vows cannot be kept.[1] Making absolute knowledge a duty is a madness of the period of virtue; we must hallow falsehood, illusion, faith—life would be in peril if we did not.[2] Nietzsche had known himself the perilousness of the pursuit of truth. "For so dangerously does it stand with us today: all that we loved when we were young has deceived us. Our last love—that which makes us confess this now, our love of truth—let us see that also this love does not deceive us!"[3] That is (as I understand him), intellectual honesty itself, the finest spiritualization of morality, is dangerous—only the few are equal to all the risks it involves. b
So torn was Nietzsche by contrary instincts, one to life, the other to truth at any cost, that he undertook, as we have seen, the desperate expedient of changing the meaning of truth, so that it should signify hereafter life-preserving and upbuilding ideas—but unavailingly.[4] Indeed, he was led to language stranger still. There was an order of assassins in the Orient whom the Crusaders came upon, who—or rather whose superiors—had for their secret motto, "Nothing is true, everything is permitted." The words struck Nietzsche by their daring and subtle suggestiveness. He quotes the motto more than once and with semi-approval[5]—and has scandalized many. c On the face of it, it means complete license, intellectual and moral. How can he, we ask, take it up and make it in a way his own? Is he turning his back on all his past? He does indeed once say, "We have libertinage of the mind in all innocence," but this is in characterizing Europeans of the nineteenth century, and the "we" is not necessarily personal;[6] if it is taken personally, it is out of harmony with other references to intellectual libertinism and his ever repeated emphasis on intellectual scrupulousness?[7] We really get at his meaning in using the motto (and also in the remark about "libertinage of the mind," in case
- ↑ Dawn of Day, § 27.
- ↑ Werke, XIII, 124, § 280; cf. preface, § 4, to Joyful Science.
- ↑ Werke (pocket ed.), VIII, 500, § 27.
- ↑ See ante, p. 187.
- ↑ Zarathustra, IV, ix (it is the "shadow" here who speaks); Genealogy etc., III, § 24; Werke, XIII, 361, § 888.
- ↑ Will to Power, § 120.
- ↑ Cf. Ibid., §§ 42, 43, and the way in which "strict conscience for what is true and actual" is spoken of in Dawn of Day, § 270.
