The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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 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. 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.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.