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I see his distinctive contribution to European thought to lie in his perception that Western man was facing a radical change in his relationship with ‘truth’: a change that would come about when he recognized that the metaphysical, religious, moral and rational truths which were formerly both backbone and substance of the Western tradition were in fact errors.
Modern man is acquiring the idea of ‘becoming’ as his ruling idea: and if everything evolves, then ‘truth’, too, evolves – so that, if ‘truth’ is synonymous with absolute truth true for all time and for everybody, a loss of belief in the truth of truth is on the way. ‘Everything evolves’ will come to mean ‘nothing is true’.
The corollary to ‘nothing is true’ is ‘everything is permitted’, and in describing this state of things Nietzsche becomes the ‘prophet of great wars’ and herald of convulsions and disasters: his prognostications of decline, of a collapse of morale through a consciousness of purposelessness, also belong here.
Altered opinions do not alter a man’s character (or do so very little); but they do illuminate individual aspects of the constellation of his personality which with a different constellation of opinions had hitherto remained dark and unrecognizable.
That everyone is allowed to learn to read will in the long run ruin not only writing but thinking, too.
For I regard profound problems as I do a cold bath – quick in, quick out.
For how much nourishment a spirit requires there is no formula; but if its taste is for independence, for rapid coming and going, for wandering, perhaps for adventures to which only the swiftest are equal, then it prefers to live free on a light diet than unfree and stuffed. Not fat, but the greatest suppleness and strength is what a good dancer wants from his food – and I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his ‘divine service’…
An aphorism, properly stamped and moulded, has not been ‘deciphered’ when it has simply been read; one has then rather to begin its exegesis, for which is required an art of exegesis. […] To be sure, to practise reading as an art in this fashion one thing above all is needed, precisely the thing which has nowadays been most thoroughly unlearned – and that is why it will be some time before my writings are ‘readable’ – a thing for which one must be almost a cow and in any event not a ‘modern man’: rumination…
my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book – what everyone else does not say in a book.
My time has not yet come, some are born posthumously.
Ultimately, no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows. What one has no access to through experience one has no ear for.
When I picture a perfect reader, I always picture a monster of courage and curiosity, also something supple, cunning, cautious, a born adventurer and discoverer.
I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful – of a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified. I am not a man, I am dynamite.
Lack of historical sense is the family failing of all philosophers; many, without being aware of it, even take the most recent manifestation of man, such as has arisen under the impress of certain religions, even certain political events, as the fixed form from which one has to start out.
there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. Consequently what is needed from now on is historical philosophizing, and with it the virtue of modesty.
Nothing is more difficult for man than to apprehend a thing impersonally: I mean to see it as a thing, not as a person: one might question, indeed, whether it is at all possible for him to suspend the clockwork of his person-constructing, person-inventing drive even for a moment.
The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the building: posterity discovers it in the bricks with which he built and which are then often used again for better building: in the fact, that is to say, that that building can be destroyed and nonetheless possess value as material.
‘What do I matter!’ – stands over the door of the thinker of the future.
What I mean to say is: the vast majority do not find it contemptible to believe this or that, and to live in accordance with this belief without first being aware of the ultimate and securest reasons for and against it and without afterwards even taking the trouble to discover such reasons – the most gifted men and the noblest women are still among this ‘vast majority’.
the higher man wants and evokes contradiction so as to acquire a guidepost to his own acts of injustice hitherto unknown to him.
And how could there exist a ‘common good’! The expression is a self-contradiction: what can be common has ever but little value.
what I found most frequently among young scholars was that behind the arrogant disdain for philosophy there lay the evil after-effect of a philosopher himself, from whom they had, to be sure, withdrawn their allegiance, without, however, having got free from the spell of his disparaging evaluation of other philosophers – the result being a feeling of ill-humour towards philosophy in general.
It may be required for the education of a philosopher that he himself has also once stood on all those steps on which his servants, the scientific labourers of philosophy, remain standing – have to remain standing; he himself must perhaps have been critic and sceptic and dogmatist and historian and, in addition, poet and collector and traveller and reader of riddles and moralist and seer and ‘free spirit’ and practically everything, so as to traverse the whole range of human values and value-feelings and be able to gaze from the heights into every distance, from the depths into every height,
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I doubt whether such pain ‘improves’ –; but I do know it deepens us
To live alone one must be an animal or a god – says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both – a philosopher.
Philosophy, as I have hitherto understood and lived it, is a voluntary living in ice and high mountains – a seeking after everything strange and questionable in existence, all that has hitherto been excommunicated by morality.
It is the mark of a higher culture to value the little unpretentious truths which have been discovered by means of rigorous method more highly than the errors handed down by metaphysical ages and men, which blind us and make us happy.
We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off.
