FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

1844-1900

Friedrich Nieu;sche' 'is the wild man, the self-proclaimed anti-Christ,cif Western thought. A brilliant polemicist, he champions energy over reason and'art over sdenc¢ while contemptuous of the quiet, "timid" virtues of domestiCity, democracy, 'arid peace. His extravagances not only remind us ofmodernism:'s persistent desii'etoshOi!k the staid middle classes but also recall the . many twentieth-century figures-'-frofll W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound to MARTIN HEIDEGGER arid PAUL DE MAN-'-whose seniui is 'inextricably mixed with dubious political views. But Nietzsche, .aninvetemteJottQf Christianity and of Platonic philosophy, is absolutely central to modem and p,ostr modem attempts to rethink the Western tradition's most fundamentalas~umptio~!

Nietzsche was born in Rocken, a small villag~ jn; Prussian Saxony. He.w!l$ !~, son and grandson (on both sides of the family) of Lutheran._ministers. His faili,er diedwhen he was four and his younger brother died the next 'year, leaving him tt~ only male in a household with five women. Nietzsche's subsequent infatuations Wit1i the work of Gennan philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and WltH 'the Work, theories, and wife of Gernian composer Richard Wagner, followe8 bf fiis equ'ally violent rejectiohs of the tWo men; are sometimes explained in terms;(jf "sur­rogatefather figures" and Oedipal rebellion. Certainly, Wagnet and his wife Cosima dominated Nietzsche's life in the early 1870s.' Having received his doctorate aulit University of Leipzig, Nietzsche wa~ appointedprofessor.of philology at theUni~rf sity.of Basel in Switzerland in 1.869; He met Wagner and Cosima von Billow ~ilAAe 1868, and his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), combines. a new theorx .9f Greek tragedy with an extended argument. that Wagner's work constitutes a German rebirth of that ancient fonn . By 1876, however, Nietzsche h!ld broken complei~iy with Wagner, repelled 'by Wagner's tum to Christianity aild his intreiising i!htl' Seinitism. That Same ,year, ill health forced Nietzsche to stop~eaching. In 1879'lie offiCially resigned his university post, receiving a small dis;ability penslon'~ Hesp~ the next ten years writing the bodks that present his ambitious attempt 'to '()veithp~ Christianity andpost~Socratic philosophy through a radical "revaluation of all vIll. ues." The last ten years of Nietzsche's life were lost to incoh~rent madness. After … mental breakdown in 1889, he returned to RockelJ to live with his mother;whett she died, in .1897, he came u~der the care of his sister Elisabeth, which continued until his death. , ' . . ' . . '. ' . .~ ,,:

Even before Nietzsche's death, his sister wrote a biography to publicize his wor~ and she published her own editions of his writings. She stressed those elements di~t accorded with her own anti-Semitic and pro-Aryan views and is often blamed ftir th~ Nazis' later appropriation of Nietzsche as a philosopher sympathetic to their policies. But blaming his sister does not absolve Nietzsche. Some aspects of his thought chime with National Socialism, while others contradict it. Those who read andinterp'ret Nietzsche's challenging work must grapple with his relation to the Nazis, just as they must take into account his tremendous influence on modernism, existentialism, and poststructuralism.

Our first selection, the essay "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense" (written 1873), was not published during Nietzsche's lifetime. It articulates a number of Nietz· sche's major themes and became a favorite reference point for poststructuralists such as JACQUES DERRIDA and Paul de Man during the 1970s. Nietzsche's target here is nothing less than the epistemological foundations of Western philosophy. From PLATO on, Western philosophy has been committed (with a few exceptions) to ascer­taining the fixed and solid truth that exists independently of human minds. Nietzsche simply denies tpat we can ever know anything except through the lens . of humall perception. We cannot put that lens aside in order to judge which perceptions accu­

lWtelypOttray the world 'and which do not. Given this impossibility, why are humans committed to the search for "truth"? Because, Nietzsche answers, truth is a useful iIlusion, .one.that serves a fundamental drive to survive. Truth is a comfortable lie; it .uggest that "the world [is] something which is similar in kind to humanity," and it bOosts self-confidence, the untroubled conviction of being right. While Nietzsche is tcOtnful;of !:his-.smUg; "anthroponiQrphism," he does underline its utility, VFheessay~s, occoul'ltof language's role in human cognition has been especially

lnfluentiIiIamong literarytheorists, Nietzsche accepts that the outer world impinges on the human·.perci:eiver, but·we ·translate· that experience intohuman;tenns by. nam­mg'it. This '~first metaphor." introdutes an unbridgeable gap, which leads Nietzsche il'cOildtide that "subject. and object".are "absolutely different spheres." Nor do the nonrepRsentatiOl'lal additions ("supplements") supplied by language stop there. We .lsoLuseithe·same lname to designate separate experiences of nerve stimulation. We ..n toliay's "leafloy the''Same word used to Iabelyestenlay's. This substitution of one 'oJt~pt" in the 'place of multiple experienceS·is the "second metaphor" that Nietz­acftelldentifies""""'"and his account of how· concepts erase' awareness of differences ~.uknater:<echo throughout .poststructuralism. "Every concept;" he writes, "comes latO~beiJ!J~ by :miOOng .eqUivalent that which is non~equivaJent[,J … by forgetting these features ' which differentiate one thirig from another." t Om:e Nietzsche pulls tire veikofiUusion from our eyes and shows-that ti-uth is a

1!in00ile .anny of metaphors; metonymies, anthropomorphisms," what next? One pos­Illile responseis.stoicism,described in the essay's last paragraph. Alone in an alien worldj 'humaris could just endure, preserving a "dignified equilibrium"in the face of ~ingtowhichlifesubject$ them. More eXtreme is the "nihilistic" denial of this World ·as"fallen" or "evil," a position that Nietzsche associates with Christianity: Against stoicism and nihilism, Nietzsche calls on humans to forcefully and joyfully ttep into the vacuum created by the death of truth; of God, and of the other meta­phYsi&al guarantees on which the West has traditionally relied: We must learn not jIIstito'acceJit but to proudly affirm that "humanity" is a "mightyarchitecturalgenius who 'suci!eeds in erecting the infinitely complicated cathedral of concepts on moving foundations; , or even, one might say, on flOwing water." Nietzsche celebrates the ere.tivity and .the wiH that 'buildsaworld for humans to inhabit-and he takes the ~stBs his. 'prime example of an individual responding joyfully to the challenge of tlieddih~ the illusion of truth.

