Nietzsche's Will to Illusion by Hans Vailhinger

 

[The author’s reference to Nietzsche’s writing are from Collected Works (Gesemmelte Briefe), the 1902 3^rd edition in German and thus not much use except for specializing scholars thus I must largely omit them though occasionally they chronologically useful. The Roman numerals will denote which Volume. The complete text can be found in Hans Vaihinger’s The Philosophy of ‘As if’; A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, which is kind of an Encyclopedia and can be purchased on Amazon.]

 

That life and science are not possible  without imaginary or false conceptions was also recognized by Nietzsche. Nietzsche early observed that such invented and therefore erroneous conceptions are unconsciously employed by men to the advantage of life and science; he was here following Schopenhauer and probably Richard Wagner and his doctrine of ‘hallucination’. But that such false ideas must be employed both in science and life by intellectually mature people and with a full realization of their falsity is a fact which Nietzsche came to perceive more and more clearly; and it was Friedrich Lange (History of Materialism), in all likelihood, who in this case served as his guide.

Nietzsche, to whom Lange’s name was doubtless already known through the philosophical circles at Bonn, became acquainted with the Geschichte des Materialismus which had appeared in October 1865,  after his departure from Bonn. He wrote an enthusiastic letter to his friend Gersdorff about the book in September 1866, agreeing with it completely; and on February 16, 1868, he wrote an even more enthusiastic letter to the same friend. He there says that  it is ‘a book which gives infinitely more than the title promises, a real treasure-house, to be looked into and read repeatedly.’ That in particular Lange’s theory of Metaphysics as a justified form of ‘poetry’ made a deep impression upon Nietzsche, is quite clear from Rohde’s letter of November 4, 1868. That this notable work long continued to influence Nietzsche is also evident from certain polemical remarks against it, to be found  Vol. XIII and XIV of his Collected Letters. The following account of Nietzsche’s doctrines, as compared with those of Lange, shows that in regard to Illusion Nietzsche must definitely be set down as a disciple and successor of Lange.

Nietzsche, like Lange, emphasizes the great significance of ’appearances’ in all the various fields of science and life and, like him, points out the fundamental and far-reaching function of ‘invention’ and ‘falsification’ as well as the falsifying influence and poetic ‘creation’, and therewith the value and the justification of the ‘myth’ – not in religion alone. Like Lange he holds that over against the world of ‘shifting’, ‘evanescent’ becoming, there is set up, in the interest of understanding and of the aesthetic satisfaction of the ‘fantasy’, a world of ‘being’ in which everything appears  ‘rounded off’ and complete; that in this way there arises an antithesis, a ‘conflict’ between ‘knowledge’ and ‘art’, ‘science’ and ‘wisdom’, which is only resolved by recognizing that this ‘invented’ world is justified and ‘indispensable ‘myth’; from which it finally follows that ‘false’ and ‘true’ are ‘relative’  concepts.

All this Nietzsche could already have found in Lange. This Kantian or, if you will, neo-Kantian origin of Nietzsche’s doctrine has hitherto been completely ignored, because Nietzsche, as was to be expected from his temperament, has repeatedly and ferociously attacked Kant whom he quite misunderstood. As if he had not also attacked Schopenhauer and Darwin, to whom he was just as much indebted! As a matter of fact there is a great deal of Kant in Nietzsche; not, it is true, of Kant in the form in which he is found in the textbooks (and in which he will probably remain for all eternity), but of the spirit of Kant, of the real Kant who understood the nature of appearance through and through, but who, in spite of having seen through it, also consciously saw and recognized its usefulness and necessity.

The writings of his youth – which are printed in Vol. I of his works and to which the [posthumous pieces of Vols.  IX and X also belong – contain a large number of important notes in a rough form. All thee early attempts came to a head in the remarkable fragment dating from the year 1873, ‘Lying, in the extra moral sense’, is what Nietzsche  with his well- known fondness for forced expressions, calls the conscious deviation from reality in myth, art, metaphor, etc. The intentional adherence to illusion, in spite of the realization of its nature, is a kind of ‘lie in the extra-moral; sense’; and ‘lying’ is simply the conscious, intentional  encouragement of illusion.

This is very clearly the case in art, the subject from which Nietzsche started in his first work, Geburt der Tragodie, etc. Art is the conscious creation of an aesthetic illusion; in this sense art rests upon the ‘primitive longing for illusion’; ‘drama as a primitive phenomena’ consists ‘in beholding ourselves transformed before ourselves and then as if we had actually passed into another body and into another character.’ Drama, in general, operates with ‘fictional’ entities. Of the ‘apollinian illusion’ he four times uses the As-if formula in this sense. This aesthetic play’, these ‘countless illusions of beautiful appearance, are what makes existence in general worthwhile’. This is ‘the wisdom of the illusion’. For that reason ‘he who destroys illusion within himself and in others is punished by that most severe tyrant,’ nature’ for ‘it is part of the essence of action to be veiled in illusion’[1]. The myth is considered from this point of view and commended, especially as a mythical fiction. The myth, which the Greeks consciously cultivated, we have lost ‘in the abstract character of our myth-less existence’; with us it has become a ‘fairy-tale,’ but it ‘must ‘be brought back to virility’; even science cannot exist without myth. Appearance, illusion, is a necessary presupposition of art as well as of life. This summarizes Nietzsche’s youthful writings. In them, we see the idea already developing that this illusion is and must be, for the superior man, a conscious one.

