508 (1883-1888)
Originally a chaos of ideas. The ideas that were consistent with one another remained, the greater number perished—and are perishing.
509 (1883-1888)
The earthly kingdom of desires out of which logic grew: the herd instinct in the background. The assumption of similar cases presupposes “similar souls.” For the purpose of mutual agreement and dominion.
510 (1883-1888)
On the origin of logic. The fundamental inclination to posit as equal, to see things as equal, is modified, held in check, by consideration of usefulness and harmfulness, by considerations of success: it adapts itself to a milder degree in which it can be satisfied without at the same time denying and endangering life. This whole process corresponds exactly to that external, mechanical process (which is its symbol) by which protoplasm makes what it appropriates equal to itself and fits it into its own forms and files.
511 (1885-1886)
Equality and similarity.
1. The coarser organ sees much apparent equality;
2. the spirit wants equality, i.e., to subsume a sense impression into an existing series: in the same way as the body assimilates inorganic matter.
Toward an understanding of logic: the will to equality is the will to power—the belief that something is thus and thus (the essence of judgment) is the consequence of a will that as much as possible shall be equal.
512 (1885)
Logic is bound to the condition: assume there are identical cases. In fact, to make possible logical thinking and inferences, this condition must first be treated fictitously as fulfilled. That is: the will to logical truth can be carried through only after a fundamental falsification of all events is assumed. From which it follows that a drive rules here that is capable of employing both means, firstly falsification, then the implementation of its own point of view: logic does not spring from will to truth.
513 (Fall 1886)
The inventive force that invented categories labored in the service of our needs, namely of our need for security, for quick understanding on the basis of signs and sounds, for means of abbreviation:—"substance”, “subject”, “object”, “being”, “becoming” have nothing to do with metaphysical truths.—
It is the powerful who made the names of things into law, and among the powerful it is the greatest artists in abstraction who created the categories.
514 (March-June 1888)
A morality, a mode of living, tried and proved by long experience and testing, at length enters consciousness as a law, as dominating—And therewith the entire group of related values and states enters into it: it becomes venerable, unassailable, holy, true; it is part of its development that its origin should be forgotten.— That is a sign it has become master—
Exactly the same thing could have happened with the categories of reason: they could have prevailed, after much groping and fumbling, through their relative utility—There came a point when one collected them together, raised them to consciousness as a whole—and when one commanded them, i.e., when they had the effect of a command—From then on, they counted as à priori, as beyond experience, as irrefutable. And yet perhaps they represent nothing more than the expediency of a certain race and species —their utility alone is their “truth"—
515 (March-June 1888)
Not “to know” but to schematize to impose upon chaos as much regularity and form as our practical needs require.
In the formation of reason, logic, the categories, it was need that was authoritative: the need, not to “know,” but to subsume, to schematize, for the purpose of intelligibility and calculation—(The development of reason is adjustment, invention, with the aim of making similar, equal—the same process that every sense impression goes through!) No pre-existing “idea” was here at work, but the utilitarian fact that only when we see things coarsely and made equal do they become calculable and usable to us—Finality in reason is an effect, not a cause: life miscarries with any other kinds of reason, to which there is a continual impulse—it becomes difficult to survey—too unequal—
The categories are “truths"‘ only in the sense that they are conditions of life for us: as Euclidean space is a conditional “truth.” (Between ourselves: since no one would maintain that there is any necessity for men to exist, reason, as well as Euclidean space, is a mere idiosyncracy of a certain species of animal, and one among many—)
The subjective compulsion not to contradict here is a biological compulsion: the instinct for the utility of inferring as we do infer is part of us, we almost are this instinct—But what naivete to extract from this a proof that we are therewith in possession of a “truth in itself”!—Not being able to contradict is proof of an incapacity, not of “truth.”
516 (Spring-Fall 1887; rev. Spring-Fall 1888)
We are unable to affirm and to deny one and the same thing: this is a subjective empirical law, not the expression of any “necessity” but only of an inability.
If, according to Aristotle, the law of contradiction is the most certain of all principles, if it is the ultimate and most basic, upon which every demonstrative proof rests, if the principle of every axiom lies in it; then one should consider all the more rigorously what presuppositions already lie at the bottom of it. Either it asserts something about. actuality, about being, as if one already knew this from another source; that is, as if opposite attributes could not be ascribed to it. Or the proposition means: opposite attributes should not be ascribed to it. In that case, logic would be an imperative, not to know the true, but to posit and arrange a world that shall be called true by us.
In short, the question remains open: are the axioms of logic adequate to reality or are they a means and measure for us to create reality, the concept “reality,” for ourselves.?—To affirm the former one would, as already said, have to have a previous knowledge of being—which is certainly not the case. The proposition therefore contains no criterion of truth, but an imperative concerning that which should count as true.
Supposing there were no self-identical “A”, such as is presupposed by every proposition of logic (and of mathematics), and the “A” were already mere appearance, then logic would have a merely apparent world as its condition. In fact, we believe in this proposition under the influence of ceaseless experience which seems continually to confirrn it. The “thing"—that is the real substratum of “A”; our belief in things is the precondition of our belief in logic. The “A” of logic is, like the atom, a reconstruction of the thing—If we do not grasp this, but make of logic a criterion of true being, we are on the way to positing as realities all those hypostases: substance, attribute, object, subject, action, etc.; that is, to conceiving a metaphysical world, that is, a “real world” (—this, however, is the apparent world once more—).
