Nietzsche -- excerpted, on interpretation and hermeneutics

 

[…] What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins […]

—“On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense”

 

***

 

Supposing truth is a woman—what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? That the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman's heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won—and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged. If it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who claim that it has fallen, that all dogmatism lies on the ground—even more, that all dogmatism is dying.

 

Speaking seriously, there are good reasons why all philosophical dogmatizing, however solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may nevertheless have been no more than a noble childishness and tyronism. And perhaps the time is at hand when it will be comprehended again and again how little used to be sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers' edifices as the dogmatists have built so far: any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like the soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not even yet ceased to do mischief); some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts.

 

The dogmatists' philosophy was, let us hope, only a promise across millennia—as astrology was in still earlier times when perhaps more work, money, acuteness, and patience were lavished in its service than for any real science so far: to astrology and its "supra-terrestrial" claims we owe the grand style of architecture in Asia and Egypt. It seems that all great things first have to bestride the earth in monstrous and frightening masks in order to inscribe themselves in the hearts of humanity with eternal demands: dogmatic philosophy was such a mask; for example, the Vedanta doctrine in Asia and Platonism in Europe.

 

Let us not be ungrateful to it, although it must certainly be conceded that the worst, most durable, and most dangerous of all errors so far was a dogmatist's error—namely, Plato's invention of the pure spirit and the good as such. But now that it is overcome, now that Europe is breathing freely again after this nightmare and at least can enjoy a healthier—sleep, we, whose task is wakefulness itself, are the heirs of all that strength which has been fostered by the fight against this error. To be sure, it meant standing truth on her head and denying perspective, the basic condition of all life, when one spoke of spirit and the good as Plato did. Indeed, as a physician one might ask: "How could the most beautiful growth of antiquity, Plato, contract such a disease? Did the wicked Socrates corrupt him after all? Could Socrates have been the corrupter of youth after all? And did he deserve his hemlock? […]

—Beyond Good and Evil, Preface

 

***

 

 

The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment; in this respect our new language may sound strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating. And we are fundamentally inclined to claim that the falsest judgments (which include the synthetic judgments a priori) are the most indispensable for us; that without accepting the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not love – that renouncing false judgments would mean renouncing life and a denial of life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life – that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token along place itself beyond good and evil.

 

—Beyond Good and Evil, Section 4

 

***

 

 

Forgive me as an old philologist who cannot desist from the malice of putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation: but “nature’s conformity to law,” of which you physicists talk so proudly, as though – why, it exists only owing to your interpretation and bad “philology.” It is no matter of fact, no “text,” but rather only a naively humanitarian emendation and perversion of meaning, with which you make abundant concession to the democratic instincts of the modern soul! “Everywhere equality before the law; nature is no different in that respect, no better off than we are” – a fine instance of ulterior motivation, in which the plebian antagonism to everything privileged and autocratic as well as a second and more refined atheism are disguised once more. “Ni Dieu, ni maitre” – that is what you, too, want; and therefore “cheers for the law of nature!” – is it not so? But as said above, that is interpretation, not text; and somebody might come along who, with opposite intentions and modes of interpretation, could read out of the same “nature,” and with regard to the same phenomena, rather the tyrannically inconsiderate and relentless enforcement of claims of power – an interpreter who would picture the unexceptional and unconditional aspects of all “will to power” so vividly that almost every word, even the word “tyranny” itself, would eventually seem unsuitable, or a weakening and attenuating metaphor – being too human – but he might, nevertheless, end by asserting the same about this world as you do, namely, that it has a “necessary” and “calculable” source, not because laws obtain in it, but because they are absolutely lacking, and every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment. Supposing that this also is only interpretation – and you will be eager enough to make this objection? – well, so much the better.

