1
The error of confusing cause and effect. There is no more dangerous
error than that of mistaking the effect for the cause: I call it the
real corruption of reason. Yet this error belongs among the most ancient
and recent habits of mankind: it is even hallowed among us and goes by
the name of “religion” or “morality.” Every single sentence which
religion and morality formulate contains it; priests and legislators of
moral codes are the originators of this corruption of reason.
I give an example. Everybody knows the book of the famous Cornaro in
which he recommends his slender diet as a recipe for a long and happy
life—a virtuous one too. Few books have been read so much; even now
thousands of copies are sold in England every year. I do not doubt that
scarcely any book (except the Bible, as is meet) has done as much harm,
has shortened as many lives, as this well-intentioned curiosum. The
reason: the mistaking of the effect for the cause. The worthy Italian
thought his diet was the cause of his long life, whereas the
precondition for a long life, the extraordinary slowness of his
metabolism, the consumption of so little, was the cause of his slender
diet. He was not free to eat little or much; his frugality was not a
matter of “free will”: he became sick when he ate more. But whoever is
no carp not only does well to eat properly, but needs to. A scholar in
our time, with his rapid consumption of nervous energy, would simply
destroy himself with Cornaro’s diet. Crede experto. [Believe him who has
tried.]
2
The most general formula on which every religion and morality is
founded is: “Do this and that, refrain from this and that—then you will
be happy! Otherwise...” Every morality, every religion, is this
imperative; I call it the great original sin of reason, the immortal
unreason. In my mouth, this formula is changed into its opposite—first
example of my “revaluation of all values”: a well-turned-out human
being, a “happy one,” must perform certain actions and shrinks
instinctively from other actions; he carries the order, which he
represents physiologically, into his relations with other human beings
and things. In a formula: his virtue is the effect of his happiness. A
long life, many descendants—these are not the wages of virtue: rather
virtue itself is that slowing down of the metabolism which leads, among
other things, also to a long life, many descendants—in short, to
Cornarism.
The church and morality say: “A generation, a people, are destroyed
by license and luxury.” My recovered reason says: when a people
approaches destruction, when it degenerates physiologically, then
license and luxury follow from this (namely, the craving for ever
stronger and more frequent stimulation, as every exhausted nature knows
it). This young man turns pale early and wilts; his friends say: that is
due to this or that disease. I say: that he became diseased, that he did
not resist the disease, was already the effect of an impoverished life
or hereditary exhaustion. The newspaper reader says: this party destroys
itself by making such a mistake. My higher politics says: a party which
makes such mistakes has reached its end; it has lost its sureness of
instinct. Every mistake in every sense is the effect of the degeneration
of instinct, of the disintegration of the will: one could almost define
what is bad in this way. All that is good is instinct—and hence easy,
necessary, free. Laboriousness is an objection: the god is typically
different from the hero. (In my language: light feet are the first
attribute of divinity.)
3
The error of a false causality. People have believed at all times
that they knew what a cause is; but whence did we take our knowledge—or
more precisely, our faith—that we had such knowledge? From the realm of
the famous “inner facts,” of which not a single one has so far proved to
be factual. We believed ourselves to be causal in the act of willing: we
thought that here at least we caught causality in the act. Nor did one
doubt that all the antecedents of an act, its causes, were to be sought
in consciousness and would be found there once sought—as “motives”:
else one would not have been free and responsible for it. Finally, who
would have denied that a thought is caused? that the ego causes the
thought?
Of these three “inward facts” which seem to guarantee causality, the
first and most persuasive is that of the will as cause. The conception
of a consciousness ("spirit") as a cause, and later also that of the ego
as cause (the “subject"), are only afterbirths: first the causality of
the will was firmly accepted as given, as empirical.
Meanwhile we have thought better of it. Today we no longer believe a
word of all this. The “inner world” is full of phantoms and
will-o'-the-wisps: the will is one of them. The will no longer moves
anything, hence does not explain anything either—it merely accompanies
events; it can also be absent. The so-called motive: another error.
Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, something alongside the
deed that is more likely to cover up the antecedents of the deeds than
to represent them. And as for the ego! That has become a fable, a
fiction, a play on words: it has altogether ceased to think, feel, or
will!
What follows from this? There are no mental causes at all. The whole
of the allegedly empirical evidence for that has gone to the devil. That
is what follows! And what a fine abuse we had perpetrated with this
"empirical evidence"; we created the world on this basis as a world of
causes, a world of will, a world of spirits. The most ancient and
enduring psychology was at work here and did not do anything else: all
that happened was considered a doing, all doing the effect of a will;
the world became to it a multiplicity of doers; a doer (a “subject") was
slipped under all that happened. It was out of himself that man
projected his three “inner facts"—that in which he believed most
firmly: the will, the spirit, the ego. He even took the concept of being
from the concept of the ego; he posited “things” as “being,” in his
image, in accordance with his concept of the ego as a cause. Small
wonder that later he always found in things only that which he gad put
into them. The thing itself, to say it once more, the concept of thing
is a mere reflex of the faith in the ego as cause. And even your atom,
my dear mechanists and physicists—how much error, how much rudimentary
psychology is still residual in your atom! Not to mention the
"thing-in-itself,” the horrendum pudendum of the metaphysicians! The
error of the spirit as cause mistaken for reality! And made the very
measure of reality! And called God!
