beyond good and evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
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On the Prejudices of Philosophers
1
The will to truth which will still tempt us to many a venture, that famous truthfulness of which all philosophers so far have spoken with
respect - what questions has this will to truth not laid before us! What strange, wicked, questionable questions! That is a long story even
now - and yet it seems as if it had scarcely begun. Is it any wonder that we should finally become suspicious, lose patience, and turn
away impatiently? that we should finally learn from this Sphinx to ask questions, too? Who is it really that puts questions to us here?
What in us really wants "truth"?
Indeed we came to a long halt at the question about the cause of this will - until we finally came to a complete stop before a still more
basic question. We asked about the value of this will. Suppose we want truth: why not rather untruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance?
The problem of the value of truth came before us - or was it we who came before the problem? Who of us is Oedipus here? Who the
Sphinx? It is a rendezvous, it seems, of questions and question marks.
And though it scarcely seems credible, it finally almost seems to us as if the problem had never even been put so far - as if we were the
first to see it, fix it with our eyes, and risk it. For it does involve a risk, and perhaps there is none that is greater.
2
"How could anything originate out of its opposite? for example, truth out of error? or the will to truth out of the will to deception? or
selfless deeds out of selfishness? or the pure and sunlike gaze of the sage out of lust? Such origins are impossible; whoever dreams of
them is a fool, indeed worse; the things of highest value must have another, peculiar origin - they cannot be derived from this transitory,
seductive, deceptive, paltry world from this turmoil of delusion and lust. Rather from the lap of Being, the intransitory, the hidden god,
the 'thing-in-itself' - there must be their basis, and nowhere else."
This way of judging constitutes the typical prejudgment and prejudice which give away the metaphysicians of all ages; this kind of
valuation looms in the background of all their logical procedures; it is on account of this "faith" that they trouble themselves about
"knowledge," about something that is finally baptized solemnly as "the truth." The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in
opposite values. It has not even occurred to the most cautious among them that one might have a doubt right here at the threshold
where it was surely most necessary - even if they vowed to themselves, "de ornnibus dubitandum."
For one may doubt, first, whether there are any opposites at all, and secondly whether these popular valuations and opposite values on
which the metaphysicians put their seal, are not perhaps merely foreground estimates, only provisional perspectives perhaps even from
some nook, perhaps from below, frog perspective as it were, to borrow an expression painters use. For all the value that the true, the
truthful, the selfless may deserve, it would still be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life might have to be ascribed to
deception, selfishness, and lust. It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of these good and revered things is precisely
that they are insidiously related, tied to and involved with these wicked, seemingly opposite things - maybe even one with them in
essence. Maybe!
But who has the will to concern himself with such dangerous maybes? For that, one really has to wait for the advent of a new species of
philosophers such as have somehow another and converse taste and propensity from those we have known so far - philosophers of the
dangerous "maybe" in every sense.
And in all seriousness: I see such new philosophers coming up.
3
After having looked long enough between the philosopher's lines and fingers, I say to myself: by far the greater part of conscious
thinking must still be included among instinctive activities, and that goes even for philosophical thinking. We have to relearn here, as
one has had to relearn about heredity and what is "innate." As the act of birth deserves no consideration in the whole process and
procedure of heredity, so "being conscious" is not in any decisive sense the opposite of what is instinctive: most of the conscious
thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts.
Behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, too, there stand valuations or, more clearly, physiological demands for the
preservation of a certain type of life. For example, that the definite should be worth more than the indefinite, and mere appearance worth
less than "truth" - such estimates might be, in spite of their regulative importance for us, nevertheless mere foreground estimates, a
certain kind of niaiserie which may be necessary for the preservation of just such beings as we are. Supposing, that is, that not just
man is the "measure of things."
4
The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment; in this respect our new language may sound
strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life serving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating. And we
are fundamentally inclined to claim that the falsest judgments (which include the synthetic judgments a priori) are the most
indispensable for us; that without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the
unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live - that renouncing
false judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life - that certainly means
resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous, way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond
good and evil.
5
What provokes one to look at all philosophers half suspiciously, half mockingly, is not that one discovers again and again how innocent
they are - how often and how easily they make mistakes and go astray; in short, their childishness and childlikeness - but that they are
not honest enough in their work, although they make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely.
They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development cold, pure, divinely unconcerned
dialectic (as opposed to the mystics of every rank, who are more honest and doltish - and talk of "inspiration"); while at bottom it is an
assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of "inspiration" - most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract - that
they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact. They are all advocates who resent that name, and for the most part even wily
spokesmen for their prejudices which they baptize "truths" - and very far from having the courage of the conscience that admits this,
precisely this, to itself; very far from having the good taste of the courage which also lets this be known, whether to warn an enemy or
friend, or, from exuberance, to mock itself.
