Life without food and drink was bad enough; but Life without nourishment for this spiritual appetite, this famished wonder,[18] this starving amazement, was utterly intolerable!
The human system could appropriate, and could transform into man, in bone and flesh, the vegetation and the animals of the earth; but what was required was a process, a Weltanschauung, a general concept of the earth which would enable man to appropriate also Life's other facts, and transform them into man the spirit. Hence the so-called thirst for knowledge may be traced to the lust of appropriation and conquest,[19] and the "will to truth" to a process of establishing things, to a process of making things true and lasting.... Thus truth is not something which is present and which has to be found and discovered; it is something which has to be created and which gives its name to a process, or better still, to the "will to overpower."[20]
For what is truth? It is any interpretation of the world which has succeeded in becoming the belief of a particular type of man.[21] Therefore there can be many truths; therefore there must be an order of rank among truths.
"Let this mean Will to Truth unto you," says Zarathustra, "that everything be made thinkable, visible, tangible unto man!
"And what ye have called the world, shall have first to be created by you:[22] your reason, your image, your will, your love shall the world be! And, verily, for your own bliss, ye knights of Knowledge!"[23]
"The purpose was to deceive oneself in a useful way; the means thereto was the invention of forms and signs, with the help of which, the confusing multifariousness of Life could be reduced to a useful and wieldly scheme."[24]
This was the craving. Not only must a meaning, a human meaning, be given to all things, in order to subordinate them to man's power; but Life itself must also be schematized and arranged. And, while all humanity cried aloud for this to be done, it was humanity's artists and higher men who set to and did it.[25]
[3] W. P., Vol. II, p. 72: "... Communication is necessary, and for it to be possible, something must be stable, simple and capable of being stated precisely."
[4] W. P., Vol. II, p. 65.