to assert in any individual case, to him the ex-
isting world was not even the most conceivably per-
fect world, for he saw everything originate out of
everything, and he found the segregation of the sub-
stances through the Nous complete and done with,
neither at the end of the filled space of the world
nor in the individual beings. For his understand-
ing it was sufficient that he had found a motion,
which, by simple continued action could create the
visible order out of a chaos mixed through and
through; and he took good care not to put the
question as to the Why? of the motion, as to the
rational purpose of motion. For if the Nous had
to fulfil by means of motion a purpose innate in the
## p. 159 (#227) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 159
noumenal essence, then it was no longer in Its free
will to commence the motion at any chance time;
in so far as the Nous is eternal, It had also to be
determined eternally by this purpose, and then no
point of time could have been allowed to exist in
which motion was still lacking, indeed it would have
been logically forbidden to assume a starting point
for motion: whereby again the conception of original
chaos, the basis of the whole Anaxagorean inter-
pretation of the world would likewise have become
logically impossible. In order to escape such diffi-
culties, which teleology creates, Anaxagoras had
always to emphasise and asseverate that the Mind
has free will; all Its actions, including that of the
primal motion, were actions of the "free will," where-
as on the contrary after that primeval moment the
whole remaining world was shaping itself in a strictly
determined, and more precisely, mechanically deter-
mined form. That absolutely free will however can
be conceived only as purposeless, somewhat after
the fashion of children's play or the artist's bent
\ for play. It is an error to ascribe to Anaxagoras
the common confusion of the teleologist, who, mar-
velling at the extraordinary appropriateness, at the
agreement of the parts with the whole, especially in
the realm of the organic, assumes that that which
exists for the intellect had also come into existence
through intellect, and that that which man brings
about only under the guidance of the idea of purpose,
must have been brought about by Nature through
reflection and ideas of purpose. (Schopenhauer,
"The World As Will And Idea," vol. ii. , Second Book,
chap. 26: On Teleology). Conceived in the manner
## p. 160 (#228) ############################################
160 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
of Anaxagoras, however, the order and appropriate-
ness of things on the contrary is nothing but the im-
mediate result of a blind mechanical motion; and
only in order to cause this motion, in order to get
for once out of the dead-rest of the Chaos, Anaxa-
goras assumed the free-willed Nous who depends
only on Itself. He appreciated in the Nous just
the very quality of being a thing of chance, a chance
agent, therefore of being able to act unconditioned,
undetermined, guided neither by causes nor by
purposes.
## p. 160 (#229) ############################################
Notes for a Continuation
(Early Part of 1873)
11
## p. 160 (#230) ############################################
l6o VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
of Anaxagoras, however, the order and appropriate-
ness of things on the contrary is nothing but the im-
mediate result of a blind mechanical motion; and
only in order to cause this motion, in order to get
for once out of the dead-rest of the Chaos, Anaxa-
goras assumed the free-willed Nous who depends
only on Itself. He appreciated in the Nous just
the very quality of being a thing of chance, a chance
agent, therefore of being able to act unconditioned,
undetermined, guided neither by causes nor by
purposes.
## p. 161 (#231) ############################################
Notes for a Continuation
(Early Part of 1873)
11
## p. 162 (#232) ############################################
>
## p. 163 (#233) ############################################
That this total conception of the Anaxagorean
doctrine must be right, is proved most clearly by
the way in which the successors of Anaxagoras,
the Agrigentine Empedocles and the atomic teacher
Democritus in their counter-systems actually criti-
cised and improved that doctrine. The method of
this critique is more than anything a continued
renunciation in that spirit of natural science men-
tioned above, the law of economy applied to the
interpretation of nature. That hypothesis, which
explains the existing world with the smallest ex-
penditure of assumptions and means is to have pre-
ference: for in such a hypothesis is to be found the
least amount of arbitrariness, and in it free play
with possibilities is prohibited. Should there be
two hypotheses which both explain the world, then
a strict test must be applied as to which of the two
better satisfies that demand of economy. He who
can manage this explanation with the simpler and
more known forces, especially the mechanical ones,
he who deduces the existing edifice of the world out
of the smallest possible number of forces, will always
be preferred to him who allows the more compli-
cated and less-known forces, and these moreover in
greater number, to carry on a world-creating play.
So then we see Empedocles endeavouring to remove
the superfluity of hypotheses from the doctrine of
Anaxagoras.
163
## p. 164 (#234) ############################################
164 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
The first hypothesis which falls as unnecessary is
that of the Anaxagorean Nous, for its assumption
is much too complex to explain anything so simple
as motion. After all it is only necessary to explain
the two kinds of motion: the motion of a body
towards another, and the motion away from another.
