Part One: On the Prejudices of Philosophers
1
The Will to
truth, which is still going to tempt us to many a hazardous enterprise; that
celebrated veracity of which all philosophers have hitherto spoken with
reverence: what questions this will to truth has already set before us! What strange, wicked, questionable
questions! It is already a long story -
yet does it not seem as if it has only just begun? Is it any wonder we should at last grow
distrustful, lose our patience, turn impatiently
away? That the sphinx should teach us
too to ask questions? Who really
is it that here questions us? What
really is it in us that wants 'the truth'? - We did
indeed pause for a long time before the question of the origin of this will -
until finally we came to a complete halt before an even more fundamental
question. We asked after the value
of this will. Granted we want truth: why
not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? - The problem of the value of truth stepped
before us - or was it we who stepped before this problem? Which of us is Oedipus here? Which of us sphinx? It is, it seems, a
rendezvous of questions and question-marks.
- And, would you believe it, it has finally almost come to seem to us
that this problem has never before been posed - that we have been the first to
see it, to fix our eyes on it, to hazard it? For there is a hazard in it and perhaps there
exists no greater hazard.
2
'How could
something originate in its antithesis? Truth in error, for example?
Or will to truth in will to deception?
Or the unselfish act in self-interest?
Or the pure radiant gaze of the sage in covetousness? Such origination is impossible; he who dreams
of it is a fool, indeed worse than a fool; the things of the highest value must
have another origin of their own - they cannot be derivable from this
transitory, seductive, deceptive mean little world, from this confusion of
desire and illusion! In the womb of
being, rather, in the intransitory, in the hidden
god, in the "thing in itself" - that is where their cause must
lie and nowhere else!' - This mode of judgement constitutes the typical
prejudice by which metaphysicians of all ages can be recognized; this mode of
evaluation stands in the background of all their logical procedures; it is on
account of this their 'faith' that they concern themselves with their
'knowledge', with something that is at last solemnly baptized 'the truth'. The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians
is the faith in antithetical values.
It has not occurred to even the most cautious of them to pause and doubt
here on the threshold, where however it was most needful they should: even if
they had vowed to themselves 'de omnibus dubitandum'. For it may be doubted firstly whether there
exist any antitheses at all, and secondly whether these popular evaluations and
value-antitheses, on which they metaphysicians have set their seal, are not
perhaps merely foreground valuations, merely provisional perspectives, perhaps
moreover the perspectives of a hole-and-corner, perhaps from below, as it were
frog-perspectives, to borrow an expression employed by painters. With all the value that may adhere to the
true, the genuine, the selfless, it could be possible that a higher and more
fundamental value for all life might have to be ascribed to appearance, to the
will to deception, to selfishness and to appetite. It might even be possible that what constitutes
the value of those good and honoured things resides precisely in their being
artfully related, knotted and crocheted to these wicked, apparently
antithetical things, perhaps even in their being essentially identical with
them. Perhaps! - But who is willing to
concern himself with such dangerous perhapses! For that we have to await the arrival of a
new species of philosopher, one which possesses tastes and inclinations opposite
to and different from those of its predecessors - philosophers of the dangerous
'perhaps' in every sense. - And to speak in all seriousness: I see such new
philosophers arising.
3
Having kept
a close eye on philosophers and read between their lines for a sufficient
length of time, I tell myself: the greater part of conscious thinking must
still be counted among the instinctive activities, and this is so even in the
case of philosophical thinking; we have to learn differently here as we have
learned differently in regard to heredity and the 'innate'. Just as the act of being born plays no part
in the procedure and progress of heredity, so 'being conscious' is in no
decisive sense the opposite of the instinctive - 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. For example, that the definite shall be of
greater value than the indefinite, appearance of less value than 'truth': but
such valuations as these could, their regulatory importance for us notwithstanding,
be no more than foreground valuations, a certain species of niaiserie
which may be necessary precisely for the preservation of being such as us. Assuming, that is to say, that it is not
precisely man who is the 'measure of things' ...
