106

  Music as Advocate

  ‘I am thirsting for a master of composition’, said an innovator to his disciple, ‘who would adopt my ideas by following my example and subsequently express them in his own language: that way I will be better able to penetrate men’s ears and hearts. With tones, you can seduce people to every error and every truth: who could refute a tone?’ ‘So you would like to be considered irrefutable?’, asked the disciple. The innovator replied, ‘I would like the seed to become a tree. In order for a doctrine to become a tree, it must be believed for a good long while; in order for it to be believed, it must be considered irrefutable. The tree needs storms and doubts and worms and wickedness, so that it will make manifest the nature and strength of its seed; let it break if it is not strong enough! But a seed is never refuted – merely destroyed!’ When he had said this, his disciple cried out impetuously, ‘But I believe in your cause, and consider it so strong that I will say everything I can think of against it.’

  The innovator chuckled and wagged his finger at him. He went on to say, ‘This kind of discipleship is best, but it is dangerous, and not every kind of doctrine can withstand it.’

  107

  Our Ultimate Gratitude towards Art

  Had we not countenanced the arts and invented this sort of cult of the untrue, we could not abide the insight now furnished by science that everything is untrue and mendacious, that delusion and error are conditions of cognitive and conscious existence. Our own sense of honesty would have left nothing but disgust and suicide in its wake. Now, however, our honesty is a countervailing power which helps us to avoid such consequences – namely, art as the willingness to be deceived. We do not always prevent our eyes from rounding off and poetically completing things; and then it is no longer the eternal imperfection that we carry across the river of becoming – for it is a goddess that we intend to carry, and we are proud and childlike in rendering this service. As an aesthetic phenomenon existence is still bearable to us;45 and through art, we are given the eye and hand and above all the good conscience to be able to make ourselves into such phenomena. We must occasionally take a rest from ourselves by artistically distancing ourselves from ourselves, by gazing at ourselves, or down upon ourselves, by laughing at ourselves or weeping over ourselves; we must discover the hero, and likewise the fool, that is within our passion for knowledge; we must now and then rejoice in our folly, that we may continue to rejoice in our wisdom! And precisely because we are, in the final analysis, such weighty and serious men, more weights than men, nothing does us so much good as the fool’s cap and bells: we especially need them when we are alone with ourselves – we need every kind of exuberant, soaring, dancing, mocking, childish and blessed art, lest we lose our freedom, our ability to stand above things, which our ideal demands of us. It would be a form of backsliding for us, especially given our excitable honesty, were we to lapse back into morality for the sake of the extremely rigorous demands which we here make upon ourselves, becoming virtuous monsters and scarecrows in the process. We should also be able to stand above morality; and not only stand with the anxious rigidity of the man who fears that at any moment he may slip and fall, but to soar and play above it as well! And to that end, how could we do without art, without the fool? For if you are in any way still ashamed of yourselves, you are not one of us!

  Book III

  * * *

  108

  New Struggles

  After the Buddha died, people showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave – a monstrous and unearthly shadow.1 God is dead;2 but given the ways of men, perhaps for millennia to come there will be caves in which His shadow will be shown.

  And we – we still have to subdue His shadow!

  109

  Let Us Beware!

  Let us beware of thinking that the world is a living being. To where would it spread? With what would it nourish itself? How could it grow and multiply? We have a pretty good idea what the organic is; and we are supposed to reinterpret something unspeakably derivative, late, rare and accidental, something we only perceive on the surface of the earth, into something essential, universal and eternal, as do those who call the universe an organism? That disgusts me. Let us beware of believing that the universe is a machine; it is certainly not constructed for any one purpose; we do it too much honour with the word ‘machine’. Let us beware of presupposing that something as perfectly shaped as the cyclical movements of our solar system obtains at all times and places; indeed a glance at the Milky Way raises doubts as to whether there are not much rougher and more contradictory movements there, and even stars with eternally linear paths and the like.3 The astronomical order in which we live is an exception; this order, and the considerable time which it requires, has again made possible that exception of exceptions, the development of organic life. The overall character of the world, however, is from all eternity chaos; not in the sense of a lack of necessity, but rather in the sense of a lack of order, structure, form, beauty, wisdom and whatever else our aesthetically attractive human qualities are called. The failures are by far the most numerous, the exceptions are not the secret purpose; and the whole music box perpetually repeats what should never be called a melody4 – and finally the very expression ‘failure’ is already an anthropomorphism which implies censure. But how could we presume to blame or praise the universe! Let us beware of imputing to it heartlessness and irrationality, or their opposites; it is neither perfect, nor beautiful, nor noble, nor wishes to become any of these things; it by no means strives to emulate man! It is by no means subject to our aesthetic and moral judgements! It also has no instinct for self-preservation, indeed, no instincts whatsoever; it also knows no law. Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, and no one who transgresses. When you know that nothing is intentional, then you also know that nothing is accidental; for it is only where there is a world of intentions that the word ‘accident’ has any meaning. Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living is only a species of the dead, and a very rare one at that.