' ;6ur .selectionsfrom The Birth 'of Tragedy (I872) show how Nietzsche returns to G!eek'thought before Plato to discover the artistic form and worldview that he prefers tbthe Platonic and Christian traditions. (MAlTHEW ARNOLD in the nineteenth century antI 'MARTlN HEIDEGGER and Erich Auerbach in the twentieth also return to the pre­Socratic 'Greeks for principles to counter modernity.) Nietzsche's mantra in this text fsthat-"only as 1m ·aesthetic pheriomenondo existence and the world appear justified." 'I'IW formula draws on. the Toot meaning of aesthetic as -"pertaining to sense percep­tiop." Nietzsche says that'.Hfe is worthwhile only if we experience strong feelings or l8nI8tions. M WALTERl'A1l!R, who was writing at almost exactly the same ·time, would put it, !theqtiality and intensity of our sensations indicates the quality of our lives. &,defor Niewlche;' as for Pater, the step from the ;'aesthetic".as sensation to the llabsthetic" as art is a short one. Art is the realm of heightened sensation. But whereas Pater-stresses the experience of the spectator, Nietzsche focuses on the exuberant joy felt ,by the arlist/creator in the struggle to bend recalcitrant materials to his or her will.

;ij Nietisbhe thus appears to promote heroicindividualisrn and transcendent genius . He h8S'often ~been read tFiis way; not leastlJycountless modernist artists, who also ies(iorided to,his diatribes against the confomiist "herds" that try to·curb the strong, lDIoral artist.' Much in Nietzsche celebrates the "will". of the "overman" (supennan) .nd"denigrates·e'Verything (from conventional morality to democracy) that would mike~tHe genius answerable to any authority outside of his self. "His" is used -advis­

~rl{ ofletters. Ecce Homo: i,s iNietzsche's_half-mad and fascinating-autobiography; the most readable, biography is Rorrald Hayman1s Nidzsche: A Critical Life (.1980).

Arthur Danto's Nietzsche as Philosop1ter(I965) remains a superb overview: it can be supplemented with Richard Schaeht'~ Nietzsche (1983-) and Alexander Nehamas's irilluential Nietzsche: Life as LitflrratUr:e (.1985). The_Ca'nabridge Companion to Niett­sche, edited by Beind Magnus and Kathleen M. Higgins (996), collectS essays that address a wide range of issues connected to Nietzsche's life" work, andinfluencel Martin Heidegger's Nietzsche ~2 vols., 1961; trans. in 4 vols., -1979~87) is a major document '-of twentieth-century philosophy' as well as a powerful, if idiosyncratic; interpretation of. Nietzsche. Many poststructuralist's have written extensively on Nietzsche, A partial list includes Michel Foucault,hnguage, Caunter-Memory, PraC­tice (1977); Paul de Man, Allegories ofReading (1979):Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Niet%~. sche's Styles (1978; 'trans. '1979); Gilles Deleuze, NietzSche and Philosophy (1962; tnms. 1983); and Sarah Kofman; Nietzsche ana Metaplwr (,1>972: trans. 1993). FOur studies of particular relevance to literary critics .are Alan D. Schrift, Nietzsche "nat.he Question of Interpretation (1990); H~nry Staten, Nietzsthe'sVoice (1990): Ernst Beh­ler; Confrontations: Derrida, -f-I'eidegger; -Nidzsche, (1-991 ): and John Sallis, CmssingSi Nietzsche ana ,he·Space ofTTIlgeay (1991 ).. the reader who.wantS a sense of the ways that· literary theorists (especially) have approached Nietzsche's work in recent decades can-start with the many fine collectiensof–essays 'on his work: -The New NietzscW, edited by David ,B. Allison (I977h Why Niemche Now?, -editedby Daniel O'H~ (985): Friedrich Nietrs~, edited'by.Harold·Bloom(l987); Niet'i:.sche as Postmotl. emist: ESSRysPro_ana Contra; edited,by Clayton Koelb ( 1990 hFeminist Intef'ptettUiorts of Friedrich Nietzsche, edited byKeHyOliveI' and Marilyn Pearsall (l99S); -a:ndWhy NietzsChe Still?; edited by Alan D. 8chrift (2000). The most usefulbibliogtaph¥ call be found in-The Cambridge Comptm«m to Nietzsche (cited above), .' ''(

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On Truth and Lying in a NOri-MoraISense l

1

In some remote comer of the universe,. JIkkeringin 'the light ofthe CQuqt~ less solar systems into which it had been poured, there ,was once:a planec on which clever animals invented cognition. It was the most ar:rogant and most mendacious minute-ih the 'history of the-world'; but a minute WasoH It Was. After nat1:trf! had drawn just a few more-breaths the planet froze and the clever animals had to-die. Somedne could invent a fable like thill and yet they wou:td-stifhibt have given a satisfactory illustration of just ht)w pitiful, how insubstaritialand transitory, how purposeless and aroitraty t'H~ human intellect . looks within nature; there were eternities: during whi.ch it did_ not eXist;: and when. it has disappeared again, nothing . will havehllPr pened~ For this .intellect has n£) further. mission that might , extend beyon.d the bounds .of human life. Rather, the:i~telle<;t is human, and only itso!VJl pOssessor: and J1i"ogenit6r· regards it with such pathos, as if it housed·:the axi·saround.which the 'entire world revolved. But if we could communicate with a midge 'we wduld ' hear that it too floats through the air With the vel"f same pa:thos'~"feeling that inoo contains within itself the flying centrlH)f this world. THere is nothing Hi rtatUre so despitable and Ttlean that would not immedi'ilttHy . swell up like a baUo6n from just one little . puff of that force o~cognition; and just as every bearer of burdens wants to be admired,

1_ Translated by Ronald Speirs. Except as indicated. all notes are the translator's.

