34

No matter what philosophical standpoint people may adopt nowadays, from every point of view the falsity of the world in which we think we live is the most certain and firmest thing which our eyes are still capable of apprehending: - for that we find reason after reason, which would like to entice us into conjectures about a fraudulent principle in the "essence of things." But anyone who makes our very thinking, that is, "the spirit," responsible for the falsity of the world - an honourable solution which every conscious or unconscious advocatus dei [pleader for god] uses -: whoever takes this world, together with space, time, form, and movement as a false inference, such a person would at least have good ground finally to learn to be distrustful of all thinking itself. Wouldn’t it be the case that thinking has played the greatest of all tricks on us up to this point? And what guarantee would there be that thinking would not continue to do what it has always done? In all seriousness: the innocence of thinkers has something touching, something inspiring reverence, which permits them even today still to present themselves before consciousness with the request that it give them honest answers: for example, to the question whether it is "real," and why it really keeps itself so absolutely separate from the outer world, and similar sorts of questions. The belief in "immediate certainties" is a moral naivete which brings honour to us philosophers - but we should not be "merely moral" men! Setting aside morality, this belief is a stupidity, which brings us little honour! It may be the case that in bourgeois life the constant willingness to suspect is considered a sign of a "bad character" and thus belongs among those things thought unwise. Here among us, beyond the bourgeois world and its affirmations and denials - what is there to stop us from being unwise and saying the philosopher has an absolute right to a "bad character," as the being who up to this point on earth has always been fooled the best - today he has the duty to be suspicious, to glance around maliciously from every depth of suspicion. Forgive me the joke of this gloomy grimace and way of expressing myself. For a long time ago I myself learned to think very differently about and make different evaluations of deceiving and being deceived, and I keep ready at least a couple of digs in the ribs for the blind anger with which philosophers themselves resist being deceived. Why not? It is nothing more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than appearance. That claim is even the most poorly demonstrated assumption there is in the world. People should at least concede this much: there would be no life at all if not on the basis of appearances and assessments from perspectives. And if people, with the virtuous enthusiasm and foolishness of some philosophers, wanted to do away entirely with the "apparent world," assuming, of course, you could do that, well then at least nothing would remain any more of your "truth" either! In fact, what compels us generally to the assumption that there is an essential opposition between "true" and "false"? Is it not enough to assume degrees of appearance and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and tones for the way things appear - different valeurs [values], to use the language of painters? Why could the world about which we have some concern - not be a fiction? And if someone then asks "But doesn’t an author belong to a fiction?" could he not be fully answered with Why? Doesn’t this "belong to" perhaps belong to the fiction? Is it then forbidden to be a little ironic about the subject as well as about the predicate and the object? Is the philosopher not permitted to rise above a faith in grammar? All due respect to governesses, but might it not be time for philosophy to renounce faith in governesses?-

35

O Voltaire! O humanity! O nonsense! There’s something about the "truth," about the search for truth. And when someone goes after it in far too human a way -"il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien" [he seeks the truth only to do good] - I’ll wager he comes up with nothing!

36

If we assume that nothing is "given" as real other than our world of desires and passions and that we cannot access from above or below any "reality" other than the direct reality of our drives - for thinking is only a relationship of these drives to each other -: are we not allowed to make the attempt and to ask the question whether this given is not a sufficient basis also for understanding the so-called mechanical (or "material") world on the basis of things like this given. I don’t mean to understand it as an illusion, an "appearance," an "idea" (in the sense of Berkeley⁶ and Schopenhauer), but as having the same degree of reality as our affects themselves have - as a more primitive form of the world of affects in which everything is still combined in a powerful unity, something which then branches off and develops in the organic process (also, as is reasonable, gets softer and weaker -), as a form of instinctual life in which the collective organic functions, along with self-regulation, assimilation, nourishment, excretion, and metabolism, are still synthetically bound up with one another - as an early form of life? In the end making this attempt is not only permitted but is also demanded by the conscience of the method. Not to assume various forms of causality as long as the attempt to manage with a single one has been pushed to its furthest limit (- all the way to nonsense, if I may say so): that is one moral of the method which people nowadays may not evade; - as a mathematician would say, it is a consequence "of its definition." In the end the question is whether we acknowledge the will as something really efficient, whether we believe in the causal properties of the will. If we do - and basically our faith in this is simply our faith in causality itself - then we must make the attempt to set up hypothetically the causality of the will as the single causality. Of course, "will" can work only on "will" - and not on "stuff" (not, for example, on "nerves"-). Briefly put, we must venture the hypothesis whether in general, wherever we recognize "effects," will is not working on will - and whether every mechanical event, to the extent that a force is active in it, is not force of will, an effect of the will. - Suppose finally that we were to succeed in explaining our entire instinctual life as a development and branching off of a single fundamental form of the will - that is, of the will to power, as my principle asserts - and suppose we could trace back all organic functions to this will to power and also locate in it the solution to the problem of reproduction and nourishment - that is one problem - then in so doing we would have earned the right to designate all efficient force unambiguously as will to power. Seen from inside, the world defined and described according to its "intelligible character" would be simply "will to power" and nothing else.-

37

"What’s that? Doesn’t that mean in popular language that God is disproved, but the devil is not -?" To the contrary, to the contrary, my friends! And in the devil’s name, who is forcing you to speak such common language?

38

What happened only very recently, in all the brightness of modern times, with the French Revolution, that ghastly and, considered closely, superfluous farce, which, however, noble and rapturous observers from all Europe have interpreted from a distance for so long and so passionately according to their own outrage and enthusiasm until the text disappeared under the interpretation, in the same way a noble posterity could once again misunderstand all the past and only by doing that perhaps make looking at that past tolerable. - Or rather, hasn’t this already happened? Were we ourselves not - this "noble posterity"? And, to the extent that we understand this point, is not this the very moment when - it is over?