7
The error of free will. Today we no longer have any pity for the concept of
"free will": we know only too well what it really is -- the foulest of all
theologians' artifices aimed at making mankind "responsible" in their sense,
that is, dependent upon them. Here I simply supply the psychology of all
"making responsible."
Wherever responsibilities are sought, it is usually the instinct of wanting to
judge and punish which is at work. Becoming has been deprived of its
innocence when any being-such-and-such is traced back to will, to
purposes, to acts of responsibility: the doctrine of the will has been invented
essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is, because one wanted to
impute guilt. The entire old psychology, the psychology of will, was
conditioned by the fact that its originators, the priests at the head of ancient
communities, wanted to create for themselves the right to punish -- or wanted
to create this right for God. Men were considered "free" so that they might
be judged and punished -- so that they might become guilty: consequently,
every act had to be considered as willed, and the origin of every act had to
be considered as lying within the consciousness (and thus the most
fundamental counterfeit in psychologicis was made the principle of
psychology itself).
Today, as we have entered into the reverse movement and we immoralists
are trying with all our strength to take the concept of guilt and the concept of
punishment out of the world again, and to cleanse psychology, history,
nature, and social institutions and sanctions of them, there is in our eyes no
more radical opposition than that of the theologians, who continue with the
concept of a "moral world-order" to infect the innocence of becoming by
means of "punishment" and "guilt." Christianity is a metaphysics of the
hangman.
8
What alone can be our doctrine? That no one gives man his
qualities -- neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he
himself. (The nonsense of the last idea was taught as "intelligible freedom" by
Kant -- perhaps by Plato already.) No one is responsible for man's being
there at all, for his being such-and-such, or for his being in these
circumstances or in this environment. The fatality of his essence is not to be
disentangled from the fatality of all that has been and will be. Man is not the
effect of some special purpose, of a will, an end; nor is he the object of an
attempt to attain an "ideal of humanity" or an "ideal of happiness" or an
"ideal of morality." It is absurd to wish to devolve one's essence on some
end or other. We have invented the concept of "end": in reality there is no
end.
One is necessary, one is a piece of fatefulness, one belongs to the whole,
one is in the whole; there is nothing which could judge, measure, compare,
or sentence our being, for that would mean judging, measuring, comparing,
or sentencing the whole. But there is nothing outside the whole. That
nobody is held responsible any longer, that the mode of being may not be
traced back to a causa prima [“first cause”], that the world does not form a unity either as
a sensorium or as "spirit" -- that alone is the great liberation; with this alone is
the innocence of becoming restored. The concept of "God" was until now
the greatest objection to existence. We deny God; in denying God we deny
responsibility: only thereby do we redeem the world.
The “Improvers” of Mankind
1
My demand upon the philosopher is known, that he take his stand beyond good and evil and leave the illusion of moral judgment beneath himself. This demand follows from an insight which I was the first to formulate: that there are altogether no moral facts. Moral judgments agree with religious ones in believing in realities which are no realities. Morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena -- more precisely, a misinterpretation. Moral judgments, like religious ones, belong to a stage of ignorance at which the very concept of the real, and the distinction between what is real and imaginary, are still lacking; thus "truth," at this stage, designates all sorts of things which we today call "imaginings." Moral judgments are therefore never to be taken literally: so understood, they always contain mere absurdity. Semeiotically, however, they remain invaluable: they reveal, at least for those who know, the most valuable realities of cultures and inwardnesses which did not know enough to "understand" themselves. Morality is mere sign language, mere symptomatology: one must know what it is all about to be able to profit from it.
2
A first example, quite provisional. At all times they have wanted to
"improve" men: this above all was called morality. Under the same word,
however, the most divergent tendencies are concealed. Both the taming of
the beast, man, and the breeding of a particular kind of man have been
called "improvement." Such zoological terms are required to express the
realities -- realities, to be sure, of which the typical "improver," the priest,
neither knows anything nor wants to know anything.
