pp. 472-474, The Ego and His Own
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472 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
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As long as you believe in the truth, you do not believe in yourself, and you are a -- servant, a -- religious man. You alone are the truth, or rather, you are more than the truth, which is nothing at all before you. You too do assuredly ask about the truth, you too do assuredly "criticize," but you do not ask about a "higher truth" -- to wit, one that should be higher than you -- nor criticize according to the criterion of such a truth. You address yourself to thoughts and notions, as you do to the appearances of things, only for the purpose of making them palatable to you, enjoyable to you, and your own: you want only to subdue them and become their owner, you want to orient yourself and feel at home in them, and you find them true, or see them in their true light, when they can no longer slip away from you, no longer have any unseized or uncomprehended place, or when they are right for you, when they are your property. If afterward they become heavier again, if they wriggle themselves out of your power again, then that is just their untruth -- to wit, your impotence. Your impotence is their power, your humility their exaltation. Their truth, therefore, is you, or is the nothing which you are for them and in which they dissolve: their
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THE OWNER 473 |
truth is their nothingness.
Only as the property of me do the
spirits, the truths, get to rest; and they then for the first
time really are, when they have been deprived of their sorry existence
and made a property of mine, when it is no longer said "the
truth develops itself, rules, asserts itself; history (also a
concept) wins the victory," etc. The truth never has won
a victory, but was always my means to the victory, like
the sword ("the sword of truth"). The truth is dead,
a letter, a word, a material that I can use up. All truth by itself
is dead, a corpse; it is alive only in the same way as my lungs
are alive -- to wit, in the measure of my own vitality. Truths
are material, like vegetables and weeds; as to whether vegetable
or weed, the decision lies in me.
Objects are to me only material
that I use up. Wherever I put my hand I grasp a truth, which I
trim for myself. The truth is certain to me, and I do not need
to long after it. To do the truth a service is in no case my intent;
it is to me only a nourishment for my thinking head, as potatoes
are for my digesting stomach, or as a friend is for my social
heart. As long as I have the humor and force for thinking, every
truth serves me only for me to work it up according to my powers.
As reality or worldliness is "vain and a thing of naught"
for Christians, so is the truth for me. It exists, exactly as
much as the things of this world go on existing although the Christian
has proved their nothingness; but it is vain, because it has its
value not in itself but in me. Of itself
it is valueless. The truth is a -- creature.
| 474 THE EGO AND HIS OWN |
As you produce innumerable things
by your activity, yes, shape the earth's surface anew and set
up works of men everywhere, so too you may still ascertain numberless
truths by your thinking, and we will gladly take delight in them.
Nevertheless, as I do not please to hand myself over to serve
your newly discovered machines mechanically, but only help to
set them running for my benefit, so too I will only use your truths,
without letting myself be used for their demands.
All truths beneath me are
to my liking; a truth above me, a truth that I should
have to direct myself by, I am not acquainted with. For
me there is no truth, for nothing is more than I! Not even my
essence, not even the essence of man, is more than I! than I,
this "drop in the bucket," this "insignificant
man"!