Though this is something Nietzsche recognised in the modern mind, he did not welcome it: in fact he dreaded its consequences, speaking of that ‘great blood-sucker, the spider scepticism’ and warning that our excessive self-consciousness will destroy us.32 We are the ‘Don Juans of cognition’, he said, whose ‘knowledge will take its revenge on us, as ignorance exacted its revenge in the Middle Ages.’