4
The
falseness of a judgement is to us not necessarily an objection to a judgement:
it is here that our new language perhaps sounds strangest. The question is to what extent it is
life-advancing, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even
species-breeding; and our fundamental tendency is to assert that the falsest
judgements (to which synthetic judgements a priori belong) are the most
indispensable to us, that without granting as true the fictions of logic,
without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the
unconditional and self-identical, without a continual falsification of the
world by means of numbers, mankind could not live - that to renounce false
judgements would be to renounce life, would be to deny life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life:
that, to be sure, means to resist customary value-sentiments in a dangerous
fashion; and a philosophy which ventures to do so places itself, by that act
alone, beyond good and evil.
5
What makes
one regard philosophers half mistrustfully and half mockingly is not that one
again and again detects how innocent they are - how often and how easily they
fall into error and go astray, in short their childishness and childlikeness -
but that they display altogether insufficient honesty, while making a mighty
and virtuous noise as soon as the problem of truthfulness is even remotely
touched on. They pose as having
discovered and attained their real opinions through the self-evolution of a
cold, pure, divinely unperturbed dialectic (in contrast to the mystics of every
rank, who are more honest and more stupid than they - these speak of
'inspiration'): while what happens at bottom is that a prejudice, a notion, an
'inspiration', generally a desire of the heart sifted and made abstract, is
defended by them with reasons sought after the event - they are one and all
advocates who do not want to be regarded as such, and for the most part no
better than cunning pleaders for their prejudices, which they baptize 'truths'
- and very far from possessing the courage of the conscience which
admits this fact to itself, very far from possessing the good taste of the
courage which publishes this fact, whether to warn a foe or a friend or out of
high spirits and in order to mock itself.
The tartuffery, as stiff as it is virtuous, of
old Kant as he lures us along the dialectical bypaths which lead, more
correctly, mislead, to his 'categorical imperative' - this spectacle makes us
smile, we who are fastidious and find no little amusement in observing the
subtle tricks of old moralists and moral-preachers. Not to speak of that hocus-pocus of
mathematical form in which, as if in iron, Spinoza encased and masked his
philosophy - 'the love of his wisdom', to render that word fairly and
squarely - so as to strike terror into the heart of any assailant who should
dare to glance at that invincible maiden and Pallas Athene
- how much personal timidity and vulnerability this masquerade of a sick
recluse betrays!
6
It has
gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a
confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious
memoir; moreover, that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy
have every time constituted the real germ of life out of which the entire plant
has grown. To explain how a
philosopher's most remote metaphysical assertions have actually been arrived
at, it is always well (and wise) to ask oneself first: what morality does this
(does he - ) aim at? I accordingly do not believe a 'drive to
knowledge' to be the father of philosophy, but that another drive has, here as
elsewhere, only employed knowledge (and false knowledge!) as a tool. But anyone who looks at the basic drives of
mankind to see to what extent they may in precisely this connection have come
into play as inspirational spirits (or demons and kobolds - ) will discover that they have all at some time or other
practised philosophy - and that each one of them would be only too glad to
present itself as the ultimate goal of existence and as the legitimate master
of all the other drives. For every drive
is tyrannical: and it is as such that it tries to philosophize. - In the
case of scholars, to be sure, in the case of really scientific men, things may
be different - 'better', if you will - there may really exist something like a
drive to knowledge there, some little independent clockwork which, when wound
up, works bravely on without any of the scholar's other drives playing
any essential part. The scholar's real
'interests' therefore generally lie in quite another direction, perhaps in his
family or in making money or in politics; it is, indeed, almost a matter of
indifference whether his little machine is set up in this region of science or
that, whether the 'promising' young worker makes himself into a good
philologist or a specialist in fungus or a chemist - he is not characterized
by becoming this or that. In the
philosopher, on the contrary, there is nothing whatever impersonal; and, above
all, his morality bears decided and decisive testimony to who he is -
that is to say, to the order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand
in relative to one another.
7
How
malicious philosophers can be! I know of
nothing more venomous than the joke Epicurus allowed himself to make against
Plato and the Platonists: he called them Dionysiokolakes. The literal and foreground meaning of this
word is 'flatterers of Dionysus', that is to say, tyrants' hangers-on and
lickspittles; in addition, however, it is as much as to say 'they are all actors,
there is nothing genuine about them' (for Dionysiokolax
was a popular term for an actor). And
the latter meaning is really the piece of malice that Epicurus discharged at
Plato: he was annoyed by the grandiose manner, the mise
en scène of which Plato and his pupils were masters - of which Epicurus was
not a master! He, the
old schoolteacher from
8
In every
philosophy there is a point at which the philosopher's 'conviction' appears on
the scene: or, to put it in the words of an ancient Mystery:
adventavit asinus,
pulcher et fortissimus.