~-;?-rsO.the proudest man of all, the philosopher, wants to see, on all sides, the eyes of the universe trained, as through telescopes, on his thoughts and

deedsi , "It-is odd that the intellect can produce this effect, since it is nothing other

tMn"anaid supplied to. the most unfortunate, most delicate and most tran­sientofbeings so as to detain them for a minute within.existence; otherwise, Without this supplement, theywould have every reason to flee existence as ~ickly : as; did Lessing's· infant son.2 The arrogance inherent in cognition ~d feeling casts a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of human beings, and.because it contains within itself the most flattering evaluation of cog­nitionrit deceives thein about the value of existence. Its most· general effect is;deception~but each of its separate effects also has something of the same

ohBracter. 1-As a means for the preservation of the individual, the intellect shows its gJ:'Utest strengths in dissimulation, since this is the means to preserve those '(I!eaker,Jess robust individuals who, by nature; are denied horns or the sharp fangs bf a.beast of prey with which towage the struggle for existence. This,d bfdissimulatibn reaches its peak in humankind, where deception, flattery, lying'.ahdcheating, speaking behind the backs of others, keeping up appear­!lirees',3 living in borrowed finery, wearing masks, the drapery of convention, play-actirig for the benefit of others and oneself-in short, the constant flut­teringof human beings around the one flame of vanity is so much the rule and,tbe,law that there is virtually nothing which defies understanding so rnde-h as the fact that an honest and pure drive towards truth should ever have emerged in thein. They are deeply immersed in' illusions and dream­im'agesj their eyes merely glide across the surface of things and see 'fonns'; nowhere does their perception lead into truth; instead it is content to receive stimuli and, as it were, to play with its fingers on the back of things. What iamore, .human beings allow themselves: to be lied to in dreams every night ofLtheir lives, without their moral sense ever seeking to prevent this happen­,mg,whereas it is said that some people have even eliminated snoring by will­pi:JWer~ What do human beings really know about themselves? Are they even eapable of perceiving themselves in their entirety just once, stretched out as in:an illuminated glass case? Does nature not remain silent about almost everything, even about our bodies, banishing and enclosing us within a proud, illusory consciousness, far away from the twists and turns of the bow­ets"the'rapid flow of the blood stream and thecomplicatedtremblings of the rienie-.fibres? Nature has thrown away the key, and woe betide fateful curi­osity should it ever succeed in peering through a crack in the chamber of ooJriciousness, out and down into the depths, and thus gain an intimation oF'lhe fact that humanity, in the indifference of its ignorance, rests on the pitiless; the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous~linging indreams,as it were; to the back of a tiger. Given this constellation, where on earth can the lJrive.to truth possibly have come from?

!_ Insofar as the individual wishes to preserve himself in relation to other

January 1778). [GOTHOLD EPHRAIM LESSING2. Lessing's first and only son died immediately (1729-178 I), Gennan dramatist and critic—edi­~e.r: birth, followed soon after by his mother. This tor's note.] ,arew fro-m Lessing the comment: "Was it . good 3. The verb 'Nietische use~ is reprilsentieret1- Thissense that they had to pull him into the worM with means keeping up a show in public, representing irili-. tongs, 6r that he noticed the filth so quickly? one's family, country, or social group before the Was it not good sense that he took the first oppor­eyes of the world . tunity to leave it again?" (Letter to Eschenburg, 10

8~6 individuals, in the state of nature he mostly used his intellect for conceal­ment and dissimulation; however, because necessity and boredom also le~d men to want to live in societies and herds, they need a peace treaty, and so they endeavour to eliminate from their world at least the crudest forms of the ' bellum omnium contra omnes. 4 In the wake of this peace treaty; however, comes something which looks like the first step towards the acqui­sition of that mysterious drive for truth. For that which is to count as 'truth' from this point onwards now becomes fixed, i.e. a way.of designating things is invented which has the same validity and force everywhere, and the leg­islation of language also produces the first laws of truth, for the contrast between truth and lying comes into existence here for the first time: the liar uses the valid tokens of designation~words-to make the unreal appear to be real; he says, for example, 'I am rich', whereas the correct designation for this condition would be, precisely, 'poor'. He misuses the established conventions by arbitrarily switching or even inverting the names for things. If he does this in a manner that is selfish and otherwise harmful, society will no longer trust him and therefore exclude him from its ranks. Human beings do not so much flee from being tricked as from being harmedhy being tricked. Even on this level they do not hate deception but rather the damaging, inimical consequences · of certain species of deception. Truthj too, is only desired by human beings in a similarly limited sense. They des~ the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth; they are indifferenho pure knowledge if it has no consequences, but they are actually hostile towards truths which may be harmful and destructive. And, besides, what is the status of those conventions of language? Are they perhaps products of knowledge, of the sense of truth? Is there a perfect match between thingS and their designations? Is language the full and adequate expression of all realities?

