On ‘the genius of the species’. – The problem of consciousness (or rather, of becoming conscious of something) first confronts us when we begin to realize how much we can do without it; and now we are brought to this initial realization by physiology and natural history (which have thus required two hundred years to catch up with Leibniz’s precocious suspicion).14 For we could think, feel, will, remember, and also ‘act’ in every sense of the term, and yet none of all this would have to ‘enter our consciousness’ (as one says figuratively). All of life would be possible without, as it were, seeing itself in the mirror; and still today, the predominant part of our lives actually unfolds without this mirroring – of course also our thinking, feeling, and willing lives, insulting as it may sound to an older philosopher. To what end does consciousness exist at all when it is basically superfluous? If one is willing to hear my answer and its possibly extravagant conjecture, it seems to me that the subtlety and strength of consciousness is always related to a person’s (or animal’s) ability to communicate; and the ability to communicate, in turn, to the need to communicate. The latter should not to be taken to mean that precisely that individual who is a master at expressing his needs and at making them understood must also be the most dependent on others in his needs. But for entire races and lineages, this seems to me to hold: where need and distress have for a long time forced people to communicate, to understand each other swiftly and subtly, there finally exists a surplus of this power and art of expression, a faculty, so to speak, which has slowly accumulated and now waits for an heir to spend it lavishly (the so-called artists are the heirs, as well as the orators, preachers, writers – all of them people who come at the end of a long chain, each of them ‘born late’ in the best sense of the term, and each of them, again, squanderers by nature). Assuming this observation is correct, I may go on to conjecture that consciousness in general has developed only under the pressure of the need to communicate; that at the outset, consciousness was necessary, was useful, only between persons (particularly between those who commanded and those who obeyed); and that it has developed only in proportion to that usefulness. Consciousness is really just a net connecting one person with another – only in this capacity did it have to develop; the solitary and predatory person would not have needed it. That our actions, thoughts, feelings, and movements – at least some of them – even enter into consciousness is the result of a terrible ‘must’ which has ruled over man for a long time: as the most endangered animal, he needed help and protection, he needed his equals; he had to express his neediness and be able to make himself understood – and to do so, he first needed ‘consciousness’, i.e. even to ‘know’ what distressed him, to ‘know’ how he felt, to ‘know’ what he thought. For, once again: man, like every living creature, is constantly thinking but does not know it; the thinking which becomes conscious is only the smallest part of it, let’s say the shallowest, worst part – for only that conscious thinking takes place in words, that is, in communication symbols; and this fact discloses the origin of consciousness. In short, the development of language and the development of consciousness (not of reason but strictly of the way in which we become conscious of reason) go hand in hand. One might add that not only language serves as a bridge between persons, but also look, touch, and gesture; without our becoming conscious of our sense impressions, our power to fix them and as it were place them outside of ourselves, has increased in proportion to the need to convey them to others by means of signs. The sign-inventing person is also the one who becomes ever more acutely conscious of himself; for only as a social animal did man learn to become conscious of himself – he is still doing it, and he is doing it more and more. My idea is clearly that consciousness actually belongs not to man’s existence as an individual but rather to the community- and herd-aspects of his nature; that accordingly, it is finely developed only in relation to its usefulness to community or herd; and that consequently each of us, even with the best will in the world to understand ourselves as individually as possible, ‘to know ourselves’, will always bring to consciousness precisely that in ourselves which is ‘non-individual’, that which is ‘average’; that due to the nature of consciousness – to the ‘genius of the species’ governing it – our thoughts themselves are continually as it were outvoted and translated back into the herd perspective. At bottom, all our actions are incomparably and utterly personal, unique, and boundlessly individual, there is no doubt; but as soon as we translate them into consciousness, they no longer seem to be…This is what I consider to be true phenomenalism and perspectivism: that due to the nature of animal consciousness, the world of which we can become conscious is merely a surface- and sign-world, a world turned into generalities and thereby debased to its lowest common denominator, – that everything which enters consciousness thereby becomes shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, a sign, a herd-mark; that all becoming conscious involves a vast and thorough corruption, falsification, superficialization, and generalization. In the end, the growing consciousness is a danger; and he who lives among the most conscious Europeans even knows it is a sickness. As one might guess, it is not the opposition between subject and object which concerns me here; I leave that distinction to those epistemologists who have got tangled up in the snares of grammar (of folk metaphysics). Even less am I concerned with the opposition between ‘thing in itself’ and appearance: for we ‘know’ far too little to even be entitled to make that distinction. We simply have no organ for knowing, for ‘truth’: we ‘know’ (or believe or imagine) exactly as much as is useful to the human herd, to the species: and even what is here called ‘usefulness’ is finally also just a belief, a fiction, and perhaps just that supremely fatal stupidity of which we some day will perish.