 Section 13 of Early Greek Philosophy and Other Essays by Frederick Nietzsche. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Section 13 on Truth and False City in their ultra-moral since 1873. In some remote corner of the universe, effused into innumerable solar systems, there was once a star upon which clever animals invented cognition. It was the hottest, most mendacious moment in the history of this world, but yet only a moment. After nature had taken breath awhile, the star congealed in the clever animals had to die. Someone might write a fable after this style, and yet he would not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, shadow-like, transitory, purposeless, and fanciful the human intellect appears in nature. There were eternities during which this intellect did not exist, and when it has once more passed away, there will be nothing to show that it has existed. For this intellect is not concerned with any further omission transcending the sphere of human life. No, it is purely human, and none but its owner and procreator regards it so pathetically as to suppose that the world revolves around it. If, however, we and the nat could understand each other, we should learn that even the nat swims through the air with the same pathos and feels within itself the flying center of the world. Nothing in nature is so bad or so insignificant that it will not at the smallest puff of that force, cognition, immediately swell up like a balloon and just as a mere porter wants to have his admirer, so the very proudest man, the philosopher, imagines he sees from all sides the eyes of the universe telescopically directed upon his actions and thoughts. It is remarkable that this is accomplished by the intellect which after all has been given to the most unfortunate, the most delicate, the most transient beings only as an expedient in order to detain them for a moment in existence from which without that extra gift they would have every cause to flee as swiftly as lessings some. That hardiness connected with cognition and sensation, spreading blinding fogs before the eyes and over the senses of men, deceives itself therefore as to the value of existence owing to the fact that it bears within itself the most flattering evaluation of cognition. Its most general effect is deception, but even its most particular effects have something of deception in their nature. The intellect as a means for the preservation of the individual develops its chief power in dissimulation, for it is by dissimulation that the feebler and less robust individuals preserve themselves since it has been denied them to fight the battle of existence with horns or the sharp teeth of beasts of prey. In man this art of dissimulation reaches its acme of perfection, in him deception, flattery, falsehood and fraud, slander, display, pretentiousness, disguise, cloaking convention and acting to others and to himself in short the continual fluttering to and fro around the one flame, vanity. All these things are so much the rule and the law that few things are more incomprehensible than the way in which an honest and pure impulse to truth could have arisen among men. They are deeply immersed in illusions and dream fancies. Their eyes glance only over the surface of things and see forms. Their sensation nowhere leads to truth but contents itself with receiving stimuli and so to say with playing hide and seek on the back of things. In addition to that at night man allows his dreams to lie to him a whole lifetime long without his moral sense ever trying to prevent them. Whereas men are said to exist to by the exercise of a strong will have overcome the habit of snoring. What indeed does man know about himself? Oh, that he could but once see himself complete, placed as it were in an illuminated glass case. Does not nature keep secret from him most things even about his body? For example, the convolutions of the intestines, the quick flow of the blood currents, the intricate vibrations of the fibers so as to banish and lock him up in proud delusive knowledge. Nature threw away the key and woe to the faithful curiosity which might be able for a moment to look out and down through a crevice in the chamber of consciousness and discover that man indifferent to his own ignorance is resting on that pitiless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous and as it were hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger. Wentz in the wide world with this state of affairs arises the impulse to truth as far as the individual tries to preserve himself against other individuals in the natural state of things he uses the intellect in most cases only for dissimulation. Since, however, man both from necessity and boredom wants to exist socially and gregariously, he must needs make peace and at least endeavor to cause the greatest belem, omnium, contra-omnis to disappear from his world. This first conclusion of peace brings with it as something which looks like the first step towards the attainment of that enigmatical bent for truth. For that which henceforth is to be truth is now fixed. That is to say, a uniformly valid and binding designation of things is invented and the legislature of language also gives the first laws of truth. Since here for the first time originates the contrast between truth and falsity. The liar uses the valid designations, the words in order to make the unreal appear as real. For example, he says I am rich whereas the right designation for his state would be poor. He abuses the fixed conventions by convenient substitution or even inversion of terms. If he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful fashion, society will no longer trust him, but will even exclude him. In this way, men avoid not so much being defrauded but being injured by fraud. At bottom, at this juncture too, they hate not deception but the evil, hostile consequences of certain species of deception. And it is in a similarly limited sense only that man desires truth. He covets the agreeable life-preserving consequences of truth. He is indifferent towards