9
You want to live
'according to nature'? O you noble
Stoics, what fraudulent words! Think of
a being such ass nature is, prodigal beyond measure, indifferent beyond
measure, without aims or intentions, without mercy or justice, at once fruitful
and barren and uncertain; think of indifference itself as a power - how could
you live according to such indifference?
To live - is that not precisely wanting to be
other than this nature? Is living not
valuating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And even if your imperative 'live according to
nature' meant at bottom the same thing as 'live according to life' - how could
you not do that? Why make a
principle of what you yourselves are and must be? - The truth of it is,
however, quite different: while you rapturously pose as deriving the canon of
your law from nature, you want something quite the reverse of that, you strange
actors and self-deceivers! Your pride
wants to prescribe your morality, your ideal, to nature, yes to nature itself,
and incorporate them in it; you demand that nature should be nature 'according
to the Stoa' and would like to make all existence
exist only after your own image - as a tremendous external glorification and universalization of Stoicism! All your love of truth notwithstanding, you
have compelled yourselves for so long and with such persistence and hypnotic
rigidity to view nature falsely, namely Stoically, you are no longer
capable of viewing it in any other way - and some abysmal arrogance infects you
at last with the Bedlamite hope that, because you know how to tyrannize
over yourselves - Stoicism is self-tyranny - nature too can be tyrannized over:
for is the Stoic not a piece of nature?... But this is an old and
never-ending story: what formerly happened with the Stoics still happens today
as soon as a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image,
it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most
spiritual will to power, to 'creation of the world', to causa
prima.
10
The zeal and
subtlety, I might even say slyness, with which the problem 'of the real and
apparent world' is set upon all over Europe today makes one think hard and
prick up one's ears; and anyone who hears in the background only a 'will to
truth' and nothing more, certainly does not enjoy the best of hearing. In rare and isolated cases such a will to
truth, some extravagant and adventurous courage, a metaphysician's ambition to
maintain a forlorn position, may actually play a part and finally prefer a
handful of 'certainty' to a whole cartful of beautiful possibilities; there may
even exist puritanical fanatics of conscience who would rather lie down and die
on a sure nothing than on an uncertain something. But this is nihilism and the sign of a
despairing, mortally weary soul, however brave the bearing of such a virtue may
appear. In the case of stronger,
livelier thinkers who are still thirsty for life, however, it seems to be
different: when they take sides against appearance and speak even of
'perspective' with an arrogant disdain, when they rank the credibility of their
own body about as low as the credibility of the ocular evidence which says 'the
earth stands still', and thus with apparent good humour let slip the firmest possession
(for what is believed in more firmly today than the body?) - who knows whether
they are not at bottom trying to win back something that was formerly an even firmer
possession, some part or other of the old domain of the faith of former times,
perhaps 'the immortal soul', perhaps 'the old God', in short ideas by which one
could live better, that is to say more vigorously and joyfully, than by 'modern
ideas'? There is distrust of
these modern ideas in this outlook, there is disbelief in all that has been
constructed yesterday and today; there is perhaps in addition a little boredom
and mockery which can no longer endure the bric-á-brac
of concepts of the most various origin such as so-called positivism brings to
the market today; the disgust of a more fastidious taste at the village-fair motleyness and patchiness of all these reality-philosophasters in whom there is nothing new or genuine
except this motleyness. In this, it seems to me, we ought to
acknowledge that these sceptical anti-realists and knowledge-microscopists of today are in the right: the instinct which
makes the recoil from modern reality stands unrefuted
- what do we care about the retrograde bypaths they choose! The essential thing about them is not that
they want to go 'back', but that they want to - get away. A little strength, soaring, courage, artistic
power more, and they would want to go up and away - and not back!
