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.In light of this, we can readthe following remark as expressing the idea that what is commonlycalled truth really amounts to myth or illusion an illusioncreated by the poetic mind in the quest for life:What, then, is truth? A maneuverable army of metaphors,metonymies, anthropomorphisms in short, a summation ofhuman relationships which have been poetically and rhetoricallyheightened, transposed, and embellished, and which, after long useby a people, are considered to be solid, canonical, and binding: truthsare illusions whose true nature has been forgotten.47Nietzsche asserts here as true the proposition that truths aremostly illusions, and he operates philosophically with a distinction44The worship of wildlifebetween the genuine truth, as opposed to what is usually taken tobe the truth, most of which he considered to be fiction.48 This is tosay that in Nietzsche s eyes, almost everyone lives in a wakingdream; almost everyone lives with a strong dimension of theApollonian, as opposed to the Dionysian, aspect of existence, whereApollonian beauty and sanity in the sense of sanitized rulethroughout the day.To see the world in terms of the Dionysianaspect, the life aspect, the feral aspect is to apprehend that we livemostly in illusion, in a condition of being captivated by a mostlyfantastic world a good portion of the time, where the tendency is torest content with merely comforting shadows as if they were reali-ties, and where reality is perceived as clothed, rather than as naked.To see the world in terms of the Dionysian aspect is also, by implica-tion, to align oneself with the fountain of life-energies from whichsuch poetic dress-ups and cover-ups emerge.Nietzsche fundamentally agreed with Kant s pivotal statementthat the things which we intuit are not in themselves what we intuitthem as being. 49 Whether there are things in themselves that can beknown, or whether there are indeed any things at all at the level ofreality as it is in itself are yet further questions.At this point in hiscareer and this would be a view that would stay with Nietzsche atleast up until 1886 he recognized that there is an illusion or appearance, which implies that there is an underlying reality towhich one implicitly refers.In his final two years, as we shall see inChapter Five, Nietzsche aimed to dissolve this distinction between appearance and reality altogether, leaving us to speak only of thesingle world of experience and existence.45God s deathSpiritual crisis and the healthful Greekslong lostBy the late 1700s, the Industrial Revolution was beginningto reveal its ambivalent effects in Europe.The developmentof manufacturing and the increased availability of materialgoods no doubt had its economic benefits, but this was hadat a heavy human price.For the previous 150 years or so,the prevailing intellectual spirit had imagined the universeto be a large mechanism, and it was becoming evident thatthe development of manufacturing was reinforcing acultural condition where human beings themselves werebeing pressed into mechanical labor as parts of factory-likesocial machines.This trend preoccupied Karl Marx(1818 83) during the later 1800s, and it was brought intoliterary expression earlier in the nineteenth century byCharles Dickens (1812 70), but as early as 1794, FriedrichSchiller (1759 1805) expressed his worries about the socialconditions that were becoming typical of the modern age conditions that were mentally fragmenting the humanbeing, undermining spiritual harmony, and threatening tonarrow down people s labor to circumscribed and superfi-cial activities.50 In the Sixth Letter of his Letters on theAesthetic Education of Humanity (1794), Schiller observedthe following:47C h a p t e r T h r e eNIETZSCHEAs soon as more wide-ranging experience and more exact modes ofthought required a sharper division of the sciences on the one hand,and on the other, as the complicated clockwork of States required astronger separation of the social classes and occupations, so was theinner bond of human nature also divided, and a corrupting conflictset its harmonious powers against each other.Intuitive and specula-tive understanding set themselves off from each other antagonisti-cally upon their respective fields, whose borders they now began toguard with distrust and jealousy, and in this narrowing-down of ouractivity to a single sphere, we have also given ourselves up to a singleruler, who, frequently enough, is disposed to repress the remainingcapacities.Whereas on one occasion an extravagant imaginationravages the hard-won fruits of the intellect, the spirit of abstractthought crushes the fire that might have warmed the heart andinspired imaginative fancy.51Schiller s observations foreshadowed those of Karl Marx, written in1848 at the age of thirty, and published fifty-four years later:Modern industry has transformed the small workspace of the patri-archal master-craftsmen into the large factories of industrial capital-ism.Masses of workers, pressed together in the factories, have beenorganized like soldiers.They are like common industry-soldiers setup under the complete hierarchy of officers and subordinates.Theyare not only servants of the bourgeoisie, of the bourgeois-state, theyare daily and hourly made to be servants of the machine, of the over-seers, and above all, of the single bourgeois manufacturer itself.Thisdespotism is even more petty, hateful, and embittering, the more itproclaims acquisition to be its goal.52The situation had not become so dire when Schiller was writing inthe late 1700s, and he retained a strong faith that the human condi-tion could be healed, believing that people could be spiritually reju-venated, if only they had a healthier outlook towards which to turn.As a remedy, Schiller recalled the classical Greeks for inspiration,because the Christian Church at the time at least in many people seyes had become too ritualized, worldly, and detached from thespiritual problems that had arisen as a side-effect of the overlymechanical and deterministic vision of the world that had trans-formed it into a giant clockwork.Since institutionalized48God s deathChristianity was not providing the inspiration that was expected,many turned elsewhere for spiritual nourishment, either in an effortto reform the prevailing Church, or in an effort to import anentirely new religious inspiration from elsewhere.A good manyintellectuals turned to the classical Greeks for inspiration; amongthem was Schiller, who was convinced that the phenomenon ofGreek humanity was indisputably a maximum which could neitherbe maintained at that level nor be surpassed. 53Calling the ancient Greeks to the rescue, however, was not an easymatter.Schiller, along with others who hoped for a reinstitution ofthe Greek spirit, soon realized that the Greek culture no longerexisted in the form it had during the time of classical Greece, andthat it was, in fact, long gone
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