In the posthumous works of this youthful period this latter point is more clearly made,. At first, indeed Nietzsche speaks merely of ‘delusional concepts as necessary and salutary provisions of the instinct, of a ‘law of the mechanism of delusions’. Religion also comes under this heading [2], but particularly ‘the actual delusional pictures of artistic culture.’ Of these ‘delusional constructs he also says: ‘the realm of delusional pictures is also part of nature and worthy of study. Thus there arises a whole  ‘network of illusions. These delusional concepts are created by the will, and created by means of ‘deceptive mechanisms’. ‘Even the recognition of their real nature does not destroy their efficacy. This recognition Nietzsche at first feels as ‘torture’, but the perception of the necessity of these illusions and phantasms for life leads to a conscious, pleasurable affirmation of illusion; in this sense, he says: ‘My philosophy is an inverted Platonism: the further it is from actual reality, the purer, more beautiful and better it becomes. Living in illusion as the ideal’: this is also the meaning of the utterance : ‘the highest indication of will is the belief in the illusion (‘although we see through it’)’ and theoretical pessimism (i.e.  the pain we feel because we are thrown back on delusional concepts) is biting its own tail’.

Entirely in the same sense is Vol X: ‘the last of the philosophers . . . proves the necessity of illusion’. The consummation of the history of philosophy is therefore, according to Nietzsche, the philosophy of illusion: the realization of its indispensability and justification: ‘Our greatness lies in the supreme illusion’’ for it is there that we are creators. Now, however, it is no longer the artistic illusion ( the ‘artistic veil’), whose necessity for life is recognized: now the circle of illusions recognized as necessary  and consciously grasped is continually widened: ‘the anthropomorphic element in all knowledge’ now makes its appearance.  It is not only ‘life that needs illusions, i.e. untruths regarded as truth’, nor does culture alone rest upon ‘isolated illusions’, our knowledge also needs them. Thus the ‘surface-nature of our intellect ‘, leads to the employment of general concepts, already in Vol. I disparaged in the extravagant expression ‘insanity.’ In the same line of thought he says ‘we emphasize the main characters and forget the accessory ones.’ Concepts we obtain only through ‘the identification of dissimilars’ and ‘we then act as if the concept of man, for instance, were actually something real, where it has been found only by dropping away all individual characters’. Our intellect operates with conscious symbols, pictures, and rhetorical figures, with ‘coarse and inadequate abstractions, with metaphors: ‘time, space and causality are only cognitive metaphors. ’To know is merely to work with one’s favorite metaphors’. Thus ‘we live and think wholly under the influence of effects of the illogical, in a world of no knowledge and false knowledge’.[3]

All these tentative beginnings  lead up to the fragment already mentioned on the Lies in the Extra-Moral Sense, the fundamental idea of which is that not only only language, but also our conceptual thinking, is based upon falsifying operations, i.e. ‘operations not corresponding to reality’. This is once more set forth in detail for the general concept and for ‘the structure of concepts’. ‘The construction of metaphors is the fundamental instinct of man’, and by this artistic impulse which is also called simply the ‘mystical impulse’ he is led, even in the domain of the theory of knowledge, to false constructs: these are at first fashioned unconsciously but for ‘the liberated intellect’ they are conscious aids: ‘scaffoldings’.

                                   *                    *

                                               *

 

The writings of the middle or transitional period, which be it said, are of a less dithyrambic character, deepen the understanding already gained at certain points. The extravagant expression ‘lie’ now occurs only rarely ‘The Greeks intentionally invested life with lies’); (The muses as liars, the artist as a deceiver’); ( ‘the lies and deceits of sensation’) (‘Education which sanctifies so many lies’). He remarks pathetically: ‘Ah, now we must embrace untruth, now at last error becomes a lie, and lying to ourselves a necessity of life’.

The thought that we must consciously make use of ‘untruth’ in our thought still causes him suffering: ‘One question there is that seems to lie like lead upon our tongues and yet never becomes articulate: the question whether we can consciously remain in falsehood and, if we must, whether death would not be preferable?’ And in in Vol. V, ‘the recognition of delusion and error as a condition of knowing and feeling’ would  without art ‘be unendurable’ and must lead to ‘suicide’. But his realization of the fact that ideas whose untruth we are conscious, are biological and theoretical necessities becomes more and more clear. At first this realization declares itself in the recognition that ‘errors and mistakes of fantasy are the only means by which mankind has gradually .  . .been able to elevate itself’:  Man must, however, ‘understand not only the historical’ but also ‘the psychological legitimacy [which therefore applies also to living] of such concepts; he must realize that the engine, man, ‘has to be stoked with . . .illusions, one-sided truths’. Nietzsche recalls a saying of Voltaire: ‘Croyez-moi, mon ami, l’erreur aussi ason merite: for that reason we must not ‘destroy such illusions for they are necessary as fairy tales and make-believe games are to a child (and for a child too his games are conscious self-deceptions)[4]. In the advanced mind  there develops more and more ‘the consciousness of illusion’, indeed a cult of illusion, ‘if nothing any longer proves to be divine unless it be an error, blindness and lies’, since on these ‘life has been arranged’ This ‘impenetrable net of errors’ is necessary for life.

To a mind thus advanced all the customary articles of belief and the convictions even of science, become ‘regulative fictions’. He recognizes them as ‘mere necessary optical errors’. In this sense he speaks of the ‘really living untruths,’ of the ‘living errors’, and adds” ‘that is why we must allow errors to live and give them a wide domain’. Summing up, he says ‘in order that there might be some degree of consciousness in the world, an unreal world of error had to arise: beings with a brief permanency, in individuals, etc. Not until an imaginary world, in contradiction to the absolute flu, had arisen, was it possible to erect this foundation a structure of knowledge’ and now finally we can see the fundamental error [the belief in permanence] upon which everything else rests . . . but this error can only be destroyed with life itself . . .our organs are adjusted to error. Thus there arises in the wise man the contradiction in life and of its ultimate determinations: man’s instinct for knowledge presupposes belief in error and life  . . .to err is the condition of living  . . . the fact that we know that we err does not do away with error. And that is not a bitter thought! We must love and cultivate error: it is the mother of knowledge.’

