,
relations
of sequence and numbers, are
really known to us in them.
really known to us in them.
Nietzsche - v02 - Early Greek Philosophy
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.
As we saw, it is language which has worked origin-
ally at the construction of ideas; in later times it is
science. Just as the bee works at the same time at
the cells and fills them with honey, thus science works
irresistibly at that great columbarium of ideas, the
cemeteryof perceptions,builds ever newerand higher
storeys; supports, purifies, renews the old cells, and
endeavours above all to fill that gigantic frame-
work and to arrange within it the whole of the em-
piric world, i. e. , the anthropomorphic world. And
as the man of action binds his life to reason and its
ideas, in order to avoid being swept away and losing
himself, so the seeker after truth builds his hut close
to the towering edifice of science in order to collabor-
ate with it and to find protection. And he needs pro-
tection. For there are awful powers which continu-
ally press upon him, and which hold out against
the "truth" of science " truths " fashioned in quite
## p. 188 (#262) ############################################
188 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
another way, bearing devices of the most hetero-
geneous character.
That impulse towards the formation of metaphors,
that fundamental impulse of man, which we cannot
reason away for one moment—for thereby we should
reason away man himself—is in truth not defeated
nor even subdued by the fact that out of its evapor-
ated products, the ideas, a regular and rigid new
world has been built as a stronghold for it. This
impulse seeks for itself a new realm of action and
another river-bed, and finds it in Mythos and more
generally in Art. This impulse constantly confuses
the rubrics and cells of the ideas, by putting up new
figures of speech, metaphors, metonymies; it con-
stantly shows its passionate longing for shaping the
existing world of waking man as motley, irregular,
inconsequentially incoherent, attractive, and eter-
nally new as the world of dreams is. For indeed,
waking man perse is only clear about his being awake
through the rigid and orderly woof of ideas, and it
is for this very reason that he sometimes comes to
believe that he was dreaming when that woof of
ideas has for a moment been torn by Art. Pascal is
quite right, when he asserts, that if the same dream
came to us every night we should be just as much
occupied by it as by the things which we see every
day; to quote his words, " If an artisan were certain
that he would dream every night for fully twelve
hours that he was a king, I believe that he would be
just as happy as a king who dreams every night for
twelve hours that he is an artisan. " The wide-awake
day of a people mystically excitable, let us say of
the earlier Greeks, is in fact through the continually-
## p. 189 (#263) ############################################
ON TRUTH AND FALSITY 189
working wonder, which the mythos presupposes,
more akin to the dream than to the day of the thinker
sobered by science. If every tree may at some time
talk as a nymph, or a god under the disguise of a
bull, carry away virgins, if the goddess Athene her-
self be suddenly seen as, with a beautiful team, she
drives, accompanied by Pisistratus, through the mar-
kets of Athens—and every honest Athenian did be-
lieve this—at any moment, as in a dream, everything
is possible; and all nature swarms around man as
if she were nothing but the masquerade of the gods,
who found it a huge joke to deceive man by assuming
all possible forms.
Man himself, however, has an invincible tendency
to let himself be deceived, and he is likeoneenchanted
with happiness when the rhapsodist narrates to him
epic romances in such a way that they appear real
or when the actor on the stage makes the king appear
more kingly than reality shows him. Intellect, that
master of dissimulation, is free and dismissed from
his service as slave, so long as It is able to deceive
without injuring, and then It celebrates Its Satur-
nalia. Never is It richer, prouder, more luxuriant,
more skilful and daring; with a creator's delight It
throws metaphorsintoconfusion,shifts the boundary-
stones of the abstractions, so that forinstance It desig-
nates the stream as the mobile way which carries man
to that place whither he would otherwise go. Now It
has thrown off Its shoulders the emblem of servitude.
Usually with gloomy officiousness It endeavours to
point out the way to a poor individual coveting exist-
ence, and It fares forth for plunder and booty like
a servant for his master, but now It Itself has be-
## p. 190 (#264) ############################################
190 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
come a master and may wipe from Its countenance
the expression of indigence. Whatever It now does,
compared with Its former doings, bears within itself
dissimulation, just as Its former doings bore the
character of distortion. It copies human life, but
takes it for a good thing and seems to rest quite
satisfied with it. That enormous framework and
hoarding of ideas, by clinging to which needy man
saves himself through life, is to the freed intellect
only a scaffolding and a toy for Its most daring feats,
and when It smashes it to pieces, throws it into
confusion, and then puts it together ironically, pair-
ing the strangest, separating the nearest items, then
It manifests that It has no use for those makeshifts
of misery, and that It is now no longer led by ideas
but by intuitions. From these intuitions no regular
road leads into the land of the spectral schemata,
the abstractions; for them the word is not made,
when man sees them he is dumb, or speaks in for-
bidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations
of ideas, in order to correspond creatively with the
impression of the powerful present intuition at least
by destroying and jeering at the old barriers of ideas.
