The origin of our concept of ‘knowledge’. – I take this explanation from the street; I heard one of the common people say ‘he knew me right away’ – and I asked myself: what do the people actually take knowledge to be? what do they want when they want ‘knowledge’? Nothing more than this: something unfamiliar is to be traced back to something familiar. And we philosophers – have we really meant anything more by knowledge? The familiar means what we are used to, so that we no longer marvel at it; the commonplace; some rule in which we are stuck; each and every thing that makes us feel at home: – And isn’t our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover among everything strange, unusual, and doubtful something which no longer unsettles us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And isn’t the rejoicing of the person who attains knowledge just rejoicing from a regained sense of security?…Take the philosopher who imagined the world to be ‘known’ when he had reduced it to the ‘idea’; wasn’t it precisely because the ‘idea’ was so familiar to him and he was so used to it? because he no longer feared the ‘idea’? – How little these men of knowledge demand! Just look at their principles and their solutions to the world riddle with this in mind! When they find something in, under, or behind things which unfortunately happens to be very familiar to us, such as our multiplication table or our logic or our willing and desiring, how happy they are right away! For ‘what is familiar is known’: on this they agree. Even the most cautious among them assume that the familiar can at least be more easily known than the strange; that for example sound method demands that we start from the ‘inner world’, from the ‘facts of consciousness’, because this world is more familiar to us. Error of errors! The familiar is what we are used to, and what we are used to is the most difficult to ‘know’ – that is, to view as a problem, to see as strange, as distant, as ‘outside us’…The great certainty of the natural sciences in comparison with psychology and the critique of the elements of consciousness – with the unnatural sciences, one might almost say – rests precisely on the fact that they take the strange as their object, while it is nearly contradictory and absurd even to want to take the not-strange as one’s object…