Only through forgetfulness could human beings ever entertain the illusion that they possess truth to the degree described above. If they will not content themselves with truth in the form of tautology, i.e. with empty husks, they will for ever exchange illusions for truth. What is a word? The copy of a nervous stimulation in sounds. To infer from the fact of the nervous stimu. lation that there exists a cause outside us is already the result of applying the principle of sufficient reason wrongly. If truth alone had been decisive in the genesis .of language, if the viewpoint of certainty had been decisive in creating deSignations, how could we possibly be permitted to say, 'The stone is hard', as if 'hard' were something known to us in some other way, and not merelr as an entirely subjective stimulus? We divide things up by gender, descrihing a tree as masculine and a plant as feminine5-how arbitrary these translations are! How far they have flown beyond the canon of certaintyrWe speak of a snake; the designati.on captures only its twisting movements and thus couId equally well apply to a worm. How arbitrarily these borders are drawn, how one-sided the preference for this or that property of a thing! When different languages are set alongside one another it becomes clear that, where words are concerned, what matters is never truth, never the fuU

4. 'War of all against all" [Latin): phrase associ. XIII). [Hobbes (I 588-1679), EngliSh poiiticalphi­ated with Thomas Hobbes' description ·of the state loso,!!her-editor's note.] of nature before the institution of political author· 5. 'Tree" is masculine in German (tier Baum) and ity (cf. Hobbes, De cive 1.12 and Leviathan, chapter "plant" (die Pjlam;e) is feminine. g- 7Z-b,

.::;-=t-­

and adequate expression;6 otherwise there would not be so many languages. The 'thing-in-itself7 (which would be, precisely, pure truth, truth without consequences) is impossible for even the creator of language to grasp, and indeed this is not at all desirable. He designates only the relations of things to human beings, and in order to express them he avails himself of the bOldest metaphors. The stimulation of a nerve is first translated into an image: first metaphor! The image is then imitated by a sound: second meta­phorl And each time there is a complete leap from one sphere into the heart of another, new sphere. One can conceive of a profoundly deaf human being who has never experienced sound or music; just as such a person will gaze in astonishment at the Chladnian sound-figures in sand,8 find their cause in the vibration of a string, and swear that he must now know what men call sound-this is precisely what happens to all of us with lan-guage. We believe that when we speak of trees, colours, snow, and flow­en,we have knowledge of the things themselves, and yet we possess only metaphors of things which in no way correspond to the original entities. :fi.istas the musical sound appears as a figure in the sand, so the mysterious 'XI .of the thing-in-itself appears first as a nervous stimulus, then as an Image, .and finally as an articulated sound. At all events, things do not plTOCeed logically when language comes into being, and the entire material .in~ and with which the man of truth, the researcher, the philosopher, works and builds; stems, if not from cloud-cuckoo land, then certainly not from the 'tIS'Sence of things.

_:Letus consider in particular how concepts are formed; each word imme­diately becomes a concept, not by virtue of the fact that it is intended to Serve as a 'memory (say) of the unique, utterly individualized, primary expe­rience to which it owes its existence, but because at the same time it must fit .countless other, more or less similar cases, i.e. cases which, strictly speak­lng; .are never equivalent, and thus nothing other than non-equivalent cases. Every concept comes into being by making equivalent that which is non­equivalent. Just as it is certain that no leaf is ever exactly the same as any other leaf, it is equally certain that the concept 'leaf is formed by dropping ,these individual differences arbitrarily, by forgetting those features which differentiate one thing from another, so that the concept then gives rise to the ITotion that something other than leaves exists in nature, something whith would be 'leaf', a primal form, say, from which all leaves were woven; drawn, delineated, dyed, curled, painted-but by a clumsy pair of hands, so that no single example turned out to be a faithful, correct, and reliable copy ofthe primal form. We call a man honest; we ask, 'Why did he act so honestly today?' Our answer is usually: 'Because of his honesty.' Honesty!-yet again, this-means that the leaf is the cause of the leaves. We have no kn.owledge of an essential quality which might be called honesty, but we do know of numer­ous individualized and hence non-equivalent actions which we equate with

6. Nietzsche uses the term adiiqual which indi­ not of what we observe [editor's note} . cates that the meaning of something is fully con­ 8. The vibration of a string can create figures in veyed by a word or expression; English "adequate" the sand (in an appropriately constructed sand­alone. does not convey this sense completely. box) which give a visual representation of that 7. Term used by the German philosopher IMMAN­ which the human ear perceives as a tone. The term UEL KANT (1724-1804) for the real object inde­ comes from the name of the physicist Ernst pendent of our awareness of it. Kant argues that Chladni [1756-1827]' whose experiments dem­luch categories as time and space, mentioned later onstrated the effect. by Nietzsche, are part of our own form of thought,

8~=1

878 / FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

each other by omitting what is unlike, and which we now designate as bonest actions; finally we formulate from them a q,ualitas occulta9 with the name 'honesty'.

Like form, a concept is produced by overlooking what .is individual and real, whereas nature knows neither forms nor concepts and hence no species, but only an 'X' which is inaccessible to us and indefinable by us. Fot the opposition we make between individual and species is also anthropemowhi€ and does not stem from the essence of things, although we equally do not dare to say that it does not correspond to the essence of things, since that would be a dogmatic assertion and, as such, just as incapable of being proved as its opposite.

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies; anthro­pomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, !lnd which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as fir~y established, canonical, and binding; truths are illusions of which we .have forgotten that they Are illusions, metaphors which have become worn ·by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour, coins which, having losttheiI' stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer as coins. Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only .heant about the obligatiQn to be truthful which society imposes in order to ,exist; i.e. the obligation to use the customary metaphors, or, to put it in moral terms, the obligation to lie in accordance with firmly established convention; to lie en masse and in a style that is binding for all. Now, it is true that human beings forget that this is how things are; thus they lie unconsciously in the way we have described, .and in accordance with centuries-old habits-and precisely because of this uncansciousness, precisely because of this forgetting, they arrive at the feeling of truth. The Jeeling that one. is obliged to describe one thing as red,. another as cold, and a third as dumb, .prompts amQraJ impulse which pertains to truth; from its opposite, .the liar whom nooni trusts and all exclude, human. beings demonstrate to themselves just how honourable, confidence-inspiring and useful truth is. As creatures of reasOn, human beings now make their actions subject to the rule of abstractions; they no longer tolerate being swept away by sudden impressions andsefu suous perceptions; they now generalize all these impressions first, turnmg them into cooler, less colourful concepts in orderto harness the vehicle of their lives and actions to them. Everything which distinguishes human.beingS from animals depends on this ability to sublimate sensuous met!lphol'S intO a schema, in other words, to dissolve an image into a concept. This is because something becomes possible 'in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved in the realm of those sensuous first impressions, namely the construction of a pyramidal order based on castes and degrees, the creation of a .new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, definitions of borders, which now confronts the other, sensuously perceived world as something firmer, more general, more familiar, more human, and hence as something regulatory and imperative. Whereas every metaphor standing for. a sensuous perception is individual and unique and is therefore always able to escape classification, the great edifice of concepts exhibits the rigid reg-

