“Ye sober beings, who feel yourselves armed against passion and fantasy and would gladly make a pride and an ornament out of your emptiness, ye call yourselves realists, and give to understand that the world is actually constituted as it appears to you: before you alone reality stands unveiled, and ye yourselves would perhaps be the best part of it—oh, ye dear images of Sais! But are not ye also in your unveiled condition still extremely passionate and dusky beings compared with the fish, and still all too like an enamored artist? And what is ‘reality’ to an enamored artist! Ye still carry about with you the valuations of things which had their origins in the passions and infatuations of earlier centuries! There is still a secret and ineffaceable drunkenness embodied in your sobriety! Your love of ‘reality,’ for example—oh, that is an old, primitive ‘love’! In every feeling, in every sense impression, there is a portion of this old love: and similarly also some kind of fantasy, prejudice, irrationality, ignorance, fear, and whatever else has become mingled and woven into it. There is that mountain! There is that cloud! What is ‘real’ in them? Remove the phantasm and the whole human element therefrom, ye sober ones! Yes, if ye could do that! If ye could forget your origin, your past, your preparatory schooling—your whole history as man and beast!”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science. trans. Thomas Common. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2008. p. 57
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