 

—Beyond Good and Evil, Section 22

 

***

 

 

[…] Forgive me the joke of this gloomy grimace and trope; for I myself have learned long ago to think differently, to estimate differently with regard to deceiving and being deceived, and I keep in reserve at least a couple of jostles for the blind rage with which the philosophers resist being deceived. Why not? It is no more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than mere appearance; it is even the worst proved assumption there is in the world. Let at least this much be admitted: there would be no life at all if not on the basis of perspective estimates and appearances; and if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and clumsiness of some philosophers, one wanted to abolish the “apparent world” altogether – well, supposing you could do that, at least nothing would be left of your “truth” either. Indeed, what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of “true” and “false”? Is it not sufficient to assume degrees of apparentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance – different “values,” to use the language of painters? Why couldn’t the world that concerns us – be a fiction? And if somebody asked, “but to a fiction there surely belongs an author?” – couldn’t one answer simply: why? Doesn’t this “belongs” perhaps belong to the fiction, too? Is it not permitted to be a bit ironical about the subject no less than the predicate and object? Shouldn’t philosophers be permitted to rise about faith in grammar? All due respect for governesses – but hasn’t the time come for philosophy to renounce the faith of governesses?

 

—Beyond Good and Evil, Section 34

 

***

 

 

If this book is incomprehensible to anyone and jars on his ears, the fault, it seems to me, is not necessarily mine. It is clear enough, assuming, as I do assume, that one has first read my earlier writings and has not spared some trouble in doing so: for they are, indeed, not easy to penetrate. Reading my Zarathustra, for example, I do not allow that anyone knows that book who has not at some time been profoundly wounded and at some time profoundly delighted by every word in it; for only then may he enjoy the privilege of reverentially sharing in the halcyon element out of which that book was born and in its sunlight clarity, remoteness, breadth, and certainty. In other cases, people find difficulty with the aphoristic form: this arises from the fact that today this form is not taken seriously enough. An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been “deciphered” when it has simply been read; rather, one has then to begin its exegesis, for which is required an art of exegesis. I have offered in the third essay of the present book an example of what I regard as “exegesis” in such a case – an aphorism is prefixed to this essay, the essay itself is a commentary on it. To be sure, one thing is necessary above all if one is to practice reading as an art in this way, something that has been unlearned most thoroughly nowadays – and therefore it will be some time before my writings are “readable” – something for which one has almost to be a cow and in any case not a “modern man”: rumination.

 

—On the Genealogy of Morals, Preface, Section 8

 

***

 

 

Suppose such an incarnate will to contradiction and antinaturalness is induced to philosophize: upon what will it vent its innermost contrariness? Upon what is felt, most certainly to be real and actual: it will look for error precisely where the instinct of life most unconditionally posits truth. It will, for example, like the ascetics of the Vedanta philosophy, downgrade physicality to an illusion; likewise pain, multiplicity, the entire conceptual antithesis “subject” and “object” – errors, nothing but errors! To renounce belief in one’s ego, to deny one’s own “reality” – what a triumph! not merely over the senses, over appearance, but a much higher kind of triumph, a violation and cruelty against reason – a voluptuous pleasure that reaches its height when the ascetic self-contempt and self-mockery of reason declares: “there is a realm of truth and being, but reason is excluded from it!”

 

(Incidentally, even in the Kantian concept of the “intelligible character of things” something remains of this lascivious ascetic discord that loves to turn reason against reason: for “intelligible character” signifies in Kant that things are so constituted that the intellect comprehends just enough of them to know that for the intellect they are – utterly incomprehensible.)

 

But precisely because we seek knowledge, let us not be ungrateful to such resolute reversals of accustomed perspectives and valuations with which the spirit has, with apparent mischievousness and futility, raged against itself for so long: to see differently in this way for once, to want to see differently, is no small discipline and preparation of the intellect for its future “objectivity” – the latter understood not as “contemplation without interest” (which is a nonsensical absurdity), but as the ability to control one’s Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge.

 

Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a “pure, will-less, painless, time-less knowing subject”; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as “pure reason,” “absolute spirituality,” “knowledge in itself”: these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, and eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which along seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing”; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity,” be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this – what would that mean but to castrate the intellect? —

 

—On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, Section 12

 

***

 

 

The origin of our concept of “knowledge” [“Erkenntnis”]. —I take this explanation from the street. I heard one of the common people say, “he knew me right away” “er hat much erkannt”. Then I asked myself: What is it that the common people take for knowledge? What do they want when they want “knowledge”? Nothing more than this: Something strange that is to be reduced to something familiar [etwas Bekanntes]. And we philosophers – have we really meant more than this when we have spoken of knowledge? What is familiar means what we are used to so that we no longer marvel at it, our everyday, some rule in which we are stuck, anything at all in which we feel at home. Look, isn’t our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover under everything strange, unusual, and questionable something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who attain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?