Q Hitl,.l,pn nrn.nprh.! fl !lIti … '

ON TRUTH AND LYING IN A NON-MORAL SENSE / 879

ularity of a Roman columbarium, I while logic breathes out that air of severity and coolness which is peculiar to mathematics. Anyone who has been touched by that cool breath will scarcely believe that concepts too, which are 8S bony and' eight-cornered as a dice and just as capable of being shIfted 'around, ate only the left-over residue ofa metaphor, and that the illusion pro­du€ed by the artistic translation of a nervous stimulus into images is, if not the mother, then at least the grandmother of each and every concept. Within this conceptual game of dice, however, 'truth' means using each die in accor­dance with its designation, counting its spots precisely, forming correct clas­sifications, and never offending against the order of castes nor against the sequence of classes of rank. Just as the Romans and the Etruscans divided up the sky with rigid mathematical lines and confined a god in a space which they had thus delimited as in a templum,2 all peoples have just such a math­ematically divided firmament of concepts above them, and they understand the demand of truth to mean that the god of every concept is to be sought onl,. in his sphere. Here one can certainly admire humanity as a mighty archi­tectural genius Wh9 succeeds in erecting the infinitely complicated cathedral of concepts on moving foundations, or even, one might say, on flowing water; admittedly, in order to rest on such foundations, it has to be like a thing con­'Strutted from cobwebs, so delicate that it can be carried off on the waves and yet sO firm as not to be blown apart by the wind. By these standards the human being is an architectural genius who is far superior to the bee; the lat­ter bqilds with wax which she gathers from nature, whereas the human being builds with the far more delicate material of concepts which he must first manufacture from himself. In this he is to be much admired-but just not for his impulse to truth, to the pure cognition of things. If someone hides some­thing behind a bush, looks for it in the same place and then finds it there, his 'Seeking and finding is nothing much to boast about; but this is exactly how dUngs 'are as far as the seeking and finding of 'truth' within the territory of reason is concerned. If I create the definition of a mammal and then, having inspected a camel, declare, 'Behold, a mammal', then a truth has certainly Men brought to light, but it is of limited value, by which I mean that iUs anthropomorphic through and through and contains not a single point which Gould 'be said to be 'true in itself, really and in a generally valid sense, regard­less of mankind. Anyone who researches for truths of that kind is basically only seeking the metamorphosis of the world in human beings; he strives for an understanding of the world as something which is similar in kind to hurn'anity, and what he gains by his efforts is at best a feeling of assimilation. ~her as the astrologer studies the stars in the service of human beings and in relation to humanity's happiness and suffering, this type of researcher MgardS the whole world as linked to humankind, as the infinitely refracted echo. of an original sound, that of humanity, and as the multiple copy of a single, original image, that of humanity. His procedure is to measure all things against man, and in doing so he takes as his point of departure the erroneous belief · that he has these things directly before him, as pure objects. Thus, forgetting that the original metaphors of perception were indeed metaphors, he takes them for the things themselves.

I. Originally a dovecote, then a catacomb with 2. literally, a space marked out; the space of the niches at regular intervals for urns containing the heavens ; sanctuary, temple (Latin) [editor's notel · ……"' ….. _t.L… ,.1….. ..1

Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor, only by virtue of the fact that a mass of images. which· originally flowed in Q. hot, liquid. stream &'80 from the primal power of the human imagination, has become hard and rigid, only.because of the invincible faith that this sun, this window; this . table :is a tru~h in.itself~in.shOl'tonly· because man forgets . himself as a subject, and indeed as an artis:tically creative subject, does he live with some degree ·of peace; security; and consistency; if he could escapeJorjust.amome.nt.from the prison walls .of this faith; it would mean the end,of his 'consciousness of self'.3 He even has to make an effort to admit to ,himself that insects or birds perceive a quite different world from.. that of human· beings, and that the question as to which of these two perceptions of the world is the more correct is quite meaningless; since this would require them to be measured by the criterion of the correct perception, i;e. by a non-existent criterion. But gen. erally it seems to me that the correct perception-which would m~an the full and adequate expression o[a11 .objectin the subject""'"'":"is something con" tradictoryand impossible; for between two absolutely.different spheres, such as· subject and object are, there is no causality, no correctness, no exptessiolt but at most an aestheticway .of relating, by which I mean an allusive traris. ference, a stammering translation into a quite different language. For:whinh purpose a middle sphere and mediating 'force is cei1:ainly required which,ean freely invent and .freely .create poetry. The word appearance (Erscheinung~ contains many seductions;, -and fm this reason J avoid using it as far as pos~ sible; for it is not true ·that the essence of things appears in the empiricaJ world. A .painterwho has no hands· and who wished to express in song the image hovering before him will still reveal more through this substitution-of one sphere for another than the empirical world .betrays of the essence of things. Even the relation of a nervous stimulus to the image produced thereby is inherently not a necessary relationship; but wherithat same image has been produced millions of times and has been . passed down through many generations of humanity, indeed eventually appears in the whole of humanity as a consequence of the same occasion, it finally acquires the'same significance foral! human beings, as if it were the .only necessary image and as if that relation of the original nervous stimulus to theitnage .produced were a relation of strict causality-in exactly the ·same way as a dream, if repeated eternally, would be felt and judged entirely as reality . . But the fact that a metaphor becomes hard and rigid is · absolutely no guarantee of the necessity and exclusive justification of that metaphor. . Anyone who is at home in such considerations will certainly have felt a

