http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ml#post5572429
It is only by means of
forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a
"truth" of the grade just indicated. If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of
tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty husks, then he will
always exchange truths for illusions.
What is a word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus. But the further inference
from the nerve stimulus to a cause outside of us is already the result of a false and
unjustifiable application of the principle of sufficient reason. If truth alone had been
the deciding factor in the genesis of language, and if the standpoint of certainty had
been decisive for designations, then how could we still dare to say "the stone is hard,"
as if "hard" were something otherwise familiar to us, and not merely a totally
subjective stimulation! We separate things according to gender, designating the tree as
masculine and the plant as feminine. What arbitrary assignments! How far this
oversteps the canons of certainty! We speak of a "snake": this designation touches
only upon its ability to twist itself and could therefore also fit a worm. What arbitrary
differentiations! What one-sided preferences, first for this, then for that property of a
thing!
The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question
of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so
many languages. The "thing in itself" (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart
from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite
incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth
striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for
expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors. To begin with, a
nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is
imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping
of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one. One can
imagine a man who is totally deaf and has never had a sensation of sound and music.
Perhaps such a person will gaze with astonishment at Chladni's sound figures; perhaps
he will discover their causes in the vibrations of the string and will now swear that he
must know what men mean by "sound."
It is this way with all of us concerning language; we believe that we know something
about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and
yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things--metaphors which correspond in no
way to the original entities. In the same way that the sound appears as a sand figure,
so the mysterious X of the thing in itself first appears as a nerve stimulus, then as an
image, and finally as a sound. Thus the genesis of language does not proceed logically
in any case, and all the material within and with which the man of truth, the scientist,
and the philosopher later work and build, if not derived from never-never land, is a
least not derived from the essence of things. In particular, let us further consider the
formation of concepts. Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it
is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original
experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as
it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases--which means, purely
and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept
arises from the equation of unequal things.
Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain
that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences
and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to
the leaves, there exists in nature the "leaf": the original model according to which all
the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted--but
by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy,
and faithful likeness of the original model. We call a person "honest," and then we ask
"why has he behaved so honestly today?" Our usual answer is, "on account of his
honesty." Honesty! This in turn means that the leaf is the cause of the leaves. We
know nothing whatsoever about an essential quality called "honesty"; but we do know
of countless individualized and consequently unequal actions which we equate by
omitting the aspects in which they are unequal and which we now designate as
"honest" actions.
Finally we formulate from them a qualities occulta which has the name "honesty." We
obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual;
whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no
species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us. For
even our contrast between individual and species is something anthropomorphic and
does not originate in the essence of things; although we should not presume to claim
that this contrast does not correspond o the essence of things: that would of course be
a dogmatic assertion and, as such, would be just as indemonstrable as its opposite.
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and;
anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically
and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage,
seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we
have forgotten are illusions- they are metaphors that have become worn out and have
been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now
considered as metal and no longer as coins.
We still do not yet know where the drive for truth comes from. For so far we have
heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to
employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie
according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon
everyone. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus
he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which
are centuries' old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness
he arrives at his sense of truth. From the sense that one is obliged to designate one
thing as "red," another as "cold," and a third as "mute," there arises a moral impulse in
regard to truth. The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a
person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts
and everyone excludes.
As a "rational" being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He
will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions. First
he universalizes all these impressions into less colorful, cooler concepts, so that he
can entrust the guidance of his life and conduct to them. Everything which
distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual
metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is
possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid
first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and
degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly
marked boundaries-a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of
first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than
the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world.
Whereas each perceptual metaphor is individual and without equals and is therefore
able to elude all classification, the great edifice of concepts displays the rigid
regularity of a Roman columbarium and exhales in logic that strength and coolness
which is characteristic of mathematics. Anyone who has felt this cool breath [of logic]
will hardly believe that even the concept-which is as bony, foursquare, and
transposable as a die-is nevertheless merely the residue of a metapho r, and that the
illusion which is involved in the artistic transference of a nerve stimulus into images
is, if not the mother, then the grandmother of every single concept. But in this
conceptual crap game "truth" means using every die in the designated manner,
counting its spots accurately, fashioning the right categories, and never violating the
order of caste and class rank.
Just as the Romans and Etruscans cut up the heavens with rigid mathematical lines
and confined a god within each of the spaces thereby delimited, as within a templum ,
so every people has a similarly mathematically divided conceptual heaven above
themselves and henceforth thinks that truth demands that each conceptual god be
sought only within his own sphere. Here one may certainly admire man as a mighty
genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of
concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in
order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one
constructed of spiders' webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong
enough not to be blown apart by every wind.
As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following
way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with
the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from
himself. In this he is greatly to be admired, but not on account of his drive for truth or
for pure knowledge of things. When someone hides something behind a bush and
looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to
praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking
and finding "truth" within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a
mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare "look, a mammal' I have indeed
brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it is
a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be
"true in itself" or really and universally valid apart from man.
