Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays: Collected Works, Volume TwoNietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays: Collected Works, Volume Two
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
Philosophy, Ancient
Still we do not yet know whence the impulse to truth comes, for up to
now we have heard only about the obligation which society imposes in
order to exist: to be truthful, that is, to use the usual metaphors,
therefore expressed morally: we have heard only about the obligation
to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie gregariously in a style
binding for all. Now man of course forgets that matters are going thus
with him; he therefore lies in that fashion pointed out unconsciously
and according to habits of centuries' standing--and by _this very
unconsciousness,_ by this very forgetting, he arrives at a sense for
truth. Through this feeling of being obliged to designate one thing as
"red," another as "cold," a third one as "dumb," awakes a moral emotion
relating to truth. Out of the antithesis "liar" whom nobody trusts,
whom all exclude, man demonstrates to himself the venerableness,
reliability, usefulness of truth. Now as a "_rational_" being he
submits his actions to the sway of abstractions; he no longer suffers
himself to be carried away by sudden impressions, by sensations, he
first generalises all these impressions into paler, cooler ideas, in
order to attach to them the ship of his life and actions. Everything
which makes man stand out in bold relief against the animal depends on
this faculty of volatilising the concrete metaphors into a schema, and
therefore resolving a perception into an idea. For within the range of
those schemata a something becomes possible that never could succeed
under the first perceptual impressions: to build up a pyramidal order
with castes and grades, to create a new world of laws, privileges,
sub-orders, delimitations, which now stands opposite the other
perceptual world of first impressions and assumes the appearance of
being the more fixed, general, known, human of the two and therefore
the regulating and imperative one. Whereas every metaphor of perception
is individual and without its equal and therefore knows how to escape
all attempts to classify it, the great "edifice of ideas shows the
rigid regularity of a Roman Columbarium and in logic breathes forth the
sternness and coolness which we find in mathematics. He who has been
breathed upon by this coolness will scarcely believe, that the idea
too, bony and hexa-hedral, and permutable as a die, remains however
only as the _residuum of a metaphor,_ and that the illusion of the
artistic metamorphosis of a nerve-stimulus into percepts is, if not
the mother, then the grand-mother of every idea. Now in this game of
dice, "Truth" means to use every die as it is designated, to count its
points carefully, to form exact classifications, and never lo violate
the order of castes and the sequences of rank. Just as the Romans
and Etruscans for their benefit cut up the sky by means of strong
mathematical lines and banned a god as it were into a _templum,_ into a
space limited in this fashion, so every nation has above its head such
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