“Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility.”

—  Karl Jaspers

Nietzsche (1946)

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Karl Jaspers photo
Karl Jaspers44
German psychiatrist and philosopher 1883–1969

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Karl Jaspers photo

“Rohde became more and more firmly bound to the bourgeois world, its institutions and accepted opinions. … The contrast between the two natures makes Rohde and Nietzsche exemplary representatives of two distinctive worlds. In their youth they both live in the realm of boundless possibilities and feel an affinity through the exuberance of their noble aspirations. Subsequently they go in opposite directions. Nietzsche remains young, leaving concrete reality as his task assumes existential import. Rohde grows old, bourgeois, stable, and skeptical. Hence courage is a fundamental trait in Nietzsche, plaintive self-irony in Rohde. … Rohde retained the interests but not the attitudes of his youth; he looked to the world of the Greeks for the object of his contemplation rather than the norm of obligation.”

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) German psychiatrist and philosopher

Source: Nietzsche (1946), pp. 61-62

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“What the virtues are to existential perfection, truths are to intellectual perfection; virtue is essentially simplicity, inward beauty, generosity, whereas truth, for its part, lies entirely in the discernment between the Real and the illusory or between the Absolute and the contingent.”

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“Having destroyed the social power of the nobility and the guildmasters, the bourgeois also destroyed their political power. Having raised itself to the actual position of first class in society, it proclaims itself to be also the dominant political class. This it does through the introduction of the representative system which rests on bourgeois, and these bourgeois deputies, by using their right to refuse to vote taxes, choose a bourgeois government.”

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Principles of Communism (1847)

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“I had been too long away from the nobility; I had forgotten how silly even the best of them could be.”

Laurell K. Hamilton (1963) Novelist

Source: Geese in Marion Zimmer Bradley (ed.) Sword and Sorceress 8, p. 40

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“What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.”

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“The existential split in man would be unbearable could he not establish a sense of unity within himself and with the natural and human world outside.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Source: The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), p. 262

Pearl S. Buck photo

“I became mentally bifocal, and so I learned early to understand that there is no such condition in human affairs as absolute truth. There is only truth as people see it, and truth, even in fact, may be kaleidoscopic in its variety.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

Source: My Several Worlds (1954), p. 52
Context: I became mentally bifocal, and so I learned early to understand that there is no such condition in human affairs as absolute truth. There is only truth as people see it, and truth, even in fact, may be kaleidoscopic in its variety. The damage such perception did to me I have felt ever since, although damage may be too dark a word, for it merely meant that I could never belong entirely to one side of any question. To be a Communist would be absurd to me, as absurd as to be entirely anything and equally impossible. I straddled the globe too young.

“One of Nietzsche’s most important legacies to us … is his claim that it is desirable and possible to dismantle the Platonic apparatus of Forms, Absolute Truth, the Idea of the Good, etc. and its historical derivatives, such as Kant’s transcendental philosophy, and that this can be done without fear of falling into “relativism.””

Raymond Geuss (1946) British philosopher

Source: Outside Ethics (2005), p. 8.

“Nietzsche saw in the Protestant ethic, in both its religious and secular (economic) forms, a final protest before the emergence into dominance of the ordered, bourgeois world of the ‘last man’—he who will pay any price in tedium for comfort and the absence of tension.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 96

“There continue to be complex debates about what Nietzsche understood truth to be. Quite certainly, he did not think, in pragmatist spirit, that beliefs are true if they serve our interests or welfare: we have just seen some of his repeated denials of this idea. The more recently fashionable view is that he was the first of the deniers, thinking that there is no such thing as truth, or that truth is what anyone thinks it is, or that it is a boring category that we can do without. This is also wrong, and more deeply so. Nietzsche did not think that the ideal of truthfulness went into retirement when its metaphysical origins were discovered, and he did not suppose, either, that truthfulness could be detached from a concern for the truth. Truthfulness as an ideal retains its power, and so far from his seeing truth as dispensable or malleable, his main question is how it can be made bearable.”

Bernard Williams (1929–2003) English moral philosopher

Source: Truth and Truthfulness (2002), p. 16

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