To call the taming of an animal its "improvement" sounds almost like a joke
to our ears. Whoever knows what goes on in menageries doubts that the
beasts are "improved" there. They are weakened, they are made less
harmful, and through the depressive effect of fear, through pain, through
wounds, and through hunger, they become sickly beasts. It is no different
with the tamed man whom the priest has "improved." In the early Middle
Ages, when the church was indeed, above all, a menagerie, the most
beautiful specimens of the "blond beast" were hunted down everywhere;
and the noble Teutons, for example, were "improved." But how did such an
"improved" Teuton who had been seduced into a monastery look
afterward? Like a caricature of man, like a miscarriage: he had become a
"sinner," he was stuck in a cage, imprisoned among all sorts of terrible
concepts. And there he lay, sick, miserable, malevolent against himself, full
of hatred against the springs of life, full of suspicion against all that was still
strong and happy. In short, a "Christian."
Physiologically speaking: in the struggle with beasts, to make them sick may
be the only means for making them weak. This the church understood: it
ruined man, it weakened him -- but it claimed to have "improved" him.
3
Let us consider the other case of so-called morality, the case of breeding a
particular race and kind. The most magnificent example of this is furnished
by Hindu morality, sanctioned as religion in the form of "the Law of Manu."
Here the task set is to breed no less than four races at once: one priestly [the Brahmans],
one warlike [the Kshatriyas], one for trade and agriculture [the Vaishyas], and finally a race of servants, the
Shudras. Obviously, we are here no longer among animal tamers: a kind of
man that is a hundred times milder and more reasonable is the condition for
even conceiving such a plan of breeding. One heaves a sigh of relief at
leaving the Christian atmosphere of disease and dungeons for this healthier,
higher, and wider world. How wretched is the New Testament compared to
Manu, how foul it smells!
Yet this organization too found it necessary to be terrible -- this time not in
the struggle with beasts, but with their counter-concept, the unbred man, the
mishmash man, the Chandala [the “untouchables” excluded from the caste system]. And again it had no other means for keeping
him from being dangerous, for making him weak, than to make him sick -- it
was the fight with the "great number." Perhaps there is nothing that
contradicts our feeling more than these protective measures of Indian
morality. The third edict, for example (Avadana-Shastra I), "on impure
vegetables," ordains that the only nourishment permitted to the Chandala
shall be garlic and onions, seeing that the holy scripture prohibits giving them
grain or fruit with grains, or water or fire. The same edict orders that the
water they need may not be taken from rivers or wells, nor from ponds, but
only from the approaches to swamps and from holes made by the footsteps
of animals. They are also prohibited from washing their laundry and from
washing themselves, since the water they are conceded as an act of grace
may be used only to quench thirst. Finally, a prohibition that Shudra women
may not assist Chandala women in childbirth, and a prohibition that the latter
may not assist each other in this condition.
The fruit of such sanitary police measures was inevitable: murderous
epidemics, ghastly venereal diseases, and thereupon again "the law of the
knife," ordaining circumcision for male children and the removal of the
internal labia for female children. Manu himself says: "The Chandalas are the
fruit of adultery, incest, and crime (these, the necessary consequences of the
concept of breeding). For clothing they shall have only rags from corpses;
for dishes, broken pots; for adornment, old iron; for divine services, only
evil spirits. They shall wander without rest from place to place. They are
prohibited from writing from left to right, and from using the right hand in
writing: the use of the right hand and of from-left-to-right is reserved for the
virtuous, for the people of race."
4
5
The morality of breeding, and the morality of taming, are, in the means they use, entirely worthy of each other: we may proclaim it as the supreme principle that, to make morality, one must have the unconditional will to its opposite. This is the great, the uncanny problem which I have been pursuing the longest: the psychology of the "improvers" of mankind. A small, and at bottom modest, fact -- that of the so-called pia fraus [“holy lie”] -- offered me the first approach to this problem: the pia fraus, the heirloom of all philosophers and priests who "improved" mankind. Neither Manu nor Plato nor Confucius nor the Jewish and Christian teachers have ever doubted their right to lie. They have not doubted that they had very different rights too. Expressed in a formula, one might say: all the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral.
