The veil of falsehood shall be torn down from within you,
and Truth shall come to dwell in the mind.
Peace and happiness shall fill your mind deep within,
if you act according to truth and self-discipline.
—Siri Guru Granth - Ang 591
Thought of the day: In order to find the truth, don’t we first have to sort through all the untruths?
This idea came up while reading Beyond Good And Evil for the first time. Boy, I’ve found reading Nietzsche is like doing a jigsaw puzzle flipped over. I recognize there are pieces, I recognize they fit together in some capacity, but I look to the box in hopes that my confidence of having assembled puzzles before might return, but to no avail. He seems to be stringing together individual words that my primitive brain can recognize, but their meaning in such a particular order doesn’t compute.
Here’s the middle of a sentence I’m struggling to understand as much as the beginning and ending, which are equally troublesome:
“…and our fundamental tendency is to assert that the falsest judgments (to which synthetic judgments a priori belong) are the most indispensable to us, that without granting as true the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a continual falsification of the world by means of numbers, mankind could not live…”
I once considered myself sharp, but after flailing to grasp this smoke of words, I now consider myself a degree duller.
Here’s my primitive brain’s understanding:
“…and our tendency to assume things incorrectly (because these assumptions exist in our mind independent of actual experience) is important to us, because without assuming these illogical things to be true, without looking through the lens of our unconscious beliefs, without lying to ourselves using calculated justifications, mankind couldn’t live…”
How’d I do?
(Keep an eye out for my upcoming translation of this translation, called Nietzsche For Morons.)
Anyway, good luck sorting through those untruths today, so you can be peaceful and happy instead of just live.
Truthfully yours,
TDH