The will to truth, wich is still going to tempt us to many a hazardous enterprise ; that celebrated veracity of wich 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 turn impatiently away? That this 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? Wich of us is Oedipus here? Which of us sphinx? It is, it seems, a rendez-vous of questions and questions-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 eye 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 this 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 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 constitues 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 mataphysicians is the faith in antithetical values. It has not occured 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 omnius dubitandum'.For it may be doubted, firstly wheter there exist any antitheses at all, and secondly wheter these popular evaluations and value-antitheses, on which the 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.
1
The will to truth, wich is still going to tempt us to many a hazardous enterprise ; that celebrated veracity of wich 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 turn impatiently away? That this 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? Wich of us is Oedipus here? Which of us sphinx? It is, it seems, a rendez-vous of questions and questions-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 eye 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 this 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 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 constitues 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 mataphysicians is the faith in antithetical values. It has not occured 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 omnius dubitandum'.For it may be doubted, firstly wheter there exist any antitheses at all, and secondly wheter these popular evaluations and value-antitheses, on which the 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.