Many passages are found in which he summarizes his thought, for instance: ‘such erroneous articles of faith . . .that there are permanent things, that there are equal things, that our will is free’. . .; ‘We operate with things that do not exist, with lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible time and divisible space . . .’; ‘We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live –  assuming bodies, lines, surfaces, causes and effects, motion and rest, shape and content; without these articles of faith nobody would now be able to endure life! But that does not mean that anything has yet been proved. Life is no argument; for error might be one of the conditions of life’.

So he says [XII]: ‘Without the assumption of a kind of being which we could oppose to actual reality, we should have nothing by which we could measure, compare or picture it: error is the presupposition of knowledge. Partial permanency, relative bodies, identical events, similar events –with these we falsify the true state of affairs ,but it would be impossible to have any knowledge of anything without having falsified it in this way’. ‘At the beginning of all intellectual activity we encounter the grossest assumptions and inventions, for instance, identity, thing permanence –these are all coeval with the intellect, and the intellect has modeled its conduct of them.’  And it is in this sense he says ‘The intellect is the means of deception, with its forced forms- substance, identity, permanency’; but it is on such opinions as ‘the belief in identity, number, space, etc. that the duration of mankind is based.’

Thinking is dependent on language, and language is already full of presuppositions: ‘we are still continually seduced by words and concepts, into imagining things as simpler than they really are, imagining them separated from one another, indivisible and existing in a for themselves. A philosophical; mythology lies hidden in language which breaks through at every moment, no matter how careful we may be’ these mythical;, fictional constituents of language must accordingly be employed with the consciousness of their falsity; It is well said that ‘we speak as though  there were really existing things, and our science only speaks of such things. But real things exist only for human optics: and from this we cannot escape’.

Nietzsche frequently points to artificial simplifications as a principal mechanism of our thought; in a very remarkable passage, according to which ‘we see our infinitely complicated nature in the form of a simplification’, Similarly: ‘ In what a curious simplification of things and human beings do we live! We have made everything easy and convenient for ourselves . . . and given out thought carte blanche to make all sorts of erroneous inferences.’

Next to simplification, isolation plays a leading part, e.g. in mechanics: ‘we isolate conceptually first the direction, secondly the moving object, thirdly pressure, etc.- in reality there are no such isolated things’.

Of logic he says: it ‘is based upon presuppositions to which nothing in the real world corresponds, e.g. the presupposition of the equality of thing, of the identity of the same things at different points of time.’ For this ‘illusion of identity’ see also Lange’s similar utterances. He says nothing more about the general concepts in III and XI, but he has this excellent remark (XII) on the ‘archetype’, i.e. the idea corresponding to the universal concept: ‘the archetype is a fiction, like purpose, line, etc.; ‘our concepts are inventions.’

“Laws of nature’ are the remains of mythological dreaming’: and in XII we find the following, so strongly reminiscent of Kant: ‘ It is our law and our conformity to laws that we read into the world of phenomena – however much the contrary seems to be true.’ Causality is a ‘picture’, something ‘that we read in’; what we call ‘experiencing’ is, in this sense, ‘an imagining’.

‘The assumption of mechanics’ also rest on ideal inventions, particularly the conception of ‘force residing in mathematical points and mathematical lines’; ‘they are in the last analysis practical sciences, and start from the fundamental errors of man, his belief in things and identities.’

New in his realization of the fictional nature of many mathematical concepts [II]: ‘in nature there is no exactly straight line nor any true circle’; ‘numerals are based on the error that more than one identical thing exists . . ,.here error already reigns, for here we are already imagining entities and unities that do not exist. [5] ‘We introduce a mathematical mean-line into absolute movement and, in general, we introduce lines and surfaces on the basis of the intellect i.e. of error, the error of assuming equality and constancy’. “Our assumptions thhat there are bodies, surfaces, lines, is simply a consequence of our assumption that there are substances and things and permanency. Just as certainly as our concepts are inventions, so certainly are the constructs of mathematical inventions.’

The idea of permanent things also belongs here. ‘It is probably due to our lack of development that we believe in things and assume something permanent in becoming, that we believe in an ego: again in XII: ‘The only existence for which we have any warrant is mutable not self-identical and possesses relations . . . Now thought asserts just the opposite we as regards reality. It need not, however, for that reason, be true. Indeed this assertion of the contrary represents perhaps only a condition of our conception. ‘Thought would be impossible if it did not fundamentally misconceive the nature of being; it must predicate substance and equality, because a knowledge of complete flux is impossible; it must ascribe attributes to reality, in order to exist itself. No subject  and no object need necessarily exist  to make thought possible but thought must believe both.’ ‘The intellect has not been arranged for the understanding of becoming. It endeavors to prove universal rigidity [eternal permanence] owing its origin in images.’ The belied in permanent duration, the unconditioned, is not ‘the belief that is most true, but the one that is most useful’. Our conception of space is also based on the belief in the permanent: ‘our conception of space holds good for an imaginary world’. The belief in permanence, which arises of itself within us, and which science maintains in its own way, is the basis of all belief in ‘reality. The permanent individual and his unity is, likewise, something necessarily imagined.