pure, ineffective knowledge. He is even inimical towards truths which possibly might prove harmful or destroying. And moreover, what after all are those conventions of language? Are they possibly products of knowledge, of the love of truth? Do the designations and the things coincide? Is language the adequate expression of all realities? Only by means of forgetfulness can man ever arrive at imagining that he possesses truth in that degree just indicated. If he does not mean to content himself with truth in the shape of tautology, that is with empty husks, he will always obtain illusions instead of truth. What is a word, the expression of a nerve stimulus in sounds? But to infer a cause outside us from the nerve stimulus is already the result of a wrong and unjustifiable application of the proposition of causality. How should we dare if truth with the genesis of language, if the point of view of certainty with the designations had alone been decisive? How indeed should we dare to say the stone is hard, as if hard was known to us otherwise, and not merely as an entirely subjective stimulus? We divide things according to genders. We designate the tree as masculine. The plant is feminine. What arbitrary metaphors? How far flown beyond the canon of certainty? We speak of a serpent. The designation fits nothing but the sinuosity and could therefore also appertain to the worm. What arbitrary demarcations? What one-sided preferences given sometimes to this, sometimes to that quality of a thing? The different languages placed side by side show that with words truth or adequate expression matters little. For otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The thing in itself, it is just this, which would be the pure, ineffective truth, is also quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and not worth making any great endeavor to obtain. He designates only the relations of things to men and for their expression he calls to his help the most daring metaphors. A nerve stimulus first transformed into a percept. First metaphor, the percept again copied into a sound. Second metaphor and each time he leaps completely out of one sphere right into the midst of an entirely different one. One can imagine a man who is quite deaf and has never had a sensation of tone and of music just as this man will possibly marvel at clogged knees, sound figures in the sand will discover their cause in the vibrations of the string and will then proclaim that now he knows what man calls tone. Even so, does it happen to us all with language? When we talk about trees, colors, snow and flowers we believe we know something about the things themselves and yet we only possess metaphors of the things and these metaphors do not in the least correspond to the original essentials. Just as the sound shows itself as a sand figure in the same way the enigmatic X of the thing in itself is seen first as nerve stimulus then as percept and finally as sound. At any rate the genesis of language did not therefore proceed on logical lines and the whole material in which and with which the man of truth, the investigator, the philosopher works and builds originates if not from nephalococcia, cloudland at any rate not from the essence of things. Let us especially think about the formation of ideas every word becomes at once an idea not by having as one might presume to serve as a reminder for the original experience happening but once an absolutely individualized to which experience such word owes its origin no but by having simultaneously to fit innumerable more or less similar which really means never equal therefore altogether unequal cases. Every idea originates through equating the unequal as certainly as no one leaf is exactly similar to any other so certain is it that the idea leaf has been formed through an arbitrary omission of these individual differences through a forgetting of the differentiating qualities and this idea now awakens the notion that in nature there is beside the leaves are something called the leaf perhaps a primal form according to which all leaves were woven drawn accurately measured, colored, crinkled, painted but by unskilled hands so that no copy had turned out correct and trustworthy as a true copy of the primal form. We call a man honest. We ask why has he acted so honestly today? Our customary answer runs on account of his honesty. The honesty that means in the leaf is the cause of the leaves. We really and truly do not know anything at all about an essential quality which might be called the honesty but we do know about numerous individualized and therefore unequal actions which we equate by omission of the unequal and now designate as honest actions. Finally, out of them we formulate a qualitas oculta with the name honesty. The disregarding of the individual and real furnishes us with the idea as it likewise also gives us the form. Whereas nature knows of no forms and ideas and therefore knows no species but only an X do us inaccessible and indefinable for our antithesis of individualized species is anthropomorphic to and does not come from the essence of things. Although on the other hand we do not dare to say that it does not correspond to it for that would be a dog medic assertion and as such just as undemonstrable as its contrary what therefore is true a mobile army of metaphors of autonomies anthropomorphisms in short of some of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified metamorphosed adorned and after a long usage seem to a nation fixed canonic and binding trues are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions worn out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses coins which have their averse the face to now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal still we do not yet know whence the impulse to truth comes for up to now we have heard only about the obligation which society imposes in order to exist to be truthful that is to use the usual metaphors therefore express morally we have heard only about the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention to lie