  Let us beware of thinking that the world perpetually creates what is new. There are no perpetually enduring substances; matter is as much an error as the god of the Eleatics.5 But when shall we have done with our caution and care? When will all these shadows of God no longer darken our understanding? When will we have completely demythologized nature? When may we begin to naturalize ourselves by means of the pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?

  110

  Origin of Knowledge

  For immense stretches of time the intellect produced nothing but errors; some of them proved useful and conducive to the preservation of the species: whoever hit upon or inherited them was more successful in the struggle on behalf of himself and his offspring. Those erroneous beliefs were continuously passed on until they almost became the common endowment of human nature. Examples include the belief that there are enduring things; that there are identical things; that there are material bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also intrinsically good. It was only very late that the deniers and doubters of such propositions emerged – it was only very late that the truth emerged as the least powerful form of knowledge. It seemed as if we were unable to live with it, our organism was adapted to the opposite; all its higher functions, sensory perceptions, any kind of experience at all, operated with those primordially embodied, fundamental errors. Moreover, even within cognition itself those propositions became the standards according to which ‘true’ and ‘false’ were assessed – all the way up to the most abstruse regions of pure logic. Therefore the strength of the cognitions did not depend on the degree of truth they possessed, but on their age, their embodiment, their character as conditions of life. Where they seemed to conflict with these conditions, they were never seriously contested; denial and doubt were regarded here as madness. The exceptional thinkers like the Eleatics, who nevertheless espoused and adhered to the opposites of these natural errors, believed that it was also possible to live by these opposites; it was they who invented the sage as the man of immutable, impersonal and universal intuition who is simultaneously the One and the All, with his own faculty for this inverted knowledge; they believed that their knowledge was at the same time the principle of life. However, in order to be able to assert all this, they had to deceive themselves about their own condition: they had to ascribe to themselves impersonality and permanence without change, misunderstanding the nature of the mind, denying the dominant role of the instincts in cognition, and in general apprehending reason as an entirely free and self-originating activity; they closed their eyes to the fact that they too had arrived at their propositions out of opposition to common sense, or from a desire for tranquillity, exclusive possession or domination.

  The subtler development of honesty and scepticism eventually made these men impossible: their lives and their judgements also proved to be dependent on the primordial instincts and fundamental errors implicit in all sentient existence. The subtler honesty and scepticism arose wherever two opposing propositions appeared to be equally applicable to life, because both were compatible with the fundamental errors; under these circumstances, a dispute could arise as to which proposition had the higher or lower degree of utility for life. This subtler honesty and scepticism likewise arose whenever new propositions were shown to be, if not useful, at least not harmful; they could then be permitted expression as a form of intellectual playfulness, something innocent and delightful, like all games. Gradually the human brain was filled with such judgements and convictions; and so there arose from this tangled skein a ferment, struggle and lust for power. Not only utility and delight, but all sorts of impulses took part in the struggle over ‘truths’: intellectual struggle became an occupation, an attraction, a vocation, a duty, an honour – knowledge and the pursuit of truth eventually became needs in their own right. From that moment forward, not only belief and conviction, but also the tendency to examine, deny, distrust and contradict became a power; all the ‘evil’ instincts were subordinated to the desire for knowledge and placed in its service. These instincts then acquired the prestige of the permitted, the honoured, the useful, and eventually the look and the innocence of the good. The desire for knowledge thus became a part of life itself, and, as life, it became a continually growing power; until finally the desire for knowledge and those primordial, fundamental errors confronted each other, both as life, both as power, both in the same man. The thinker is now the being in whom the impulse towards truth and those life-preserving errors struggle for the first time, now that the impulse towards truth has also been proven to be a life-preserving power. The importance of this struggle is paramount; all else is a matter of indifference. I am raising the ultimate question concerning the conditions of life, and making an initial attempt to answer it by experiment. How far does truth admit of embodiment? That is the question, that is the experiment.