There are ages, when the rational and the intui-
tive man stand side by side, the one full of fear of the
intuition, the other full of scorn for the abstraction;
the latter just as irrational as the former is inartistic.
Both desire to rule over life; the one by knowing
how to meet the most important needs with foresight,
prudence, regularity; the other as an "over-joyous"
hero by ignoring those needs and taking that life
only as real which simulates appearance and beauty.
Wherever intuitive man, as for instance in the earlier
## p. 191 (#265) ############################################
ON TRUTH AND FALSITY 191
history of Greece, brandishes his weapons more
powerfully and victoriously than his opponent, there
under favourable conditions, a culture can develop
and art can establish her rule over life. . That dis-
sembling, that denying of neediness, that splendour
of metaphorical notions and especially that direct-
ness of dissimulation accompany all utterances of
such a life. Neither the house of man, nor his way
of walking, nor his clothing, nor his earthen jug sug-
gest that necessity invented them; it seems as if they
all were intended as the expressions of a sublime
happiness, an Olympic cloudlessness, and as it were
a playing at seriousness. Whereas the man guided
by ideas and abstractions only wards off misfortune
by means of them, without even enforcing for him-
self happiness out of the abstractions; whereas he
strives after the greatest possible freedom from pains,
the intuitive man dwelling in the midst of culture
has from his intuitions a harvest: besides the ward-
ing off of evil, he attains a continuous in-pouring of
enlightenment, enlivenment and redemption. Of
course when he does suffer, he suffers more: and he
even suffers more frequently since he cannot learn
from experience, but again and again falls into the
same ditch into which he has fallen before. I n suffer-
ing he is just as irrational as in happiness; he cries
aloud and finds no consolation. How different
matters are in the same misfortune with the Stoic,
taught by experience and ruling himself by ideas!
He who otherwise only looks for uprightness, truth,
freedom from deceptions and shelter from ensnaring
andAudden attack, in his misfortune performs the
masterpiece of dissimulation, just as the other did
## p. 192 (#266) ############################################
192 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
in his happiness; he shows no twitching mobile
human face but as it were a mask with dignified,
harmonious features; he does not cry out and does
not even alter his voice ; when a heavy thundercloud
bursts upon him, he wraps himself up in his cloak
and with slow and measured step walks away from
beneath it.
THE END.
Printed at The Darien Press, Edinburgh.
## p. (#267) ################################################
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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.
As we saw, it is language which has worked origin-
ally at the construction of ideas; in later times it is
science. Just as the bee works at the same time at
the cells and fills them with honey, thus science works
irresistibly at that great columbarium of ideas, the
cemeteryof perceptions,builds ever newerand higher
storeys; supports, purifies, renews the old cells, and
endeavours above all to fill that gigantic frame-
work and to arrange within it the whole of the em-
piric world, i. e. , the anthropomorphic world. And
as the man of action binds his life to reason and its
ideas, in order to avoid being swept away and losing
himself, so the seeker after truth builds his hut close
to the towering edifice of science in order to collabor-
ate with it and to find protection. And he needs pro-
tection. For there are awful powers which continu-
ally press upon him, and which hold out against
the "truth" of science " truths " fashioned in quite
## p. 188 (#262) ############################################
188 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
another way, bearing devices of the most hetero-
geneous character.
That impulse towards the formation of metaphors,
that fundamental impulse of man, which we cannot
reason away for one moment—for thereby we should
reason away man himself—is in truth not defeated
nor even subdued by the fact that out of its evapor-
ated products, the ideas, a regular and rigid new
world has been built as a stronghold for it. This
impulse seeks for itself a new realm of action and
another river-bed, and finds it in Mythos and more
generally in Art. This impulse constantly confuses
the rubrics and cells of the ideas, by putting up new
figures of speech, metaphors, metonymies; it con-
stantly shows its passionate longing for shaping the
existing world of waking man as motley, irregular,
inconsequentially incoherent, attractive, and eter-
nally new as the world of dreams is. For indeed,
waking man perse is only clear about his being awake
through the rigid and orderly woof of ideas, and it
is for this very reason that he sometimes comes to
believe that he was dreaming when that woof of
ideas has for a moment been torn by Art. Pascal is
quite right, when he asserts, that if the same dream
came to us every night we should be just as much
occupied by it as by the things which we see every
day; to quote his words, " If an artisan were certain
that he would dream every night for fully twelve
hours that he was a king, I believe that he would be
just as happy as a king who dreams every night for
twelve hours that he is an artisan. " The wide-awake
day of a people mystically excitable, let us say of
the earlier Greeks, is in fact through the continually-
## p. 189 (#263) ############################################
ON TRUTH AND FALSITY 189
working wonder, which the mythos presupposes,
more akin to the dream than to the day of the thinker
sobered by science. If every tree may at some time
talk as a nymph, or a god under the disguise of a
bull, carry away virgins, if the goddess Athene her-
self be suddenly seen as, with a beautiful team, she
drives, accompanied by Pisistratus, through the mar-
kets of Athens—and every honest Athenian did be-
lieve this—at any moment, as in a dream, everything
is possible; and all nature swarms around man as
if she were nothing but the masquerade of the gods,
who found it a huge joke to deceive man by assuming
all possible forms.
