HOMER'S CONTEST. The Greek genius acknowledged strife, struggle, contest to be necessary in this life. Only through competition and emulation will the Common-Wealth thrive. Yet there was no unbridled ambition. Everyone's individual endeavours were subordinated to the welfare of the community. The curse of present-day contest is that it does not do the same.
In THE RELATION OF SCHOPENHAUER'S PHILOSOPHY TO A GERMAN CULTURE an amusing and yet serious attack is made on the hollow would-be culture of the German Philistines who after the Franco-Prussian war were swollen with self-conceit, self-sufficiency, and were a great danger to real Culture. Nietzsche points out Schopenhauer's great philosophy as the only possible means of escaping the humdrum of Philistia with its hypocrisy and intellectual ostrichisation.
The essay on GREEK PHILOSOPHY DURING THE TRAGIC AGE is a performance of great interest to the scholar. It brims with ideas. The Hegelian School, especially Zeller, has shown what an important place is held by the earlier thinkers in the history of Greek thought and how necessary a knowledge of their work is for all who wish to understand Plato and Aristotle. Diels' great book: "Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker", Benn's, Burnet's and Fairbanks' books we may regard as the peristyle through which we enter the temple of Early Greek Philosophy. Nietzsche's essay then is like a beautiful festoon swinging between the columns erected by Diels and the others out of the marble of facts.
Beauty and the personal equation are the two "leitmotive" of Nietzsche's history of the pre-Socratian philosophers. Especially does he lay stress upon the personal equation, since that is the only permanent item of interest, considering that every "System" crumbles into nothing with the appearance of a new thinker. In this way Nietzsche treats of Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Xenophanes, Anaxagoras. There are also some sketches of a draft for an intended but never accomplished continuation, in which Empedocles, Democritus and Plato were to be dealt with.
Probably the most popular of the Essays in this book will prove to be the one on TRUTH AND FALSITY. It is an epistemological rhapsody on the relativity of truth, on "Appearance and Reality," on "perceptual flux" versus—"conceptual conceit."
Man's intellect is only a means in the struggle for existence, a means taking the place of the animal's horns and teeth. It adapts itself especially to deception and dissimulation.
There are no absolute truths. Truth is relative and always imperfect. Yet fictitious values fixed by convention and utility are set down as truth. The liar does not use these standard coins of the realm. He is hated; not out of love for truth, no, but because he is dangerous.
Our words never hit the essence, the "X" of a thing, but indicate only external characteristics. Language is the columbarium of the ideas, the cemetery of perceptions.
Truths are metaphors, illusions, anthropomorphisms about which one has forgotten that they are such. There are different truths to different beings. Like a spider man sits in the web of his truths and ideas. He wants to be deceived. By means of error he mostly lives; truth is often fatal. When the liar, the story-teller, the poet, the rhapsodist lie to him without hurting him he—loves them!—