  111

  Origin of the Logical

  How did logic arise in the human head? Doubtless, out of illogic, a domain which must originally have been immense. Countless beings who inferred differently from the way in which we do now perished; and yet they may have come nearer to the truth! For example, whoever was not able to identify the ‘same’ often enough with regard to food or predators, whoever subsumed too slowly or cautiously, had less chance of survival than those who responded to similar cases by immediately guessing that they were identical. The prevailing tendency, however, was to treat similar cases as identical – an illogical tendency, since nothing is identical – and it was this which created the initial foundation for logic. In order for the notion of substance to arise (something indispensable to logic, although in the strictest sense nothing real corresponds to it), for the longest time it was likewise necessary for the mutability of things not to be seen, not to have been perceived; those creatures who did not see with exactitude had an advantage over those who saw everything ‘in flux’. By itself, a sceptical tendency, the exercise of excessive caution in making inferences, is extremely dangerous. No living creature would have survived unless the opposite tendency – the tendency to affirm rather than to suspend judgement, to err and invent rather than to wait and see, to accept rather than to reject, to jump to conclusions rather than to do justice – had not grown extraordinarily strong.

  The course of logical thought and inference in our brain as it is now corresponds to a succession of impulses and a struggle between them, which in themselves and taken individually are all very illogical and unjust; on the whole, we only experience the result of this struggle, so quickly and imperceptibly does this primordial process now take place within us.

  112

  Cause and Effect

  ‘Explanation’ is what we call it; but ‘description’ is what distinguishes us from earlier stages of knowledge and science. We describe better – we explain just as little as our predecessors. We have discovered a complicated process where the more naive investigators of earlier periods saw only two things, ‘cause’ and ‘effect’, as they were called; we have done no more than perfect the image of becoming; we have not really fathomed what lies behind it. With each instance, the series of ‘causes’ lies before us that much more completely; we infer that such-and-such must first precede in order for something else to follow – but in so doing we have grasped nothing. For example, the qualitative aspect of every chemical process seems just as ‘miraculous’ as motion does; nobody has ever ‘explained’ impact. How could we explain anything! We operate only with things which do not exist, with lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible times, divisible spaces – how can we expect to explain anything when we start by making everything into an image, into our image! At most, we can regard science as humanizing things as faithfully as possible; we always learn to describe ourselves more accurately by describing things and their successions. Cause and effect: such a duality probably never exists; actually, what we have here is a continuum out of which we have isolated a few pieces; just as we always perceive motion as isolated points, and therefore do not really see it, but infer it. The suddenness with which many effects emerge leads us into error; but it is only sudden for us. There is an infinite multiplicity of processes in that second of suddenness which escape us. An intellect which could see cause and effect as a continuum, and not arbitrarily divided and dismembered as we do, an intellect which could see the flow of events – would reject the notion of cause and effect, and would deny all conditionality.

  113

  On the Doctrine of Poisons

  So many things have to come together for scientific thought to arise; and all of these requisite abilities had to be individually invented, exercised and cultivated! But in isolation, they have very often had a completely different effect from that which they have now, when they are confined to scientific thought and keep each other in check – they have acted as poisons, for example, the doubting impulse, the denying impulse, the wait-and-see impulse, the collecting impulse, the disintegrating impulse. Many hecatombs of men were sacrificed before these impulses learned to acknowledge each other’s existence and regard themselves as functions of one organizing power in one man! And how far are we still from a time when the powers of art and the practical wisdom of life join forces with the rigours of scientific thought! Were they to do so, a superior organic system might be formed in relation to which the scholar, the physician, the artist and the legislator as we now know them will seem like relics of a bygone era!

  114

  The Extent of the Moral

  When we see a new image, we immediately interpret it with the aid of all the prior experiences we have ever had, in accordance with the degree of our honesty and fair-mindedness. There are no experiences which are not at the same time moral experiences, not even in the realm of sense-perception.

  115

  The Four Errors

  Man has been educated by his errors: first, he always only saw himself partially; second, he ascribed to himself fictitious qualities; third, he felt himself to possess a false superiority over animals and nature; fourth, he devised ever-new tables of goods,6 and for a time accepted them as eternal and unconditional, so that now this, now that human impulse or condition was given pride of place and was ennobled as a result of this assessment. When we subtract the effect of these four errors, we also subtract humaneness, humanity and ‘human dignity’.

  116

  Gregarious Instinct

  Wherever we find a morality we find a value judgement and a hierarchy of human impulses and activities. These value judgements and hierarchies are always the expression of the needs of a community or herd; that which is to its greatest advantage – and its second-greatest, and third-greatest – is also the supreme standard by which the value of every individual is measured. Morality teaches the individual to become a function of the herd, and to ascribe value to himself only as a function. Since the conditions for the preservation of one community are quite different from those of another community, there have been quite different moralities; and with respect to substantial transformations of herds, communities, states and societies yet to come, we can predict that there will continue to be quite divergent moralities. Morality is the gregarious instinct in the individual.