At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis
of the world into man. He strives to understand the world as something analogous to
man, and at best he achieves by his struggles the feeling of assimilation. Similar to the
way in which astrologers considered the stars to be in man 's service and connected
with his happiness and sorrow, such an investigator considers the entire universe in
connection with man: the entire universe as the infinitely fractured echo of one
original sound-man; the entire universe as the infinitely multiplied copy of one
original picture-man. His method is to treat man as the measure of all things, but in
doing so he again proceeds from the error of believing that he hasthese things [which
he intends to measure] immediately before him as mere objects. He forgets that the
original perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the things
themselves. Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any
repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation
of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human
imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith ththis sun, this window, this
table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically
creative subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency.
If but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his "self
consciousness" would be immediately destroyed. It is even a difficult thing for him to
admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from
the one that man does, and that the question of which of these perceptions of the
world is the more correct one is quite meaningless, for this would have to have been
decided previously in accordance with the criterion of thecorrect perception, which
means, in accordance with a criterion which is not available . But in any case it seems
to me that "the correct perception" -- which would mean "the adequate expression of
an object in the subject" -- is a contradictory impossibility.
For between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is
no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation:
I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign
tongue-for which I there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate
sphere and mediating force. "Appearance" is a word that contains many temptations,
which is why I avoid it as much as possible. For it is not true that the essence of things
"appears" in the empirical world. A painter without hands who wished to express in
song the picture before his mind would, by means of this substitution of spheres, still
reveal more about the essence of things than does the empirical world. Even the
relationship of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is not a necessary one.
But when the same image has been generated millions of times and has been handed
down for many generations and finally appears on the same occasion every time for
all mankind, then it acquires at last the same meaning for men it would have if it were
the sole necessary image and if the relationship of the original nerve stimulus to the
generated image were a strictly causal one. In the same manner, an eternally repeated
dream would certainly be felt and judged to be reality. But the hardening and
congealing of a metaphor guarantees absolutely nothing concerning its necessity and
exclusive justification.
Every person who is familiar with such considerations has no doubt felt a deep
mistrust of all idealism of this sort: just as often as he has quite early convinced
himself of the eternal consistency, omnipresence, and fallibility of the laws of nature.
He has concluded thatso far as we can penetrate here-from the telescopic heights to
the microscopic depths-everything is secure, complete, infinite, regular, and without
any gaps. Science will be able to dig successfully in this shaft forever, and the things
that are discovered will harmonize with and not contradict each other. How little does
this resemble a product of the imagination, for if it were such, there should be some
place where the illusion and reality can be divined.
Against this, the following must be said: if each us had a different kind of sense
perception-if we could only perceive things now as a bird, now as a worm, now as a
plant, or if one of us saw a stimulus as red, another as blue, while a third even heard
the same stimulus as a sound-then no one would speak of such a regularity of nature,
rather, nature would be grasped only as a creation which is subjective in the highest
degree. After all, what is a law of nature as such for us? We are not acquainted with it
in itself, but only with its effects, which means in its relation to other laws of naturewhich,
in turn, are known to us only as sums of relations. Therefore all these relations
always refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their
essence.
All that we actually know about these laws of nature is what we ourselves bring to
them-time and space, and therefore relationships of succession and number. But
everything marvelous about the laws of nature, everything that quite astonishes us
therein and seems to demand explanation, everything that might lead us to distrust
idealism: all this is completely and solely contained within the mathematical strictness
and inviolability of our representations of time and space. But we produce these
representations in and from ourselves with the same necessity with which the spider
spins. If we are forced to comprehend all things only under these forms, then it ceases
to be amazing that in all things we actually comprehend nothing but these forms. For
they must all bear within themselves the laws of number, and it is precisely number
which is most astonishing in things. All that conformity to law, which impresses us so
much in the movement of the stars and in chemical processes, coincides at bottom
with those properties which we bring to things. Thus it is we who impress ourselves in
this way. In conjunction with this, it of course follows that the artistic process of
metaphor formation with which every sensation begins in us already presupposes
these forms and thus occurs within them. The only way in which the possibility of
subsequently constructing a new conceptual edifice from metaphors themselves can
be explained is by the firm persistence of these original forms.
That is to say: this conceptual edifice is an imitation of temporal, spatial, and
numerical relationships in the domain of metaphor.
We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of
concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science.
Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science
works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of
perceptions. It is always building new, higher stories and shoring up, cleaning, and
renovating the old cells; above all, it takes pains to fill up this monstrously towering
framework and to arrange therein the entire empirical world, which is to say, the
anthropomorphic world. Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its
concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds
his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on it and to
find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist. And he requires
shelter, for there are frightful powers which continuously break in upon him, powers
which oppose scientific "truth" with completely different kinds of "truths" which bear
on their shields the most varied sorts of emblems. The drive toward the formation of
metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant
dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself.
