Part II. The Psychology of Friedrich Nietzsche as a Psychopathological Problem

Let us compare the philosophical scepticism of other personalities with the struggle Nietzsche wages against truth. Ordinarily, at the bottom of this scepticism a sense for truth is really expressed. The drive for truth impels the philosophers to search for its value, its sources, its limits. In Nietzsche this drive does not exist, and the way he approaches these problems of knowledge is but the result of his erroneous sense of truth. It is understandable that in a talented personality such a lack comes to expression otherwise than in a subordinated way. However great the distance between Nietzsche and the psychopathically inferior people who lack a sense of truth in everyday life, qualitatively speaking, in him as in them one has to deal with the same psychological peculiarity which at least borders upon the pathological.