fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly
extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration,
without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain:
imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power--how COULD you live
in accordance with such indifference? To live--is not that just
endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing,
preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different?
And granted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," means
actually the same as "living according to life"--how could you do
DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves
are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you:
while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature,
you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players
and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and
ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein;
you insist that it shall be Nature "according to the Stoa," and would
like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal
glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth,
you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such
hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say, Stoically,
that you are no longer able to see it otherwise--and to crown all, some
unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that
BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over yourselves--Stoicism is
self-tyranny--Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over: is
not the Stoic a PART of Nature?... But this is an old and everlasting
story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today,
as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always
creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy
is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the
will to "creation of the world," the will to the causa prima.