 

Here is a philosopher who fancied that the world was “known” when he had reduced it to the “idea.” Was it not because the “idea” was so familiar to him and he was so well used to it – because he hardly was afraid of the “idea” any more?

 

How easily these men of knowledge are satisfied! Just have a look at their principles and their solutions of the world riddle with this in mind! When they are finished in things – under them, or behind them – that is unfortunately quite familiar to us, such as our multiplication tables or our logic, or our willing and desiring – how happy they are right away! For “what is familiar is known” [“was bekannt ist, ist erkannt”]. On this they are agreed. Even the most cautious among them suppose that what is familiar is at least more easily knowable than what is strange, and that, for example, sound method demands that we start from the “inner world,” from the “facts of consciousness,” because this world is more familiar to us; and what we are used to is more difficult to “know” – that is, to see as a problem, that is, to see as strange, as distant, as “outside us.”

 

The great certainty of the natural sciences in comparison with psychology and the critique of the elements of consciousness – one might almost say, with the unnatural sciences – is due precisely to the fact that they choose for their object what is strange, while it is almost contradictory and absurd to even try to choose for an object what is not strange.

 

—The Gay Science, Section 355

 

***

 

 

Our new “infinite.” — How far the perspective character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this: whether existence without interpretation, without “sense.” Does not become “nonsense”; whether, on the other hand, all existence is not essentially actively engaged in interpretation [ob … nicht alles Dasein essentiell ein auslegendes Dasein ist.] — that cannot be decided even by the most industrious and most scrupulously conscientious analysis and self-examination of the intellect; for in the course of this analysis the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspectives, and only in these. We cannot look around our own corner: it is a hopeless curiosity that wants to know what other kinds of intellects and perspectives there might be; for example, whether some beings might be able to experience time backward, or alternately forward and backward (which would involve another direction of life and another concept of cause and effect). But I should think that today we are at least far from the ridiculous immodesty that would be involved in decreeing from our corner that perspectives are permitted only from this corner. Rathe has the world become "infinite" for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations. Once more we are seized by a great shudder; but who would feel inclined immediately to deify again after the old manner this monster of an unknown world? And to worship the unknown henceforth as "the Unknown One"? Alas, too many ungodly possibilities of interpretation are included in the unknown, too much devilry, stupidity, and foolishness of interpretation—even our own human, all too human folly, which we know.

 

—The Gay Science, Section 374

 

***

 

 

Learning to think: in our schools one no longer has any idea of this. Even in the universities, even among the real scholars of philosophy, logic as a theory, as a practice, as a craft, is beginning to die out. One need only read German books: there is no longer the remotest recollection that thinking requires a technique, a teaching curriculum, a will to mastery – that thinking wants to be learned like dancing as a kind of dancing. Who among Germans still knows from experience the delicate shudder which light feet in spiritual matters send into every muscle? The stiff clumsiness of the spiritual gesture, the bungling hand at grasping – that is German to such a degree that abroad one mistakes it for the German character as such. The German has no fingers for nuances.

 

That the Germans have been able to stand their philosophers at all, especially that most deformed concept-cripple of all time, the great Kant, provides not a bad notion of German grace. For one cannot subtract dancing in every form from a noble education – to be able to dance with one’s feet, with concepts, with words: need I still add that one must be able to do it with the pen too – that one must learn to write? But at this point I should become completely enigmatic for German readers.

 

—Twilight of the Idols, “What the Germans Lack,” Section 7

 

***

 

 

What is a belief? How does it originate? Every belief is a considering-something-true.

 

The most extreme form of nihilism would be the view that every belief, every considering-something-true, is necessarily false because there simple is no true world. Thus: a perspectival appearance whose origin lies in us (in so far as we continually need a narrower, abbreviated, simplified world).

