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No! You can’t get round me with science, when I search for the natural antagonists of the ascetic ideal, when I put the question: “ Where is the opposed will in which the opponent ideal expresses itself?” Science is not, by a long way, independent enough to fulfil this function; in every department science needs an ideal value, a power which creates values, and in whose service it can believe in itself⁠—science itself never creates values. Its relation to the ascetic ideal is not in itself antagonistic; speaking roughly, it rather represents the progressive force in the inner evolution of that ideal. Tested more exactly, its opposition and antagonism are concerned not with the ideal itself, but only with that ideal’s outworks, its outer garb, its masquerade, with its temporary hardening, stiffening, and dogmatising⁠—it makes the life in the ideal free once more, while it repudiates its superficial elements. These two phenomena, science and the ascetic ideal, both rest on the same basis⁠—I have already made this clear⁠—the basis, I say, oft the same over-appreciation of truth (more accurately the same belief in the impossibility of valuing and of criticising truth), and consequently they are necessarily allies, so that, in the event of their being attacked, they must always be attacked and called into question together. A valuation of the ascetic ideal inevitably entails a valuation of science as well; lose no time in seeing this clearly, and be sharp to catch it! ( Art , I am speaking provisionally, for I will treat it on some other occasion in greater detail⁠—art, I repeat, in which lying is sanctified and the will for deception has good conscience on its side, is much more fundamentally opposed to the ascetic ideal than is science: Plato’s instinct felt this⁠—Plato, the greatest enemy of art which Europe has produced up to the present. Plato versus Homer, that is the complete, the true antagonism⁠—on the one side, the wholehearted “transcendental,” the great defamer of life; on the other, its involuntary panegyrist, the golden nature. An artistic subservience to the