Freedom and responsibility are frequently treated as necessary errors (‘the illusion of free choice’): ‘We can only dream ourselves free, not make ourselves so; for that reason even ‘a complete atheist who holds firmly to the fundamentally irresponsible and non-meritorious character of all human action, can experience a feeling of shame when treated as if he merited this or that’; he then appears to himself; as if ‘he had forced his way into a higher order of beings,’. Here also, belongs the statement: ‘such a thing as character has no real existence, it is only a helpful abstraction’;’ and particularly the following trenchant saying: ‘Blame only has meaning as a means of deterrence and subsequent influence as a motive;  the object of praise is to spur on, to incite to imitation: in so far as both are given as if they had been merited by some act, the falsehood and the illusion present in all praise and blame are unavoidable; they are, indeed, the means sanctified by the higher purpose.’ But these ‘moral advantages are still indispensable’; and similarly we put it ‘as if we showed the way to nature’ in our acts, whereas in truth we are led by her.’ Our freedom, our autonomy, is an ‘interpretation’, i.e. something  ‘read in’. Very characteristically he says: “I will set down once for all in order everything that I negate: There is no reward or punishment, no wisdom, no goodness, no purpose, no will. But in order to act you must believe in error and you will continue to behave in accordance with these errors even when you have recognized them as errors.’

The subject, too, is a self-fashioned concept that we cannot dispense with: ‘we place ourselves as a unity in the midst of this self-fashioned world of images, as that which abides in the midst of change. But it is an error.’ He says pertinently that’the ego is an attempt to see and to understand our infinitely complicated nature in a simplified fashion – an image to represent a thing’. That is the ‘original error’. The whole opposition between subject and object’ is an artificial division.

Nietzsche also recognizes the distinction between Thing-in-itself and Appearance as an artificial one and consequently as a conceptual invention: ‘the true essence of things is an invention of the conceiving being, without which it would not be able to represent things to itself’. The  entire phenomenal world is a conception ‘spun out of intellectual errors’: ‘the world as idea’ is the same as ‘the world as error’, ‘the world of phantoms in which we live.’ Our external world is a product of the fantasy’. ‘The belief in external things’ is one of the necessary errors of mankind. ‘Matter, stuff, is a subjective form’, ‘the whole perceptual and sensible world is the primordial poem of mankind.’

The aesthetic illusion naturally recurs again and again, for instance, and twice in the ‘as if’ form. He speaks of the artistic deception’. Art, ‘a kind of cult of the untrue’, is based on ‘the will to illusion.’

We will close with a fine passage [V]: ‘ What then is ‘Appearance’ for me! Assuredly not the converse of any real Being – what can I say of any Being except the mere predicate  of its appearance! Assuredly not a dead mask that can be put over the face of some unknown and presumably also taken off again! Appearance is for me that which acts and moves . . .’

                                   *                     *

                                               *

The works of Nietzsche’s third period in Vols. VI-VIII contain  (apart from the introductory chapters of Jenseits von Gut und Bose in Vol, VII) less that bears on our subject than the posthumous writings belonging to this period in Vols XII, XIII, XIV, XV; the last two volumes deserve our particular attention.

It is intelligible enough, from what has preceded , that ‘the problem of the value of truth’, ceremoniously introduced in Vol. VII, IX can now be stated; here Nietzsche places himself not only ‘beyond good and evil’ but also beyond truth and falsehood.[6]; ‘it is nothing but a moral prejudice that regards truth as of more value than illusion . . .there would be no life at all if it were not on the basis of perspective valuations and semblances’: ‘the perspective is the basic condition of all life.’ This expression, seldom found  up till now, henceforth occuirs more frequently: the perspective is a necessary deception which remains even after we have recognized its falsity. In this sense Nietzsche had already (V.) given to his philosophy the appropriate title ‘perspectivism.’[7] This is also the sense in which the often quoted passage is to be understood: ‘it is now time to substitute for the Kantian question: ‘how are synthetic judgments a priori possible?’ Another question ‘Why is the belief in such judgments necessary? To understand namely that, for the survival of beings like ourselves, belief in the truth of such judgments is necessary: for which reason they may, of course, even be false judgments!  . . . They are indeed all false judgments. But belief in their truth is necessary as a superficial optical illusion characteristic of the perspective optics of life.’ ‘The falsest judgments (among which are to be classed synthetic judgments a priori) are the most indispensable ines for us; without giving validity to logical fictions, without measuring by the purely imaginary world of the unconditioned, the ‘self-identical’, without continual falsification of the world by number, man cannot live – the renunciation of false judgments would be a renunciation of life.[8]

This  ‘will to deception’ is to be thus understood, which indeed is the soul of art.’

‘Whatever be the philosophic standpoint we take today, from whatever side we look at it, the mistakenness of the world in which we believe we are living is the most definite and most certain thing we see . . . And why should the world in which we live not be a fiction?’ Even the most exact and the most positive ‘science tries to keep us in this simplified, entirely artificial world, invented and falsified to suit us; and willy-nilly science loves error because it is alive and loves life.’ In this sense, for instance, physics makes use of the atomic theory, though it ‘is one of the most thoroughly disproved things that exist’; but the atomic theory serves the scientist ‘as a convenient tool, as an abbreviation of his means of expression.’; the whole of physics is such an artificial, false, serviceable ‘arrangement.’[9]

Subject and Object are such artificial yet, for the time being indispensable concepts; the ‘ego’ and the ‘it’ are likewise ‘fictions’, as are Cause and Effect. “Cause’ and ‘Effect’ must not erroneously be made concrete . . .they should be used only as pure concepts, i.e. as conventional fictions for the purpose of defining, understanding and explaining . . . It is we ourselves who have invented causes . . . interdependence, relativity, compulsion, number, law freedom, end: and when we read this sign-world into things as something really existing and mix it up with them, we are merely doing what we have always done, namely mythologizing.’ Nietzsche attacks in particular the mythical idea of the ‘active thing’: ‘There is no substratum, there is no ‘being’ behinds the action, behind this ‘action on’, behind the becoming; the ‘agent’ has been merely read into the action – the action is all there is’; the atom and the Kantian Thing-in-itself are also such conventional fictions. So, too, is that ‘natural law of which you physicists talk so proudly but which exists – only in virtue of your interpretation . . .it is no fact . . .on the contrary, it is only a naïve human manner of arranging things’ – just a ‘humanistic’ anthropomorphism which for the enlightened man is conscious. He knows more or less clearly ‘that the thing is not so, and that we merely let it stand at that.’

