That will which is yet to seduce us into many a venture,

that famous truthfulness of which all philosophers up to this time have spoken reverently—

think what questions this will to truth has posed for us!

What strange, wicked, questionable, questions!

It has been a long story – and yet it seems hardly to have started.

No wonder if just for once we become suspicious, and, losing our patience, impatiently turn around!

Let us learn to ask this Sphinx some questions ourselves, for a change.

Just who is it anyway who has been asking these questions?

Just what is it in us that wants "to approach truth"?

Indeed, we tarried a long time before the question of the cause of this will.

And in the end we stopped altogether before the even more basic question.

We asked "What is the value of this will?"

Supposing we want truth: why not rather untruth?

Uncertainty? Even Ignorance?

The problem of the value of truth confronted us—

or were we the ones who confronted the problem?

Which of us is Oedipus? Which of us the Sphinx?

It is a rendezvous of questions and question marks.

It may be unbelievable, but it seems to us in the end as though the problem had never yet been posed—

as though it were being seen, fixed, above all risked, for the first time.

For there is a risk in posing it—perhaps no greater risk could be found.

How is it possible for anything to come out of its opposite?

Truth, for example, out of error?

Or the will to truth out of the will to deception?

Or a self-less act out of self-interest?

Or the pure sunny contemplation of a wise man out of covetousness?

This sort of origin is impossible.

Who dreams of it is a fool or worse;

the things of highest value must have some other, indigenous origin;

they cannot be derived from this ephemeral, seductive, deceptive, inferior world,

this labyrinth of delusion and greed!

Their basis must lie in the womb of Being,

in the Eternal, in the hidden God, in the "Thing in Itself"—

here and nowhere else!—

This type of judgement is the typical prejudice by which the metaphysicians of all time can be recognized.

This type of valuation stands back of all their logical methods;

this is the "faith" that enables them to struggle for what they call "knowing"

—a something which at last they solemnly christen "truth."

The basic faith of all metaphysicians is faith in the antithetical nature of values.

It has never occurred to the most cautious of them,

even though they had taken the vow to "doubt everything,"

to pause in doubt at the very threshold where doubt would have been most necessary.

But we may indeed doubt:

first, whether antitheses exist at all, and second,

whether those popular valuations and value-antitheses upon which the metaphysicians have placed their stamp of approval are not perhaps merely superficial valuations,

merely provisional perspectives

—and perspectives from a tight corner at that,

possibly from below, a "worms eye view" so to speak.

Admitting all the value accorded to the true, the truthful, the selfless,

it is nonetheless possible that a higher value should be ascribed to appearance,

to the will to deception, to self-interest, to greed—a higher value with respect to all life.

Furthermore, it is quite possible that the very value of those good and honored things consists, in fact, in their insidious relatedness to these wicked, seemingly opposite things—

it could be that they are inextricably bound up, entwined, perhaps even similar in their very nature.

Perhaps! But who is willing to be troubled by such a perilous Perhaps?

We must wait for a new species of philosopher to arrive,

who will have some other, opposite tastes and inclinations than the previous ones.

Philosophers of the Perilous Perhaps, in every sense!

And seriously, I can see such new philosophers coming up over the horizon.

After keeping an eye on and reading between the lines of the philosophers for a long time, I find that I must tell myself the following:

the largest part of conscious thinking must be considered an instinctual activity,

even in the case of philosophical thinking.

We must simply re-learn, as we have had to re-learn about heredity and "inborn" qualities.

As little as the act of birth is of consequence in the whole process and progress of heredity, so little is consciousness in any decisive sense opposed to instinct.

Most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided by his instincts and forced along certain lines.

Even behind logic and its apparent sovereignty of development stand value judgements,

or, to speak more plainly,

physiological demands for preserving a certain type of life.

Such as, for example, that the definite is worth more than the indefinite, that appearance is less valuable than "the truth."

