Nietzsche

Books

Beyond Good and Evil

Granted that we want the truth: why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance?

Prejudices of Philosophers, 1

For example, that the certain is worth more than the uncertain, that illusion is less valuable than "truth": such valuations, in spite of their regulative importance for us, might notwithstanding be only superficial valuations... Supposing, in effect, that man is not just the "measure of things..."

Prejudices of Philosophers, 3

The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it... The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing; and we are fundamentally inclined to maintian that the falsest opinions (to which the syntehtci judgements a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us... without a comparison of reality with the purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live... To recognize untruth as a condition of life: that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner,and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.

Prejudices of Philosophers, 4

Accordingly, I do not believe that an "impulse to knowledge" is the father of philosophy; but that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has only made use of knowledge (and mistaken knowledge!) as an instrument.

Prejudices of Philosophers, 6

To be sure, in the case of scholars, in the case of really scientific men, it may be otherwise - "better," if you will; there may really be such a thing as an "impulsse oto knowledge," some kind of small, independent clockwork, which, when well wound up, works away industriously to that end, without the rest of the scholarly impulses taking any material part therein.

Prejudices of Philosophers, 6

But this is an old and everlasting story... as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to "creation of the world," the will to the causa prima.

Prejudices of Philosophers, 9