Part I — The Prejudices of Philosophers

First Part:

The Prejudices of Philosophers.

1 The will to truth, which will still tempt us into many a venture—that celebrated truthfulness of which all philosophers have so far spoken with reverence: what questions this will to truth has already laid before us! What strange, wicked, questionable questions! It is already a long story—and yet it seems scarcely to have begun? Is it any wonder if at last we grow suspicious, lose patience, turn impatiently around? If we learn from this Sphinx to ask questions in our turn? Who is it, really, who puts questions to us here? What in us really wants “truth”?—Indeed, we paused a long time over the question of this will's cause—until, at last, we came to a complete halt before a still more fundamental question. We asked about the value of this will. Suppose we want truth: why not prefer untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance?—The problem of the value of truth stepped before us—or was it we who stepped before the problem? Which of us here is Oedipus? Which the Sphinx? It seems to be a rendezvous of questions and question marks.—And would anyone believe that we are finally coming to feel as though the problem had never been posed before—as though we were the first to see it, take it in our sights, dare it? For there is a venture in this, and perhaps none is greater.

2 “How could anything arise from its opposite? Truth from error, for example? Or the will to truth from the will to deception? Or selfless action from self-interest? Or the sage's pure, sunlike contemplation from desire? Such an origin is impossible; anyone who dreams of it is a fool, or worse. Things of the highest value must have another, their own origin—they cannot be derived from this transient, seductive, deceptive, paltry world, from this confusion of delusion and desire! Rather, in the womb of being, in the imperishable, in the hidden God, in the ‘thing in itself’—there their ground must lie, and nowhere else!”—This manner of judging constitutes the characteristic prejudice by which the metaphysicians of every age can be recognized. This manner of valuation stands behind all their logical procedures; out of this “faith” of theirs they strive for their “knowledge,” for something solemnly christened “the truth” at the end. The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is faith in oppositions of values. It has not occurred even to the most cautious among them to doubt here, at the very threshold, where doubt was most needed—even if they had vowed “to doubt everything.” For one may doubt, first, whether opposites exist at all; and second, whether those popular valuations and oppositions of values on which the metaphysicians have set their seal may not be merely foreground valuations, merely provisional perspectives, perhaps seen from a particular corner, perhaps from below upward—frog perspectives, as it were, to borrow an expression familiar to painters. For all the value that may belong to what is true, truthful, selfless, it would be possible that appearance, the will to deception, self-interest, and desire should be assigned a higher and more fundamental value for all life. It would even be possible that what constitutes the value of those good and revered things consists precisely in their being related, connected, interlaced with those wicked, apparently opposite things in a compromising way—perhaps even essentially identical with them. Perhaps!—But who is willing to concern himself with such dangerous perhapses! For that we must await the arrival of a new breed of philosophers, whose taste and inclination in some respect run counter to those of their predecessors—philosophers of the dangerous Perhaps in every sense.—And in all seriousness: I see such new philosophers approaching.

3 After looking long enough between philosophers' lines and watching their hands, I tell myself: we must count even the greater part of conscious thinking among instinctive activities, including philosophical thinking. Here we must relearn, as we have relearned in the matter of heredity and the “innate.” Just as the act of birth counts for little in the whole course and progress of heredity, so “consciousness” is not opposed to the instinctive in any decisive sense—most of a philosopher's conscious thinking is secretly guided by his instincts and forced into particular channels. Behind all logic and its apparent sovereignty of movement, too, stand valuations—or, more plainly, physiological demands for the preservation of a certain kind of life. That the definite is worth more than the indefinite, for example, or appearance less than “truth”: such valuations, for all their regulative importance for us, might still be only foreground valuations, a particular kind of foolishness that may be needed precisely to preserve beings such as ourselves. Supposing, that is, that the human being is not precisely the “measure of things”…

4 The falsity of a judgment is not yet, for us, an objection to that judgment; perhaps it is here that our new language sounds strangest. The question is how far it promotes life, preserves life, preserves a species, perhaps even breeds a species; and we are fundamentally inclined to assert that the falsest judgments—which include synthetic judgments a priori—are the most indispensable to us: that without granting validity to logical fictions, without measuring reality against the wholly invented world of the unconditional and the self-identical, without constantly falsifying the world through number, human beings could not live—that renouncing false judgments would be renouncing life, negating life. To acknowledge untruth as a condition of life: that certainly means resisting familiar feelings of value in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that dares this places itself, by that act alone, beyond good and evil.

5 What tempts us to regard all philosophers half suspiciously, half mockingly is not that we discover 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 their dealings are not honest enough, while they all make a great, virtuous uproar as soon as the problem of truthfulness is even remotely touched. They all act as though they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic—unlike mystics of every rank, who are more honest and more clumsy than they are: these speak of “inspiration.” In reality, a proposition adopted in advance, an idea, an “inspiration,” usually a heart's desire made abstract and sifted clean, is defended by them with reasons sought after the event. They are all advocates who do not want to be called that, and mostly even cunning spokesmen for their prejudices, which they christen “truths”—very far from the courage of a conscience that admits this, precisely this, to itself; very far from the good taste of a courage that also lets it be understood, whether to warn an enemy or a friend, or out of exuberance and to mock itself. Old Kant's Tartuffery, as stiff as it is decorous, with which he lures us onto the dialectical bypaths that lead—or rather mislead—to his “categorical imperative”: this spectacle makes us spoiled spectators smile, we who find no little amusement in watching the subtle tricks of old moralists and moral preachers. Or consider that hocus-pocus of mathematical form in which Spinoza armored and masked his philosophy as though in bronze—ultimately, “the love of his wisdom,” to interpret the word rightly and fairly—so as to intimidate in advance any attacker who might dare to cast a glance at this invincible virgin and Pallas Athena: how much personal timidity and vulnerability this masquerade of a sick recluse betrays!

6 Gradually I have come to see what every great philosophy has so far been: its author's confession, and a kind of involuntary, unnoticed memoir; likewise, that the moral—or immoral—intentions in every philosophy constituted the true living seed from which the whole plant always grew. Indeed, to explain how a philosopher's most remote metaphysical assertions actually came about, it is good—and wise—always to ask first: what morality is it—what morality is he—aiming at? Accordingly, I do not believe that a “drive for knowledge” is the father of philosophy, but that another drive, here as elsewhere, has merely used knowledge—and misapprehension!—as a tool. Anyone who examines humanity's fundamental drives to see how far they may have played their game precisely here, as inspiring spirits—or demons and goblins—will find that all of them have practiced philosophy at some time, and that every single one would be only too glad to present itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the rightful master of all the other drives. For every drive lusts for mastery: and as such it tries to philosophize.—Admittedly, things may stand differently with scholars, with genuinely scientific people—“better,” if you like. There may really be something like a drive for knowledge there, some small independent clockwork that, once properly wound, works bravely away without substantially involving the scholar's other drives as a whole. The scholar's real “interests” therefore usually lie somewhere quite different: in the family, perhaps, or earning money, or politics. Indeed, it is almost immaterial whether his little machine is placed at this or that point in science, and whether the “promising” young worker makes himself a good philologist or an expert on fungi or a chemist: becoming this or that does not characterize him.—Conversely, there is absolutely nothing impersonal about the philosopher; and his morality in particular provides decided and decisive testimony to who he is—that is, to the order of rank in which the innermost drives of his nature stand in relation to one another.

7 How malicious philosophers can be! I know nothing more poisonous than the joke Epicurus allowed himself against Plato and the Platonists: he called them Dionysiokolakes. Literally, on the surface, this means “flatterers of Dionysius,” so accessories of tyrants and toadies; but beyond that it also means “they are all actors, nothing about them is genuine”—for Dionysokolax was a popular name for an actor. And this last meaning is the real malice Epicurus fired at Plato: he resented the grand manner, the art of staging oneself, which Plato and his pupils understood—and which Epicurus did not! He, the old schoolmaster from Samos, who sat hidden in his little garden in Athens and wrote three hundred books—who knows? Perhaps out of rage and ambition directed against Plato?—It took a hundred years for Greece to discover who this garden god Epicurus had been.—Did it discover him?—

8 In every philosophy there is a point at which the philosopher's “conviction” steps onto the stage—or, to put it in the language of an old mystery play:

The ass has arrived,handsome and very strong.

