How do things stand in this case?—these people who say no today, these outsiders, these people who are determined on one point, their demand for intellectual probity, these hard, strong, abstemious, heroic spirits, who constitute the honour of our age, all these pale atheists, anti-Christians, immoralists, nihilists, these sceptics, ephectics, spiritually hectic (collectively they are all hectic in some sense or other), the last idealists of knowledge, the only ones in whom intellectual conscience lives and takes on human form nowadays—they really do believe that they are as free as possible from the ascetic ideal, these "free, very free spirits." And yet I am revealing to them what they cannot see for themselves, for they are standing too close to themselves. This ascetic ideal is also their very own ideal. They themselves represent it today. Perhaps they are the only ones who do. They themselves are its most spiritual offspring, the furthest advanced of its troops and its crowd of scouts fighting at the very front, its most awkward, most delicate, most incomprehensibly seductive form. If I am any kind of solver of puzzles, then I want to be that with this statement! . . . They are not free spirits—not by any stretch—for they still believe in the truth. . .
When the Christian crusaders in the Orient came across that unconquered Order of Assassins, that free-spirited order par excellence, whose lowest ranks lived a life of obedience of the sort no order of monks attained, then they received by some means or other a hint about that symbol and motto, which only the highest ranks kept as their secret, "Nothing is true. Everything is permitted." . . . Well now, that was spiritual freedom. With that the very belief in truth was cancelled. . . Has a European, a Christian free spirit ever wandered by mistake into this proposition and its labyrinthine consequences? Has he come to know the Minotaur of this cavern from his own experience? . . . I doubt it. More that that: I know differently. Nothing is more immediately foreign to people set on one thing, these so-called "free spirits," than freedom and emancipation in this sense. In these matters they are more firmly bound, because they believe in the truth, as no one else does, firmly and unconditionally.
Perhaps I understand all this from too close a distance: that admirable philosophical abstinence which such a belief requires, that intellectual stoicism, which ultimately does not permit one to affirm just as strongly as it forbids one to deny, that desire to come to a standstill before the facts, the factum brutum [brute fact], that fatalism of the "petits faits" [small facts] (what I call ce petit faitalisme [this small factism]), that quality with which French science nowadays seeks a sort of moral precedence over German science, the attainment of a state where one, in general, abandons interpretation (violating, emending, abbreviating, letting go, filling in the cracks, composing, forging, and the other actions which belong to the nature of all interpretation). Generally speaking, this attitude expresses just as much virtuous asceticism as any denial of sensuality (basically it is only one mode of this denial). However, what compels a person to this unconditional will for truth is the faith in the ascetic ideal itself, even though it may be for him an unconscious imperative. We should not deceive ourselves on this point—it is a belief in a metaphysical value, the value of truth in itself, something guaranteed and affirmed only in that ideal (it stands or falls with that ideal).
Strictly speaking, there is no scientific knowledge at all which stands "without pre-suppositions." The idea of such a science is unimaginable, paralogical. A philosophy, a "belief," must always be there first, so that with it scientific knowledge can have a direction, a sense, a border, a method, a justification, an existence. (Whoever thinks the reverse, whoever, for example, is preparing to place philosophy "on a strictly scientific foundation," first must place, not just philosophy, but also truth itself on its head—the worst injury to decency one could possibly give to two such venerable women!).
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, III, 24.
