Early Notebooks

Friedrich Nietzsche

Notebook I, autumn 1885 – spring 1886

Writings from the Late Notebooks

1(61)Everything which enters consciousness is the last link in a chain, a closure. It is just an illusion that one thought is the immediate cause of another thought. The events which are actually connected are played out below our consciousness: the series and sequences of feelings, thoughts, etc., that appear are symptoms of what actually happens! – Below every thought lies an affect. Every thought, every feeling, every will is not born of one particular drive but is a totalstate, a whole surface ofthe whole consciousness, and results from how the power of all the drives that constitute us is fixed at that moment – thus, the power of the drive that dominates just now as well as of the drives obeying or resisting it. The next thought is a sign of how the total power situation has now shifted again.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Writings from the Early Notebooks

Notebook 29, summer – autumn 1873

16 All drives are connected with pleasure and displeasure there can be no drive for truth, i.e. for a pure truth entirely without any consequences or affects, because at that point pleasure and displeasure would cease, and there is no drive that has no premonition of pleasure in its own satisfaction. The pleasure of thinking does not indicate a desire for truth. The pleasure of all sensory perceptions derives from the fact that they are brought into being through inferences. To that extent man is always swimming in a sea of pleasure. But to what extent can inference, a logical operation, give pleasure?