deep mistrust of this kind of idealism when once he has become clearly convinced of the eternal consistency, ubiquitou-sness.·andinfal!ibility bf the laws of nature; he will then conclude that everything, as far as we can'pen­etrate, wheth~r to the heights of the telescopic world or the depths· of the microscopic world, is so sure, so elaborated; so endless, so much in conform­ity to laws, and so free of lacunae, that science will be able to mine ,t,hese shafts successfully for ever, and that everything. found there will be in agree. ment and without self-contradiction. How little ·all of this resembles a prod­uct of the imagination~ for if it were such a thing, the illusion and the unreality would be bound to be detectable somewhere. The first thing to be

g~o3. The word Nietzsche uses here-SelbstbewuJltsein-eould also mean "self-confidence."

~ B-(said against this view is this: if each of us still had a different kind of sensuOus perception, if we ourselves could only perceive things as,variously, a bird, a worm, or a plant does, or if one of us were to see a stimulus as red, a second 'person were to see -the'same stimulus as blue, while a third were even to hear it as a sourid; nobody would ever 'speak of nature as something conforming to laws; rather they wouldotake it to be nothing other than a highly subjective formation. Consequently, what is a law of nature for us at all? It is not known to us in itself but orily in its effects, i.e. in its relations to other laws of nature which are in tum known to us only as relations. Thus; all these relations rilfer only to one another. and they are utterly incomprehensible to us in their essential nature; the only things we really know about them are things whiCh we bring to bear on. them: time and space, in other words, relations of succession and number. But everything which is wonderful and which elicits our astonishment at precisely these laws of nature, everything which demands explanation : of us and could seduce us into being suspicious of idealism, is attributa.l>le precisely and exclusively to the rigour and universal validity of the representations of time ' and space. But these we produce Within ourselves and from ourselves with the same necessity as a spider spins; if.we are forced, to- comprehend all things under these ·formsalone, then it is no longer wonderful that what we comprehend i1'lall these things is actu­ally nothing other than these very forms; for all of them must exhibit the laws of number, and number is · precisely that which is . most astonishing about things. All the conformity to laws which we find so imposing in the .orbitS of the stars and chemical . processes is basically identical with those qualities which we ourselves bring to bear on things, so that what we find imposing is our own activity. Of course the consequence of this is that the artistic production of metaphor, with which every sensation begins within us, already presupposes those forms, and is thus executed in them; only from the stability of these original forms can one explain how it is possible for an edifice 'of I!oncepts to be constituted in its turn from the metaphors them­selves. For this ,coriceptual edifice is an imitation of the relations of time. space, and nember on the foundations of metaphor.

2 ~~ l

Originally, as we have seen,it is language which works ·on building the edifice .of concepts; later it is science. Just as the bee simultaneously builds t'he cells of its comb'and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly at that great columbarium of concepts, the burial site of perceptions, · builds ever­new,ever-higher tiers, supports; cleans,. renews the old cells, and . strives lIbove all to fill that framework which ' towers up to vast heights. and. to fit into itin an orderly way the whole empirical world, i.e. the anthropomorphic .world. If even the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts. so as not to be swept away and lose himself, the researcher builds his hut close by the tower of science so that he can lend a hand with the building and find protection for himself beneath its already existing bulwarks. And he has need of protection, for there exist fearful powers which constantly press in on him and which confront scientific truth with 'truths' of quite another kind, on shields emblazoned with the most multifarious emblems.

That drive to form metaphors; 'that fundamental human drive which can­

~~"2 not be left out of consideration for even a second without also leaving out human beings themselves, is in truth not defeated, indeed hardly even tamed, by the process whereby a regular and rigid new world is built from its own sublimated products—-<:oncepts-in order to imprison it in a fortress. The drive seeks out a c'hannel and a new area for its activity, and finds it in myth and in art generally. It constantly confuses the cells and the classifications of concepts by setting up new translations, metaphors, metonymies; it con; stantly manifests the desire to shape the given world of the waking human being in ways which are just as multiform, irregular; inconsequential, inco' herent, charming and ever-new, as things are in the world of dream. Actually the waking human being is only clear about the fact that he is awake thanks to the rigid and regular web of concepts, and for that reasbn he sometimes comes to believe that he is dreaming if once that web of concepts is toin apart by ·art. 'Pascal is right to maintain that if the same dream were to come to us every night we would occupy ourselves with it just as much as we do with the things we see every day: 'If an artisan could be sure to dream each night for a full twelve hours that he was a king,' says Pascal, 'I believe he would be just as happy as a king who dreamt for twelve hours each night that he was an artisan.'4 Thanks to the constantly effective miracle assumed by myth, the waking day of a people ' who are stimulated by myth, as the ancient Greeks were, does indeed resemble dream more than it does the day of a thinker whose mind has been sobered by sCience. If, one day, any tree may speak as a nymph, or if a god can carry off virgins in the guise of a bull, if the goddess Athene herself is suddenly seen riding on a beautiful chariot in the company of Pisistratus through the market-places of Athens5~and ' that was what the honest Athenian believed-then anything is possible at any time, as it is 'in dream, and the whole of nature cavorts around men as if it were just a masquerade of the gods who are merely having fun by deceiv­ing men in every shape and form .

