THE WILL TO POWER IN SCIENCE.
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Levy, Oscar, and Ludovici, Anthony M. (Anthony Mario)
Thus the road to science was doubly barred: first, by the belief in the real world; and secondly, by the opponents of this belief. Natural science and psychology were (1) condemned in their objects, (2) deprived of their artlessness....
Everything is so absolutely bound and related to everything else in the real world, that to condemn, or to think away anything, means to condemn and think away the whole. The words "this should not be," "this ought not to be," are a farce.... If one imagines the consequences, one would ruin the very source of Life by suppressing everything which is in any sense whatever dangerous or destructive. Physiology proves this much better!
We see how morality (a) poisons the whole concept of the world, (b) cuts off the way to science, (c) dissipates and undermines all real instincts (by teaching that their root is immoral).
We thus perceive a terrible tool of decadence at work, which succeeds in remaining immune, thanks to the holy names and holy attitudes it assumes.
585.
The awful recovery of our consciousness: not of the individual, but of the human species. Let us reflect; let us think backwards; let us follow the narrow and broad highway.
A.
Man seeks "the truth": a world that does not contradict itself, that does not deceive, that does not change, a real world—a world in which there is no suffering: contradiction, deception, variability—-the causes of suffering! He does not doubt that there is such a thing as a world as it ought to be; he would fain find a road to it. (Indian criticism: even the ego is apparent and not real.)
Whence does man derive the concept of reality? —Why does he make variability, deception, contradiction, the origin of suffering; why not rather of his happiness? ...
The contempt and hatred of all that perishes, changes, and varies: whence comes this valuation of stability? Obviously, the will to truth is merely the longing for a stable world.
The senses deceive; reason corrects the errors: therefore, it was concluded, reason is the road to a static state; the most spiritual ideas must be nearest to the "real world."—It is from the senses that the greatest number of misfortunes come they are cheats, deluders, and destroyers.
Happiness can be promised only by Being: change and happiness exclude each other. The loftiest desire is thus to be one with Being. That is the formula for the way to happiness.
In summa: The world as it ought to be exists; this world in which we live is an error—this our world should not exist.
The belief in Being shows itself only as a result: the real primum mobile is the disbelief in Becoming, the mistrust of Becoming, the scorn of all Becoming....
What kind of a man reflects in this way? An unfruitful, suffering kind, a world-weary kind. If we try and fancy what the opposite kind of man would be like, we have a picture of a creature who would not require the belief in Being; he would rather despise it as dead, tedious, and indifferent....
The belief that the world which ought to be, is, really exists, is a belief proper to the unfruitful, who do not wish to create a world as it should be. They take it for granted, they seek for means and ways of attaining to it. "The will to truth"—is the impotence of the will to create.
To recognise that something
Antagonism in
is thus or thus:
the degrees of
To act so that something will
energy in
be thus or thus:
various natures.
The fiction of a world which corresponds to our desires; psychological artifices and interpretations calculated to associate all that we honour and regard as pleasant, with this real world.
"The will to truth" at this stage is essentially the art of interpretation: to which also belongs that interpretation which still possesses strength.
The same species of men, grown one degree poorer, no longer possessed of the power to interpret and to create fictions, produces the Nihilists. A Nihilist is the man who says of the world as it is, that it ought not to exist, and of the world as it ought to be, that it does not exist. According to this, existence (action, suffering, willing, and feeling) has no sense: the pathos of the "in vain" is the Nihilist's pathos—and as pathos it is moreover an inconsistency on the part of the Nihilist.
He who is not able to introduce his will into things, the man without either will or energy, at least invests them with some meaning, i.e. he believes that a will is already in them.
The degree of a man's will-power may be measured from the extent to which he can dispense with the meaning in things, from the extent to which he is able to endure a world without meaning: because he himself arranges a small portion of it.
The philosophical objective view of things may thus be a sign of poverty both of will and of energy. For energy organises what is closest and next; the "scientists," whose only desire is to ascertain what exists, are such as cannot arrange things as they ought to be.
The artists, an intermediary species, they at least set up a symbol of what should exist,—they are productive inasmuch as they actually alter and transform; not like the scientists, who leave everything as it is.
The connection between philosophers and the pessimistic religions; the same species of man (they attribute the highest degree of reality to the things which are valued highest).
The connection between philosophers and moral men and their evaluations (the moral interpretation of the world as the sense of the world: after the collapse of the religious sense).
The overcoming of philosophers by the annihilation of the world of being: intermediary period of Nihilism; before there is sufficient strength present to transvalue values, and to make the world of becoming, and of appearance, the only world to be deified and called good.
B.
Nihilism as a normal phenomenon may be a symptom of increasing strength or of increasing weakness:—