Great philosophies
start at birth
and your family
they drive
toward their own goal
not truth 

only your cousin
the scientists
may still be interested in
truth

Friedrich Nietzsche

Beyond Good and Evil

Section one on the prejudices of philosophers

6. It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; moreover, that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy have every time constituted the real germ of life out of which the entire plant has grown. To explain how a philosopher’s most remote metaphysical assertions have actually been arrived at, it is always well (and wise) to ask oneself first: what morality does this (does he – ) aim at? I accordingly do not believe a ‘drive to knowledge’ to be the father of philosophy, but that another drive has, here as elsewhere, only employed knowledge (and false knowledge!) as a tool. But anyone who looks at the basic drives of mankind to see to what extent they may in precisely this connection have come into play as inspirational spirits (or demons and kobolds – ) will discover that they have all at some time or other practised philosophy – and that each one of them would be only too glad to present itself as the ultimate goal of existence and as the legitimate master of all the other drives. For every drive is tyrannical: and it is as such that it tries to philosophize. – In the case of scholars, to be sure, in the case of really scientific men, things may be different – ‘better’, if you will – there may really exist something like a drive to knowledge there, some little independent clockwork which, when wound up, works bravely on without any of the scholar’s other drives playing any essential part. The scholar’s real ‘interests’ therefore generally lie in quite another direction, perhaps in his family or in making money or in politics; it is, indeed, almost a matter of indifference whether his little machine is set up in this region of science or that, whether the ‘promising’ young worker makes himself into a good philologist or a specialist in fungus or a chemist – he is not characterized by becoming this or that. In the philosopher, on the contrary, there is nothing whatever impersonal; and, above all, his morality bears decided and decisive testimony to who he is – that is to say, to the order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand in relative to one another.

Translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 2003