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 England every year. I do not doubt that hardly any book (the Bible rightly excepted) has done so much harm, has shortened so many lives, as this curiosity, which was so well meant. The reason: mistaking the consequence for the cause. The worthy Italian saw in his diet the cause of his long life: while the prerequisite of long life, an extraordinarily slow metabolism, a small consumption, was the cause of his meagre diet. He was not free to eat much or little as he chose, his frugality was not an act of 'free will': he became ill when he ate more. But if one is not a bony fellow of this sort one does not merely do well, one positively needs to eat properly. A scholar of our day, with his rapid consumption of nervous energy, would kill himself with Cornaro's regiment. Credo experto. -

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. -