...the doctrine of the will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment...the priests...wanted to create for themselves the right to punish...we immoralists are trying with all our strength to take the concept of guilt and the concept of punishment out of the world again...Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman ...

...Today one feels responsible only for one's will and actions, and one finds one's pride in oneself...But during the longest period of the human past..."free will" was very closely associated with a bad conscience...There is no point on which we have learned to think and feel more differently.

...Whoever knows how seriously my philosophy has taken up the fight against feelings of revenge and rancor, even into the doctrine of "free will" - the fight against Christianity is merely a special case of this - will understand why I am making such a point of my own behavior, my instinctive sureness in practice. During periods of décadence I forbade myself such feelings as harmful; as soon as my life was rich and proud enough again, I forbade myself them, as beneath me.

...the priest desires precisely the degeneration of the whole, of humanity...What is the point of these concepts of lies, the secondary concepts of morality, "soul," "spirit," "free will," "God," if not the physiological ruination of humanity?

...the holy pretext of "improving" mankind, as the ruse for sucking the blood of life itself. Morality as vampirism ......The concept of "God" invented as a counterconcept of life, - everything harmful, poisonous, slanderous, the whole hostility until death against life synthesized in this concept in a gruesome unity!...The concept of the "beyond," the "true world" invented in order to devaluate the only world there is...The concept of "sin" invented along with the torture instrument that belongs with it, the concept of "free will," in order to confuse the instincts, to make mistrust of the instincts second nature!

...What was formerly merely sickly now becomes indecent--it is indecent to be a Christian today...a theologian, a priest, a pope of today not only errs when he speaks, but actually lies...The priest knows, as every one knows, that there is no longer any "God," or any "sinner," or any "Saviour"--that "free will" and the "moral order of the world" are lies...the concepts "the other world," "the last judgment," "the immortality of the soul," the "soul" itself: they are all merely so many in instruments of torture, systems of cruelty, whereby the priest becomes master and remains master.

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 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 ...

Return

Herd remorse.- During the longest and most remote periods of the human past, the sting of conscience was not at all what it is now. Today one feels responsible only for one's will and actions, and one finds one's pride in oneself. All our teachers of law start from this sense of self and pleasure in the individual, as if this had always been the fount of law. But during the longest period of the human past nothing was more terrible than to feel that one stood by oneself. To be alone, to experience things by oneself, neither to obey nor to rule, to be an individ-ual-that was not a pleasure but a punishment; one was sentenced "to individuality."10 Freedom of thought was consid-ered discomfort itself. While we experience law and submission as compulsion and loss, it was egoism that was formerly experi-enced as something painful and as real misery. To be a self and to esteem oneself according to one's own weight and measure-that offended taste in those days. An inclination to do this would have been considered madness; for being alone was associated with every misery and fear. In those days, "free will" was very closely associated with a bad conscience; and the more unfree one's actions were and the more the herd instinct rather than any personal sense found expression in an action, the more moral one felt. Whatever harmed the herd, whether the individual had wanted it or not wanted it, prompted the sting of conscience in the individual-and in his neighbor, too and even in the whole herd. -There is no point on which we have learned to think and feel more differently.

Return

Freedom from ressentiment, enlightenment about ressentiment—who knows how much I am ultimately indebted in this respect as well to my long sickness! The problem is not exactly simple: one must have experienced it from strength as well as from weakness. If anything at all must be adduced against being sick and being weak, it is that man's really remedial instinct, his fighting instinct [Wehr- und Waffen-Instinkt] wears out. One does not know how to get rid of anything, how to get over anything, how to repel anything,—everything hurts. Men and things obtrude too closely, experiences strike too deep, memory is a festering wound. Sickness itself is a kind of ressentiment.— Against it the invalid has only one great remedy—I call it Russian fatalism, that fatalism without revolt with which the Russian soldier, when a campaign becomes too strenuous, finally lies down in the snow. No longer to accept anything at all, to take anything, to take anything in—to cease reacting altogether ... The great intelligence of this fatalism is not always merely the courage to die, since it can preserve life under the most perilous conditions by reducing the metabolism, slowing it down, as a kind of will to hibernate. Carrying this logic a few steps further, we have the fakir, who sleeps for weeks in a grave ... Because one would use oneself up too quickly, if one reacted at all, one no longer reacts at all: this is the logic. And nothing burns one up faster than the affects of ressentiment. Anger, pathological vulnerability, the impotence for revenge, the lust, the thirst for revenge, poison-mixing in any sense— for the exhausted that is surely the most disadvantageous way to react: it involves a rapid consumption of nervous energy, a pathological increase of harmful secretions, for example of the gall bladder into the stomach. Ressentiment is the forbidden as such for the sick man—it is his specific evil: unfortunately also his most natural inclination. This was comprehended by that profound physiologist Buddha. His "religion," which it would be better to call a system of hygiene, to avoid confounding it with so pitiful a thing as Christianity, depended for its effect upon the triumph over ressentiment: to liberate the soul from it—the first step towards recovery. "Not by enmity is enmity ended; by friendship enmity is ended": this stands at the beginning of Buddha's doctrine—it is not morality that speaks thus, thus speaks physiology.— Ressentiment, born of weakness, is most harmful for the the weak themselves,—conversely, given a rich nature, it is a superfluous feeling, a feeling which, if one remains master of it, is almost a proof of riches. Whoever knows how seriously my philosophy has taken up the fight against feelings of revenge and rancor, even into the doctrine of "free will" - the fight against Christianity is merely a special case of this - will understand why I am making such a point of my own behavior, my instinctive sureness in practice. During periods of décadence I forbade myself such feelings as harmful; as soon as my life was rich and proud enough again, I forbade myself them, as beneath me. That "Russian fatalism" of which I spoke manifested itself in me in such a way that for years I clung tenaciously to almost unbearable situations, places, apartments, society, once chance had placed them in my way—it was better than changing them, than feeling that they could be changed,—than rebelling against them ... He who disturbed this fatalism, who tried by force to awaken me, seemed to me then a mortal enemy:—in fact, it was mortally dangerous every time.— To take oneself as a destiny [ein Fatum], not to wish oneself "different"—that is in such cases great reason itself.

Return

Return

Return

Return

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.