But human beings themselves have an unconquerable urge to let them­selves be deceived, and they are as if enchanted with happiness when the bard recites epic fairy-tales as if they were true, or when the actor in a play acts the king more regally than reality shows him to be. The intellect, that master of pretence, is free and absolved of its usual slavery for as long as it can deceive without doing harm, and it celebrates its Saturnalian festivrus6 when it does so; at no time is it richer, more luxuriant, more proud, skilful, and bold. Full of creative contentment, it jumbles up metaphors and shifts the boundary stones of abstraction, describing a river, for example, as a mov­ing road that carries men to destinations to which they normally walk. The intellect has now cast off the mark of servitude; whereas it normally labours; with dull-spirited industry, to show to some poor individual who lusts after life the road and the tools he needs, and rides out in search of spoils and booty for its master, here the intellect has become the master itself and is

~. Pensks V1.386, [Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), war and wisdom and the patron ofAthens,.was he!' French mathematician, theologian, and philoso­ self restoring him to power, 'The guise of a bulr:,her-edttor's note,] Zeus, the Greek king of the gods, took the fonn of5. Herodotus 1.60. [The Greek historian (ca, a bull when he abducted Europa, a Phoenician ~84-<a . 425 B.e.E,) describes in the passage cited princess-editor's note.] I ruse of the Athenian ruler Pisistratus (d. 527 6. Roman holidays at the winter solstice during l .e,E,) after he was forced out of the city in 566: which no business was conducted, slaves were Ie dressed a tall , handsome woman in armor and tempornrily freed , and the normal rules of propri­ed the people to believe that Athena, goddess <>f ety were suspended [editnr's note] , & ~ 2

~~3 permitted to wipe the expression of neediness from its face. Whatever the intellect now does, all of it, compared with what it did before, bears the mark ofpretence, just as what it did before bore the mark of distortion. It copies human life, but it takes it to be something good and appears to be fairly content with it. That vast assembly of beams and boards to which needy man clings, thereby saving himself on his journey through life, is used by the liberated intellect as a mere climbing frame and plaything on which to per­form its most reckless tricks; and when it smashes this framework, jumbles it up and ironically re-assembles it, pairing the most unlike things and divid­ing those things which are closest to one another, it reveals the fact that it does not require those makeshift aids of neediness, and that it is now guided, not by concepts but by intuitions. No regular way leads from these intuitions into the land of the ghostly schemata and abstractions; words are not made for them; man is struck dumb when he sees them, or he will speak only in forbidden metaphors and unheard-of combinations of concepts so that, by at least demolishing and deriding the old conceptual barriers, he may do creative justice to the impression made on him by the mighty, present intu­ition.

There are epochs in which the man of reason and the man of intuition stand side by side, the one fearful of intuition, the other filled with scorn for abstraction, the latter as unreasonable as the former is unartistic. They both desire to rule over life; the one by his knowledge of how to cope with the chief calamities of life by providing for the future, by prudence and regular­ity; the other by being an 'exuberant hero'7 who does not see those calamities and who only acknowledges life as real when it is disguised as beauty and appearance. Where the man of intuition, as was once the case in ancient Greece, wields his weapons more mightily and victoriously than his contrary, a culture can take shape, given favourable conditions, and the rule of art over life can become established; all the expressions of a life lived thus are accompanied by pretence, by the denial of neediness, by the radiance of metaphorical visions, and indeed generally by the immediacy of deception. Neither the house, nor the gait, nor the clothing, nor the pitcher of clay gives any hint that these things were invented by neediness; it seems as if all of them were intended to express sublime happiness and OlympianS cloudless­ness and, as it were, a playing with earnest things. Whereas the man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds thereby in warding off misfortune, is unable to compel the abstractions themselves to yield him happiness, and strives merely to be as free as possible of pain, the man of intuition, standing in the midst of a culture, reaps directly from his intuitions not just protection from harm but also a constant stream of brightness, a lightening of the spirit, redemption, and release , Of course, when he suffers, he suffers more severely; indeed he suffers more frequently because he does 'not know how to learn from experience and keeps on falling into the very same trap time after time. When he is suffering he is just as unreasonable as he is when happy, he shouts out loudly and knows no solace, How differ-

S 8'3 7. Phrase used to describe Siegfried in Wagner's ner's Ring cycle, was IIrst produced in 1876…..,di · GDttenliImmerung (Act 111) . [Richard Wagner tor's note.] (1813-1883), German composer who was Nietz­ 8, That is, characteristic of Mount Olympus, the sche's friend and mentor until their falling out in home of the Greek gods [editor's nole] , 1876, GlJtterdiimmenmg, the conclusion of Wag­

~'f!t..f endy the same misfortune' isendured 'by the stoic wh.o -has learned ~ experience and who governs himself by means ofcconcepts! This·man),wlliJ otherwise seeks :oniy,honesty; truth;:freedom from 'iIIusions, and pl'oteGtiOo from the onslaughts of 'things which :might 'distract him/ now perfornnsi in the 'midst of misfortune, a masterpiece of pretence, just as the othel",did in the midst of happiness: ·he does nnt- wear a twitching, mobile, human face, but rather a mask, as it were, with its features in' dignified equilibrium,']. does not ·shout; nor does he even change his tone of voice. If a v6Titabl, storm-cloud empties itselfon his head, he wraps himself in his cloak and slowly walks away from under it.

1'873 r90~ 't."

From The 'Birth of Tragedyl .

1 ..

We shall have gained much for the science of aesthetics when we have~~~ to realize, not just through logical insight but also with the certainty,of s~ine­thing directly apprehepded (Ansr;/uluung), that the continuous evolu,tjoA.rP'f art is bound up with the duality of the Apolline and the Dionysiac in rJu~a .

