THE WILL TO POWER IN SCIENCE.
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Levy, Oscar, and Ludovici, Anthony M. (Anthony Mario)
Logical accuracy, transparency, considered as the criterion of truth ("omne illud verum est, quod clare et distincte percipitur."—Descartes): by this means the mechanical hypothesis of the world becomes desirable and credible.
But this is gross confusion: like simplex sigillum veri. Whence comes the knowledge that the real nature of things stands in this relation to our intellect? Could it not be otherwise? Could it not be this, that the hypothesis which gives the intellect the greatest feeling of power and security, is preferred, valued, and marked as true—The intellect sets its freest and strongest faculty and ability as the criterion of what is most valuable, consequently of what is true....
"True"—from the standpoint of sentiment—is that which most provokes sentiment ("I");
from the standpoint of thought—is that which gives thought the greatest sensation of strength;
from the standpoint of touch, sight, and hearing—is that which calls forth the greatest resistance.
Thus it is the highest degrees of activity which awaken belief in regard to the object, in regard to its "reality." The sensations of strength, struggle, and resistance convince the subject that there is something which is being resisted.
534.
The criterion of truth lies in the enhancement of the feeling of power.
535.
According to my way of thinking, "truth" does not necessarily mean the opposite of error, but, in the most fundamental cases, merely the relation of different errors to each other: thus one error might be older, deeper than another, perhaps altogether ineradicable, one without which organic creatures like ourselves could not exist; whereas other errors might not tyrannise over us to that extent as conditions of existence, but when measured according to the standard of those other "tyrants," could even be laid aside and "refuted." Why should an irrefutable assumption necessarily be "true"? This question may exasperate the logicians who limit things according to the limitations they find in themselves: but I have long since declared war with this logician's optimism.
536.
Everything simple is simply imaginary, but not "true." That which is real and true is, however, neither a unity nor reducible to a unity.
537.
What is truth?—Inertia; that hypothesis which brings satisfaction, the smallest expense of intellectual strength, etc.
538.
First proposition. The easier way of thinking always triumphs over the more difficult way;—dogmatically: simplex sigillum veri.—Dico: to suppose that clearness is any proof of truth, is absolute childishness. . . .
Second proposition. The teaching of Being, of things, and of all those constant entities, is a hundred times more easy than the teaching of Becoming and of evolution. . .
Third proposition. Logic was intended to be a method of facilitating thought: a means of expression, —not truth. . . . Later on it got to act like truth. . . .
539.
Parmenides said: "One can form no concept of the non-existent";—we are at the other extreme, and say, "That Of which a concept can be formed, is certainly fictional."
540.
There are many kinds of eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes—therefore there must be many kinds of "truths," and consequently there can be no truth.
541.
Inscriptions over the porch of a modern lunatic asylum.
"That which is necessarily true in thought must be necessarily true in morality."—HERBERT SPENCER.
"The ultimate test of the truth of a proposition is the inconceivableness of its negation,"—HERBERT SPENCER.
542.
If the character of existence were false,:—and this would be possible,—what would truth then be, all our truth? ... An unprincipled falsification of the false? A higher degree of falseness? ...
543.
In a world which was essentially false, truthfulness would be an anti-natural tendency: its only purpose would be to provide a means of attaining to a higher degree of falsity. For a world of truth and Being to be simulated, the truthful one would first have to be created (it being understood that he must believe himself to be "truthful").
Simple, transparent, not in contradiction with himself, lasting, remaining always the same to himself, free from faults, sudden changes, dissimulation, and form: such a man conceives a world of Being as "God" in His own image.
In order that truthfulness may be possible, the whole sphere in which man moves must be very tidy, small, and respectable: the advantage in every respect must be with the truthful one.—Lies, tricks, dissimulations, must cause astonishment.
544.
"Dissimulation" increases in accordance with the rising order of rank among organic beings. In the inorganic world it seems to be entirely absent. There power opposes power quite roughly —ruse begins in the organic world; plants are already masters of it. The greatest men, such as Cæsar and Napoleon (see Stendhal's remark concerning him),[3] as also the higher races (the Italians), the Greeks (Odysseus); the most supreme cunning, belongs to the very essence of the elevation of man. ... The problem of the actor. My Dionysian ideal.... The optics of all the organic functions, of all the strongest vital instincts: the power which will have error in all life; error as the very first principle of thought itself. Before "thought" is possible, "fancy" must first have done its work; the picturing of identical cases, of the seemingness of identity, is more primeval than the cognition of identity.
(h) Against Causality.
545.
I believe in absolute space as the basis of force, and I believe the latter to be limited and formed. Time, eternal. But space and time as things in themselves do not exist. "Changes" are only appearances (or mere processes of our senses to us); if we set recurrence, however regular, between them, nothing is proved beyond the fact that it has always happened so. The feeling that post hoc is propter hoc, is easily explained as the result of a misunderstanding, it is comprehensible. But appearances cannot be "causes"!
546.
The interpretation of a phenomenon, either as an action or as the endurance of an action (that is to say, every action involves the suffering of it), amounts to this: every change, every differentiation, presupposes the existence of an agent and somebody acted upon, who is "altered."
Source notes
[3] The reference to Stendhal here, seems to point to a passage in his Life of Napoleon (Preface, p. xv) of which Nietzsche had made a note in another place, and which reads: "Une croyance presque instinctive chez moi c'est que tout homme puissant ment quand il parle et à plus forte raison quand il écrit."