Such valuations, all their regulative importance notwithstanding,

can for us be only foreground-valuations,

a definite type of ridiculous simplicity,

possibly necessary for the preservation of the creature we happen to be.

Assuming, to be sure, that man does not happen to be "the measure of all things"...

The falseness of a given judgement does not constitute an objection against it, so far as we are concerned.

It is perhaps in this respect that our new language sounds strangest.

The real question is how far a judgement furthers and maintains life, preserves a given type, possibly cultivates and trains a given type.

We are, in fact, fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest judgements

(to which belong the synthetic a priori judgements)

are the most indispensable to us,

that man cannot live without accepting the logical fictions as valid,

without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the absolute, the immutable,

without constantly falsifying the world by means of numeration.

That getting along without false judgements would amount to getting along without life, negating life.

To admit untruth as a necessary condition of life:

this implies, to be sure, a perilous resistance against customary value-feelings.

A philosophy that risks it nonetheless, if it did nothing else, would by this alone have taken its stand beyond good and evil.

What tempts us to look at all philosophers half suspiciously and half mockingly is not so much that we recognize again and again how innocent they are,

how often and how easily they make mistakes and lose their way,

in short their childishness and childlike-ness—

but rather that they are not sufficiently candid,

though they make a great virtuous noisy to-do as soon as the problem of truthfulness is even remotely touched upon.

Every one of them pretends that he has discovered and reached his opinions through the self-development of cold, pure, divinely untroubled dialectic

(in distinction to the mystics of every rank who, more honest and fatuous, talk about "inspiration"),

whereas, at bottom, a pre-conceived dogma, a notion, "an institution," or mostly a heart's desire, made abstract and refined,

is defended by them with arguments sought after the fact.

They are all of them lawyers (though wanting to be called anything but that),

and for the most part quite sly defenders of their prejudices which they christen "truths"—

very far removed they are from the courageous conscience which admits precisely this;

very remote from the courageous good taste which makes sure that others understand—

perhaps to warn an enemy or a friend, perhaps from sheer high spirits and self-mockery.

The spectacle of old Kant's Tartuffery, as stiff as it is respectable,

luring us onto the dialectical crooked paths which lead to (or better mislead) to his "categorical imperative"

—this spectacle makes us, used to diversions as we are, smile.

For we find no small entertainment in keeping our eye on the delicate tricks of ancient moralists and morality-preachers.

Or consider that hocus-pocus of mathematical form with which Spinoza masked and armor-plated as though in bronze his philosophy

(or let us translate the word properly: "the love of his own wisdom")!

He used it to intimidate at the very start the courageous attacker who might dare cast eyes on this invincible virgin and Pallas Athene—

how much insecurity and vulnerability this masquerade of a sick recluse betrays!

Gradually I have come to realize what every great philosophy up to now has been:

the personal confession of its originator,

a type of involuntary and unaware memoirs;

also that the moral (or amoral) intentions of each philosophy constitute the protoplasm from which each entire plant has grown.

Indeed, one will do well (and wisely), if one wishes to explain to himself how on earth the more remote metaphysical assertions of a philosopher ever arose to ask each time:

What sort of morality is this (is he) aiming at?

Thus I do not believe that a "desire for comprehension" is the father of philosophy,

but rather that a quite different desire has here as elsewhere used comprehension (together with miscomprehension) as tools to serve its own ends.

Anyone who looks at the basic desires of man with a view to finding out how well they have played their part in precisely this field

as inspirational genii (or demons or hobgoblins) will note that they have all philosophized at one time or another.

Each individual desire wants badly to represent itself as the final aim of existence and as rightful master of all the others.

For each desire is autocratic and as such it attempts to philosophize.

In the case of scholars, to be sure, the specifically "scientific" men, it may be different—"better" if you wish.

They may really have something like a "desire for comprehension,"

some small independent clockwork mechanism which, when properly wound, works bravely on without involving the remaining desires of the scholars.