The equally stiff and decorous Tartuffery of the old Kant as he lures us on the dialectical bypaths that lead to his "categorical imperative"
- really lead astray and seduce - this spectacle makes us smile, as we are fastidious and find it quite amusing to watch closely the
subtle tricks of old moralists and preachers of morals. Or consider the hocus-pocus of mathematical form with which Spinoza a clad his
philosophy - really "the love of his wisdom," to render that word fairly and squarely - in mail and mask, to strike terror at the very outset
into the heart of any assailant who should dare to glance at that invincible maiden and Pallas Athena: how much personal timidity and
vulnerability this masquerade of a sick hermit betrays!
6
Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been - namely, the personal confession of its author and a
kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of
life from which the whole plant had grown.
Indeed, if one would explain how the abstrusest metaphysical claims of a philosopher really came about, it is always well (and wise) to
ask first: at what morality does all this (does he) aim? According, I do not believe that a "drive to knowledge" is the father of philosophy;
but rather that another drive has, here as elsewhere employed understanding (and misunderstanding) as a mere instrument. But anyone
who considers the basic drives of man to see to what extent they may have been at play just here as in inspiring spirits (or demons and
kobolds) will find that all of them have done philosophy at some time - and that every single one of them would like only too well to
represent just itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the legitimate master of all the other drives. For every drive wants to be
master - and it attempts to philosophize in that spirit.
To be sure: among scholars who are really scientific men things may be different -"better," if you like - there you may really find
something like a drive for knowledge, some small independent clockwork that, once well wound, works on vigorously without any
essential participation from all the other drives of the scholar. The real "interests" of the scholar therefore lie usually somewhere else -
say, in his family, or in making money, or in politics. Indeed, it is almost a matter of total indifference whether his little machine is
placed at this or that spot in science, and whether the "promising" young worker turns himself into a good philologist or an expert on
fungi or a chemist: it does not characterize him that he becomes this or that. In the philosopher conversely, there is nothing whatever
that is impersonal; and above all his morality bears decided and decisive witness to who he is - that is, in what order of rank the
innermost drives of his nature stand in relation to each other.
7
How malicious philosophers can be! I know of nothing more venomous than the joke Epicurus permitted himself against Plato and the
Platonists; he called them Dionysiokolakes. That means literally - and this is the foreground meaning -"flatterers of Dionysius," in other
words, tyrant's baggage and lickspittles; but addition to this he also wants to say, "they are all actors, there is nothing genuine about
them" (for Dionysokolax was a popular name for an actor). And the latter is really the malice that Epicurus aimed at Plato: he was
peeved by the grandiose manner, the mise en scene at which Plato and his disciples were so expert - at which Epicurus was not an
expert - he, that old schoolmaster from Samos who sat, hidden away, in his little garden at Athens and wrote three hundred books -
who knows? perhaps from rage and ambition against Plato?
It took a hundred years until Greece found out who this garden god, Epicurus, had been - did they find out?
8
There is a point in every philosophy when the philosopher's "conviction" appears on the stage - or to use the language of an ancient
Mystery:
Adventavit asinus, Pulcher et fortissimus.
9
"According to nature" you want to live? O you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wasteful
beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and
uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power - how could you live according to this indifference? Is that not
precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is not living - estimating, preferring, being unjust, being limited - wanting to be different?
And supposing your imperative "live according to nature" meant at bottom as much as "live according to life" how could you not do that?
Why make a principle of what you yourselves are and must be?
In truth, the matter is altogether different: while you pretend rapturously to read the canon of your law in nature, you want something
opposite, you strange actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to impose your morality, your ideal, on nature - even on nature - and
incorporate them in her; you demand that she be nature "according to the Stoa," and you would like all existence to exist only after your
own image - as an immense eternal glorification and generalization of Stoicism. For all your love of truth, you have forced yourselves so
long, so persistently, so rigidly-hypnotically to see nature the wrong way, namely Stoically, that you are no longer able to see her
differently. And some abysmal arrogance finally still inspires you with the insane hope that because you know how to tyrannize
yourselves - Stoicism is self tyranny - nature, too, lets herself be tyrannized: is not the Stoic - a piece of nature?
But this is an ancient, eternal story: what formerly happened with the Stoics still happens today, too, as soon as any 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 the "creation of the world," to the causa prima.
10
The eagerness and subtlety-I might even say, shrewdness- with which the problem of "the real and the apparent world" is to day
attacked all over Europe makes one think and wonder; and anyone who hears nothing in the background except a "will to truth,"
certainly does not have the best of ears. In rare and isolate instances it may really be the case that such a will to truth, some
extravagant and adventurous courage, a metaphysician's ambition to hold a hopeless position, may participate and ultimately prefer
even a handful of "certainty" to a whole carload of beautiful possibilities; there may actually be puritanical fanatics of conscience who
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