gregariously in a style binding for all now man of course forgets that matters are going thus with him he therefore lies in that fashion pointed out unconsciously and according to habits of centuries standing and by this very unconsciousness by this very beginning he arrives at a sense for truth through this feeling of being obliged to designate one thing is read another as cold a third one as dumb awakes a moral emotion relating to truth out of the antithesis liar whom nobody trusts whom all exclude man demonstrates to himself the venerableness reliability usefulness of truth now as a rational being he submits his actions to the sway of abstractions you no longer suffers himself to be carried away by sudden impressions by sensations he first generalizes all these impressions into paler cooler ideas in order to attach to them the ship of his life and actions everything which makes man stand out in bold relief against the animal depends on this faculty of volatilizing the concrete metaphors into a schema and therefore resolving a perception into an idea for within the range of those schemata something becomes possible that never could succeed under the first perceptual impressions to build up a pyramidal order with casts and grades to create a new world of laws privileges suborders delimitations which now stands opposite the other perceptual world of first impressions and assumes the appearance of being the more fixed general known human of the two and therefore the regulating and imperative one whereas every metaphor of perception is individual and without its equal and therefore it knows how to escape all the attempts to classify it the great edifice of ideas shows the rigid regularity of a Roman columbarium and then logic breeze forth the sternness and coolness which we find in mathematics he who has been breathed upon by this coolness will scarcely believe that the idea to bony and hexahedral and permutable as a die remains however only as the residual of a metaphor and that the illusion of the artistic metamorphosis of a nerve stimulus into percepts is if not the mother than the grandmother of every idea now in this game of dice truth means to use every die as it is designated to count its points carefully to form exact classifications and never to violate the order of casts and the sequences of rank just as the Romans and the trustings for their benefit cut up the sky by means of strong mathematical lines and banned the God as it were into a template into a space limited in this fashion so every nation has above its head such as Scott of ideas divided up mathematically and it understands the demand for truth to mean that every conceptual God is to be looked for only in his own sphere when may hear well admire man who succeeded in piling up and infinitely complex dome of ideas on a movable foundation and as it were on running water as a powerful genius of architecture of course in order to obtain hold on such a foundation it must be as an edifice piled up out of cobwebs so fragile as to be carried away by the ways so firm as not to be blown asunder by every wind in this way man as an architectural genius rises high above the be she builds with wax which she brings together out of nature he with the much more delicate material of ideas which he must first manufacture within himself is very much to be admired here but not on account of his impulse for truth is bent for pure cognition of things if somebody hides a thing behind a bush seeks it again and finds it in the self same place then there is not much to boast up respecting the seeking and finding thus however matters stand with the seeking and finding of truth within the realm of reason if I make the definition of the mammal and then declare after inspecting a camel behold a mammal then no doubt of truth is brought to light thereby but it is a very limited value I mean it is anthropomorphic through and through and does not contain one single point which is true in itself real and universally valid apart from man the seeker after such truth seeks at the bottom only the metamorphosis of the world in man he strives for an understanding of the world as a human like thing and by his baffling gains at best the feeling of an assimilation similarly as the astrologer contemplated the stars in the service of man and in connection with their happiness and unhappiness such as seeker contemplates the whole world as related to man as the infinitely protracted echo of an original sound man as the multiplied copy of the one arc type man his procedure is to apply man as the measure of all things whereby he starts from the error of believing that he has these things immediately before him as pure objects he therefore forgets that the original metaphors of perception are metaphors and takes them for the things themselves only by forgetting that primitive world of metaphors only by the conglolation and coagulation of an original mass of similes and percepts pouring forth as a fiery liquid out of the primal faculty of human fancy only by the invincible faith that this son this window this table is a truth in itself in short only by the fact that man forgets himself as subject and what is more as an artistically creating subject only by all this does he live with some repose safety and consequence if he were able to get out of the prison walls of this faith even for an instant only his self consciousness would be destroyed at once already it costs him some trouble to admit to himself that the insect and the bird perceive a world different from his own and that the question which of the two world perceptions is more accurate is quite a senseless one since to decide this question it would be necessary to apply the standard of right perception that is to apply a standard which does not exist on the whole it seems to me that the right perception which would mean the adequate expression of an object in the subject is a non entity full of contradictions for between two utterly different spheres as between subject and object there is no causality no accuracy no expression but at the