-
11
It seems to
me that there is today an effort going on everywhere to distract attention from
the actual influence exercised on German philosophy by Kant and, in particular,
prudently to gloss over the value he set upon himself. Kant was first and foremost proud of his
table of categories; with this table in his hand he said: 'This is the hardest thing
that could ever be undertaken on behalf of metaphysics.' - But let us
understand this 'could be'! He was proud
of having discovered a new faculty in man, the faculty of synthetic
judgements a priori. Granted he
deceived himself in this: the evolution and rapid burgeoning of German
philosophy nonetheless depended on this pride of his and of the eager rivalry
of the whole younger generation to discover, if possible, something of which to
be still prouder - and in any event 'new faculties'! - But let us stop and
reflect: it is time we did so. Kant
asked himself: how are synthetic judgements a priori possible? - and what, really, did he answer? By means of a faculty: but
unfortunately not in a few words, but so circumspectly, venerably, and with
such an expenditure of German profundity and flourishes that the comical niaiserie allemande involved in such an
answer was overlooked. People even lost
their heads altogether on account of this new faculty, and the rejoicing
reached its climax when Kant went on further to discover a moral faculty in man
- for at that time the Germans were still moral and by no means practitioners
of Realpolitik. - The honeymoon time of German
philosophy arrived; and the young theologians of the College of Tübingen went straightway off into the bushes - all in
search of 'faculties'. And what did they
not find - in that innocent, rich, still youthful era of the German spirit, to
which the malicious fairy, romanticism, piped and sang, in those days when one
was not yet able to distinguish between 'finding' and 'inventing'! They found above all a faculty for the
'supra-sensible': Schelling baptized it intellectual
intuition, and therewith satisfied the most heartfelt longings of his Germans,
which longings were fundamentally pious.
One can do no greater wrong to this whole high-spirited and enthusiastic
movement, which was really youthfulness however boldly it disguised itself in
hoary and senile concepts, than to take it seriously and, an even worse
injustice, to treat it with moral indignation; it is enough to say that one
grew older - and the dream disappeared.
A time came when one rubbed one's eyes: one is still rubbing them
today. One had been dreaming: and the
first and foremost of the dreamers was - old Kant. 'By means of a faculty' -
he had said, or at least meant.
But is that - an answer? An explanation? Or is
it not rather merely a repetition of the question? How does opium induce sleep? 'By means of a faculty', namely the virtus dormitiva -
replies the doctor in Molière,
quia est
in eo virtus dormitiva,
cujos est
natura sensus assoupire.
But answers
like that belong in comedy, and it is high time to replace the Kantian question
'how are synthetic judgements a priori possible?' with another question:
'why is belief in such judgements necessary?' - that is to say, it is
time to grasp that, for the purpose of preserving being such as ourselves, such
judgements must be believed to be true; although they might of course
still be false judgements! Or,
more clearly, crudely and basically: synthetic judgements a priori
should not 'be possible' at all: we have no right to them, in our mouths they
are nothing but false judgements. But
belief in their truth is, of course, necessary as foreground belief and ocular
evidence belonging to the perspective optics of life. - Finally, in considering
the enormous influence 'German philosophy' - I hope you understand its right to
inverted commas? - has exercised throughout Europe, one cannot doubt that a
certain virtus dormitiva
has played a part in it: the noble idlers, the virtuous, the mystics, the
artists, the three-quarter Christians and the political obscurantists
of all nations were delighted to possess, thanks to German philosophy, an
antidote to the still overwhelming sensualism which
had overflowed out of the previous century into this, in short - 'sensus assoupire' ...
12
As for
materialistic atomism, it is one of the best-refuted things there are; and
perhaps no scholar in Europe is still so unscholarly today as to accord it
serious significance except for handy everyday use (as an abbreviated means of
expression) - thanks above all to the Pole Boscovich
who, together with the Pole Copernicus, has been the greatest and most
triumphant opponent of ocular evidence hitherto. For while Copernicus persuaded us to believe,
contrary to all the senses, that the earth does not stand firm, Boscovich taught us to abjure belief in the last thing of
earth that 'stood firm', belief in 'substance', in 'matter', in the
earth-residuum and particle atom: it was the greatest triumph over the senses
hitherto achieved on earth. - One must, however, go still further and also
declare war, a remorseless war of the knife, on the 'atomistic need' which,
like that more famous 'metaphysical need', still goes on living a dangerous
afterlife in regions where no-one suspects it - one must also first of all
finish off that other and more fateful atomism which Christianity has taught
best and longest, the soul atomism.
Let this expression be allowed to designate that belief which regards
the soul as being something indestructible, eternal, indivisible,
as a monad, as an atomon: this belief
ought to be ejected from science!