9 You want to live “according to nature”? Oh, you noble Stoics, what a fraud of words! Imagine a being such as nature: wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without intentions or considerations, without mercy or justice, fertile and barren and uncertain all at once; imagine indifference itself as power—how could you live according to this indifference? Living—is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is living not evaluating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And suppose your imperative “live according to nature” really means “live according to life”—how could you not? Why make a principle of what you yourselves are and must be?—In truth, things stand quite otherwise: while you delightedly pretend to read the canon of your law out of nature, you want the opposite, you strange actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to prescribe and incorporate your morality, your ideal, into nature—even into nature. You demand that it be nature “according to the Stoa,” and would like to make all existence exist only in your own image—as an immense, eternal glorification and generalization of Stoicism! For all your love of truth, you force yourselves so long, so persistently, with such hypnotic rigidity, to see nature falsely, namely Stoically, that you can no longer see it otherwise—and some abysmal arrogance finally inspires in you the madman's hope that because you know how to tyrannize yourselves—Stoicism is self-tyranny—nature, too, can be tyrannized: is the Stoic not a piece of nature?… But this is an old, eternal story: what happened then with the Stoics still happens today whenever a 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 zeal and subtlety—I would even say cunning—with which people everywhere in Europe now attack the problem “of the real and the apparent world” give us cause to think and listen; and anyone who hears only a “will to truth” behind it, and nothing more, certainly does not possess the sharpest ears. In a few rare cases such a will to truth may really be involved: some extravagant, adventurous courage, a metaphysician's ambition to hold a lost position, which ultimately still prefers a handful of “certainty” to a whole wagonload of beautiful possibilities. There may even be puritanical fanatics of conscience who would rather lie down to die on a certain Nothing than on an uncertain Something. But this is nihilism, and the sign of a despairing soul, weary to death—however brave the gestures of such virtue may appear. With stronger, more vital thinkers, still thirsty for life, matters seem different: when they take sides against appearance and already pronounce the word “perspectival” with arrogance; when they rate the credibility of their own bodies about as low as that of the evidence of the senses, which says “the earth stands still”; and thus, apparently in good spirits, let their surest possession slip from their hands—for what do people now believe in more certainly than their bodies?—who knows whether, at bottom, they want to reconquer something once possessed still more certainly, some piece of the old landed estate of former faith, perhaps “the immortal soul,” perhaps “the old God”: in short, ideas on which one could live better, that is, more vigorously and cheerfully, than on “modern ideas”? There is distrust of these modern ideas here, disbelief in everything built yesterday and today; perhaps a touch of weariness and mockery is mixed in, unable any longer to endure the bric-a-brac of concepts of the most various origins that so-called positivism now brings to market, a more fastidious taste's disgust at the fairground motley and patchwork of all these petty reality-philosophers, about whom nothing is new or genuine but this motley. In this, I think, we should grant these skeptical opponents of reality and microscopists of knowledge their due: their instinct, which drives them away from modern reality, has not been refuted—what do their backward-running bypaths matter to us! What is essential about them is not that they want to go “back,” but that they want to go—away. A little more strength, flight, courage, artistry: and they would want to go out—and not back!—

11 It seems to me that people everywhere are now trying to divert attention from the real influence Kant exerted on German philosophy, and especially to slip prudently past the value he accorded himself. Above all and first of all, Kant was proud of his table of categories; holding that table in his hands, he said: “This is the hardest thing that could ever have been undertaken for the sake of metaphysics.”—Do understand this “could have been”! He was proud of having discovered a new faculty in human beings, the faculty for synthetic judgments a priori. Suppose he deceived himself in this: nevertheless, the development and rapid flowering of German philosophy depend on this pride, and on the rivalry of all the younger thinkers to discover something still more worthy of pride if possible—and in any case “new faculties”!—But let us reflect: it is time. How are synthetic judgments a priori possible? Kant asked himself—and what did he actually answer? Through a faculty: unfortunately, though, not in three words, but so elaborately, venerably, and with such an expenditure of German profundity and ornamental intricacy that people failed to hear the amusing German foolishness contained in such an answer. They were even beside themselves over this new faculty, and the rejoicing reached its height when Kant also discovered a moral faculty in human beings—for in those days the Germans were still moral, and not at all “realpolitical.”—The honeymoon of German philosophy arrived; all the young theologians of the Tübingen seminary promptly went into the bushes—they all searched for “faculties.” And what did they not find—in that innocent, rich, still youthful age of the German spirit, into which Romanticism, the malicious fairy, blew and sang, when people still did not know how to distinguish “finding” from “inventing”! Above all, a faculty for the “supersensible”: Schelling christened it intellectual intuition, and thereby met the most heartfelt cravings of his Germans, who at bottom craved piety. One cannot do this whole exuberant, rapturous movement—which was youth, however boldly it disguised itself in gray and aged concepts—a greater injustice than by taking it seriously, let alone treating it with moral indignation. Enough: people grew older—the dream dissolved. A time came when people rubbed their foreheads; they are still rubbing them today. They had been dreaming—first and foremost, old Kant. “Through a faculty”—he had said, or at least meant. But is that—an answer? An explanation? Or not rather a mere repetition of the question? How does opium induce sleep? “Through a faculty,” namely the sleep-inducing power—answers that doctor in Molière:

because it has a sleep-inducing power,whose nature is to put the senses to sleep.

But answers of this kind belong in comedy, and it is finally time to replace the Kantian question “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” with another question: “Why is belief in such judgments necessary?”—namely, to grasp that, for the preservation of beings of our kind, such judgments must be believed true; which of course would not prevent them from being false judgments! Or, to put it more plainly, bluntly, and thoroughly: synthetic judgments a priori ought not to “be possible” at all. We have no right to them; in our mouths they are nothing but false judgments. Only, belief in their truth is certainly necessary, as a foreground belief and visible appearance belonging to life's perspectival optics.—Finally, to recall the immense effect that “German philosophy”—you understand its entitlement to quotation marks, I hope?—has exerted throughout Europe, let no one doubt that a certain sleep-inducing power was involved. Among noble idlers, the virtuous, mystics, artists, three-quarter Christians, and political obscurantists of every nation, people were delighted, thanks to German philosophy, to have an antidote to the still-overpowering sensualism that streamed from the previous century into this one—in short, “to put the senses to sleep”…

12 As for materialistic atomism: it is among the most thoroughly refuted things there are; and perhaps no scholar in Europe today is still so unscholarly as to attach any serious significance to it beyond convenient everyday use—namely, as a shorthand for expression—thanks chiefly to that Pole Boscovich, who, together with the Pole Copernicus, has so far been the greatest and most victorious opponent of the evidence of the senses. For while Copernicus persuaded us to believe, against all the senses, that the earth does not stand firm, Boscovich taught us to renounce belief in the last thing about the earth that “stood firm”: belief in “substance,” in “matter,” in the atom as a scrap and clump of earth. This was the greatest triumph over the senses yet won on earth.—But we must go further still, and also declare war on the “atomistic need,” which continues to lead a dangerous afterlife in fields where no one suspects it, like that more famous “metaphysical need”—a merciless war to the knife. We must first also finish off that other, more fateful atomism which Christianity has taught best and longest: soul-atomism. Let this word designate the belief that takes the soul to be something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, a monad, an atom: this belief must be expelled from science! Between ourselves, there is no need whatever to get rid of “the soul” itself in the process and renounce one of the oldest and most venerable hypotheses—as commonly happens to naturalists in their clumsiness, who lose “the soul” almost as soon as they touch it. But the way lies open to new versions and refinements of the soul hypothesis; and concepts such as “mortal soul,” “soul as a multiplicity of subjects,” and “soul as a social structure of drives and affects” henceforth seek citizenship in science. In putting an end to the superstition that has so far proliferated around the idea of the soul with an almost tropical luxuriance, the new psychologist has admittedly thrust himself, as it were, into a new wilderness and a new distrust—it may be that the older psychologists had an easier and merrier time of it. But in the end he knows that precisely by doing this he has also condemned himself to inventing—and, who knows? Perhaps to finding.—

13 Physiologists should think twice before positing the drive for self-preservation as an organic being's cardinal drive. Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power: self-preservation is only one of its indirect and most frequent consequences.—In short, here as everywhere, beware of superfluous teleological principles—such as the drive for self-preservation, which we owe to Spinoza's inconsistency.—For this is what method demands, and method must essentially be economy of principles.

