Nietzsche suggests that that there was a turning point in history when humanity decided that reason wasn’t a fallible, imperfect human phenomenon, but rather something that came from a higher place. We used to be skeptical of reason and inquiry, thinking that “change, mutation, becoming” and interfering in the world’s natural order was bad. Then language changed this by teaching people to see themselves as separate from the rest of the world—as “deed and doer” (action and actioner, or object and subject). Once we accept that we are separate from the external world, we must also accept that there are things about the external world that we simply can’t know—and that everything we
think we know comes not from the external world but
from within ourselves. Thus, everything we know about the world is innate, subjective, and biased. The appeal of reason, thus, was that it offered a means for outsider humans to uncover objective, outside—higher—knowledge about the world.