O sancta simplicitas! In what strange simplification and falsification man lives! One can never cease wondering when once one has got eyes for beholding this marvel! How we have made everything around us clear and free and easy and simple! how we have been able to give our senses a passport to everything superficial, our thoughts a godlike desire for wanton pranks and wrong inferences!—how from the beginning, we have contrived to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom, thoughtlessness, imprudence, heartiness, and gaiety—in order to enjoy life!
Man has comported his way of being towards a lifestyle that tends towards errors: he accepts such things as atomism and free-will as necessary components of life. However, when further investigated, these concepts contain no objective truth whatsoever. So why do we have such tendencies to believe in these concepts?
Man retains this dominating ignorance as a tool in order to enjoy life... to an "almost inconceivable freedom, thoughtlessness, imprudence, and gaiety". Man's convictions are not objectively necessary, they are only necessary for a certain way of life.
And only on this solidified, granite-like foundation of ignorance could knowledge rear itself hitherto, the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will, the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue! Not as its opposite, but—as its refinement!
The will to ignorance is more powerful than our will to knowledge. It presupposes it. Every knowledge seeking is backed by an appeal to live a life towards simplicity.
It is to be hoped, indeed, that LANGUAGE, here as elsewhere, will not get over its awkwardness, and that it will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and many refinements of gradation; it is equally to be hoped that the incarnated Tartuffery of morals, which now belongs to our unconquerable "flesh and blood," will turn the words round in the mouths of us discerning ones. Here and there we understand it, and laugh at the way in which precisely the best knowledge seeks most to retain us in this SIMPLIFIED, thoroughly artificial, suitably imagined, and suitably falsified world: at the way in which, whether it will or not, it loves error, because, as living itself, it loves life!
This simplicitly is deeply embedded in the most fundamental ideas: Language and Morality.
Language asserts the existance of opposities at the expense of generalizing details
Morality will tell us what we ought to believe is good and bad
The free spirit and “discerning ones” can sometimes catch these errors escaping from their own mouths. And when this happens, all they can do is observe these human-all-too-human tendencies and laugh.
It is easy to fall into these traps of unfounded assumptions. But sometimes we can catch ourselves. And when that happens, we can laugh at ourselves and our attempts at constructing our own artificial, simplified, and sheltered world.
The free spirit loves laughing at itself; it loves when it overcomes its own desire for the false, simplified life. "...as living itself, it loves life!"
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