14 It may now be dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation and adjustment of the world—to suit us, if I may say so!—and not an explanation of the world. But insofar as it rests on belief in the senses, it passes for more, and must continue for a long time to pass for more, namely, an explanation. It has eyes and fingers on its side; it has visual evidence and tangibility on its side: this works its spell, persuades, convinces an age whose basic taste is plebeian—for such an age instinctively follows the canon of truth of eternally popular sensualism. What is clear, what “explained”? Only what can be seen and touched—every problem must be driven that far. Conversely, the charm of the Platonic way of thinking lay precisely in resistance against what the senses make evident: it was a noble way of thinking—perhaps among people who enjoyed even stronger and more demanding senses than our contemporaries possess, but who knew how to find a higher triumph in remaining masters of these senses: and this by means of pale, cold, gray nets of concepts they cast over the colorful whirl of the senses—the rabble of the senses, as Plato said. There was a different kind of enjoyment in this mastering and interpreting of the world in Plato's manner from what today's physicists offer us, likewise the Darwinists and anti-teleologists among workers in physiology, with their principle of the “least possible force” and the greatest possible stupidity. “Where human beings have nothing more to see and grasp, they have nothing more to seek”—that is certainly a different imperative from Plato's, but it may nevertheless be precisely the right imperative for a sturdy, industrious race of machinists and bridge builders of the future, who have nothing but rough work to get through.

15 To practice physiology with a good conscience, one must insist that the sense organs are not appearances in the sense of idealist philosophy: as such, they could not be causes! Sensualism, then, at least as a regulative hypothesis, not to say a heuristic principle.—What? And others even say that the external world is the work of our organs? But then our body, as a piece of this external world, would be the work of our organs! But then our organs themselves would be—the work of our organs! This, it seems to me, is a thorough reductio ad absurdum: supposing that the concept causa sui is something thoroughly absurd. Consequently, the external world is not the work of our organs—?

16 There are still harmless self-observers who believe that there are “immediate certainties,” for example “I think,” or, as Schopenhauer's superstition had it, “I will”: as though here knowing could take hold of its object pure and naked, as a “thing in itself,” with no falsification on either the subject's or the object's part. But that “immediate certainty,” like “absolute knowledge” and the “thing in itself,” contains a contradiction in terms, I will repeat a hundred times: people should finally free themselves from the seduction of words! The populace may believe that knowing means knowing through and through; the philosopher must tell himself: “When I analyze the process expressed in the sentence ‘I think,’ I obtain a series of rash assertions whose justification is difficult, perhaps impossible—for example, that it is I who think; that there must be something at all that thinks; that thinking is an activity and effect on the part of a being conceived as a cause; that there is an ‘I’; finally, that what is to be designated as thinking is already settled—that I know what thinking is. For if I had not already decided this for myself, by what standard should I judge that what is happening just now is not perhaps ‘willing’ or ‘feeling’? Enough: that ‘I think’ presupposes that I compare my present state with other states I know in myself, in order to establish what it is; because of this reference back to other ‘knowledge,’ it certainly has no immediate ‘certainty’ for me.”—In place of that “immediate certainty” in which the populace may believe in the given case, the philosopher thus finds himself holding a series of metaphysical questions, genuine questions of conscience for the intellect: “Where do I get the concept of thinking? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an I, and even of an I as cause, and finally of an I as the cause of thoughts?” Anyone who ventures to answer those metaphysical questions immediately by appealing to a kind of intuition of knowledge—as does the man who says “I think, and know that this at least is true, real, certain”—will find a smile and two question marks waiting in a philosopher today. “Sir,” the philosopher may give him to understand, “it is unlikely that you are not mistaken: but why insist on truth at all?”—

17 As for the logicians' superstition: I will not tire of underlining again and again a small, brief fact that these superstitious people are reluctant to admit—namely, that a thought comes when “it” wants to, and not when “I” want to; so it is a falsification of the facts to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks: but that this “it” is precisely that old, celebrated “I” is, to put it mildly, only an assumption, an assertion, above all no “immediate certainty.” Finally, even this “it thinks” already goes too far: this “it” already contains an interpretation of the process and does not belong to the process itself. Here one infers according to grammatical habit: “Thinking is an activity; every activity requires someone active; consequently—”. Following much the same pattern, the older atomism sought, in addition to the “force” that acts, that little clump of matter in which it sits and out of which it acts: the atom. More rigorous minds finally learned to do without this “scrap of earth,” and perhaps one day people, including the logicians, will grow accustomed to doing without that little “it” into which the honest old I has evaporated.

18 It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it can be refuted: precisely through this it attracts subtler minds. It seems that the theory of “free will,” refuted a hundred times, owes its continued existence only to this charm: someone keeps coming along who feels strong enough to refute it.

19 Philosophers commonly speak of the will as though it were the best-known thing in the world; indeed, Schopenhauer gave us to understand that the will alone is actually known to us, completely known, known without subtraction or addition. But it seems to me again and again that in this case, too, Schopenhauer merely did what philosophers commonly do: he adopted and exaggerated a popular prejudice. Willing seems to me above all something complicated, something that is a unity only as a word—and precisely in that single word lies the popular prejudice that has mastered philosophers' always scant caution. So let us be more cautious for once; let us be “unphilosophical”—let us say: in every willing there is, first, a plurality of feelings, namely the feeling of the state away from which, the feeling of the state toward which, the feeling of this “away” and “toward” themselves; then also an accompanying muscular feeling that, even without our setting “arms and legs” in motion, begins its play through a kind of habit as soon as we “will.” Just as feeling, and indeed many kinds of feeling, must be acknowledged as an ingredient of the will, so, second, must thinking: in every act of will there is a commanding thought—and we must certainly not believe we can separate this thought from “willing,” as though will would then remain! Third, the will is not merely a complex of feeling and thinking, but above all also an affect: specifically, the affect of command. What is called “freedom of the will” is essentially the affect of superiority in relation to whoever must obey: “I am free, ‘he’ must obey”—this consciousness inhabits every willing, as do that tension of attention, that straight gaze fixed exclusively on one thing, that unconditional valuation “now this is needed and nothing else,” that inner certainty that obedience will follow, and everything else belonging to the state of one who commands. A human being who wills commands something within himself that obeys, or that he believes obeys. But now observe what is strangest about the will—this thing so manifold for which the populace has only one word: insofar as, in a given case, we are both the commanding and the obeying parties, and as the obeying party know the feelings of compulsion, urgency, pressure, resistance, and movement that commonly begin immediately after the act of will; insofar as, on the other hand, we habitually pass over and deceive ourselves about this duality by means of the synthetic concept “I,” a whole chain of erroneous inferences, and consequently false valuations of the will itself, has attached itself to willing—so that the person who wills believes in good faith that willing suffices for action. Because in the great majority of cases willing has occurred only where the effect of the command—thus obedience, thus action—could also be expected, the appearance has translated itself into a feeling, as though there were a necessity of effect here. In short, the person who wills believes, with a fair degree of certainty, that will and action are somehow one; he attributes success, the execution of the willing, to the will itself as well, and enjoys in doing so an increase in that feeling of power that every success brings. “Freedom of the will”—that is the expression for that manifold state of pleasure in the person who wills, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor—who, as such, shares in the enjoyment of the triumph over resistances, but judges within himself that it is his will itself that actually overcomes those resistances. In this way the person who wills adds the pleasurable feelings of the executing, successful instruments, the serving “under-wills” or under-souls—our body is, after all, only a social structure of many souls—to his pleasurable feeling as commander. The effect is me: what happens here is what happens in every well-constituted and fortunate community, that the ruling class identifies itself with the community's successes. All willing is simply a matter of commanding and obeying, on the basis, as I have said, of a social structure of many “souls”: for this reason a philosopher should claim the right to bring willing as such within the field of morality—morality understood, that is, as the study of the relations of rule under which the phenomenon “life” arises.—

