“God is not a basis for interpreting the world, but the fact which really transforms it.”
"Socialism in the Theology of Karl Barth"
Notebooks (Summer 1886 – Fall 1887)
Variant translation: Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying "there are only facts," I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations…
As translated in The Portable Nietzsche (1954) by Walter Kaufmann, p. 458
“God is not a basis for interpreting the world, but the fact which really transforms it.”
"Socialism in the Theology of Karl Barth"
“We only have observations and interpretations. Most of the interpretations remain questionable.”
Source: PsyberMagick (1995), p. 12
Context: We doubt that any facts actually exist. We only have observations and interpretations. Most of the interpretations remain questionable.
“There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena”
Source: Beyond Good and Evil
Source: Assigning Meanings to Programs http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~weimer/2007-615/reading/FloydMeaning.pdf (1967), p. 25.
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Variant: We have spiritual facts and their interpretations by which they are communicated to others, sruti or what is heard, and smṛti or what is remembered. Śaṅkara equates them with pratyakṣa or intuition and anumana or inference. It is the distinction between immediacy and thought. Intuitions abide, while interpretations change.
Source: After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, with Noam Chomsky, 1979, p. vii.
Chomsky and Herman (1979), After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, p. vii.
Quotes 1960s-1980s, 1970s
Light (1919), Ch. XX The Cult
Context: My spirit is no longer what it was. Vaguely I seek, everywhere. I must see things with all their consequences, and right to their source. Against all the chains of facts I must have long arguments to bring; and the world's chaos requires an interpretation equally terrible.