Between ourselves, it is not at all necessary by that same act to get
rid of 'the soul' itself and thus forgo one of the oldest and most venerable of
hypotheses: as is often the way with clumsy naturalists, who can hardly touch
'the soul' without losing it. But the
road to new forms and refinements of the soul-hypothesis stands open: and such
conceptions as 'mortal soul' and 'soul as multiplicity of the subject' and
'soul as social structure of the drives and emotions' want henceforth to
possess civic rights in science. To be
sure, when the new psychologist puts an end to the superstition which
has hitherto flourished around the soul-idea with almost tropical luxuriance,
he has as it were thrust himself out into a new wilderness and a new mistrust -
it may be that the older psychologists had a merrier and more comfortable time
of it - : ultimately, however, he sees that, by precisely that act, he has also
condemned himself to inventing the new - and, who knows? perhaps to finding it. -
13
Physiologists
should think again before postulating the drive to self-preservation as the
cardinal drive in an organic being. A
living thing desires above all to vent its strength - life as such is
will to power - : self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most
frequent consequences of it. - In short, here as everywhere, beware of superfluous
teleological principles! - such as is the drive to
self-preservation (we owe it to Spinoza's inconsistency). For this is a requirement
of method, which has essentially to be economy of principles.
14
It is perhaps
just dawning on five or six minds that physics too is only an interpretation
and arrangement of the world (according to our own requirements, if I may say
so!) 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. It has the
eyes and the hands on its side, it has ocular evidence and palpability on its
side: and this has the effect of fascinating, persuading, convincing an
age with fundamentally plebeian tastes - for it instinctively follows the canon
of eternal, popular sensualism. What is obvious, what has been
'explained'? Only that which can be seen
and felt - thus far has every problem to be scrutinized. Obversely: it was
precisely in opposition to palpability that the charm of the Platonic mode of
thinking, which was a noble mode of thinking, consisted - on the part of
men who perhaps rejoiced in even stronger and more exacting senses than our
contemporaries possess, but who knew how to experience a greater triumph in
mastering them: which they did by means of pale, cold, grey conceptual nets
thrown over the motley whirl of the senses - the mob of the senses, as Plato
called them. This overcoming and
interpretation of the world in the manner of Plato involved a kind of enjoyment
different from that which the physicists of today offer us, or from that
offered us by the Darwinists and anti-teleologists
among the labourers in physiology, with their principle of the 'smallest possible
effort' and the greatest possible stupidity.
'Where man has nothing more to see or grasp he has nothing more to do' -
that is certainly a different imperative from the Platonic, but for an uncouth
industrious race of machinists and bridge-builders of the future, which has
nothing but course work to get through, it may well be the right one.
15
If one is to
pursue physiology with a good conscience one is compelled to insist that the
organs of sense and not phenomena in the sense of idealist philosophy:
for if they were they could not be causes!
Sensualism is therefore at least a regulative
hypothesis, certainly a heuristic principle. - What? and
others even go so far as to say that the external world is the work of our
organs? But then our body, as a piece of
this external world, would be the work of our organs! But then our organs themselves would be - the
work of our organs! This, it seems to
me, is a complete reductio ad absurdum,
supposing that the concept causa sui is something altogether
absurd. Consequently the external world
is not the work of our organs - ?
