an impetus to fearless honesty, The Mechanics of Virtue, aphorism 229
229
As an impetus to fearless honesty, the intellectual conscience – private guilt – is inferior to the prospect of fame for one’s honesty. With guilt, one is never motivated forward, only backward. One never affirms, but only reacts. One finds no right to posit a goal and chase it. Nonetheless fame alone is a grand motive to lie, and philosophers and poets are more often charlatans than not ... often more concerned with the minimum requirements for shepherding the maximum number of followers than with the maximum courage for a severe honesty that more often than not requires a break with one’s own herd ... a distinction between private consciousness and herd-thought. But of course this latter only wants to trade the maximum number of worshippers for a smaller group who have the maximum height of fearless understanding. Honesty, at its highest, is still only our immature desire to throw over our shoulders glory and honor.
Of course, this greater vanity usually threatens the presumptions of the majority, and so one must settle for notoriety and perhaps, with a lot of luck, a few unflinching readers. If one can accept the role of vanity in one's every pursuit, one is half-way there. Honesty includes this half, or it is nothing – for if one’s honesty does not admit to vanity, it is only vanity.