The
Four Great Errors
1
The error of
mistaking cause for consequence. - There
is no more dangerous error than that of mistaking the consequence for the
cause: I call it reason's intrinsic form of corruption. Nonetheless, this error is among the most
ancient and most recent habits of mankind: it is even sanctified among us, it bears the names 'religion' and 'morality'. Every proposition formulated by
religion and morality contains it; priests and moral legislators are the
authors of this corruption of reason. - I adduce an example. Everyone knows the book of the celebrated Cornaro in which he recommends his meagre diet as a recipe
for a long and happy life - a virtuous one, too. Few books have been so widely read; even now
many thousands of copies are printed in
2
The most general formula at the basis of
every religion and morality is: 'Do this and this, refrain from this and this -
and you will be happy! Otherwise....'
Every morality, every religion is this imperative - I call it the great
original sin of reason, immortal unreason. In my mouth this formula is converted into
its reverse - first example of my 'revaluation of all values': a
well-constituted human being, a 'happy one', must perform certain
actions and instinctively shrinks from other actions, he transports the order
of which he is the physiological representative into his relations with other
human beings and with things. In a
formula: his virtue is the consequence of his happiness.... Long life, a
plentiful posterity is not the reward of virtue, virtue itself is rather
just that slowing down of the metabolism which also has, among other things, a
long life, a plentiful posterity, in short Cornarism,
as its outcome. - The Church and morality say: 'A race, a people perishes
through vice and luxury'. My restored
reason says: when a people is perishing, degenerating
physiologically, vice and luxury (that is to say the necessity for stronger and
stronger and more and more frequent stimulants, such as every exhausted nature
is acquainted with) follow therefrom. A young man grows prematurely pale and
faded. His friends say: this and that
illness is to blame. I say: that
he became ill, that he failed to resist the illness, was already the
consequence of an impoverished life, an hereditary
exhaustion. The newspaper reader says:
this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which
makes errors like this is already finished - it is no longer secure in its
instincts. Every error, of whatever
kind, is a consequence of degeneration of instinct, disintegration of will: one
has thereby virtually defined the bad.
Everything good is instinct - and consequently easy, necessary,
free. Effort is an objection, the god
is typically distinguished from the hero (in my language: light feet are
the first attribute of divinity).
3
The error of a false
causality. - We have always believed we know what a
cause is: but whence did we derive our knowledge, more precisely our belief we
possessed this knowledge? From the realm
of the celebrated 'inner facts', none of which has up till now been shown to be
factual. We believed ourselves to be
causal agents in the act of willing; we at least thought we were there catching
causality in the act. It was
likewise never doubted that all the antecedentia
of an action, its causes, were to be sought in the consciousness and could be
discovered there if one sought them - as 'motives': for otherwise one would not
have been free to perform it, responsible for it. Finally, who would have disputed that a
thought is caused? that the ego causes the thought?
... Of these three 'inner facts' through which causality seemed to be
guaranteed the first and most convincing was that of will as cause; the
conception of a consciousness ('mind') as cause and later still that of the ego
(the 'subject') as cause are merely after-products after causality had, on the
basis of will, been firmly established as a given fact, as empiricism....
Meanwhile we have thought better. Today
we do not believe a word of it. The
'inner world' is full of phantoms and false lights: the will is one of them. The will no longer moves anything,
consequently no longer explains anything - it merely accompanies events, it can
also be absent. The so-called 'motive':
another error. Merely
a surface phenomenon of consciousness, an accompaniment to an act, which
conceals rather than exposed the antecedentia
of the act. And as for the
ego! It has become a fable, a fiction, a play on words: it has totally ceased to think, to feel and
to will! ... What follows from this?
There are no spiritual causes at all!