If our present Becoming is a segregating, although
not a complete one, then Empedocles asks: what
prevents complete segregation? Evidently a force
works against it, i. e. , a latent motion of attraction.
Further: in order to explain that Chaos, a force
must already have been at work; a movement is
necessary to bring about this complicated entangle-
ment.
Therefore periodical preponderance of the one
and the other force is certain. They are opposites.
The force of attraction is still at work; for other-
wise there would be no Things at all, everything
would be segregated.
This is the actual fact: two kinds of motion.
The Nous does not explain them. On the con-
trary, Love and Hatred; indeed we certainly see
that these move as well as that the Nous moves.
Now the conception of the primal state under-
goes a change: it is the most blessed. With Anaxa-
goras it was the chaos before the architectural work,
the heap of stones as it were upon the building site.
3
Empedocles had conceived the thought of a tan-
gential force originated by revolution and working
## p. 165 (#235) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 165
(notes for a continuation)
against gravity ("de coelo," i. , p. 284), Schopen-
hauer, "W. A. W. ," ii. 390.
He considered the continuation of the circular
movement according to Anaxagoras impossible. It
would result in a whirl, i. e. , the contrary of ordered
motion.
If the particles were infinitely mixed, pell-mell,
then one would be able to break asunder the bodies
without any exertion of power, they would not cohere
or hold together, they would be as dust.
The forces, which press the atoms against one
another, and which give stability to the mass, Em-
pedocles calls "Love. " It is a molecular force, a
constitutive force of the bodies.
4
Against Anaxagoras.
1. The Chaos already presupposes motion.
2. Nothing prevented the complete segregation.
3. Our bodies would be dust-forms. How can
motion exist, if there are not counter-motions in all
bodies?
4. An ordered permanent circular motion impos-
sible ; only a whirl. He assumes the whirl itself to
be an effect of the v*ikos. —diroppoiai. How do distant
things operate on one another, sun upon earth? If
everything were still in a whirl, that would be im-
possible. Therefore at least two moving powers:
which must be inherent in Things.
5. Why infinite ovra? Transgression of experi-
ence. Anaxagoras meant the chemical atoms.
Empedocles tried the assumption of four kinds of
## p. 166 (#236) ############################################
166 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
chemical atoms. He took the aggregate states to
be essential, and heat to be co-ordinated. There-
fore the aggregate states through repulsion and
attraction; matter in four forms.
6. The periodical principle is necessary.
7. With the living beings Empedocles will also
deal still on the same principle. Here also he
denies purposiveness. His greatest deed. With
Anaxagoras a dualism.
5
The symbolism of sexual love. Here as in the
Platonic fable the longing after Oneness shows itself,
and here, likewise, is shown that once a greater unity
already existed; were this greater unity established,
then this would again strive after a still greater one
The conviction of the unity of everything living
guarantees that once there was an immense Living
Something, of which we are pieces; that is probably
the Sphairos itself. He is the most blessed deity.
Everything was connected only through love, there-
fore in the highest degree appropriate. Love has been
torn to pieces and splintered by hatred, love has been
divided into her elements and killed—bereft of life.
In the whirl no living individuals originate Even-
tually everything is segregated and now our period
begins. (He opposes the Anaxagorean Primal Mix-
ture by a Primal Discord. ) Love, blind as she is,
with furious haste again throws the elements one
against another endeavouring to see whether she can
bring them back to life again or not. Here and there
she is successful. It continues. A presentiment
originates in the living beings, that they are to strive
## p. 167 (#237) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 167
(NOTES FOR A CONTINUATION)
after still higher unions than home and the primal
state. Eros. It is a terrible crime to kill life, for
thereby one works back to the Primal Discord.
Some day everything will be again one single life,
the most blissful state.
The Pythagorean-orphean doctrine re-interpreted
in the manner of natural science. Empedocles con-
sciously masters both means of expression, therefore
he is the first rhetor. Political aims.
The double-nature—the agonal and the loving, the
compassionate.
Attempt of the Hellenic total reform.
All inorganic matter has originated out of organic,
it is dead organic matter. Corpse and man.
DEMOCRITUS
The greatest possible simplification of the hypo-
theses.
1. There is motion, therefore vacuum, therefore
a " Non-Existent. " Thinking is motion.
2. If there is a "Non-Existent" it must be indi-
visible, i. e. , absolutely filled. Division is only ex-
plicable in case of empty spaces and pores. The
"Non-Existent" alone is an absolutely porous thing.