 

—That is the measure of strength to what extent we can admit to ourselves, without perishing, the merely apparent character, the necessity of lies.

 

To this extent, nihilism, as the denial of a truthful world, of being, might be a divine way of thinking.

 

—The Will to Power, Section 15

 

***

 

 

My attempt to understand moral judgments as symptoms and sign languages which betray the process of physiological prosperity or failure, likewise the consciousness of the conditions for preservation and growth – a mode of interpretations of the same worth as astrology, prejudices prompted by the instincts (of races, communities, of the various stages of life, as youth or decay, etc.).

 

Applied to the specific Christian-European morality: Our moral judgments are signs of decline, of disbelief in life, a preparation for pessimism.

 

My chief proposition: there are no moral phenomenal, there is only a moral interpretation of these phenomena. This interpretation itself is of extra-moral origin.

 

What does it mean that our interpretation has projected a contradiction into existence? —Of decisive importance: behind all other evaluations these moral evaluations stand in command. Supposing they were abolished, according to what would we measure then? And then of what value would be knowledge, etc., etc.? ? ?

 

—The Will to Power, Section 258

 

***

 

 

Insight: all evaluation is made from a definite perspective: that of the preservation of the individual, a community, a race, a state, a church, a faith, a culture. —Because we forget that valuation is always from a perspective, a single individual contains within him a vast confusion of contradictory valuations and consequently of contradictory drives. This is the expression of the diseased condition in man, in contrast to the animals in which all existing instincts answer to quite definite tasks.

 

This contradictory creature has in his nature, however, a great method of acquiring knowledge: he feels many pros and cons, he raises himself to justice – to comprehension beyond esteeming things good and evil.

 

The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions, who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men – as well as his great moments of grand harmony – a rare accident even in us! A sort of planetary motion—

 

—The Will to Power, Section 259

 

***

 

 

Profound aversion to reposing once and for all in any one total view of the world. Fascination of the opposing point of view: refusal to be deprived of the stimulus of the enigmatic.

 

—The Will to Power, Section 470

 

***

 

 

I maintain the phenomenality of the inner world, too: everything of which we become conscious is arranged, simplified, schematized, interpreted through – the actual process of inner “perception,” the causal connection between thoughts, feelings, desires, between subject and object, are absolutely hidden from us – and are perhaps purely imaginary. The “apparent inner world” is governed by just the same forms and procedures as the “outer” world. We never encounter “facts”: pleasure and displeasure are subsequent and derivative intellectual phenomena—

 

“Causality” eludes us; to suppose a direct causal link between thoughts, as logic does – that is the consequence of the crudest and clumsiest observation. Between two thoughts all kinds of affects play their game: but their motions are too fast, therefore we fail to recognize them, we deny them –

 

“Thinking,” as epistemologists conceive it, simply does not occur; it is a quite arbitrary fiction, arrived at by selecting one element from the process and eliminating all the rest, an artificial arrangement for the purpose of intelligibility—

 

The “spirit,” something that thinks: where possible even “absolute, pure spirit” —this conception is a second derivative of that false introspection which believes in “thinking,” and secondly a subject-substratum in which every act of thinking, and nothing else, has its origin: that is to say, both the deed and the doer are fictions.

 

—The Will to Power, Section 477

 

***

 

 

The phenomenalism of the “inner world.” Chronological inversion, so that the cause enters consciousness later than the effect. —We have learned that pain is projected to a part of the body without being situated there – we have learned that sense impressions naively supposed to be conditioned by the out world are, on the contrary, conditioned by the inner world; that we are always unconscious of the real activity of the outer world – The fragment of outer world of which we are conscious is born after an effect from outside has impressed itself upon us, and is subsequently projected as its “cause” —

 

In the phenomenalism of the “inner world” we invert the chronological order of cause and effect. The fundamental fact of “inner experience” is that the cause is imagined after the effect has taken place – The same applies to the succession of thoughts: —we seek the reason for a thought before we are conscious of it; and the reason enters consciousness first, and then its consequence – Our entire dream life is the interpretation of complex feelings with a view to possible causes – and in such a way that we are conscious of a condition only when the supposed causal chain associated with it has entered consciousness.

