[lit-ideas] Nietzsche and truth
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Lit-Ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 21:52:23 -0500
Aimlessly browsing the other night, I came across this passage, copied
below as a belated contribution to the "Nietzsche and Truth" thread. -EY
______
The intellectual conscience.—-I keep having the same experience and keep
resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it though it is
palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience.
Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an
intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated
cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange
eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that
evil. Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are
underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your
doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not feel it
contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without
having first given themselves an account of the final and most certain
reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such
reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still
belong to this “great majority.” But what is goodheartedness,
refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues
tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not
account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest
distress—-as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower.
Among some pious people I found a hatred of reason and was well disposed
toward them for that: for this at least betrayed their bad intellectual
conscience. But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors
and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence
without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture
of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions,
perhaps even finding him faintly amusing—-that is what I feel to be
contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in
everybody. Some folly keeps persuading me that every human being has
this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my type of injustice.
_The Gay Science_, Book One, 2, translated by Walter Kaufmann
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