3. The secondary qualities of matter, vo/iy, not of
Matter-In-Itself.
4. Establishment of the primary qualities of
the arofia. Wherein homogeneous, wherein hetero-
geneous?
5. The aggregate-states of Empedocles (four ele-
## p. 168 (#238) ############################################
168 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
ments) presuppose only the homogeneous atoms,
they themselves cannot therefore be on-o.
6. Motion is connected indissolubly with theatoms,
effect of gravity. Epicur. Critique: what doesgravity
signify in an infinite vacuum?
7. Thinking is the motion of the fire-atoms. Soul,
life, perceptions of the senses.
Value of materialism and its embarrassment.
Plato and Democritus.
The hermit-like homeless noble searcher for truth.
Democritus and the Pythagoreans together find
the basis of natural sciences.
What are the causes which have interrupted a
flourishing science of experimental physics in anti-
quity after Democritus?
7
Anaxagoras has taken from Heraclitus the idea
that in every Becoming and in every Being the
opposites are together.
He felt strongly the contradiction that a body
has many qualities and he pulverised it in the belief
that he had now dissolved it into its true qualities.
Plato: first Heraclitean, later Sceptic: Every-
thing, even Thinking, is in a state of flux.
Brought through Socrates to the permanence of
the good, the beautiful.
These assumed as entitative.
All generic ideals partake of the idea of the good,
the beautiful, and they too are therefore entitative,
## p. 169 (#239) ############################################
EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY 169
(notes for a continuation)
being (as the soul partakes of the idea of Life).
The idea is formless.
Through Pythagoras' metempsychosis has been
answered the question: how we can know anything
about the ideas.
Plato's end: scepticism in Parmenides. Refuta-
tion of ideology.
8
CONCLUSION
Greek thought during the tragic age is pessimistic
or artistically optimistic.
Their judgment about life implies more.
The One, flight from the Becoming. Aut unity,
aut artistic play.
Deep distrust of reality: nobody assumes a good
god, who has made everything optime.
(Pythagoreans, religious sect.
Anaximander.
Empedocles.
Eleates.
(Anaxagoras.
Heraclitus.
Democritus: the world without moral
and aesthetic meaning, pessimism of
chance.
If one placed a tragedy before all these, the three
former would see in it the mirror of the fatality
of existence, Parmenides a transitory appearance,
Heraclitus and Anaxagoras an artistic edifice and
image of the world-laws, Democritus the result of
machines.
## p. 170 (#240) ############################################
170 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
With Socrates Optimism begins, an optimism no
longer artistic, with teleology and faith in the good
god; faith in the enlightened good man. Dissolu-
tion of the instincts.
Socrates breaks with the hitherto prevailing know-
ledge and culture; he intends returning to the old
citizen-virtue and to the State.
Plato dissociates himself from the State, when
he observes that the State has become identical
with the new Culture.
The Socratic scepticism is a weapon against the
hitherto prevailing culture and knowledge.
## p. 170 (#241) ############################################
On Truth and Falsity in their
Ultramoral Sense
(1873)
## p. 170 (#242) ############################################
## p. 171 (#243) ############################################
In some remote corner of the universe, effused into
innumerable solar-systems, there was once a star
upon which clever animals invented cognition. It
was the haughtiest, most mendacious moment in
the history of this world, but yet only a moment.
After Nature had taken breath awhile the star con-
gealed and the clever animals had to die. —Someone
might write a fable after this style, and yet he would
not have illustrated sufficiently, how wretched,
shadow-like, transitory, purposeless and fanciful
the human intellect appears in Nature. There were
eternities during which this intellect did not exist,
and when it has once more passed away there will
be nothing to show that it has existed. For this
intellect is not concerned with any further mission
transcending the sphere of human life. No, it is
purely human and none but its owner and procreator
regards it so pathetically as to suppose that the
world revolves around it. If, however, we and the
gnat could understand each other we should learn
that even the gnat swims through the air with the
same pathos, and feels within itself the flying centre
of the world. Nothing in Nature is so bad or so
insignificant that it will not, at the smallest puff of
that force cognition, immediately swell up like a
balloon, and just as a mere porter wants to have his
admirer, so the very proudest man, the philosopher,
173
## p. 172 (#244) ############################################
## p. 173 (#245) ############################################
In some remote corner of the universe, effused into
innumerable solar-systems, there was once a star
upon which clever animals invented cognition. It
was the haughtiest, most mendacious moment in
the history of this world, but yet only a moment.