20 That individual philosophical concepts are not arbitrary, do not grow on their own, but grow up in relation and kinship with one another; that however suddenly and capriciously they seem to emerge in the history of thought, they belong to a system just as much as all the members of a continent's fauna: this finally also reveals itself in the sureness with which the most diverse philosophers repeatedly fill out a certain basic pattern of possible philosophies. Under an invisible spell, they run the same orbit again and again: however independent of one another they may feel in their critical or systematic will, something in them leads them, something drives them after one another in a particular order—precisely that inborn system and kinship of concepts. Their thinking is in fact much less a discovering than a recognizing, a remembering again, a return and homecoming to a distant, ancient, collective household of the soul from which those concepts once grew: to that extent, philosophizing is a kind of atavism of the highest rank. The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing is easily enough explained. Precisely where languages are related, it is quite unavoidable that, thanks to the shared philosophy of grammar—I mean thanks to the unconscious dominion and guidance of the same grammatical functions—everything is prepared in advance for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems; just as the path to certain other possibilities of interpreting the world seems barred. Philosophers of the Ural-Altaic language region—in which the concept of the subject is least developed—will very probably look “into the world” differently, and be found on different paths, from Indo-Europeans or Muslims: the spell of particular grammatical functions is, at bottom, the spell of physiological value judgments and racial conditions.—So much toward rejecting Locke's superficiality concerning the origin of ideas.

21 The causa sui is the finest self-contradiction yet devised, a kind of logical rape and violation of nature: but the extravagant pride of humanity has managed to entangle itself deeply and terribly with precisely this nonsense. The desire for “freedom of the will,” in that metaphysically superlative sense that unfortunately still rules the minds of the half-educated—the desire to bear the whole and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and absolve God, the world, one's ancestors, chance, and society of it—is nothing less than the desire to be precisely this causa sui and, with a daring surpassing Münchhausen's, to pull oneself out of the swamp of nothingness by one's own hair into existence. Suppose someone thus sees through the rustic simplicity of this celebrated concept “free will” and strikes it from his mind: I now ask him to carry his “enlightenment” a step further and also strike from his mind the reversal of that misconcept “free will”—I mean “unfree will,” which amounts to a misuse of cause and effect. One should not mistakenly reify “cause” and “effect”, as natural scientists do—and those who, like them, think in naturalistic terms today—according to the prevailing mechanistic clumsiness that has the cause press and push until it “takes effect.” One should use “cause” and “effect” only as pure concepts, that is, as conventional fictions for the purposes of designation and communication, not explanation. In the “in itself” there is nothing of “causal connections,” of “necessity,” of “psychological unfreedom”; there “the effect” does not “follow the cause,” no “law” rules. It is we alone who have invented causes, succession, mutual dependence, relativity, compulsion, number, law, freedom, grounds, and purposes; and when we project this world of signs into things as something “in itself,” when we mix it into them, we do once more what we have always done: we make mythology. “Unfree will” is mythology: in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills.—When a thinker already feels something of compulsion, distress, having-to-follow, pressure, unfreedom in every “causal connection” and “psychological necessity,” it is almost always a symptom of where he himself is deficient: to feel in precisely this way is revealing—the person reveals himself. And in general, if I have observed rightly, the “unfreedom of the will” is taken as a problem from two utterly opposite sides, but always in a deeply personal way: some will not at any price relinquish their “responsibility,” their belief in themselves, their personal claim to their own merit—the vain races belong here; the others, conversely, want to be responsible for nothing, guilty of nothing, and out of an inner self-contempt demand to be able to shift themselves off somewhere else. These latter people, when they write books, commonly take the side of criminals today; a kind of socialist compassion is their most attractive disguise. And indeed, the fatalism of the weak-willed beautifies itself astonishingly when it knows how to present itself as “the religion of human suffering”: that is its “good taste.”

22 Forgive me, an old philologist who cannot give up his malice, for putting my finger on bad arts of interpretation: but that “lawfulness of nature,” of which you physicists speak so proudly, as though—exists only thanks to your interpretation and bad “philology.” It is no fact, no “text,” but rather only a naively humanitarian adjustment and distortion of meaning, with which you amply accommodate the democratic instincts of the modern soul! “Equality before the law everywhere—nature is no different and no better than we are in this”: a charming ulterior thought in which the common man's hostility toward everything privileged and sovereign disguises itself once more, as does a second, subtler atheism. “Neither God nor master”—that is what you want too: and therefore “long live the law of nature!”—is that not so? But as I said, this is interpretation, not text; and someone could come who, with the opposite intention and art of interpretation, knew how to read out of the same nature, and with regard to the same phenomena, precisely the tyrannically ruthless and inexorable enforcement of claims to power—an interpreter who would set before your eyes the absence of exceptions or conditions in all “will to power” so forcefully that almost every word, even the word “tyranny,” would finally appear unusable, or already a weakening and softening metaphor—as too human; and who would nevertheless end by asserting the same thing about this world that you assert, namely, that its course is “necessary” and “calculable,” but not because laws rule in it, rather because laws are absolutely absent, and every power at every moment draws its ultimate consequence. Suppose this too is only interpretation—and you will be eager enough to raise that objection?—well, so much the better.—

23 All psychology so far has remained caught in moral prejudices and fears: it has not ventured into the depths. To conceive it as the morphology and developmental theory of the will to power, as I conceive it—no one has so much as brushed against this in thought: insofar, that is, as one may recognize in what has so far been written a symptom of what has so far been left unsaid. The force of moral prejudices has penetrated deep into the most spiritual world, the apparently coldest and most free of presuppositions—and, as goes without saying, has damaged, inhibited, blinded, distorted it. A genuine physio-psychology has to contend with unconscious resistances in the researcher's heart; it has “the heart” against it. Even a theory of the mutual conditioning of the “good” and the “wicked” drives, as a subtler immorality, brings distress and aversion to a still vigorous and hearty conscience—still more a theory that all good drives can be derived from wicked ones. But suppose someone goes so far as to take the affects of hatred, envy, greed, and lust for mastery as affects that condition life, as something that must fundamentally and essentially be present in life's whole household, and consequently must be heightened further if life itself is to be heightened further—he suffers from such a direction of judgment as from seasickness. And yet even this hypothesis is far from the most painful and strange in this immense, still almost new realm of dangerous insights—and there are in fact a hundred good reasons for everyone to keep away from it who—can! On the other hand, once one's ship has been driven here—well! Forward! Now grit your teeth hard! Open your eyes! Keep your hand firm on the helm!—We sail straight beyond morality; perhaps in doing so we crush and grind to pieces our own remaining morality as we make and dare our voyage there—but what do we matter! Never yet has a deeper world of insight opened to daring travelers and adventurers: and the psychologist who thus “makes sacrifices”—it is not the sacrifice of the intellect, quite the contrary!—will at least be entitled to demand in return that psychology be recognized again as mistress of the sciences, for whose service and preparation the other sciences exist. For psychology is now once more the path to the fundamental problems.