. . . . ). ' I '!J I'

thesame way as reproduction depends on there being two sexes whicK8Q­exist in a state of perpetual conflict il)terrupted only occasionally by periq~~ of reconciliation. We have borrowed these names from the Greeks who reve3I the p~ofound ~yst~ries of their view of art to those with insight, n~t'iri~~h~ cepts, admittedly, hut through the penetratingly vivid figures of th~ir g;;cls,

.Their two deities of art, Apollo and Dionysos,2 proVide the staI1ing~poi~t.M' our recognition that there exists in the world Of the Gr~eks anenorr4<?¥'s opposition, both in origin and goals, between the Apolline art ofth~ , ~mag.~­maker or s<;ulptor (Bildner) and the imageless art of music, which is !i:haf)~t Dionysos. These two very different drives (Triebe) exist side by sid~, rhos~ in open confliCt, stimulating and provoking (reizen) one another to give J>lrlh to ever-new, more vigorous offspring in whom they perpetuate the cO!lflih inherent in theoppositlon ' betWeen th~m, an opposition only appa;~~tly bridged by the common term 'art'-until eventually, by a metaphysic.aLmii:~ acle of the Hellenic 'Will', they appear paired and, in this pairing, fiijaliy engender a work of art which is Dionysiac and Apolline in equal measl,1re: Attic tragedy.3 . .' '. …. . . .. I; ~~

In order to gain a closer understanding of these two drives, let us thin of them in the first place as the separate art-worlds of dream and in~xic~uo" (Rausch). Between these two physioJqgical phenomena an oppos,it'ion,clm ')e observed which corresponds to that between the Apolline and the Dionysiac, As Lucretius' envisages it, it was in dream that the magnincent fig':lie,~.~r

I ~.'> I. Translated by Ronald Speirs . Except as indi­ civilization; as Phoebus Apollo, he is god of light cated, all subsequent notes are the translator's; in [editor's note). the text, he occasionally retains the original 3: Plays performed at the festival .of Plol)~II.S if' German in parelitheses. The full title is the Birth Athens 'during the 5th century B,C,E. : [&litot~ of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music , note]. .. . :_ .::. r ,. Q-.1 2. Greek god of wine, the object of frenzied cult 4, Roman. poet and philosopher' , (ca .., 94,'.5 worship (somewhat muted in its official forms). B.C.E .); see De Rerum Natura (On the Nafure OJ Apollo: Greek god of music, prophecy, and medi­ Things) 5. l 169-82 [editor's note1. . . cine, associated with the higher developments of

.the gOGkfirst appeared before the souls of men; in dream the great image­

.maker sawthe delightfully proportioned bodies'of super-human beings; and tHe Hellenic paet, if asked about the secrets of poetic procreation, would likewise have reminded uS0fdreamand would have given an account much IikeJthat,gi:ven by Hans Sachsin the Meistersinger:

My friend, it is the poet's task To mar'khis dreams, their meaning ask.

. Trust me, the truest phantom man doth know Hath meaningorily dreams may show: The arts of verse and poetry .'

. Tell nought but dreaming's prophecy.s r l , . '.' . . .

E,yery ~.uman~eing is fully an artist when creating the worlds of dream, and the lovely semblance of dream is the .precondition of all the arts of image­maki.ng, including, as we shall see,an impo-rtant half of poetry. We take pleasure in dreaming, understanding its figu1'es without-mediation; all forms j~ak to us; nothing is indifferent or unnecessary. Yet even while this dream­.reality is m~st alive, we nevertheless retain a pervasive sense thaUt is sem­bla~e; at least this is my experience, and I could adduce a good deal of iVidenc'e and the statements ofpoets to attest to the frequency, indeed nor­i{alW; 'pf my experience. Philosophical natures even have a presentiment

,tlilit 'hiaa'en .beneath the reality in which We live and have our being there ilso1lies' a second, quite different reality; in other words, this reality too is a

'~b1ance. IndeedSchopenhauer actually states that the mark af a person 's capacity for philosophy is the gift for feeling occasionally as if people and all tru.niS were mere phantoms or dream"images.6A person with artistic sensi­bi,litnelates to the reality of dream in the same way as a philosopher relates ~:thl: realitypf existel1ce: he attends to it closely and with pleasure. using ~ese images to interpret life! and practising for life with the help of these ~ts, Not that it is .only the pleasant and friendly images which give him this feeling of complete intelligibility; he also sees passing before him things phich,are grave,gloomy, sad, dark, sudden blocks, teasings of chanoe, anx­~!.s expectations, in short the entire 'Divine Comedy" of life, including the ~f~o'r qut not like som,emere shadow"play-for he, too, lives in these ~q~s ~nd shares in the suffering-and yet never without that fleeting sense Q~ i~..~aracter as semblance. Perhaps others will recall, as I do, shouting q&.t~! ljometimes successfully, words of encouragement in the midst of the

.pepls.and, terrors of a dream: 'It is a dream!. I will dream on!' I have even ~~r6 of people,who were capable of continuil1g the causality of one and the ~1Dft dr~am through three and more successive nights. All of these facts are GtfMl eviden~e that our innermost being; the deep ground (Untergrund) com­~9P tp all OiJr Iiyes, experiences the state of dreaming with profound plea-J …r~ (,LwtJ and joyous necessity. , .. . .

:The 'Greeks also expressed the joyol..s necessity of dream-experience in rlJ /, : t . .

f r ~ •

~.;CWailnb, me Meistersinger, Act in, s~. i. [Rich; ed. J. Fr8'~~nstlidt (Leipzig 1874) ~ p , 295 , [Arthuritt Wagner (1813.,.1883), German composer Schopenhauer 0788-1860), German philoso­.mOle music and aesthetic theories greatly influ· pher, a major influence on Nietzsche—editor's 'fIPCI!CI Nietzsche's argument in The Birth of Trag­ note.) ;.!y. Hans Sachs (149~1576) , German poet and 7. Epic poem by the ltali~n poet DAN-rEAL,'GHIERI dremalist who has a niajorrole in Wagner's 1868 (1265- 1321); in the Srst part of the Inferno, the opera-editor's note.) poet narrates a passage through hell [editor's note ]. 6. Au.! Schopenhauers handschriftlichem Nachlass,