After Nature had taken breath awhile the star con-
gealed and the clever animals had to die. —Someone
might write a fable after this style, and yet he would
not have illustrated sufficiently, how wretched,
shadow-like, transitory, purposeless and fanciful
the human intellect appears in Nature. There were
eternities during which this intellect did not exist,
and when it has once more passed away there will
be nothing to show that it has existed. For this
intellect is not concerned with any further mission
transcending the sphere of human life. No, it is
purely human and none but its owner and procreator
regards it so pathetically as to suppose that the
world revolves around it. If, however, we and the
gnat could understand each other we should learn
that even the gnat swims through the air with the
same pathos, and feels within itself the flying centre
of the world. Nothing in Nature is so bad or so
insignificant that it will not, at the smallest puff of
that force cognition, immediately swell up like a
balloon, and just as a mere porter wants to have his
admirer, so the very proudest man, the philosopher,
## p. 174 (#246) ############################################
174 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
imagines he sees from all sides the eyes of the uni-
verse telescopically directed upon his actions and
thoughts.
It is remarkable that this is accomplished by the
intellect, which after all has been given to the most
unfortunate, the most delicate, the most transient
beings only as an expedient, in order to detain them
for a moment in existence, from which without that
extra-gift they would have every cause to flee as
swiftly as Lessing's son. * That haughtiness con-
nected with cognition and sensation, spreading
blinding fogs before the eyes and over the senses
of men, deceives itself therefore as to the value of
existence owing to the fact that it bears within it-
self the most flattering evaluation of cognition. Its
most general effect is deception; but even its most
particular effects have something of deception in
their nature.
The intellect, as a means for the preservation of
the individual, develops its chief power in dissimu-
lation ; for it is by dissimulation that the feebler, and
* The German poet, Lessing, had been married for just
a little over one year to Eva Konig. A son was born
and died the same day, and the mother's life was despaired
of. In a letter to his friend Eschenburg the poet wrote:
". . . and I lost him so unwillingly, this son! For he had
so much understanding! so much understanding! Do not
suppose that the few hours of fatherhood have made me an
ape of a father! I know what I say. Was it not under-
standing, that they had to drag him into the world with a
pair of forceps? that he so soon suspected the evil of this
world? Was it not understanding, that he seized the first
opportunity to get away from it? . . . "
Eva Konig died a week later. —Tr.
## p. 175 (#247) ############################################
ON TRUTH AND FALSITY 175
less robust individuals preserve themselves, since it
has been denied them to fight the battle of existence
with horns or the sharp teeth of beasts of prey. In
man this art of dissimulation reaches its acme of
perfection : in him deception, flattery, falsehood and
fraud, slander, display, pretentiousness, disguise,
cloaking convention, and acting to others and to
himself in short, the continual fluttering to and fro
around the one flame—Vanity: all these things are
so much the rule, and the law, that few things are
more incomprehensible than the way in which an
honest and pure impulse to truth could have arisen
among men. They are deeply immersed in illusions
and dream-fancies; their eyes glance only over the
surface of things and see "forms "; their sensation
nowhere leads to truth, but contents itself with re-
ceiving stimuli and, so to say, with playing hide-and-
seek on the back of things. In addition to that, at
night man allows his dreams to lie to him a whole
life-time long, without his moral sense ever trying
to prevent them ; whereas men are said to exist who
by the exercise of a strong will have overcome the
habit of snoring. What indeed does man know
about himself? Oh! that he could but once see
himself complete, placed as it were in an illumin-
ated glass-case! Does not nature keep secret from
him most things, even about his body, e. g. , the con-
volutions of the intestines, the quick flow of the
blood-currents, the intricate vibrations of the fibres,
so as to banish and lock him up in proud, delusive
knowledge? Nature threw away the key; and woe
to the fateful curiosity which might be able for a
moment to look out and down through a crevice in
## p. 176 (#248) ############################################
176 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
the chamber of consciousness, and discover that man,
indifferent to his own ignorance, is resting on the
pitiless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous,
and, as it were, hanging in dreams on the back of a
tiger. Whence, in the wide world, with this state of
affairs, arises the impulse to truth?
As far as the individual tries to preserve himself
against other individuals, in the natural state of
things he uses the intellect in most cases only for dis-
simulation ; since, however, man both from necessity
and boredom wants to exist sociallyand gregariously,
he must needs make peace and at least endeavour
to cause the greatest bellum omnium contra omnes to
disappear from his world. This first conclusion of
peace brings with it a something which looks like the
first step towards the attainment of that enigmatical
bent for truth. For that which henceforth is to be
"truth" is now fixed ; that is to say, a uniformly valid
and binding designation of things is invented and
the legislature of language also gives the first laws
of truth : since here, for the first time, originates the
contrast between truth and falsity. The liar uses
the valid designations, the words, in order to make
the unreal appear as real; e. g. , he says," I am rich,"
whereas the right designation for his state would be
"poor. " He abuses the fixed conventions by con-
venient substitution or even inversion of terms. If
he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful
fashion, society will no longer trust him but will
even exclude him. In this way men avoid not so
much being defrauded, but being injured by fraud.