The whole of the alleged empiricism which affirmed them has gone to the
devil! That is what follows! -
And we had made a nice misuse of that 'empiricism', we had created the
world on the basis of it as a world of causes, as a world of will, as a world
of spirit. The oldest and longest-lived
psychology was at work here - indeed it has done nothing else: every event was
to it an action, every action the effect of a will, the world became for it a
multiplicity of agents, an agent ('subject') foisted itself
upon every event. Man projected his
three 'inner facts', that in which he believed more firmly than in anything
else, will, spirit, ego, outside himself - he derived the concept 'being' only
from the concept 'ego', he posited 'things' as possessing being according to
his own image, according to his concept of the ego as cause. No wonder he later always discovered in
things only that which he had put into them! - The thing itself, to say
it again, the concept 'thing' is merely a reflection of the belief in the ego
as cause.... And even your atom, messieurs mechanists and physicists,
how much error, how much rudimentary psychology, still remains in your atom! -
To say nothing of the 'thing in itself', [In Kant's philosophy the causes of sensations are called 'things
in themselves'. The thing in itself is
unknowable: the sensations we actually experience are produced by the operation
of our subjective mental apparatus.] that horrendum
pudendum [ugly shameful
part.] of the
metaphysicians! The error of spirit as
cause mistaken for reality! And made the
measure of reality! And called God!
-
4
The error of
imaginary causes. - To start from the dream: on to a
certain sensation, the result for example of a distant cannon-shot, a cause is
subsequently foisted (often a whole little novel in which precisely the dreamer
is the chief character). The sensation,
meanwhile, continues to persist, as a kind of resonance: it waits, as it were,
until the cause-creating drive permits it to step into the foreground - now no
longer as a chance occurrence but as 'meaning'.
The cannon-shot enters in a causal way, in an apparent inversion
of time. That which comes later, the
motivation, is experienced first, often with a hundred details which pass like
lightning, the shot follows.... What has happened? The ideas engendered by a certain
condition have been misunderstood as the cause of that condition. - We do just
the same thing, in fact, when we are awake.
Most of our general feelings - every sort of restraint, pressure,
tension, explosion in the play and counter-play of our organs, likewise and
especially the condition of the nervus sympathicus - excite our cause-creating drive: we want
to have a reason for feeling as we do - for feeling well or for
feeling ill. It never suffices us simply
to establish the mere fact that we feel as we do: we acknowledge this fact
- become conscious of it - only when we have furnished it with a
motivation of some kind. - The memory, which in such a case becomes active
without our being aware of it, calls up earlier states of a similar kind and
the causal interpretations which have grown out of them - not their
causality. To be sure, the belief that
these ideas, the accompanying occurrences in the consciousness, were causes is
also brought up by the memory. Thus
there arises an habituation to a certain causal
interpretation which in truth obstructs and even prohibits an investigation
of the cause.
5
Psychological
explanation. - To trace something unknown back to
something known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying and gives moreover a
feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety
attend the unknown - the first instinct is to eliminate these
distressing states. First principle: any
explanation is better than none. Because
it is at bottom only a question of wanting to get rid of oppressive ideas, one
is not exactly particular about what means one uses to get rid of them: the
first idea which explains that the unknown is in fact the known does so much
good that one 'holds it for true'. Proof by pleasure ('by potency') as criterion of truth.
- the cause-creating drive is thus conditioned and
excited by the feeling of fear. The
question 'why?' should furnish, if at all possible, not so much the cause for
its own sake as a certain kind of cause - a soothing, liberating,
alleviating cause. That something
already known, experienced, inscribed in the memory is posited as cause
is the first consequence of this need.
The new, the unexperienced, the strange is
excluded from being cause. - Thus there is sought not only some kind of
explanation as cause, but a selected and preferred kind of
explanation, the kind by means of which the feeling of the strange, new, unexperienced is most speedily and most frequently
abolished - the most common explanations. - Consequence: a particular
kind of cause-ascription comes to preponderate more and more, becomes
concentrated into a system and finally comes to dominate over the rest,
that is to say simply to exclude other causes and explanations. - The
banker thinks at once of 'business', the Christian of 'sin', the girl of her
love.