Skirmishes of an Untimely Man
5
G. Eliot. -- They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more
firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English
consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic females à la
Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation
from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral
fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there.
We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls
the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by
no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite
the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought
out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one
breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands. Christianity
presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him,
what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a
command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to
criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth -- it stands and falls with faith in
God.
When the English actually believe that they know "intuitively" what is good
and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require
Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the
dominion of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength
and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English morality has been
forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is
no longer felt. For the English, morality is not yet a problem.
14
Anti-Darwin. -- As for the famous "struggle for existence," so far it seems
to me to be asserted rather than proved. It occurs, but as an exception; the
total appearance of life is not the extremity, not starvation, but rather riches,
profusion, even absurd squandering -- and where there is struggle, it is a
struggle for power. One should not mistake Malthus for nature.
Assuming, however, that there is such a struggle for existence -- and, indeed,
it occurs -- its result is unfortunately the opposite of what Darwin's school
desires, and of what one might perhaps desire with them -- namely, in favor
of the strong, the privileged, the fortunate exceptions. The species do not
grow in perfection: the weak prevail over the strong again and again, for
they are the great majority -- and they are also more intelligent. Darwin forgot
the spirit (that is English!); the weak have more spirit. One must need spirit
to acquire spirit; one loses it when one no longer needs it. Whoever has
strength dispenses with the spirit ("Let it go!" they think in Germany today;
"the Reich must still remain to us"). It will be noted that by "spirit" I mean
care, patience, cunning, simulation, great self-control, and everything that is
mimicry (the latter includes a great deal of so-called virtue).
33
The natural value of egoism. -- Self-interest is worth as much as the person who has it: it can be worth a great deal, and it can be unworthy and contemptible. Every individual may be scrutinized to see whether he represents the ascending or the descending line of life. Having made that decision, one has a canon for the worth of his self-interest. If he represents the ascending line, then his worth is indeed extraordinary -- and for the sake of life as a whole, which takes a step farther through him, the care for his preservation and for the creation of the best conditions for him may even be extreme. The single one, the "individual," as hitherto understood by the people and the philosophers alike, is an error after all: he is nothing by himself, no atom, no "link in the chain," nothing merely inherited from former times; he is the whole single line of humanity up to himself. If he represents the descending development, decay, chronic degeneration, and sickness (sicknesses are, in general, the consequences of decay, not its causes), then he has small worth, and the minimum of decency requires that he take away as little as possible from those who have turned out well. He is merely their parasite.
34
Christian and anarchist. -- When the anarchist, as the mouthpiece of the
declining strata of society, demands with a fine indignation what is "right,"
"justice," and "equal rights," he is merely under the pressure of his own
uncultured state, which cannot comprehend the real reason for his
suffering -- what it is that he is poor in: life. A causal instinct asserts itself in
him: it must be somebody's fault that he is in a bad way.
Also, the "fine indignation" itself soothes him; it is a pleasure for all wretched
devils to scold: it gives a slight but intoxicating sense of power. Even
plaintiveness and complaining can give life a charm for the sake of which
one endures it: there is a fine dose of revenge in every complaint; one
charges one's own bad situation, and under certain circumstances even
one's own badness, to those who are different, as if that were an injustice, a
forbidden privilege. "If I am canaille, you ought to be too" -- on such logic are
revolutions made.
Complaining is never any good: it stems from weakness. Whether one
charges one's misfortune to others or to oneself -- the socialist does the
former; the Christian, for example, the latter -- really makes no difference.
The common and, let us add, the unworthy thing is that it is supposed to be
somebody's fault that one is suffering; in short, that the sufferer prescribes
the honey of revenge for himself against his suffering. The objects of this
need for revenge, as a need for pleasure, are mere occasions: everywhere
the sufferer finds occasions for satisfying his little revenge. If he is a
Christian -- to repeat it once more -- he finds them in himself. The Christian
and the anarchist are both decadents. When the Christian condemns,
slanders, and besmirches "the world," his instinct is the same as that which
prompts the socialist worker to condemn, slander, and besmirch society.
