In my opinion, Frederich Neitzsche’s essay does a really good job at highlighting the concepts of truth and knowing we are starting to discuss in class. He talks about the deceptive “truth” created by mankind and the universe before its influences, in efforts to show the reader that there is a huge lack of meaning and understanding. Neitzsche opens up his essay with a short story which clearly was referring to our world and how we are the animals creating “truths” under the universe that surrounds us. He goes on to state that “one might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature” (Neitzsche 1). What he is trying to say that mankind and its knowledge mean nothing compared to nature because nature was around before everything and will continue to be around even after mankind falls off the face of the earth. Whatever mankind contributes does not and will not ever matter. He claims that this “invented knowledge” is just a way of mankind giving themselves meaning in the vast universe. Making humans sound naive and self-centered, even comparing them to a mosquito and how it probably thinks the world revolves around it as well.

In addition to this, according to Neitzsche humans are “immersed in illusions and dream images” of what is believed to be the truth. He is trying to show how they jump over the real meaning of everything and make up what they want along the way to make it easier for themselves. Through these “truths” they create a way of socializing, and here was where I was able to see the idea of categorization emerge once again. Those who believed in the invited knowledge spoke the “truth” and those who didn’t were “liars”. Neitzsche blames this outcome on the fact that mankind always wants “to exist socially” and therefore categorizes individuals into these groups. Humans lack the ability to think for themselves granting social constructs to dictate their beliefs and essentially their lives. Language was even meaningless in Neitzsche eyes, to him it was just another form of “stimuli” made up by mankind. All these factors led to the categorizations of culture, religion, and class that we have been continuously seeing in our readings.

Neitzsche’s way of thinking in this essay gave me a sense of realism, he was direct and looked at the truth that was right in front of him. He acknowledged nature but went deeper than that, he showed the flaws of the human race by illustrating his observation of the world in his essay. He touched upon the idea of knowing and how humans have been wrong since the beginning of time. The truths that they have created are simply made up and meaningless. I could see how literature is starting to take a turn because everything we have touched upon thus far is coming back to influence this change.