after long use seem to a people fixed, canonical, and binding: truths are illusions, the origin and nature of which have been forgotten, metaphors that have no longer the moving effect of metaphors, coins that have lost their image and superscription and now are looked upon as metal, no more as coin." Concepts have, if not their mother, then their grandmother, in these illusory images. Even "being," which Nietzsche thinks originally meant "breathing," comes from a metaphor.[1] We do not even know the real nature of our own bodies, nature "has thrown the key away"—we only play or fumble on the surface of things here as everywhere else.
IV
What then is the human intellect for, if truth is beyond its power? Nietzsche's answer in brief is that it is to give us practical guidance in life. It is a useful tool to this end; it did not arise to serve theoretic purposes. It observes how things affect us, noting particularly whether they harm or help us, and draws up from this very personal angle of vision a picture or scheme of things, by the help of which we can thread our way through life's mazes a little more assuredly—conceptualizing and logicizing the material, so that we may handle it more easily. There would be nothing to say against this pictured, logicized world, did we not proceed to take it for what it is not. We think that it is something independent of us, something that would be here in all its particulars just the same whether we were here or not. Color, sound, sweet and sour, hard and soft, heavy and light, we think that we simply find,—that we have no hand in constituting them. I have known people to grow angry when it was suggested that a sound they hear is not something altogether apart from them—so instinctive has the view become. That is, we believe what is not true, we are deceived. It is not deception that is practised upon us—we deceive ourselves; ultimately it is the intellect that is the deceiving party. It does its work so thoroughly that we are not aware, unless we critically examine ourselves, that there is any deception in the matter.
What conclusion is to be drawn? Is the deception therefore
- ↑ "Philosophy in the Tragic Period etc.," sect. 11.
