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Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
In some remote corner of the universe, scattered among innumerable and sparkling solar systems, there was once a star in which cunning animals invented knowledge. It was the most superb and most fallacious minute in the history of the universe, but, after all, only a minute.
After a couple of breaths of nature, the star went numb and the cunning animals had to perish.
Someone could invent such a fable and yet it would not have sufficiently illustrated how pitiful and gloomy, how sterile and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature; there were eternities in which it did not exist, when again it is all over for it, nothing will have happened. For there is for that intellect no further mission leading beyond human life.
It is only human, and only its possessor and creator takes it so pathetically as if the hinges of the world were turning in it. But if we could understand a mosquito, we would come to know that it, too, sails through the air with the same pathos and feels itself to be the flying center of this world. There is nothing in nature so despicable and insignificant that, with the slightest breath of that power of knowledge, it does not immediately swell like a wineskin; and just as any stable boy wants to have his admirers, so the proudest of men, the philosopher, wants the eyes of the universe to gaze telescopically on his actions and thoughts from everywhere.
It is remarkable that such a state is produced by the intellect, which, precisely, has only been added as a resource to the most wretched, delicate and ephemeral beings, in order to preserve them for a minute in existence; from which, on the contrary, without this addition, they would have every reason to flee as quickly as Lessing's son1.
That pride attached to knowledge and sensation, a blinding mist placed over the eyes and senses of men, deceives them about the value of existence, for it carries in it the most flattering valuation of knowledge itself. Its most general effect is deception-though even the more particular effects carry with them something of the same character.
The intellect, as a means for the preservation of the individual, develops its primary forces in fiction, for this is the means by which weak and feeble individuals are preserved, such as those who have been denied the use, in the struggle for existence, of horns or the sharp teeth of butchering animals.
This art of fiction reaches its highest expression in man: here deceit, flattery, lying and fraud, backbiting, hypocrisy, living on the glitter of others, masking, concealing conventionalism, theatrics before others and oneself, in a word, the incessant fluttering before the flame of vanity is to such an extent the rule and the law, that there is hardly anything more inconceivable than the fact that a sincere and pure impulse towards truth could have arisen among men.
They are deeply immersed in illusions and reveries, their glances are limited to gliding over the surface of things and perceiving forms, their sensations do not in any case lead to truth, but are content to receive stimuli and, as it were, to play a groping game on the back of things.
Moreover, all his life long, man allows himself to be deceived at night in sleep, without his moral sentiment ever having tried to prevent it; whereas there seem to have been men who, by dint of willpower, have succeeded in eliminating snoring.
What does man really know of himself? Would he be able to perceive himself, if only once, as if he were lying in an illuminated glass case? Does not nature conceal most things from him, even about his own body, so that, apart from the convolutions of his bowels, the rapid flow of his blood circulation, the complex vibrations of his fibers, he is secluded and enclosed in a proud and duping consciousness? She has thrown away the key, and woe betide the dismal curiosity that could look, for once, outward and downward, through a crevice of the room of consciousness and glimpse then that the human being rests on cruelty, greed, insatiability, murder, in the indifference of his ignorance and, as it were, hanging in his dreams on the back of a tiger!