The Portable Nietzsche by Friedrich Nietzsche Page A

equal—in other words, a lot of unequal cases. Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal. No leaf ever wholly equals another, and the concept “leaf” is formed through an arbitrary abstraction from these individual differences, through forgetting the distinctions; and now it gives rise to the idea that in nature there might be something besides the leaves which would be “leaf”—some kind of original form after which all leaves have been woven, marked, copied, colored, curled, and painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no copy turned out to be a correct, reliable, and faithful image of the original form. We call a person “honest.” Why did he act so honestly today? we ask. Our answer usually sounds like this: because of his honesty. Honesty! That is to say again: the leaf is the cause of the leaves. After all, we know nothing of an essence-like quality named “honesty”; we know only numerous individualized, and thus unequal actions, which we equate by omitting the unequal and by then calling them honest actions. In the end, we distill from them a qualitas occulta with the name of “honesty”. . . .
    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 a 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.
    We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors—in moral terms: the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all. . . .

NOTES ABOUT WAGNER
    (January 1874)
    If Goethe is a transposed painter and Schiller a transposed orator, then Wagner is a transposed actor.
    (VII, 341)

    As a pamphleteer he is an orator without the power to convince.
    (VII, 353)

    It was a special form of Wagner’s ambition to relate himself to high points of the past: Schiller-Goethe, Beethoven, Luther, Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, Bismarck. Only to the Renaissance could he establish no relationship; but he invented the German spirit as opposed to the Romance.
    (VII, 353)

NOTES (1874)
    German Culture. . . . Political superiority without any real human superiority is most harmful. One must seek to make amends for political superiority. To be ashamed of one’s power. To use it in the most salutary way. Everybody thinks that the Germans may now rest on their moral and intellectual superiority. One seems to think that now it is time for something else, for the state. Till now, for “art,” etc. This is an ignominious misunderstanding; there are seeds for the most glorious development of man. And these must perish for the sake of the state? What, after all, is a state? The time of the scholars is past. Their place must be taken by philalethes. 7 Tremendous power. The only way to use the present kind of German power correctly is to comprehend the tremendous obligation which lies in it. Any slackening of cultural tasks would turn this power into the most revolting tyranny.
    (VII, 145 f. )

    A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness .
    (VII, 156)

NOTES (1875)
    The political defeat of Greece was the greatest failure of culture: for it has brought with it the revolting theory that one can foster culture only when one is armed to the teeth and wears boxing gloves. The rise of Christianity was the second great failure: raw power there and the dull intellect here became victors over the aristocratic genius