Page:The Genealogy of Morals.djvu/190

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THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS

is it caused by? Because up to the present the ascetic ideal dominated all philosophy, because Truth was fixed as Being, as God, as the Supreme Court of Appeal, because Truth was not allowed to be a problem. Do you understand this "allowed"? From the minute that the belief in the God of the ascetic ideal is repudiated, there exists a new problem: the problem of the value of truth. The Will for Truth needed a critique—let us define by these words our own task—the value of truth is tentatively to be called in question. . . . (If this seems too laconically expressed, I recommend the reader to peruse again that passage from the Joyful Wisdom which bears the title, "How far we also are still pious," Aph. 344, and best of all the whole fifth book of that work, as well as the Preface to The Dawn of Day.


25.

No! You can't get round me with science, when I search for the natural antagonists of the ascetic ideal, when I put the question: "Where is the opposed will in which the opponent ideal expresses itself?" Science is not, by a long way, independent enough to fulfil this function; in every department science needs an ideal value, a power which creates values, and in whose service it can believe in itself—science itself never creates values. Its relation to the ascetic ideal is not in itself antagonistic: speaking roughly, it rather represents the progressive force in the inner evolution of that ideal. Tested more exactly, its opposition and antagonism are concerned not with the ideal itself, but only with that ideal's outworks, its outer