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I've started reading Friedrich Nietzsche, and I can't help but be confused anyone took him seriously. The man seems to advocate for ideas that ultimately imply a kind of evil, and I'm wondering if I'm missing historical context that helps explain some of his more ridiculous statements. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes: "For us, the falsity of a judgment is still no objection to that judgment -- that's where our new way of speaking sounds perhaps most strange. The question is the extent to which it makes demands on life, sustains life, maintains the species, perhaps even creates species. And as a matter of principle we are ready to assert that the falsest judgments (to which a priori synthetic judgments belong) are the most indispensable to us, (emphasis mine) that without our allowing logical fictions to count, without a way of measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world through numbers, human beings could not live -- that if we managed to give up false judgments, it would amount to a renunciation of life, a denial of life." Isn't the advocacy of falsehoods as "most indispensable" implying that one should engage in falsehoods as often as they can, that fictions are the true preferred content of one's mind and thoughts? I could understand how he could say that falsehoods were "indispensable," with his subsequent argument, but I can't understand how he would say they're "the most indispensable." Obviously, if a person was entirely contained with falsehoods, none of their words would count. They would have to admit that they're not seeking truth, and we have no reason to assume that the words they write and speak are expected to be truth. It all seems self-contradictory, and I would expect someone to assume that Nietzsche is simply a charlatan trying to manipulate people for some alternative, personal purpose. Yet, people seem to think he's a great philosopher, so I'm wondering if I'm missing historical context or whether the speech of the times lent itself to peculiar wording.