The fragments in Vol. XIV offer a welcome amplification of this, particularly the famous passage: ‘The erroneousness of a concept does not for me constitute an objection to it; the question is –to  what extent it is advantageous to life . . .indeed I am convinced that the most erroneous assumptions are precisely the most indispensable for us, that without granting the validity of the logical fiction, without measuring reality by the invented world of the unconditional, the self-identical, man could not live; and that a negation of this fiction . . . is the equivalent to the negation of life itself. To admit untruth as a condition of life – this does not indeed imply a terrible negation of customary valuations.’

‘My basic concept is that the ‘unconditioned’ is a regulative fiction, to which reality must not be ascribed’, but such fictions are useful and necessary to life, even to the life of ‘knowledge’, for ‘knowledge’ is, in its nature, something that invents, something that falsifies’, ‘a fictive, assumptive force must be assumed, just as we must assume the inheritance and perpetuation of fictions.’ We may recognize the contradictio in these fictional concepts [10], e.g. in the concepts of the Unconditioned, the Existent, Absolute knowledge, Absolute values, the Thing-in-itself, Pure mind, but the intellect is not possible without the positing’ of such fictional concepts, particularly that of the unconditioned. These fictions, as we have already seen, Nietzsche calls perspectives: ‘If we could get out of the world of perspectives we should perish  .  .  . we must approve of the false . . . and accept it’: the perspective nature of the world is as deep as our understanding can reach to-day’: and in this sense he shows that ‘number’ is a perspective form, as are ‘time’ and ‘space. We no more harbor ‘one soul’ in our breasts than we do ‘two’: ‘individuals’, like material ‘atoms’ are no longer tenable, unless it be as manipulative devices of thought [11]. . . ‘Subject and object’, ‘active and passive’, ‘ cause and effect’, ‘means and end’; are all merely perspective forms. Such ‘perspective falsifications’ are necessary for man’s existence and indeed for all organisms;’ Along with the organic world a perspective sphere is give’, at first, of course, unconscious; but in the mature man there develops a conscious ‘will to illusion, the realization of perspectives i.e. positing falsehood as truth’. The human intellect, with its fixed forms, particularly its grammatico-logical categories is a falsification apparatus’ yet man makes use of it consciously. For the purpose of life and knowledge – in so far as we can speak of such things – the intellect needs, ‘as a necessary means, the introduction of full blown fictions as schemata, which . . .enable us to conceive of happenings as simpler than they really are’, in other words, to falsify them. Thus it has come about that these errors have made men inventive: and that is why the ‘cult of error’ is necessary: indeed a ‘joy of illusion’ develops the ‘will to illusion’ for we recognize ‘the value of regulative fictions, e.g. the fictions of logic.’

That the logical forms rest on fictions is frequently repeated: ‘Logic is a consistent sign-language worked out on the assumption of the existence of identical cases’ and consequently ‘logicality is only possible as the result of a basic error’: that identical things and identical cases exist is the basic fiction, first in judgment and then in inference’:  ‘The invented, rigid, conceptual world’ is an important means of thought: indeed our practical thinking does not in the least follow the fictional scheme of logic: ‘Logical thinking represents the model-example of a perfect fiction’: ‘Thus the working of the intellect is to be regarded as if it really corresponded to this regulative scheme of fictional thought’. Also are the remarks on logic and mathematics as ‘sign-conventions’ and also those on grammatical; forms dominating logical thought, the ‘metaphysics of language’. Even Plato thought of his ‘Ideas’ essentially in this way i.e. as mere ‘regulative fictions.’

In one part of the fragments of Vol. XV prominence is given to an an aspect of Nietzsche’s thought of which we have already had occasional glimpses before: the damage these regulatory fictions cause when not used as such but when a character of reality is erroneously ascribed to them, as is indeed generally the case. In this sense these regulative conceptual aids are – fictions in malo sensu, ‘merely’ fictions. Thus, ‘ the subject, the ego is only a fiction’; the mind as an agent of thought is fictional, nay, the pure logical thinking of the mind, posited by the theorists of knowledge, is ‘ an absolutely arbitrary fiction’: ‘Mind’ and ‘reason’ are ‘fictional synthesis and unities’ and are even deprecated as ‘useless fictions’ ‘Subject’ is a fiction implying that many similar conditions in us are the effect of the substratum . . . This is to be denied, ‘the subject is not a thing that has an effect, but merely a fiction’; in man  ‘we have imagined a primum mobile that does not exist at all’ ‘This artificial freeing and explaining of the ego as something in and for itself’ has had  evil consequences, among which is the assumption of an inherent ‘spiritual causation’ which is also only a fiction and, with it, the assumption ‘of free actions’, which are then separated, into moral and immoral: - this is all ‘imaginary, unreal and fictional’ : particularly the concepts on which morality is based. But the genus, he contends, is as illusory and false as the ego; into the concept of genus, idea, purpose , etc. a fiction has been read, a false reality, and that is why these become bad fictions: in this  sense generic concepts are ‘false unities that have been invented’ and the same is true also of the ‘causal fiction’, ‘the schematism of the thing’ and, in general, of all ‘that is thought’. In particular the entire world of Things-in-themselves, the true world of the eternally existent in contrast with the world of becoming, is ‘ a mere fiction’; also, we ‘imagine for ourselves a God in this world, accomplish our actions ‘as if they were the commands of God and thus arrive a the ‘bad and petty fictions’ of the Christian view at the ‘fictions of the world beyond.’; but ‘we must do battle with all the presuppositions upon which a ‘true world’ has been fictively constructed.’

