in all thinking, then its essence presumably cannot be conceived by ordinary thinking and its rules of the game.
Certainly, Nietzsche's statement that honoring truth is already the consequence of an illusion, and the statement underlying this one, to the effect that truth is an illusion, even the illusion, sound arbitrary and alienating. These statements are not only supposed to sound that way, they must be alienating and terrible because, as thoughtful statements, they speak of what occurs in a concealed way that is always inaccessible to what is public. Hence it is necessary first of all to give the right emphasis to this first reference to Nietzsche's fundamental thought surrounding the essence of knowledge and truth. This can be done by pointing out that Nietzsche's definition of the essence of truth is not an overwrought and foundationless assertion of a man who is bent upon originality at any cost; the essential definition of truth as "illusion" is essentially connected with the metaphysical interpretation of beings and thus is as old and as primordial as metaphysics itself.
In one of the great originators of Western thinking, Heraclitus, we find a fragment (Fr. 28) whose first part (which is all that we shall consider) reads as follows: δοκέοντα γάρ ό δοκιμώτατος γινώσκει, φυλάσσει·. This saying, with its clear precision and the veiled, yet announced, play of thought in it, cannot be adequately rendered in our language, no matter how philosophical it may be. Thus we shall attempt a translation that paraphrases and clarifies right from the start: "What shows itself, what appears to one man alone, is that which the most famous one (who is held in the highest regard and fame) knows, and his knowing watches over what alone appears, holding fast to it as to what is firm and gives support." More succinctly, and more literally faithful to the Greek: "For having views I is also I the knowing of the most highly regarded one, watching over I holding fast to a view."
However, we must avoid misinterpreting this saying in a modem epistemological sense, looking for the Kantian distinction of "appearance" and "thing in itself" and ultimately even falsifying the concept of "appearance" into that of "mere illusion." The weight of the ancient Greek saying rests rather in the fact that what shows itself, what proffers