Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/208

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192
NIETZSCHE THE THINKER

so far as each other's bodies are concerned, every one would probably feel that to make his thinking or feeling dependent upon the thinking and feeling of another was absurd—indeed, no clear-headed person will assert that he feels another's feeling or can, or that another can feel his (we can only reconstruct one another's feelings and feel them in imagination, and the same is true of thoughts). Opposed as Nietzsche was in a general way to the idea of "another world," a "transcendent world," he came to see that, strictly speaking, other souls were themselves another world, a transcendent world, and he makes Zarathustra say so.[1] Once he formally argues the matter: "For a single man the [independent] reality of the would be without probability, but for two it becomes probable. That is, the other man is an imagination of ours, entirely our 'will,' our 'idea': and we are again the same in him. But because we know that he deceives himself about us [in thinking that we are simply his imagination] and that we are in reality despite the phantom-picture of us which he carries in his head, we conclude that he too is a reality despite our imagination of him: in short, that realities outside us exist."[2] (2) Another line of reflection came to him: Although distinguishing absolutely between "true" and "false" in the world at large is a difficult and perhaps impossible thing, setting up an end ourselves and trying to make thinks go that way is another matter—and it is what every strong man does to a greater or lesser extent, indeed, what practically every one tries to do.[3] The very arranging, classifying, interpreting, valuing of the world and of things in it, about the objective validity of which Nietzsche is in doubt, is an incident to this end. The most wonderful of all things is not the world in its mystery, or the truths of values about which we dispute, but what is immediate and best proved, our own willing, valuing, creative selves.[4] The extraordinary turn is accordingly made that the factor the action of which breeds skepticism as to our possession of objective truth, viz., our will to power and exercise of it, is that about which skepticism is impossible; the very changing of

  1. Zarathustra, I, iii; III, xii, § 4; xiii, § 2.
  2. Werke, XI, 180,' § 68.
  3. Cf. Will to Power, § 605.
  4. Zarathustra, I, iii.