First Part:

The Prejudices of Philosophers.

1 The will to truth will still tempt us into many risks. That famous truthfulness, which all philosophers so far have spoken of with respect—what questions this will to truth has already put before us! What strange, troubling, questionable questions! It is already a long story—and yet it seems to have barely begun? Is it any wonder if we finally grow suspicious, lose patience, and turn around impatiently? If we too learn from this Sphinx to ask questions? Who is really asking us questions here? What in us really wants "truth"? In fact, we paused for a long time over the question of what causes this will, until at last we came to a complete stop before an even deeper question. We asked about the value of this will. Suppose we want truth: why not prefer untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The problem of the value of truth stepped before us—or was it we who stepped before the problem? Which of us is Oedipus here? Which is the Sphinx? It seems to be a meeting of questions and question marks. And, would you believe it, we finally find ourselves thinking that the problem has never been raised before—that we are the first to see it, face it, and risk it? There is a risk here, and perhaps no greater one exists.

2 "How could something come from its opposite? Truth from error, for example? Or the will to truth from the will to deceive? Or an unselfish action from self-interest? Or the wise person's pure, sunlike vision from desire? That kind of origin is impossible. Anyone who dreams of it is a fool, or worse. The things with the highest value must have a different origin, one of their own. They cannot come from this passing, tempting, deceptive, lowly world, from this tangle of delusion and desire! Instead, their foundation must lie in the lap of being, in what does not pass away, in the hidden God, in the 'thing in itself'—there and nowhere else!" This way of judging is the typical prejudice by which we can recognize metaphysicians of every age. Valuations like these stand behind all their logical procedures. From this "belief" they work toward their "knowledge," toward something that is finally christened "the truth" in a solemn ceremony. The metaphysicians' basic belief is the belief in opposites of value. Even the most cautious among them never thought to start doubting here, on the threshold, where doubt was most needed—even if they had vowed "to doubt everything." For we may doubt, first, whether opposites exist at all. And second, whether those popular valuations and oppositions of value that metaphysicians have stamped with their seal might be only surface judgments, only provisional perspectives. Perhaps, on top of that, they come from a particular corner, perhaps from below looking up: frog's-eye views, so to speak, to borrow a familiar painters' term. Whatever value truth, truthfulness, and unselfishness may have, appearance, the will to deceive, self-interest, and desire might have to be given a higher and more basic value for all life. It might even be that what gives those good and respected things their value is precisely their being dangerously related, linked, and hooked into those bad, apparently opposite things—perhaps even being essentially the same as them. Perhaps! But who is willing to bother with such dangerous perhapses! For that, we must wait for a new kind of philosopher to arrive, with tastes and leanings somehow opposite to those of earlier philosophers—philosophers of the dangerous Perhaps in every sense. And in all seriousness: I see such new philosophers coming.

3 After spending long enough reading between philosophers' lines and watching what their hands are doing, I tell myself this: most conscious thinking must still be counted among instinctive activities, even philosophical thinking. We must learn to think differently here, just as we have had to change our thinking about heredity and what is "inborn." The act of birth counts for very little in the whole process of heredity before and after it. In the same way, "consciousness" is not opposed to instinct in any decisive sense. Most of a philosopher's conscious thinking is secretly guided by his instincts and forced into particular paths. Behind all logic too, and its apparently independent movements, stand valuations. To speak more plainly, they are physiological demands for preserving a particular kind of life. For example, that what is definite is worth more than what is indefinite, that appearance is worth less than "truth." However important such judgments may be in directing us, they might still be only surface judgments, a certain kind of foolishness that may be necessary to preserve creatures like us. Assuming, that is, that human beings are not the "measure of things"…

4 The fact that a judgment is false is not yet an objection to it, as far as we are concerned. This may be where our new way of speaking sounds strangest. The question is how far the judgment promotes life, preserves life, preserves a species, perhaps even breeds a species. And we are basically inclined to maintain that the falsest judgments—which include synthetic judgments a priori—are the ones we can least do without. Human beings could not live without accepting logical fictions, without measuring reality against the wholly invented world of the unconditional and the self-identical, without constantly falsifying the world through numbers. Giving up false judgments would mean giving up life, denying life. Admitting that untruth is a condition of life certainly means resisting our usual feelings about value in a dangerous way. A philosophy that dares to do that places itself beyond good and evil by that act alone.

5 What tempts us to look at all philosophers with a mixture of suspicion and mockery is not that we keep discovering how innocent they are—how often and how easily they make mistakes and lose their way; in short, their childishness and childlike ways. It is that they are not honest enough, even though they all make a great, virtuous noise as soon as the problem of truthfulness is touched on, however remotely. They all pretend they have discovered and reached their actual opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely untroubled dialectic. In this they differ from mystics of every rank, who are more honest and more clumsy: mystics speak of "inspiration." At bottom, though, what the philosophers defend with reasons they have hunted up afterward is a proposition settled in advance, a sudden idea, an "inspiration"—usually a heartfelt wish that has been made abstract and put through a sieve. They are all lawyers who refuse to be called lawyers, and usually they are even sly advocates for prejudices they christen "truths." They are very far from the courage of conscience that admits this, exactly this, to itself. They are very far from the good taste of a courage that also lets others know it, whether to warn an enemy or a friend, or out of high spirits and to make fun of itself. Old Kant's Tartuffe-like hypocrisy, as stiff as it is morally proper, lures us onto the back ways of dialectic that lead—or rather mislead—us to his "categorical imperative." This spectacle makes us spoiled spectators smile. We find no little amusement in watching the subtle tricks of old moralists and preachers of morality. Or take that hocus-pocus of mathematical form in which Spinoza armored and masked his philosophy as if in bronze—ultimately, "the love of his wisdom," to interpret the word correctly and fairly. He did it to intimidate in advance any attacker who might dare to set eyes on this unconquerable virgin and Pallas Athena. How much personal timidity and vulnerability this masquerade of a sick recluse gives away!

6 I have gradually come to see what every great philosophy so far has been: its author's personal confession, and a kind of unintended, unnoticed memoir. I have also come to see that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy were the real living seed from which the whole plant grew. In fact, to explain how a philosopher's most remote metaphysical claims came about, we do well—and act wisely—to begin by asking: what morality is it (is he—) aiming at? So I do not believe that a "drive for knowledge" is the father of philosophy. Rather, here as elsewhere, another drive has merely used knowledge (and mistaken knowledge!) as a tool. But anyone who looks at the basic human drives to see how far they may have been at play here as inspiring spirits (or demons and goblins—) will find that they have all practiced philosophy at some point. Each one would dearly like to present itself as the ultimate purpose of existence and the rightful master of all the other drives. For every drive wants to rule, and as such it tries to philosophize. Of course, things may be different with scholars, with truly scientific people—"better," if you like. There may really be something like a drive for knowledge there: some little independent clockwork that, once properly wound up, gets down to work bravely without all the scholar's other drives taking any essential part in it. That is why a scholar's real "interests" usually lie somewhere else entirely—in his family, perhaps, or in making money, or in politics. Indeed, it makes almost no difference whether his little machine is placed in this area of science or that, or whether the "promising" young worker makes himself into a good philologist, mushroom expert, or chemist. Becoming one thing or another does not characterize him. By contrast, there is nothing at all impersonal about a philosopher. In particular, his morality gives clear and decisive evidence of who he is—that is, of the order of rank among the deepest drives of his nature.

7 How spiteful philosophers can be! I know nothing more poisonous than the joke Epicurus allowed himself against Plato and the Platonists: he called them Dionysiokolakes. Literally and on the surface, this means "flatterers of Dionysius," that is, a tyrant's hangers-on and bootlickers. But it also means "they are all actors; there is nothing genuine about them" (since Dionysokolax was a popular term for an actor). This last point is the real barb Epicurus fired at Plato. He resented the grand manner, the skill at putting oneself onstage, that Plato and his students possessed—and that Epicurus did not! He, the old schoolteacher from Samos, sat hidden in his little garden in Athens and wrote three hundred books. Who knows? Perhaps he did it out of anger and ambition to rival Plato? It took Greece a hundred years to find out who this garden god Epicurus had been. Did it find out?

