Fundamentally our actions are in an incomparable manner altogether personal, unique and absolutely individual there is no doubt about it; but as soon as we translate them into consciousness, they do not appear so any longer.
This is the proper phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand it: the nature of animal consciousness involves the notion that the world of which we can become conscious is only a superficial and symbolic world, a generalised and vulgarised world; that everything which becomes conscious becomes just thereby shallow, meagre, relatively stupid, a generalisation, a symbol, a characteristic of the herd; that with the evolving of consciousness there is always combined a great, radical perversion, falsification, superficialisation, and generalisation.
Finally, the growing consciousness is a danger, and whoever lives among the most conscious Europeans knows even that it is a disease.
As may be conjectured, it is not the antithesis of subject and object with which I am here concerned: I leave that distinction to the epistemologists who have remained entangled in the toils of grammar (popular metaphysics).
It is still less the antithesis of "thing in itself" and phenomenon, for we do not "know" enough to be entitled even to make such a distinction. Indeed, we have not any organ at all for knowledge or for "truth": we "know" (or believe, or imagine) just as much as may be of use in the interest of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called "usefulness" is ultimately only a belief, something fanciful and perhaps precisely the most fatal stupidity by which we shall one day perish.
Nietzsche