At bottom, at this juncture too, they hate not decep-
tion, but the evil, hostile consequences of certain
## p. 177 (#249) ############################################
ON TRUTH AND FALSITY 177
species of deception. And it is in a similarly
limited sense only that man desires truth: he covets
the agreeable, life-preserving consequences of truth;
he is indifferent towards pure, ineffective know-
ledge; he is even inimical towards truths which
possibly might prove harmful or destroying. And,
moreover, what after all are those conventions of
language? Are they possibly products of know-
ledge, of the love of truth; do the designations
and the things coincide? Is language the adequate
expression of all realities?
Only by means of forgetfulness can man ever
arrive at imagining that he possesses "truth" in
that degree just indicated. If he does not mean to
content himself with truth in the shape of tautology,
that is, with empty husks, he will always obtain
illusions instead of truth. What is a word? The
expression of a nerve-stimulus in sounds. But to
infer a cause outside us from the nerve-stimulus is
already the result of a wrong and unjustifiable appli-
cation of the proposition of causality. How should
we dare, if truth with the genesis of language, if the
point of view of certainty with the designations had
alone been decisive; how indeed should we dare to
say: the stone is hard; as if "hard" was known
to us otherwise; and not merely as an entirely sub-
jective stimulus! We divide things according to
genders; we designate the tree as masculine,* the
plant as feminine: f what arbitrary metaphors!
How far flown beyond the canon of certainty! We
* In German the tree—der Baum—is masculine. —Tr.
t In German the plant—die Pflanze—is feminine. —Tr.
12
## p. 178 (#250) ############################################
178 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
speak of a "serpent";* the designation fits nothing
but the sinuosity, and could therefore also apper-
tain to the worm. What arbitrary demarcations!
what one-sided preferences given sometimes to this,
sometimes to that quality of a thing! The different
languages placed side by side show that with words
truth or adequate expression matters little: for other-
wise there would not be so many languages. The
"Thing-in-itself" (it is just this which would be the
pure ineffective truth) is also quite incomprehensible
to the creator of language and not worth making
any great endeavour to obtain. He designates only
the relations of things to men and for their expres-
sion he calls to his help the most daring metaphors.
A nerve-stimulus, first transformed into a percept!
First metaphor! The percept again copied into
a sound! Second metaphor! And each time he
leaps completely out of one sphere right into the
midst of an entirely different one. One can imagine
a man who is quite deaf and has never had a sensa-
tion of tone and of music; just as this man will
possibly marvel at Chladni's sound figures in the
sand, will discover their cause in the vibrations of
the string, and will then proclaim that now he knows
what man calls "tone "; even so does it happen to
us all with language. When we talk about trees,
colours, snow and flowers, we believe we know some-
thing about the things themselves, and yet we only
possess metaphors of the things, and these metaphors
do not in the least correspond to the original essen-
tials. Just as the sound shows itself as a sand-
* Cf. the German die Schlange and schlingen, the English
serpent from the Latin serpere. —Tr.
gf
## p. 179 (#251) ############################################
ON TRUTH AND FALSITY 179
figure, in the same way the enigmatical x of the
Thing-in-itself is seen first as nerve-stimulus, then
as percept, and finally as sound. At any rate the
genesis of language did not therefore proceed on
logical lines, and the whole material in which and
with which the man of truth, the investigator, the
philosopher works and builds, originates, if not
from Nephelococcygia, cloud-land, at any rate not
from the essence of things.
