Part Two

The Free Spirit

24

O sancta simplicitas [blessed simplicity]! Human beings live in such a peculiarly simple and counterfeit way! Once a man develops eyes to see this wonder, he cannot check his amazement! How bright and free and light and simple we have made everything around us! How we have learned to give our senses free license for everything superficial, our thinking a divine craving for wanton leaps and erroneous conclusions! How we have learned ways, right from the start, to maintain our ignorance in order to enjoy a hardly conceivable freedom, safety, carelessness, heartiness, and merriment in life - in order to enjoy life. And only on this now firm granite foundation of ignorance could scientific knowledge up to now rise up, the will to know on the foundation of a much more powerful will, the will not to know, to uncertainty, to what is not true! Not as its opposite, but - as its refinement! For if language, here as elsewhere, does not cast off its clumsiness and continues to speak about opposites, where there are only degrees and many subtleties of gradation, and similarly if inveterate Tartufferie [hypocrisy] in morality, which nowadays belongs to our invincible "flesh and blood," turns the words even of us knowledgeable people around in our mouths, - here and there we understand that and laugh about how it’s precisely the best scientific knowledge that most wants to hold us in this simplified, completely artificial, appropriately created, and appropriately falsified world, - how it loves error, voluntarily and involuntarily, because, as something alive - it loves life!