The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
_A._
Man seeks "the truth": a world that does not contradict itself, that does not deceive, that does not change, a _real_ world--a world in which there is no suffering: contradiction, deception, variability---the causes of suffering! He does not doubt that there is such a thing as a world as it ought to be; he would fain find a road to it. (Indian criticism: even the ego is apparent and _not_ real.) Whence does man derive the concept of _reality_? --Why does he make variability, deception, contradiction, the origin of _suffering;_ why not rather of his happiness? ... The contempt and hatred of all that perishes, changes, and varies: whence comes this valuation of stability? Obviously, the will to truth is _merely_ the longing for a _stable world._ The senses deceive; reason corrects the errors: _therefore,_ it was concluded, reason is the road to a static state; the most _spiritual_ ideas must be nearest to the "real world."--It is from the senses that the greatest number of misfortunes come they are cheats, deluders, and destroyers. Happiness can be promised only by Being: change and happiness exclude each other. The loftiest desire is thus to be one with Being. That is the formula for the way to happiness. _In summa:_ The world as it _ought_ to be exists; this world in which we live is an error--this our world should _not_ exist.
_The belief in Being_ shows itself only as a result: the real primum _mobile_ is the disbelief in Becoming, the mistrust of Becoming, the scorn of all Becoming.... What kind of a man reflects in this way? An unfruitful, _suffering_ kind, a world-weary kind. If we try and fancy what the opposite kind of man would be like, we have a picture of a creature who would not require the belief in Being; he would rather despise it as dead, tedious, and indifferent.... The belief that the world which ought to be, is, really exists, is a belief proper to the unfruitful, _who do not wish to create a world as it should be._ They take it for granted, they seek for means and ways of attaining to it. "The will to truth"--_is the impotence of the will to create._ To recognise that something } Antagonism in is _thus_ or _thus:_ } the degrees of To act so that something will } energy in be _thus_ or _thus:_ } various natures. The fiction of a world which corresponds to our desires; psychological artifices and interpretations calculated to associate all that we honour and regard as pleasant, with this _real world._ "The will to truth" at this stage is essentially _the art of interpretation:_ to which also belongs that interpretation which still possesses strength.
The same species of men, grown one degree poorer, _no longer possessed of the power_ to interpret and to create fictions, produces the Nihi_lists._ A Nihilist is the man who says of the world as it is, that it ought _not_ to exist, and of the world as it ought to be, that it does not exist. According to this, existence (action, suffering, willing, and feeling) has no sense: the pathos of the "in vain" is the Nihilist's pathos--and as pathos it is moreover an _inconsistency_ on the part of the Nihilist. He who is not able to introduce his will into things, the man without either will or energy, at least invests them with some meaning, _i.e._ he believes that a will is already in them. The degree of a man's _will-power_ may be measured from the extent to which he can dispense with the meaning in things, from the extent to which he is able to endure a world without meaning: _because he himself arranges a small portion of it._ The _philosophical objective view of things_ may thus be a sign of poverty both of will and of energy. For energy organises what is closest and next; the "scientists," whose only desire is to _ascertain_ what exists, are such as cannot arrange things _as they ought to be._
The _artists,_ an intermediary species, they at least set up a symbol of what should exist,--they are productive inasmuch as they actually _alter_ and transform; not like the scientists, who leave everything as it is. _The connection between philosophers and the pessimistic religions;_ the same species of man (_they attribute the highest degree of reality_ to the _things which are valued highest_). _The connection between philosophers and moral men_ and their evaluations (the _moral_ interpretation of the world as the sense of the world: after the collapse of the religious sense). _The overcoming of philosophers_ by the annihilation of the world of being: intermediary period of Nihilism; before there is sufficient strength present to transvalue values, and to make the world of becoming, and of appearance, the _only_ world to be deified and called good.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.