 

The whole of “inner experience” rests upon the fact that a cause for an excitement of the nerve centers is sought and imagined – and that only a cause thus discovered enters consciousness: this cause in no way corresponds to the real cause – it is a groping on the basis of previous “inner experiences,” i.e., of memory. But memory also maintains the habit of the old interpretations, i.e., of erroneous causality – so that the “inner experience” has to contain within it the consequences of all previous false causal fictions. Our “outer world” as we project it every moment is indissolubly tied to the old error of the ground: we interpret it by means of the schematism of “things,” etc.

 

“Inner experience” enters our consciousness only after it has found a language the individual understands – i.e., a translation of a condition into conditions familiar to him —; “to understand” means merely: to be able to express something new in the language of something old and familiar. E.g., “I feel unwell” – such a judgment presupposes a great and late neutrality of the observer—; the simple man always says: this or that makes me feel unwell – he makes up his mind about his feeling unwell only when he has seen a reason for feeling unwell. —I call that a lack of philology; to be able to read off a text as a text without interposing an interpretation is the last developed form of “inner experience” —perhaps one that is hardly possible—

 

—The Will to Power, Section 479

 

***

 

 

Against positivism, which halts at phenomena – “There are only facts” —I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact “in itself”: perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing.

 

“Everything is subjective,” you say; but even this is interpretation. The “subject” is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is. —Finally, is it necessary to posit and interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is invention, hypothesis.

 

In so far as the word “knowledge” has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings —“Perspectivism.”

 

It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all other drives to accept as a norm.

 

—The Will to Power, Section 481

 

***

 

 

We set up a word at the point at which our ignorance begins, at which we can see no further, e.g., the word “I,” the word “do,” the word “suffer”: —these are perhaps the horizon of our knowledge, but not “truths.”

 

—The Will to Power, Section 482

 

***

 

 

Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive.

 

—The Will to Power, Section 493

 

***

 

 

Ultimate Solution. — We believe in reason: this, however, is the philosophy of gray concepts. Language depends on the most naïve prejudices.

 

Now we read disharmonies and problems into things because we think only in the form of language – and thus believe in the “eternal truth” of “reason” (e.g., subject, attribute, etc.).

 

We cease to think when we refuse to do so under the constraint of language; we barely reach the doubt that sees this limitation as limitation.

 

Rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme that we cannot throw off.

 

—The Will to Power, Section 522

 

***

 

 

There are many kinds of eyes. Even the sphinx has eyes – and consequently there are many kinds of “truths,” and consequently there is no truth.

 

—The Will to Power, Section 540

 

***

 

 

[…] Will to truth is a making firm, a making true and durable, an abolition of the false character of things, a reinterpretation of it into beings. “Truth” is therefore not something there, that might be found or discovered – but something that must be created and that gives a name to a process, or rather to a will to overcome that has in itself no end – introducing truth, as a process in infinitum, an active determining – not a becoming-conscious of something that is in itself firm and determined. It is a word for the “will to power.” […]

 

—The Will to Power, Section 552

 

***

 

 

A “thing-in-itself” just as perverse as a “sense-in-itself,” a “meaning-in-itself.” There are no “facts-in-themselves,” for a sense must always be projected into them before there can be “facts.”

 

The question “what is that?” is an imposition of meaning from some other viewpoint. “Essence,” the “essential nature,” is something perspective and already presupposes a multiplicity. At the bottom of it there always lies “what is that for me?” (for us, for all that lives, etc.)

 

A thing would be defined once all creatures had asked “what is that?” and had answered their question. Supposing one single creature, with its own relationship and perspectives for all things, were missing, then the thing would not yet be “defined.”

 

In short: the essence of a thing is only an opinion about the “thing.” Or rather: “it is considered” is the real “it is,” the sole “this is.”

 

One may not ask: “who then interprets?” for the interpretation itself is a form of the will to power, exists (but not as a “being” but as a process, a becoming) as an affect.

