And On The Other Hand
This same will has at its service an apparently opposite drive of the spirit, a suddenly adopted preference of ignorance, of deliberate shutting out, a shutting of one’s windows, an inner No to this or that, a prohibition to approach, a sort of defensive attitude against much that is knowable, a contentment with the dark, with the limited horizon, an acceptance and approval of ignorance: as that which is all necessary according to the degree to the spirits appropriating power, its “digestive power,” to speak figuratively (and in fact “the spirit” resembles a stomach more than anything else).
Here also belong an occasional propensity of the spirit to let itself be deceived (perhaps with a waggish suspicion that it is NOT so and so, but is only allowed to pass as such), a delight in uncertainty and ambiguity, an exulting enjoyment of arbitrary, out-of-the-way narrowness and mystery, of the too-near, of the foreground, of the magnified, the diminished, the misshapen, the beautified–an enjoyment of the arbitrariness of all these manifestations of power.
Finally, in this connection, there is the not unscrupulous readiness of the spirit to deceive other spirits and dissemble before them– the constant urge and surge of a creating, shaping, changeable power: the spirit enjoys therein its craftiness and its variety of masks, it enjoys also its feeling of security therein–it is precisely by its Protean arts that it is best protected and concealed!—–
This will to mere appearance, to simplification, to a mask, for a cloak, in short, for a surface
——for every surface is a cloak.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Our Virtues #230
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GN21riPP1Lo
