Stylized Excerpt From Beyond Good and Evil

The speaker believes that the falseness of an opinion should not be a reason to reject it. They argue that opinions, even if false, can be important for our survival and development as a species. They assert that without the ability to imagine and compare with a hypothetical world, and without the use of numbers to represent reality, humans would not be able to live. The speaker suggests that acknowledging the importance of falsehood in life challenges traditional ideas of value and places philosophy beyond the concepts of good and evil. The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it, it is here perhaps that our new language sounds most strange. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-rearing? And we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions, to which synthetic judgments a priori belong, are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live, that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life itself. To recognize untruth as a condition of life, perhaps certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a very dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby, by that act alone, placed itself beyond good and evil.