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(4) The question how things-in-themselves are constituted, quite apart from our sense-receptivity and from the activity of our understanding, must be answered by the further question: how were we able to know that things existed? "Thingness" is one of our own inventions. The question is whether there are not a good many more ways of creating such a world of appearance—and whether this creating, rationalising, adjusting, and falsifying be not the best-guaranteed reality itself: in short, whether that which "fixes the meaning of things" is not the only reality: and whether the "effect of environment upon us" be not merely the result of such will-exercising subjects.... The other "creatures" act upon us; our adjusted world of appearance is an arrangement and an overpowering of its activities: a sort of defensive measure. The subject alone is demonstrable; the hypothesis might be advanced that subjects are all that exist,—that[Pg 74] "object" is only a form of action of subject upon subject ... a modus of the subject.
(k) The Metaphysical Need.
570.
If one resembles all the philosophers that have gone before, one can have no eyes for what has existed and what will exist—one sees only what is. But as there is no such thing as Being; all that the philosophers had to deal with was a host of fancies, this was their "world."
571.
To assert the existence as a whole of things concerning which we know nothing, simply because there is an advantage in not being able to know anything of them, was a piece of artlessness on Kant's part, and the result of the recoil-stroke of certain needs—especially in the realm of morals and metaphysics.
572.
An artist cannot endure reality; he turns away or back from it: his earnest opinion is that the worth of a thing consists in that nebulous residue of it which one derives from colour, form, sound, and thought; he believes that the more subtle, attenuated, and volatile, a thing or a man becomes, the more valuable he becomes: the less real, the greater the worth. This is Platonism: but Plato was guilty of yet further audacity in the matter of[Pg 75] turning tables—he measured the degree of reality according to the degree of value, and said: The more there is of "idea" the more there is of Being. He twisted the concept "reality" round and said: "What ye regard as real is an error, and the nearer we get to the 'idea' the nearer we are to 'truth.'"—Is this understood? It was the greatest of all rechristenings: and because Christianity adopted it, we are blind to its astounding features. At bottom, Plato, like the artist he was, placed appearance before Being! and therefore lies and fiction before truth! unreality before actuality!—He was, however, so convinced of the value of appearance, that he granted it the attributes of "Being," "causality," "goodness," and "truth," and, in short, all those things which are associated with value.
The concept value itself regarded as a cause: first standpoint.
The ideal granted all attributes, conferring honour: second standpoint.
573.
The idea of the "true world" or of "God" as absolutely spiritual, intellectual, and good, is an emergency measure to the extent to which the antagonistic instincts are all-powerful....
Moderation and existing humanity is reflected exactly in the humanisation of the gods. The Greeks of the strongest period, who entertained no fear whatever of themselves, but on the contrary were pleased with themselves, brought down their gods to all their emotions.
The spiritualisation of the idea of God is thus very far from being a sign of progress: one is heartily conscious of this when one reads Goethe—in his works the vaporisation of God into virtue and spirit is felt as being upon a lower plane.
574.
The nonsense of all metaphysics shown to reside in the derivation of the conditioned out of the unconditioned.
It belongs to the nature of thinking that it adds the unconditioned to the conditioned, that it invents it—just as it thought of and invented the "ego" to cover the multifariousness of its processes i it measures the world according to a host of self-devised measurements—according to its fundamental fictions "the unconditioned," "end and means," "things," "substances," and according to logical laws, figures, and forms.
There would be nothing which could be called knowledge, if thought did not first so re-create the world into "things" which are in its own image. It is only through thought that there is untruth.
The origin of thought, like that of feelings, cannot be traced: but that is no proof of its primordiality or absoluteness! It simply shows that we cannot get behind it, because we have nothing else save thought and feeling.
575.
To know is to point to past experience: in its nature it is a regressus in infinitum. That which[Pg 77] halts (in the face of a so-called causa prima or the unconditioned, etc.) is laziness, weariness.
576.
Concerning the psychology of metaphysics—the influence of fear. That which has been most feared, the cause of the greatest suffering (lust of power, voluptuousness, etc.), has been treated with the greatest amount of hostility by men, and eliminated from the "real" world. Thus the passions have been step by step struck out, God posited as the opposite of evil—that is to say, reality is conceived to be the negation of the passions and the emotions (i.e. nonentity).
Irrationality, impulsive action, accidental action, is, moreover, hated by them (as the cause of incalculable suffering). Consequently they denied this element in the absolute, and interpreted it as absolute "rationality" and "conformity of means to ends."
Change and perishability were also feared; and by this fear an oppressed soul is revealed, full of distrust and painful experiences (the case with Spinoza: a man differently constituted would have regarded this change as a charm).
A nature overflowing and playing with energy, would call precisely the passions, irrationality and change, good in a eudemonistic sense, together with their consequences: danger, contrast, ruin, etc.
577.
Against the value of that which always remains the same (remember Spinoza's artlessness and[Pg 78] Descartes' likewise), the value of the shortest and of the most perishable, the seductive flash of gold on the belly of the serpent vita——
578.
Moral values in epistemology itself:—
The faith in reason—why not mistrust?
The "real world" is the good world—why?
Appearance, change, contradiction, struggle, regarded as immoral: the desire for a world which knows nothing of these things.
The transcendental world discovered, so that a place may be kept for "moral freedom" (as in Kant).
Dialectics as the road to virtue (in Plato and Socrates: probably because sophistry was held to be the road to immorality).
Time and space are ideal: consequently there is unity in the essence of things; consequently no sin, no evil, no imperfection, a justification of God.