The "Last Judgment" is the sweet comfort of revenge -- the revolution, which
the socialist worker also awaits, but conceived as a little farther off. The
"beyond" -- why a beyond, if not as a means for besmirching this world?
35
Critique of the morality of decadence. -- An "altruistic" morality -- a morality in which self-interest withers away -- remains a bad sign under all circumstances. This is true of individuals; it is particularly true of nations. The best is lacking when self-interest begins to be lacking. Instinctively to choose what is harmful for oneself, to feel attracted by "disinterested" motives, that is virtually the formula of decadence. "Not to seek one's own advantage" -- that is merely the moral fig leaf for quite a different, namely, a physiological, state of affairs: "I no longer know how to find my own advantage." Disintegration of the instincts! Man is finished when he becomes altruistic. Instead of saying naively, "I am no longer worth anything," the moral lie in the mouth of the decadent says, "Nothing is worth anything, life is not worth anything." Such a judgment always remains very dangerous, it is contagious: throughout the morbid soil of society it soon proliferates into a tropical vegetation of concepts -- now as a religion (Christianity), now as a philosophy (Schopenhauerism). Sometimes the poisonous vegetation which has grown out of such decomposition poisons life itself for millennia with its fumes.
36
Morality for physicians. -- The sick man is a parasite of society. In a
certain state it is indecent to live longer. To go on vegetating in cowardly
dependence on physicians and machinations, after the meaning of life, the
right to life, has been lost, that ought to prompt a profound contempt in
society. The physicians, in turn, would have to be the mediators of this
contempt -- not prescriptions, but every day a new dose of nausea with their
patients. To create a new responsibility, that of the physician, for all cases in
which the highest interest of life, of ascending life, demands the most
inconsiderate pushing down and aside of degenerating life -- for example, for
the right of procreation, for the right to be born, for the right to live.
To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death freely
chosen, death at the right time, brightly and cheerfully accomplished amid
children and witnesses: then a real farewell is still possible, as the one who is
taking leave is still there; also a real estimate of what one has achieved and
what one has wished, drawing the sum of one's life -- all in opposition to the
wretched and revolting comedy that Christianity has made of the hour of
death. One should never forget that Christianity has exploited the weakness
of the dying for a rape of the conscience; and the manner of death itself, for
value judgments about man and the past.
Here it is important to defy all the cowardices of prejudice and to establish,
above all, the real, that is, the physiological, appreciation of so-called natural
death -- which is in the end also "unnatural," a kind of suicide. One never
perishes through anybody but oneself. But usually it is death under the most
contemptible conditions, an unfree death, death not at the right time, a
coward's death. From love of life, one should desire a different death: free,
conscious, without accident, without ambush.
Finally, some advice for our dear pessimists and other decadents. It is not in
our hands to prevent our birth; but we can correct this mistake -- for in some
cases it is a mistake. When one does away with oneself, one does the most
estimable thing possible: one almost earns the right to live. Society -- what am
I saying? -- life itself derives more advantage from this than from any "life" of
renunciation, anemia, and other virtues: one has liberated the others from
one's sight; one has liberated life from an objection. Pessimism, pur, vert [“pure, fresh”], is
proved only by the self-refutation of our dear pessimists: one must advance
a step further in its logic and not only negate life with "will and
representation," as Schopenhauer did -- one must first of all negate
Schopenhauer. Incidentally, however contagious pessimism is, it still does
not increase the sickliness of an age, of a generation as a whole: it is an
expression of this sickliness. One falls victim to it as one falls victim to
cholera: one has to be morbid enough in one's whole predisposition.
Pessimism itself does not create a single decadent more; I recall the statistics
which show that the years in which cholera rages do not differ from other
years in the total number of deaths.
To proceed to part 4, click here.