31. On Nietzsche
Nietzsche admired the greatness of the personalities and the impulsive natures of the ancient philosophers. It took the greatest courage of thought to think the thoughts that were thought in the tragic age of the Greeks: by Thales, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras. No one understands these sages unless they can build up a picture of their personalities from their thoughts. We are not interested in their teachings, but in their characters. We are drawn to explore their questions, to find out what kind of person Heraclitus was, because we have the feeling that his philosophy was only a condition of life that Heraclitus had to create for himself in order to be able to exist. One can wander through dreary stretches of modern philosophical history; nowhere is there such a necessary connection between character and the world of ideas. With most of the philosophers of the present day, one has the feeling that they pursue philosophy as an external business; one can also imagine them without this business. Indeed, the connection between the world of the senses and the personality rarely interests them. They strive for “objective truth,” that is, for that insipid and weak construct that arises from cowardly thinking, because not the whole personality is active when philosophizing. The ancient philosophers before Socrates were artists. And Nietzsche is another such philosophical artist. Only a fool would choose him as a master and swear by his words. Only the artistically sensitive person can gain a relationship with Nietzsche. He created his world of ideas like the ancient philosophers of the tragic age, because he needed it to live. Truth for him is not what can be supported by the strict proofs of school logic, but what proves to him to be life-promoting.
He does not prove his views, he tries them out on his own body to see if he can live with them. His rich, bold, deep nature needed dangerous truths to sustain itself. This is the charm of Nietzsche's writings: they always point us to the great man who creates a zest for life in them. A nature as rare and lonely as Nietzsche's could not easily get along with the world. He erected his thoughts between himself and the world in order to be able to endure the world.
Not the rigid thinking, not the so-called scientific drive, but the mood conjures up Nietzsche's thoughts. They detach themselves from him as products of the personality. All thoughts that go beyond a mere description of actual observation arise in this way. It's just that those who believe in objective truths don't have enough insight to understand this.
Even their most objective truths are the products of subjective personalities, only tailored for a certain average way of life. Objectivity means nothing more than being suitable for a large number of people to live by. But the select personality needs select truths. The more objective a truth is, i.e., the more universally valid it is, the more trite it is. Anyone who demands that we accept their truths must also assume that we are similar personalities to them. It follows that only the most stale truths can be universally valid.
If a god could write a philosophy, it would presumably contain all objective truth; but for us mere humans, it would be irrelevant because we do not see the world from an absolute, divine center, but rather from our own individual vantage point. We would presumably not know what to do with a divine truth that was not tailored to our point of view.