172 Nietzschelong biological prehistory. If man spins out an entire world with "this
faculty of knowledge ," he also discovers that this world has spun him
out along with his faculty of knowledge. He perceives the nature that
allows him to perceive. Man is a historical and scientific event of the self-
perception of nature. Nature sets the stage within man to make its
appearance. For a brief moment, nature within man, this "clever ani-
mal," sees itself. "It was the most haughty and inauthentic minute of
'world history,'" Nietzsche wrote in his essay "On Truth and
Falsehood," "but only a minute. After nature had taken a few breaths,
the star froze, and the clever animals had to die" (1,875; TF). Knowledge
is born together with the human race, and knowledge dies along with it.
What kind of a world is not yet or no longer mirrored in knowledge?
We apprehend animate and inanimate nature, which is itself devoid of
apprehension. A stone does not know that it is there, nor do plants or,
most likely, animals. Primitive forms of perception develop, means of
reaction and reception. But the knowledge to which we have access
enables us to know that we are perceiving and to perceive that we know.
One aspect of this doubling and reflexivity of the human faculty of
knowledge is our insight into the historicity of the faculty of knowledge.
Knowledge attempts to penetrate into the night from which it emerged.
How could we picture a condition completely devoid of knowledge
other than as night? The hypothesis of a biological evolution of knowl-
edge leads us into the murkiness of a world devoid of knowledge, which
we are entirely incapable of imagining. We cannot imagine a situation
that is without imagining. We cannot perceive nonperception. If the
"clever animals invented knowledge" (1,875; TF) in a remote corner of
the solar system on a star, and if after a few short breaths by nature the
humans died and the star froze, how does nature live on without being
recognized? And in what sense was nature extant before a knowing gaze
registered it?
It is a common belief that the mere presence of something is the sim-
plest thing in the world, but actually it is the most puzzling thing of all.
It is easier and more natural to imagine a God and an entire animated