This drive is not truly vanquished and scarcely subdued by the fact that a regular and
rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own ephemeral products, the
concepts. It seeks a new realm and another channel for its activity, and it finds
thismyth and in art generally. This drive continually confuses the conceptual
categories and cells by bringing forward new transferences, metaphors, and
metonymies. It continually manifests an ardent desire to refashion the world which
presents itself to waking man, so that it will be as colorful, irregular, lacking in results
and coherence, charming, and eternally new as the world of dreams. Indeed, it is only
by means of the rigid and regular web of concepts that the waking man clearly sees
that he is awake; and it is precisely because of this that he sometimes thinks that he
must be dreaming when this web of concepts is torn by art.
Pascal is right in maintaining that if the same dream came to us every night we would
be just as occupied with it as we are with the things that we see every day. "If a
workman were sure to dream for twelve straight hours every night that he was king,"
said Pascal, "I believe that he would be just as happy as a king who dreamt for twelve
hours every night that he was a workman. In fact, because of the way that myth takes
it for granted that miracles are always happening, the waking life of a mythically
inspired people -- the ancient Greeks, for instance -- more closely resembles a dream
than it does the waking world of a scientifically disenchanted thinker. When every
tree can suddenly speak as a nymph, when a god in the shape of a bull can drag away
maidens, when even the goddess Athena herself is suddenly seen in the company of
Peisastratus driving through the market place of Athens with a beautiful team of
horses -- and this is what the honest Athenian believed -- then, as in a dream, anything
is possible at each moment, and all of nature swarms around man as if it were nothing
but a masquerade of the gods, who were merely amusing themselves by deceiving
men in all these shapes.
But man has an invincible inclination to allow himself to be deceived D and is, as it
were, enchanted with happiness when the rhapsodist tells him epic fables as if they
were true, or when the actor in the theater acts more royally than any real king. So
long as it is able to deceive without injuring, that master of deception, the intellect, is
free; it is released from its former slavery and celebrates its Saturnalia. It is never
more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more clever and more daring. With creative pleasure
it throws metaphors into confusion and displaces the boundary stones of abstractions,
so that, for example, it designates the stream as "the moving path which carries man
where he would otherwise walk." The intellect has now thrown the token of bondage
from itself.
At other times it endeavors, with gloomy officiousness, to show the way and to
demonstrate the tools to a poor individual who covets existence; it is like a servant
who goes in search of booty and prey for his master. But now it has become the
master and it dares to wipe from its face the expression of indigence. In comparison
with its previous conduct, everything that it now does bears the mark of dissimulation,
just as that previous conduct did of distortion. The free intellect copies human life, but
it considers this life to be something good and seems to be quite satisfied with it. That
immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his
whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for
the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this
framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic
fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating
that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by
intuitions rather than by concepts.
There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly
schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when
man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in
unheard-of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking
the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of
the powerful present intuition.
There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the
one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as
irrational as the former is inartistic. They both desire to rule over life: the former, by
knowing how to meet his principle needs by means of foresight, prudence, and
regularity; the latter, by disregarding these needs and, as an "overjoyed hero,"
counting as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty.
Whenever, as was perhaps the case in ancient Greece, the intuitive man handles his
weapons more authoritatively and victoriously than his opponent, then, under
favorable circumstances, a culture can take shape and art's mastery over life can be
established. All the manifestations of such a life will be accompanied by this
dissimulation, this disavowal of indigence, this glitter of metaphorical intuitions, and,
in general, this immediacy of deception: neither the house, nor the gait, nor the
clothes, nor the clay jugs give evidence of having been invented because of a pressing
need.
It seems as if they were all intended to express an exalted happiness, an Olympian
cloudlessness, and, as it were, a playing with seriousness. The man who is guided by
concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune,
without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he
aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the
midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing
illumination, cheer, and redemption-in addition to obtaining a defense against
misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers
more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and
keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch. He is then just as irrational in
sorrow as he is in happiness: he cries aloud and will not be consoled. How differently
the stoical man who learns from experience and governs himself by concepts is
affected by the same misfortunes!
This man, who at other times seeks nothing but sincerity, truth, freedom from
deception, and protection against ensnaring surprise attacks, now executes a
masterpiece of deception: he executes his masterpiece of deception in misfortune, as
the other type of man executes his in times of happiness. He wears no quivering and
changeable human face, but, as it were, a mask with dignified, symmetrical features.
He does not cry; he does not even alter his voice. When a real storm cloud thunders
above him, he wraps himself in his cloak, and with slow steps he walks from beneath
it.
)
Made it easy as sh!t to quit smoking tho, any wanting to qu!t just get asthma. 
