The Genealogy of Morals The Complete Works, Volume Thirteen, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy. · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
24.
And now look at the other side, at those rare cases, of which I spoke, the most supreme idealists to be found nowadays among philosophers and scholars. Have we, perchance, found in them the sought-for _opponents_ of the ascetic ideal, its _anti-idealists_? In fact, they _believe_ themselves to be such, these "unbelievers" (for they are all of them that): it seems that this idea is their last remnant of faith, the idea of being opponents of this ideal, so earnest are they on this subject, so passionate in word and gesture;--but does it follow that what they believe must necessarily be _true_? We "knowers" have grown by degrees suspicious of all kinds of believers, our suspicion has step by step habituated us to draw just the opposite conclusions to what people have drawn before; that is to say, wherever the strength of a belief is particularly prominent to draw the conclusion of the difficulty of proving what is believed, the conclusion of its actual _improbability_. We do not again deny that "faith produces salvation": _for that very reason_ we do deny that faith _proves_ anything,--a strong faith, which produces happiness, causes suspicion of the object of that faith, it does not establish its "truth," it does establish a certain probability of--_illusion_. What is now the position in these cases?
These solitaries and deniers of to-day; these fanatics in one thing, in their claim to intellectual cleanness; these hard, stern, continent, heroic spirits, who constitute the glory of our time; all these pale atheists, anti-Christians, immoralists, Nihilists; these sceptics, "ephectics," and "hectics" of the intellect (in a certain sense they are the latter, both collectively and individually); these supreme idealists of knowledge, in whom alone nowadays the intellectual conscience dwells and is alive--in point of fact they believe themselves as far away as possible from the ascetic ideal, do these "free, very free spirits": and yet, if I may reveal what they themselves cannot see--for they stand too near themselves: this ideal is simply _their_ ideal, they represent it nowadays and perhaps no one else, they themselves are its most spiritualised product, its most advanced picket of skirmishers and scouts, its most insidious delicate and elusive form of seduction.--If I am in any way a reader of riddles, then I will be one with this sentence: for some time past there have been no free spirits; _for they still believe in truth_.
When the Christian Crusaders in the East came into collision with that invincible order of assassins, that order of free spirits _par excellence_, whose lowest grade lives in a state of discipline such as no order of monks has ever attained, then in some way or other they managed to get an inkling of that symbol and tally-word, that was reserved for the highest grade alone as their _secretum_, "Nothing is true, everything is allowed,"--in sooth, that was _freedom_ of thought, thereby was _taking leave_ of the very belief in truth. Has indeed any European, any Christian freethinker, ever yet wandered into this proposition and its labyrinthine consequences? Does he know _from experience_ the Minotauros of this den.--I doubt it--nay, I know otherwise. Nothing is more really alien to these "mono-fanatics," these _so-called_ "free spirits," than freedom and unfettering in that sense; in no respect are they more closely tied, the absolute fanaticism of their belief in truth is unparalleled.
I know all this perhaps too much from experience at close quarters--that dignified philosophic abstinence to which a belief like that binds its adherents, that stoicism of the intellect, which eventually vetoes negation as rigidly as it does affirmation, that wish for standing still in front of the actual, the _factum brutum_, that fatalism in "_petits faits_" (ce petit faitalism, as I call it), in which French Science now attempts a kind of moral superiority over German, this renunciation of interpretation generally (that is, of forcing, doctoring, abridging, omitting, suppressing, inventing, falsifying, and all the other _essential_ attributes of interpretation)--all this, considered broadly, expresses the asceticism of virtue, quite as efficiently as does any repudiation of the senses (it is at bottom only a _modus_ of that repudiation.) But what forces it into that unqualified will for truth is the faith _in the ascetic ideal itself_, even though it take the form of its unconscious imperatives,--make no mistake about it, it is the faith, I repeat, in a _metaphysical_ value, an _intrinsic_ value of truth, of a character which is only warranted and guaranteed in this ideal (it stands and falls with that ideal).
Judged strictly, there does not exist a science without its "hypotheses," the thought of such a science is inconceivable, illogical: a philosophy, a faith, must always exist first to enable science to gain thereby a direction, a meaning, a limit and method, a _right_ to existence. (He who holds a contrary opinion on the subject--he, for example, who takes it upon himself to establish philosophy "upon a strictly scientific basis"--has first got to "turn up-side-down" not only philosophy but also truth itself--the gravest insult which could possibly be offered to two such respectable females!) Yes, there is no doubt about it--and here I quote my _Joyful Wisdom_, cp. Book V. Aph. 344: "The man who is truthful in that daring and extreme fashion, which is the presupposition of the faith in science, _asserts thereby a different world_ from that of life, nature, and history; and in so far as he asserts the existence of that different world, come, must he not similarly repudiate its counterpart, this world, _our_ world?
The belief on which our faith in science is based has remained to this day a metaphysical belief--even we knowers of to-day, we godless foes of metaphysics, we too take our fire from that conflagration which was kindled by a thousand-year-old faith, from that Christian belief, which was also Plato's belief, the belief that God is truth, that truth is _divine_.... But what if this belief becomes more and more incredible, what if nothing proves itself to be divine, unless it be error, blindness, lies--what if God, Himself proved Himself to be our _oldest lie_?"--It is necessary to stop at this point and to consider the situation carefully. Science itself now _needs_ a justification (which is not for a minute to say that there is such a justification). Turn in this context to the most ancient and the most modern philosophers: they all fail to realise the extent of the need of a justification on the part of the Will for Truth--here is a gap in every philosophy--what is it caused by? Because up to the present the ascetic ideal dominated all philosophy, because Truth was fixed as Being, as God, as the Supreme Court of Appeal, because Truth was not allowed to be a problem. Do you understand this "allowed"? From the minute that the belief in the God of the ascetic ideal is repudiated, there exists _a new problem_: the problem of the value of truth. The Will for Truth needed a critique--let us define by these words our own task---the value of truth is tentatively _to be called in question_.... (If this seems too laconically expressed, I recommend the reader to peruse again that passage from the _Joyful Wisdom_ which bears the title, "How far we also are still pious," Aph. 344, and best of all the whole fifth book of that work, as well as the Preface to _The Dawn of Day_.)
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