Let us especially think about the formation of
ideas. Every word becomes at once an idea not
by having, as one might presume, to serve as a
reminder for the original experience happening but
once and absolutely individualised, to which experi-
ence such word owes its origin, no, but by having
simultaneously to fit innumerable, more or less
similar (which really means never equal, therefore
altogether unequal) cases. Every idea originates
through equating the unequal. As certainly as no
one leaf is exactly similar to any other, so certain
is it that the idea "leaf" has been formed through
an arbitrary omission of these individual differences,
through a forgetting of the differentiating qualities,
and this idea now awakens the notion that in
nature there is, besides the leaves, a something
called the "leaf," perhaps a primal form accord-
ing to which all leaves were woven, drawn, accur-
ately measured, coloured, crinkled, painted, but by
unskilled hands, so that no copy had turned out
correct and trustworthy as a true copy of the primal
form. We call a man "honest"; we ask, why
has he acted so honestly to-day? Our customary
answer runs, "On account of his honesty. " The
## p. 180 (#252) ############################################
180 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
Honesty! That means again: the "leaf" is the cause
of the leaves. We really and truly do not know
anything at all about an essential quality which
might be called the honesty, but we do know about
numerous individualised, and therefore unequal
actions, which we equate by omission of the un-
equal, and now designate as honest actions; finally
out of them we formulate a qualitas occulta with
the name " Honesty. " The disregarding of the indi-
vidual and real furnishes us with the idea, as it like-
wise also gives us the form; whereas nature knows
of no forms and ideas, and therefore knows no species
but only an x, to us inaccessible and indefinable.
For our antithesis of individual and species is anthro-
pomorphic too and does not come from the essence
of things, although on the other hand we do not dare
to say that it does not correspond to it; for that
would be a dogmatic assertion and as such just as
undemonstrable as its contrary.
What therefore is truth? A mobile army of meta-
phors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a
sum of human relations which became poetically and
rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned,
and after long usage seem to a nation fixed, canonic
and binding; truths are illusions of which one has for-
gotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors
which have become powerless to affect the senses;
coins which have their obverse effaced and now are
no longer of account as coins but merely as metal.
Still we do not yet know whence the impulse to
truth comes, for up to now we have heard only about
the obligation which society imposes in order to
exist: to be truthful, that is, to use the usual meta-
## p. 181 (#253) ############################################
ON TRUTH AND FALSITY l8l
phors, therefore expressed morally: we have heard
only about the obligation to lie according to a fixed
convention, to lie gregariously in a style binding for
all. Now man of course forgets that matters are going
thus with him; he therefore lies in that fashion pointed
out unconsciously and according to habits of cen-
turies' standing—and by this very unconsciousness; by
this very forgetting, he arrives at a sense for truth.
Through this feeling of being obliged to designate
one thing as "red," another as "cold," a third one as
"dumb," awakes a moral emotion relating to truth.
Out of the antithesis "liar" whom nobody trusts,
whom all exclude, man demonstrates to himself the
venerableness, reliability, usefulness of truth. Now as
a " rational" being he submits his actions to the sway
of abstractions; he no longer suffers himself to be
carried away by sudden impressions, by sensations,
he first generalises all these impressions into paler,
cooler ideas, in order to attach to them the ship of his
life and actions. Everything which makes man stand
out in bold relief against the animal depends on this
faculty of volatilising the concrete metaphors into a
schema, and therefore resolving a perception into an
idea. For within the range of those schemata a
something becomes possible that never could succeed
under the first perceptual impressions: to build up
a pyramidal order with castes and grades, to create
a new world of laws, privileges, sub-orders, delimita-
tions, which now stands opposite the other perceptual
world of first impressions and assumes the appear-
ance of being the more fixed, general, known, human
of the two and therefore the regulating and impera-
tive one. Whereas every metaphor of perception is
## p. 182 (#254) ############################################
182 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
individual and without its equal and therefore knows
how to escape all attempts to classify it, the great
edifice of ideas shows the rigid regularity of a Roman
Columbarium and in logic breathes forth the stern-
ness and coolness which we find in mathematics. He
who has been breathed upon by this coolness will
scarcely believe, that the idea too, bony and hexa-
hedral, and permutable as a die, remains however only
as the residuum of a metaphor, and that the illusion
of the artistic metamorphosis of a nerve-stimulus
into percepts is, if not the mother, then the grand-
mother of every idea. Now in this game of dice,
"Truth" means to use every die as it is designated, to
count its pointscarefully,toformexact classifications,
and never to violate the order of castes and the se-
quences of rank. Just as the Romans and Etruscans
for their benefit cut up the sky by means of strong
mathematical lines and banned a god as it were into
a templum, into a space limited in this fashion, so
every nation has above its head such a sky of ideas
