Of First and Last Things (Preface and Chapter One)

Preface (1886)

1. I have been told often enough, and always with great surprise, that there is something common and distinctive in all my writings, from The Birth of Tragedy to the most recent: they all contain, I have been told, snares and nets for careless birds, and an almost constant, unnoticed invitation to overturn habitual valuations and valued habits. "What? Everything only — human, all too human?" With this sigh one comes away from my writings, not without a certain shyness and mistrust even toward morality.

2. So I invented for myself, when I needed them, the "free spirits" to whom this melancholy-brave book is dedicated. Such free spirits do not exist, never did exist; but, as I have said, I needed their company at the time, to keep me in good spirits in the midst of bad things — illness, loneliness, foreign lands, inertia, inactivity — as brave companions and ghosts with whom one can chatter and laugh, if one feels like it, and whom one can send to the devil if they become a nuisance.

3. One may suppose that a spirit in whom the type "free spirit" will one day ripen to perfection has had its decisive experience in a great liberation, and that before that, it was all the more a bound spirit, chained for ever, as it seemed, to its corner and its pillar. The great liberation comes for such bound people suddenly, like an earthquake: the young soul is shaken, torn loose, torn away all at once, and does not itself understand what is happening. An impulse and urge rules and masters it like a command: a will and wish awakens, to go away, anywhere, at any price. "Better to die than to live here" — so sounds the imperious voice and temptation; and this "here," this "at home," is everything it had loved until then!

4. It is a long way from this morbid isolation, from the desert of these years of temptation, to that tremendous, overflowing certainty and health which cannot do without illness itself, as a means and fishhook of knowledge; to that mature freedom of spirit which is just as much self-mastery and discipline of the heart. In between lie long years of convalescence, years full of many-coloured, painfully magical transformations. Then the free spirit draws near to life again, slowly, almost reluctantly, almost mistrustfully. It grows warmer around him, yellower, as it were. It is as if his eyes were only now opened to what is near.

7. The free spirit hears a voice: "You shall become master over yourself, master also of your own virtues. Formerly they were your masters; but they must be only your tools beside other tools. You shall get control over your For and Against and learn how to put them out and in, according to your higher purpose. You shall learn to grasp the perspectival in every valuation."

Chapter One. Of First and Last Things

1. Chemistry of concepts and feelings. Philosophical problems today again take almost the same form of questions as two thousand years ago: how can something originate from its opposite — reason from unreason, the sentient from the dead, logic from illogic, disinterested contemplation from covetous desire, altruism from egoism, truth from error? Metaphysical philosophy has helped itself over this difficulty by denying that the one originates from the other, and by assuming a miraculous source for the more highly valued things, in the very kernel and essence of the "thing in itself." Historical philosophy, by contrast, which can no longer be separated from natural science, has found that there are no opposites, except in the customary exaggeration of popular or metaphysical interpretation, and that an error of reason lies at the bottom of this opposition. What we need, and what can be given to us only now, at the present level of the individual sciences, is a chemistry of the moral, religious and aesthetic ideas and feelings — of all those emotions we experience in the great and small dealings of culture and society, indeed even in solitude. And what if this chemistry should end with the conclusion that, in this domain too, the most glorious colours are derived from base, even despised materials?

2. Inherited defect of philosophers. All philosophers share this common defect: they start from present-day man and think they can reach their goal by analysing him. Without wanting to, they think of "man" as an aeterna veritas, as something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure measure of things. But everything the philosopher says about man is basically no more than a testimony about the man of a very limited period of time. Lack of historical sense is the original sin of all philosophers. Everything has become: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. Consequently, what is needed from now on is historical philosophising, and with it the virtue of modesty.

3. Esteem for unpretentious truths. It is the mark of a higher culture to value the little, unpretentious truths, which have been found by a strict method, more highly than the gladdening and dazzling errors that spring from metaphysical and artistic ages and men.

9. Metaphysical world. It is true that there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it can hardly be disputed. We see all things through the human head, and cannot cut this head off. But even if its existence were ever so well proved, it is certain that the knowledge of it would be the most useless of all knowledge, more useless even than the knowledge of the chemical composition of water must be to the sailor in danger of shipwreck.

11. Language as a putative science. The significance of language for the development of culture lies in this: that in it man set up a separate world beside the other, a place he took to be so firm that from it he could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make himself master of it. Man for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates; he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world. Only now, very late, does it dawn on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a monstrous error.

13. Logic of the dream. In sleep and dreams we pass through the whole curriculum of earlier humanity. In the dream we reason as men reasoned in a waking state through many thousands of years: the first cause that occurs to the mind to explain anything that needs explanation satisfies it and passes for truth.

16. Appearance and thing-in-itself. Philosophers are in the habit of setting themselves before life and experience — before what they call the world of appearance — as before a painting that has been unrolled once and for all, and that unchangeably shows the same scene. But that which we now call the world is the result of a number of errors and fantasies which have gradually arisen in the general development of organic beings, and have grown together, and are now handed down to us as an accumulated treasure of the whole past — as a treasure, for the worth of our humanity rests upon it. From this world of representation strict science can indeed release us only to a small extent. But it can gradually and step by step illuminate the history of the origin of that world as representation, and lift us, at least for moments, above the whole process.

34. In mitigation. Will our philosophy not thus become a tragedy? Will truth not become hostile to life, to the better? A question seems to weigh on our tongue and yet will not be uttered: whether one can consciously remain in untruth? or, if one must, whether death would not be preferable? For there is no longer any "ought"; morality, insofar as it was an "ought," has been destroyed by our way of thinking just as much as religion. Knowledge can allow only pleasure and displeasure, benefit and harm, as motives. I believe that the answer depends on the temperament of a man. I can imagine another consequence: a much simpler life, freer of emotions, in which one would at last live among men and with oneself as in nature, without praise, reproach or agitation, delighting in many things as in a spectacle that one formerly had only to fear. One would be free of emphasis, and would no longer feel the goad of the thought that one is not only nature, or more than nature. A man from whom the ordinary fetters of life have fallen to such an extent that he continues to live only in order to know better, must be able to renounce without envy and vexation much, indeed almost everything, that other men value; that free, fearless hovering over men, customs, laws and the traditional valuations of things must suffice him as the most desirable state.