 

The origin of “things” is wholly the work of that which imagines, thinks, wills, feels. The concept “thing” itself just as much as all its qualities. —Even “the subject” is such a created entity, a “thing” like all others: a simplification with the object of defining the force which posits, invents, thinks, as distinct from all individual positing, inventing, thinking as such. Thus a capacity as distinct from all that is individual – fundamentally, action collectively considered with respect to all anticipated actions (action and the probability of similar actions).

 

—The Will to Power, Section 556

 

***

 

 

That things possess a constitution in themselves quite apart from interpretation and subjectivity, is a quite idle hypothesis: it presupposes that interpretation and subjectivity are not essential, that a thing freed from all relationships would still be a thing.

 

Conversely, the apparent objective character of things: could it not be merely a difference of degree within the subjective?—that perhaps that which changes slowly presents itself to us as “objectively” enduring, being, “in-itself” —that the objective is only a false concept of a genus and an antithesis within the subjective?

 

—The Will to Power, Section 560

 

***

 

 

[…] The belief that the world as it ought to be is, really exists, is a belief of the unproductive who do not desire to create a world as it ought to be. They posit it as already available, they seek ways and means of reaching it. “Will to truth” —as the importance of the will to create. […]

 

The fiction of a world that corresponds to our desires: psychological trick and interpretation with the aim of associating everything we honor and find pleasant with this true world.

 

“Will to truth” at this stage is essentially an art of interpretation: which at least requires the power to interpret. […]

 

Whoever is incapable of laying his will into things, lacking will and strength, at least lays some meaning into them, i.e., the faith that there is a will in them already.

 

It is a measure of the degree of strength of will to what extent one can do without meaning in things, to what extent one can endure to live in a meaningless world because one organizes a small portion of it oneself. […]

 

—The Will to Power, Section 585A

 

***

 

 

Our values are interpreted into things.

Is there then any meaning in the in-itself?!

Is meaning not necessarily relative to meaning and perspective?

All meaning is will to power (all relative meaning resolves itself into it).

 

—The Will to Power, Section 590

 

***

 

 

No limit to the ways in which the world can be interpreted; every interpretation a symptom of growth or of decline.

 

Inertia needs unity (monism); plurality of interpretations a sign of strength. Not to desire to deprive the world of its disturbing and enigmatic character!

 

—The Will to Power, Section 600

 

***

 

 

“Interpretation,” the introduction of meaning – not “explanation” (in most cases a new interpretation over an old interpretation that has become incomprehensible, that is now itself only a sign). There are no facts, everything is in flux, incomprehensible, elusive; what is relatively most enduring – our opinions.

 

—The Will to Power, Section 604

 

***

 

 

The ascertaining of “truth” and “untruth,” the ascertaining of facts in general, is fundamentally different from creative positing, from forming, shaping, overcoming, willing, such as is of the essence of philosophy. To introduce a meaning – this task still remains to be done, assuming there is no meaning yet. Thus it is with sounds, but also with the fate of peoples: they are capable of the most different interpretations and direction toward different goals.

 

On a yet higher level is to posit a goal and mold facts according to it; that is, active interpretation and not merely conceptual translation.

 

—The Will to Power, Section 605

 

***

 

 

Ultimately, man finds in things nothing but what he himself has imported into them: the finding is called science, the importing – art, religion, love, pride. Even if this should be a piece of childishness, one should carry on with both and be well disposed toward both – some should find; others – we others! – should import!

 

—The Will to Power, Section 606

 

***

 

 

That the value of the world lies in our interpretation (—that other interpretations than merely human ones are perhaps somewhere possible— ); that previous interpretations have been perspective valuations by virtue of which we can survive in life, i.e., in the will to power, for the growth of power; that every elevation of man brings with it the overcoming of narrower interpretations; that every strengthening and increase of power opens up new perspectives and means believing in new horizons – this idea permeates my writings. The world with which we are concerned is false, i.e., is not a fact but a fable and approximation on the basis of a meager sum of observations; it is “in flux,” as something in a state of becoming, as a falsehood always changing but never getting near the truth: for – there is no “truth.”

 

—The Will to Power, Section 616