 

The opposition to the misuse of fictions, dating from the stirring times of the Gotzendammerung and the Antichrist  must not be misunderstood: the necessary complement to it is furnished by numerous other passages which show that Nietzsche had realized the utility and necessity of fictions. This realization is evident also in many fragments of Vol XV: thus he speaks on the ‘necessity of false values; and accordingly of the ‘necessity, causality, expediency’ as ‘useful ‘useful illusions’;, for such illusions are a necessity if we are to live’; ‘illusion has a survival-value for us’. [12] Logic, which, like geometry and arithmetic, holds only for fictive ‘entities’, is nevertheless  a ‘useful invention’, a good ‘aid’. The categories at ‘falsifications’ but ‘clever’ and ‘useful means for bringing order into the world’: the system of categories, the ‘system of falsification on principle’ is, nevertheless, ‘a serviceable and handy scheme’, a system of necessary manipulations’ a ‘necessary perspectivism.’ [13]. It is with it as with the concept of the atom:: there, as here, it is a question of ‘pure semiotic’, but it is not within our power to change at will our means of expression. ‘The demand for an adequate method of expression is senseless, it is in the nature  . . . of a means of expression to express merely a relation’. These concepts are therefore inadequate but useful fictions. This is particularly true of the category of substance: the ‘existent’ is a ‘simplification, for practical purposes’ based upon the artificial creation of identical; cases: it is ‘a picture’ introduced by us for practically useful and perspective reasons, for ‘there lies within us an ordering, falsifying, artificially-separating power’ whose products, however, - these numerous falsifications’ –are useful and necessary: for ‘Life is based on these presuppositions’: ‘the
fictional world of subject, substance, reason, etc. is necessary.’

This paragraph takes us directly to those thoughts of Nietzsche that might be called the beginning of a Metaphysic of As-if; with the question, what part illusion plays in the totality of cosmic happenings and how these cosmic happenings, from which illusion is necessarily developed, are to be regarded and evaluated – with this question, the young Nietzsche has already busied himself: we find in the posthumous writings even of the first period an admirable note: ‘My philosophy is an inverted Platonism: the further it is from actual reality, the purer, more beautiful and better it becomes. Living in illusions is ideal’. [XI]: in the same place we find Nietzsche struggling with the metaphysical problem of appearance and concluding: ‘The One, in a Greek spirit of gaiety, creates illusion from within itself.’ In the second period we find the problem has deepened: ‘Our idealistic fantasy-building is also part of reality and must appear in its character. It is not the source, but that is why it is there’ ‘We really know only the being which conceives with its falsifying activity. What part does this ‘performing Being play in general Being? Is all Being perhaps necessarily a conceiving and, consequently, a falsifying? At any rate, our conceiving and, with it the erroneous but necessary belief in the unconditioned, ‘must be deducible from the nature of the Esse and from conditioned existence in general. [XI]  The question plays a great part in the third period, and in this way Nietzsche finds himself confronted with Descartes’ problem of deceiving God: - the erroneousness of our conceptual world remains a fact; We find a superabundance of evidence for that which might seduce into making guesses at a deceiving principle in the ‘nature of things’. ‘What if God is a deceiver, in spite of Descartes?’. ‘Let us assume that there is something deceptive and fraudulent in the nature of things . . .We should, in that case, as a reality, have to participate to some extent, in this deceptive and fraudulent basis of things and in its basic will .  . .’: ‘Descartes is not radical enough. In face of his desire to have certainty and his ‘I will not be cheated’, it is necessary to ask why not?’ ‘The staring-point: irony against Descartes: given that there was something deceiving in the basis of things from which we have sprung, what good would it do de omnibus dubitare!  It might be the best way of cheating ourselves.’ From this it follows that : ‘The will to appearance, to illusion, to deception . . .is deeper, ‘more metaphysical’, than the will to truth’ and ‘the deceptive perspective character belongs to existence’; we must ‘not forget to include this perspective, assumptive force in ‘true Being: ‘This creating, logicizing, arranging, falsifying, is the best guaranteed reality’, ‘so that web might be tempted to assume that there is nothing else but concept-making, i. e. , falsifying subjects.’ In the same passage [XIV]  Nietzsche sums up his doctrine in the following monumental words: ‘Parmenides said: ‘We do not think that which is not’ – we at the other extreme say : What can be thought must certainly be a fiction’’ Cf. the very similar passages in Lange on the value of that which is non-existent and yet thought, i.e. of appearance. From this standpoint, appearance is no more to be censored and attacked by the philosophers as heretofore, and illusion, so far as it proves itself to be useful and valuable and at the same time aesthetically unobjectionable, is to be affirmed, desired and justified. ‘Perspectivism is necessary for us.’

                                 *                         *

                                                *

This realization of the utility and necessity of fictions would have certainly have led Nietzsche, in the course of time, to recognize the utility and necessity of religious fictions also. The question has often been asked where Nietzsche would have been led, in the course of his development, had not the premature catastrophe of 1888 put an end to his development. The answer is: that Nietzsche, after he had unsparingly revealed the evil side of religious concepts, would necessarily have been led to emphasize their good side also, and to recognize them once more as useful and necessary fictions. He was on the direct road thereto. In what has gone before, we have found a number of expressions pointing in this direction, expressions in which he recognizes the historical necessity of the religious conceptual world.[14]We also encountered a remarkable passage, quite reminiscent of Kant, in which it is said that man should not indeed believe in the religious presuppositions of traditional morality but should, nevertheless, act according to them and take them  ‘as regulative’, i.e. take them as regulative fictions. That is also the tendency of a few other remarkable utterances in Vol. XV: not only does Nietzsche  recognize that we owe to the religious ‘illusion’ an ‘artificial strengthening’ but he finds the ‘species man’ impoverished now that it is no longer in possession of the power to inject such illusion into reality, is no longer in possession of the power ‘to fashion fictions’[15]. Has in other words, become ‘nihilistic.’