8 In every philosophy there is a point where the philosopher's "conviction" steps onstage—or, to put it in the words of an old mystery play:

The ass has arrived,Handsome and very strong.

9 You want to live "according to nature"? Oh, you noble Stoics, what a fraud of words! Imagine a being like nature: endlessly wasteful, endlessly indifferent, without intentions or consideration, without pity or justice, fertile and barren and uncertain all at once. Imagine indifference itself as a power. How could you live according to this indifference? Isn't living precisely wanting to be different from this nature? Isn't living assessing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And suppose your command to "live according to nature" really means "live according to life"—how could you not? Why make a principle of what you yourselves are and must be? The truth is quite different. You pretend, in your delight, to read the rule of your law out of nature, but you want the opposite, you strange actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to prescribe your morality and your ideal to nature—even to nature—and incorporate them into it. You demand that nature be nature "according to the Stoa," and you would like to make all existence exist only in your own image—as one enormous, eternal glorification and generalization of Stoicism! For all your love of truth, you force yourselves so long, so stubbornly, with such hypnotic rigidity, to see nature falsely—that is, stoically—that you can no longer see it any other way. And finally some unfathomable arrogance even gives you the madman's hope that, because you know how to tyrannize yourselves—Stoicism is self-tyranny—nature too can be tyrannized. Isn't the Stoic a piece of nature, after all?… But this is an old, eternal story. What happened with the Stoics then still happens today as soon as a 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 being the first cause.

10 The eagerness and subtlety—I would even say cunning—with which people throughout Europe now tackle the problem "of the real world and the apparent world" give us reason to think and listen closely. Anyone who hears only a "will to truth" and nothing else in the background certainly does not have the sharpest ears. In a few rare cases, such a will to truth may really be involved: some extravagant, adventurous courage, a metaphysician's ambition to hold a lost position, which ultimately still prefers a handful of "certainty" to a whole wagonload of beautiful possibilities. There may even be puritanical fanatics of conscience who would rather lie down to die on a certain nothing than on an uncertain something. But this is nihilism, the sign of a despairing soul tired to death, however brave the gestures of such virtue may look. Things seem different with the stronger thinkers, those fuller of life and still thirsty for it. They take sides against appearance and already say the word "perspectival" with arrogance. They rate the trustworthiness of their own bodies about as low as that of the visible evidence that says "the earth stands still." And in this seemingly cheerful mood they let their most certain possession slip out of their hands—for what do people now believe in more firmly than their bodies? Who knows whether, deep down, they want to win back something that was once possessed even more securely? Something from the old landed estate of former belief: perhaps "the immortal soul," perhaps "the old God"—in short, ideas that allowed people to live better, that is, more vigorously and cheerfully, than "modern ideas" do? There is distrust of these modern ideas here, disbelief in everything built yesterday and today. Perhaps there is a touch of weariness and mockery mixed in, too, unable to bear any longer the bric-a-brac of concepts from the most varied origins that so-called positivism brings to market today. It is the disgust of a more refined taste at the fairground colors and patchwork of all these little would-be philosophers of reality, about whom nothing is new and genuine except those colors. It seems to me that we should grant these skeptical opponents of reality, these microscopic investigators of knowledge today, that much. The instinct driving them away from modern reality has not been refuted. What do we care about the sneaking paths that take them backward! What matters about them is not that they want to go "back," but that they want to get—away. A little more strength, flight, courage, artistry: and they would want to go out and beyond—not back!

11 It seems to me that people everywhere are now trying to turn attention away from Kant's real influence on German philosophy. In particular, they are cleverly slipping past the value he assigned to himself. Kant was proud first and foremost of his table of categories. Holding this table in his hands, he said: "This is the hardest thing that could ever have been undertaken for metaphysics." Just understand that "could have been"! He was proud of having discovered a new faculty in human beings: the faculty for synthetic judgments a priori. Suppose he was deceiving himself here. Still, the development and rapid flowering of German philosophy depend on this pride, and on the rivalry of all the younger thinkers to discover something to be even prouder of, if possible—and in any case, "new faculties"! But let's stop and think; it is time. How are synthetic judgments a priori possible? Kant asked himself. And what did he actually answer? By virtue of a faculty. Unfortunately, he did not say it in three words. He said it at such length, with such solemnity and such an expenditure of German profundity and elaborate flourishes, that people missed the amusing German foolishness tucked inside the answer. People were even beside themselves over this new faculty. The rejoicing reached its peak when Kant went on to discover a moral faculty in human beings as well. For in those days the Germans were still moral, and not at all devoted to "power politics." The honeymoon of German philosophy arrived. All the young theologians at the Tübingen seminary promptly went into the bushes—all hunting for "faculties." And what didn't they find, in that innocent, rich, still youthful age of the German spirit! Romanticism, the wicked fairy, blew and sang into it, back when people still did not know how to tell "finding" from "inventing." Above all, they found a faculty for the "supersensible." Schelling christened it intellectual intuition, and in doing so met the deepest desires of his Germans, whose desires were fundamentally devout. There is no greater injustice we could do to this whole exuberant, rapturous movement than to take it seriously, or even treat it with moral outrage. It was youth, however boldly it dressed itself up in gray, aged concepts. Enough: people grew older, and the dream vanished. A time came when people rubbed their foreheads; they are still rubbing them today. They had been dreaming—first and foremost, old Kant. "By virtue of a faculty," he had said, or at least meant. But is that an answer? An explanation? Isn't it just a repetition of the question? How does opium make people sleep? "By virtue of a faculty," namely its sleep-producing power, answers that doctor in Molière:

Because it contains a sleep-producing power,Whose nature is to put the senses to sleep.

But answers like that belong in comedy. It is finally time to replace Kant's question, "How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?" with another: "Why is belief in such judgments necessary?" It is time, that is, to understand that creatures of our kind must believe these judgments are true in order to survive—though the judgments could, of course, still be false! Or, to put it more plainly, bluntly, and thoroughly: synthetic judgments a priori should not be "possible" at all. We have no right to them; spoken by us, they are nothing but false judgments. Still, belief in their truth is necessary, as a surface belief and visible appearance belonging to the perspectival optics of life. Finally, to recall the enormous effect that "German philosophy" has had throughout Europe—I hope you understand its right to quotation marks?—there can be no doubt that a certain sleep-producing power played a part. Noble idlers, virtuous people, mystics, artists, three-quarter Christians, and political obscurantists of every nation were delighted to have, thanks to German philosophy, an antidote to the still overpowering doctrine of the senses that flowed from the previous century into this one. In short, something "to put the senses to sleep"…

12 As for materialistic atomism, it is among the most thoroughly refuted things there are. Perhaps no scholar in Europe today is still so unscholarly as to give it serious importance, except as a convenient tool for everyday use—that is, as a shortened way of expressing things. For this we must first thank that Pole Boscovich, who, together with the Pole Copernicus, has so far been the greatest and most successful opponent of visible appearances. Copernicus persuaded us to believe, against all the senses, that the earth does not stand still. Boscovich taught us to renounce belief in the last thing about the earth that "stood firm": belief in "substance," in "matter," in the atom as a little lump and last scrap of earth. This was the greatest triumph over the senses ever won on earth. But we must go further. We must also declare war on the "atomistic need" that still leads a dangerous afterlife in areas where no one suspects it, just like the more famous "metaphysical need"—a merciless war to the knife. First, we must also finish off that other, more disastrous atomism that Christianity has taught best and longest: soul atomism. Let me use that term for the belief that takes the soul to be something indestructible, eternal, indivisible—a monad, an atom. This belief must be driven out of science! Between ourselves, there is no need at all to get rid of "the soul" itself in the process and give up one of the oldest and most respected hypotheses. That is what usually happens to clumsy naturalists: the moment they touch "the soul," they lose it. But the way is open to new versions and refinements of the soul hypothesis. Concepts such as "mortal soul," "soul as a multiplicity of subjects," and "soul as a social structure of drives and emotions" now seek citizenship in science. By putting an end to the superstition that has grown around the idea of the soul with an almost tropical abundance, the new psychologist has, of course, pushed himself out into something like a new wasteland and a new distrust. The older psychologists may have had an easier and more enjoyable time. But in the end he knows that this also condemns him to invent—and, who knows? Perhaps to find.