The very first acts of thought, affirmation and denial, holding true and holding not true, are, in as much as they presuppose, not only the habit of holding things true and holding them not true, but a right to do this, already dominated by the belief that we can gain possession of knowledge, that judgments really can hit upon the truth;—in short, logic does not doubt its ability to assert something about the true-in-itself (namely, that it cannot have opposite attributes).
Here reigns the coarse sensualistic prejudice that sensations teach us truths about things—that I cannot say at the same time of one and the same thing that it is hard and that it is soft. (The instinctive proof “I cannot have two opposite sensations at the same time"—quite coarse and false.)
The conceptual ban on contradiction proceeds from the belief that we are able to form concepts, that the concept not only designates the essence of a thing but comprehends it—In fact, logic (like geometry and arithmetic) applies only to fictitious entities that we have created. Logic is the attempt to comprehend the actual world by means of a scheme of being posited by ourselves; more correctly, to make it formulatable and calculable for us—
517 (Spring-Fall 1887)
In order to think and infer it is necessary to assume beings: logic handles only formulas for what remains the same. That is why this assumption would not be proof of reality: “beings” are part of our perspective. The “ego” as a being (—not affected by becoming and development).
The fictitious world of subject, substance, “reason” etc., is needed—: there is in us a power to order, simplify, falsify, artificially distinguish. “Truth” is the will to be master over the multiplicity of sensations:—to classify phenomena into definite categories. In this we start from a belief in the “in-itself” of things (we take phenomena as real).
The character of the world in a state of becoming as incapable of formulation, as “false,” as “’self-contradictory.” Knowledge and becoming exclude one another. Consequently, “knowledge” must be something else: there must first of all be a will to make knowable, a kind of becoming must itself create the deception of beings.
518 (1885-1886)
If our “ego” is for us the sole being, after the model of which we fashion and understand all being: very well! Then there would be very much room to doubt whether what we have here is not a perspective illusion—an apparent unity that encloses everything like a horizon. The evidence of the body reveals a tremendous multiplicity; it is allowable, for purposes of method, to employ the more easily studied, richer phenomena as evidence for the understanding of the poorer. Finally: supposing everything is becoming, then knowledge is possible only on the basis of belief in being.
519 (1883-1888)
If there “is only one being, the ego” and all other “being” is fashioned after its model—if, finally, belief in the “ego” stands or falls with belief in logic, i.e., the metaphysical truth of the categories of reason; if, on the other hand, the ego proves to be something in a state of becoming: then—
520 (1885)
Continual transition forbids us to speak of “individuals,” etc; the “number” of beings is itself in flux. We would know nothing of time and motion if we did not, in a coarse fashion, believe we see what is at “rest” beside what is in motion. The same applies to cause and effect, and without the erroneous conception of “empty space” we should certainly not have acquired the conception of space. The principle of identity has behind it the “apparent fact” of things that are the same. A world in a state of becoming could not, in a strict sense, be “comprehended” or “known”; only to the extent that the “comprehending” and “knowing” intellect encounters a coarse, already-created world, fabricated out of mere appearances but become firm to the extent that this kind of appearance has preserved life—only to this extent is there anything like “knowledge”; i.e., a measuring of earlier and later errors by one another.
521 (Spring-Fall 1887)
On “logical semblance"— The concepts “individual” and “species” equally false and merely apparent. “Species” expresses only the fact that an abundance of similar creatures appear at the same time and that the tempo of their further growth and change is for a long time slowed down, so actual small continuations and increases are not very much noticed (—a phase of evolution in which the evolution is not visible, so an equilibrium seems to have been attained, making possible the false notion that a goal has been attained—and that evolution has a goal—).
The form counts as something enduring and therefore more valuable; but the form has merely been invented by us; and however often “the same form is attained,” it does not mean that it is the same form—what appears is always something new, and it is only we, who are always comparing, who include the new, to the extent that it is similar to the old, in the unity of the “form.” As if a type should be attained and, as it were, was intended by and inherent in the process of formation.
Form, species, law, idea, purpose—in all these cases the same error is made of giving a false reality to a fiction, as if events were in some way obedient to something—an artificial distinction is made in respect of events between that which acts and that toward which the act is directed (but this “which” and this “toward” are only posited in obedience to our metaphysical-logical dogmatism: they are not “facts").
One should not understand this compulsion to construct concepts, species, forms, purposes, laws ("a world of identical cases") as if they enabled us to fix the real world; but as a compulsion to arrange a world for ourselves in which our existence is made possible:—we thereby create a world which is calculable, simplified, comprehensible, etc., for us.
This same compulsion exists in the sense activities that support reason—by simplification, coarsening, emphasizing, and elaborating, upon which all “recognition,” all ability to make oneself intelligible rests. Our needs have made our senses so precise that the “same apparent world” always reappears and has thus acquired the semblance of reality.
Our subjective compulsion to believe in logic only reveals that, long before logic itself entered our consciousness, we did nothing but introduce its postulates into events: now we discover them in events—we can no longer do otherwise—and imagine that this compulsion guarantees something connected with “truth.” It is we who created the “thing,” the “identical thing,” subject, attribute, activity, object, substance, form, after we had long pursued the process of making identical, coarse and simple. The world seems logical to us because we have made it logical.
522 (1886-1887)
Ultimate solution.—We believe in reason: this, however, is the philosophy of gray concepts. Language depends on the most naive 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 a limitation.
Rational thought is interpretation according to a scheme that we cannot throw off..