He says in his exaggerated language: ‘Catastrophe: what if falsehood is something divine? Whether the value of all things may not consist in the fact that they are false? Whether we should not believe in God not because he  is [16] true, but because he is false? . . . What if it be not just the lying and falsifying, the reading in of meanings, which constitutes a value, a sense, a purpose?’ And in a remarkable aphorism he sets to the credit of the nineteenth century, as contrasted with the eighteenth, whose ‘specter’ was reason, the ‘strength’ of which it gave proof in again becoming ‘more tolerant’ towards religion: ‘We do not hide from ourselves the obverse of evil things’: ‘Intolerance towards priests and the church’ has decreased; even the objection of rationalists, that it is immoral to believe in God ‘we regard as the best justification of this belief’ –because religious fictions in their capacity as myths [17]  should no more be measured by a moral standard than by a logical one.

These utterances are the harbingers of a wider and final period of NIetzsce’s development  which was cut short by his illness. Nietzsche would inevitably have gained the road taken by the Kant he so completely misunderstood and also followed by F. A. Lange, the Lange by whom he had been so much influenced in his youth. He would not have revoked his Antichrist, whose incisive truths had, once and for all, to be spoken, but he would have presented the ‘obverse of evil things’ with the same relentless frankness: he would have ‘justified’ the utility and necessity of religious fictions.

 

 

[1]’There are errors of the most salutary and beneficial kind’ and, on the other hand, there are ‘doctrines which I regard as true but deadly’; hence Nietzsche also approves of Plato’s indispensable lie in the Republic.

[2] It is very striking that Nietzsche here already recognizes the freedom of the will ‘as a necessary delusional concept’. Man ‘conceives of freedom as if he could also act otherwise’, indeed ‘the whole process of world-history goes on as if freedom of will existed’ ‘Moral freedom’, however, ‘is a necessary illusion’.

[3] It is in this sense that we must also understand the following important sentence in Vol 1: ‘The tremendous courage and wisdom of Kant and Schopenhauer accomplished that most difficult of  all victories, the victory over the optimism which lies concealed in the essence of logic. Cf. for logical optimism and pessimism.
[4] In this sense he says patiently: ‘Why cannot we learn to look upon Metaphysics and religion as the legitimate play of grown-ups’. Similarly of the ‘illusions of the next world’. ‘There may be necessary errors’ he says, in definite contradiction of what Pascal says of Christian dogmas ‘We need blindness sometimes and must allow certain articles of faith and errors to remain untouched within us so long as they maintain  us in life’. In another passage he appears to reprobate this ‘conscious adherence to illusion and the compulsory assimilation of it as the basis of our civilization’ which he himself finds necessary; but the criticism is directed against a misuse by Richard Wagner.

[5] The same passage continues: ‘our sensations of space and time are false, for if consistently tested, they lead to logical contradictions. In all scientific calculations we inevitably operate with a number of imaginary quantities, but because these quantities are, at least, constant, as, for instance, our sensations of time and space, the scientific results acquire absolute rigidity and certainty.’ In other words we always think and compute with constant errors. Our empirical conception of the world, therefore, is based on ‘erroneous fundamental assumptions’; ‘the world as idea means the world as error.’ In this connection Nietzsche expressly invokes Kant: ‘when Kant says ‘reason does not derive its laws from nature but prescribes them to nature’, this is, in regard to the concept of nature, completely true.’ This sentence of Kant, as we can infer from other occasional references to it, had made a great impression on Nietzsche: it is just this ‘creative ‘active’ force of the mind, its ‘inventive, poetic, and falsifying’ activity that Nietzsche, as we shall see, repeatedly emphasizes. There is, then, much more of Kant in Nietzsche than is generally imagined.

[6] ‘Truth does not mean the antithesis of error but the relation of certain errors to other errors, for instance, as that they are older, more completely assimilated, that we do not know how to live without them, and the like.’ ‘What is it that forces us to assume an essential antithesis of ‘true’ and ‘false’?
[7] we find ‘our poetical-logical power of determining perspectives in all things’, and, in quite a Kantian fashion, Nietzsche speaks of ‘the abundance of optical errors’ which inevitably flow therefrom and which we must consciously maintain. This perspective  mode of imaginative creation, found in all organic beings, itself, he says, constitutes a happening, an inner happening accompanying the external ones.

[8]Because deception and falsification is necessary for life, at least as necessary as true ideas, not only in man, according to Nietzsche, adjusted to it, but all organic life also: ‘illusion . . . begins with the organic world.’ ‘thus mankind and all organic beings have made it; they have gone on ordering the world, in action, in thought, in imagination, until they have made of it something that they can use, something that they can reckon with.’: ‘the capacity to create (to form, invent, imagine) is the fundamental capacity of the organic world; ‘in the organic world error begins: things, substances, attributes, activities . . . these are the specific errors by means of which organisms live,’ But man is not content with these minor falsifications – ‘ It is the major falsifications and interpretations that in the past have lifted us above mere animal happiness’. In this sense Nietzsche in XIII already calls man ‘the fantastic animal’ and and speaks of the ‘impertinence of our fantasy’; the importance of fantasy is stressed in XII; from it springs our ‘myth-making instinct’ and the whole ‘picture-language ‘ of science, our whole ‘idealistic phantasmagoria’, which, however, as conscious ‘lying’, is a necessary element in life.