13 Physiologists should think twice before making the drive for self-preservation the primary drive of a living thing. Above all, a living thing wants to release its strength—life itself is will to power. Self-preservation is only one of its indirect and most common results. In short, here as everywhere, beware of unnecessary principles that explain things in terms of purposes! The drive for self-preservation is one such principle (we owe it to Spinoza's inconsistency—). Our method demands this caution: its essential requirement must be economy in principles.

14 It may now be dawning on five or six people that physics too is only an interpretation and arrangement of the world—to fit us, if I may say so!—and not an explanation of the world. But because it rests on belief in the senses, it passes for more than that, and will have to keep passing for more for a long time: namely, for an explanation. It has eyes and fingers on its side; it has visible appearances and things we can touch on its side. This charms, persuades, and convinces an age whose basic taste is that of the common people. Such an age instinctively follows the standard of truth set by the eternally popular doctrine of the senses. What is clear, what is "explained"? Only what can be seen and touched. Every problem must be pushed that far. By contrast, the charm of Plato's way of thinking lay precisely in going against the evidence of the senses. It was a noble way of thinking. Perhaps it arose among people whose senses were even stronger and more demanding than those of our contemporaries, but who knew how to find a higher triumph in remaining masters of these senses. They did so with pale, cold, gray nets of concepts, which they threw over the colorful whirl of the senses—the mob of the senses, as Plato said. This conquering and interpreting of the world in Plato's style offered a different kind of pleasure from what today's physicists offer us, along with the Darwinists and opponents of purpose-based explanations working in physiology, with their principle of the "least possible force" and the greatest possible stupidity. "Where people have nothing left to see or grasp, they have no business looking for anything either." This is certainly a different command from Plato's, but it may be just the right one for a rough, hardworking race of machinists and bridge builders of the future, who have nothing but coarse work to do.

15 To practice physiology with a good conscience, we must insist that the sense organs are not appearances in the sense meant by idealist philosophy. If they were, they could not be causes! So the doctrine of the senses must at least be a guiding hypothesis, not to say a principle of discovery. What? And others even say that the external world is the work of our organs? But then our body, as a piece of that external world, would be the work of our organs! Then our organs themselves would be—the work of our organs! This seems to me a thorough reduction to absurdity, assuming that the concept of being one's own cause is something thoroughly absurd. So the external world is not the work of our organs—?

16 There are still innocent self-observers who believe in "immediate certainties": "I think," for example, or, as Schopenhauer's superstition had it, "I will." It is as though knowledge here could get hold of its object pure and naked, as a "thing in itself," with no falsification on either the subject's side or the object's. But I will repeat a hundred times that "immediate certainty," like "absolute knowledge" and "thing in itself," contains a contradiction in terms. People should finally free themselves from the seduction of words! Ordinary people may believe that knowing means knowing completely. But the philosopher must tell himself: "If I take apart the process expressed in the sentence 'I think,' I get a series of bold claims that are hard, perhaps impossible, to justify. For example: that I am the one thinking; that there must be something doing the thinking at all; that thinking is an activity and effect of a being conceived as a cause; that there is an 'I'; and finally, that it is already settled what is meant by thinking—that I know what thinking is. For if I had not already decided that for myself, how could I judge whether what is happening right now might instead be 'willing' or 'feeling'? In short, that 'I think' assumes that I compare my present condition with other conditions I know in myself, in order to establish what it is. Because it refers back to 'knowledge' from elsewhere, it certainly has no immediate 'certainty' for me." So instead of the "immediate certainty" that ordinary people may believe in here, the philosopher finds himself holding a series of metaphysical questions, genuine questions of intellectual conscience. They are: "Where do I get the concept of thinking? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an I, and even of an I as a cause, and finally of an I as the cause of thoughts?" Anyone who dares to answer these metaphysical questions at once by appealing to a kind of intuitive knowledge—as someone does who says, "I think, and know that this at least is true, real, certain"—will find a philosopher today ready with a smile and two question marks. "Sir," the philosopher may let him know, "it is unlikely that you are not mistaken. But why insist on truth at all?"

17 As for the logicians' superstition, I will never tire of stressing a small, brief fact that these superstitious people dislike admitting: a thought comes when "it" wants to, and not when "I" want it to. So it falsifies the facts to say that the subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think." It thinks. But that this "it" is precisely that old, famous "I" is, to put it mildly, only an assumption, a claim—certainly not an "immediate certainty." In the end, even "it thinks" goes too far. This "it" already contains an interpretation of the process and does not belong to the process itself. Here we reason according to grammatical habit: "Thinking is an activity; every activity requires someone who acts; therefore—." Older atomism followed roughly the same pattern. Besides the "force" that acts, it still looked for that little lump of matter in which the force sits and out of which it acts: the atom. More rigorous minds finally learned to do without this "scrap of earth." Perhaps one day logicians too will get used to doing without that little "it" into which the honest old I has evaporated.

18 It is certainly not the least of a theory's attractions that it can be refuted. That is precisely how it attracts more subtle minds. The theory of "free will," refuted a hundred times, seems to owe its continued existence only to this attraction. Someone keeps coming along who feels strong enough to refute it.

19 Philosophers tend to speak of the will as though it were the best-known thing in the world. Schopenhauer even suggested that the will alone is really known to us, known completely, with nothing taken away or added. But it keeps striking me that in this case too Schopenhauer merely did what philosophers usually do: he adopted a popular prejudice and exaggerated it. To me, willing seems above all to be something complicated, something that is a unity only as a word. And in that single word lies the popular prejudice that has overpowered the philosophers' always scant caution. So let's be more cautious for once. Let's be "unphilosophical" and say: first, in every act of willing there are many feelings. There is the feeling of the condition we want to move away from, the feeling of the condition we want to move toward, the feeling of this "away" and "toward" themselves. There is also an accompanying feeling in the muscles, which, through a kind of habit, begins to play its part as soon as we "will," even if we do not set our "arms and legs" in motion. Just as we must recognize feeling, and indeed many kinds of feeling, as an ingredient of the will, so, second, we must recognize thinking too. In every act of will there is a commanding thought. We must not imagine we could separate this thought from "willing," as though some will would then be left over! Third, the will is not only a complex of feeling and thinking, but above all an emotion: the emotion of command. What is called "freedom of the will" is essentially the feeling of superiority toward someone who must obey: "I am free; 'he' must obey." This awareness is present in every will. So are that tense attention, that direct gaze fixed on one thing alone, that unconditional valuation, "This and nothing else is needed now," that inner certainty of being obeyed, and everything else that belongs to the commander's condition. A person who wills commands something in himself that obeys, or that he believes obeys. But now notice the strangest thing about the will—this thing so full of variety for which ordinary people have only one word. In a given case we are both those who command and those who obey. As those who obey, we know what it feels like to be forced, urged, and pressed, to resist and to move that usually begin immediately after the act of will. On the other hand, we habitually pass over this duality and deceive ourselves about it by means of the unifying concept "I." So a whole chain of mistaken conclusions, and consequently false valuations of the will itself, has attached itself to willing. The result is that the person willing sincerely believes that willing is enough for action. In the great majority of cases, willing has occurred only where the effect of the command—obedience, and therefore action—could also be expected. So the appearance has turned into the feeling that the effect necessarily follows. In short, the person willing believes with a fair degree of certainty that will and action are somehow one. He credits the success, the carrying out of the willing, to the will itself, and in doing so enjoys an increase in the feeling of power that every success brings. "Freedom of the will" is the term for this many-sided state of pleasure in the person who wills. He commands and at the same time identifies himself with the one carrying out the command. As such, he shares in the triumph over resistance, but judges inwardly that his will itself is what really overcomes the resistance. In this way, the person willing adds the pleasurable feelings of the successful tools carrying out his commands, of the obedient "under-wills" or under-souls—for our body is only a social structure of many souls—to his own pleasure as commander. "I am the effect": what happens here is what happens in every well-organized, happy community, where the ruling class identifies itself with the community's successes. All willing is simply a matter of commanding and obeying, on the basis, as I said, of a social structure of many "souls." That is why a philosopher should claim the right to consider willing itself within the field of morality—morality understood, that is, as the study of the relations of rule under which the phenomenon "life" arises.