divided up mathematically, and it understands the
demand for truth to mean that every conceptual god
is to be looked for only in his own sphere. One may
here well admire man, who succeeded in piling up an
infinitely complex domeof ideas on a movable founda-
tion and as it were on running water, as a powerful
genius of architecture. Of course in order to obtain
hold on such a foundation it must be as an edifice
piled up out of cobwebs, so fragile, as to be carried
away by the waves: so firm, as not to be blown
asunder by every wind. In this way man as an
architectural genius rises high above the bee; she
builds with wax, which she brings together out of
## p. 183 (#255) ############################################
ON TRUTH AND FALSITY 183
nature; he with the much more delicate material of
ideas, which he must first manufacture within him-
self. He is very much to be admired here—but not
on account of his impulse for truth, his bent for pure
cognition of things. If somebody hides a thing be-
hind a bush, seeks it again and finds it in the self-
same place, then there is not much to boast of, re-
specting this seeking and finding; thus, however,
matters stand with the seeking and finding of "truth"
within the realm of reason. If I make the definition
of the mammal and then declare after inspecting a
camel, " Behold a mammal," then no doubt a truth
is brought to light thereby, but it is of very limited
value, I mean it is anthropomorphic through and
through, and does not contain one single point which
is "true-in-itself," real and universally valid, apart
from man. The seeker after such truths seeks at
the bottom only the metamorphosis of the world in
man, he strives for an understanding of the world as
a human-like thing and by his battling gains at best
the feeling of an assimilation. Similarly, as the
astrologer contemplated the stars in the service of
man and in connection with their happiness and
unhappiness, such a seeker contemplates the whole
world as related to man, as the infinitely protracted
echo of an original sound: man; as the multiplied
copy of the one arch-type: man. His procedure is
to apply man as the measure of all things, whereby
he starts from the error of believing that he has these
things immediately before him as pure objects. He
therefore forgets that the original metaphors of per-
ception are metaphors, and takes them for the things
themselves.
## p. 183 (#256) ############################################
182 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
individual and without its equal and therefore knows
how to escape all attempts to classify it, the great
edifice of ideas shows the rigid regularity of a Roman
Columbarium and in logic breathes forth the stern-
ness and coolness which we find in mathematics. He
who has been breathed upon by this coolness will
scarcely believe, that the idea too, bony and hexa-
hedral, and permutable as a die, remains however only
as the residuum of a metaphor, and that the illusion
of the artistic metamorphosis of a nerve-stimulus
into percepts is, if not the mother, then the grand-
mother of every idea. Now in this game of dice,
"Truth" means to use every die as it is designated, to
count its pointscarefully,toform exact classifications,
and never to violate the order of castes and the se-
quences of rank. Just as the Romans and Etruscans
for their benefit cut up the sky by means of strong
mathematical lines and banned a god as it were into
a templum, into a space limited in this fashion, so
every nation has above its head such a sky of ideas
divided up mathematically, and it understands the
demand for truth to mean that every conceptual god
is to be looked for only in his own sphere. One may
here well admire man, who succeeded in piling up an
infinitely complex domeof ideas on a movable founda-
tion and as it were on running water, as a powerful
genius of architecture. Of course in order to obtain
hold on such a foundation it must be as an edifice
piled up out of cobwebs, so fragile, as to be carried
away by the waves: so firm, as not to be blown
asunder by every wind. In this way man as an
architectural genius rises high above the bee; she
builds with wax, which she brings together out of
## p. 183 (#257) ############################################
ON TRUTH AND FALSITY 183
nature; he with the much more delicate material of
ideas, which he must first manufacture within him-
self. He is very much to be admired here—but not
on account of his impulse for truth, his bent for pure
cognition of things. If somebody hides a thing be-
hind a bush, seeks it again and finds it in the self-
same place, then there is not much to boast of, re-
specting this seeking and finding; thus, however,
matters stand with the seeking and finding of "truth"
within the realm of reason. If I make the definition
of the mammal and then declare after inspecting a
camel, " Behold a mammal," then no doubt a truth
is brought to light thereby, but it is of very limited
value, I mean it is anthropomorphic through and
through, and does not contain one single point which
is "true-in-itself," real and universally valid, apart
from man. The seeker after such truths seeks at
the bottom only the metamorphosis of the world in
man, he strives for an understanding of the world as
a human-like thing and by his battling gains at best
the feeling of an assimilation. Similarly, as the
astrologer contemplated the stars in the service of
man and in connection with their happiness and
unhappiness, such a seeker contemplates the whole
world as related to man, as the infinitely protracted
echo of an original sound: man; as the multiplied
copy of the one arch-type: man. His procedure is
to apply man as the measure of all things, whereby
he starts from the error of believing that he has these
things immediately before him as pure objects. He
therefore forgets that the original metaphors of per-
ception are metaphors, and takes them for the things
themselves.