6
The entire realm of morality and religion
falls under this concept of imaginary causes. - 'Explanation' of unpleasant
general feelings. They arise from
beings hostile to us (evil spirits: most celebrated case - hysterics
misunderstood as witches). They arise
from actions we cannot approve of (the feeling of 'sin', of 'culpability'
foisted upon a physiological discomfort - one always finds reasons for being
discontented with oneself). They arise
as punishments, as payments for something we should not have done, should not
have been (generalized in an impudent form by Schopenhauer into a
proposition in which morality appears for what it is, the actual poisoner and calumniator of life: 'Every great pain,
whether physical or mental, declares what it is we deserve; for it could not
have come upon us if we had not deserved it.'
World as Will and Idea II 666)
They arise as the consequences of rash actions which have turned out
badly ( - the emotions, the senses assigned as 'cause', as 'to blame';
physiological states of distress construed, with the aid of other states
of distress, as 'deserved'). - 'Explanation' of pleasant
general feelings. They arise from
trust in God. They arise from the
consciousness of good actions (the so-called 'good conscience', a physiological
condition sometimes so like a sound digestion as to be mistaken for it). They arise from the successful outcome of
undertakings (- naive fallacy: the successful outcome of an undertaking
certainly does not produce any pleasant general feelings in a hypochondriac or
a Pascal). They arise from faith, hope
and charity - the Christian virtues. - In reality all these supposes
explanations are consequential states and as it were translations of
pleasurable and unpleasurable feelings into a false
dialect: one is in a state in which one can experience hope because the
physiological basic feeling is once more strong and ample; one trusts in God because
the feeling of plenitude and strength makes one calm. - Morality and religion
fall entirely under the psychology of error: in every single case cause
is mistaken for effect; or the effect of what is believed true is
mistaken for the truth; or a state of consciousness is mistaken for the
causation of this state.
7
The error of free
will. - We no longer have any sympathy today
with the concept of 'free will': we know only too well what it is - the most
infamous of all the arts of the theologian for making mankind 'accountable' in
his sense of the word, that is to say for making mankind dependent on him....
I give here only the psychology of making men accountable. - Everywhere
accountability is sought, it is usually the instinct
for punishing and judging which seeks it. One has deprived becoming of its innocence if
being in this or that state is traced back to will, to intentions, to
accountable acts: the doctrine of will has been invented essentially for the
purpose of punishment, that is of finding guilty. The whole of the old-style psychology, the
psychology of will, has as its precondition the desire of its authors, the
priests at the head of the ancient communities, to create for themselves a right
to ordain punishments - or their desire to create for God a right to do so....
Men were thought of as 'free' so that they could become guilty:
consequently, every action had to be thought of as willed, the origin of
every action as lying in the consciousness ( - whereby
the most fundamental falsification in psychologicis
was made into the very principle of psychology).... Today, when we have started
to move in the reverse direction, when we immoralists
especially are trying with all our might to remove the concept of guilt and the
concept of punishment from the world and to purge psychology, history, nature,
the social institutions and sanctions of them, there is in our eyes no more
radical opposition than that of the theologians, who continue to infect the
innocence of becoming with 'punishment' and 'guilt' by means of the concept of
the 'moral world-order'. Christianity is
a hangman's metaphysics ...
8
What alone can our teaching be? -
That no-one gives a human being his qualities: not God, not society, not
his parents or ancestors, not he himself (- the nonsensical idea here
last rejected was propounded, as 'intelligible freedom', by Kant, and perhaps
also by Plato before him). No-one
is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for
living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives. The fatality of his nature cannot be disentangled
from the fatality of all that which has been and will be. He is not the result of a special
design, a will, a purpose; he is not the subject of an attempt to attain
to an 'ideal of man' or an 'ideal of happiness' or an 'ideal of morality' - it
is absurd to want to hand over his nature to some purpose or other. We invented the concept 'purpose': in
reality purpose is lacking.... One is necessary, one is a piece of fate,
one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole - there exists nothing
which could judge, measure, compare, condemn the
whole.... But nothing exists apart from the whole! - That no-one is any
longer made accountable, that the kind of being manifested cannot be traced
back to a causa prima, [first cause] that the world is a unity neither as sensorium nor as 'spirit', this alone is the great
liberation - thus alone is the innocence of becoming restored....
The concept 'God' has hitherto been the greatest objection to
existence.... We deny God; in denying God, we deny accountability: only by
doing that do we redeem the world. -