My philosophy
wanders like the animal chooses

like birth itself
does not shape you
neither is a philosophy not shaped
by its birth

our philosophy
is not the measure of man

 

Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond Good and Evil

Section one on the prejudices of philosophers

3. Having long kept a strict eye on the philosophers, and having looked between their lines, I say to myself: the largest part of conscious thinking has to be considered an instinctual activity, even in the case of philosophical thinking; we need a new understanding here, just as we’ve come to a new understanding of heredity and the ‘innate’. Just as the act of birth is scarcely relevant to the entire process and progress of heredity, so ‘consciousness’ is scarcely opposite to the instincts in any decisive sense — most of a philosopher’s conscious thinking is secretly guided and channeled into particular tracks by his instincts. Behind all logic, too, and its apparent tyranny of movement there are value judgments, or to speak more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a particular kind of life. That a certainty is worth more than an uncertainty, for example, or that appearance is worth less than ‘truth’: whatever their regulatory importance for us , such evaluations might still be nothing but foreground evaluations, a certain kind of niaiserie , * as is required for the preservation of beings like us. Given, that is, that man is not necessarily the ‘measure of all things.’

Translated by Marion Faber, Oxford University Press, 1998