The real "interests," therefore, of the scholars lie in quite another field—

in their family, perhaps, or their livelihood, or in politics.

It makes almost no difference, in fact, whether the little machine is employed in one place or another to serve science,

and whether the "promising" young worker makes of himself a philologist or a mushroom-fancier or a chemist—

his becoming this or that does not characterize him.

Conversely, there is nothing impersonal whatever in the philosopher.

And particularly his morality testifies decidedly and decisively as to who he is—that is, what order of rank the innermost desires of his nature occupy.

How malicious philosophers can be!

I know of nothing more ferocious than the jest that Epicurus permitted himself against Plato and the Platonists.

He called them Dionysiokolakes.

Superficially, and literally, it means "flatterers of Dionysius,"

that is "yes-men" and lick-spittles;

but in addition the word signifies "They are only actors; they are not genuine"

(for Dionysiokolax was the popular designation for an actor).

This latter implication is really the malice that Epicurus aimed at Plato;

he was annoyed by the grand manner, the play-acting, that Plato and all his students so well knew how to put on—and Epicurus did not!

He, the old schoolmaster of Samos, sat hidden in his little garden at Athens and wrote three hundred books.

Who knows—perhaps out of furious ambition to equal Plato!

It took one hundred years before Greece realized just who this garden-god Epicurus had been. If, indeed, she ever realized it!

In every philosophy there comes the point where the philosopher's "conviction" enters the scene—

or, in the words of an ancient mystery,

adventavit asinus pulcher et fortissimus. (Enters now the ass Beautiful and most strong.)

"In moderation, according to nature" you wish to live? Oh noble Stoics! How your words deceive!

Think of a being like Nature, immoderately wasteful, immoderately indifferent, devoid of intentions and considerateness,

devoid of compassion, and a sense of justice,

fruitful and desolate and uncertain at the same time; think of Indifference on the throne—how could you live in moderation according to this indifference?

Living—isn't it precisely a wishing-to-be-different from this Nature?

Doesn't living mean evaluating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different?

But suppose your imperative "to live in moderation, according to nature" only means 'to live in moderation, according to life"—

how then could you live otherwise?

Why make a principle of something that you are and have to be?

The truth is quite another matter:

while rapturously pretending to read the canon of your law out of nature, you actually want the opposite—you strange play-actors and self-deceivers!

Your pride wants to dictate your morality, your ideal, to nature (even to nature!).

It wants to incorporate itself in nature; you demand that nature be nature "in moderation, according to the Stoa";

you want to remake all existence to mirror your own existence;

you want an enormous everlasting glorification of stoicism!

With all your love for truth, you force yourselves to see nature falsely, i.e. stoically—

so long, so insistently, so hypnotically petrified, until you can no longer see it any other way.

And in the end some abysmal arrogance gives you the insane hope that, because you know how to tyrannize over yourselves

(stoicism is self-tyranny),

you can also tyrannize over nature—for isn't the Stoic a part of nature?...

But all this is an old, everlasting story.

What happened to the Stoics still happens today, as soon as a philosophy begins to have faith in itself.

It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise,

for philosophy is this tyrannical desire; it is the most spiritual will to power, to "creation of the world," to the causa prima.

The eagerness and artfulness (I should perhaps better say shrewdness) with which everyone in Europe today attacks the problems of "the real and the apparent world"

gives us to think and to listen.

Anyone who hears only a "will to truth" in the background surely does not enjoy the keenest hearing.

In individual and rare cases there may really be involved such a will to truth—

some extravagant and adventurous bravery, some metaphysician's ambition to deal with a lost cause.

There may be a few who really prefer a handful of "certainty" to a whole wagonload of beautiful possibilities;

There may even be some puritanical fantasists of conscience who would prefer a certain nothing to an uncertain something—for a deathbed!

But this is nihilism and the token of a despairing soul, weary unto death, however brave the gestures of such a virtue may look.