20 Individual philosophical concepts are not arbitrary things that grow on their own. They grow up in relation and kinship with one another. However suddenly and randomly they may seem to appear in the history of thought, they belong to a system just as much as all the animals of a continent do. One more sign of this is how reliably the most varied philosophers keep filling out a certain basic pattern of possible philosophies. Under an invisible spell, they keep running around the same orbit yet again. However independent of one another they may feel in their drive to criticize or build systems, something in them guides them; something drives them one after another in a particular order. It is precisely that inborn system and kinship of concepts. Their thinking is, in fact, much less a discovery than a recognition, a remembering, a return and homecoming to a distant, ancient, shared household of the soul, out of which those concepts once grew. To that extent, philosophizing is a kind of reversion to ancestry of the highest order. The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing is easy enough to explain. Wherever languages are related, their shared philosophy of grammar—I mean the unconscious rule and guidance of the same grammatical functions—inevitably prepares everything in advance for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems. At the same time, the way seems blocked to certain other possible interpretations of the world. Philosophers in the Ural-Altaic language group, where the concept of the subject is least developed, will very probably look differently "into the world" and be found on different paths from Indo-Europeans or Muslims. The spell of particular grammatical functions is ultimately the spell of physiological value judgments and racial conditions. So much for rejecting Locke's superficial view of the origin of ideas.

21 Being one's own cause is the finest self-contradiction anyone has yet thought up, a kind of logical rape and unnatural act. But human beings' extravagant pride has managed to entangle itself deeply and terribly in precisely this nonsense. The desire for "freedom of the will," in that superlative metaphysical sense that unfortunately still rules the minds of the half-educated, is a desire to bear the whole and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and to relieve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society of it. It is nothing less than the desire to be one's own cause, and, with a daring beyond even Münchhausen's, to pull oneself by the hair out of the swamp of nothingness into existence. Suppose someone sees through the peasant simplicity of this famous concept of "free will" and removes it from his mind. I now ask him to take his "enlightenment" a step further and also remove the reverse of that non-concept "free will" from his mind. I mean the "unfree will," which amounts to misusing cause and effect. We should not mistakenly make real things out of "cause" and "effect", as natural scientists do—and those who, like them, now think in terms of nature—following the prevailing mechanistic stupidity that makes the cause push and shove until it "takes effect." We should use "cause" and "effect" only as pure concepts: that is, as conventional fictions for naming things and communicating, not for explaining them. In the "in itself" there is nothing of "causal connections," of "necessity," of "psychological unfreedom." There, "the effect" does not "follow the cause"; no "law" rules there. We alone have invented causes, succession, being for one another, relativity, compulsion, number, law, freedom, reason, purpose. And when we project this world of signs into things as something "in itself," mixing it into them, we do once again what we have always done: we make mythology. The "unfree will" is mythology. In real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills. When a thinker already feels something of compulsion, distress, having to follow, pressure, and unfreedom in every "causal connection" and "psychological necessity," this is almost always a symptom of what he himself lacks. Feeling in precisely that way is revealing: the person gives himself away. And in general, if I have observed correctly, people approach "unfreedom of the will" as a problem from two completely opposite sides, but always in a deeply personal way. Some refuse at any price to give up their "responsibility," their belief in themselves, their personal right to their own merit (vain races belong here—). Others, on the contrary, want to be responsible for nothing, to be guilty of nothing. Out of an inner self-contempt, they demand to be able to roll themselves off onto something else, anywhere at all. Nowadays, when these latter people write books, they usually take up the cause of criminals. A kind of socialist pity is their most appealing disguise. And indeed, the fatalism of the weak-willed becomes astonishingly prettier when it knows how to present itself as "the religion of human suffering." That is its "good taste."

22 Forgive me, as an old philologist who cannot give up the nasty habit of pointing out bad interpretation: but that "lawfulness of nature" you physicists talk about so proudly, as though—exists only thanks to your interpretation and bad "philology." It is not a fact, not a "text," but merely a naively humanitarian arrangement and distortion of meaning, with which you amply satisfy the democratic instincts of the modern soul! "Equality before the law everywhere—nature is no different and no better off than we are." A nice ulterior thought, disguising once again the mob's hostility to everything privileged and sovereign, as well as a second, subtler atheism. "Neither God nor master"—that is what you want too: and so, "Long live the law of nature!" Isn't that right? But, as I said, this is interpretation, not text. Someone might come along with the opposite intention and skill in interpretation, who knew how to read, out of the same nature and with the same phenomena in view, precisely the tyrannically ruthless and relentless assertion of claims to power. Such an interpreter would show you so clearly the lack of exceptions and conditions in all "will to power" that almost every word, even the word "tyranny," would finally seem unusable, or already a weakening and softening metaphor—too human. Yet he might finish by claiming the same thing about this world that you claim: that it has a "necessary" and "calculable" course. But not because laws rule in it. Rather, because laws are absolutely absent, and every power draws its ultimate consequence at every moment. Suppose this too is only interpretation—and you will be eager enough to object to that effect? Well, so much the better.

23 All psychology so far has remained stuck in moral prejudices and fears. It has not dared to go into the depths. To understand it as a study of forms and a theory of the development of the will to power, as I do—no one has even brushed against that in their thoughts. That is, if we are allowed to see in what has been written so far a symptom of what has been kept silent so far. The power of moral prejudices has penetrated deeply into the most spiritual world, the seemingly coldest world and the one most free of assumptions—and naturally it has done damage, held things back, blinded, and distorted. A genuine physio-psychology has to fight unconscious resistance in the researcher's heart; it has "the heart" against it. Even a theory that "good" and "bad" drives depend on one another distresses and disgusts a still strong and hearty conscience, as a subtler kind of immorality. A theory that all good drives can be derived from bad ones does so even more. But suppose someone goes so far as to take hatred, envy, greed, and the lust to rule as emotions that condition life, as something that must be present in life's whole economy, fundamentally and essentially. It follows that they must be intensified if life is to be intensified. Someone whose judgment moves in this direction suffers from it as from seasickness. And yet even this hypothesis is far from the most painful and strange one in this enormous, still almost new realm of dangerous knowledge. There really are a hundred good reasons for everyone to stay away from it who—can! On the other hand, once your ship has been driven here—well then! Come on! Now grit your teeth hard! Open your eyes! Keep your hand firm on the wheel! We are sailing straight past morality; perhaps we are crushing and grinding up our own remaining morality as we make and dare our voyage there—but what do we matter! Never before has a deeper world of insight opened up to daring travelers and adventurers. And the psychologist who "makes sacrifices" in this way—it is not a sacrifice of the intellect; quite the opposite!—will at least be entitled to demand in return that psychology once again be recognized as the mistress of the sciences. The other sciences exist to serve and prepare for it. For psychology is now once again the path to the fundamental problems.