[30] My reading of this passage thus differs significantly from the skeptical reading offered by Stephen Houlgate, who argues that the passage's apparent collapse of the opposition between essence and appearance actually presupposes that very opposition. Houlgate reads Nietzsche as beginning from the presupposition that there was once a legitimate distinction between essence and appearance but that this distinction is now impossible to discern, because alien appearances have veiled and, by now, fused with essences to such a degree that the latter are no longer distinguishable or knowable ("Kant, Nietzsche, and the 'Thing in itself,'" Nietzsche-Studien 22 [1993]: 118, 141–42, 145–46). I maintain, on the contrary, that Nietzsche rejects the very notion that the distinction between essence and appearance is one of kind, arguing instead that it is simply one of degree—that essences are simply established appearances. Several other passages support my antiskeptical reading, e.g., HL (3, P. 77), where Nietzsche notes that every "first nature was once a second nature and [ . . . ] every victorious second nature will become a first," and GS 290, which offers a similar conception of the interpretive construction of "first natures" out of "second natures." (See also the account of "things" and their role in "interpretations" given in GM II:12, which is discussed at length in chapter 3.) Note that the scenario in GS 58 also recalls the famous passage from "On Truth and Lies," where Nietzsche describes truth as an ever-shifting system in which the strange and new has become the familiar and taken for granted, and those passages in Nietzsche's later work where he argues that "knowledge" consists simply in the reduction of the strange to the familiar (see, e.g., GS 355; TI "Errors" 5; WP 499, 501, 551).