utmost and aesthetical relation I mean a suggestive metamorphosis a stammering translation and to quite a distinct foreign language for which purpose however there is needed at any rate and intermediate sphere and intermediate force freely composing and freely inventing the word phenomenon contains many seductions and on that account I void it as much as possible for it is not true that the essence of things appears in the empiric world a painter who had no hands and wanted to express the picture distinctly present to his mind by the agency of song would still reveal much more with this permutation of spheres than the empiric world reveals about the essence of things the very relation about nerve stimulus to the produce percept is in itself no necessary one but if the same percept has been reproduced millions of times and has been the inheritance of many successive generations of man and in the end appears each time to all mankind as the result of the same cause and it attains finally for man the same importance as if it were the unique necessary percept and as if that relation between the original nerve stimulus and the percept produced were a close relation of causality just as a dream eternally repeated would be perceived and judged as though real but the congliation and coagulation of a metaphor does not at all guarantee the necessity and exclusive justification of that metaphor surely every human being who is at home with such contemplations has felt a deep distressed against any idealism of that kind as often as he has distinctly convinced himself of the eternal rigidity omnipresence and infallibility of nature's laws he has arrived at the conclusion that as far as we can penetrate the heights of the telescopic in the depths of the microscopic world everything is quite secure complete infinite determined and continuous science will have to dig in these shafts eternally and successfully and all things found are sure to have to harmonize and not to contradict one another how little does this resemble a product of fancy for if it were one it would necessarily betray somewhere its nature of appearance and unreality against this it may be objected in the first place that if each of us had for himself a different sensibility if we ourselves were only able to perceive sometimes as a bird sometimes as a worm sometimes as a plant or if one of us saw the same stimulus as red another's blue if a third person even proceeded as a tone then nobody would talk of such an orderliness of nature but would conceive of her only as an extremely subjective structure secondly what is for us in general a law of nature it is not known in itself but only in its effects that is to say in its relations to other laws of nature which again are known to us only as sums of relations therefore all these relations refer only one to another and are absolutely incomprehensible to us in their essence only that which we add time space that is relations of sequence and numbers are really known to us in them everything wonderful however that we marvel at in the laws of nature everything that demands an explanation and might seduce us into distrusting idealism lies really and solely in the mathematical rigor and inviolability of the conceptions of time and space these however we produce within ourselves and throw them forth with that necessity with which the spider spins since we are compelled to conceive all things under these forms only then it is no longer wonderful but in all things we actually conceive none but these forms for they all must bear within themselves the laws of number and this very idea of number is the most marvelous in all things all obedience to law which impresses us so forcibly in the orbits of stars and in chemical processes coincides at the bottom with those qualities which we ourselves attach to those things so that it is we who thereby make the impression upon ourselves once it clearly follows that that artistic formation of metaphors with which every sensation in us begins already presupposes those forms is therefore only consummated within them only out of the persistency of these primal forms the possibility explains itself how afterwards out of metaphors themselves a structure of ideas could again be compiled for the latter is an imitation of the relations of time space and number in the realm of metaphors to as we saw it is language which has worked originally at the construction of ideas and later times it is science just as the bee works at the same time at the cells and fills them with honey the science works irresistibly at that great columbarium of ideas the cemetery perception builds ever newer and higher stories supports purifies renews the old cells and endeavors above all to fill that gigantic framework and to arrange within it the whole of the empiric world that is the anthropomorphic world and as the man of action binds his life to reason and its ideas in order to avoid being swept away and losing himself so the secret of truth builds his hut close to the towering edifice of science in order to collaborate with it and to find protection and he needs protection for there are awful powers which continually press upon him and which hold out against the truth of science truth fashioned in quite another way bearing devices of the most heterogeneous character that impulse towards the formation of metaphors that fundamental impulse of man which we cannot reason away for one moment for there about we should reason away man himself isn't truth not defeated nor even subdued by the fact that out of its evaporated products the ideas of regular and rigid new world has been built as a strong hold for it this impulse seeks for itself a new realm of action and another riverbed and finds it in mythos and more generally in art this impulse constantly confuses the rubrics and cells of the ideas by putting up new figures of speech metaphors metonymies it constantly shows its passionate longing for shaping the existing world of waking man as motley irregular and consequentially incoherent attractive and eternally new as the world