For one could assert nothing at all of the metaphysical world except that it was a being-other, an inaccessible, incomprehensible being-other; it would be a thing with negative qualities. – Even if the existence of such a world were never so well demonstrated, it is certain that knowledge of it would be the most useless of all knowledge: more useless even than knowledge of the chemical composition of water must be to the sailor in danger of shipwreck.
To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.
Logic too depends on presuppositions with which nothing in the real world corresponds, for example on the presupposition that there are identical things, that the same thing is identical at different points of time: but this science came into existence through the opposite belief (that such conditions do obtain in the real world). It is the same with mathematics, which would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no real circle, no absolute magnitude.
To a world which is not our idea the laws of numbers are wholly inapplicable: these are valid only in the human world.
The theory of freedom of will is an invention of ruling classes.
Our usual imprecise mode of observation takes a group of phenomena as one and calls it a fact: between this fact and another fact it imagines in addition an empty space, it isolates every fact. In reality, however, all our doing and knowing is not a succession of facts and empty spaces but a continuous flux. Now, belief in freedom of will is incompatible precisely with the idea of a continuous, homogeneous, undivided, indivisible flowing: it presupposes that every individual action is isolate and indivisible; it is an atomism in the domain of willing and knowing.
Through words and concepts we are still continually misled into imagining things as simpler than they are, separate from one another, indivisible, each existing in and for itself.
Whence did logic come into existence in the human head? Certainly out of illogic, whose realm must initially have been tremendous. But countless creatures who reasoned differently from the way we now reason have perished: they could always have been better reasoners.
The course of logical thinking and concluding in our present brain corresponds to a process and struggle of drives which in themselves individually are all very illogical and unjust; we usually experience only the outcome of that struggle: so rapidly and secretly does that primeval mechanism now work in us.
We call it ‘explanation’, but it is ’description’ which distinguishes us from earlier stages of knowledge and science. We describe better – we explain just as little as any who came before us.
We operate with nothing but things which do not exist, with lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time, divisible space – how should explanation even be possible when we first make everything into an image, into our own image! It is sufficient to regard science as the most fruitful possible humanization of things, we learn to describe ourselves more and more exactly by describing things and the succession of things.
most of a philosopher’s conscious thinking is secretly directed and compelled into definite channels by his instincts. Behind all logic, too, and its apparent autonomy there stand evaluations, in plainer terms physiological demands for the preservation of a certain species of life.
It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics too is only an interpretation and arrangement of the world […] and not an explanation of the world: but insofar as it is founded on belief in the senses it passes for more than that and must continue to do so for a long time to come.
That individual philosophical concepts are not something arbitrary, something growing up autonomously, but on the contrary grow up connected and related to one another; that, however suddenly and arbitrarily they appear to emerge in the history of thought, they nonetheless belong just as much to a system as do the members of the fauna of a continent: that fact is in the end also shown in the fact that the most diverse philosophers unfailingly fill out again and again a certain basic scheme of possible philosophies.
Now it seems to me […] that refinement and strength of consciousness always stands in proportion to the capacity for communication of a human being (or animal), capacity for communication in turn in proportion to need for communication […] Supposing this observation to be correct, I may then go on to conjecture that consciousness evolved at all only under the pressure of need for communication – that it was from the very first necessary and useful only between man and man (between commanders and obeyers in particular) and also evolved only in proportion to the degree of this usefulness.
the evolution of language and the evolution of consciousness (not of reason but only of reason’s becoming conscious of itself) go hand in hand.
My idea, as one can see, is that consciousness does not really belong to the existence of man as an individual but rather to that in him which is community and herd; that, as follows from this, it has also evolved in refinement only with regard to usefulness for community and herd,
For we have no organ at all for knowledge, for ‘truth’: we ‘know’ (or believe or imagine) precisely as much as may be useful in the interest of the human herd, the species: and even what is here called ‘usefulness’ is in the end only a belief, something imagined and perhaps precisely that most fatal piece of stupidity by which we shall one day perish.
Is the rejoicing of the man of knowledge not precisely the rejoicing of the feeling of security re-attained? … This philosopher supposed the world ‘known’ when he had traced it back to the ‘idea’: was it not, alas, because the ‘idea’ was so familiar to him, because he was so accustomed to it and now had so little to fear from the ‘idea’?
The world has rather once again become for us ‘infinite’: insofar as we cannot reject the possibility that it contains in itself infinite interpretations.
Justice (fairness) originates between parties of approximately equal power, as Thucydides correctly grasped (in the terrible colloquy between the Athenian and Melian ambassadors): where there is no clearly recognizable superiority of force and a contest would result in mutual injury producing no decisive outcome the idea arises of coming to an understanding and negotiating over one another’s demands: the characteristic of exchange is the original characteristic of justice.
To be moral, to act in accordance with custom, to be ethical means to practise obedience towards a law or tradition established from of old.
