The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
602.
This relative world, this world for the eye, the touch, and the ear, is very false, even when adjusted to a much more sensitive sensual apparatus. But its comprehensibility, its clearness, its practicability, its beauty, will begin to _near their end_ if we _refine_ our senses, just as beauty ceases to exist when the processes of its history are reflected upon: the arrangement of the _end_ is in itself an illusion. Let it suffice, that the more coarsely and more superficially it is understood, the _more valuable,_ the more definite, the more beautiful and important the world then seems. The more deeply one looks into it, the further our valuation retreats from our view,-_senselessness approaches!_ We have created the world that has any value! Knowing this, we also perceive that the veneration of truth is already the _result of illusion_--and that it is much more necessary to esteem the formative, simplifying, moulding, and romancing power. "All is false--everything is allowed!" Only as the result of a certain bluntness of vision and the desire for simplicity does the beautiful and the "valuable" make its appearance: in itself it is purely fanciful. We know that the destruction of an illusion does not necessarily produce a truth, but only one more piece of _ignorance;_ it is the extension of our "empty space," an increase in our "waste."
Of what alone can _knowledge_ consist?--"Interpretation," the introduction of a sense into things, _not_ "explanation" (in the majority of cases a new interpretation of an old interpretation which has grown incomprehensible and little more than a mere sign). There is no such thing as an established fact, everything fluctuates, everything, is intangible, yielding; after all, the most lasting of all things are our opinions. The ascertaining of "truth" and "untruth," the ascertaining of facts in general, is fundamentally different from the creative _placing,_ forming, moulding, subduing, and _willing_ which lies at the root of _philosophy. To give a sense to things_--this duty always remains _over,_ provided _no sense already lies in them._ The same holds good of sounds, and also of the fate of nations they are susceptible of the most varied interpretations and turns, _for different purposes._ A higher duty is to _fix a goal_ and to mould facts according to it: _that is,_ the _interpretation of action,_ and not merely a _transvaluation_ of concepts. Man ultimately finds nothing more in things than he himself has laid in them--this process of finding again is science, the actual process of laying a meaning in things, is art, religion, love, pride. In both, even if they are child's play, one should show good courage and one should plough ahead; on the one hand, to find again, on the other,--we are the other,--to lay a sense in things. _Science_: its two sides:-- In regard to the individual; In regard to the complex of culture ("levels of culture") --antagonistic valuation in regard to this and that side.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.