Man himself, however, has an invincible tendency
to let himself be deceived, and he is likeoneenchanted
with happiness when the rhapsodist narrates to him
epic romances in such a way that they appear real
or when the actor on the stage makes the king appear
more kingly than reality shows him. Intellect, that
master of dissimulation, is free and dismissed from
his service as slave, so long as It is able to deceive
without injuring, and then It celebrates Its Satur-
nalia. Never is It richer, prouder, more luxuriant,
more skilful and daring; with a creator's delight It
throws metaphorsintoconfusion,shifts the boundary-
stones of the abstractions, so that forinstance It desig-
nates the stream as the mobile way which carries man
to that place whither he would otherwise go. Now It
has thrown off Its shoulders the emblem of servitude.
Usually with gloomy officiousness It endeavours to
point out the way to a poor individual coveting exist-
ence, and It fares forth for plunder and booty like
a servant for his master, but now It Itself has be-
## p. 190 (#264) ############################################
190 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
come a master and may wipe from Its countenance
the expression of indigence. Whatever It now does,
compared with Its former doings, bears within itself
dissimulation, just as Its former doings bore the
character of distortion. It copies human life, but
takes it for a good thing and seems to rest quite
satisfied with it. That enormous framework and
hoarding of ideas, by clinging to which needy man
saves himself through life, is to the freed intellect
only a scaffolding and a toy for Its most daring feats,
and when It smashes it to pieces, throws it into
confusion, and then puts it together ironically, pair-
ing the strangest, separating the nearest items, then
It manifests that It has no use for those makeshifts
of misery, and that It is now no longer led by ideas
but by intuitions. From these intuitions no regular
road leads into the land of the spectral schemata,
the abstractions; for them the word is not made,
when man sees them he is dumb, or speaks in for-
bidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations
of ideas, in order to correspond creatively with the
impression of the powerful present intuition at least
by destroying and jeering at the old barriers of ideas.
There are ages, when the rational and the intui-
tive man stand side by side, the one full of fear of the
intuition, the other full of scorn for the abstraction;
the latter just as irrational as the former is inartistic.
Both desire to rule over life; the one by knowing
how to meet the most important needs with foresight,
prudence, regularity; the other as an "over-joyous"
hero by ignoring those needs and taking that life
only as real which simulates appearance and beauty.
Wherever intuitive man, as for instance in the earlier
## p. 191 (#265) ############################################
ON TRUTH AND FALSITY 191
history of Greece, brandishes his weapons more
powerfully and victoriously than his opponent, there
under favourable conditions, a culture can develop
and art can establish her rule over life. . That dis-
sembling, that denying of neediness, that splendour
of metaphorical notions and especially that direct-
ness of dissimulation accompany all utterances of
such a life. Neither the house of man, nor his way
of walking, nor his clothing, nor his earthen jug sug-
gest that necessity invented them; it seems as if they
all were intended as the expressions of a sublime
happiness, an Olympic cloudlessness, and as it were
a playing at seriousness. Whereas the man guided
by ideas and abstractions only wards off misfortune
by means of them, without even enforcing for him-
self happiness out of the abstractions; whereas he
strives after the greatest possible freedom from pains,
the intuitive man dwelling in the midst of culture
has from his intuitions a harvest: besides the ward-
ing off of evil, he attains a continuous in-pouring of
enlightenment, enlivenment and redemption. Of
course when he does suffer, he suffers more: and he
even suffers more frequently since he cannot learn
from experience, but again and again falls into the
same ditch into which he has fallen before. I n suffer-
ing he is just as irrational as in happiness; he cries
aloud and finds no consolation. How different
matters are in the same misfortune with the Stoic,
taught by experience and ruling himself by ideas!
He who otherwise only looks for uprightness, truth,
freedom from deceptions and shelter from ensnaring
andAudden attack, in his misfortune performs the
masterpiece of dissimulation, just as the other did
## p. 192 (#266) ############################################
192 VARIOUS PROSE ESSAYS
in his happiness; he shows no twitching mobile
human face but as it were a mask with dignified,
harmonious features; he does not cry out and does
not even alter his voice ; when a heavy thundercloud
bursts upon him, he wraps himself up in his cloak
and with slow and measured step walks away from
beneath it.
THE END.
Printed at The Darien Press, Edinburgh.
## p. (#267) ################################################
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