If you are interested in truth, you will quickly learn how seldom others are. When entering into a discussion, whether it be about wine or geopolitics, you will inevitably brush up against a sensibility that either mirrors yours or diverges: if you care about truth, not as a well-defined endstate to be reached in the conversation, or even in life, but as a mode of thinking in general, then you will no doubt come up against a current which seeks to swim against the tide: they take the name of feeling, sensibility, reflex. All of these have their own lineal traces, and any thinker who is deserving of the title will be by nature a historian first, and philosopher, poet, or political scientist second. It is not shocking that Nietzsche’s primary vocation, philology, a profession concentrated on the cross-section of language and culture, prepared him to write such books as On The Genealogy of Morals—the ‘truth’ of the matter, so far as such a thing goes, is already in the name of that book.
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