of dreams is for indeed waking man per se is only clear about his being awake through the rigid and orderly roof of ideas and it is for this very reason that he sometimes comes to believe that he was dreaming when that roof of ideas has for a moment been torn by art Pascal is quite right when he asserts that if the same dream came to us every night we should be just as much occupied by it as by the things which we see every day to quote his words if an artisan were certain that he would dream every night for fully 12 hours that he was a king I believe that he would be just as happy as a king who dreams every night for 12 hours that he is an artisan the wide awake day of our people mystically excitable let us say of the earlier Greeks is in fact through the continually working wonder which the mythos presupposes more akin to the dream than to the day of the thinker sobered by science if every three may at some time talk as a nymph or a God under the disguise of a bull carry away virgins if the Goddess Athena herself be suddenly seen as with a beautiful team she drives accompanied by Pizzastratus through the markets of Athens and every honest Athenian did believe this at any moment as in a dream everything is possible and all natures swarms around man as if she were nothing but the masquerade of the gods who founded a huge joke to deceive man by assuming all possible forms man himself however has an invincible tendency to let himself be deceived and he is like one enchanted with happiness when the rhapsodist narrates to him epic romances in such a way that they appear real or when the actor on the stage makes the king appear more kingly than reality shows him intellect that master of dissimulation is free and dismissed from his service as slave so long as it is able to deceive without injuring and then it celebrates its satanalia never is it richer prouder more luxuriant more skillful and daring with a creator's delight it throws metaphors into confusion shifts the boundary stones of the abstraction so that for instance it designates the stream as the mobile way which carries man to that place whether he would otherwise go now it has thrown off its shoulders the emblem of servitude usually with gloomy officiousness it endeavors to point out the way to report individual coveting existence and it fares forth for plunder and booty like a servant for his master but now it itself has become a master and may wipe from its countenance the expression of indigence whatever it now does compared with its former doings bears within itself dissimulation just as its former doings bore the character of distortion it copies human life but takes it for a good thing and seems to rest quite satisfied with it that enormous framework and hoarding of ideas by clinging to which needy man saves himself through life is to the freed intellect only a scaffolding and a toy for its most daring feats and when it smashes it to pieces throws it into confusion and then puts it together ironically pairing the strangers separating the nearest items then it manifests that it has no use for those makeshifts of misery and that it is now no longer led by ideas but by intuitions from these intuitions no regular road leads into the land of the spectral schemata the abstractions for them the word is not made when man sees them he is dumb or speaks in forbidden metaphors and in unheard of combinations are ideas in order to correspond creatively with the impression of the powerful present intuition at least by destroying and jeering at the old barriers of ideas there are ages when the rational and the intuitive man stands side by side the one full of fear of the intuition the other full of scorn for the abstraction the latter just as irrational as the former is in artistic both desire to rule over life the one by knowing how to meet the most important needs with foresight prudence regularity the other as an over joyous hero by ignoring those needs and taking that life only as real which simulates appearance and beauty wherever intuitive man as for instance in the earlier history of Greece brandishes his weapons more powerfully and victoriously than his opponent there under favorable conditions a culture can develop and art can establish a rule over life that dissembling that denying of neediness that splendor of metaphorical notions and especially that directness of dissimulation accompany all utterances of such a life neither the house of man nor his way of walking nor as clothing nor as earth and jug suggest that necessity invented them it seems as if they all were intended as the expressions of a sublime happiness and Olympic cloudlessness and as it were a playing at seriousness whereas the man guided by ideas and abstractions only wards off misfortune by means of them without even enforcing for himself happiness out of the abstractions whereas he strives after the greatest possible freedom from pains the intuitive man dwelling in the midst of culture has from his intuitions a harvest besides the wording off of evil he attains a continuous in pouring of enlightenment enlightenment and redemption of course when he does suffer he suffers more and even suffers more frequently since he cannot learn from experience but again and again falls into the same ditch into which he has fallen before in suffering he is just as irrational as in happiness he cries out and finds no consolation how different matters are in the same misfortune with the stoic taught by experience and ruling himself by ideas he who otherwise only looks for uprightness true freedom from deceptions and shelter from ensnaring a sudden attack in his misfortune performs the masterpiece of dissimulation just as the other did in his happiness he shows no twitching mobile human face but as it were a mask with dignified harmonious features he does not cry out and does not even alter his voice when a heavy thundercloud bursts upon him he wraps himself up in his cloak and with slow and measured step walks away from beneath it in a section 13 in early Greek philosophy and other essays by Frederick Nietzsche