16
There are
still harmless self-observers who believe 'immediate certainties' exist, for
example 'I think' or, as was Schopenhauer's superstition, 'I will': as though
knowledge here got hold of its object pure and naked, as 'thing in itself', and
no falsification occurred either on the side of the subject or on that of the
object. But I shall reiterate a hundred
times that 'immediate certainty', like 'absolute knowledge' and 'thing in
itself', contains a contradictio in adjecto: we really ought to get free from the seduction
of words! Let the people believe that
knowledge is total knowledge, but the philosopher must say to himself: when I
analyse the event expressed in the sentence 'I think', I acquire a series of
rash assertions which are difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove - for
example, that it is I who think, that it has to be something at all
which thinks, that thinking is an
activity and operation on the part of an entity thought of as a cause, that an
'I' exists, finally that what is designated by 'thinking' has already been
determined - that I know what thinking is. For if I had not already decided that matter
within myself, by what standard could I determine that what is happening is not
perhaps 'willing' or 'feeling'? Enough:
this 'I think' presupposes that I compare my present state with other
known states of myself in order to determine what it is: on account of this
retrospective connection with other 'knowledge' at any rate it possesses no
immediate certainty for me. - In place of that 'immediate certainty' in which
the people may believe in the present case, the philosopher acquires in this
way a series of metaphysical questions, true questions of conscience for the
intellect, namely: 'Whence do I take the concept thinking? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an
"I" as cause, and finally of an "I" as cause of
thought?' Whoever feels able to answer
these metaphysical questions straight away with an appeal to a sort of intuitive
knowledge, as he does who says: 'I think, and know at least that this is true,
actual and certain' - will find a philosopher today ready with a smile and two
question-marks. 'My dear sir,' the philosopher
will perhaps give him to understand, 'it is improbable you are not mistaken:
but why do you want the truth at all?' -
17
As for the
superstitions of the logicians, I shall never tire of underlining a concise
little fact which these superstitious people are loathe to admit - namely, that
a thought comes when 'it' wants, not when 'I' want; so that it is a falsification
of the facts to say: the subject 'I' is the condition of the predicate
'think'. It thinks: but that this
'it' is precisely that famous old 'I' is, to put it mildly, only an assumption,
an assertion, above all not an 'immediate certainty'. For even with this 'it thinks' one has
already gone too far: this 'it' already contains an interpretation of
the event and does not belong to the event itself. The inference here is in accordance with the
habit of grammar: 'thinking is an activity, to every activity pertains one who
acts, consequently - '. It was more or
less in accordance with the same scheme that the older atomism sought, in
addition to the 'force' which acts, that little lump of matter in which it
resides, out of which it acts, the atom; more rigorous minds at last learned to
get along without this 'residuum of earth', and perhaps we and the logicians as
well will one day accustom ourselves to getting along without that little 'it'
(which is what the honest old 'I' has evaporated into).
18
It is
certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable: it is with
precisely this charm that it entices subtler minds. It seems that the hundred times refuted
theory of 'free will' owes its continued existence to this charm alone - :again and again there comes along someone who feels he is
strong enough to refute it.
19
Philosophers
are given to speaking of the will as if it were the best-known thing in the
world; Schopenhauer, indeed, would have us understand that the will alone is
truly known to us, known completely, known without
deduction or addition. But it seems to
me that in this case too Schopenhauer has done only what philosophers in
general are given to doing: that he has taken up a popular prejudice and
exaggerated it. Willing seems to be
above all something complicated, something that is a unity only as a
word - and it is precisely in this one word that the popular prejudice
resides which has overborne the always inadequate caution of the
philosophers. Let us therefore be more
cautious for once, let us be 'unphilosophical' - let
us say: in all willing there is, first of all, a plurality of sensations,
namely the sensation of the condition we leave, the condition of the
sensation towards which we go, the sensation of this 'leaving' and
'going' itself, and then also an accompanying muscular sensation which, even
without our putting 'arms and legs' in motion, comes into play through a kind
of habit as soon as we 'will'. As
feelings, and indeed many varieties of feeling, can therefore be recognized as
an ingredient of will, so, in the second place, can thinking: in every act of
will there is a commanding thought - and do not imagine that this thought can
be separated from the 'willing', as though will would then remain over! Thirdly, will is not only a complex of
feeling and thinking, but above all an emotion: and in fact the emotion
of command. What is called 'freedom of
will' is essentially the emotion of superiority over him who must obey: 'I am
free, "he" must obey' - this consciousness adheres to every will, as
does that tense attention, that straight look which fixes itself exclusively on
one thing, that unconditional evaluation 'this and nothing else is