## p. 184 (#258) ############################################
184 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
Only by forgetting that primitive world of meta-
phors, only by the congelation and coagulation of an
original mass of similes and percepts pouring forth
as a fiery liquid out of the primal faculty of human
fancy, only by the invincible faith, that this sun, this
window, this table is a truth in itself: in short only
by the fact that man forgets himself as subject, and
what is more as an artistically creating subject: only
by all this does he live with some repose, safety and
consequence. If he were able to get out of the prison
walls of this faith, even for an instant only, his " self-
consciousness " would be destroyed at once. Already
it costs him some trouble to admit to himself that the
insect and the bird perceive a world different from his
own, and that the question, which of the two world-
perceptions is more accurate, is quite a senseless one,
since to decide this question it would be necessary
to apply the standard of right perception, i. e. , to apply
a standard which does not exist. On the whole it
seems to me that the "right perception"—which
would mean the adequate expression of an object in
the subject—is a nonentity full of contradictions:
for between two utterly different spheres, as between
subject and object, there is no causality, no accuracy,
no expression, but at the utmost an cesthetical relation,
I mean a suggestive metamorphosis, a stammering
translation into quite a distinct foreign language, for
which purpose however there is needed at any rate
an intermediate sphere, an intermediate force, freely
composing and freely inventing. The word "phe-
nomenon" contains many seductions, and on that
account I avoid it as much as possible, for it is not
true that the essence of things appears in the empiric
## p. 185 (#259) ############################################
ON TRUTH AND FALSITY 185
world. A painter who had no hands and wanted to
express the picture distinctly present to his mind by
the agency of song, would still reveal much more
with this permutation of spheres, than the empiric
world reveals about the essence of things. The very
relation of a nerve-stimulus to the produced percept
is in itself no necessary one; but if the same percept
has been reproduced millions of times and has been
the inheritance of many successive generations of
man, and in the end appears each time to all mankind
as the result of the same cause, then it attains finally
for man the same importance as if it were the unique,
necessary percept and as if that relation between
the original nerve-stimulus and the percept pro-
duced were a close relation of causality: just as
a dream eternally repeated, would be perceived and
judged as though real. But the congelation and
coagulation of a metaphor does not at all guaran-
tee the necessity and exclusive justification of that
metaphor.
Surely every human being who is at home with
such contemplations has felt a deep distrust against
any idealism of that kind, as often as he has distinctly
convinced himself of the eternal rigidity, omni-
presence, and infallibility of nature's laws: he has
arrived at the conclusion that as far as we can pene-
trate the heights of the telescopic and the depths of
the microscopic world, everything is quite secure,
complete, infinite, determined, and continuous.
Science will have to dig in these shafts eternally
and successfully and all things found are sure to
have to harmonise and not to contradict one another.
How little does this resemble a product of fancy, for
## p. 186 (#260) ############################################
186 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
if it were one it would necessarily betray somewhere
its nature of appearance and unreality. Against this
it may be objected in the first place that if each of us
had for himself a different sensibility, if we ourselves
were only able to perceive sometimes as a bird, some-
times as a worm, sometimes as a plant, or if one of
us saw the same stimulus as red, another as blue, if
a third person even perceived it as a tone, then no-
body would talk of such an orderliness of nature, but
would conceive of her only as an extremely subjec-
tive structure. Secondly, what is, for us in general, a
law of nature? It is not known in itself but only in
its effects, that is to say in its relations to other laws
of nature, which again are known to us only as sums
of relations. Therefore all these relations refer only
one to another and are absolutely incomprehensible
to us in their essence; only that which we add: time,
space, i. e. , relations of sequence and numbers, are
really known to us in them. Everything wonderful
however, that we marvel at in the laws of nature,
everything that demands an explanation and might
seduce us into distrusting idealism, lies really and
solely in the mathematical rigour and inviolability
of the conceptions of time and space. These how-
ever we produce within ourselves and throw them
forth with that necessity with which the spider spins;
since we are compelled to conceive all things under
these forms only, then it is no longer wonderful that
in all things we actually conceive none but these
forms: for they all must bear within themselves the
laws of number, and this very idea of number is the
most marvellous in all things. All obedience to law
which impresses us so forcibly in the orbits of stars
## p. 187 (#261) ############################################
ON TRUTH AND FALSITY 187
and in chemical processes coincides at the bottom
with those qualities which we ourselves attach to
those things, so that it is we who thereby make the
impression upon ourselves. Whence it clearly follows
that that artistic formation of metaphors, with which
every sensation in us begins, already presupposes
those forms,and is therefore only consummated with-
in them; only out of the persistency of these primal
forms the possibility explains itself, how afterwards
out of the metaphors themselves a structure of ideas
could again be compiled. For the latter is an imita-
tion of the relations of time, space and number in
the realm of metaphors.
