Self-Knowledge and Moral Prejudices: An Introspection

On Self-Knowledge and the Origin of Moral Prejudices

We know that we are strangers to ourselves; we ourselves are strangers to ourselves. This is a good foundation. We have not sought ever—how could it happen that one day we were to meet? It is rightly said: 'Where your treasure is, there your heart is.' Our treasure is where the hives are based on our knowledge. We are always coming to them—winged animals born and honey gatherers of the spirit—we take care of itself heart of one thing: of "bringing home" something.

In regard, moreover, to life, the so-called "experience"—who of us has even been serious enough for them? Or had enough time? I fear that in such cases we have ever paid good attention "to the question." It just happens that we have our heart there—and not even our ears! Rather, just as a man divinely distracted and absorbed, in whose ears the clock has just boomed heavily with twelve strokes of noon, is revealed suddenly and asks, "What has sounded really there?" So we also sometimes rub our ears after things have occurred and ask, totally surprised, totally perplexed, "What is it that we actually lived there?" Indeed, "Who are we really?" And we start to count, delayed as previously mentioned, the twelve vibrant strokes of our experience, our life, our being—alas, and we are wrong in the account...

We remain necessarily strangers to ourselves; we do not understand ourselves. We have to confuse ourselves with others; we are always met by the phrase, "Everyone is for himself the more distant." As far as we are concerned, we are not "the ones we know of..."

The Genesis of Moral Judgments

My thoughts on the origin of our moral prejudices—for theirs is discussed in this polemic—had their first expression, sparse and tentative, in that collection of aphorisms entitled Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. The drafting began in Sorrento during a winter that allowed me to pause, as a traveler makes a halt, and cover with his eyes the vast and dangerous land through which my spirit had walked before. This was in the winter of 1876-1877; the thoughts themselves are older. In essence, they were identical to those that I now pick up again in these treaties—hopefully, this long interval has favored them, and they have become riper, brighter, stronger, more perfect!

The fact that I still cling to them, that they themselves have meanwhile joined together with increasing force, and even are interlaced, reinforces in me the joyful confidence that from the beginning, they arose in me not in isolation, nor accidentally, nor sporadically, but from a common root: a fundamental desire for knowledge, which dictated its orders in the depth, spoke of an ever more demanding, things resolved, and increasingly precise. This is, indeed, all that befits a philosopher. We have no right to be alone somewhere: we are not permitted either to be wrong alone or to find the truth alone. Rather, with the necessity with which a tree bears fruit, so emerge from us our thoughts, our values, our affirmations, and our denials.