4
The error of imaginary causes. To begin with dreams: ex post facto,
a cause is slipped under a particular sensation (for example, one
following a far-off cannon shot)—often a whole little novel in which
the dreamer turns up as the protagonist. The sensation endures meanwhile
in a kind of resonance: it waits, as it were, until the causal instinct
permits it to step into the foreground—now no longer as a chance
occurrence, but as “meaning.” The cannon shot appears in a causal mode,
in an apparent reversal of time. What is really later, the motivation,
is experienced first—often with a hundred details which pass like
lightning and the shot follows. What has happened? The representations
which were produced by a certain state have been misunderstood as its
causes.
In fact, we do the same thing when awake. Most of our general
feelings—every kind of inhibition, pressure, tension, and explosion in
the play and counterplay of our organs, and particularly the state of
the nervus sympaticus—excite our causal instinct: we want to have a
reason for feeling this way or that—for feeling bad or for feeling
good. We are never satisfied merely to state the fact that we feel this
way or that: we admit this fact only—become conscious of it only—when
we have furnished some kind of motivation. Memory, which swings into
action in such cases, unknown to us, brings up earlier states of the
same kind, together with the causal interpretations associated with
them—not their real causes. The faith, to be sure, that such
representations, such accompanying conscious processes are the causes is
also brought forth by memory. Thus originates a habitual acceptance of a
particular causal interpretation, which, as a matter of fact, inhibits
any investigation into the real cause—even precludes it.
5
The psychological explanation of this. To derive something unknown
from something familiar relieves, comforts, and satisfies, besides
giving a feeling of power. With the unknown, one is confronted with
danger, discomfort, and care; the first instinct is to abolish these
painful states. First principle: any explanation is better than none.
Since at bottom it is merely a matter of wishing to be rid of oppressive
representations, one is not too particular about the means of getting
rid of them: the first representation that explains the unknown as
familiar feels so good that one “considers it true.” The proof of
pleasure ("of strength") as a criterion of truth.
The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the
feeling of fear. The “why?” shall, if at all possible, not give the
cause for its own sake so much as for a particular kind of cause—a
cause that is comforting, liberating, and relieving. That it is
something already familiar, experienced, and inscribed in the memory,
which is posited as a cause, that is the first consequence of this need.
That which is new and strange and has not been experienced before, is
excluded as a cause. Thus one searches not only for some kind of
explanation to serve as a cause, but for a particularly selected and
preferred kind of explanation—that which has most quickly and most
frequently abolished the feeling of the strange, new, and hitherto
unexperienced: the most habitual explanations. Consequence: one kind of
positing of causes predominates more and more, is concentrated into a
system and finally emerges as dominant, that is, as simply precluding
other causes and explanations. The banker immediately thinks of
"business,” the Christian of “sin,” and the girl of her love.
6
The whole realm of morality and religion belongs under this concept
of imaginary causes. The “explanation” of disagreeable general feelings.
They are produced by beings that are hostile to us (evil spirits: the
most famous case—the misunderstanding of the hysterical as witches).
They are produced by acts which cannot be approved (the feeling of
"sin,” of “sinfulness,” is slipped under a physiological discomfort; one
always finds reasons for being dissatisfied with oneself). They are
produced as punishments, as payment for something we should not have
done, for what we should not have been (impudently generalized by
Schopenhauer into a principle in which morality appears as what it
really is—as the very poisoner and slanderer of life: “Every great
pain, whether physical or spiritual, declares what we deserve; for it
could not come to us if we did not deserve it.” World as Will and
Representation II, 666). They are produced as effects of ill-considered
actions that turn out badly. (Here the affects, the senses, are posited
as causes, as “guilty"; and physiological calamities are interpreted
with the help of other calamities as “deserved.")
The “explanation” of agreeable general feelings. They are produced
by trust in God. They are produced by the consciousness of good deeds
(the so-called “good conscience"—a physiological state which at times
looks so much like good digestion that it is hard to tell them apart).
They are produced by the successful termination of some enterprise (a
naive fallacy: the successful termination of some enterprise does not by
any means give a hypochondriac or a Pascal agreeable general feelings).
They are produced by faith, charity, and hope—the Christian virtues.
In truth, all these supposed explanations are resultant states and,
as it were, translations of pleasurable or unpleasurable feelings into a
false dialect: one is in a state of hope because the basic physiological
feeling is once again strong and rich; one trusts in God because the
feeling of fullness and strength gives a sense of rest. Morality and
religion belong altogether to the psychology of error: in every single
case, cause and effect are confused; or truth is confused with the
effects of believing something to be true; or a state of consciousness
is confused with its causes.
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 besides the
whole. That nobody is held responsible any longer, that the mode of
being may not be traced back to a causa prima, 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, we deny the responsibility in God: only thereby do we
redeem the world.
NIETZSCHE
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