necessary now', that inner certainty that one will be obeyed, and whatever else
pertains to the state of him who gives commands. A man who wills - commands something
in himself which obeys or which he believes obeys. But now observe the strangest thing of all
about the will - about this so complex thing for which people have only one
word: inasmuch as in the given circumstances we at the same time command and
obey, and as the side which obeys knows the sensations of constraint,
compulsion, pressure, resistance, motion which usually begin immediately after
the act of will; inasmuch as, on the other hand, we are in the habit of
disregarding and deceiving ourselves over this duality by means of the
synthetic concept 'I'; so a whole chain of erroneous conclusions and
consequently of false evaluations of the
will itself has been attached to the will itself - so that he who wills
believes wholeheartedly that willing suffices for action. Because in the great majority of cases
willing takes place only where the effect of the command, that is to say
obedience, that is to say the action, was to be expected, the appearance
has translated itself into the sensation, as if there were here a necessity
of effect. Enough: he who wills
believes with a tolerable degree of certainty that will and action are somehow
one - he attributes the success, the carrying out of the willing, to the will
itself, and thereby enjoys an increase of that sensation of power which all
success brings with it. 'Freedom of
will' - is the expression for that complex condition of pleasure of the person
who wills, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor
of the command - who as such also enjoys the triumph over resistance involved
but who thinks it was his will itself which overcame these resistances. He who wills adds in
this way the sensations of pleasure of the successful executive agents, the
serviceable 'under-wills' or under-souls - for our body is only a social
structure composed of many souls - to his sensations of pleasure as
commander. L'effet,
c'est moi: what happens
here is what happens in every well-constructed and happy commonwealth: the
ruling class identifies itself with the successes of the commonwealth. In all willing it is absolutely a question of
commanding and obeying, on the basis, as I have said already, of a social
structure composed of many 'souls': on which account a philosopher should claim
the right to include willing as such within the field of morality: that is, of
morality understood as the theory of the relations of dominance under which the
phenomenon of life arises. -
20
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. Under an invisible spell they always trace
once more the identical orbit: however independent of one another they may
feel, with their will to criticism or systematism,
something in them leads them, something drives them in a definite order one
after another: it is precisely that innate systematism
and relationship of concepts. Their
thinking is in fact not so much a discovering as a recognizing, a remembering, a return and home-coming to a far-off, primordial, total
household of the soul out of which those concepts one emerged - philosophizing
is to that extent a species of atavism of the first rank. The singular family resemblance between all
Indian, Greek and German philosophizing is easy enough to explain. Where there exists a language affinity it is
quite impossible, thanks to the common philosophy of grammar - I mean thanks to
unconscious domination and directing by similar grammatical functions - to
avoid everything being prepared in advance for a similar evolution and
succession of philosophical systems: just as the road seems to be barred to
certain other possibilities of world interpretation. Philosophers within the domain of the
Ural-Altaic languages (in which the concept of the subject is least developed)
will in all probability look 'into the world' differently and be found on
different paths from the Indo-Germans and Moslems: the spell of definite
grammatical functions is in the last resort the spell of physiological
values judgements and racial conditions. - So much by way of retort to Locke's
superficiality with regard to the origin of ideas.
21
The causa sui
is the best self-contradiction hitherto imagines, a kind of logical rape and
unnaturalness: but mankind's extravagant pride has managed to get itself deeply
and frightfully entangled with precisely this piece of nonsense. For the desire for 'freedom of will' in that
metaphysical superlative sense which is unfortunately still dominant in the
minds of the half-educated, the desire to bear the whole and sole
responsibility for one's actions and to absolve God, world, ancestors, chance,
society from responsibility for them, is nothing less than the desire to be
precisely that causa sui
and, with more than Münchhausen temerity, to pull
oneself into existence out of the swamp of nothingness by one's own hair. Assuming it is possible in this way to get
beyond the peasant simplicity of this celebrated concept 'free will' and banish
it from one's mind, I would then ask whoever does that to carry his
'enlightenment' a step further and also banish from his mind the contrary of
that unnatural concept 'free will': I mean 'unfree
will', which amounts to an abuse of cause and effect. One ought not to make 'cause' and 'effect' into
material things, as natural scientists do (and those who, like them,
naturalize in their thinking - ), in accordance with
the prevailing mechanistic stupidity which has the cause press and push until
it 'produces an effect'; one ought to employ 'cause' and 'effect' only as pure concepts,
that is to say as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation, mutual
understanding, not explanation.