 

[9] In the posthumous fragments of Vol XIII these scientific fictions are preferably called ‘regulative  hypothesis’, where ‘hypothesis’ (as by Lange) is employed accurately instead of ‘fiction. Thus XIII :  ‘ cause  and effect’ is a truth ‘but an hypothesis by means of which we humanize the world. By means of the atomic hypothesis we make the world accessible both in our eye and in our calculation’ A ‘strong’ minds is able to reject the delusion of such absolute concepts and yet keep them as ‘hypothesis’; The whole mechanistic view of nature, especially the ‘conception of pressure and impact’ can be allowed validity only ‘in the sense of a regulative hypothesis for the world of illusory appearance’; ‘The mechanistic conception is to be conceived of as a regulative principle of method’; in this senses Nietzsche announces to us the ‘triumph of the anti-teleological, mechanistic method of thought as a regulative hypothesis, and as a ‘conscious one’ withal. Thus ‘the mathematical physicist construct for themselves a force-point-world with which they can calculate i.e. ‘as a provisional truth on the lines of which we can work (in other words a ‘working hypothesis’), although ‘the assumption of atoms can easily be recognized as purely subjective. Thus he also says: ‘in order that we might reckon we had first to imagine’. In other passages What Nietzsche has here said of  calculation is applied to thinking in general. Of particular significance is the passage in Vol. XIII: ‘the mind has hitherto been too weak and too uncertain of itself to grasp an hypothesis as an hypothesis and, at the same time, to take it as a guide it required faith. To judge from this context this refers to morality. Thus, the ‘strong ‘; mind ought to be conscious of its fictive nature and yet ‘take it as a directive’. He need not ‘believe’ it, but he should be able to act on it – a quite Kantian dictum! Of mechanics with its presuppositions, especially those of the atom and of empty space, he says it is ‘a kind of ideal, regulative method, nothing more.’

 

[10] The ‘world of Being’ is an invention – there is only the world of Becoming; and it is because of this invented world of Being that the poet regards himself also as ‘being’ and contrasts himself with it. Being is, consequently, a product of thought, substance is an ‘error. ‘The royal prerogative, which we assume after the manner of artists, plumes itself on having created this world’, he says quite in the Kantian tradition.

[11] The concepts ‘individual’, ‘person’, etc. are indeed false, but serve admirably to simplify thought’ they are however, ‘deceptions, like all the concepts enumerated above, they are ‘false but permanent error’. ‘Our means and ends’ are very useful abbreviations for rendering processes tangible and concrete’.

[12] Compare in this connection the magnificent Hymn to Illusion, to the ‘whole Olympus of Illusion’ [VIII and XII], to the ‘lie’ in the good sense –the creation of myths. Compare XIII: it is a ‘prejudice, he says, ‘to believe that the philosopher must fight against illusion as of it were his own enemy.’ (the perspective oo illusion as the law of conservation). He says quite in the  manner of Kant ;” We are adjusted to optical errors’ and we may even ask what is the ‘most useful belief,; the inner processes are essentially productive of error because life is only possible under the guidance of narrowing perspective-creating powers.’ ‘Consciousness is something essentially falsifying.’

 

[13] ‘’Thought is not a means of ‘knowledge’ but a means of designating, arranging and manipulating events for our use’; ‘thought is the cause and the condition both of the ‘subject’ and of the ‘object’, as it is of ‘substance’ and of ‘matter’, etc.’ ‘The inventive power which creates categories is working in the service of or needs, namely of security and rapid intelligibility on the basis of conventions and signs.’;. Thinking is identical with ‘creating pictures’.

[14] The important and beautiful passage in VII where the religions are praised in detail as ‘educative and ennobling means’ especially belongs here. It is true that Nietzsche, at the same time, points out ‘the evil obverse side and holds the religions to account for all the damage they have done. Yet he also says: : ‘There is perhaps nothing in Christianity and Buddhism so worthy of respect as their art of exhorting even the lowliest to transport themselves into a higher illusory arrangement of things through piety.’ [ see Kant’s similar utterances on p. 320 of The Philosophy of ‘As if’] This art, it is true, springs from a ‘will to falsehood at any price’ but it is just for this reason that the homines religioso ‘are to be reckoned among the artists, as belonging to their highest order, among whom, also, ‘the will to deceive is accompanied by a good conscience.’ Even in Antichrist Nietzsche has, from this point of view, a sympathetic word for the ‘great symbolic’, Christ, and for the ‘primitive symbolism’ of Christianity, though he deplores its development in ‘even grosser misunderstanding.’ Nietzsche has so little against such myths that he makes a demand for a ‘myth of the future. As a test of such a future-myth we can interpret the idea of the ‘eternal recurrences’. True enough, Nietzsche meant this at first as hypothetical, then as dogmatic, but, in the end, he himself  appears to have interpreted it merely as a useful fiction. In a sense he says of this idea: ‘perhaps it is not true.’ And it is thus possible that O. Ewald was right in interpreting this thought as a pedagogical-regulative idea. Simmel also does. The idea of the ‘superman’, to, is a heuristic-pedagogical Utopian fiction of this sort.

[15]This creating, logicizing, putting in order, falsifying, simplifying, arranging, artificially separating, poetizing, imagining ‘the perspective, assumptive force he also calls bluntly, but very appropriately, ‘the error-desirng force within us, and the ‘will to deception’.

[16] In the printed edition there is a ‘not’ between the ‘is’ and the ‘true, which is also found in the manuscript, but which is clearly a slip of the pen and is to be corrected.

[17] According to XIII, likewise, Nietzsche would like to see the belief in God retained as a ‘pathetic myth’. Cf. also the characteristic utterances XIV, about the ‘necessity of ‘invented’ religious concepts. For Nietzsche’s theory of knowledge cf. also the two illuminating works- R. Eisler, Nietzsches Erhenntistheorie und Metaphysih (1902) and F. Rittelmeyer, F. Nietzsche und das Erhenninisproblem (1903)