Part 8

510.

Concerning the origin of logic. The fundamental proneness to equalise things and to see them equal, gets to be modified, and kept within bounds, by the consideration of what is useful or harmful--in fact, by considerations of success: it then becomes adapted in suchwise as to be gratified in a milder way, without at the same time denying life or endangering it. This whole process corresponds entirely with that external and mechanical process (which is its symbol) by which the protoplasm continually assimilates, makes equal to itself, what it appropriates, and arranges it according to its own forms and requirements.

511.

Likeness and Similarity.

1. The coarser the organ the more apparent likenesses it sees;

2. The mind will have likeness--that is to say, the identification of one sensual impression with others already experienced: just as the body assimilates inorganic matter.

For the understanding of Logic:--

The will which tends to see likeness everywhere is the will to power--the belief that something is so and so (the essence of a judgment), is the result of a will which would fain have it as similar as possible.

512.

Logic is bound up with the proviso: granted that identical cases exist. As a matter of fact, before one can think and conclude in a logical fashion, this condition must first be assumed. That is to say, the will to logical truth cannot be consummated before a fundamental falsification of all phenomena has been assumed. From which it follows that an instinct rules here, which is capable of employing both means: first, falsification; and secondly, the carrying out of its own point of view: logic does not spring from a will to truth.

513.

The inventive force which devised the categories, worked in the service of our need of security, of quick intelligibility, in the form of signs, sounds, and abbreviations.--"Substance," "subject," "object," "Being," "Becoming," are not matters of metaphysical truth. It was the powerful who made the names of things into law, and, among the powerful, it was the greatest artists in abstraction who created the categories.

514.

A moral--that is to say, a method of living which long experience and experiment have tested and proved efficient, at last enters consciousness as a law, as dominant.... And then the whole group of related values and conditions become part of it: it becomes venerable, unassailable, holy, true; a necessary part of its evolution is that its origin should be forgotten.... That is a sign that it has become master. Exactly the same thing might have happened with the categories of reason: the latter, after much groping and many trials, might have proved true through relative usefulness.... A stage was reached when they were grasped as a whole, and when they appealed to consciousness as a whole,--when belief in them was commanded,--that is to say, when they acted as if they commanded.... From that time forward they passed as a priori, as beyond experience, as irrefutable. And, possibly, they may have been the expression of no more than a certain practicality answering the ends of a race and a species,--their usefulness alone is their "truth."

515.

The object is, not "to know," but to schematise,--to impose as much regularity and form upon chaos, as our practical needs require. In the formation of reason, logic, and the categories, it was a need in us that was the determining power: not the need "to know," but to classify, to schematise, for the purpose of intelligibility and calculation. (The adjustment and interpretation of all similar and equal things,--the same process, which every sensual impression undergoes, is the development of reason!) No pre-existing "idea" had anything to do with it: but utility, which teaches us that things can be reckoned with and managed, only when we view them roughly as equal.... Finality in reason is an effect, not a cause: Life degenerates with every other form of reason, although constant attempts are being made to attain to those other forms of reason;--for Life would then become too obscure, too unequal.

The categories are "truths" only in the sense that they are the conditions of our existence, just as Euclid's Space is a conditional "truth." (Between ourselves, as no one will maintain that men are absolutely necessary, reason, as well as Euclid's Space, are seen to be but an idiosyncrasy of one particular species of animals, one idiosyncrasy alone among many others....)

The subjective constraint which prevents one from contradicting here, is a biological constraint: the instinct which makes us see the utility of concluding as we do conclude, is in our blood, we are almost this instinct.... But what simplicity it is to attempt to derive from this fact that we possess an absolute truth! ... The inability to contradict anything is a proof of impotence but not of "truth."

516.

We are not able to affirm and to deny one and the same thing: that is a principle of subjective experience--which is not in the least "necessary," but only a sign of inability.

If, according to Aristotle, the principium contradictionis is the most certain of all principles; if it is the most ultimate of all, and the basis of every demonstration; if the principle of every other axiom lie within it: then one should analyse it all the more severely, in order to discover how many assumptions already lie at its root. It either assumes something concerning reality and Being, as if these had become known in some other sphere--that is to say, as if it were impossible to ascribe the opposite attributes to it; or the proposition means: that the opposites should not be ascribed to it. In that case, logic would be an imperative, not directed at the knowledge of truth, but at the adjusting and fixing of a world which must seem true to us.

In short, the question is a debatable one: are the axioms of logic adequate to reality, or are they measures and means by which alone we can, create realities, or the concept "reality"?... In order to affirm the first alternative, however, one would, as we have seen, require a previous knowledge of Being; which is certainly not the case. The proposition therefore contains no criterion of truth, but an imperative concerning that which should pass as true.

Supposing there were no such thing as A identical with itself, as every logical (and mathematical) proposition presupposes, and that A is in itself an appearance, then logic would have a mere world of appearance as its first condition. As a matter of fact, we believe in that proposition, under the influence of an endless empiricism which seems to confirm it every minute. The "thing"--that is the real substratum of A; our belief in things is the first condition of our faith in logic. The A in logic is, like the atom, a reconstruction of the thing.... By not understanding this, and by making logic into a criterion of real being, we are already on the road to the classification of all those hypostases, substance, attribute, object, subject, action, etc., as realities--that is to say, the conception of a metaphysical world or a "real world" (--this is, however, once more the world of appearance...).

The primitive acts of thought, affirmation, and negation, the holding of a thing for true, and the holding of a thing for not true,--in so far as they do not only presuppose a mere habit, but the very right to postulate truth or untruth at all,--are already dominated by a belief, that there is such a thing as knowledge for us, and that judgments can really hit the truth: in short, logic never doubts that it is able to pronounce something concerning truth in itself (--that is to say, that to the thing which is in itself true, no opposite attributes can be ascribed).

In this belief there reigns the sensual and coarse prejudice that our sensations teach us truths concerning things,--that I cannot at the same moment of time say of one and the same thing that it is hard and soft. (The instinctive proof, "I cannot have two opposite sensations at once," is quite coarse and false.)

That all contradiction in concepts should be forbidden, is the result of a belief, that we are able to form concepts, that a concept not only characterises but also holds the essence of a thing.... As a matter of fact, logic (like geometry and arithmetic) only holds good of assumed existences which we have created. Logic is the attempt on our part to understand the actual world according to a scheme of Being devised by ourselves; or, more exactly, it is our attempt at making the actual world more calculable and more susceptible to formulation, for our own purposes....

517.

In order to be able to think and to draw conclusions, it is necessary to acknowledge that which exists: logic only deals with formulæ for things which are constant. That is why this acknowledgment would not in the least prove reality: "that which is" is part of our optics. The ego regarded as Being (not affected by either Becoming or evolution).