In the 'in itself' there is nothing of 'causal connection', of
'necessity', of 'psychological unfreedom'; there 'the
effect' does not 'follow the cause', there no 'law' rules. It is we alone who have fabricated
causes, succession, reciprocity, relativity, compulsion, number, law, freedom,
motive, purpose; and when we falsely introduce this world of symbols into
things and mingle it with them as though this symbol-world always behaved,
namely mythologically. 'Unfree will' is
mythology: in real life it is only a question of strong and weak
wills. - It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself
when a thinker detects in every 'causal connection' and 'psychological
necessity' something of compulsion, exigency, constraint, pressure, unfreedom: such feelings are traitors, the person who has
them gives himself away. And, if I have
observed correctly, 'unfreedom of will' is in general
conceived as a problem from two completely antithetical standpoints but always
in a profoundly personal manner: one will at not price give up his
'responsibility', his belief in himself, the personal right to his
deserts (the vain races belong here - ), the other, on the contrary, will not
be responsible for anything, to blame for anything, and out of an inner self-contempt
wants to be able to shift off his responsibility for himself somewhere
else. This latter, when he writes books,
tends today to espouse the cause of the criminal; his most pleasing disguise is
a kind of socialist sympathy. And the
fatalism of the weak-willed is indeed beautified to an astonishing degree when
it can present itself as 'la religion de la souffrance
humaine': that is its 'good taste'.
22
You must
pardon me as an old philologist who cannot refrain from the maliciousness of putting
his finger on bad arts of interpretation: but 'nature's conformity to law' of
which you physicists speak so proudly, as though - it exists only thanks to
your interpretation and bad 'philology' - it is not a fact, not a 'text', but
rather only a naive humanitarian adjustment and distortion of meaning with
which you go more than half-way to meet the democratic instincts of the modern
soul! 'Everywhere equality before the
law - nature is in this matter no different from us and no better off than we':
a nice piece of mental reservation in which vulgar hostility towards everything
privileged and autocratic, as well as a second and more subtle atheism, lie
once more disguised. 'Ni dieu, ni maître'
- that is your motto too: and therefore 'long live the law of nature!' - isn't
that so? But, as aforesaid, that is
interpretation, not text; and someone could come along who, with an opposite
intention and art of interpretation, knew how to read out of the same nature and
with regard to the same phenomena the tyrannically ruthless and inexorable
enforcement of power-demands - an interpreter who could bring before your eyes
the universality and unconditionality of all 'will to
power' in such a way that almost any word and even the word 'tyranny' would
finally seem unsuitable or as a weakening and moderating metaphor - as too
human - and who nonetheless ended by asserting of this world the same as you
assert of it, namely that is has a 'necessary' and 'calculable' course, but not
because laws prevail in it but because laws are absolutely lacking, and
every power draws its ultimate consequences every moment. Granted this too is only interpretation - and
you will be eager enough to raise this objection? - well,
so much the better. -
23
All
psychology has hitherto remained anchored to moral prejudices and timidities:
it has not ventured into the depths. To
conceive it as morphology and the development-theory of the will to power,
as I conceive it - has never so much as entered the mind of anyone else:
insofar as it is permissible to see in what has hitherto been written a symptom
of what has hitherto been kept silent.
The power of moral prejudices has penetrated deep into the most
spiritual world, which is apparently the coldest and most
free of presuppositions - and, as goes without saying, has there acted
in a harmful, inhibiting, blinding, distorting fashion. A genuine physio-psychology
has to struggle with unconscious resistances in the heart of the investigator,
it has 'the heart' against it: even a theory of the mutual dependence of the
'good' and the 'wicked' impulses causes, as a more refined immorality,
revulsion to a conscience still strong and hearty - and even more a theory of
the derivation of all good impulses from wicked ones. Supposing, however, that someone goes so far
as to regard the emotions of hatred, envy, covetousness, and lust for
domination as life-conditioning emotions, as something which must fundamentally
and essentially be present in the total economy of life, consequently must be
heightened further if life is to be heightened further - he suffers from such a
judgement as from seasickness. And yet
even this hypothesis is far from being the strangest and most painful in this
tremendous, still almost unexplored realm of dangerous knowledge - and there
are in fact a hundred good reasons why everyone should keep away from it who - can! On the other hand: if your ship has
been driven into these seas, very well!
Now clench your teeth! Keep your
eyes open! Keep a firm hand on the helm!
- We sail straight over morality and past it, we flatten, we crush
perhaps what is left of our own morality by venturing to voyage thither - but
what do we matter! Never yet has
a deeper world of insight revealed itself to daring travellers and
adventurers: and the psychologist who in this fashion 'brings a sacrifice' - it
is not the sacrifizio
dell-intelletto, on the contrary! - will at least be entitled to demand in
return that psychology shall again be recognized as the queen of the sciences,
to serve and prepare for which the other sciences exist. For psychology is now once again to road to
the fundamental problems.